Sometimes there were long silences, while other times, the revelations came in quick succession. Muhammad was able to recite each one to his family and close friends, who also memorized them. Each revelation incident became a surah, a chapter in the eventual Quran, but for now just a discrete portion of the message. Each line was called an ayah. The fact that the ayahs rhymed helped with the memorization, but then Mecca’s culture was one of oral tradition. We’ve lost the faculty for vast memorizations, since now we put our efforts into learning to write. They still memorized things frequently and well, so it was easy and obvious for them to do it.
The first believers were Muhammad’s wife and his immediate family: four daughters still at home, and two adopted sons, Ali and Zayd. Very soon, his merchant friend Abu Bakr also embraced the message and began urging his family and friends to believe in it, too. (Note: the name “Abu Bakr” meant that his son was called Bakr, and it was considered very polite to address a man as “father of son” or his wife as “mother of son. History sometimes records this version of someone’s name, called a kunya, instead of their given name.)
And at first, the message was very simple: tawhid, or belief in the oneness of God. This was to be stated in every prayer as, “There is no God but Allah,” which in Arabic creates a tongue-twister of L’s: La ilahah illa-‘llah. Also very early came the now-familiar phrase “God is great,” Allahu akbar, to be included in prayers. An early revelation added the duty to perform ritual washing before prayer and a set form of bowing, sitting, and standing in repeating prayers. The duty to memorize and recite the known surahs went without saying, for how else could the words be preserved?
After Abu Bakr, the next convert was also an important man. Uthman was related to Muhammad through his mother, but was part of the wealthiest Meccan clan by his father’s line. (His grandfather’s name had been Umayyah; eventually, the dynasty of Caliphs descended from Uthman would be named after Umayyah, the Umayyads.) In 611, Uthman was taking his caravan back from Syria when he heard a dream voice telling him to awake, for “Ahmad” had arisen in Mecca. Puzzled, he shared the dream with another Meccan along the way, Talhah who was a cousin of Abu Bakr. This young man knew that Abu Bakr had been talking about Muhammad (similar to “Ahmad”), so they went to Abu Bakr and the Prophet to hear and profess faith.
A growing number of Muhammad’s cousins, and some of their mothers, were also embracing the new belief. Abu Talib, the uncle who had raised him, was affectionate but not accepting, and other uncles remained hostile to the message. Muhammad hosted a banquet for the clan of Banu Hashim. Some hadiths state that at this banquet, the food was multiplied from an originally small portion prepared by Ali. When his uncles gave him no opportunity to speak, he hosted a second banquet the next day, at which he addressed them. “God has commanded me to call you to Him. Which of you will help me, and be my brother and my successor in this?” A long silence was broken only by adopted son Ali, who was 13 or 15 years old. When Ali spoke up, Muhammad said, “this is my brother and my successor.” The uncles laughed, saying now Abu Talib would have to obey his own youngest son.
It’s interesting that both Sunni and Shi’ite scholars accept the story of Ali’s public stand at the banquet. To Shi’ites, this was the public proclamation of Ali’s formal inheritance of the leader’s mantle. As we’ll see in later entries, Muhammad’s companions did not choose Ali as the successor at the time of the Prophet’s death. But they did not try to suppress this story; apparently they just didn’t credit that what the Prophet said that day meant a legally binding will or even a formal proclamation.
A handful of women were early converts, on the heels of Khadijah. Several of Muhammad’s aunts, both blood-relation aunts and the wives of his uncles, converted. This included his uncle Abbas’s wife, Umm Fadl, although Abbas hesitated (Abbas later became the titular head of another Muslim dynasty, the Abbasids). There was a freed Abyssinian slave in the Prophet’s household, a widow known as Umm Ayman, and she became a prominent Muslim who married Zayd, the adopted son. In these early years, the women in Mecca seemed to have a great deal of freedom of belief and choice.
During these early times, they met where they could to recite the memorized surahs together and pray. There was the most space in the masjid, the wide clearing around the Ka’abah, and that’s where Meccans were supposed to pray. But their style of prayer was unique, strange, and therefore disruptive. They had learned the routine of sitting, standing, and prostrating in a uniform manner. They went through the prayer routines in the drill-like way that today’s Muslims still often pray in public. The Meccans were astonished. That’s when the private, family-based movement started to be noticed and mostly not in a welcoming way.