Part Three: The First Words

The first revelation did not come again right away, and the gap between the first event and the resumption was, by the most honest reading of the sources, one of the most psychologically important periods in Muhammad's life — the period in which, having been through something he still did not understand, he had to wait and wonder whether it had meant anything at all.

The tradition is clear about the gap. After the encounter in the cave, after Muhammad had told Khadija and she had taken him to Waraqa, and after Waraqa had told him that what had come to him was of the kind that the great prophetic traditions of the region knew, there was a period during which no new revelation came. The gap was not a day. It was not a week. It stretched across months — the traditions vary on the exact length, and the chronology of the Qur'an is not precisely recoverable from the sources — but the effect is consistent in every version: Muhammad went back to the cave, waited, and the silence was, for him, a catastrophe.

What Muhammad did during the gap is not perfectly known, because the sources are interested in the revelations and the events more than in the daily texture of his waiting. We know that he continued to live in Mecca, that he was still married to Khadija, still with Abu Talib, still known as al-Amin, still a man of the caravan trade. The brief mentions of his life during this period are, in the sira, sparse. But the sparse record tells us something important: Muhammad did not, during the gap, set himself up as a public figure. He did not begin to preach. He did not announce his message. He waited.

The shape of the waiting is what matters. Muhammad had been through an overwhelming event that he himself had interpreted, with Khadija's help and Waraqa's help, as a possible divine communication. He had been told that he had been chosen. And then silence. If the communication had been real, why had it stopped? If he had been chosen, why had he been left alone with the memory of what had happened and nothing further? The anxiety of the gap is not invented by the later tradition. It reads, on the face of it, like the experience of a man who has had an overwhelming event and does not know what it means or whether it will happen again. The silence was real. It was long. It mattered.

The length matters. If the gap had been a few weeks, it would be a footnote in the life of almost any religious founder — a pause, a preparation, a moment of doubt overcome quickly. The gap in Muhammad's case was long enough to have become, in his own mind, a sustained uncertainty. The tradition does not give us the precise number of months, and we should not pretend it does. But the tradition is clear that the gap was long enough to have been, for Muhammad, a source of distress. The Qur'an, in the suras that scholars associate with this early period, speaks to a man who is called to be steadfast, to be patient, to be warned that the people of his town would not like what he had to say, to be told that the message would come and that he should wait for it. The suras of this early period — the earliest Meccan suras, which come at the end of the standard text — are anxious, urgent, fragmented, and they give the impression of a man who is in the middle of a crisis of waiting.

The Qur'an itself preserves traces of the gap. The earliest suras — the short, intense Meccan chapters that come at the end of the standard text — speak to a man under pressure, a man who has been chosen and is being told that the message will come, a man who is being urged to be steadfast, who is being warned that the people of Mecca will not like what he has to say, who is being told to be patient in the face of the delay. The early suras do not narrate the biography, but they do give us the atmosphere of the period in which Muhammad was trying to understand what had happened to him and whether it would continue.

The gap matters for the shape of the whole story. If the revelations had come continuously from the first moment, Muhammad's life would have had a different shape — the prophet as a man who knew from the start that he was receiving revelation, who could organize his life around it, who could build his movement from a position of certainty. That is not what happened. What happened was that the man who thought he was mad, and who was told by his wife and his cousin's friend that he was not, was then left with a long silence in which he had to live with the memory of the encounter and the uncertainty of whether anything more would come. The uncertainty is part of the story, and it is part of why the early suras feel the way they do — urgent, anxious, sometimes irritable, sometimes comforted, sometimes rebuking Muhammad himself for the way he has reacted.

The Qur'an's own first sura, Sura Al-Alaq, the ninety-sixth chapter, is the sura of the first revelation, and it is preserved as the first words Muhammad received. Read in the name of your Lord who created, the sura begins, and the words are the words that came to Muhammad in the cave. The sura is short — fifty-three verses in the standard text — and it is one of the earliest of the Meccan suras, and it is the sura that records the first event. But the sura itself does not tell the story of the gap. It tells the words of the first revelation and nothing more. The gap has to be inferred from the silence that follows, and from the shape of the next suras, and from the later tradition's memory of Muhammad's distress.

When the revelation resumed, it came with the same kind of directness that the first had had. The second revelation is traditionally remembered as the command to stand up and warn — iqra giving way to abd, in the sense of the call to preach, to warn the people. The Arabic of the second revelation, in the traditional account, is the command to stand and to warn and to glorify God. The early suras that follow — the ones that speak of judgment, of the fatherless, of the scales of the afterlife, of the burial of infant girls, of the coming reckoning — are the language of a man who has received a charge and is now, in the silence that has ended, beginning to act on it. The resumption of revelation is not simply the continuation of the first event. It is the beginning of the public life. The man who had been told to read and had been too terrified to understand it was now, after the gap, being told to warn, and warning was a public act.

