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When the City Turned — Mockery, Bribes, and a Quran They Couldn't Answer
Once the message went public, Makkah fought back — but not, at first, with fists. They tried to drown out the Quran, mock him as a madman and a magician, and buy him off with wealth, power, and women. The strange part? Their own greatest minds admitted, privately, that they had no answer for what he was reciting.
The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 7
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 13.
In Chapter 6, the message went public — and the leaders of Makkah pressured his uncle Abu Talib to shut it down. That failed.
So they opened a wider campaign. Not violence yet — that comes in the next chapter. First they tried everything else: silence the Quran, mock the man, and, when neither worked, simply buy him.
What makes this chapter fascinating is how much it reveals about the Quraysh's own hearts. Because again and again, when their smartest people actually listened to what he was reciting, they couldn't explain it away — and it terrified them.
Silencing the sound
Their first move was to make sure no one could actually hear the Quran.
Whenever the Prophet (SAW) recited near the Kaaba, the Quraysh would erupt — shouting, whistling, jeering — to drown out the words. Anyone curious had to strain to catch a verse over the noise. The point was simple: don't let this thing spread by being heard.
So the believers, gathered secretly in the house of a young convert named al-Arqam — the hidden base that became their meeting place — asked a bold question: who will go and recite the Quran out loud, in public, in front of everyone?
The room went silent. It was that dangerous.
The man with no clan who did it anyway
One person stood up: Ibn Mas'ud (RA), a young man who knew the Quran better than almost anyone — he later said he learned more than seventy chapters directly from the Prophet's own mouth.
The others hesitated. Ibn Mas'ud (RA) was poor, a foreigner, with no powerful tribe behind him. Pick someone with family to protect him, they said — because in Makkah, your clan was your only shield. He had none.
He insisted. God will protect me.
The next morning he stood at the Maqam of Ibrahim, right by the Kaaba, and began to recite Surah ar-Rahman in a clear, beautiful voice. The Quraysh had never heard anything like it. People drifted over, drawn in — until someone realized what it was. This is what Muhammad claims was revealed to him!
They fell on him and beat him. He kept reciting until he physically couldn't, and staggered back bloodied, unable to finish even two pages. His friends said, this is exactly what we feared. His answer tells you what kind of people the first Muslims were:
By God, he said, I have never despised them more than I do today — and I'll go do it again tomorrow if you want.
The enemies who sneaked out to listen
Here's where it gets revealing.
The Prophet (SAW) prayed at night in his home, reciting the Quran aloud in the dead silence of the small, sleeping town. And three of the most powerful men in Makkah — Abu Sufyan, Abu Jahl, and al-Akhnas — each secretly crept out in the dark to stand outside his house and listen.
They didn't plan it together. They just kept bumping into each other in the alleyways at dawn, each caught doing the same guilty thing. Three nights running. Finally, embarrassed, they swore a pact never to come back — if the people see us doing this, we're finished.
Think about that. The men leading the war against the message couldn't stop themselves from sneaking out to hear it.
Why they really said no
The morning after, al-Akhnas went to Abu Jahl and asked him, man to man: what did you honestly make of what we heard?
And Abu Jahl gave an answer so honest it should stop you cold. He didn't say the Quran was false. He said this:
The clan of Abd Manaf and our clan have competed for generations — for the honor of feeding the pilgrims, for bravery, for leadership. We were neck and neck, like two racehorses at the finish line. And now they say one of them is a prophet who receives revelation from the sky. How can we ever compete with that? By God, we will never believe in him.
Read it again. His reason for rejecting the message was not it isn't true. It was I can't bear for their family to win. Pure pride.
This is one of the quiet, devastating lessons of the seerah. Many people who reject the truth don't actually doubt it. They just have too much invested in themselves to accept it.
Madman? Magician? Poet?
Unable to answer the Quran, the Quraysh turned to smearing the man. They tried out labels — and none of them fit, which is why they kept switching.
He's a madman — but they'd known him for forty years as the sanest, most trustworthy man among them. He's a fortune-teller — but he sounded nothing like one. He's a poet — but he had never written a line of poetry in his life, and the Quran was plainly not poetry.
The Quran itself pushed back at the whole flailing effort — reminding them that he had lived a full lifetime among them without ever being any of these things.
The critic who knew the truth
The most telling episode is about al-Walid ibn al-Mughira — the single greatest master of the Arabic language in Makkah, the "Shakespeare" of his people, chief of a leading clan (and the father of the future general Khalid ibn al-Walid).
If anyone could expose the Quran as mere clever wordcraft, it was him. So he listened to it, carefully, all the way through. And afterward he said something that raced through the city:
"By God, I have just heard from Muhammad speech that is not the speech of men, nor the speech of jinn. It has a sweetness to it; it has a beauty. Its highest part is fruitful and its lowest part flows. It rises above everything, and nothing rises above it."
That's the verdict of the era's foremost expert: I have no category for this.
Abu Jahl panicked and rushed to him: your people won't rest until you say something against it. Al-Walid, a politician to his core, folded. He asked for a few days, paced his house searching for an accusation he didn't believe — and finally settled on the weakest possible one: call it magic.
Not because it was true. Because it was the only label left. A man who knew, better than anyone alive, that this was no ordinary speech — chose to call it a trick, to keep his standing.
The great bribe
When mockery failed, the Quraysh tried the oldest tactic of all: money.
They sent one of their wisest elders, Utbah ibn Rabi'ah, to negotiate directly. Utbah laid out an extraordinary offer. If you want wealth, we'll make you the richest man among us. If you want power, we'll make you our king. If you want women, choose any woman you like. If you're unwell, we'll bring you the finest doctors. Just stop dividing us.
The Prophet (SAW) let him finish every word without interrupting — then asked, gently, are you done, Abu al-Walid? And instead of a counter-offer, he simply began to recite. He chose Surah Fussilat, and Utbah sat back to listen, until the recitation reached this line:
Quran“But if they turn away, then say, 'I have warned you of a thunderbolt like the thunderbolt that struck Aad and Thamud.'”
Utbah went pale. He reached out and put his hand over the Prophet's mouth, begging him — by God, by the ties of kinship between us — to stop.
He went back to the Quraysh shaken, and told them the truth: Leave this man alone. The words I heard from him will be great news. If the other Arabs deal with him, you'll be rid of him by someone else's hand. But if he wins — his kingdom is your kingdom, his glory is your glory, and you will be the happiest of people through him.
Their response? He's bewitched you, Utbah. And they ignored the one wise man among them.
The line that could not be crossed
At one point the Quraysh proposed a "compromise": we'll worship your God one day, and you worship ours the next. A tidy political deal — take turns, and keep the peace.
But the whole message rested on there being one God, worshipped alone. There was nothing to split the difference on. And so came one of the shortest, most uncompromising chapters of the Quran:
Quran“Say, 'O disbelievers, I do not worship what you worship, nor are you worshippers of what I worship... For you is your religion, and for me is my religion.'”
You have your way. I have mine. No deal.
They had tried to silence him, mock him, and buy him. Every attempt had failed — and worse, every attempt had exposed that they knew, deep down, they had no real answer.
So they reached for the last tool left to people who cannot win an argument: cruelty. And it fell hardest, as it always does, on those least able to defend themselves.
Up next: The Persecution — when words and money failed, Makkah turned to torture. The story of Bilal under the desert sun, the first person to die for this faith, and a desperate escape across the sea.
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