The Persecution — Torture, the First Martyr, and an Escape Across the Sea

The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 8

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 episodes 14 and 15.

In Chapter 7, the leaders of Makkah tried everything short of violence to stop the message — ridicule, bribery, pressure on his protectors. None of it worked.

So they crossed a line. They turned to torture.

But here's the ugly, telling detail: they mostly didn't dare touch the ones who had powerful families. They went after the people no one would protect — the slaves, the poor, the foreigners. This chapter is about them, and about how a handful of the persecuted made one of the boldest decisions in the whole story.

A note before we begin. Some of what follows is hard to read. It is the price the first Muslims paid, and they are honored for it — so we tell it plainly rather than skipping past it.

The ones with no one to protect them

In the tribal system of Arabia, your safety came from your clan. Harm someone and their relatives came after you. So the powerful were shielded — and the powerless were exposed.

That's who the persecution fell on hardest.

Bilal (RA) was an Abyssinian slave owned by one of the cruelest of the Makkan chiefs. When his master learned he'd become a Muslim, he dragged Bilal out into the desert at the hottest hour, laid him on the burning sand, and had a massive boulder heaved onto his chest — telling him he'd stay there until he died or renounced his faith.

Bilal (RA) would not renounce it. Crushed under the rock, he answered with a single word, again and again: "Ahad… Ahad" — One… One. Meaning: God is One. That was his entire reply to the torture.

He was eventually saved by Abu Bakr (RA), the Prophet's best friend, who bought Bilal and set him free. Freeing tortured believers became something of a mission for Abu Bakr — he spent much of his wealth on it.

The first to die

Not everyone survived.

An elderly woman named Sumayyah (RA) — one of the very first people to accept Islam — was tortured along with her husband Yasir and their son Ammar, a poor family with no clan to shield them. She refused to give up her faith.

For that, the seerah records, one of Makkah's chief persecutors killed her. She became the first person ever to die for Islam — the first martyr, before there was even a Muslim community to mourn her properly.

Sit with that. The faith's first martyr was not a warrior or a chief. It was an old, powerless woman, whose only crime was refusing to say that God was not One.

Her son Ammar (RA) was tortured so badly that, at his breaking point, he said with his tongue what the torturers demanded — while his heart never wavered. He came to the Prophet (SAW) in anguish, terrified he'd lost his faith. He was gently reassured: if they do it again, say it again. God judges the heart, not words forced out under torture. Islam does not demand that you die needlessly; it is, at its core, a merciful and realistic religion.

"How long must we bear this?"

The suffering wore the believers down. One of them, a young man named Khabbab (RA) who was branded with hot iron by his owner, finally came to the Prophet (SAW) as he rested in the shade of the Kaaba, and asked the question everyone was thinking: why don't you pray to God to make it stop?

The answer he got is one of the most striking moments in the Prophet's life — recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari:

Hadith

“Among the nations before you, a believing man would be put in a ditch dug for him, and a saw would be put over his head and he would be cut in two — yet that would not make him give up his religion. His flesh would be combed off his bones with iron combs — yet that would not turn him from his faith. By Allah, this religion will prevail, until a traveler from Sana to Hadramawt will fear none but Allah, or a wolf for his sheep. But you are being hasty.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 3460

Notice what he did not say. He didn't promise a rescue was coming tomorrow. He told them the truth: believers before you suffered worse and held firm — and this faith will win in the end, so completely that one day a lone traveler will cross the whole of Arabia fearing nothing but God. You're just being impatient.

He was right. Within a couple of generations, that exact security became real across the Muslim world.

They came for the Prophet too

You might assume Muhammad (SAW) himself was safe, shielded by his uncle Abu Talib. Mostly he was. But not always.

Once, while he prayed at the Kaaba, one of the chiefs crept up behind him, wrapped his own cloak around the Prophet's neck, and throttled him with all his strength. Abu Bakr (RA) rushed over, pulled the man off, and cried out a line that the Quran would later echo:

Quran

“Would you kill a man for saying, 'My Lord is Allah,' when he has brought you clear proofs from your Lord?”

— Surah Ghafir 40:28

Another time, sitting near the Kaaba, one of the chiefs dared the others: who will fetch the filthy insides of that dead camel and dump them on Muhammad's back while he prostrates? The most wretched of them did it. The account comes from an eyewitness, Ibn Mas'ud (RA):

Hadith

“He waited till the Prophet prostrated, then placed it on his back between his shoulders. I was watching but could do nothing — I wish I had had people with me to hold them off. They were laughing and falling over one another. The Messenger of Allah stayed in prostration and did not lift his head, until Fatima came and threw it off his back.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 240

Picture it: a grown man, filth heaped on his back, unable to rise, while a crowd howls with laughter — until his young daughter Fatima (RA) comes running, crying, to clean him off. This was the price of the message in those years.

A hidden house and a secret school

Through all this, the believers needed somewhere safe to gather, learn, and pray — the Kaaba was too public and surrounded by idols.

So the Prophet (SAW) chose the house of a young convert named al-Arqam (RA) as a secret base. It became the first "school" of Islam, where new Muslims were taught their faith away from hostile eyes.

The choice was quietly brilliant. Al-Arqam was young, from a rival clan no one would suspect of helping the Prophet, and his house sat right in the busy center of town beside the Kaaba — so believers coming and going just blended into the everyday foot traffic. Hiding in plain sight.

The escape across the sea

Eventually the torture became unbearable, and the Prophet (SAW) gave a remarkable instruction: those of you who can, leave.

He pointed them toward Abyssinia — modern Ethiopia — an African kingdom across the Red Sea ruled by a Christian king known as the Negus (in Arabic, an-Najashi). The Prophet described him as a just ruler in whose land no one is wronged. Go there, he said, until God gives relief.

We can barely grasp today how frightening this was. Leaving your tribe's land meant giving up all protection, all status, everything — walking into a foreign country where you didn't speak the language, at the mercy of strangers. People simply did not do this.

But roughly fifteen of them did: eleven men and four women, in about the fifth year of the mission. The first to go were the Prophet's own son-in-law Uthman (RA) and daughter Ruqayyah (RA). They slipped down to the coast, boarded a ship, and crossed to Africa.

One of them, Umm Salama (RA), later summed up what they found there in a single grateful sentence: we settled in a good land, among good neighbors, safe in our religion, and we were not wronged. It was exactly the refuge the Quran promises those forced from home for their faith:

Quran

“And those who emigrated for the cause of Allah after they were wronged — We will surely settle them in this world in a good place; but the reward of the Hereafter is greater, if only they knew.”

— Surah An-Nahl 16:41

For the first time in years, a group of Muslims could breathe.

But the Quraysh were not going to let them go so easily. They sent a delegation racing across the sea after them — to demand the king hand the refugees back. What happened in that African court is one of the most stirring scenes in the entire story.

---

Up next: The Court of the Just King — the Quraysh chase the refugees across the sea and demand a Christian king hand them back. What happens in that African court — a speech, a recitation, and a king moved to tears — becomes one of the most stirring scenes in the whole story.