The Mosque
His first act was to build. The drying-floor where al-Qaṣwāʾ had knelt was bought from the two orphans — they offered it free; he insisted on the price — and on it rose the Prophet's Mosque: palm-trunk pillars, a roof of fronds, a floor of earth. He carried the bricks with his companions, and they chanted as they worked. Around it stood the small rooms of his household, and at its rear sheltered the Ahl al-Ṣuffah — the people of the bench, poor emigrants without house or family, living as students of the mosque itself.12
Here the community's form crystallised: five daily prayers in congregation, the Friday assembly, and — after a believer's dream confirmed by the Prophet ﷺ — the human voice rather than bell or horn calling to prayer. Bilāl, the slave who had gasped “Aḥad, Aḥad” under the boulder, was chosen as the first muezzin of Islam.31
The Brotherhood
The Emigrants — Muhājirūn — had arrived with nothing. The Prophet ﷺ paired each with one of the Anṣār, the Helpers of Madīnah, in a formal bond of brotherhood. The Anṣār's generosity astonished even its beneficiaries: Saʿd ibn al-Rabīʿ offered his brother ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAwf half of everything he owned. The emigrant's reply set the other half of the ethic: “May God bless you in your family and wealth — direct me to the market.” He died one of the wealthiest men in Islam, self-made in the market of Madīnah.41
The Covenant of Madīnah
The oasis the Prophet ﷺ now led was not a tribe but a patchwork — Emigrants, the Aws and Khazraj (still raw from a generation of civil war), pagan hold-outs, and three substantial Jewish tribes: Banū Qaynuqāʿ, Banū al-Naḍīr, and Banū Qurayẓah. He bound them in a written agreement, preserved by Ibn Isḥāq and reckoned by historians among the most remarkable constitutional documents of antiquity: the believers of Quraysh and Yathrib, and those who joined them, are “one community — ummah — to the exclusion of other men”; the Jews who adhere to it are “a community alongside the believers — to the Jews their religion, and to the Muslims their religion”; each must aid the other against attack on Yathrib; and disputes are referred “to God and to Muḥammad.”56
Not all of Madīnah submitted inwardly. ʿAbdullāh ibn Ubayy, the Khazrajite grandee whom the war-weary oasis had been about to crown king, professed Islam and nursed his grievance; around him gathered the munāfiqūn — the hypocrites — whose double game shadows the whole Madinan period of the Qur'an.16
The Qiblah Turns
For sixteen or seventeen months the Muslims had prayed toward Jerusalem. In Shaʿbān of the second year, in the middle of the noon prayer at a mosque of Banū Salimah, revelation turned the community bodily around: “Turn your face toward the Sacred Mosque; and wherever you may be, turn your faces toward it.”7 The congregation wheeled where they stood; the mosque is called Masjid al-Qiblatayn — the Mosque of the Two Qiblahs — to this day. In the same year, the fast of Ramadan was ordained, and the poor-due systematised: within two years of arriving as a refugee, the Prophet ﷺ presided over a community with its own worship, law, treasury, and direction of prayer — no longer a sect sheltering in an oasis, but a nation facing the House of Ibrāhīm.81