One reason that, at first, Muhammad’s message stayed among his clan is that in Mecca, people tended to live in family and clan blocks. It’s a typical way that older cities grew: each patriarch built additions onto the house, and it eventually became a block. In such cities, people who handled small daily chores and shopping typically stayed within their family quarter. You see it also in the old Italian cities like Genoa and Florence. Shakespeare clearly had in mind this type of layout for Romeo and Juliet: crossing into a hostile clan’s block was a bad idea.
A few of Muhammad’s early followers, like Abu Bakr and Uthman, lived in different quarters of Mecca, so the message began to move into those areas. Abu Bakr made his house available for prayers or other meetings, but the wall around his garden was not so high that others couldn’t see in. Most of the Meccans thought the prayers looked silly. They thought it was just a weird little cult, not connected to some important empire, so there was no reason to look into it.
Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib did not yet profess the new belief publicly, but he formally made it known that Muhammad was under his personal protection. The other clan chiefs had to respect this, since they didn’t want civil war, nor did they want the clan-chief-protection racket to die out. Until Abu Talib died, Muhammad was physically safe, apart from mockery and some dirt thrown on him. A few of the men in the city were very hostile to the new message.
One day, Muhammad went up a rocky hill that was embedded in the city. This was one way to be high enough that everyone could see you. He called out to them, “If I warned you of raiders approaching, you would listen! Now I’m warning you of greater danger, and will you listen?” His most important uncle, Abu Lahab, shouted back with ridicule. The next revelation/surah denounced this uncle by name for his harsh rejection; the Prophet may even have recited it from the top of the hill (I’m not sure). Incensed, the uncle dissolved engagements that had been formed with Muhammad’s older daughters. Ostracization within the city had begun.
It’s a long, complicated story: how individual bullying turned to strategic bullying, as the entire tribe of Quraysh got involved. Each time someone went to speak to Muhammad face to face, he typically came away either converted or no longer willing to be an active persecutor. Remember the power of poetry with these Arabs: the growing body of surahs that became the Quran were in rhymed prose, not strictly poetry, but they struck the Meccans’ ears as poetry. When Muhammad began to recite, they would stand there mesmerized, feeling transports of emotion. Imagine if the Beatles’ “English Invasion” had been a religious one, carried forward by infectious pop beats. The power of poetry was so great in Mecca that it seems to have worked much that way. Some men were converted as soon as they heard a few lines of one surah. But there were always plenty of families who had not heard the poetry, who were still very hostile, and who did things like throwing dung or dirt.
During this time, many of the revelations were tied to events that had just happened, as persecution and attempts at persuasion both grew more intense. For example, one day Muhammad was trying to persuade a clan leader, when a poor convert came and interrupted him. He wanted to hear a recitation, but the Prophet was annoyed, since the flow of speech had stopped and the clan leader got up and left. This annoyance is embedded in a revelation, noting that “he frowned and turned away.” The message rebuked him for not valuing the poor convert enough. It’s certainly possible to read the verses without knowing why he “frowned,” but it probably makes more sense if you do. (Note: Shi’ites do not believe that Muhammad frowned at this man, since that was an ungenerous response that was uncharacteristic of him.) Many of the surahs from this time talk about the persecution, alluding to specific events.
The literate ones among his followers had realized the importance of writing down the surahs on whatever was at hand. Perhaps in a rich man’s house, they were written on fresh parchment, while among the poorer families, they were jotted down on old accounts or even palm fronds (we still have some old Arabic script on palm branches; you can fit about three lines of script going down the stem’s length). Probably they knew which surahs were older, since those were familiar, but they made no concerted effort to keep the records in time order. As tribes from other towns started catching the new belief, some copies of surahs traveled back with them, out of order, of course. Eventually, when the surahs were all collected after the Prophet’s death, they were put into an order that isn’t always chronological. For example, that second revelation that opened with the puzzling letter “N” is Surah 68! One of the types of Islamic study with hadiths is an attempt to connect events with surahs. The biographies I’m working with typically cite surahs that seem related to events as they tell the events.
Persecution grew. The city did not want to lose its lucrative business model, in which the remaining pagans in Arabia all flooded in during the pilgrimage weeks. As in the New Testament apostles’ adventures at Ephesus, the reaction of the craftsmen to this monotheistic threat was violent. They tried various ways to drive Muhammad out of the city. We must remember, too, that Muhammad was constantly talking about what we today would call “social justice.” Give to the poor; share your wealth; limit your lifestyle. His friend Abu Bakr spent quite a bit of his wealth on supporting the converted poor. All of this was entirely unwelcome to the lifestyle influencers of the city.
Even during this period, some of the persecutors were converted to belief. A young man named Umar was furious when he heard that his sister’s family had converted. He wanted to kill the Prophet, but then he went to his brother-in-law, to attack him instead. He ended up hitting his sister badly enough that she bled, which froze him in his tracks. She showed him a Quranic passage, and he was immediately impressed by the eloquence. He continued his walk to the Prophet’s house, but this time, he wanted to profess faith. Then he publicly told the chief persecutor, his uncle, that he was now one of them.