The First Revelation in the Cave of Hira

Mecca in the Year of the Silence

Before the first revelation descended, writing already existed. For centuries a mature, dated Arabic alphabet had been carved into stone in the north of the Arab world, as the pre-Islamic inscriptions testify, so that when the revelation came, a ready writing system stood prepared to record it. Against that background we return to the city where it began. Mecca in 610 CE was a city that no longer understood its own language. The Ka’bah, the House that Ibrahim ﵇ and his son Ismail ﵇ had raised with their bare hands as the first house of pure worship on earth, stood surrounded by hundreds of idols. Every tribe carried its own stone, every household its own image, every trader its own amulet, and the stone gods stood closer to the House than the faith of the man who had built it. The city was rich, the city was powerful, the city was empty.

It was the century of the jahiliyya, the age of ignorance. No prophet had spoken to the Arabs in their own tongue since Isa ﵇, no revealed Book had been given to them, no living voice corrected their customs. Between the last word of Isa ﵇ and what was to come lay a silence of six centuries, a stillness so long that the people had forgotten what they had once known. Ibrahim ﵇ they still knew by name, Ismail ﵇ too, but their tawhid had been replaced by a bewildering multiplicity. Even the most sacred formula of the Arabs was defiled with shirk: the pilgrim who circled the Ka’bah no longer called out “Labbayk Allahumma Labbayk” without adding to it, in the words that Muslim ﵀ would later record: except a partner who belongs to You, over whom You dispose.

The social order was no better than the theological: daughters were buried alive out of fear of poverty or shame, slaves were counted as property, and blood feuds silenced whole generations. The strong devoured the weak, and no one found anything strange in it. Trade flourished, poetry flourished, eloquence flourished, and beneath all that splendour the human being bled to death.

This was a people that had lost its compass: no Scripture, no prophet, no law. It was a darkness so deep that even the sincere among them, the hunafa, no longer knew where they were to turn their faces. Zaid ibn Amr wandered in search of the faith of Ibrahim ﵇ and died without finding it, and Waraqah ibn Nawfal, cousin of Khadijah ﵂, had turned to Christianity and studied the ancient Scriptures, still waiting for something, for someone.

And in the heart of that city, in a house at the foot of the hills, there lived a man of forty. His name was Muhammad ibn Abdullah, and the city called him Al-Amin, the Trustworthy. He traded for his wife, he cared for his children, he slept in simple cloths, he kept silent more than he spoke. No one knew that the silence of six centuries was about to break, and no one suspected that the Writer of the heavens had already sharpened a pen.

The Years of Hira

Above Mecca, to the northeast of the Ka’bah, rises Jabal an-Nour, the Mountain of Light. It is no gentle mountain: its flanks are of sharp, black-grey rock, without trees, without springs, and whoever wishes to reach the summit must climb over stones that cut the soles apart, in a heat that in summer robs all breath. And yet the Prophet ﷺ climbed there every year, for weeks on end.

Not out of discontent with his life. He had a wife who loved him, children whom he cherished, a reputation that opened every door. He climbed because something in him found no rest with what his people had made of the House of his forefather Ibrahim ﵇. The Arabs called this withdrawal tahannuth: a seeking of purity by abstaining from the world. He took bread and water with him, sometimes barley meal, and remained in the narrow cave of Hira until his provisions ran out; then he descended, replenished his pouch with Khadijah ﵂, and climbed again.

The cave of Hira is not spacious, scarcely more than a hollow in the rock in which one man can sit, pray and sleep. Above it there is only the sky, and by night the stars in a density the city-dweller does not know.

What he sought there, the biographers are cautious about. He sought the truth of Ibrahim ﵇, some write; he sought a sign, others write. Aisha ﵂ relates what she later heard from him: that the revelation began for him with true dreams, dreams that came like the breaking of dawn, clear and undeniable, and that this continued for six months. After those dreams, solitude became dear to him: he wanted to be alone, he wanted silence, he wanted the mountain.

There were in Mecca a few others who carried the same restlessness: the hunafa, men who sought the pure tawhid of Ibrahim ﵇ without accepting the idolatry of their tribe. Zaid ibn Amr ibn Nufayl had withdrawn from the cult of his people and died, still searching, before the first revelation. Uthman ibn Al-Huwayrith had gone to Byzantium and there embraced Christianity. 'Ubaydullah ibn Jahsh would later become a Muslim and journey with the believers to Abyssinia, only to turn there to Christianity after all. And Waraqah ibn Nawfal had studied the Bible. The Prophet ﷺ knew them, and they him, but what he sought on the mountain was of a different order than what they had sought in the books: he had no text, only the sky above the cave and the longing that grew within him.

