From Abyssinia to the Boycott

As open persecution, intimidation, and torture continued, the Prophet ﷺ told the sahaba that Makkah had become too constricted for them, and suggested those who wished emigrate to the neighboring Christian land of Abyssinia, ruled by a just king (the Najashi, As'hama ibn Abjar) who would allow them to worship without interference. Fifteen people emigrated, 11 men and 4 women, traveling roughly a day and a half to Juddah and then by ship to Abyssinia. Among them were Uthman ibn Affan and his wife Ruqayyah, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Uthman ibn Maz'un, Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, Mus'ab ibn Umayr, Abu Salama and his wife Umm Salama, and Amir ibn Rabi'ah and his wife Layla. Only the higher-status Qureshi Muslims, who had the political means to leave, emigrated; enslaved converts such as Bilal, Khabbab, Ibn Mas'ud, and Ammar could not.

Placed here because: Ep. 16: "They emigrated in Rajab" of the 5th year of the dawah.

In Ramadan of the 5th year of the dawah, the Prophet ﷺ recited Surah al-Najm in full before a mixed gathering of Muslims and the Quraysh in Makkah. Surah al-Najm builds toward a powerful conclusion, and its momentum affected the entire congregation; when the Prophet ﷺ reached the final verse, "So prostrate to Allah and worship [Him]" [53:62], the Muslims fell into sajdah, and the Quraysh were so moved that they fell into sajdah with them; Muslim and non-Muslim united behind the Prophet ﷺ for the first time. The only one who did not join was al-Walid ibn al-Mughira (in another narration, Umayyah ibn Khalaf), who instead took a handful of sand, put it to his head, and said it was sufficient for him. This account is narrated in Sahih al-Bukhari from Ibn Abbas RA and is the version scholars broadly accept as authentic. Later, weaker reports (found only in tertiary works such as al-Tabari's Tafsir and al-Wahidi's Asbab al-Nuzul, never in the six books of hadith or in the biographies of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham) add that shaytan interjected two verses praising the idols al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat ("these are the exalted cranes, whose intercession is to be hoped for") between verses 20 and 21 of the surah. In one such report, the interjection was heard only by the Quraysh, not the Muslims; in a further, more extreme report, the Prophet ﷺ himself is said to have mistaken shaytan's recitation for that of Jibril AS and recited the words himself, before Jibril AS returned and told him the words were not his. Western orientalists (e.g. Sir William Muir) later coined the term "satanic verses" for this story; Islamic sources call it Qissat al-Gharaniq (the Story of the Cranes/Gharaniq).

Placed here because: Ep. 16: "in the month of Ramadan ... in the 5th year of the dawah, the Prophet ﷺ recited Surah al-Najm in its entirety."

Word reached the roughly fifteen Muslims who had emigrated to Abyssinia in Rajab that the Quraysh had accepted Islam, an exaggeration of the news that the Quraysh had joined the Muslims in prostration at the recitation of Surah al-Najm in Makkah. Although the emigrants had not faced persecution in Abyssinia, adjusting to an unfamiliar land, language, and culture had been difficult, and they were eager to return. Yearning for home, they packed their belongings and set out for Makkah without waiting to confirm the rumor.

Placed here because: Ep. 16: "they came back in the month of Shawwal. They emigrated in Rajab but came back just 3 months later."

After the failed rumor-driven return, and as persecution continued unabated, news of the safety and hospitality of Abyssinia spread among the Muslims. More than 80 Muslims (a huge proportion of Makkah's population) emigrated a second time, headed by Ja'far ibn Abi Talib RA, a direct cousin of the Prophet ﷺ. Uthman ibn Affan RA chose to remain in Makkah (later emigrating to Madinah instead), and Mus'ab ibn Umayr RA, who had gone the first time, also did not return to Abyssinia.

Placed here because: Shortly after the first emigrants returned to a Makkah as hostile as they had left it.

