Journey to Ta'if

The Prophet ﷺ traveled to Taif in the tenth year of prophethood (619 CE) following the deaths of Abu Talib and Khadijah, seeking an alternative base for the mission among the Thaqif tribe. He arrived with Zayd ibn Harith and met with the three sons of Amr ibn Umayr al-Thaqafi, the most powerful men in the city. Their responses were uniformly dismissive: one asked whether Allah could find no one better than him to send; another refused conversation entirely; the third said his rejection was dangerous if the Prophet ﷺ was genuine, and irrelevant if he was not. They arranged for servants and young men to line the road as the Prophet ﷺ departed, throwing stones at him until his feet bled and his sandals filled with blood. The Prophet ﷺ stopped at the wall of a garden outside the city and prayed what became one of the most moving prayers in the seerah: 'O Allah, I complain to You of my weakness, my insufficient means, and my insignificance before people... if You are not angry with me, I do not care — but Your favor is the most expansive thing for me.' The garden's owners — Utbah and Shaybah, non-Muslim Qurayshis — watched and sent their Christian slave Addas with a plate of grapes. Addas heard the Prophet ﷺ say 'Bismillah,' was startled — these were not words spoken in that land — and when the Prophet ﷺ mentioned Yunus ibn Matta as a brother prophet, Addas wept and embraced him. Jibril then appeared with the Angel of the Mountains, who offered to bring the flanking mountains down on Taif's people. The Prophet ﷺ declined: 'I hope that Allah will bring from their descendants people who will worship Allah alone.' He returned to Mecca under the tribal protection of Mut'im ibn Adi — a non-Muslim whose act the Prophet ﷺ remembered at Badr years later, saying he would have released all the prisoners for Mut'im's sake had he lived. The rejection of Taif effectively closed the Meccan phase of the mission and accelerated the search northward, toward Yathrib and the men from the Khazraj tribe who would initiate the path to Medina.