The Ḥajj of Abū Bakr aṣ-Ṣiddīq

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Having jumped ahead to gather the delegations, we now step back in the chronology to the next great event of the ninth year: the Ḥajj led by Abū Bakr aṣ-Ṣiddīq. Recall the timing, Mecca was conquered in Ramaḍān of the eighth year. So the Muslims could have made Ḥajj that Dhū al-Ḥijjah, only three months later. Why was there no organised pilgrimage from Medina? Not, as some might guess, because the delegations kept everyone busy, for you do not delay a wājib, a farḍ, on account of delegations; that would be indefensible. The real reason is that Mecca was not yet secure.

❧Mecca was not yet safe

Even within the Ḥijāz the danger was plain: how could we forget Ṭāʾif? Ṭāʾif is an hour's drive away, the very next city, and it still held a large and deeply hostile population. Beyond it lay Thaqīf, Najrān, and the unsettled northern frontier of Tabūk. A concerted Ḥajj led from Medina was simply not yet feasible. And so in the eighth year only a small group of Muslims performed Ḥajj, for the first time ever done openly, since Mecca now lay under Islamic control, led by the man the Prophet ﷺ had appointed governor of Mecca: ʿAttāb ibn Asīd, of Banū ʿAbd Shams, a local Meccan and a late convert of the Conquest. The Prophet ﷺ himself and the Ṣaḥābah in Medina did not perform Ḥajj that year at all.

❧Why a junior convert governed Mecca

Why appoint so junior a man over Mecca, rather than a senior like ʿUmar or ʿUthmān? A trick question, the shaykh says, but you should know the answer: they all had to go back. The elite were all Muhājirūn, and a true Muhājir could never return to settle in the city he had abandoned for Allāh, or his Hijrah would be nullified. That renunciation was total, and it was unique to that generation; for us today, if a land one fled for Allāh's sake later becomes safe, one may return. But that first generation had given everything up as a binding vow, and none of them, not even the Prophet ﷺ, could go back to live in Mecca. So the only ones free to remain were those who had never left it: the converts of Mecca, and ʿAttāb at their head. The books of history say little of that eighth-year Ḥajj precisely because none of the elite Ṣaḥābah, and not the Prophet ﷺ, took part in it.

❧The ninth year: Abū Bakr with three hundred

By the ninth year Tabūk was behind them, and Thaqīf, the great threat right next door, the tribe that had first bargained to keep its prayers and its wine, had accepted Islam. Now the Prophet ﷺ dispatched an official delegation from Medina under Abū Bakr aṣ-Ṣiddīq: three hundred pilgrims, and twenty-five sacrificial camels sent as hady. He himself would not go, and he gave the reason openly: the idolaters still performed ṭawāf around the Kaʿbah naked, and it did not befit the Prophet of Allāh ﷺ to make Ḥajj amid such vulgarity, he would not go until that was ended. He was sending Abū Bakr to lay the foundations for the one perfect pilgrimage of his own life still to come, the Farewell Ḥajj. The idols had been cleared in the eighth year; now the pagan rites, and the pagans themselves, had to go, so that from this year forward Mecca would be a purely Islamic sanctuary, with no idol-worshippers coming to it at all.