Hijrah 1444: The meaning and “meaning of meaning” of migration (I)
A thousand, four hundred and thirty-three years ago, history stood as witness to the emigration of seventy men and women from Mecca to Medina. In the morning of 24 September, 622 CE, Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace and blessing of Allah), accompanied by his bosom friend, confidant and follower, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, having slipped […]
A thousand, four hundred and thirty-three years ago, history stood as witness to the emigration of seventy men and women from Mecca to Medina. In the morning of 24 September, 622 CE, Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace and blessing of Allah), accompanied by his bosom friend, confidant and follower, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, having slipped away under the cover of the night, having taken untrodden paths and having escaped the inhumanity of the aristocratic powers of Makkah (his homeland) eventually arrived the safe and secure earth-land of Madinah. This event is usually celebrated all over the Muslim world the same way it was celebrated by the second Caliph in Islamic history, Umar b. Khatab. It was the latter who began to date the undated in Muslim reality; it was B. Khattab who first started the usage of the date of emigration of the Muslims from Makkah to Madinat in the affairs of the Islamic state. The successful arrival of the Prophet of Islam from Makkah to Madina after thirteen years of persecution in the hands of the Makkan unbelievers known as Hijra has since then been commemorated on a yearly basis by the Muslim world.
A question however becomes pertinent: since the Hijra was an event in history; a door that was opened by the migration of the Prophet from Makkah and “closed” by his arrival to Madina, of what value is its commemoration by the Muslims? Why do we have to talk about and re-engage the Hijra?
The Muslim world usually “celebrates” the Hijra partly in an attempt to ensure the dated becomes undated in Islamic history. We mark the Hijra in order to prevent it from being conclusive or teleological. We reread the Hijra as a community and we endeavour to derive meaning and meaning of meaning of the event based on our conviction that such an important event should not be viewed in the past perfect but in the past-present. We do this based on our awareness that we are destined and confined into that space in the world today where if we fail to read and reread the event, we might actually have failed in reading our lives through the prism of the Qur’an. An unexamined life, our teachers would counsel, is not worth living.
Where and how then do we begin our inquiry into the Hijra of the Prophetic era? How do we begin to read for the meaning of the meaning of the Hijra in contemporary Muslim existential reality? The starting point for this kind of exercise should probably be through the exploration of the Qur’an; in the pre-hijra era of the Hijra. We have to grapple with history as it unfolded in space, in the rigid geographical terrain of Makkah in order to make sense of and derive the meaning of meaning of Hijrah in our world today. We might also have to put the Hijra in an historical-theological perspective. Let us endeavour to begin with the latter.
In our world’s written and unwritten histories, there have been migrations of different kinds. For example, Prophet Musa -Moses- (upon him be peace) was in emigration with the Jewish nation for forty days in the geography of the unknown and one in which divine anger orbited over the horizon of the Jews like a gravity. Prophet Isa’s (Jesus) prophetic enterprise, (upon him be peace), was circumscribed by his constant emigration from the recalcitrance and obduracy of the Jewish race to which he had been sent as a national prophet. Prophet Ibrahim -Abraham- (upon him be peace) was sui generis in this trajectory. He was an emigrant (muhajir) without a companion; he was an emigrant without a helper. He believed in the Almighty at a time humanity had reached a consensus to apostatise and impugn the divine.
At the onset of the modern period, the French warrior, Napoleon Bonaparte, could equally be cited as an “emigrant”. In company of his soldiers, he, in 1798, emigrated from Paris and eventually landed in Cairo. His arrival to Cairo marked the beginning of an era in which Africans were forced to discard the robe of the enslaved so that they might be colonized. The ‘hijra’ of the modern period in which Europeans left the metropolis for the continents of Asia and Africa was that of individuals and corporate agencies that believed in the primordial supremacy of the “White” race over the “inferior”, the “black” and coloured races of the world.
The Hijra of the Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace) from Makkah to Madina in 622, however, had none of the above-mentioned trajectories. It was based neither on racial superiority nor the realization of pecuniary gains. But in order for us to plumb its inner portals, our entré-point should ordinarily be the Qur’an. The tutored in Islamic history is aware of the fact that for events in Muslim realities in the past to enjoy credence, in order for events which the persona, the charisma and the vocation of the Prophet catalyzed to be valid, it must be told by the Qur’an itself; such events must enjoy Qur’anic certification.