Umm Salamah's Hijrah: Sixteen Months of Separation

Abu Salamah ibn ʿAbd al-Asad was the first companion to emigrate to Madinah. He went openly, loading his wife Umm Salamah and their infant son onto a camel and setting off without subtlety. The Quraysh intercepted him immediately.

They said: "As for you, you may go. You have no binding protection among us now." They released him. "But your wife is a Qurashiyyah. She is ours. We will not let her leave." They detained Umm Salamah.

When the news reached Abu Salamah's tribe, their Jāhilī pride responded: "If you're keeping her, fine. But the boy is ours." A tug-of-war broke out over the infant, literally. The child's arm was nearly pulled from its socket until Umm Salamah cried out for them to stop. Abu Salamah's tribe took the boy. The Quraysh kept Umm Salamah. Abu Salamah was forced to leave for Madinah alone.

Umm Salamah narrated what followed herself: "For more than sixteen months, every single day, I would go to al-Baṭḥāʾ (the outskirts of Makkah, from which you can see the direction of Yathrib) and cry. Every day. My husband was there. My son was there. I could not reach either of them."

After sixteen months, some of her cousins finally interceded with the Qurayshi elders: "She's just a woman. She wants to go to her husband. What purpose is served by holding her?" The elders relented. She was released.

She went to Abu Salamah's tribe, and by that time tempers had cooled. They returned her son.

And then she simply began walking toward Madinah. Alone. With an infant. On foot. No escort, no tribe, no guarantee of safety. Just tawakkul, complete trust in Allah.

At Tanʿīm, the point outside Makkah where the ḥaram begins, the place we know today as Masjid ʿĀʾishah, she encountered ʿUthmān ibn Ṭalḥah. He was a young nobleman of the Quraysh, from the Banū ʿAbd al-Dār, returning from some journey. He was not a Muslim.

He said: "Where are you going?"

"To my husband in Yathrib."

"You're alone?"

"I have no one. I have Allah."

ʿUthmān ibn Ṭalḥah said: "Wallāhi, this will not be."

And he escorted her the entire way from Makkah to Madinah, on foot, leading her camel by hand. The journey was at minimum two weeks. He did not ride while she rode; he walked. Whenever it was time to stop, he would tell the camel to kneel, turn his back while she dismounted so nothing of her would be exposed, help her settle under a tree, then go sleep by the camel. In the morning he would rise, bring the camel, turn his back again while she mounted, and continue walking. He exchanged no unnecessary words with her. He was a complete gentleman, by the standards of Jāhiliyyah or any other standard.

When the first houses of Yathrib came into view, he said: "Your husband is in there." Then he turned and walked back to Makkah, alone, without a camel, in the desert.

Umm Salamah said: "I do not believe there was a more noble Arab than ʿUthmān ibn Ṭalḥah."

He did not know it, but the woman he had honored would become the Mother of the Believers, a wife of the Prophet ﷺ (after Abu Salamah passed away from Uḥud wounds). He had shown reverence to the Prophet ﷺ's future wife without knowing it.

Allah does not let such acts pass unrecorded.

ʿUthmān ibn Ṭalḥah converted to Islam among the very last batch before the Conquest of Makkah, along with Khālid ibn al-Walīd and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, just before the door of special reward closed.

At the Conquest, al-ʿAbbās asked the Prophet ﷺ to grant him both the Siqāyah (the right to provide water to pilgrims) and the keys of the Kaaba. In response, Allah revealed: Inna Allāha yaʾmurukum an tuʾaddū al-amānāti ilā ahlihā, "Allāh commands you to give trusts back to those who deserve them." (4:58).

The Prophet ﷺ gave the key to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and said: "Take this key to ʿUthmān ibn Ṭalḥah. These keys are his and the inheritance of his descendants until the Day of Judgment. Whoever takes them from his descendants without right is a wrongdoer."

ʿAlī delivered it. ʿUthmān said: "Even the Banū Hāshim claimed it?" ʿAlī said: "Allāh revealed a verse of Quran about this." ʿUthmān held the key.

Fourteen and a half centuries later, to this day, the keepers of the key of the Kaaba are the descendants of ʿUthmān ibn Ṭalḥah. The man who walked an unknown Muslim woman and her infant across the desert, as a pagan, earned a reward that has echoed for fifteen centuries.