The next sura after Al-Alaq in the traditional chronology is not certain, but the early suras that scholars associate with this first period of the revelation include Sura Al-Muddaththir, the seventy-fourth chapter, which commands Muhammad to arise and warn and to put aside the garment that covers him and to devote himself to the divine calling. Sura Al-Muddaththir is significant because it marks the transition from the private revelation to the public command. The sura is in the first person — O you who are wrapped in your garment, arise and warn — and it is the moment at which Muhammad is told to go public. The sura is brief. It is intense. It is the beginning of the public life.

The gap also matters for the way the early movement formed. The first believers did not come to Muhammad in a mass. They came one by one, or in small groups, over time. The silence between the first revelation and the resumption gave Muhammad time to recover from his terror, to speak to Khadija, to think, to be with his wife and his cousin and the small circle that formed around him. The first public preaching, when it came, was not a sudden burst. It was the gradual emergence of a man who had been through something private and overwhelming and who was now, after the silence had ended, beginning to speak.

The period of the gap was also the period in which Muhammad's own understanding of what had happened to him consolidated. The silence was not simply a period of waiting. It was a period of processing. Muhammad had to live with what had happened, with the fact that he had been through something he could not fully name, with the fact that a man who knew the scriptures had recognized his experience as belonging to the prophetic tradition, with the fact that Khadija had stood by him. The silence was the space in which Muhammad's own sense of the event slowly took shape, and the silence was the space in which the later story, with its certainty, had to be grown from the first uncertain moment.

The interest in the silence is not just dramatic. It is interpretive. The silence is part of the interiority that the sources preserve, and it cannot be skipped by anyone who wants to give the reader access to what it was like to be him. The Qur'an gave Muhammad words to say when he was afraid. The tradition remembered that he thought he was mad. The silence between the first and second revelation is the space in which Muhammad had to live with his own uncertainty, and it is the space that made the first public words — the first warnings, the first suras — the words of a man who had been through something and was now, after a period of doubt about what it meant, beginning to act on it.

The silence is also the counterpoint to the usual story of prophetic certainty. The call that Muhammad received was not followed by immediate clarity. It was followed by a long period in which the recipient had to wonder whether it meant anything at all, and then by a resumption that carried the same charge but in a man who had already lived through the silence. That is not a weakness. It is a fact about him, and a fact that gives the biography its human texture. The man who could not be certain at the beginning is the same man who, after the silence ended, became the steady leader of a movement, the man who would stand in the cave and receive the words, the man who would, over twenty-two years, receive the whole Qur'an as it is known today.

There is also a more specific piece of evidence in the sources for the gap, and it comes from the way the early suras address Muhammad's own state. The Qur'an, in the early Meccan suras, speaks to Muhammad as a man who is being reassured, being comforted, being warned, being urged. The suras of this period are not just the message to the Meccans. They are also, in part, the message to Muhammad himself. The Qur'an tells Muhammad not to be sad over what the Meccans say. It tells him that the message will come. It tells him that God is with him. The early suras treat Muhammad, in other words, as a man who needs to hear these things — a man who is anxious, a man who is being told to persist. This is not the language of a prophet who has already settled into his role. This is the language of a man who is still finding his footing.

The story now moves to the second phase of the Meccan period — the public preaching, the first suras, the response of the town. But the silence matters first, because it was real, it was long, and it shaped the man who came out of it. The story of the first revelations is not just the story of the words that came. It is the story, too, of the gap between them, and of what the gap did to the man who had heard the first words and was waiting for the next.

When the revelations began again after the silence, they came in the form of short, compact chapters — suras — in a language that was, to the people of Mecca, immediately recognizable as powerful Arabic, and in a style that was, to the people of Mecca, unlike anything they had heard before.

The language of the Qur'an was a matter of the first importance to the Meccans, and it is a matter of first importance to the biographer. The Qur'an was not, in its original form, a book. It was an oral revelation — words that came to Muhammad and that he recited, and that were memorized by those who heard them, and that were preserved in the memory of the community before they were ever written down in a single collected text. The early suras were short enough to be memorized in a single hearing, and they were rhythmic enough, and intense enough, to leave a strong impression. They were not the long, flowing style of the tribal poetry that was the model of excellence in Arabian speech. They were something else — shorter, more direct, more anxious, more focused on a single message repeated with variations. The Meccans heard them and they understood at once that the Arabic was extraordinary, and they also understood that the form was not what they were used to.

A reader today who does not know Arabic should be told plainly that the sound of the Qur'an was, for its first audience, the audience that mattered, part of the evidence for what it was. The recitation was not simply a vehicle for meaning. The sound — the rhythm, the cadence, the repetitions, the way a single phrase would carry through a short sura — was itself part of the experience. The early suras were not written to be read in silence. They were meant to be heard, and the hearing was the event. The Meccans understood this. They understood that what they were hearing was not the Arabic of the poets, and that it was not the Arabic of the soothsayers, and that it was not the Arabic of the conversations of the market. It was something else.

