The Council at Dār al-Nadwah
With their enemy about to slip beyond reach, the chiefs of Quraysh met in council at Dār al-Nadwah. Imprisonment and exile were weighed and rejected; the counsel that carried — the Qur'an alludes to the session: “and when those who disbelieved plotted against you, to detain you, or kill you, or drive you out”1 — was Abū Jahl's: one strong young man from every clan, striking together with a single blow, so that the blood would be spread across all Quraysh and Banū Hāshim could not seek revenge.2
That noon, the Prophet ﷺ came veiled to Abū Bakr's house with word that permission had come. Abū Bakr wept for joy and offered the two camels he had kept fattened for months. That night, with the assassins gathering at his door, the Prophet ﷺ left ʿAlī in his bed wrapped in his green cloak — ʿAlī, who stayed behind to return the goods the Makkans, even now, still deposited with al-Amīn — and passed out of the house and the city.23
Three Days in Thawr
Instead of striking north for Yathrib, the two fugitives went south, to a cave on Mount Thawr, and lay hidden three days while the city hunted them — a hundred camels on each head. ʿAbdullāh ibn Abī Bakr brought news by night; the freedman ʿĀmir ibn Fuhayrah grazed sheep over the tracks. Once, searchers stood close enough that Abū Bakr whispered: “If one of them looks at his feet, he will see us.” The answer entered the Qur'an: “Do not grieve; truly God is with us.” — “O Abū Bakr, what do you think of two whose third is God?”42
On the third night a hired guide, Ibn Urayqiṭ — a pagan, trusted with their lives — brought the camels, and they rode for Yathrib by the coast road. Of the pursuers, the sīrah remembers Surāqah ibn Mālik, whose horse sank thrice in the sand as he closed on the party; understanding, he begged amnesty — and the Prophet ﷺ, a fugitive with a price on his head, promised him the bracelets of Chosroes. Surāqah lived to receive them from the treasury of ʿUmar.25
Arrival
On the way they halted at the tent of Umm Maʿbad, whose barren, exhausted goat gave a vessel of milk under his hand; her description of the stranger to her husband is one of the treasured portraits of the sīrah. At Qubāʾ, on Yathrib's southern edge, the Prophet ﷺ rested fourteen days and founded the first mosque of Islam — “a mosque founded upon God-consciousness from the first day.”62
On a Friday he entered the city henceforth called Madīnat al-Nabī — the City of the Prophet — every house pleading for the honour of hosting him. He let his she-camel al-Qaṣwāʾ choose: she knelt on a drying-floor for dates belonging to two orphan boys, and he lodged with Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī beside it. Anas ibn Mālik, a boy then, remembered it all his life: “I never saw a day brighter than the day he entered.” Seventeen years later, ʿUmar would fix this emigration — not the Prophet's birth, not the first revelation — as the year one of the Muslim calendar: the year the community began.27