The pitch darkness over Mecca covered no ordinary night. It covered the deep sorrow in a prophet’s heart and the enormous responsibility laid on the shoulders of humanity.
The time had come to leave the city where he was born and raised, whose streets and rocks and people he knew by heart. When the Prophet Muhammad looked at Mecca one last time, the human grief that filled his chest was a reminder that a prophet too is a man made of life and flesh and feeling. "O Mecca, by God you are the best of lands in the sight of God. Had your people not driven me out, I would never have left you." Those words were the tears of a parting from one’s homeland, wept inwardly.
Yet this parting was no flight. It was a deliberate step towards a new cradle of civilisation where belief, thought and humanity could breathe. Responsibility covered the sorrow like armour.
The angel Gabriel brought word that the Meccan idolaters had gathered at Dar al-Nadwa and resolved to kill the Prophet Muhammad, that he should not sleep in his bed that night, and that permission for the Hijra had been given. The first strategic move of the Hijra began after that nocturnal warning, at the hottest hour of the day.
In the scorching midday heat, when the sun stood at its highest and nobody in Mecca left their house, the Prophet Muhammad covered his face entirely with his turban and came to the door of his friend Abu Bakr. Seeing so unusual a visit at such an hour, Abu Bakr understood that something extraordinary had happened. When his blessed guest stepped inside and said, "Send out those with you, let us speak alone," Abu Bakr replied that only his daughters Aisha and Asma were in the house, and that no secret would escape through them.
At the moment the words "Permission for the Hijra has been given" were spoken, the tears running from Abu Bakr’s eyes were not tears of fear. They were tears of loyalty, from years of waiting for this moment and from the honour of being allowed to travel beside that blessed traveller. To his question, "Am I permitted to be your companion on the road, O Messenger of God?" the answer was yes, and that yes was the timeless seal of a friendship.
Once the plan had been laid at noon, the most critical stage of the night began. The house was surrounded by armed young men, one chosen from each tribe. The Prophet Muhammad entrusted to Ali the task of returning to their owners the deposits that even his enemies had handed over to him with their eyes closed, and with it an example of loyalty that would count a life as nothing.
Ali drew the Prophet Muhammad’s green cloak over himself and lay down in his bed, so that when the idolaters looked inside they would believe the blessed guest was sleeping there and time would be won. That act is the historic emblem of a young man lying down to death without hesitation in the shadow of drawn swords. The Prophet Muhammad, for his part, slipped out unseen from before the eyes of the men at the door, scattering a handful of earth as he went, and left his house.
The Hijra was far more than a journey woven with miracles. It was a masterpiece of human reasoning, of strategy, and of precaution planned down to its finest detail.
format_quote"The fate of a journey is settled by the expertise of its guide."
Hasan Bekmezci
An agreement was made with Abdullah ibn Urayqit, a man who had not yet become a Muslim and who still held the beliefs of the idolaters, but who was known for his honesty, his fidelity to his word and his expertise. That choice is the most concrete proof of the value Islam places on competence.
Urayqit knew by heart not the main caravan roads between Mecca and Medina, but the desolate, steep and rocky shortcuts of the desert that nobody else dared take and where water was scarce. Two camels were handed over, and it was agreed that they would meet three days later at the foot of the Cave of Thawr.
Through those three dangerous days, when the searches were at their most intense, food had to be carried up to the Cave of Thawr, and the most ingenious part of the plan was that this task fell to Asma. Asma was in the final stage of her pregnancy at the time. Neither the idolaters nor their trackers could harbour the slightest suspicion that a pregnant woman would climb, in the freezing cold of night, to a cave at the summit of the steep and punishing Mount Thawr.
Finding no cord to tie the provision bag onto her camel, Asma split the sash at her waist in two and bound the bag with it, and that sacrifice gave her the name by which history knows her, She of the Two Belts. To erase the tracks that Asma and her brother Abdullah left going to and from the cave, Amir ibn Fuhayra, a freedman of Abu Bakr, drove his flock of sheep along behind them and wiped the footprints from the desert entirely. Abdullah gathered intelligence in Mecca by day and carried it up to the cave by night.