What Muhammad said, in these first years, clustered around a small number of themes, and the themes were the building blocks of his message.

The first was judgment. The early suras speak repeatedly of a coming reckoning, of a day when deeds will be weighed, of the fate of those who denied the truth, of the punishment that is coming for the people of the town if they do not respond. The judgment is not presented as a distant, abstract theology. It is close. It is a warning to the Meccans where they stand. It is, in the language of the first suras, the language of a warner who has arrived from among the people themselves, calling on them to wake up before it is too late.

The judgment theme is the dominant theme of the earliest Meccan revelation, and it is the theme that the Meccans heard first. The Qur'an's earliest suras speak of a day of judgment, of the resurrection of the dead, of the scales on which deeds will be weighed, of the punishment of the deniers, of the reward of the believers. The language is vivid, sometimes terrifying. The suras paint a picture of a world in which what happened in this life was not the end, in which the injustices of the present would be set right, in which the powerful who oppressed the weak would be called to account, and in which the weak who had been wronged would be vindicated. The Meccans heard this and understood that Muhammad was telling them that their present advantages — their wealth, their power, their idols, their status — would not save them from this judgment.

The second was the fatherless and the vulnerable. The Qur'an's early concern with orphans — the command not to devour their property, the insistence that they be treated justly, the reminder of what happens to a child without protection — is not a disguised form of a later legal system. It is the concern of a man who grew up an orphan in a society where the tribe was everything, and who had, in his own life, experienced the vulnerability that the system produced. The repeated attention to the orphan is one of the most persistent themes of the early Meccan revelation, and it is one that speaks directly to the society Muhammad was addressing.

The Qur'an's concern with the orphan is not a single verse or a single theme. It is a sustained focus across the early suras. Do not devour the property of the orphan except in the way that is good, the Qur'an says, and the command is repeated, and the orphan is treated as a sign of the society's moral condition. The orphan is the test of the society — if the society treats the orphan badly, the society is bad. This is the logic of the theme, and it is a logic that Muhammad, as an orphan himself, would have felt in his own life.

The third was the burial of infant girls. The Qur'an in its earliest form speaks, bitterly, of the practice of burying infant daughters alive when the family feared poverty or shame. When the female child is questioned for what sin she was killed, the Qur'an says, and the question is not rhetorical in the way a modern reader might take it. It is a direct accusation against a practice that existed in parts of Arabia and that the Qur'an treats as an outrage. The passage is one of the most distinctive and forceful pieces of the early revelation, and it sets the moral tone of Muhammad's message in a way that the Meccan elite could not easily dismiss: this was not a set of rules about ritual purity. This was a condemnation of what the society did to its own children.

The practice of burying infant girls is not a universal practice of pre-Islamic Arabia — the sources do not suggest that every tribe did it, or that it was the norm everywhere — but it was known enough to be a matter of concern, and it was a practice that the Qur'an treats as an abomination. The passage is included here because it is one of the clearest examples of the moral force of the early revelation, and because it is one of the clearest examples of the Qur'an's concern with the vulnerable. The practice was a form of the same logic that made orphanhood so dangerous: a child without protection, a girl without value in the tribal economy, a child who could be disposed of. The Qur'an's response was to say that this was wrong, and that God would question the person who did it.

The fourth was the scales, the balance, the idea that every person's life and deeds would be measured, that the world was not a place where things simply happened without consequence, that there was a judgment coming that would set right what the current world left wrong. The imagery of the scales — the weighing of deeds — is one of the central moral images of the Qur'an, and it appears early, in the Meccan period, as part of the language of the warning. The scales are not a minor detail. They are the image at the center of the judgment, and they are the image that makes the judgment concrete. The Qur'an says that on the day of judgment, the scales will be set up, and the deeds will be weighed, and the balance will be true. The image is one that the original audience would have understood, because weighing and balance were part of the commercial life of Mecca. The Qur'an took a commercial image and turned it into a moral one.

The fifth was the oneness of God. The message was not, at this stage, a complex legal system or a detailed political program. It was the insistence that God is one, that the idols are false, that the Meccans were worshipping things that could not help them, that Abraham had been a monotheist and that the Kaaba had been built for the worship of one God and then corrupted. The message was uncompromising on this point, and the uncompromising quality of it was part of what made the Meccans furious. It was not enough to ask them to add one god to their pantheon, or to honor a new prophet alongside their old gods. It was to tell them that everything they did at the Kaaba was wrong.

The oneness of God is the theological core of the message, and it is the message that the Meccans heard and rejected. The Qur'an did not present monotheism as a new idea. It presented it as the original idea, the idea of Abraham, the idea that had been corrupted by the idols and needed to be restored. The Qur'an's argument was that the Meccans had forgotten the one God and had taken up the idols, and that the idols could not help them, and that the one God could. The argument was not abstract. It was practical. The Qur'an said that the idols were not gods, that they could not hear, could not see, could not help, could not harm, and that worship of them was a mistake. The argument was, in its way, a simple one, but it was not a gentle one. It was a challenge to the whole religious structure of the town.

