Between Ṣafā and Marwah: the search that became a rite

Most of what a pilgrim does at Hajj is addressed to Allah directly — a garment put on at a fixed boundary, a House circled, a night stood through. Saʿy is different: its script is a transcript. Seven crossings between two low rises at the edge of the Sanctuary, copying a movement nobody designed as a ceremony — what one woman actually did on that ground, in an emergency, when there was no rite there to perform.

The sources that preserve it are also more precise than most retellings — about where the running starts and stops, and about what she was actually searching for.

۞ إِنَّ ٱلصَّفَا وَٱلْمَرْوَةَ مِن شَعَآئِرِ ٱللَّهِ ۖ فَمَنْ حَجَّ ٱلْبَيْتَ أَوِ ٱعْتَمَرَ فَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْهِ أَن يَطَّوَّفَ بِهِمَا ۚ وَمَن تَطَوَّعَ خَيْرًا فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ شَاكِرٌ عَلِيمٌ

Indeed Ṣafā and Marwah are among the symbols of Allah. So whoever makes Hajj to the House, or performs ʿumrah, there is no blame on him if he goes between them. And whoever volunteers good — then Allah is Appreciative, All-Knowing.

— Sūrat al-Baqarah, 2:158

“No blame” is strange wording for a rite of Hajj, and it misled someone close enough to the source to have known better. ʿUrwah put the difficulty to his aunt ʿĀʾishah: by Allah, the verse looks as though there is no blame on a person who does not go between Ṣafā and Marwah. Her answer is a point of Arabic before it is a point of law:

بِئْسَ مَا قُلْتَ يَا ابْنَ أُخْتِي، إِنَّ هَذِهِ لَوْ كَانَتْ كَمَا أَوَّلْتَهَا عَلَيْهِ، كَانَتْ: لَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْهِ أَنْ لَا يَتَطَوَّفَ بِهِمَا

What a poor thing you have said, son of my sister. Had this verse meant what you have read into it, it would have run: “there is no blame on him if he does not go between them.”

She then gives the occasion. The Anṣār, before Islam, used to enter iḥrām for the idol Manāt at al-Mushallal, and anyone who had done so felt it wrong afterwards to walk between Ṣafā and Marwah. When they accepted Islam they asked about that scruple, and the verse came down to lift it. It answers an anxiety about the two hills; it never offered a way out of them.

Two things on that page rarely travel with the famous half. ʿĀʾishah closes by saying that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) established going between them as sunnah, so it is not open to anyone to drop it. And Abū Bakr b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, hearing the report, adds a second group he had been taught about: people who had always gone between the two hills and then hesitated once the Qurʾān commanded ṭawāf of the House without naming Ṣafā at all. He concludes that the verse settled both anxieties at once. Al-Bukhārī files the exchange under a chapter heading that answers the question before the hadith does: the obligation of Ṣafā and Marwah, and their being made among the symbols of Allah.

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 2/157 of , hadith 1643, narrated from ʿUrwah.

Jābir b. ʿAbdullāh, asked in old age to describe the Prophet’s pilgrimage, remembered him coming out of the gate toward Ṣafā. As he drew near the hill he recited the opening of that same verse, and then said:

أَبْدَأُ بِمَا بَدَأَ اللَّهُ بِهِ

I begin with what Allah began with.

Then he began with Ṣafā.

That one sentence is the reason a circuit runs from Ṣafā to Marwah and not the other way round. The order is not convenience or local habit: it is read off the order of the naming in the verse, and it was said out loud, as a reason, before the first step.

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, hadith 1218, in the long report of Jābir beginning at printed page 2/886 of .

He climbed Ṣafā until the House came into view, faced the qiblah, declared Allah one and magnified Him, and said:

لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ وَحْدَهُ لَا شَرِيكَ لَهُ. لَهُ الْمُلْكُ وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ وَهُوَ عَلَى كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرٌ. لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ وَحْدَهُ. أَنْجَزَ وَعْدَهُ. وَنَصَرَ عَبْدَهُ. وَهَزَمَ الْأَحْزَابَ وَحْدَهُ

There is no god but Allah alone, He has no partner. His is the dominion and His is the praise, and He has power over all things. There is no god but Allah alone. He fulfilled His promise, gave victory to His servant, and defeated the confederates by Himself.

Jābir’s next words repay reading slowly: then he supplicated in between that; he said the like of this three times. The dhikr is given verbatim. The duʿāʾ is not — not its wording, not its subject, not its length. What the narration fixes, it fixes exactly; what it hands to the pilgrim, it hands over whole.

That line between the fixed and the open is what two familiar additions blur. Ibn ʿUthaymīn, listing the errors people make during saʿy, names the habit of reciting ﴿إِنَّ الصَّفَا وَالْمَرْوَةَ مِنْ شَعَائِرِ اللَّهِ﴾ every time one approaches either hill — page 104 of . The sunnah, he finishes on the following page, is to recite it on approaching Ṣafā in the first circuit only; and giving each circuit its own designated supplication, he adds there, has no basis — page 105 of .

Neither addition is careless. Both come from wanting to fill a silence with something respectable. But the silence is the part of saʿy that belongs to the person performing it.

Jābir’s account changes verb exactly where the ground changes:

حَتَّى إِذَا انْصَبَّتْ قَدَمَاهُ فِي بَطْنِ الْوَادِي سَعَى. حَتَّى إِذَا صعدتا مشى

Until, when his feet came down into the bottom of the valley, he ran; and when they climbed out of it, he walked.

