The First Refuge

A king under whom no one is wronged

In its first years in Makkah, Islam had no state, no army and no safe house. Believers who had no powerful clan behind them were beaten, starved and left in the sun. The Prophet could not protect them, and he said so.

Ibn Ishaq, the earliest biographer whose work survives, reports what he told them instead: that they should go to Abyssinia, because its king was one under whom no one was wronged, and it was a land of truth, and they could stay there until God made a way out for them.¹

In the month of Rajab, in the fifth year of his mission, about 615, the first group slipped down to the coast and took ship. Ibn Sa’d counts eleven men and four women.² Among them were Uthman ibn Affan and his wife Ruqayyah, the Prophet’s own daughter. A second, larger group followed. Ibn Ishaq counts about eighty-three men, besides the women and children.¹

The kingdom they reached was Aksum, in the highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea. Arabic sources call its king النجاشي, al-Najashi, the Negus. That is a title. Muslim tradition gives his name as Ashama ibn Abjar.

The hearing

Quraysh did not let them go quietly. They sent two envoys, Amr ibn al-As and Abdullah ibn Abi Rabi’ah, with gifts for the king and for his bishops, and one request: hand these people back.

The king would not decide without hearing the refugees. The account comes from Umm Salama, who was in the room, and it is preserved by Ibn Ishaq and in the Musnad of Ahmad.¹³ Ja’far ibn Abi Talib spoke for the Muslims. They had been a people of ignorance, he said, who worshiped idols, cut off their kin and let the strong devour the weak, until God sent them a messenger whose honesty they already knew. He called them to worship God alone, to speak the truth, to keep their trusts, to be good to neighbors and to stop shedding blood.

The king asked whether he had with him anything of what this messenger had brought. Ja’far recited from the opening of Surah Maryam, the chapter named for Mary. Umm Salama says the king wept until his beard was wet, and his bishops wept with him. Then he said that this and what Jesus had brought came from the same niche, and that he would never give them up.

The envoys tried once more the next day: ask them, they said, what they claim about Jesus. Ja’far answered that he is the servant of God and His messenger, His spirit and His word, which He cast to the virgin Mary. The king picked a stick up from the ground and said that Jesus was no more than that, by the length of the stick. The gifts were returned. The refugees stayed.

Your brother Ashama

Some of the emigrants went home early. Others stayed in Africa for years and rejoined the Prophet in Madinah only at the time of Khaybar, in the seventh year after the Hijrah. The Prophet and the king never met.

When the king died, traditionally in the ninth year after the Hijrah, about 630, the Prophet did something he is not recorded doing for anyone else in this way.

Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) informed (the people) about the death of An-Najashi on the very day he died. He went towards the Musalla (praying place) and the people stood behind him in rows. He said four Takbirs (i.e. offered the Funeral prayer).

Today a pious man has died. So get up and offer the funeral prayer for your brother Ashama.

A funeral prayer in Madinah for a man who died in Africa, a continent away. The first country to shelter Muslims was African and Christian, and its king is remembered by Muslims as a brother.

Bilal and Umm Ayman

Africa was also inside the first Muslim community, not only across the water from it. Bilal ibn Rabah was born in Makkah to an Abyssinian mother, Hamamah, and enslaved by Umayyah ibn Khalaf. When he accepted Islam he was laid out on the hot ground under a stone. He kept answering with one word, أَحَد, Ahad: One. Abu Bakr bought him and set him free.

In Madinah, Bilal was the first to call the adhan. The voice that summoned the first Muslims to prayer was his. He died in Syria about 640, around the twentieth year after the Hijrah.

At the time of the Fajr prayer the Prophet (ﷺ) asked Bilal, "Tell me of the best deed you did after embracing Islam, for I heard your footsteps in front of me in Paradise." Bilal replied, "I did not do anything worth mentioning except that whenever I performed ablution during the day or night, I prayed after that ablution as much as was written for me."

Umm Ayman, whose name was Barakah, is described in the sources as Abyssinian. She was in the household when the Prophet was born, and she looked after him as a child after his mother died. Her son Usama ibn Zayd grew up to command an army while still a young man.

Negash today

In Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, there is a village called Negash. Its mosque, al-Nejashi, is by tradition the burial place of the king and of companions who never went home. It was badly damaged by shelling late in 2020, during the war in Tigray, and has been under restoration since. People still go there to stand where the first refuge was given.