These themes — judgment, the vulnerable, the buried daughters, the scales, the one God — are the substance of the earliest suras. They are not extensive. They are hammering. They are repeated with variation. They are the voice of a man who has received a charge, who is warning his people, and who does not yet have the long legal suras of the Medina period to draw on. The language is short, rhythmic, intense, and it carries the kind of directness that oral revelation, delivered by a man who is not a poet in the tribal sense but who is speaking a language charged with something his listeners can feel, carries.

The early suras also have a formal quality that is worth describing plainly. The Meccan suras are not the long, discursive suras of the Medina period. They are short, they are single-themed, they are filled with oaths and warnings and promises, and they have a kind of intensity that comes from the way the theme is repeated and developed. The oaths are a notable feature — the Qur'an begins many of the early suras with oaths by things in the natural world: by the night, by the morning, by the pen, by the sunrise, by the night visitor, by the stars, by the sky, by the moon, by time, by the fig, by the olive, by the mountain. The oaths are not decorative. They are part of the argument. The Qur'an swears by these things to establish the authority of what follows. The oaths are meant to carry weight.

The Meccan suras also have a rhythmic, almost chant-like quality in translation, and the rhythm is part of what made them powerful in the original Arabic. The suras repeat phrases, they use parallelism, they build to a climax, and they end with a summary or a warning. The form is not the form of the Arabic poetry that was the high achievement of the tribal tradition, and the Meccans heard the difference. The Qur'an was not poetry, and it was not prose in the ordinary sense. It was something that the Meccans did not have a category for, and the lack of a category was part of the power.

For the biographer, the important thing is that the early suras give us access to what Muhammad was saying at the moment he was saying it, and that they give us that access in a form that is close to the moment — much closer than the sira, which was written more than a century later. The Qur'an is not a biography, and it does not tell us what Muhammad felt or did on most days. But it tells us what he said, and it tells us, in the long run, what it did to him. The suras that console him, the suras that rebuke him, the suras that answer his enemies, and the one sura — a short one, memorable for its slightness — that tells him off for turning away from a blind man who came to see him, are the closest thing we have to the unfiltered voice of Muhammad under pressure.

The sura that rebukes him is Sura Abasa, the eightieth chapter, and it is worth lingering on briefly, because it is the one piece of the Qur'an that gives us a moment of Muhammad's own behavior and his own correction. The tradition says that a blind man came to Muhammad asking for instruction, and Muhammad turned away from him, frowning, because he was preoccupied with some of the leading men of the Quraysh who were listening. The sura was then revealed, and it rebuked Muhammad for his reaction, and told him that the blind man might have purified himself, or have been reminded, and that he should not have turned away. The passage is short, and it is tender in a way that the Qur'an's more severe moments are not. It is also, for the biographer, one of the most valuable pieces of evidence in the whole source material: it gives us Muhammad's own reaction, his impatience with a poor and blind man who interrupted him, and the Qur'an's rebuke of that reaction. It lets us see him being wronged and then being corrected, and it lets us see that the correction came from the revelation he believed was from God.

The early suras are not the whole of what Muhammad said. The message developed over time, and the style changed as the years passed. The Meccan suras are short and intense; the Medinan suras, later, are longer and more concerned with law and community. But the early suras are the core of what the first Muslims heard, and they are the foundation on which the rest of the message was built. A reader who wants to know what Muhammad said when he first began to warn his people should begin there, with the short, anxious, rhythmic chapters that were the immediate response to the silence that had ended, and that were the first public form of a message that would eventually carry the whole Islamic world.

The early suras are also the foundation of the Qur'an's authority in the Islamic tradition, because they are the first layer, and the first layer is the one that the community heard first and the one that was preserved first. The early suras are the beginning of the Qur'an as a collected text, and the beginning of the Qur'an as the word of God in the Islamic sense. The honest account does not confuse the two — the historical beginning and the theological beginning are not the same thing — but it also does not pretend that they are unrelated. The historical beginning is the beginning of the written text, the theological beginning is the beginning of the divine communication, and both are true in their own way.

The Meccan elite's response to Muhammad's message did not begin with theological argument and it did not end there. It began with the fact that the message threatened the town's whole arrangement — its sanctuary, its trade, its social structure, and the standing of the men who controlled those things — and it continued with the theological arguments that were added on top of that.

Muhammad had been known in Mecca for years as al-Amin, the trustworthy. He had been the man who settled the Black Stone dispute. He had been the man who carried the caravans and kept his word and was married to Khadija and had a reputation that the town, by and large, respected. Then he began to say that the gods of the Kaaba were false, that God was one, that the town's whole religious center was built on a mistake, and that the Meccans were in danger of a coming judgment if they did not change. He was not a stranger. He was not an outsider. He was the man they knew, telling them that the thing they had built their lives around was wrong.

