The Prophet ﷺ Enters Madinah: 'O Arabs, Your King Has Arrived!'

For days, the Anṣār had been going out of the city every morning toward what is now Qubāʾ, the first settlement outside the city gates, waiting and watching the horizon. They knew the Prophet ﷺ was coming. It was only a matter of when. Word had reached Madinah that he had left Makkah, that he had escaped the Quraysh's assassins, that he was on his way.

So every morning they would walk out, armed and ready, and stand in the open until the sun rose high enough that the heat became unbearable, around 10 or 11 in the morning. Then they had no choice but to return to their houses to rest through the midday heat.

And then the day came. They had gone out as usual. They had waited. And the heat had driven them back in. They had retired to their homes.

At that moment, the Prophet ﷺ and Abū Bakr appeared on the horizon.

There was no Anṣārī to see them.

But there was a Jewish man.

He was on top of a date palm tree, plucking dates. The orchards and groves that lay on the outskirts of the city were largely Jewish-owned, it was the Jews, not the Arabs, who had first farmed this land, and it was their groves and fortresses that dotted the periphery. So when two figures appeared in the distance crossing the open plain, it was this Jewish man who first saw them.

And the excitement, the weeks and months of anticipation that had gripped the entire city, Jewish and Arab alike, moved him.

He cried out from the top of the tree, at the top of his lungs:

"Yā maʿshar al-ʿArab! Hādhā jaddukum alladhī tuntaẓirūn!"

❧"O Arabs! Your grandfather [your great one / your leader] whom you have been waiting for has arrived!"

In another version of the narration, he shouted: "O Arabs, your *king* has arrived!"

Notice the phrasing. He did not say "our king." He said "your king." He was genuinely excited, excitement is contagious, and for weeks the whole city had been buzzing. But in that instinctive phrasing, in that single word, the future was already encoded: these were their affairs. The Prophet ﷺ was their leader. The Yahūd had not yet decided where they stood.

They would have to decide.

❧The Ansar Rush Out

The cry spread instantly through the streets of Madinah. The Anṣār, the men who had pledged at ʿAqabah, who had been waiting weeks for this moment, poured out of their houses, running.

Al-Barāʾ ibn ʿĀzib narrates in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: "Ra'aytu al-Anṣāra yatabawwaʾūna li-liqāʾihi", "I saw the Anṣār preparing themselves for his reception." He describes them as coming out dressed in their finest clothes. In another narration: armed and adorned. This was their moment and they were not going to be unprepared for it.

Over 500 men came out, armed as an honor guard, dressed as for a celebration. The women climbed up onto the flat rooftops of their houses to see, because they could not easily go into the streets of mixed crowds, but they were not going to miss this moment. Children ran through the streets and clustered at the edges of the crowd.

And all around the Prophet ﷺ, as he entered the city, there was joy, a kind of joy Madinah had never known. Songs were sung, and the women from the rooftops joined in, the famous lines that have echoed through fourteen centuries of Islamic memory:

Ṭalaʿa l-badru ʿalaynā

Min thaniyyāt al-wadāʿ

Wajaba l-shukru ʿalaynā

Mā daʿā li-llāhi dāʿ

"The full moon has risen over us, from the passes of farewell. Gratitude is due from us, for as long as anyone calls to Allāh."

The light of a new era was visible. The first stone of the first Islamic state had been laid in the ground of Yathrib.

❧A Date Contested

There are two narrations for the exact date of entry: the 2nd of Rabīʿ al-Awwal and the 12th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal. Both narrations are transmitted. It was a Monday, this is agreed upon. The exact date continues to be discussed among Islamic historians. It was the 14th year of the Daʿwah, which became Year 1 of the Hijrī calendar.

❧What Came Next

The Prophet ﷺ stayed temporarily in the quarter of the Banū ʿAdī ibn al-Najjār with Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, his closest living relative among the Anṣār through his grandfather ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib's mother Salmā. He would stay there for approximately seven months until his mosque and the adjacent rooms for his family were completed.

The Madanī period of Islam had begun.