32 • 3 THE PROPHET OF MECCAWhen the earth shall quake with a predestined quaking,
When the earth shall bring forth her burdens,
and men shall ask, "What ails her?"
Upon that day shall she tell her news
with which thy Lord has inspired her,
Upon that day shall men come out in scattered groups
to be shown what they have done.
Then he who has done one atom's weight of good shall see it
And he who has done one atom's weight of evil shall see it. (QURAN, 109:1-8)Being God's messenger to the Arabs was an awesome task for an unlet¬
tered, middle-aged merchant, an orphan who had gained a precarious
hold on a little wealth and status. Muhammad was tempted to shirk the
responsibility; and yet, when he received no messages for a while, he
feared that God had abandoned him. During this time, he kept asking
himself whether he really was a prophet, but his wife never doubted him.
A few of his friends and relatives believed in him, too. Once new revela¬
tions reached Muhammad, he came to know that his mission was real.
The Early Muslims
The first believers, although they came from every class and many of
Mecca's clans, were mainly young men from the upper-middle stratum—
that of the "nearly haves" from which so many revolutions elsewhere have
sprung—rather like Muhammad himself. Some converts were sons or
younger brothers of the leading merchants; others were notables who had
somehow lost (or failed to attain) the status they wanted within pagan
Mecca. A few were "weak," meaning that they came from outside the sys¬
tem, that they had no clan to protect them against harm from other Arabs,
or that their families lacked the political clout of the Umayyads or the
Hashimites. Even though Muhammad's uncle, Abu-Talib, never embraced
Islam, he went on protecting his nephew. Abu-Talib's son, Ali, raised in
Muhammad's home, was probably his first male convert, certainly the first
who never had bowed to idols and grew up as a Muslim. Later, he would
marry the Prophet's daughter, Fatima, and become a leader of early Islam.
Other early converts were Abu-Bakr, Muhammad's best friend and a man of
wealth and social standing; Arkam, a young member of a strong clan, who
let the Muslims meet at his home; Umar, an imposing figure from a weak
clan; Uthman, an elegant but quiet youth of the powerful Umayyad family;
Bilal, an Ethiopian slave set free by Abu-Bakr; and Zayd ibn Haritha, a cap¬
tured Christian Arab whom Muhammad adopted.