Makkah held no more than a few hundred people, and the second emigration had taken more than eighty of them to Abyssinia: a tenth of the city, and a humiliation for the guardians of the Haram that their own people were fleeing them. The Quraysh sent two men to bring them back, Amr ibn al-As and a companion the sources name differently, Abdullah ibn Abi Rabi'ah or Umara ibn al-Walid, loaded with gifts of fine leather. Umm Salama, who was there, tells the story. The Muslims had been received with every kindness by the Najashi, As'hama ibn Abjar, and never heard a hard word from his people. The two envoys went first to every one of his ministers with a gift and a request: there was a band of renegade youths in the country whom their elders wanted back, and when the king was asked, the ministers should remember who had given them presents. Next day they put it to the king himself, with his gifts before him: some foolish young men had abandoned the religion of their fathers without adopting his, and the leaders of their people asked that they be handed over. The ministers rose as one and said the Quraysh spoke sense. The Najashi said no: by God, he would not surrender people who had chosen his land and his protection over every other until he had heard them. He sent for the Muslims. They were afraid, and Ja'far ibn Abi Talib told them they would say only the truth, and only what the Prophet ﷺ had taught them. In the hall, before the king and his bishops, the Quraysh envoys prostrated; Ja'far walked in upright, and when a minister demanded to know why, said that the Muslims prostrated to no one but their Lord. Asked what this religion was that was neither the Christianity of the king nor the faith of their fathers, Ja'far gave the speech the Seerah has kept: they had been a people of ignorance, worshipping idols, eating carrion, committing obscenity, cutting the ties of kinship, the strong devouring the weak, until Allah sent them a Messenger ﷺ from among themselves whose lineage and truthfulness they knew, who called them to one God, to honesty, to kinship and good neighbourliness, to prayer, fasting and charity, and away from blood and orphans' wealth and slander; they had believed him, and for that their people had tortured them and tried to force them back, and so they had come to the king's land and chosen him over every other ruler, trusting they would not be wronged there. Had they anything of what this Prophet ﷺ said had been revealed to him? Ja'far recited the opening of Surah Maryam, the story of the virgin and her son, in the hall of the palace, and the bishops wept without understanding the words, and when it was translated the Najashi wept too and swore that this and what Moses and Jesus brought had sprung from one lamp. He told the envoys to go: he would never hand these people over. Amr told his companion on the way out that he had one trick left, and was told to leave it, they were kin after all; but Amr came back next morning and told the king that these people said something monstrous about Jesus. The Muslims were summoned again and were terrified, and again Ja'far said they would say what the Prophet ﷺ had said and nothing else: that Jesus was the servant of Allah and His Messenger and His Word, cast to the virgin Maryam. He did not attack the Trinity; he stated the truth and let it stand. The Najashi picked up a twig from the floor and said that what they had said did not differ from what Jesus had said by that much. It emerged in later years that the king himself did not hold the doctrine his priests held, and Ja'far's words matched what he quietly believed. He sent the envoys away a second time and this time gave them back their gifts. Umm Salama said the two of them left humbled and disgraced, and the Muslims stayed in the best of neighbourhoods until they came home to the Prophet ﷺ at Khaybar. The king's own people muttered that he had turned heretic, and he answered them with a parchment hidden in his robe.

Placed here because: Shortly after the second emigration, when the Quraysh sent Amr ibn al-As to bring the Muslims back.

Abu Jahal cursed the Prophet ﷺ and his ancestors at length in public. When Hamzah, the Prophet ﷺ's uncle and a leading archer of Makkah, returned from an expedition, the women of Banu Hashim taunted him for not defending his nephew's honor. Enraged on learning it had happened publicly, Hamzah struck Abu Jahal across the face with his bow at the Ka'bah and declared himself a follower of the Prophet ﷺ's religion, though he had not planned to say so. After a night of anguished du'a, he went to the Prophet ﷺ the next morning, was convinced by him, and testified to the truth.

Placed here because: Sixth year of the dawah; Ep. 18 tells it immediately before Umar's conversion, "three days" earlier.

