According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muḥammad sent some of his followers to Abyssinia to escape from the persecution that he and his community experienced in Mecca. This first hijra (Arabic for “emigration”) is the first recorded instance of Muslims in Africa, and has become a story of great importance for many African Muslims, even today. The tradition relates how the Negus (the king) of Abyssinia received the Muslim emigrants well. The story is related, or alluded to, in two categories of sources that claim to describe the life of Muḥammad: the biographies of his life, and some of the ḥadīths, i.e. legal traditions said to record his sayings and doings. Modern scholars have debated to what extent these sources can be used in the study of the history of the Prophet; their positions range from total scepticism to more or less uncritical acceptance of the sources. In this study, samples of sources regarding the migration to Abyssinia are investigated, one from each of the above-mentioned categories: a letter and an oral tradition describing the early work of the Prophet, purportedly transmitted by the traditionist ‘Urwa ibn al-Zubayr (d. 713), and a ḥadīth about tensions between the migrants to Abyssinia and those who remained in Mecca. The conclusion is that there is reason to believe that the Abyssinian migration actually took place, although details, such as the dealings between the migrants and the Negus, are probably later additions to the story.