Why So Little Survives from Makkah

This account of al-Hijrah receives more space here than is usual. Most books of Sīrah simply glance over the whole thing in a few pages, and that is it. But a great deal of time is given to it here — some already, and more besides — because of the importance of al-Hijrah to al-Ḥabashah in the present situation. This was a Muslim minority living among a predominantly Christian country, so there are some resemblances there. But when it comes to An-Najāshī, there is no personality similar to him in the West today — a deeply religious leader with justice. There has not been anything like that. Perhaps at one moment in time, the laws and constitutions of the West were somewhat close to the personality of An-Najāshī, but that has pretty much changed now. This remains an important subject, one that needs to be discussed.

Unfortunately, not a great many narrations survive dealing with al-Ḥabashah in particular, and with the Makkah era in general. In any book of Sīrah — one such book, for example, runs to around 700 pages, and the Makkah era takes up 150 of them. So 150 pages deal with 13 years of the life of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), and everything before that, while almost 600 pages deal with the last ten years of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The disproportion is plain.

There's a few reasons for that. Number one: the documentation of hadith wasn't allowed until the Muslims were in Madīnah. In Makkah, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) didn't allow them to write down hadith, because he didn't want it to mix with the Qur'an and cause confusion. The priority was to concentrate first on the Qur'an, and only afterwards to document the hadith. That's one reason. The second reason is our early scholars weren't very interested in Makkah compared to their interest in Madīnah. Why? Because all of the laws and issues relating to the Islamic state were learned in Madīnah. Makkah didn't really relate much to our early scholars, because they were living under a caliphate, and they were concerned with the Islamic law, the Islamic state, the institutions of the Muslim society, and all of that is to be learned from the ten years of Madīnah, not Makkah. This is why the writings on Madīnah are detailed and elaborate, while there is not much written about Makkah.

More focus needs to be given to the 13 years the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) spent in Makkah, because there is a significant percentage of the Muslims around the world living as minorities. There are a hundred million plus living as a minority in India, sixty million Muslim minority in China, millions of Muslims living in Russia, millions of Muslims living in Western Europe, in Northern America, in South America. There is a lot of fiqh that is needed for these Muslim minorities, and that is to be learned from the years of Makkah. More study is needed on the narrations that survived from Makkah.