The exile, or migration, of
Muhammad and his followers in September 622 from
Mecca to
Medina was a seminal event in the history of
Islam. This event was named , originally meaning "the breaking of the ties of kinship or association", and those Meccan supporters who followed Muhammad into exile—as well as those who had earlier gone
into exile in Abyssinia—became known as the , a title that acquired enormous prestige in later years. In the
Quran, the is considered as an obligation of all Muslims, notably in the injunction that all Muslims residing in the lands of non-believers (the ) and thus unable to practice their religion freely and be liable to commit wrong-doing, should migrate to Islamic lands; else they are to be condemned to hell. As a result, in early Islam, following the rapid
Muslim conquests, the new
garrison towns where the Arab Muslims settled were often referred to as the "places of migration" (). This use did not last long, however. As the historian Alan Verskin remarks, "
hijra was a useful concept for a minority community with limited political power that was in the process of establishing itself", while the Muslims held political power and quickly became the dominant group in the lands they had conquered. Consequently, while most
Sunni jurists came to accept that the Quranic injunction only applied to the Meccans of Muhammad's time, and consider it to have been abrogated thereafter, the term was in turn "seized upon by minority Islamic opposition groups [...] who sought divine justification for their actions", such as the
Kharijites and
Zaydi Shi'a. Thus, in the 680s, during the civil war of the
Second Fitna, the Kharijite leader
Nafi ibn al-Azraq, "held that only those who actively supported him were genuinely Muslims, and spoke of them as , who made the to his camp, which was " (W. Montgomery Watt). In the 9th century, the great
Zaidi imam and theologian
al-Qasim al-Rassi (785–860) considered the Muslim rulers of his time as illegitimate tyrants, and the lands they ruled as "abode of injustice" (). Consequently, according to al-Rassi, it was the duty of every faithful Muslim to emigrate. In the words of the historian
Wilferd Madelung, "The Quranic duty of hijra, imposed initially on the faithful in order that they should dissociate from the
polytheists, was permanent and now applied to their dissociation from the unjust and oppressors". ==Isma'ilism==