Ibn Hajar ﵀ relates that in the years before the first revelation strange events hung about him, and that Jibril ﵇ let his nearness be felt before he let his voice be heard. There is the tradition of the stone in Mecca that greeted him when he passed by, a greeting the Prophet ﷺ still remembered years later. It was, writes Al-Azami ﵀, a gradual preparation: Allah ﷻ did not cast His messenger into the deep without first teaching him to swim.

It was no coincidence, no delusion, no sudden inspiration, but a trajectory, a building-up, a preparation whose meaning the man on the mountain would understand only later. Six centuries of silence were drawing to a close, and on a night of Ramadan, in the fortieth year of his life, the time of waiting broke open.

The Night of Qadr

It was Ramadan, the month of which the Quran would later say that it was sent down in it, on a night that would be called the Night of Qadr. The Prophet ﷺ sat as he always sat, in tahannuth, his head bowed, and what then happened lies at the root of everything that follows.

There was a presence. No vision in the ordinary sense, no dream, no thought: there was someone with him in the cave. The angel Jibril ﵇, whom the Prophet ﷺ did not yet know by name at that moment, spoke the first word that humanity would hear of the final revelation.

Then, the Prophet ﷺ later recounted, Jibril ﵇ embraced him and pressed him against himself until he felt he had no strength left. Then he let him go.

Again the grip, again the pressure to the very limit of what a human can bear, again the release.

And then, after the third grip, Jibril ﵇ spoke the first verses that humanity ever heard of the Book that would outlast the ages.

What happened here is a turning point in the history of humanity. An unlettered man, in a cave, received five verses of which every word fell into place with a precision the Arabic language had not yet known. Not poetry, for it had no metre; not prose, for it carried a rhythm that no prose carries; not the incantation of a kahin, for it knew no muttering rhyme. It was something new, something that sounded like itself.

And there is in these five verses something that is seldom noticed. In the very first words ever revealed, Allah ﷻ names Himself “Who taught by the pen”. The pen. Before there was a Companion ﵁ who could write for him, before a madrassah existed, before the Prophet ﷺ even knew the name of his angel, the revelation announced its own written future. The Quran says in the fourth verse already what it would do for centuries: let itself be set down, in pen and parchment, in memory and in stone.

This is no coincidence and no literary incidental, but the architecture of preservation, visible from the very first night: the oral recitation and the written recording are named in the same breath, iqra at the beginning, al-qalam in the middle. Reading, and the pen; recitation, and script. Two pillars in five verses, six centuries in the preparing and spoken in a single night.

The Return

The next thing history knows is that the Prophet ﷺ descended the mountain, not slowly and composed, but trembling. He did not know what had befallen him; he feared for his mind, he feared that a jinn had touched him as a jinn touched the poets of his people. The path from Hira to Mecca is long and steep, but he walked it in a state that carried itself onward.

Aisha ﵂ later relates, as Al-Bukhari ﵀ records, that he came home to Khadijah ﵂ and could find only one word:

Khadijah ﵂ wrapped him in a cloth and at that moment asked for no explanation; she let him come to rest beneath the fabric, held him fast, and waited until his breathing grew steady. Only then, once the shock had passed, could he tell what had happened: the cave, the grip, the voice, the words that had come out of him as though they stood written in his heart. And his fear:

This is, in the terse rendering of the tradition, one of the most crucial moments in the history of faith. No hesitation, no doubt, no asking for proof: Khadijah ﵂ believed at once. She became, without any solemn declaration, the first human being on earth to believe in the message of the Prophet ﷺ, and therewith also the first witness. For this deserves attention: the revelation was not for a single day a secret. That very same night everything was told to the human being who knew him the longest and the best.

Her faith was not naive. It was the sum of years of marriage, of seeing day after day what kind of man she had married. She had known the Prophet ﷺ from within, as no other human knew him; she knew that he did not lie, that he bore no madness, that no jinn had visited him. What convinced her was not first of all the content of what he had heard, but the man who had heard it: a human being whose whole life had already been a testimony before the first verse was spoken.

And yet she too knew that this was greater than herself, and that it needed a confirmation from beyond her own house. So she rose, wrapped herself in her mantle, and brought him to the man in Mecca who knew the ancient Scriptures like no other.