Three days after Hamzah became a Muslim, most likely in Dhu al-Hijjah of the sixth year of the dawah, the Muslims of Makkah were given a second man the Quraysh had thought beyond reach. Umar ibn al-Khattab was, with Abu Jahl, the strongest man of his generation in body and in lineage, and one of the two fiercest enemies the new faith had. When Layla was loading her camel for the second emigration to Abyssinia and told him that his cruelty was driving them from their homes to worship Allah, he had softened for a moment and wished her blessing wherever she went; her husband Amir ibn Rabi'ah, hearing of it, said that his father's donkey would accept Islam before Umar did. What neither of them knew was that the Prophet ﷺ had asked Allah to strengthen Islam through whichever of the two men, Abu Jahl or Umar, was dearer to Him. His son Abdullah later said it was Umar who was the dearer. More than one story is told of how it happened, and they are best read as strands of one rope. One night Umar went looking for drink and found none of his companions at home, nor even the wine-seller, and went to the Ka'bah to walk off the craving. He found the Prophet ﷺ alone in the dark, praying, and crept up behind him meaning to beat him, and instead, for the first time, listened. The surah was al-Haqqah. As he told himself this was a poet's verse, the recitation answered that it was not the word of a poet; as he thought it the word of a soothsayer, it answered that too; as he wondered whether the man had invented it, the verses said that had he invented any of it, Allah would have seized him by the right hand and cut his aorta. He stood until the surah was finished and went home. Islam, he said afterwards, entered his heart that night, though he did not yet accept it. Then one day Abu Jahl, holding forth among the Quraysh about the man who had insulted their gods and their fathers, offered a hundred red and black camels and a hundred measures of silver to whoever would rid them of him. Umar went home, took his sword and set out. On the road he met Nu'aym ibn Abdillah al-Nahham, a secret Muslim, who asked where he was going and was told: to kill Muhammad ﷺ. Nu'aym, frightened, asked whether he thought the Banu Abd Manaf would let him walk the earth after killing one of their own, and told him, to turn him aside, that he had better put his own house in order first: his sister Fatima and her husband Sa'id ibn Zayd had accepted Islam. It did not calm him. He went to their house and heard, through the door, the recitation of the Qur'an: Khabbab ibn al-Aratt, whom the Prophet ﷺ had assigned as their teacher, was inside with them. Khabbab hid, Fatima sat on the page, and Umar pounded on the door demanding to know what the murmuring had been. They denied it; he struck at Sa'id and the blow landed on his sister; and she and her husband, bleeding and past fear, told him that yes, they were Muslims, and he could do as he pleased. The sight of that steadiness turned him, as Layla's words had. He asked to see what they had been reading, and Fatima, after he swore not to harm it, told him a mushrik might not touch it until he had washed. He did ghusl, read from Surah Taha, and asked to be taken to the Prophet ﷺ. Sa'id led him, sword still in hand, to the house of al-Arqam, where the Muslims met in secret. Someone inside cried that Umar was at the door with a sword, and Hamzah said to let him in: if Allah meant good by him he would accept Islam, and if not, his own sword would be the end of him. The Prophet ﷺ took hold of his collar and asked what had brought him, and whether he would go on until Allah sent down a punishment on him. Umar said he had come to believe in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ. The takbir the Prophet ﷺ raised was heard by everyone in the house. That day the Muslims, some forty of them, walked to the Ka'bah in two ranks, Umar at the head of one and Hamzah of the other, and prayed there in public for the first time; no one dared touch them. The Prophet ﷺ named him al-Faruq, the one who divides truth from falsehood, and it is from that day, Ibn Mas'ud said at his deathbed, that the Muslims had never ceased to be in honour. Umar was not a man to hide what he had done. He went to Abu Jahl's door to tell him in person that he now believed in Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and had the door slammed in his face with a curse. Then he asked who the worst gossip in Makkah was, was pointed to Jamil ibn Ma'mar al-Jumahi, and confided in him that he had become a Muslim; Jamil ran into the streets barely dressed, shouting that Ibn al-Khattab had become a Sabian, with Umar behind him correcting the word: aslamtu, I have accepted Islam. He was fought by the crowd at the Ka'bah until al-As ibn Wa'il gave him protection. Of him the Prophet ﷺ later said that if there was anyone in his community who was spoken to from the heavens without being a prophet, it was Umar; and under him, as caliph, the faith that had been forty people walking to the Ka'bah spread over most of the known world.

Placed here because: Ep. 18: "just three days after the conversion of Hamzah ... It most likely occurred in Dhu al-Hijjah in the 6th year of the dawah."

In the 7th year of the dawah, the Qurayshi tribes agreed to kill the Prophet ﷺ but could not overcome Banu Hashim's protection. They offered Abu Talib blood money and pressure to hand the Prophet ﷺ over, threatening to cut off all trade, marriage, and social relations with Banu Hashim & Banu al-Muttalib if he refused. Abu Talib refused, and the two cousin tribes withdrew to the Valley of Abu Talib outside Makkah, enduring severe hardship, eating leaves and shrubbery, for about 2-3 years, sustained in secret by sympathizers such as Mut'im ibn Adi and Hakim ibn Hizam. The Quraysh wrote and hung a boycott treaty inside the Ka'bah. The Prophet ﷺ continued to give dawah during the hajj seasons throughout. The boycott ended after the Prophet ﷺ made du'a for a famine on the Quraysh, a group of sympathetic Quraysh led by Hisham ibn Amr and Zuhayr ibn Abi Umayya publicly turned opinion against Abu Jahal at a gathering, and finally the Prophet ﷺ informed Abu Talib that the treaty's text had been eaten away by termites except for the phrase "In the name of Allah", which proved true when the Quraysh opened it, nullifying the pact.

Placed here because: Ep. 18: "With these two conversions, both Hamzah RA and Umar RA, the Quraysh really felt threatened ... It's said that in the 7th year of the dawah, all the Qureshi tribes came together."