ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Restatement of the History of Islam and Muslims Muhammad's Visit to Ta'if More than ten years had passed since Muhammad, may God bless him and his Ahlul-Bait, had first begun to preach Islam. His success in these ten years had been rather modest, limited as it was to the conversion of fewer than 170 men and women in Makkah.

But after the death of his wife, Khadija, and his uncle, Abu Talib, it appeared that the Quraysh would wrest even that limited success from his hands. Makkah had proved inhospitable to Islam and it occurred to the Prophet that he ought, perhaps to try to preach the new faith in some other city. The nearest city was Ta’if, 70 miles in the south-east of Makkah, and he went there in late 619. Zayd bin Haritha went with him.

In Ta’if, Muhammad, the Messenger of God, called on the three chiefs of the local tribes, and invited them to abandon their gross idolatry, to acknowledge the Oneness of God, to repudiate man-made distinctions of high and low, and to believe in the equality and brotherhood of all men. The chiefs of Ta’if were a conceited and arrogant crew, and they did not want even to listen to Muhammad. They greeted him with mockery and ridicule and set upon him the idlers and the louts of the city.

They pelted him and Zayd with clods and rocks. Wounded and covered with blood, Muhammad staggered out of Ta’if. Once he was outside the city walls, he almost collapsed but a certain gardener took him into his hut, dressed his wounds, and let him rest and recuperate until he felt strong enough to resume his journey across the rough terrain between Ta’if and Makkah.

But when Muhammad arrived in the environs of Makkah, he sensed that he could not reenter his native city now that his uncle, Abu Talib, was not there to protect him. Pagan hostility toward him had reached the flash point. He realized that if he entered Makkah, he would be killed Muhammad could not enter his hometown, and there was no other place to go to. What was he to do? In this extremity, Muhammad sent word to three nobles in the city asking each of them to take him under his protection.

Two of them refused but the third one – the gallant Mutim ibn Adiy – responded to his signal of distress. It was the same Mutim who had, earlier, flouted the chiefs of Quraysh by tearing into pieces their covenant to boycott the Banu Hashim, and had brought the two clans of Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib from the Sh’ib Abu Talib back into the city.