The response was immediate and it was not polite. The Qur'an records the kinds of things the Meccans said about Muhammad — that he was a poet, that he was a magician, that he was possessed, that he was fabricating the revelation, that he was trying to win power and status for himself and his clan. The accusations were not invented by the later tradition. They are in the Qur'an, because the Qur'an was responding to them in real time. They are the Meccan elite's own language, preserved in the record of the man they were arguing with.

The most important thing about these accusations is that they were not purely intellectual. They were also social and personal. To call Muhammad a poet was to say that his words were not revelation but the product of a man's skill — a way of reducing the claim without engaging it. To call him a magician was to say that what his listeners experienced was not divine communication but a trick. To call him possessed was to say that he had lost his mind. To say he was fabricating was to say that he was a liar. Each of these charges had a strategic purpose: they reduced the claim, undermined the authority of the man making it, and gave the Meccan elite a vocabulary for refusing to take the message seriously.

The men of the Quraysh who opposed Muhammad were not a single person. They were a group of men of standing in the town, men of the leading clans, men who controlled the sanctuary and the trade and the political life of the Quraysh. Among the most prominent of the opponents were Abu Jahl, whose name was Amr ibn Hisham, a man of the Makhzum clan, one of the leading clans of the Quraysh, who became one of the most determined of the enemies of Muhammad; al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, a rich and influential man of the Banu Makhzum, who was the one who heard the Qur'an and was impressed by its language and then tried to find a way to deal with it; and Utba ibn Rabi'a, an elder of the Quraysh who was one of the first to try to negotiate with Muhammad on behalf of the Quraysh. These men were not cartoon enemies. They were the leaders of the town, men of power and wealth and standing, men who had the most to lose from the success of Muhammad's message.

Abu Jahl is worth a specific mention, because he is the most vivid of the opponents in the early sources. He was a man of the Makhzum, the clan that controlled much of the Meccan trade and that was one of the most powerful in the Quraysh. He was a man of influence, of wealth, and of hostility. The tradition remembers him as one of the most relentless of the opponents, as a man who persecuted the Muslims, who urged the boycott, who was among the men who tried to kill Muhammad in the assassination plot, and who was killed at the Battle of Badr. He is the face of the opposition in the early story — the man who represents the Quraysh's determination to resist Muhammad in the strongest form.

Al-Walid ibn al-Mughira is worth a specific mention for a different reason. The tradition records that he heard Muhammad reciting the Qur'an and was struck by the language — by the power of the Arabic, by the way it was unlike the poetry he knew — and that he went to the other leaders of the Quraysh and proposed that they should try to deal with Muhammad in a way that would not require them to fight him directly. He proposed, in the tradition's account, that they should call Muhammad a sorcerer or a poet or a madman or a genius, in order to discredit him in the public mind. The proposal was a sign of the kind of threat Muhammad posed. Al-Walid was not dismissing the message because it was obviously false. He was dismissing it because it was powerful and he needed to neutralize the power.

The religious core of the objection was also real, and it was serious. The Meccans did not deny the idea of one God in the abstract. They knew the Abrahamic tradition, they knew the Jewish and Christian communities, they knew the hanifs who had turned away from idol worship. Their objection was not that monotheism was logically impossible. Their objection was that Muhammad's monotheism was uncompromising, that it required the abandonment of the idols they worshipped at the Kaaba, that it required the abandonment of the economic and social structure that the sanctuary represented, and that it required a change in the way they lived that they were not ready to make.

The Meccans did not summon the theologians of the town to debate Muhammad. They summoned the leaders of the town to deal with him. The opposition was not a matter of intellectual refutation. It was a matter of political and economic resistance. The Quraysh's leaders understood that the message was a threat to their position, and they responded as men in their position would respond — by argument on one side, by pressure on the other, and by the attempt to preserve the structure that gave them their standing.

The economic and social objection was the larger one, and it is the one that should not be allowed to slip into the background. The Quraysh's wealth came from the caravans and the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage depended on the sanctuary. The sanctuary depended on the idols. If Muhammad's message succeeded, the idols would be abandoned, the pilgrimages would cease to be what they were, the Quraysh's position would be undermined, and the town's economy would be damaged. That was not a small thing. That was the material basis of the town's existence.

The Meccan elite understood this, and their response was shaped by it. They did not simply argue that Muhammad was wrong. They tried to preserve the structure that made them powerful. They tried to isolate the Muslims. They tried to persuade Muhammad to stop. They tried to buy him off. They tried to threaten him. They tried to kill him. The sequence of their responses was the sequence of a group that had a great deal at stake and that was watching the threat grow.

