The three nights in the cave

For three days after the Hijra began, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and Abu Bakr hid in the cave of Thawr. Meccan trackers stood at the mouth of the cave. Abu Bakr wept: 'If they look at their feet, they will see us.' The Prophet answered him with the words that would later become a verse of the Quran.

On the night the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ left Mecca for Yathrib, the plan had been drawn to draw the Quraysh's search parties north, toward Medina. So the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr went south. They walked all night through the hills. Before dawn they reached a small cave in the side of Jabal Thawr, five miles south of Mecca. They climbed into it. There were only two of them.

Abu Bakr had made arrangements. His son Abdullah would spend his days in Mecca gathering news of the Quraysh's movements and his nights climbing to the cave to report. His daughter Asma would bring them food. His freed slave Amir ibn Fuhayrah would pasture his sheep on the paths leading to the cave and would drive them along the trails to erase the footprints Abdullah had left. It was a careful operation, run by a small family under maximum stress.

On the second morning after the Prophet ﷺ escaped, the Quraysh understood he was gone. They put a bounty on his head: a hundred camels for the man who brought him back alive or dead. Search parties fanned out in every direction. One party of the best trackers of Quraysh went south. They followed the trail expertly, past Amir ibn Fuhayrah's sheep-marks, up the side of Jabal Thawr, and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Abu Bakr, inside the cave, saw their feet through the gap in the entrance stones. He heard their voices. He heard them arguing whether the Prophet ﷺ could have gone inside. One of them said: no man could have gone into this cave. It is too narrow at the mouth. If Muhammad had gone in, he would have to have come out. There is no sign of a struggle inside. Another said: let's look inside anyway. A third said: there is a spider's web across the entrance. It would have been broken if anyone had entered. And a pair of doves had nested at the mouth. They would not have nested there if anyone had entered.

The Meccan trackers left. They walked back down the mountain. Whatever it was, the spider's web, the doves, or a decision made in a heart that had come to the mouth of the cave and then turned away, they left. The Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr remained in the cave for three days. When the manhunt cooled, they came out and turned north, toward Medina.

The Quran preserves that moment. In Surah At-Tawbah, verse 40, Allah says: "If you do not help him, Allah has already helped him: when the disbelievers drove him out, the second of two, when they were in the cave, when he said to his companion, 'Do not grieve. Verily, Allah is with us.' Then Allah sent down His tranquility upon him and strengthened him with soldiers you did not see."

Abu Bakr is the companion in that verse. "Do not grieve. Verily, Allah is with us." Fourteen hundred years of Muslim children have learned that verse as one of the earliest verses they memorise. Sufi tradition made those words the model of every soul in every hour of fear, whispered by whoever needs them: La tahzan. Innallaha ma'ana. Do not grieve. Allah is with us.

What the story teaches

The three nights in the cave are remembered as one of the most sacred episodes in Islamic history. It is the story that names Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (the truthful) in a way no other companion is named, because he is the companion in the verse of the cave. It is the story of a friendship. Muhammad ﷺ chose Abu Bakr, out of the entire ummah, to go with him on the most dangerous night of his life. Abu Bakr accepted. He knew what it meant. When they stood together in that cave with the Meccan trackers' feet inches away, they were two men whose bond had been tested by a decade of persecution and by every conceivable form of danger. The verse of the cave preserves that friendship in the eternal words of the Quran. Every Muslim who whispers "La tahzan. Innallaha ma'ana" is speaking, in that instant, the exact words the Prophet ﷺ spoke to his oldest friend in the darkness under Jabal Thawr.