Quraysh Plot to Assassinate the Prophet

# The Quraysh Plot to Kill the Prophet ﷺ

The Council of Dar al-Nadwa

As Muslims began trickling out of Mecca toward Yathrib in the weeks following the Second Pledge of Aqabah, the Quraysh leadership realized the situation was slipping beyond their control. If the Muslims established themselves in Yathrib with the full protection of its tribal confederacy — an organized community with military backing — the Quraysh's ability to suppress the movement would be gone. More pressingly: if the Prophet ﷺ himself reached Yathrib, he would be beyond their reach permanently.

The Quraysh convened an emergency council at Dar al-Nadwa — the traditional meeting house of the Quraysh leadership, the institution in which major collective decisions of the tribe were made. The council was convened to determine a final solution to the problem of Muhammad ﷺ before he could leave.

Various proposals were put forward and rejected. One leader suggested imprisonment — but a long imprisonment, the council recognized, would rally Banu Hashim eventually and produce a rescue. Another suggested banishment — but the Prophet ﷺ, free in Arabia and able to preach among other tribes, might find allies even more powerful than Yathrib. A third proposal — made by Abu Jahl according to the classical accounts — was assassination. But a straightforward killing by any one clan would trigger the blood obligation with Banu Hashim, producing exactly the intra-tribal conflict the Quraysh wanted to avoid.

Abu Jahl's solution to the blood-obligation problem was collective action: select one young man from each Qurayshi clan, all striking simultaneously. Banu Hashim would face the united Quraysh demanding blood money for all their sons — an impossible military position that would force them to accept blood money rather than retaliation. In this way, the blood of the Prophet ﷺ would be distributed across all the clans and Banu Hashim could not retaliate against any specific family.

The council adopted this plan. They selected their men and set the night.

The Night of Departure

The Prophet ﷺ was informed of the plan through revelation. Allah had revealed that the Quraysh had plotted and that Allah was the best of plotters — and the Prophet ﷺ was given the signal to depart. He went to the house of Abu Bakr, who had been preparing for the migration for months on the Prophet's ﷺ instructions, keeping two riding camels fed and ready at a cost of eight hundred dirhams. When the Prophet ﷺ arrived at midday — an unusual time to visit — Abu Bakr understood immediately. The Prophet ﷺ said: "Permission has been given for me to depart." Abu Bakr wept with joy. He told his daughters Aishah and Asma to prepare the provisions. Asma, finding she had nothing to tie the food bag with, cut her girdle in two — earning from the Prophet ﷺ the epithet Dhat al-Nitaqayn, "the one of the two girdles."

The Prophet ﷺ returned to his own house, where that night the assassins gathered and surrounded it, waiting for the morning to strike. He asked Ali ibn Abi Talib to sleep in his bed wrapped in his green Hadhrami cloak — a request that required Ali to remain behind and exposed while the Prophet ﷺ slipped past the watchers. Ali agreed without hesitation.

The Exit Past the Watchers

The Prophet ﷺ took a handful of dust, recited the opening verses of Surah Ya-Sin — "And We have set a barrier before them and a barrier behind them, and We have covered them so that they do not see" (36:9) — and sprinkled the dust. He walked out of his house and past the gathered assassins. Not one of them saw him. Some accounts describe the dust settling on their heads.

At dawn, the watchers rushed the house. Ali rose from the bed. The attackers demanded to know where Muhammad was. Ali said he did not know. The Prophet ﷺ was already gone.

The Cave of Thawr

The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr made their way south — in the opposite direction from Yathrib, to deceive any pursuit — to the cave of Thawr, a cave in the mountain south of Mecca. They hid there for three nights. The Quraysh launched a pursuit and a reward: one hundred camels to whoever brought Muhammad ﷺ back, dead or alive — one of the largest rewards offered in Arabia. The search parties fanned out in all directions.

Asma bint Abi Bakr brought provisions to the cave each night. Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr gathered information in Mecca by day and brought it to the cave by night. Abd Allah ibn Urayqit, a non-Muslim hired guide who knew the desert routes, kept their camels ready below the mountain.

On one occasion, the Qurayshi search party reached the very entrance of the cave. Abu Bakr, seeing their feet at the cave mouth, whispered to the Prophet ﷺ in fear. The Prophet ﷺ said the words preserved in Surah al-Tawbah 9:40: "Do not grieve — Allah is with us." The Qurayshis looked at the cave mouth and saw an unbroken spider web across the entrance and a dove nesting on its eggs at the base of the entrance. They concluded no one had entered recently and moved on.

The narration of the spider web and the dove is recorded in Ibn Hisham and is widely accepted in the classical tradition. It represents the divine protection of the Prophet ﷺ through natural means — not through the miraculous suspension of natural law but through its direction.

After Three Nights

After three nights in the cave of Thawr, the guide Abd Allah ibn Urayqit came with the camels and the party departed, taking an unfamiliar coastal route to avoid the known roads and the Qurayshi search parties. They traveled south along the Red Sea coast before turning north toward Yathrib — a longer route than the direct road, but one the Quraysh had not anticipated.

The Quraysh's plot had failed at every level. The assassination attempt had been foiled by revelation and by Ali's courage. The search in the cave had been foiled by a spider web. The route to Yathrib had been successfully hidden. The Prophet ﷺ arrived in Yathrib — which would be renamed al-Madinah al-Munawwarah — as a free man, welcomed rather than hunted.

The plot at Dar al-Nadwa was the Quraysh's last attempt to contain Islam within the Arabian tribal system they controlled. It failed, and in failing, it completed the conditions that made the first Islamic state possible. The Hijra was not an escape — it was a transition. The Prophet ﷺ had left Mecca; he would return, in eight years, as its conqueror.

Sources: Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-Nabawiyya; Sahih al-Bukhari (Kitab Manaqib al-Ansar); Ibn Kathir, al-Bidayah wan-Nihayah; Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra; Surah Ya-Sin (36:9); Surah al-Tawbah (9:40)