Muhammad’s Hijrah journey from Mecca to Medina founds the Islamic calendar

Story: 622 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 0622

In the summer of 622 C.E., a small group of people slipped quietly out of Mecca under cover of night. The prophet Muhammad and his companion Abu Bakr hid in a cave south of the city while a planned assassination waited behind them. Three days later, they set out on a 260-mile journey north through the desert. That journey — the Hijrah migration — would become one of the most consequential acts of movement in human history.

What the evidence shows

• Hijrah migration: Muhammad departed Mecca in May 622 C.E., arriving in Medina after a journey of several weeks — a move driven by years of persecution, boycott, and a final assassination plot by Meccan leaders.
• Islamic calendar epoch: The year of the Hijrah was later designated as year one of the Lunar Hijri calendar, the dating system still used by roughly 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide for religious observance.
• Constitution of Medina: Following his arrival, Muhammad helped establish a founding civic compact that unified Arab and Jewish tribes under a shared governance structure — one of the earliest written constitutional documents in recorded history.

Why Muhammad left Mecca

Islam had been spreading slowly in Mecca for over a decade, but the early community faced severe resistance. Muhammad’s followers endured torture, economic boycotts, and social exclusion. When his uncle Abu Talib — his most powerful protector among Mecca’s leaders — died, that protection vanished.

The turning point came in 622 C.E. when Meccan leaders convened to plan Muhammad’s assassination, selecting representatives from multiple clans so that no single tribe could be held responsible for the killing. Informed of the plot, Muhammad asked his cousin Ali to sleep in his bed as a decoy while he and Abu Bakr escaped through the night.

They hid for three days in a cave on Mount Thawr. Abu Bakr’s children and servants brought them food. Then, guided by a pagan navigator named Abdallah ibn Arqat — a detail that tends to be overlooked — they made their way north toward Medina on camels that Abu Bakr had quietly purchased in advance.

A city already in motion

Medina was not an empty stage waiting for Muhammad’s arrival. The city had been shaped for centuries by the labor and culture of Jewish farming communities — described in Muslim sources as descendants of survivors of the Roman-Jewish wars — who had cultivated its oasis lands and built its agricultural foundations. Arab tribes from southern Arabia had migrated there over time and settled alongside them. By 620 C.E., two of those Arab tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj, had been in near-constant conflict for nearly a hundred years.

It was members of the Khazraj who first encountered Muhammad in Mecca, heard him preach, and recognized in him a potential unifying figure. Their reasoning was pragmatic: Jewish neighbors had long spoken of a coming prophet, and the Khazraj saw in Muhammad both a spiritual leader and a path toward ending the decades-long feud with the Aws. By 622 C.E., 75 converts from Medina — including two women — had pledged their allegiance and their protection to Muhammad at the mountain pass of Aqaba.

Those pledges made the migration possible. The Hijrah migration was not a solo act of courage — it was the result of years of negotiation, hospitality, and cross-tribal alliance-building.

Lasting impact

The Hijrah did more than move a community from one city to another. It marked the moment Islam became a political and civic reality, not just a religious movement. In Medina, Muhammad helped establish the Constitution of Medina, a compact between Muslim, Jewish, and other tribal communities that defined mutual obligations, dispute resolution mechanisms, and shared defense. Scholars have described it as one of the earliest pluralistic civic charters in the ancient world.

The Hijrah year became the anchor for the Lunar Hijri calendar — designated not during Muhammad’s lifetime but under the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, in the 640s C.E. The calendar counts its years from the moment a community chose to build something new rather than from a birth, a conquest, or a cosmic event. That framing — time starting with an act of community formation — is itself a statement about what the tradition valued.

Within Muhammad’s lifetime, the migration also helped forge alliances among previously fragmented Arab tribes, laying civic and military groundwork for the rapid spread of Islam across Arabia and, within a century, across an enormous arc of the known world — from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Islamic art history resources trace how that expansion carried science, philosophy, medicine, and architectural innovation from one end of the world to the other.

Millions of Muslims today mark the Hijri New Year — known as Islamic New Year — as a moment of reflection on the themes of migration, perseverance, and new beginnings. The word Hijrah itself carries layered meaning: not just physical movement, but a turning away from what harms and a turning toward what sustains.

Blindspots and limits

The historical record of the Hijrah is shaped almost entirely by Muslim sources written one to two centuries after the events, which means independent corroboration is limited and some details remain contested among historians. The migration also came at real cost to those who undertook it: Muslim emigrants lost their property, livelihoods, and social networks when Meccan leaders seized what they left behind. The subsequent raids Muhammad led on Meccan caravans beginning in 623 C.E. reflect a community under serious economic and existential pressure — a dimension that devotional narratives sometimes smooth over.

The relationship between the early Muslim community in Medina and its Jewish tribes, initially collaborative under the Constitution of Medina, later deteriorated severely, ending in expulsion and violence. That chapter is part of the full historical picture that the Hijrah set in motion.

None of that diminishes the significance of the journey. But it does remind us that moments of genuine founding are rarely clean — they carry with them everything that came before and everything that followed.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Hijrah

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights gain global recognition at COP30
• Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
• The Good News for Humankind archive on the medieval era

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