This event was named hijra, originally meaning "the breaking of the ties of kinship or association", and those Meccan supporters who followed Muhammad into exile—as well as those who had earlier gone into exile in Abyssinia—became known as the muhājirūn, a title that acquired enormous prestige in later years.
[4] Consequently, while most Sunni jurists came to accept that the Quranic injunction only applied to the Meccans of Muhammad's time, and consider it to have been abrogated thereafter,[3][5] the term was in turn "seized upon by minority Islamic opposition groups [...] who sought divine justification for their actions", such as the Kharijites and Zaydi Shi'a.
[5] Thus, in the 680s, during the civil war of the Second Fitna, the Kharijite leader Nafi ibn al-Azraq, "held that only those who actively supported him were genuinely Muslims, and spoke of them as muhājirūn, who made the hijra to his camp, which was dār al-hijra" (W. Montgomery Watt).
[6] In the 9th century, the great Zaidi imam and theologian al-Qasim al-Rassi (785–860) considered the Muslim rulers of his time as illegitimate tyrants, and the lands they ruled as "abode of injustice" (dār al-ẓulm).
[8] The historian Heinz Halm described this event thus: This name recalls the Hijra, the emigration of the Prophet [Muhammad] from pagan Mecca to Medina, and with it the founding of the original Islamic community, which soon began to expand militarily: as the Prophet abandoned the corrupt Mecca and made a new beginning with a few loyal followers in exile, thus the followers of the daʿwa, the true "believers" or "friends of God", now abandoned the corrupted community of the Muslims, who had become unbelievers, to begin, in the dār al-hijra, the creation of an Islam renewed from its very foundations.The analogy was furthered by giving the name of muhājirūn to those who abandoned their homes to join Ibn Hawshab in the dār al-hijra.