The Testimony of Waraqah

Waraqah ibn Nawfal was the cousin of Khadijah ﵂ on her father’s side. He was old, by Arab reckoning very old, and his eyes had grown weak to the point of near-blindness. In his youth he had followed the hanifiyya, the search for the pure faith of Ibrahim ﵇, and in the end he had become a Christian. He had learned Hebrew, or in another tradition Syriac, and had with his own hand copied portions of the earlier Scriptures, as Al-Bukhari ﵀ records in the opening chapter of his Sahih. He was, in a city without Scriptures, a man who knew what a Scripture was.

Khadijah ﵂ led the Prophet ﷺ to his house and summed up for the old man what she had heard. Then Waraqah spoke:

The Prophet ﷺ told him everything: the cave, the presence, the threefold iqra, the verses. Waraqah listened to the end, and the tradition records his answer with a precision that has endured through the ages:

Three things turn in this conversation. The first is the recognition: Waraqah, speaking from the framework of the earlier Scriptures, recognizes what has happened as the return of the same revelation that Musa ﵇ had received. Not a new line, not a deviation, but the continuation. The word Namus that he chooses, understood by the classical commentators as the bearer of the divine revelation, as Jibril ﵇ himself, names that chain by its name: the same angel, the same source, the same axis through history.

The second is the prediction. The greatest service Waraqah renders is not the confirmation but the warning: this is true, he says, and precisely for that reason you will suffer, for never has a man come with such a thing without his people turning against him. The Prophet ﷺ leaves the house of Waraqah with a new peace about the nature of his experience, but also with the knowledge that the way forward will run through opposition.

The third is the testimony itself. Consider what has already happened in these very first hours and days: the experience was told that same night to Khadijah ﵂, and shortly after laid before and judged by the only independent expert on the older Scriptures that the city possessed. Waraqah dies not long afterward, before the first open preaching and before the first persecution, but his judgement remained preserved in the same tradition that carries the whole story. The first revelation is not a story reconstructed generations later; it was told that same night, shortly after laid before an expert on the earlier Scriptures, and from the very outset passed on by those who had been present.

After that followed an interruption, the fatrat al-wahy. How long exactly it lasted is variously related, but the Prophet ﷺ found himself in a long silence after the first thunderclap. When Jibril ﵇ returned, it was with Ya ayyuha al-muddaththir, and the public mission began.

The Manner of the Wahy

Before the story can go further, one element must be brought into sharp focus that determines the whole history of the compilation: how did the revelations that followed the first one come? Aisha ﵂ relates the answer that the Prophet ﷺ himself gave when Al-Harith ibn Hisham ﵁ put that question to him; Al-Bukhari ﵀ preserved the conversation, and Al-Azami places it at the centre of his analysis of the wahy process.

Aisha ﵂ added what she had seen with her own eyes: that on a day of severe cold he received the revelation, and that the sweat nonetheless streamed from his forehead. The pressure of receiving was bodily, not symbolic. And at the same time, and this is crucial for the history of the text, the retention was complete: when Jibril ﵇ departed, the verse was engraved in the heart of the Prophet ﷺ. Not retained by effort, not held fast by repetition, but taken up by a process that Allah ﷻ Himself names as His own work.

Al-Azami draws from this a conclusion that reaches beyond the ordinary biography. When Allah ﷻ says in Surah Al-Qiyamah inna ‘alayna jam’ahu wa-qur’anah, fa-idha qara’nahu fa-attabi’ qur’anah, then He announces a divine guarantee for both the gathering and the reciting. The Prophet ﷺ is relieved of the human burden of the fear of forgetting: the memory of the revelation is not left to the vulnerability of a human, but assured by the Hand that sends the revelation.

The Annual Recitation

There is yet another mechanism that becomes visible in this earliest period and that in the later compilation determines everything. A series of hadiths, gathered together by Al-Azami, describes a fixed rhythm of mutual recitation between Jibril ﵇ and the Prophet ﷺ, each year anew, with the express purpose of refreshing the memory of the Prophet ﷺ.

Fatimah ﵂, daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, later told in confidence what her father had confided to her in the last months of his life. Jibril ﵇ recited the Quran to me once a year, but this year he has recited it to me twice. I think my time is drawing near. Ibn Abbas ﵁ added: every night in Ramadan they met, until the end of the month, and recited the whole Quran to one another.

Abu Hurayrah ﵁ relates the same: every year in Ramadan the mutual recitation took place, and in the year of his passing twice. This process bears in the tradition the name Mu’arada: a counter-recitation in which two parties recite and listen in turn. The one recites and the other confirms, until there is no more room for deviation.

What must be held fast here: the corrective mechanism of the Quran was not invented after the death of the Prophet ﷺ, not devised by Abu Bakr ﵁ and not instituted by Uthman ