Moments with the Messenger | Episode 2

Episode 2: The Two Gifts: Hajar, Zamzam and the Founding of Mecca

Having told the story of the Hijra by starting in the middle, DaliaMogahed now goes back to the beginning—to the great-grandfather many generations removed of the Prophet ﷺ, Sayyidina Ibrahim (as). Born into an idolatrous society to a father who manufactured idols, Ibrahim's fitra was clear even as a child, and his story becomes the origin that explains how we arrived at the Hijra in the first place.

This episode follows Ibrahim's unshakable conviction through his hardest tests: silencing a tyrant king with a single argument about the sun, being stripped and catapulted into an inferno that Allah commanded to become "cool and peaceful," and the surrender of walking away from his wife and infant son in a barren valley without knowing how Allah's aid would come. Alongside him stands Hajar—the Egyptian servant gifted in a Pharaoh's chamber who became the mother in whose footsteps millions still walk—whose running between Safa and Marwa Dalia unpacks as one of the most profound acts of worship we perform: striving sourced in tawakkul, effort that never causes the outcome but always precedes it.

From the gushing of Zamzam and the arrival of the Jurhum, to the rebuilding of the Kaaba by father and son, to the dua that Muhammad ﷺ would one day answer, the story finally turns dark—how a single dictator, Amr ibn Luhai, brought idolatry and its accompanying corruptions into a peninsula that had been founded on Tawhid, setting the stage for the world into which the Prophet ﷺ would be born.

Along the way: never judge a person by their family, surrender doesn't mean you stop making dua, and the danger of uncritical followership of anyone who isn't a prophet.