5 facts about why the first Muslims kept the faith in Mecca

The strongest form of the claim says that prophethood was a route to riches and rank. The sources record a different exchange. Before his call Muhammad was known in Mecca as al-Amin, the trustworthy, and after it he was mocked. The Quran preserves the taunt that a true messenger would have a treasure sent down to him (25:7-8).^[1] Its own instruction to him is to say: “I ask you for no wage for this” (6:90).^[2]

Ibn Ishaq, the earliest biographer, reports that Meccan leaders sent a spokesman, Utba ibn Rabia, to offer him wealth, leadership and kingship if he would stop. The Prophet answered by reciting the opening verses of Surah 41.^[3] Another report says the Quraysh proposed that each side worship the other’s god for a year, and the commentators link Surah 109 to it: “To you your religion, and to me mine” (109:6).^[4] A critic can fairly note that these accounts come from the biographies and the commentaries and not from the hadith collections that scholars grade most strictly. Even so, every early source agrees on the direction of the story: payment was offered to him, and he refused it.

The claim names Khadija, the Prophet’s wife, and her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal as the planners. Both are real figures. Khadija was a wealthy merchant, and Waraqa, a Christian who knew the earlier scriptures, was her cousin.^[5] The question is what the sources show them doing.

In the report preserved by al-Bukhari, Muhammad came down from the cave of Hira trembling and asked to be covered. Khadija comforted him and took him to Waraqa, who said that the angel who came to Moses had come to him, and that his people would drive him out. Waraqa died soon afterwards, and revelation paused for a time.^[6] A man following a script does not return home afraid for his own mind, and an adviser who dies within days has no chance to run a campaign. The Meccan Muslims also held no army, no territory and no treasury, so a plan aimed at Persian and Roman treasure had nothing to work with. Those campaigns lay years away.

The critic says the Meccan community numbered under fifty after ten years. No source gives a head-count for any year, so the exact figure cannot be checked, and it is fair to concede that the community was small and outnumbered. What the sources do show is steady growth. Ibn Ishaq lists the first converts in sequence: Khadija, Ali, Zayd ibn Haritha and Abu Bakr, then through Abu Bakr men such as Uthman, al-Zubayr, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas and Talha, followed by dozens more by name.^[7]

The movement also crossed Mecca’s borders. In the last years before the Hijra (the migration to Medina), the Prophet sent Mus’ab ibn Umayr to teach the people of Yathrib, and at the second pledge of Aqaba about seventy men and two women from there swore to protect him.^[8] No fighting had been permitted at that stage. The Quran told the believers to bear patiently what was said against them (73:10), and the first permission to fight (22:39) came, by the report al-Tabari gives from Ibn Abbas, as the Prophet left Mecca.^[9] The wars of the later period are real history, and the piece 5 reasons why Islam is the religion of peace discusses them. They do not explain how a community formed, held together and won an invitation abroad before any of them began.

Persecution is poor evidence of a profitable fraud, and the Meccan record is full of it. The biographers describe Bilal, an enslaved man, pinned on hot ground under a rock until Abu Bakr bought and freed him, and the killing of Sumayya, whom tradition remembers as the first martyr, together with her husband Yasir’s death and the torture of their son Ammar.^[10] Khabbab ibn al-Aratt came to the Prophet in distress, and the Prophet reminded him that earlier believers had been combed with iron combs.^[11]

The pressure reached the Prophet’s own clan. The Quraysh agreed a written pact against Banu Hashim and Banu Muttalib, forbidding marriage and trade with them, and the clans were shut into the quarter of Abu Talib for “two or three years”, in Ibn Ishaq’s words, until some of the Quraysh themselves moved to end the pact.^[12] After the deaths of Khadija and Abu Talib, who had protected him, he went to Taif looking for support and was driven out and stoned. Aisha asked him whether any day had been harder than Uhud, and he named that one.^[13] Recruits who gained nothing and lost standing, safety and sometimes their lives are hard to explain as clients of a business.

The claim reads the migration to Abyssinia as proof that early Muslims buckled, and counts fifteen believers against thousands of opponents. The sources do not hide the departure. In the fifth year of the call the Prophet advised the believers to leave for the Christian kingdom across the Red Sea, whose king, he said, wronged no one. The first party was small, twelve men and four women in one count, and a larger group followed: Ibn Ishaq gives the total who went as eighty-three men, apart from the children.^[14] The Quran addressed them: “My earth is wide, so worship Me alone” (29:56).

The departure was a flight from pressure, and those who left kept the faith in exile for years, some until after the Hijra. When Quraysh envoys asked the king, the Negus, to send the refugees back, Ja’far ibn Abi Talib answered for them and recited from Surah Maryam, and the king refused the demand.^[15] The fifteen to 4,985 comparison also counts the whole of Mecca as one opposing body, when the reports show clans and individuals split in their response. A faith whose members chose exile over abandoning it has shown the opposite of what the claim says.