On Hijrah 1447 and the semiotics of its celebration (I)

A thousand, four hundred and forty-seven years ago, history stood as witness to the emigration of 70 men and women from Makkah to Madinah. In the morning of 24 September, 622 CE, Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace and blessing of the Almighty), accompanied by his bosom friend, confidant and follower, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, having […]

A thousand, four hundred and forty-seven years ago, history stood as witness to the emigration of 70 men and women from Makkah to Madinah. In the morning of 24 September, 622 CE, Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace and blessing of the Almighty), 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 (may the Almighty be pleased with him). 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 Madinah in the affairs of the Islamic state.

The successful arrival of the Prophet of Islam from Makkah to Madinah after 13 years of persecution in the hands of the Makkan unbelievers, known as Hijrah, has since then been commemorated every year by the Muslim world. 

A question, however, becomes pertinent: since the Hijrah was an event in history; a door which was opened by the migration of the Prophet from Makkah and became “closed” by his arrival to Madinah, of what value is its commemoration by the Muslims? Why do we have to talk about and re-engage the Hijrah? 

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The Muslim world usually “celebrates” the Hijrah partly in its attempt to ensure the dated becomes undated in Islamic history. We mark the Hijrah to prevent the Hijra from being conclusive or teleological. We reread the Hijrah as a community and endeavour to derive, in line with Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani, the meaning and the meaning of meaning of the event based on our conviction that such an important occasion should not be viewed in the past perfect but in the past-present.

We do this based on the realisation that we are destined and confined into that space in world history 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 Hijrah of the Prophetic era? How do we begin to read the meaning of the Hijrah in contemporary Muslim existential realities?  

The starting point for this kind of exercise should be the exploration of the Qur’an; in the pre-hijrah era of the Hijrah. 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 the meaning of Hijrah in our world today. We might also have to put the Hijrah in a historical-theological perspective. Let us endeavour to begin with the latter.

In the world’s written and unwritten histories, there have been emigrations and peregrinations. For example, the persona of Prophet Musa’s (upon him be peace) gained relevance, in part, from his crossing, as leader of the Jewish nation, of that landscape of the unknown. For forty days, the Jews were in exodus to the unknown, and within that period, divine anger orbited above them, on the horizon, like gravity.

Remember Prophet Isa (alayhi salam). His prophetic enterprise was equally mapped on his constant departure (hijrah) from the recalcitrance and obduracy of the Jewish race to which he had been sent as a national prophet. Bring to mind the story of Prophet Ibrahim (upon him be peace). There you have the locus classicus in ‘migration studies’. There you have an emigrant (a muhajir) without a companion; there you have an emigrant without a helper (nasir). Prophet Ibrahim believed in the Almighty at a time when humanity had reached a consensus to apostatise and impugn the divine.

At the beginning of the modern period, the French warrior, Napoleon Bonaparte, could equally be cited as an “emigrant”. In the company of his soldiers, he, in 1798, emigrated from Paris and eventually landed in Cairo. His arrival in Cairo marked the beginning of an era in which Africans discarded the robe of slavery so that they might put on the garb of colonisation. The ‘hijrah’ 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” over the “inferior” and “black” qua coloured races of the world.

The Hijrah of Prophet Muhammad (upon him be peace) from Makkah to Madinah in 622, however, had none of the aforementioned trajectories. The migration from Makkah to Madinah was based neither on racial superiority nor was it circumscribed by the pursuit of pecuniary gains. Now, 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, they must be told by the Qur’an itself; such events must enjoy Qur’anic certification.

But in reading the Qur’an for the Hijra, we run into a brick wall. This is because the Hijrah is not effusively celebrated by the Qur’an. No chapter is named after it; no complete narration in the Qur’an is dedicated to it. Yet. We all know that the Hijra was full of highly enchanting scenarios, the likes of which only Ibn Hisham and other biographers of the Prophet could tell with relish. The Quran has not effusively ‘celebrated’ the Hijrah probably because to do that would have run contrary to the Qur’anic style: a style which gives precedence to brevity where detailed narration is expected; a style which employs stories not as an end in itself but as a means toward a glorious end; a style which concerns itself with the Prophet but might even treat the Prophet as a second person; a style that would tell the story of the world by using Makkah and Madinah as ‘laboratory’.

Thus, the story of the saga of the Hijrah is told in two Ayats (signs) of the Qur’an only. The first reads in part thus: “And we have put a barrier before them and a barrier behind them and we have covered them up such that they cannot see” (Q36:8). The second Ayat goes thus: “When the unbelievers drove him out with his closest associate and he and his second were in the cave, he assured him (his second): grief not because the Almighty is with us and He caused his peace to descend into his heart and aided him with warriors unseen; thus did he utterly humble the scheming of the unbelievers…” (Q9:40).