The City That Came Out to Meet Him

Yathrib had heard he was coming. Each morning the Muslims of the city would walk out to the lava-fields on the edge of town and wait, watching the shimmering road from Makkah, until the midday heat drove them home. The longing in that waiting is one of the tender images of the whole story: a city straining its eyes for a man most of them had never seen.

One day a Jew, watching from a rooftop, saw the white-clad travellers approaching and called out at the top of his voice: O Arabs, here is your man whom you have been awaiting. The believers seized their weapons and rushed out, and met the Messenger of Allah ﷺ at last. He halted first at Quba, on the city's edge, and stayed there some days, and there he laid the foundations of the first mosque built in Islam, the mosque whose worshippers Allah praised: a mosque founded on piety from the first day.

Ali (ra) caught up with them at Quba, having stayed behind in Makkah those extra days to return the deposits, his feet torn from walking. And here too the Prophet ﷺ was joined by the household he had left. The exiles were home, in a city that would never again be Yathrib.

For from that arrival, the city took a new name from the man it received: Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, al-Madinah. The hijrah from which the Muslim calendar counts its years was complete, not merely a change of place but the birth of a community that could finally live its faith in the open, build, govern, pray aloud, and call others without fear.