The obstacle was also a matter of clan and honor. Muhammad belonged to the Banu Hashim, a respected but not dominant clan of the Quraysh. When he began to preach, he was not a man of power, and he was not announcing a message from a position of authority. He was a man of moderate standing telling the town that it was wrong, and the town's response was shaped in part by the fact that he was not someone they could dismiss as a threat from the outside. He was, in their terms, one of them. That made the challenge more irritating, because it was harder to ignore a complaint from a man you knew than a threat from an enemy.

The power of the Meccan elite in the town's social life was the power that came from the clan system, from the sanctuary, from the trade, from the reputation economy. The men who opposed Muhammad were the men who had the most to lose from his success, and they were the men who had the power to resist him in the short term. They were not omnipotent. They could not simply make Muhammad disappear. But they could make life difficult for him and for his followers, and they could try to persuade the town to turn against him.

The opposition grew over time. At first it was mockery, argument, threats. Then it became pressure, boycott, and the attempt to isolate the Muslims from the rest of the town. The Meccan elite tried to persuade Muhammad to stop, or to compromise, or to keep the message to himself. They offered him wealth if he would stop. They offered him leadership if he would stop. They offered him the protection of the town if he would stop. Muhammad rejected all of it. The Qur'an records his refusal, and the refusal is one of the most important early signs of the man he was becoming: a man who would not trade the message for anything the town had to offer.

The offer of wealth and power was one of the most striking episodes in the early opposition. The Quraysh offered Muhammad that he could have any woman he wanted, any wealth he wanted, any leadership he wanted, if he would only stop preaching. The offer was made, according to the tradition, by the men of the Quraysh, and Muhammad's response was to refuse it. The refusal is recorded in the Qur'an, and it is one of the clearest signs of the man's character. Muhammad had the chance to gain wealth and power in the town by stopping the message. He chose the message instead.

The opposition also shaped the way the message was heard. The Meccans were not a passive audience. They were a hostile one, and the hostility made the early suras the kind of intense, anxious, repetitive, warning-centered thing they were. The Qur'an was not a calm theological treatise. It was a message being spoken into a hostile environment, and the environment left its mark on it. The anger of the Meccans is audible in the Qur'an's urgency.

The biographer needs to understand that the Meccan opposition was not an irrational reaction to a purely religious message. It was a rational response — rational in the sense that the message threatened the material and social structure of the town, and the town's leaders reacted to that threat in the ways that men in their position would react: by arguing, by threatening, by trying to isolate the threat, by attempting to buy it off, and eventually by using force. The opposition was not a matter of stupid pagan resistance to pure truth. It was a matter of real people with real interests defending a real position against a challenge that, if successful, would have destroyed their way of life.

The Meccan elite are not, in this story, a cartoon of villainy. They are men of a town who had built their wealth and their honor on a sanctuary and a trade and a set of practices, and who heard a man they knew telling them that the whole thing was wrong and that God was angry with them, and who, after a period of argument, concluded that the man had to be stopped. The story of the opposition is the story of a society under threat from within, and of the ways a tribal society, with its honor, its trade, and its religion fused together, defended itself against a challenge that could not be met by argument alone.

The opposition was also a matter of the Meccan elite's sense of themselves. They were the guardians of the sanctuary. They were the masters of the trade. They were the leaders of the town. Muhammad's message, if successful, would have turned their world upside down. It would have made their gods false, their sanctuary corrupted, their trade and their pilgrimage and their prestige dependent on a mistake. The Meccan elite understood this, and their opposition was not a petty personal animosity. It was a defense of the way they understood their town and their place in it.

The chapter ends here, with the opposition full-grown and the Muslims under pressure, and with the reader understanding that the Meccan period of Muhammad's life was not a period of easy preaching followed by mass conversion, but a period of argument, threat, pressure, and the slow build of a movement that was small enough to be persecuted and large enough to be a problem. The next chapter — Chapter 14 — will look at the first believers, the people who came to Muhammad when the town was turning against him, and the shape of the movement at its beginning.

The first Muslims did not arrive in a mass. They came one at a time, or in small groups, over the first years of the message, and the shape of the early community was determined by who those people were and what they had to risk in order to believe.

The tradition names the earliest believers, and the list is the list of the people who were close enough to Muhammad to judge his claim and free enough, or brave enough, or desperate enough, to follow it. The first was Khadija, his wife, who believed in him when he came down from the cave thinking he was mad, and who stood by him through the earliest opposition. The second was Ali, his cousin, who was young enough — the traditions put him at around ten or slightly older — to have no power to lose and every reason to be close to the man who raised him, and who became the first young male believer. The third was Abu Bakr, a friend of Muhammad's, a man of standing in Mecca, a man of the Quraysh who had the independence and the courage to believe in his friend's message when the town was beginning to turn against it.

