The Hijrah — the night the road to Madinah was watched

Thirteen years.

The message had been given in Makkah for thirteen years, and most of those years were years in which the people who accepted it were beaten, starved and buried. The first handful prayed in secret. Then it was public, and what followed is on the record: Bilal laid out on the hot sand, Sumayyah killed, and Banu Hashim shut into the valley of Abu Talib for three years — no trade, no marriage, no help.

The year after that is called in the biographies the Year of Sorrow. In that one year Khadijah died, who had been there from the first day, and Abu Talib died, who never believed but whose protection was the reason the Quraysh could not raise a hand. Both supports went at once.

That sequence comes from the biographies, chiefly Ibn Ishaq, and is well known; Sahih al-Bukhari does not carry it in that order. Most of what follows is from Sahih al-Bukhari, and the number is given each time.

Then came Ta'if. And after it, season by season, an approach to tribe after tribe at the pilgrimage — and refusal after refusal.

And then, one night, in the valley of Aqabah, some men from Yathrib gave their pledge. Twelve men the first year, seventy-three the next. Ubadah ibn as-Samit narrates the words of it himself:

We pledged to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم that we would associate nothing with Allah, would not steal, would not commit adultery, would not kill our children, would not invent slander, and would not disobey in what is right.

Sahih al-Bukhari 18 and 3892 — the pledge of Aqabah.

One thing in that pledge deserves attention: there is no fighting in it. It is a pledge about character. The first thing asked of the city that was about to receive the migration was a promise about the kind of people its people would be. What they would build came later.

And after that pledge, one at a time, quietly, people began to leave. One household, then another. Makkah started to empty.