The Quiet Beginning — Three Secret Years and the Day He Went Public

The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 6

The life that changed the world — written for non-Muslims, beginners, and the curious.

Adapted from Dr. Yasir Qadhi's seerah lecture series. This chapter draws on episode 12.

Chapter 5 ended with a command: "Arise and warn." A man in his forties, who had spent his life avoiding the spotlight, had just been told to go warn his people.

So how do you start a religion in a city that worships three hundred and sixty idols, when you are one man?

The answer, for the first three years, was: very quietly.

Private, not secret

You will often read that Muhammad (SAW) began with a "secret" mission. That's not quite the right word.

Secret means nobody knew. Private means he simply kept it low-key — he didn't stand in the town square announcing it. And that's what this was: a private invitation, not a hidden one.

He didn't call it out in public. He went to the people he already knew and trusted, one by one, and told them what had happened to him. Word got around — people in Makkah had heard there was a man preaching something new — but because he wasn't confronting anyone publicly, there was nothing for anyone to publicly fight.

And here is the quiet genius of it: for three years, there was no persecution. No mockery, no violence. The message wasn't threatening anyone's public life yet, so the city left it alone.

That breathing room mattered. It let the first Muslims actually learn their faith — how to pray, what they believed, who they now were — before the storm came. It was, you could say, basic training before the battle.

The first to believe

Think about who says yes to a message like this when it costs everything and offers nothing worldly in return.

The very first believers were four people incredibly close to him. His wife Khadijah (RA) — "(RA)" is short for radiy Allahu anha, "may Allah be pleased with her," an honorific Muslims say after a companion's name. His best friend Abu Bakr (RA). His young cousin Ali (RA), still just a boy living in his household. And Zayd ibn Harithah (RA), a freed slave he had loved like a son (you met Zayd back in Chapter 4).

A wife, a best friend, a child, and a freed slave. That's where the largest religion-changing movement in history began — around one dinner table.

After that, the message spread mostly among the poor and the powerless of Makkah. That's not a coincidence.

Years later, a Roman emperor named Heraclius reportedly asked a Makkan trader a sharp question about this new prophet: are his followers the powerful, or the weak? Told it was the weak, the emperor said that this is exactly how a true message begins — because the rich have too much to lose, while the poor can hear the truth without their status getting in the way.

One verse changes the plan

Three years in, a verse of the Quran arrived that ended the quiet phase. It was short and it was a direct order:

Quran

“And warn your closest kinsmen.”

— Surah Ash-Shu'ara 26:214

Start with your own family. Before the whole world, before the whole city — your own relatives first.

So he did something that must have felt enormously awkward. He invited about forty of his male relatives — his uncles, his cousins, the leading men of his clan — to a meal at his home, planning to tell them everything.

It didn't go smoothly. Twice he tried. The first time, one of his uncles — a hostile man named Abu Lahab — sensed what was coming and broke up the gathering before he could speak. So he invited them all back a second time.

This time he stood up and said it plainly: I have brought you the best of this world and the next. I am a messenger of Allah to you. No Arab, he told them, had ever brought his people something better.

The room mostly went quiet — polite, unconvinced, unwilling to take it seriously. Except for one voice. The youngest person there, the boy Ali (RA), stood up and said he would help him.

The child believed. Most of the grown men didn't. That pattern — of who steps forward and who steps back — would repeat for the rest of the story.

The day he climbed the hill

Then came the moment he went fully public — not just to his family, but to all of Makkah at once.

There's a hill right beside the Kaaba called Safa. In that era it was tall, and everyone in the small city knew its unwritten rule: you did not climb to the top of Safa and start shouting unless you had a genuine emergency to announce. It was the town's alarm bell.

So one morning, Muhammad (SAW) climbed Safa and called out. And the whole city — maybe a thousand people — stopped what they were doing and came, because that call meant something is happening.

What he said next is preserved in the most rigorously verified collection of his life, Sahih al-Bukhari, narrated by his cousin Ibn Abbas (RA):

Hadith

“'Do you see? If I informed you that cavalry were advancing up the side of this mountain, would you believe me?' They said, 'We have never heard you telling a lie.' Then he said, 'I am a plain warner to you of a coming severe punishment.'”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 4765

Look at how he did it. He didn't start with the message. He started with a question about his own honesty.

