The Tribe That Came From Yemen

In the desert, a source of water immediately attracts forms of life. So birds began to hover over the well, because nothing was living there — it was a dead valley. There was a tribe called Jurhum, nomads in that particular area. And where did Jurhum come from? Jurhum was a tribe that moved out of Yemen. Yemen was the birthplace of the Arab people and the Arabic language, and that is where the Arab tribes emigrated from, and there were many mass emigrations, waves of emigration, that happened from Yemen at different times.

One of them was when the dam was destroyed, and there's a whole chapter in the Qur'an called Sabaʾ, which was the name of that kingdom. Allah tells us the story that these were people who built the first dam in the world^*, and because of that dam, they had a year-round source of water. Even though there is not a lot of rain in Arabia — the precipitation level is low — because of this dam, they had a year-round source of water, and a massive network of irrigation that went for hundreds of miles. So suddenly this semi-arid area came to hold a huge population because of the existence of water.

And there are some stories — there might be exaggeration — that a woman would go out of her house and go for a walk with a basket on her head, and she would come back home and the basket would be filled with fruits, the fruits just dropping from the trees. But it does say in the Qur'an that because of their wealth and the cultivation they had, they didn't feel any pain in travelling, because it was a continuous series of settlements. Wherever they would go, there would be villages and towns, and there was so much wealth that they didn't feel the suffering and difficulty of travelling like the rest of the people of the world.

So these people, because of their arrogance and disbelief in Allah, said: "We want to feel the pain of travelling like everybody else." So they asked Allah: "O Allah, make it difficult on us like everybody else." And Allah did make it difficult on them, and they rejected the message of Allah, so Allah destroyed the dam. The dam was destroyed, and it flooded the area, and suddenly the whole civilisation collapsed. So you had a huge wave of emigration, which spread the Arab people out of Yemen into Najd and Ḥijāz and Iraq and al-Shām. So you had some tribes settling in ʿUmān, some of them settled in Najd, some of them settled in Ḥijāz, al-Aws wa-l-Khazraj settled in Madīnah, and then some of the Arab tribes went to Syria, and some of them went into Iraq. So that is how the Arab people spread out of their small locality in Yemen.

This background matters because Jurhum was one of these tribes — although Jurhum might have emigrated from Yemen before the dam, Allāhu aʿlam. In any case, they are one of the tribes that ended up moving out of Yemen, and they went into Ḥijāz. They were familiar with the area around Makkah, and they knew that there was no water in that area. So when they saw birds hovering in the sky, they wondered what was going on in that particular area, and they sent one or two people to go and investigate the matter.