The Cry from Ṣafā
Commanded to warn his kin, the Prophet ﷺ climbed the hill of Ṣafā at the edge of the sanctuary and called out, “Yā ṣabāḥāh!” — the ancient alarm by which Arabs warned of a raid at dawn. Clan by clan, Quraysh assembled. He asked them: “If I told you that horsemen were in the valley behind this hill, about to attack you, would you believe me?” They said: “Yes — we have never known you to lie.” He said: “Then I am a warner to you before a terrible punishment.”1
It was his uncle Abū Lahab who broke the silence: “May you perish — tabban laka! Is this what you gathered us for?” And concerning him came down the sūrah that Makkah's children would soon know by heart: “Perish the two hands of Abū Lahab, and perish he; his wealth avails him not, nor what he has earned.”12 The lines of the next decade were drawn in that hour: the man they had called al-Amīn had staked his entire credit on an unseen world, and his own kin had answered with a curse.
What Quraysh Could Not Forgive
The message struck at everything Makkah lived by. It declared the idols — the city's prestige and pilgrim revenue — to be nothing; it promised a resurrection and a reckoning that made the slave's soul weigh equal to the chieftain's; and it subordinated the ways of the fathers, the deepest Arab loyalty, to the command of God. The chiefs went to Abū Ṭālib demanding he silence or surrender his nephew. The old man deflected them gently; when at last they pressed him with threats of open enmity, he sent for his nephew and asked him to spare them both. The Prophet's ﷺ answer has come down through Ibn Isḥāq: “O my uncle, by God, if they placed the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left to abandon this matter, I would not abandon it until God makes it prevail or I perish in its cause.” Abū Ṭālib replied: “Go and say what you will; by God, I will never give you up.”13
Then they tried purchase. ʿUtbah ibn Rabīʿah came offering wealth, kingship, physicians — whatever it might take. The Prophet ﷺ answered by reciting from Sūrat Fuṣṣilat until ʿUtbah returned to his fellows with an altered face, counselling them: “Leave the man alone; by God, the speech I heard is neither poetry, nor sorcery, nor soothsaying.”14 They demanded miracles instead — springs, gardens, an ascent into heaven with a book they could read — and the Qur'an answered: “Say: Glory be to my Lord! Am I anything but a mortal messenger?”5
The War of Words
Denied his silence and unable to buy him, Quraysh waged a campaign of ridicule — poet, soothsayer, madman, sorcerer, bewitched — each label tried and each answered in the revelation itself. Al-Walīd ibn al-Mughīrah, their shrewdest elder, conceded in private council that the Qur'an resembled no known genre, and settled at last on “sorcery passed down” as the story to tell the pilgrims; the Qur'an fixed the deliberation, and the man, in seventeen scalding verses.61 Meanwhile the believers grew — and Quraysh, running out of words, reached for other instruments.