These three — Khadija, Ali, Abu Bakr — are the core of the early community. They are not the whole of it, but they are the beginning, and they matter because they represent the three kinds of person the first message attracted: the wife who knew him and had the wealth to support the movement, the young cousin who had no worldly status to lose, and the friend of standing who believed the man he knew. The early community did not form from a population convinced by public preaching. It formed from a small number of people whose proximity, or their circumstances, brought them to the message, and whose belief was a personal act before it was a public one.

The order of the first believers is itself interesting. The first to believe was the woman who knew Muhammad best, who had observed him in the cave, who had seen him come down terrified, who had taken him to Waraqa, and who had the wealth and the independence to support him in the early days. The second to believe was the young boy who had no worldly position to lose and every reason to be close to the man who raised him. The third to believe was the friend of standing who believed the man he knew. The order is not an accident. It is the order of the people who had the closest relationship to Muhammad and the most reason to trust him.

Khadija's belief is the most important of the early moments, because it set the pattern for the whole early community. She believed in Muhammad before he had done anything public. She believed in him when he was still terrified, still not sure what had happened, still afraid he was mad. She believed in him because she knew him, because she had seen his character, because she had seen the way he was, and because she had the resources to back her judgment. Her belief was not the belief of a mass. It was the belief of a person who had known Muhammad and who had decided to stand with him. That belief, and the support that came with it, was the foundation of the early community.

Ali's belief was the belief of a young man who had grown up in Muhammad's household and who had no position in the town to lose. Ali was young — the traditions vary on the exact age, but he was a boy or a very young man — and he had been close to Muhammad since childhood, and he had watched Muhammad's life, and he had seen the way Muhammad lived. His belief was a personal belief, a belief in the man he knew and in what the man was saying. The fact that Ali was young and had no power to lose made his belief possible in a way that would have been impossible for a man of standing in the town who had everything to risk by joining a persecuted movement.

Abu Bakr's belief was the belief of a man of the Quraysh who had the independence and the courage to stand with Muhammad in the face of the opposition. Abu Bakr was a friend of Muhammad's, a man who knew him well, a man of standing, a man who had his own wealth and his own position, and a man who was willing to risk that wealth and position for the sake of what he believed Muhammad was saying. Abu Bakr's belief was significant because it showed that the message was not only attracting the vulnerable and the young. It was also attracting men of standing, men who had something to lose and who were willing to lose it.

After them came the people who were closer to the edges of Meccan society — the people who had less to lose and more to gain from a movement that promised judgment on the powerful and protection for the vulnerable. Zayd ibn Haritha was a slave or a freedman of Muhammad's household — the traditions are ambiguous about whether he was originally a slave given to Muhammad by Khadija or a freedman who had been with him from earlier — and he became one of the earliest and most devoted of the Muslims. He was among the first to believe, and he stayed with Muhammad through the whole of the Meccan and Medinan story, and he was the one whom Muhammad treated with a special closeness that the later tradition remembers in ways that are emotionally vivid even if their exact legal meaning is disputed. Whatever the technical status, Zayd was a man of the household, a believer from the early days, and a person for whom Muhammad's faith meant something intimate and lasting.

Zayd's story is interesting for several reasons. First, he was a man who belonged to Muhammad's household, and whose closeness to Muhammad was a matter of daily life. Second, he was a man who had the least worldly status — a slave or a freedman — and who was among the first to believe. Third, his relationship with Muhammad was close enough that the later tradition remembered it in ways that were emotionally vivid, and that raised questions about the legal status of the relationship. The tradition remembers that Muhammad treated Zayd with a special closeness, that Zayd was one of the first to believe, and that Zayd was among the small group who formed the core of the early community.

The early believers also included women who are remembered less vividly in the tradition than Khadija and who are no less part of the first community. The traditions name some of them — Sumayya, the mother of Ammar, and her husband Yasir, who were among the first to believe and among the first to suffer — and they point to a community in which women were not merely followers of their husbands but persons making their own commitment. Sumayya and Yasir were among the poor and unprotected who came to the message early, and Sumayya is remembered in the tradition as one of the first to be killed for the faith in Mecca, a fact that makes her part of the first community and part of the first martyrs. The point of mentioning these women is not to add names for ornament. It is to make clear that the first community was not a band of men alone. It was men and women, free and slave, young and old, and the women were part of it from the beginning.

Bilal ibn Rabah was an Abyssinian slave in Mecca, owned by an unbeliever — the tradition names his owner as Umayya ibn Khalaf — and he became a believer at a time when the opposition was growing. His story is one of the most powerful in the early memory, because it is the clearest early instance of what the message meant to a man who had the least. Bilal was tortured for his faith — the tradition records that he was put in the heat of the sun, on his back, with a heavy stone on his chest, and that his owner demanded that he renounce Islam, and that Bilal refused, and that his only response, in the face of the torture, was to repeat "One God, one God" — Ahad, ahad. The refusal and the repetition are remembered as the emblem of what the message meant to the unprotected: that there was one God, and that this God did not belong to the Quraysh or to the rich, and that a slave could belong to Him in a way that the Quraysh could not take away.

