We can assume that at the beginning...

We can assume that at the beginning, the pagan aristocrats of Makkah witnessed the efforts of Islam to win recognition, more with amusement than with irritation, not to speak of the hatred and the hysteria which gripped them a little later. But as the new movement began to gather momentum, they sensed that the ideas which Muhammad was broadcasting, were really “dangerous,” and there was nothing funny about them.

They argued that their forefathers had worshipped idols for countless generations, therefore idolatry was right; and they could not allow Muhammad to meddle with their mode of worship. But Muhammad was not content merely with denouncing idolatry.

Far more dangerous and frightening to the all-grasping Umayyads were his ideas of economic and social justice which threatened to pull down the fortress of their privileges; the old structure of authority and hierarchy; and all the fossilized institutions of the past. They made it clear, therefore, that privilege was something they were not going to relinquish – at any cost – come hell or high water.

But the one idea that the self-selected elite of the Quraysh found most outrageous, was the “notion,” fostered by Muhammad, that the members of the depressed, despised and exploited classes, many of them their slaves, now converted to Islam, were their equals – the equals of the high and the mighty Quraysh! The staple of their life was conceit and arrogance, and equality with their own slaves, ex-slaves and clients, was utterly unthinkable to them.

They were obsessed with delusions of their own “superiority” to the rest of mankind. By promulgating the “heterodox” doctrine of equality – the equality of the master and the slave, the rich and the poor; and the Arab and the non-Arab; by repudiating claims ofsuperiority of the bloodline, and by teaching that in the sight of God, the status of a believer was infinitely higher than the status of all the unbelievers in the world, Muhammad had committed “lese majesty” against the Quraysh!

The Quraysh worshipped many idols, and race was one of them. But racial pride is discounted by Islam. According to Al-Qur’an al-Majid, all men have descended from Adam, and Adam was a handful of dust. Iblis (Satan, the Devil) became the accursed one precisely because he argued for the superiority of what he presumed to be his high origins as against what he considered to be the lowly origins of man.