The Six of Yathrib

Year after year, at the pilgrimage season, the Prophet ﷺ would move among the tribes camped around Makkah, offering himself and his message: who will shelter me so that I may deliver the words of my Lord? Tribe after tribe refused, some politely, some cruelly, and Abu Lahab often walked behind him telling them to ignore his nephew.

Then, at the hill of Aqabah near Mina, he came upon six young men of the Khazraj from Yathrib. He sat with them and called them to Allah and recited the Qur'an. Something in them was already prepared: their city shared its valleys with Jewish tribes who, in every quarrel, would warn that a prophet was about to be sent, and they would follow him and destroy the Arabs of Yathrib as the nations of old were destroyed.

So when these six heard the Prophet ﷺ, they said to one another: by Allah, this is the very prophet the Jews threatened us with; do not let them reach him before us. They believed on the spot. And they carried something the men of Makkah and Ta'if did not: a wound that the message could heal. Yathrib was exhausted by a long civil war between its two great tribes, Aws and Khazraj, that had bled the city for generations and reached its peak at the battle of Bu'ath.

We have left our people, they told him, for no people are more divided by enmity than they; perhaps Allah will unite them through you. If He unites them upon you, no man will be mightier than you. They went home as the first seeds of Islam in Yathrib, promising to return the next year, and they began to speak quietly of the Prophet ﷺ until barely a house of the Ansar remained without mention of him.