Bilal's story is one of the most powerful in the early memory, and it is one of the most revealing. The torture of Bilal was the kind of thing that the Meccan elite did to the unprotected. The persecution was concentrated on the slaves and the unprotected, on the people who had no clan to defend them, on the people who had the least. Bilal's refusal, and his repetition of the words "One God," are the emblem of the early community's belief that the message belonged to the vulnerable as much as to the powerful, and that the vulnerable could belong to God in a way that the powerful could not take away. The story is a small one in the grand narrative, but it is one of the clearest examples of the message's appeal to the people at the bottom of Meccan society.

The early believers included others, men and women, who came in smaller numbers and whose names are preserved in the tradition because the tradition remembered that the first community was made of persons, not just of a mass. The early list of believers — the names that Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham record — is a list of individuals, and it is worth reading as that: a set of human beings who each made a decision to stand with Muhammad at a time when that decision had no obvious worldly advantage and real worldly risk.

Among the others who came in the early period were men of standing who had been won over by Muhammad's personal character, men of the lower classes who had been won over by the message's promise of justice, and women who had been won over by the message's promise of equality and dignity. The early community was a mixture of the powerful and the vulnerable, of the young and the old, of the men and the women, and the mixture is the form that the community took at the beginning.

The shape of the early community matters for several reasons. First, it tells us what kind of social base the message had at the start: not the powerful Quraysh, not the men who controlled the sanctuary and the trade, but a mixture of the wife of substance, the young relative, the friend of standing, the slave, the freedman, the Abyssinian, and the others who were on the edges of Meccan society or close enough to Muhammad to see what he was saying and believe it. The movement began, in other words, in the places where a challenge to the established order would meet the least resistance and the most need — among the people who had reason to doubt the Meccan system because they were outside its benefits, or who had enough personal trust in Muhammad to override the social pressure against him.

Second, the early community was small enough that the Meccan opposition could feel it was a real threat and also small enough that the Muslims could be pressured, boycotted, and pursued without the town being openly at war. The early years were a period of tension, of argument, of the slow hardening of the Quraysh against the message, but not yet a period of open violence against the Muslims as a whole. The persecution was concentrated on the vulnerable — on Bilal, on the slaves and the unprotected who had no clan to defend them — and it was the kind of pressure that a tribal society could exert without declaring war. The Muslims who had protection — Muhammad himself, his clan, Abu Bakr — could survive the pressure in ways that Bilal and Zayd and the slaves could not. That asymmetry was real, and it shaped the early story in ways that the later triumphal narrative sometimes flinches from: the first Muslims who suffered most were the ones who had the least.

Third, the early community's composition was prophetic of what would come later. The Muslim community would grow, and it would eventually include the powerful and the tribal leaders and the men of the Quraysh who had opposed Muhammad. But at the beginning it was the young, the poor, the unprotected, and the few who trusted Muhammad. That beginning was not an accident. It was the shape of a movement that had as its first audience the people who were least satisfied with the Meccan system, and it was the shape of a message that, from the beginning, took the vulnerable seriously and the powerful skeptically.

The early community was also the community that Muhammad had to build, and the community that he had to protect. The early years were the years of building, and the years of protecting, and the years of the slow accumulation of the small group that would become the basis of the larger movement. The community was not large enough in the early years to be a political force. It was a small group of believers, a small group of followers, a small group of people who had decided to stand with Muhammad in the face of the opposition. The community was the beginning of the movement, and the beginning was the most vulnerable period of the life of the movement.

There is a distinction worth making about the early period, and it is one that the later tradition sometimes blurs. In the earliest phase, the belief was private — a small circle of people who believed in Muhammad when he had not yet begun to preach publicly to the town. The tradition remembers that Muhammad first preached to a small circle, and that the message became public only later. The distinction between the private and the public phases is real, and it is important, because it explains how a man could begin a movement in a hostile town without immediately becoming the target of the town's full force. Muhammad began by telling a few people, and those few people believed, and the circle grew, and the circle was the beginning of the community. The public preaching came later, and the public preaching was the thing that brought the opposition down on the community in force.

The community at the end of the Meccan period, before the emigration, was a small group of men and women, some free and some not, some with protection and some without, who had believed in Muhammad when his own town was turning against him, and who had paid, some of them, the price of their belief. They were the first Muslims, and they were not a faceless mass. They were persons. The story of the Meccan period is not complete without them, and the story of what they had to risk is not complete without the recollection that the first to die for the faith in Mecca were not the powerful but the powerless.

Part Four takes up the persecution in full: the boycott, the emigration to Abyssinia, the Year of Sorrow, the stoning at Ta'if, and the night journey that ended with the road out to Medina. The first believers introduced here are the people who would go with Muhammad into that story, and some of them would not survive it unchanged.