The run belongs to the dip, not to the distance. Ibn ʿUthaymīn names running the whole way from Ṣafā to Marwah as contrary to the sunnah — the running is between the two markers only and the rest is walked — and puts it down to not knowing, or to wanting the rite over with.

It is also not asked of women. Ibn Abī Shaybah gathers the early rulings under a heading that is itself the question — a woman in iḥrām: does she do raml or not? — and the answers run one way. ʿĀʾishah, asked whether women do raml, replied: have you no pattern in us? There is no raml upon you, at the House nor between Ṣafā and Marwah. Ibn ʿUmar’s answer is the same sentence with nothing added to it.

— printed page 3/150 of , reports 12951 and 12952.

Al-Bukhārī’s long report from Ibn ʿAbbās never uses the name Hājar. From its first line to its last it calls her umm Ismāʿīl, the mother of Ismāʿīl.

Ibrāhīm brought her and the nursing child to the place of the House when there was nobody in Makkah and no water in it, set down beside them a bag holding dates and a skin holding water, and turned to go. She followed him: where are you going, leaving us in this valley with no person in it and nothing at all? She said it several times and he did not turn to her. Then she asked a different question:

آللهُ الَّذِي أَمَرَكَ بِهَذَا قَالَ: نَعَمْ قَالَتْ: إِذَنْ لَا يُضَيِّعَنَا

“Is it Allah who commanded you to do this?” He said: “Yes.” She said: “Then He will not abandon us.”

And she went back. Nothing in the situation had changed; only what she now knew about it.

When the skin was empty she thirsted and the child thirsted, and she watched him writhing on the ground, and walked away rather than watch. Ṣafā was simply the nearest hill to where she stood, so she climbed it and turned to face the valley — and here the narration is precise in a way the retellings are not. She was not scanning for water. She was looking to see whether there was anyone: هَلْ تَرَى أَحَدًا. The phrase repeats on each hill, and each time the answer is that she saw no one.

Between the hills her movement changes:

فَهَبَطَتْ مِنَ الصَّفَا حَتَّى إِذَا بَلَغَتِ الْوَادِيَ رَفَعَتْ طَرَفَ دِرْعِهَا ثُمَّ سَعَتْ سَعْيَ الْإِنْسَانِ الْمَجْهُودِ حَتَّى جَاوَزَتِ الْوَادِيَ

So she came down from Ṣafā, and when she reached the valley she lifted the hem of her shift and then ran the run of a person at the end of their strength, until she had crossed the valley.

She did that seven times. Ibn ʿAbbās then gives the Prophet’s one-line verdict on the whole of it: فَذَلِكَ سَعْيُ النَّاسِ بَيْنَهُمَا — that is people’s saʿy between the two.

The geometry is worth noticing. She ran across the valley floor and walked the climbs, because that is what a person carrying panic uphill does. The Prophet ran where the ground dipped and walked where it rose. Saʿy is not a stylised gesture toward her search; it is her search, kept at its own proportions, with the running left exactly where hers was.

The water, when it came, came at neither hill and by no effort of hers. On Marwah she heard a voice, listened, heard it again, and found the angel at the place of Zamzam, digging until the water showed. She began banking it into a basin with her hand and scooping it into her skin, and it kept welling up behind each scoop. The Prophet’s comment on that detail is the one line of the report most likely to stop a reader:

يَرْحَمُ اللهُ أُمَّ إِسْمَاعِيلَ لَوْ تَرَكَتْ زَمْزَمَ أَوْ قَالَ لَوْ لَمْ تَغْرِفْ مِنَ الْمَاءِ لَكَانَتْ زَمْزَمُ عَيْنًا مَعِينًا

May Allah have mercy on the mother of Ismāʿīl. Had she left Zamzam alone — or he said: had she not scooped from the water — Zamzam would have been a flowing spring.

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 4/142 of , hadith 3364, narrated from Ibn ʿAbbās.

She had gone out looking for a person, and would have settled for a skin of water. She was answered with a well that has not stopped since, and a town built around it. The verse that opens the rite ends by naming Allah Shākir — the One who acknowledges what is done for Him and repays it. Her seven crossings are the acknowledgement, still being made in their millions, on the same ground.

Ṣafā carries a second memory, and it belongs to the beginning, not the farewell. Ibn ʿAbbās reports that the Prophet climbed Ṣafā one day and called out yā ṣabāḥāh — the cry raised when a raid is breaking at dawn. Quraysh gathered to him and asked what was wrong. He asked them: if I told you that an enemy was about to fall on you by morning or by evening, would you not believe me? They said yes. He said: then I am a warner to you before a severe punishment. Abū Lahab answered: ruin to you — is this why you gathered us? And the sūra came down that begins by returning that word to him.

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 6/122 of , hadith 4801, narrated from Ibn ʿAbbās.

The content he climbed that hill to announce, and was cursed for, is the content the pilgrim climbs it to recite now: there is no god but Allah alone, He has no partner. The rock did not change. Everything the message did in the interval lies between the ridicule and the dhikr.

Saʿy resists being hurried, and not because hurry is forbidden — the rite contains a run. It resists it because almost nothing in saʿy is left to the pilgrim to supply, except the one part that cannot be done quickly. The starting hill is fixed. The dhikr is fixed. The count is fixed. The running is confined to a stretch of ground you could pace out in under a minute. What is yours is the asking, standing where a woman asked with far less reason for hope than you have, and was answered past anything she had thought to ask for.

If anything above is wrong — a rendering that misses the Arabic, a citation that does not hold up, a claim stated with more confidence than the page allows — tell us. That correction is worth more to us than the post standing unchallenged.

May Allah ﷻ accept the saʿy of everyone who has made it, and grant to everyone still asking the answer they did not know how to ask for.