The Cloud on the Road from Ta'if

Once, Aisha asked her husband, the Prophet ﷺ, a question. "Has there ever been a day harder for you than the day of Uhud?"

Uhud was the battle in which seventy Muslims lost their lives and the Prophet ﷺ himself was wounded. It is hard to imagine a day worse than that.

But the Prophet ﷺ said there had been one. Her people, the Quraysh, had troubled him a great deal, he told her, and they were his own tribe too. And the hardest of all that he had faced from them was the day he went to a man called Ibn Abd Yalil.

This is what happened.

Years before, when the Prophet ﷺ was still living in Makkah, most of the Quraysh had refused his message. He travelled to Ta'if, a town up in the mountains, to speak to Ibn Abd Yalil, one of its chiefs. He went to invite him to Islam, to the worship of Allah alone, and he went hoping for a yes.

But Ibn Abd Yalil would not give the Prophet ﷺ the answer he had hoped for. The answer was no.

So the Prophet ﷺ set off again, his heart heavy with sorrow. The road wound down through rocky hills and dry valleys. He went on and on, so full of grief that he hardly noticed where he was going. At last he found himself at a place called Qarn ath-Tha'alib, the Hill of the Foxes, a long way down the road towards Makkah.

He lifted his head. A cloud had spread its shade over him. He looked, and there in the cloud was the angel Jibril عليه السلام, calling to him.

"Allah has heard what your people said to you," Jibril said, "and how they answered you. He has sent you the Angel of the Mountains, so that you can order him to do whatever you wish to them."

Then the Angel of the Mountains called to the Prophet ﷺ and greeted him with salaam. "O Muhammad ﷺ," he said, "order whatever you wish. If you like, I will bring the two mountains together over them."

Scholars explain that these were the two mountains that face each other across the valley of Makkah, the home of his own people.

Remember, this was the day he would later call the hardest he had faced from his people. He had come with hope and been turned away. Now an angel, sent by Allah, was waiting for his word. Many of us, hurt that badly, would want the people who had hurt us to pay.

But this is what the Prophet ﷺ said:

"No, but I hope that Allah will bring out from their descendants people who will worship Allah alone, and will not worship anything besides Him."

He did not pretend the day had not hurt; years later, when Aisha asked, he still remembered it. But on that road, with the angel ready to do whatever he ordered, he did not ask for anyone to be harmed. He chose hope.

In time, his hope began to come true, even in his own lifetime. The people of Makkah, his own tribe of Quraysh, came into Islam, and their children after them. Even Thaqif, the tribe of Ta'if, sent a group to the Prophet ﷺ to pledge themselves to Islam.

Today, five times every day, the call to prayer rises over Makkah, and over the hills of Ta'if too.

Aisha heard this story from the Prophet ﷺ himself. She told it to her nephew, Urwa, and it was passed on from teacher to student until Imam al-Bukhari and Imam Muslim wrote it down in their books of hadith. That is how it has reached you tonight.

Now close your eyes. If anything is weighing on your heart, imagine setting it down beside you, and let a cool cloud spread its shade over you, soft and quiet, all the way into sleep.