1 Rabi al-Awwal: The Night the Hijra Began

According to historical accounts, Meccan leaders had plotted to assassinate the Prophet that very night: representatives from every clan were to strike his house together, so responsibility for the killing would be shared and no single clan could be singled out for revenge. That night, Imam Ali slept in the Prophet’s bed in his place, so the attackers would believe Muhammad was still home — buying him time to slip out of Mecca unnoticed. Shia sources call this act of sacrifice “Laylat al-Mabit” (the Night of Staying), and some commentators hold that verse 2:207 of the Quran was revealed about it — an interpretation more common in Shia tradition than in Sunni scholarship.

Rather than heading straight north toward Yathrib, the Prophet and his closest companion, Abu Bakr, first took shelter in the cave of Thawr, a mountain south of Mecca, to throw pursuers off their trail. Sources differ on how many nights they spent there — some say two, others three. One account that reconciles the two puts their stay from the night of 1 Rabi al-Awwal until Monday night (around the 5th), before they set out on the main route to Yathrib with the guidance of Abdullah ibn Uraiqit. For the full journey — including the stop at Umm Ma’bad’s tent and the arrival at Quba — see The Hijra Route: Mapping the Prophet’s Journey from Mecca to Medina in the Noorjoo magazine.

Here’s a detail often left out: the formal Islamic lunar calendar, with its fixed months and epoch, wasn’t set in the year of the Hijra itself. It was established roughly sixteen years later, under Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, around 17 AH (638 CE). To match the older Arab custom of starting the year in Muharram, the first Hijri year was counted from that Muharram — not from Rabi al-Awwal, the month the migration actually took place in. In other words, “Year 1 AH” and the actual month of the Hijra don’t share the same starting point, a detail noted in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and by historians such as W. Montgomery Watt.

According to the well-known account, after leaving the cave of Thawr, the Prophet and Abu Bakr reached Quba, a village on the southern outskirts of Yathrib, on the 8th of Rabi al-Awwal, where they stayed for several days — the site of the first mosque in Islamic history, Quba Mosque. Finally, on Friday, 12 Rabi al-Awwal, the Prophet formally entered Yathrib, which from then on was known in his honor as “Madinat al-Nabi,” later shortened to Medina. To read about the pressures that made this migration necessary and the people of Yathrib’s formal invitation, see Why Did the Prophet of Islam Migrate to Medina? in the Noorjoo magazine.

Not every detail of these few days is recorded identically across the earliest Islamic sources. As noted above, accounts of how many nights were spent in the cave of Thawr vary between two and three; some narrations also place the actual departure from Mecca a day or two earlier, at the very end of Safar, rather than the night of 1 Rabi al-Awwal itself. But nearly all historical accounts agree on one point: the Prophet’s arrival in Yathrib fell on Friday, 12 Rabi al-Awwal — a date accepted equally in Shia and Sunni sources, unlike some of the finer details of the journey.

Unlike the solar Gregorian calendar, the Islamic lunar calendar follows the moon, and its year runs about 11 days shorter. As a result, the Gregorian equivalent of 1 Rabi al-Awwal falls roughly 11 days earlier each year than the year before. This year (1448 AH), it corresponds to Friday, August 14, 2026. Like the rest of Noorjoo’s calendar content, only this section is updated annually; the moon-sighting used to fix the exact date may shift it by a day or two depending on the religious authority followed.

Compared to 12 Rabi al-Awwal — the date many Sunni communities also mark as the Prophet’s birthday, the Mawlid — 1 Rabi al-Awwal is a quieter occasion. In Shia tradition, some sources recommend fasting on this day and visiting the shrines of the Prophet and Imam Ali, a way of remembering both the start of the Hijra and Imam Ali’s sacrifice on the night of Laylat al-Mabit together.