Aḥad, Aḥad
Bilāl was an Abyssinian slave of Umayyah ibn Khalaf of Jumaḥ, and among the earliest to accept Islam. Because he had no clan to protect him, there was nothing to stop what followed. Umayyah would take him out at the hottest part of the day, lay him on his back on the burning sand of Makkah, and have a great rock placed on his chest, telling him he would stay there until he died or renounced Muḥammad ﷺ and worshipped al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā.1
Ibn Isḥāq records what he said in that condition: “Aḥad, aḥad” — One, One. It is the whole of his theology and the whole of his resistance in a single repeated word, and the sīrah preserves it without comment because none is required.1
Abū Bakr passed while this was happening, rebuked Umayyah, and bought him — Umayyah, the sources say, would have sold him for far less than he asked — and freed him. He was one of seven Abū Bakr bought and freed, and the exegetes read Sūrat al-Layl's praise of “he who gives from his wealth to purify himself” as concerning these purchases.2
The Call
In Madīnah, when the Muslims debated how to summon people to prayer — a horn like the Jews, a bell like the Christians, a fire — ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd came with words he had seen in a dream. The Prophet ﷺ judged it a true vision and said, “Go with it to Bilāl and have him call it, for he has a more beautiful voice than you.” And so the words were first said aloud by a freed Abyssinian slave.3
He called the prayer for the rest of the Prophet's ﷺ life. ʿUmar used to say of him, “Abū Bakr is our master, and he freed our master” — a sentence that says a great deal about what the community had become in twenty years.4
On the day Makkah was taken, the Prophet ﷺ entered the sanctuary he had been driven out of, and ordered Bilāl to climb onto the roof of the Kaʿbah and call the prayer over the city. Among the Qurayshī nobles listening below, one remarked that at least his father had not lived to hear this. It was in that setting, the exegetes say, that the verse was recited: “O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous of you.”5
After
The Prophet ﷺ told him once, “Bilāl, tell me the deed you have done with the most hope in it in Islam, for I heard the sound of your sandals ahead of me in Paradise.” Bilāl could think of nothing except that he never performed ablution, by night or day, without praying whatever was written for him to pray.6
After the Prophet's ﷺ death he could not bring himself to give the call again; the sources relate that he broke down partway through and could not finish, and that he left Madīnah for Syria. Long afterwards, at the request of al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, he called it once more in Madīnah, and the report says that the people wept as they had not wept since the day the Prophet ﷺ died.7