If I told you an army was about to attack from the other side of this hill — where you can't see, but I can — would you take my word for it and run? And they answered without hesitation: we have never once caught you in a lie. He was, after all, the man they had nicknamed al-Amin, "the Trustworthy" (Chapter 3).

Then trust me on this too, he was saying. There is a danger coming you cannot see. Save yourselves.

Dirt in his face

The reaction was instant, and it was ugly.

His uncle Abu Lahab — the same one who had sabotaged the family dinner — stood up in front of everyone, grabbed a fistful of dirt, and threw it. "May you perish!" he spat. "Is this why you gathered us here?"

Throwing dirt at someone was a gesture of pure contempt — you're not worth the sand in my hand. This was his own nephew, in public, humiliating him in front of the entire city.

It was the first open act of hostility against the message. And it got an answer that outlasted Abu Lahab by fourteen centuries: a whole short chapter of the Quran came down about him, which Muslims still recite today.

Quran

“Perish the hands of Abu Lahab, and perish he. His wealth will not avail him, nor what he earned. He will burn in a Fire of blazing flame.”

— Surah Al-Masad 111:1–3

Of all the enemies the Prophet (SAW) would face over twenty-three years, only one is cursed by name in the Quran — and it was his own uncle. The message had gone public. So had the opposition.

The uncle who protected him without believing

There's one more relationship at the heart of this chapter, and it's a complicated, moving one.

Another uncle, Abu Talib, was the head of their clan — and the man who had raised Muhammad (SAW) as his own son after the Prophet was orphaned. Abu Talib never accepted the new faith. But he made a decision that kept his nephew alive: he would protect him, no matter the cost.

In the tribal system of Arabia, you could not harm a member of another clan unless that clan's chief allowed it. As long as Abu Talib stood over his nephew, the leaders of Makkah were stuck. So they came to Abu Talib — first with pressure, then with threats.

The seerah records the moment they pushed him hardest. Worn down, Abu Talib went to his nephew and gently begged him to ease up — have mercy on me, I'm an old man, don't put more on me than I can carry. And Muhammad's (SAW) answer has echoed ever since:

"By Allah, my uncle, if they placed the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left to make me abandon this, I would not — until Allah makes it prevail, or I die trying."

Then, the reports say, he broke down in tears and turned to leave. And something in that broke through to the old man. Abu Talib called him back. Go, say what you want. I will never hand you over.

He kept that promise for the rest of his life.

Why the beloved uncle never believed

Here is the part that puzzles people, and it's worth sitting with.

The Makkans even offered Abu Talib a grotesque trade: hand over your nephew to be killed, and we'll give you a strong, handsome young man of the tribe to raise in his place — a son for a son. Abu Talib called it what it was — you want me to hand you my child to kill, while I raise yours? — and refused.

He shielded his nephew through boycott, hardship, and years of hostility. He clearly loved him more than anyone. And yet, even on his deathbed, when the Prophet (SAW) begged him to say the words that would mark him as a believer, Abu Talib couldn't let go of one thing: the pride of his ancestors' religion. He died as he had lived — protecting the Prophet, but not following him.

Muslims see a hard wisdom in that. The one man positioned to physically protect Muhammad (SAW) had to remain outside the faith — because the moment he converted, he'd have lost the tribal standing that made his protection possible. It's a painful reminder the Quran states plainly elsewhere: not even a prophet can force the heart of the person he loves most to believe.

Abu Lahab and Abu Talib were brothers. One cursed him and is cursed in scripture forever. The other never believed, but gave everything to shield him. Same blood, opposite roads — a theme this story returns to again and again: in the end, lineage saves no one. Only what you do.

The private years were over. The city now knew exactly who he was and what he was claiming. And the people who had merely mocked him were about to turn to something far worse.

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Up next: When the City Turned — the Quraysh's campaign to crush the message: the ridicule, the bargaining, the pressure, and the day they decided that trusted "al-Amin" had become their enemy.