'Ali
and
New
Believers

Now, several years after Muhammad married Khadija there was a severe drought in the region around Makkah,

which caused something close to a famine in the land.

And when he saw that this famine was causing great hardship to his uncle Abu Talib and his family,

Muhammad decided that he should try to do something to help.

So he went to 'Abbas,

a rich and successful merchant,

and his wife Umm al-Fadl,

both of whom had been close friends of his for many years,

and they agreed that as Abu Talib had more children than he could easily support,

they would offer to each take charge of one of his sons

until his circumstances improved.

Abu Talib gratefully agreed,

and Ja'far, who was about fifteen, went with 'Abbas,

and Muhammad and Khadija took into their household his five year old son named 'Ali,

'Ali would be brought up as a brother to his young cousins,

being about the same age as the middle sisters Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum.

From this time onwards,

'Ali ibn Abu Talib was to be close to Muhammad.

When Muhammad returned from Hira, having received the first words of the Qur'an,

the first person to believe in him and accept his Message of the Oneness of God was his wife Khadija,

but the second person,

and the first man to recognise him as God's Messenger

was 'Ali ibn Abu Talib.

At the time he was only a boy,

perhaps ten years old,

but as time went on 'Ali became the Messenger's foremost champion in battle,

as well as a close friend and advisor,

becoming an even more central part of the Messenger's family

when he eventually married Muhammad's youngest daughter

Fatimah,

the two of them having two sons,

Hasan and Hussein.

Others submitted to worshipping the One God in the days and weeks that followed,

in the beginning only from those close to the Messenger,

all of whom kept the Message secret in the early days.

But it was a hard thing to keep secret,

especially as some very strange things were happening to people.

The Messenger's adopted son

An old friend

Events guiding people to Islam

Women and Slaves

Abu Dharr, Hamza and Umar