Among the most consequential early events in Islamic history is the first Hijra—the migration of a small band of persecuted Muslims to Abyssinia, sometime around 615 CE. It is a story taught in every madrasa and Sunday school, narrated with confidence as a foundational episode in the Prophet’s biography. A just Christian king, the Negus, extended refuge to the believers when Makkah had become unbearable. The story is presented as settled fact.
It is not settled fact. Scholars cannot agree on where the Muslims actually went. They cannot agree on who the king was. They cannot confirm that any record of this king exists outside of Islamic sources. And the debate over these most elemental details—the destination and the host—has burned for decades, inflamed not only by historical ambiguity but by the competing national pride of three modern states. If this is the condition of one of the best-known episodes in prophetic biography, we are compelled to ask a harder question: what does it mean to derive legally binding religious rulings from hadith narrations whose chain of transmission is far more tenuous than the historical event they purport to transmit?
A Migration to Nowhere Specific
The scholarly debate over the Hijra to Abyssinia is not a marginal footnote. As one contemporary researcher notes, it “raged in the 1980s and 1990s and continues today” on two critical issues: the precise destination of the migration, and the identity of the king who sheltered the Muslims. The College of African Studies at the International African University in Khartoum—an institution dedicated to the history of the region—was, within living memory, “consumed by discussions and research on both these questions.” 1
Three competing positions have emerged. One school holds that the destination was Aksum, in present-day Ethiopia. Another locates it at Massawa, on the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea. A third school, led by the late Sudanese scholar ‘Abdallah al-Tayyib, argues the migration went to Suakin, a port city in northeast Sudan. Each position is “backed up by evidence.” None has decisively prevailed.
This is not merely an academic puzzle. The disagreement tracks something deeper: the term al-Habashah, used in Arabic sources, was a loose geographical designation for the regions across the Red Sea, not a precise territorial marker. The Kingdom of Aksum in the seventh century bore little resemblance to the modern nation of Ethiopia. Its domains stretched across what is now northwestern Ethiopia, Eritrea, parts of Somalia, the Adwa Valley, and the Bijat Mountains. Lake Tana, Addis Ababa, and the Ethiopian Highlands had no connection to the event at all. The word points in a general direction, not at a fixed coordinate. The assumption that Islamic tradition speaks with cartographic precision about this event is, on examination, unfounded.
The analysis of the journey’s duration helps narrow the geography but does not resolve it. The crossing from the port of al-Shu’aybah lasted roughly two nights by sea, which rules out the main Aksumite port of Adulis as too distant. The most plausible landfall, based on distance, appears to be the Badi’ port near present-day Massawa—a region controlled not by the king of Aksum himself, but by a subordinate coastal ruler known as the Bahri Najashi, or “Negus of the Sea,” whose capital was Debarwa, roughly twenty-five kilometres from modern Asmara. If this reconstruction is correct, the Muslims did not seek refuge with a great sovereign but with a regional vassal—a detail that substantially alters the historical and symbolic weight of the episode.
A King Without a Record
The question of the king is equally vexed. Islamic sources give his name in variant forms: Ashamah ibn Abjar, Ashamah ibn Abhar, Saham ibn Abhar. The variants are not trivial—they reflect the kind of transmission distortion that accumulates across oral chains. More damaging still: no king bearing any version of this name appears in the records of the Kingdom of Aksum. The Aksumite king list, reconstructed from inscriptions, coins, and external sources, contains no figure that maps onto the Negus of Islamic tradition.
This is a significant historical silence. The Kingdom of Aksum was not an obscure polity. It was one of the major powers of late antiquity, trading with Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, maintaining diplomatic correspondence, minting its own coins. It left inscriptions. It left archaeological remains. And yet the ruler who, according to Islamic sources, received the companions of the Prophet and adjudicated their theological dispute with the Makkan delegation—this ruler leaves no independent trace.
The most charitable resolution, advanced by careful scholars, is that the Negus of the story was not the king of Aksum at all, but a local sub-king—a Bahri Najashi who ruled the coastal region as a vassal. In Ge’ez, the ancient Semitic language of the region, “Negus” simply means king; the supreme ruler was distinguished as Najusa Najast—king of kings. The Arabs condensed these distinctions. The title became a proper name, the regional vassal became conflated with the supreme monarch, and centuries of transmission hardened the confusion into received wisdom.
Politics Masquerading as History
There is a further complication that lays bare how historical knowledge is shaped by interests entirely external to the evidence. The debate over the destination of the migration has been “motivated by the national pride of three countries—Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan—that were competing for the honour of being the first country to which the Muslims migrated.” Three modern nation-states, none of which existed in the seventh century, are investing scholarly energy and institutional prestige in claiming the inheritance of a single ancient event.
This is not an aberration. It is a clarifying instance of a general phenomenon: the retrospective shaping of religious and historical memory by the needs of communities in the present. The impulse that motivates an Eritrean scholar to argue for Massawa, an Ethiopian to argue for Aksum, and a Sudanese to argue for Suakin is the same impulse that motivated earlier transmitters of Islamic tradition—tribal, regional, political, theological—to preserve, emphasize, and occasionally construct narrations that served the interests of their communities. The Hadith corpus did not descend from a politically neutral sky.
The Epistemological Trap: From Famous Event to Legal Decree
Now we arrive at the core problem. The Hijra to Abyssinia is not an obscure episode—it is among the most celebrated events of early Islamic history. It was a major, public occurrence involving dozens of companions. It was geographically anchored. It involved a foreign king whose identity mattered enough that the Makkans sent a delegation to negotiate the Muslims’ return. The event had witnesses, participants, and immediate political significance. And yet the most basic facts—where exactly it happened, who the king was—remain genuinely contested fourteen centuries later.
Consider, then, the epistemological situation of the Hadith corpus. The vast majority of legal hadiths—the narrations from which Islamic jurisprudence derives its rulings for all kinds of obscure rulings—were not only transmitted through far narrower chains than the Hijra. Many were recorded in writing only a century or more after the Prophet’s death. Many were transmitted by one, two, or three individuals over several generations before they were committed to paper. Also, keep in mind that the events they describe are not great public migrations witnessed by the entire Muslim community and the Quraysh, but rather private utterances, intimate domestic details, momentary rulings on specific occasions, and reports of what the Prophet did or did not say when alone with a companion. Also, the first delegation to go consisted of some of the most prominent Muslims, including Uthman and the Prophet’s daughter, Ruqayyah. Yet despite this, the legal tradition proceeded to construct elaborate and binding religious decrees from narrations that at best offer only conjecture (zaan) rather than certainty.
The Quranic Standard and Why It Matters
The Quran is, by contrast, guaranteed by God to be preserved. Even for those who doubt the supernatural, the Quran has historically been gen uinely mass-transmitted ( mutawatir) in the most absolute sense. It was transmitted by entire communities simultaneously, memorized and recited, and maintained through parallel oral and written traditions across geographically dispersed populations from its onset. The textual integrity of the Quran is not a faith claim—every single Muslim, from its inception to the present, has memorized a portion or the entire Quran in an unbroken chain of mass transmission, which is not the case for the hadith corpus.
The Quran itself is not silent on the epistemological question. It directly and repeatedly warns against following zann—conjecture—in matters of religion.
Most of them follow nothing but conjecture ( zaan), and conjecture is no substitute for the truth. GOD is fully aware of everything they do. (10:36).
They had no knowledge about this; they only conjectured. Conjecture is no substitute for the truth. (53:28)
These are not incidental verses. They form a recurring epistemological admonition: do not treat probabilistic knowledge as though it carries the weight of certainty, especially in matters of religious obligation.
The Hijra to Abyssinia offers a concrete illustration of why this warning is not abstract. Here is an event involving real people, a physical migration, a sea crossing, a political encounter, narrated by supposed participants. And still: the destination is unknown, the king’s name is unverifiable, his connection to the Aksumite throne is disputed, and three modern nation-states spend scholarly resources competing over which piece of geography can claim the inheritance.
