The night of the bed

On the night the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ left Mecca for Medina, a group of Quraysh assassins surrounded his house waiting to strike him at first light. Ali ibn Abi Talib lay down in the Prophet's bed, wrapped himself in the Prophet's green cloak, and gave the Prophet the opening he needed to leave.

In the thirteenth year of the Prophet's mission, the Quraysh leaders held a council. They knew Muhammad ﷺ was about to leave Mecca for Yathrib, later known as Medina. The Muslims in Yathrib had pledged him allegiance. If he escaped, they lost their chance to destroy the religion in its cradle. They resolved to kill him that night.

The plan was drawn to spread the guilt so no single tribe could be avenged. Every clan of Quraysh would send one young warrior. Together, at dawn, they would surround his house, break in, and strike him at once so that no one clan could be blamed for the assassination and the Banu Hashim would be unable to demand blood-price from a single household. It was an elegant political solution to what they had begun to see as a religious problem.

Angel Jibreel came to the Prophet ﷺ that night with warning. The Prophet told Ali what was coming. He said: Ali, wrap yourself in my green cloak and lie in my bed tonight. When the assassins look through the door they will see the cloak and think I am asleep. They will wait for dawn to strike. That will give me the time to leave the city. Ali did not hesitate. He wrapped himself in the cloak and lay in the bed.

Ali at this point was in his early twenties. The plan was, from his perspective, that he would be discovered at dawn by a ring of armed assassins from every hostile clan of Quraysh, and he would be the one they struck first. The Prophet had promised him that no harm would come to him. Ali took this on that promise alone.

The Prophet ﷺ walked out of his house that night through the ring of assassins. In one version of the story, he recited the verse from Surah Ya-Sin: "And We have put a barrier in front of them and a barrier behind them, and We have covered them so that they cannot see", and scattered a handful of dust as he passed. In another version, the assassins were simply distracted at that moment. In every version, he walked past them unharmed. He met Abu Bakr at the appointed meeting place. Together they set off south (a feint) to the cave of Thawr, where they would hide for three days before turning north to Medina.

At dawn the assassins burst through the door with drawn swords. They pulled the green cloak off the sleeping figure. It was not Muhammad ﷺ. It was Ali. They were dumbstruck. They struck him some blows and demanded to know where the Prophet was. Ali refused to answer. They took him to the Kaaba, beat him, held him for a day, and eventually released him. He suffered and survived.

Ali stayed in Mecca for three more days after that morning, at the Prophet's instruction, to return the trusts (al-amanat) which the Meccans had deposited with Muhammad ﷺ. The Prophet, though hated as a prophet, was still trusted as al-Amin, "the trustworthy," for the safekeeping of jewellery, money, and precious things. Even his enemies had used him as their bank. Ali stayed to return each deposit to its rightful Meccan owner before he himself left the city. When every trust had been returned, he set out on foot for Medina, walking the entire distance alone.

What the story teaches

The night of the bed is remembered as one of the earliest and clearest acts of sacrifice-for-the-Prophet in Islamic history. Ali did not fight in defense. He offered his own body as a decoy in another man's place. The Muslim tradition remembers what Ali did that night as an act of pure self-forgetting: a young man volunteering to sleep in the place of another man knowing that he would probably be killed at first light. Ali's willingness to do this, and the Prophet's willingness to ask him to, is one of the most intimate scenes of trust in early Islamic history. The green cloak of the Prophet has been remembered ever since, in the poetry and iconography of the Ahl al-Bayt, as the cloak that Ali wore that night.