The First Hajj Under Muslim Governance

In the ninth year of the Hijra, the Prophet ﷺ did not lead the Hajj himself. He appointed Abu Bakr al-Siddiq as the leader of the Hajj — the first to lead the pilgrimage under Muslim governance of Mecca. Abu Bakr departed for Mecca with approximately three hundred pilgrims at the beginning of Dhul-Qa'dah. The appointment was significant: it established Abu Bakr's standing as the Prophet's ﷺ designated representative for the most important annual ritual of Islamic practice, a precedent that companions would later note in the discussions about succession after the Prophet's ﷺ death.

Shortly after Abu Bakr's departure, the opening verses of Surah al-Tawbah were revealed — a sweeping declaration that dissolved the remaining treaties with the polytheist tribes of Arabia on specific terms. The revelation required immediate public proclamation at the Hajj gathering. The Prophet ﷺ sent Ali ibn Abi Talib to deliver the proclamation directly, riding quickly to overtake the Hajj party. The narrations record that Abu Bakr, upon seeing Ali arrive, asked whether he had come to lead or to convey a message. Ali said he had come to convey. The Hajj leadership remained with Abu Bakr.

The Proclamation of al-Bara'ah

At the Hajj, Ali ibn Abi Talib delivered the proclamation of al-Bara'ah — the declaration of disavowal — to the assembled pilgrims. The proclamation announced four things: no polytheist would be permitted to perform Hajj after this year; no one would circumambulate the Kaaba naked, as had been a pre-Islamic practice; anyone with a treaty with the Prophet ﷺ that he had honored would have that treaty honored until its expiry; and polytheists who had no treaty, or whose treaty terms had been violated, were given four months to travel freely and then the protection of the Prophet ﷺ would end.

The proclamation was made to the maximum possible audience — the Hajj gathering — as a public declaration addressed to all of Arabia. The Quran had mandated this dissemination: "And an announcement from Allah and His Messenger to the people on the day of the greatest Hajj: that Allah is disassociated from the polytheists, and so is His Messenger." (Surah al-Tawbah 9:3). The "day of the greatest Hajj" — yawm al-Hajj al-akbar — is understood by most scholars as the Day of Sacrifice, the tenth of Dhul-Hijjah.

Why Ali Rather Than Abu Bakr?

The classical scholars have addressed the question of why the Prophet ﷺ sent Ali to deliver the proclamation after having appointed Abu Bakr as the Hajj leader. The most widely accepted explanation, preserved in the narrations, is that the Arab custom of the time required that a declaration of dissolution of a covenant be made by a member of the same clan or family as the one who had made the covenant. The Prophet ﷺ had made the treaties; therefore, the formal dissolution needed to be delivered by a member of his family — the Banu Hashim — and Ali ibn Abi Talib was the appropriate representative. Abu Bakr's leadership of the Hajj was not diminished by this: he led the prayers and the rites, while Ali carried out a specific legal function that required familial representation.

The narration preserving this explanation comes from Ali himself and is considered reliable by the scholars of hadith. The distinction between the two roles — religious leadership and legal representation — is clear in the text of the accounts, and the two roles were discharged simultaneously by two different companions.

The End of Polytheist Hajj

The proclamation of 9 AH marked the formal end of polytheist participation in the Hajj. From the following year — 10 AH, when the Prophet ﷺ led the Farewell Pilgrimage — the Hajj was exclusively Muslim. The Kaaba, which had been surrounded by 360 idols at the Conquest of Mecca and had seen the Hajj performed alongside polytheist rites for centuries, became from this year onward the site of Islamic pilgrimage exclusively. The proclamation that Ali delivered in 9 AH, on Abu Bakr's Hajj, was the legal act that made the Farewell Pilgrimage of 10 AH possible in the form in which it was performed.

Abu Bakr's Precedent

The appointment of Abu Bakr to lead the Hajj in 9 AH established a precedent that those who later argued for his caliphate invoked directly. The Prophet ﷺ trusted him with the leadership of the community's most important annual gathering; he later appointed him to lead the prayer during the final illness. These two appointments — the Hajj of 9 AH and the prayer during the illness — formed the basis of the argument that the Prophet ﷺ had indicated his preference for Abu Bakr's leadership over the community by action rather than explicit designation.

The Transition of the Hajj

The Hajj of 9 AH — led by Abu Bakr, with Ali delivering the al-Bara'ah proclamation — was a transitional moment in the institution's history. It was the first Hajj organized and led by the Muslim community since the Conquest of Mecca, and it served simultaneously as a religious gathering and a legal proclamation that restructured the terms of Arabia's relationship with the new governing authority. The pilgrims who came that year saw both: Abu Bakr leading the rites of Hajj as the Prophet's ﷺ representative, and Ali publicly dissolving the framework of Jahiliyyah-era treaties that had allowed polytheist groups to participate in the Hajj alongside Muslims. Within twelve months, the Prophet ﷺ himself would lead the Farewell Pilgrimage with 100,000 companions, in a Hajj from which every trace of polytheism had been formally excluded by the proclamation of the year before. The 9 AH Hajj made the 10 AH Farewell Pilgrimage possible in the form it took — a singular Muslim gathering, led by the Prophet ﷺ himself for the first and only time, to an audience of over 100,000 in a Mecca from which every formal vestige of polytheism had already been removed.

Sources: Sahih al-Bukhari (Kitab al-Hajj, Kitab al-Maghazi, Kitab al-Tafsir); Sahih Muslim; Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-Nabawiyya; Ibn Kathir, al-Bidayah wan-Nihayah; Surah al-Tawbah (9:1-3)