If this is the epistemological condition of a major public event with many eyewitnesses and obvious political salience—what should we conclude about a solitary narration, transmitted over a century later, claiming to record a private remark about eating a shoulder of lamb without performing ablution, a wiping of spit on one occasion, or the prescribed penalty for a category of conduct?
The Limits of the Rijal Method
Traditional hadith criticism attempts to address this problem through the science of rijal—the evaluation of the moral and memorial reliability of individual transmitters in the chain. A narrator assessed as thiqa (trustworthy) and dabit (precise) elevates the hadith’s grade; a narrator found to be weak, confused, or dishonest degrades it. The system is sophisticated enough that it took centuries to develop—which is itself the central irony. By the time the evaluative apparatus was in place, the narrators being assessed had been dead for generations. This raises an uncomfortable question about how qualified scholars centuries removed could be at determining the reliability and trustworthiness of individuals they never met, especially given that the Quran explicitly warned the Prophet himself that he could not reliably identify the hypocrites in his immediate presence:
Among the Arabs around you, there are hypocrites. Also, among the city dwellers, there are those who are accustomed to hypocrisy. You do not know them, but we know them. We will double the retribution for them, then they end up committed to a terrible retribution. (9:101)
If the Prophet could not pierce the social performance of those around him in real time, the claim that later critics could accurately assess the inner character of men and women they knew only through reports requires extraordinary confidence. The rijal enterprise is also, at its foundation, another layer of human assessment subject to the same problems it was designed to solve. Assessments of narrators were themselves transmitted through chains, influenced by sectarian loyalties, regional biases, and the personal relationships between critics and their subjects. A narrator from a disfavoured theological school might be graded weak by scholars of an opposing tradition. A narrator with ties to a compiler might receive more charitable evaluation. The rijal literature itself—the biographical dictionaries of narrators—reflects the political and theological fractures of the communities that produced it. It cannot stand outside history.
Furthermore, the rijal method evaluates the moral character of transmitters but has no mechanism for addressing memory distortion in good-faith narrators—the compounding effect of paraphrase, translation across registers of Arabic, the collapse of context over time, or the natural human tendency to reconstruct rather than retrieve. A narrator could be perfectly pious and wholly sincere while transmitting a significantly distorted version of an original utterance. The Hijra debate demonstrates this precisely: the name of the king was transmitted by devout and reliable narrators and still comes down to us in multiple irreconcilable forms.
What Honest Engagement Requires
None of this is an argument that the Hadith corpus contains no genuine historical memory of the Prophet’s life and practice. It almost certainly does. The accumulated scholarly labour of generations of hadith critics is not absolutely worthless, and some of the broad outlines of the Prophet’s life can be derived from it. The problem is not with hadith as historical evidence, read with appropriate critical care. The problem is with hadith elevated as secondary revelation—used to generate legally binding obligations that override Quranic principles, restrict individual freedom, and in some cases produce rulings for which the Quran itself provides no foundation.
The Hijra to Abyssinia is a useful corrective precisely because it is not an obscure case. It is taught as settled history. It appears in every biography of the Prophet. And it cannot answer the most elementary questions about itself. The destination is uncertain. The king’s name is uncertain. His political status is uncertain. The route is reconstructed from inference. A modern researcher rightly calls for inquiry that “goes beyond Islamic source material and encompasses the histories of other nations and the disciplines of archaeology, philology, genetics, and other modern sciences.” That is the standard of honest historical inquiry.
It should also be the standard applied when a jurist reaches into the Hadith corpus, extracts a narration transmitted by two or three individuals across a century, and derives from it a ruling that governs human bodies, freedoms, and lives. The honest designation for such a ruling is not divine law. It is—by the internal categories of classical Islamic scholarship itself—an inference from conjecture. The Quran distinguished these categories carefully. The tradition that followed it, in its rush toward legal comprehensiveness, largely erased that distinction. Recovering it is not an act of impiety. It is an act of intellectual honesty—and the Hijra to Abyssinia, that famous journey to an uncertain shore, is an apt place to begin.
The First Spring, Wadah Khanfar, translated by Sslam Farouk-Alli, p. 187 ↩︎