When the journey began after three days of waiting in the Cave of Thawr, night had settled over the desert like black velvet. On the foremost camel rode the guide Abdullah ibn Urayqit, reading the route like a compass, and the caravan crossed the desert silently behind him.
In the story of everyone who migrates there is an absolute and unavoidable night full of stars. When a person leaves behind the soil they know, the homeland they are used to and their own past, and sets out towards an unknown future, the night becomes their confidant and the darkness their shelter. In that darkness drawn over them to escape the eyes of day, alone, with the freezing cold of the desert brushing the face, the only companions left are the stars drifting across the sky.
That night was no ordinary journey. It was the labour pain of an entirely new birth in the history of humanity. The known world was being left behind, and steps were being taken across dark dunes towards a green cradle of civilisation. Between the rhythmic steps of camels sinking into the sand and rising again, a traveller who lifted his head would hear what the stars were whispering under that endless dome.
format_quote"Do not be afraid. This pitch darkness is the labour of a new morning. The Light that is to be born will illuminate not one city but the heart of all humanity."
The stars were celestial witnesses scattering hope into the traveller’s heart in the loneliness of the night. That was the whole method of finding one’s way in the desert: locate the single point that does not move while everything else turns around it, and build the entire route from there. The sky was a map that left no trace on the sand, that the wind could not erase, that could be neither bought nor lost.
The story of that blessed journey, and its visual memory, is brought back to life in the "Arabian Night" dial designed by IFL Watches on the sharp, iconic stainless steel case of the Tissot PRX.
The lower half of the dial is covered by cold sapphire-blue dunes painted layer upon layer; through the centre and the right a caravan of three camels crosses the desert in silhouette; on the left the gold-lit domes of Medina rise beside the full moon of the fourteenth night; and the upper half is filled by a night sky worked in microscopic star dust.
The dunes across the lower half of the dial are painted by hand, layer upon layer, in tones of blue and deep navy chosen to carry the freezing cold and the mystical atmosphere of a desert night. As the light refracts, the dunes gain depth. The camel silhouettes that make up the caravan are worked under a microscope with single-hair brushes.
The architecture rising on the left of the dial, in gold and orange tones, calls to mind Medina the Radiant, where the caravan arrived. The clear full moon shining behind those domes is no accidental celestial body.
The companions of the Prophet and the court poets always met in a single comparison when they described the blessed countenance of the Prophet Muhammad and the divine light upon his face: "His face shone like the full moon of the fourteenth night." (Ka'b ibn Malik).
That full moon on the dial stands both for the moment of arrival of the Hijra in the calendar and for the light that rose like a full moon over the pitch darkness of humanity. The immortal ode the people of Medina sang as they poured into the roads refers to exactly that light:
format_quote""Tala'al-badru 'alayna min thaniyyat al-wada..." (The full moon has risen over us, from the valley of farewell...)"
The IFL Watches "Arabian Night" is not merely a luxurious custom dial. It is that great night of the Hijra carried to the wrist in the language of micro-art: sorrow met with strategy, fear met with submission, the sacrifice of Ali, the courage of Asma, the guidance of the stars, and a darkness lit by a light like the moon of the fourteenth night.
The watch itself is built on the Tissot PRX case in 316L stainless steel, with its sharp integrated architecture and its brushed and polished surfaces held together. The case is forty millimetres across, forty-four millimetres long and ten point four millimetres deep; the glass is scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, the movement is Swiss made, and the date window sits at three o’clock. Because the dial is painted by hand in enamel colours that resist ultraviolet light, no two of the hundred and fifty are exactly alike.
Every time you turn your wrist, the cold blue dunes inside that brushed steel case, the silhouette of the caravan and the shining full moon whisper to you that even the darkest desert nights are pregnant with a morning as bright as Medina.
What gives most pause is this. The people who found their way that night carried neither an instrument nor a map. It was enough for them to raise their heads and look, because the sense of direction had been placed in the sky beforehand. Since the measure was not ours to set, all that is left to us is to look in the right place.
