Hijrah, Asylum and the Moral Limits of Borders: Re-reading Islamic Migration Doctrine in the Age of the Nation-State

Abstract

Abstract

This article re-examines the Islamic doctrine of Hijrah in relation to modern borders, asylum, forced migration and the treatment of displaced persons. It is guided by the central question: How can the Islamic doctrine of Hijrah be understood as an ethical and legal framework for evaluating modern borders, asylum, forced migration and the treatment of displaced persons? Existing discussions of Hijrah often treat it as a historical event, a legal rule concerning residence in non-Muslim territory, or a spiritual metaphor for leaving sin. Modern migration studies, by contrast, usually discuss borders, refugee status, statelessness and citizenship without sustained engagement with Islamic legal and ethical resources. This article bridges these concepts by using a historical-textual and maqasid-oriented method. It analyses Qur’anic references to Hijrah, Prophetic precedents such as the migrations to Abyssinia and Madinah, classical juristic debates on the continuing obligation of migration, and contemporary scholarship on asylum, citizenship and border control. It argues that Hijrah should not be reduced either to unrestricted movement or to a past Prophetic episode. Rather, it is best understood as a context-sensitive doctrine that protects religion, life, dignity, family, moral agency and justice when these values are threatened by persecution or forced immobility. The article further contends that Hijrah places ethical limits on exclusionary border regimes, especially when such regimes deny sanctuary, return people to danger, produce statelessness, or make human dignity conditional on nationality. The contribution of the article is to reconstruct Hijrah as an Islamic ethical-legal framework for asylum, protection and humane mobility in the modern nation-state system.