Migration to Abyssinia

Background

According to the traditional view, members of the early Muslim community in Mecca faced persecution, which prompted Muhammad to advise them to seek refuge in Aksum. The earliest extant account is given in the sirah of the eighth-century Muslim historian Ibn Ishaq:

Another view, grounded in the political developments of the time, suggests that following the capture of Jerusalem in 614 by the Sasanian Empire, many believers saw a potential danger to the community as they were not the partisans of the Persians who practiced Zoroastrianism and had earlier supported the Jews of Arabia in Himyar. The acceptance of these Muslims into the Kingdom of Aksum at precisely a moment of Persian triumph in the Levant recalls the Aksumite foreign policy of the previous century, which saw Aksum and Persia compete for influence in Arabia.

The migration(s)

According to historians of Islam, there were two migrations, although there are differences of opinion with regard to the dates.

The first group of migrants, which comprised twelve men and four women, who fled Arabia in the year or according to other sources, and was granted asylum by Najashi, the Negus of the Kingdom of Aksum, a Christian state that existed in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. This group included Muhammad's daughter Ruqayyah and his son-in-law Uthman ibn Affan, who would later become the third caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate after Muhammad's death. Prior to the exile, Muhammad chose Uthman ibn Mazʽun, one of his most important companions, as the leader of this group. According to Tabqat Ibn Saʽd, the group boarded a merchant ship from the sea port of Shuʽaiba and paid a half-dinar each to cross into East Africa via the Red Sea. After a year, the exiles heard rumours that the Quraysh had converted to Islam, which prompted them to return to Mecca. Confronted with the opposite reality, they set out for the Aksumite kingdom again in or according to other sources, this time accompanied by other newly-founded Muslims, with the migrant group comprising 83 men and 18 women in total.

Some Western historians such as Leone Caetani (1869–1935) and William Montgomery Watt (1909–2006) questioned the account of two migrations. Although Ibn Ishaq provided two partially overlapping lists of migrants, he did not mention that the first group returned and went back a second time. Watt argued that the word used by Ibn Ishaq (tatāba‘a, ) and the order of the names on the lists suggests that the migration may have taken place in a number of smaller groups rather than two large parties, while the appearance of the two lists reflected the controversies surrounding the assignment of priority on official registers during the reign of the second Rashidun caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab.

In Aksum

Much of the coverage of this event comes from the historian Ibn Ishaq.

When the Quraysh learned that the early Muslims were planning to move to the Aksumite kingdom, they sent a delegation to the Negus to demand the surrender of the fugitives. They selected two envoys: ‘Amr ibn al-‘As and Abdullah bin Rabiah. The Meccan envoys were given gifts for the Aksumite king Najashi and his generals. The gifts were made up of leather and prepared by fine skin. The Meccans appealed to the generals, arguing that the Muslim migrants were rebels who had invented a new religion, the likes of which neither the Meccans nor the Aksumites had heard of, and that their relatives were asking for their return. The king granted them an audience, but ultimately refused to hand over the migrants until he heard their defence.

The Sahaba were later brought in front of the Negus and his bishops. Jaʽfar ibn Abi Talib, who acted as the leader of the exiles, spoke in their defence:

The Christian king requested their revelations from God. Jaʽfar then recited a passage from the Quran's Surah Maryam (). When the king heard it, he wept and exclaimed: "Verily, this is the word of Jesus (the Injeel) has come from the same source of light (miškāt)".

However, one of the envoys, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, thought of an alternative tactic. On the following day, he returned to the king and told him that the Muslims had disrespected Jesus. When the Muslims heard that the king had summoned them again to question them about their view of Jesus, they tried to find a diplomatic answer, but ultimately decided to speak according to the revelation they had received. When the king addressed Jaʽfar, he replied that they held Jesus to be "the servant of Allah, His prophet, His spirit and His word, which he cast unto the pure virgin Mary". Muslim accounts state that upon hearing these words, the Negus declared that Jesus was indeed no more than what he had said; he turned to the Muslims and told them: "go, for you are safe in my country". He then returned the gifts to the envoys and dismissed them.

The Satanic Verses

Main article: Satanic Verses

Along with many others, Tabari recorded that Muhammad was desperate, hoping for an accommodation with his tribe. So, while he was in the presence of a number of Quraysh, after delivering verses mentioning three of their favorite deities (Quran 53:19–20), Satan put upon his tongue two short verses: "These are the high flying ones / whose intercession is to be hoped for." This led to a general reconciliation between Muhammad and the Meccans, and the Muslims in Abyssinia began to return home. However, the next day, Muhammad retracted these verses at the behest of Gabriel, claiming that they had been cast by Satan to his tongue and God had abrogated them. Instead, verses that revile those goddesses were then revealed. The returning Muslims thus had to make arrangements for clan protection before they could re-enter Mecca.

According to the scholar Shahab Ahmed, the so-called Satanic Verses incident was reported en masse and documented by nearly all of the major biographers of Muhammad during Islam's first two centuries, which, according to these early sources, corresponds to Quran 22:52. Ahmed notes that with the rise of the hadith movement and systematic theology introducing new doctrines such as —the belief in Muhammad’s infallibility, which holds that he could not be deceived by Satan—the early community’s historical memory of the incident was reevaluated. By the 20th century, Muslim scholars unanimously rejected this incident. On the other hand, most European biographers of Muhammad have historically recognized the veracity of this incident of satanic verses on the basis of the criterion of embarrassment. Historian Alfred T. Welch proposes that the period of Muhammad's turning away from strict monotheism was likely far longer but was later encapsulated in a story that made it much shorter and implicated Satan as the culprit. However, recent Western secular scholarship has generally questioned the veracity of the Satanic Verses narrative.

End of the Muslim exile

Many of the exiles in Aksum returned to Mecca in 622 and made the hijra to Medina with Muhammad, while a second wave went to Medina in 628.

First migration list

The first list of emigrants reported by Ibn Ishaq included the following eleven men and four women:

• Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas
• Jahsh ibn Riyab
• Abd-Allah ibn Jahsh
• Ja'far ibn Abi Talib spokesman
• Uthman, son-in-law and companion of Muhammad, husband of Ruqayyah, and the third rightly guided caliph.
• Ruqayyah bint Muhammad, the wife of Uthman and daughter of Muhammad.
• Abu Hudhayfa ibn 'Utba
• Sahla bint Suhail, wife of Abu Hudhayfa
• Zubayr ibn al-Awwam
• Mus'ab ibn Umair
• Abdur Rahman bin Awf
• Abu Salama Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Asad
• Umm Salama, wife of Abu Salama
• Uthman bin Maz'oon leader of group
• Amir bin Rabiah
• Layla bint Abi Asmah – wife of Amir

Notes

References

Sources

References

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18. He is father of Zainab and a father-in-law of Muhammad. In some accounts relating to Sahabahs in China, he (Jahsh) is noted as Geys. Muslims of Chams (Cambodiya) trace ancestry to a father-in-law of Muhammad, who is Jahsh (Geys). See [[T.W. Arnold. T. W. Arnold]], ''The Preaching of Islam'', 294n8.
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