The Story Behind the Theme
For thirteen years before the hijra, the Prophet ﷺ and those who believed alongside him endured life in Makkah. They were mocked, boycotted, starved, beaten, some of them buried in the sand. And often it was not strangers who turned on them but their own: family, neighbours, friends, people they had known their whole lives. They lost much. They waited, and waited, for a relief that did not arrive on their timetable. The migration was not an escape from a single bad night. It was the far edge of more than a decade of patience.
It is worth holding onto that, because we so often imagine that the people who change their lives do it in one clean leap, that they wake one morning transformed. The hijra teaches the opposite. The turning, when it finally came, had a long, dark, patient road behind it. If your own change has been slow, if you have been waiting longer than you hoped, that is not failure. It is the most ordinary part of every true migration: the part before the road opens.
A Leaving of Something Loved
When the command to leave finally, it asked the Prophet ﷺ to leave the place he loved most in the world. He was reported to have looked back at Makkah and said that of all of Allah's earth, it was the most beloved land to him, and that had his people not driven him out, he would never have left.
The hijra was not a turning away from something he hated. It was the leaving of something he loved, because something else had become more beloved to Allah. That is what makes it so hard, and so blessed. Migration is rarely the easy abandoning of a bad thing. More often it is the costly setting-down of a thing the heart is still wrapped around, because we have seen, at last, which direction is home.
A Migration That Ended in Belonging
After the fear and the heat and the loss, there was a welcome. The people of Madina, the Ansar, came out to meet them. Tradition tells us they greeted the Prophet ﷺ with songs of joy, that families lined the way, that homes were opened and lives were shared. People with no tie of blood took in strangers and called them brothers.
That is how the first hijra ended. Not in exhaustion, but in belonging. The journey that began in loss arrived at a home brimming with love.
Our Calendar Begins at a Migration
This is what made me name my whole brand Hijri. From that single journey, the entire ummah chose to count its time. Not from a birth, not from a battle won or a land conquered, not from a king's coronation. From an act of leaving what was harmful and turning, together, toward Allah.
Our very calendar begins at a migration. We measure our days from the moment a people found the courage to begin again. So to say you are allowed to begin again is not a slogan. It is the organising principle of Muslim time itself.
There is a small piece of wordplay in all this, and it is deliberate. The publication is called Hijri. Its first volume is Hijra. The name of the whole and the name of this beginning share a single root, because a hijri life, a life measured by this calendar, is one organised around the willingness to migrate toward Allah, again and again, for as long as we are given.
A Sacred Month, A Day of Deliverance
It is fitting that the year opens here. Muharram is one of the four sacred months, a stretch of time Allah set apart and weighted with honour. And within it sits Ashura, the tenth day, which carries its own ancient story of rescue.
It was on this day, we are taught, that Allah delivered Musa and his people from Pharaoh, parting the sea before a cornered, frightened people and drowning the tyranny that pursued them. Musa fasted in gratitude, and the Prophet ﷺ later fasted that day too and encouraged us to, ideally pairing the tenth with the ninth. So the year begins with the memory of a sea splitting for those who had no way out. Hold that beside the hijra and a single theme emerges: deliverance belongs to Allah, and it often arrives at the very edge of our helplessness.
A New Year is a Direction, Not a Verdict
This is the ground the first volume of Hijri walks. A new year is not a report card on the last one, and you are not the sum of your worst twelve months. The door of return has never once - not for a single morning - been closed; Allah loves the one who turns back to Him far more than He is troubled by the one who strayed.
You are not standing at the end of a disappointing year. You are standing at the edge of a parting sea. And you need only one word to reach for: Hijra. The turning. The willingness to set out before you feel ready.
May Allah make this the year our hearts find their way home, and gather us among those whose journey toward Him never stopped, no matter how many times they had to begin again.
Bismillah. Let us begin, together.
- Masuma Abdul-Muhit, Muharram 1448
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