The Muhajirun's Homesickness and the Prophet's Dua for Madinah

Despite all the blessings of Madinah, its lush date palms, its water, its generous and welcoming Anṣār, the early Muhājirūn did not love Madinah. Not because of anything wrong with the city, but because there is truly no place like home.

They were homesick. And their homesickness was so intense that it became a physical illness.

❧ʿĀʾishah's Account

ʿĀʾishah narrates, she is a young girl at this point, newly married to the Prophet ﷺ, that she went to visit her father Abū Bakr and Bilāl, who had both fallen sick:

"I entered upon my father and he was in a severe fever, and Bilāl was with him also ill. I said: 'Yā abatī, kayfa tajiduk?', 'O my father, how do you find yourself?'"

Abū Bakr was shaking with fever and yet, instead of speaking of his condition, he spoke poetry about death:

"Kullu imriʾin muṣabbaḥun fī ahlihi, wal-mawtu adnā min shirāki naʿlihi", "Every person wakes up in the morning among his family, yet death is closer to him than his own shoelace."

He was so overwhelmed by illness and grief that he was composing verses about mortality, about waking among one's people and yet being closer to death than to life.

Then ʿĀʾishah turned to Bilāl, who was also lying sick. Bilāl, who had been tortured on the hot sands of Makkah by Umayyah ibn Khalaf, who had been purchased from slavery by Abū Bakr and freed, who had been among the most oppressed people in Makkah, Bilāl was now in a city of water and shade and dates. And yet he was longing for the thorns of Makkah.

He recited poetry:

"Alā layta shiʿrī hal abītanna laylatan bi-wādin wa ḥawlī idhkharun wa jalīlu", "If only I knew, shall I ever spend a night in a valley surrounded by Idhkhar and Jalīl?"

Idhkhar and Jalīl are the thorny desert plants that grow on the hillsides outside of Makkah. He was not longing for luxury. He was longing for the specific thorns of the specific land where he had grown up, a land that had tortured him, exiled him, and where his tormentors still lived.

Then Bilāl said:

"Allāhumma ilʿan Shaybah ibn Rabīʿah, Allāhumma ilʿan Umayyah ibn Khalaf", "O Allāh, curse Shaybah ibn Rabīʿah, O Allāh, curse Umayyah ibn Khalaf."

One after another, he invoked Allāh's curse on the men who had been responsible for their expulsion: "Akhrajūnā min diyārinā", "They threw us out of our homes."

He is fuming. He is sick, he is homesick, and he is angry.

❧The Prophet's Dua

ʿĀʾishah left that scene, Abū Bakr shivering and reciting death poetry, Bilāl cursing the enemies from his sickbed, and went back to the Prophet ﷺ to tell him what she had seen.

The Prophet ﷺ responded with supplication.

"Allāhumma ḥabbib ilaynā al-Madīnata ka-ḥubbinā Makkata aw ashadd", "O Allāh, make Madinah beloved to us the way we used to love Makkah, or even more beloved."

"Allāhumma bārik lanā fī ṣāʿinā wa muddina", "O Allāh, bless us in our Ṣāʿ and our Mudd", i.e., bless all of the food of Madinah.

"Wa ṣaḥḥihhā lanā, wa anqil ḥummāhā ilā al-Juḥfah", "And make it healthy for us, and transfer its fevers and plagues to al-Juḥfah", the barren, uninhabited land beyond the city limits.

Madinah was a lusher environment than Makkah, more water, more vegetation, and with that came more microbes and more fevers. The Makkans were simply not accustomed to this. The Prophet ﷺ asked Allāh to take those diseases away from the city.

❧The Effect

Allāh answered that duʿāʾ.

The love of Madinah entered the hearts of the Muhājirūn, growing slowly but surely until it surpassed even their love of Makkah. Anas ibn Mālik narrates in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī that whenever the Prophet ﷺ would travel and then return to Madinah, and the outskirts of the city came into view in the distance, his face would light up and he would urge his camel to go faster.

That duʿāʾ, scholars say, extends to every Muslim who sincerely loves the Prophet ﷺ. The special peace of Madinah, the sukūn, the quietude, the sweetness one feels when entering the city of the Prophet, is something that even Muslims who have never visited have an intuitive longing for. And those who have visited carry the memory of it differently from the memory of any other place.

It is the answered duʿāʾ of the Prophet ﷺ, still working.