The first hijra: Muslims find refuge in Abyssinia
Persecuted in Mecca, a small group of the Prophet Muhammad's followers cross the Red Sea and are protected by the Christian king of Aksum.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings, George Allen & Unwin (1983)
- Muhammad — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan — Haggai Erlich, Lynne Rienner (2010)
In the early years of Muhammad’s preaching in Mecca, his followers, many of them poor or enslaved, faced mockery, boycotts and violence. According to the early Muslim biographies, around 615 the Prophet advised a group of them to go to Abyssinia, where “a king rules in whose realm no one is wronged”. About a dozen went first, and later a larger party of around eighty or more, among them the Prophet’s daughter Ruqayya and her husband Uthman, and his cousin Ja’far ibn Abi Talib.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings, George Allen & Unwin (1983)
- Muhammad — Encyclopaedia Britannica
The tradition says Mecca’s leaders sent envoys with gifts to demand their return. The king, the Negus (al-Najashi in Arabic), heard both sides. When Ja’far recited verses about Mary and Jesus from the Qur’an, the king is said to have drawn a line on the ground with his staff and declared that the difference between their faith and his was no wider than that line. He refused to give them up. Some refugees stayed for years, returning only after the Muslims had settled in Medina.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings, George Allen & Unwin (1983)
- Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan — Haggai Erlich, Lynne Rienner (2010)
This “first hijra”, seven years before the famous migration to Medina, made the Horn of Africa one of Islam’s earliest homes. A later tradition attributed to the Prophet, “leave the Abyssinians alone as long as they leave you alone”, was long cited by Muslim scholars as a reason to treat Ethiopia differently from other Christian lands, though relations in later centuries were often far less peaceful. Bilal, the Prophet’s first muezzin, was also of Ethiopian descent, and Ethiopian Muslims are proud of both connections.
- Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan — Haggai Erlich, Lynne Rienner (2010)
- Muhammad — Encyclopaedia Britannica
The details come from Muslim sources written down more than a century later, and the king’s identity and conversion are debated. But the core memory, of a Christian African kingdom that sheltered refugees, is shared across Ethiopia’s faiths.
- Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan — Haggai Erlich, Lynne Rienner (2010)
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings, George Allen & Unwin (1983)
When the Quraysh sent envoys to bring the refugees back, the Negus (al-Najashi) asked the Muslims what they believed. Ja'far ibn Abi Talib recited the Qur'an's chapter on Mary, and the king wept and refused to hand them over. Many traditions say he became a Muslim himself.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings, George Allen & Unwin (1983)
- Muhammad — Encyclopaedia Britannica
The king who welcomed the refugees is remembered as a just Christian ruler, and the story is part of Ethiopia's image of itself as a land of refuge. Most Ethiopian Christians do not accept that he converted.
- Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan — Haggai Erlich, Lynne Rienner (2010)
Why it matters today
Ethiopian Muslims treasure the story as proof that Islam has roots in their land as deep as anywhere outside Mecca, and Christians and Muslims alike cite it as a founding model of coexistence. The village of Negash in Tigray, linked by tradition to the refugees and to the king, is a place of pilgrimage.
The first hijra is remembered as the moment a Christian king sheltered the first Muslims, a story often told to teach gratitude, fairness to People of the Book, and the dignity of refugees. Muslim tradition holds that the Prophet prayed for the Negus when he died.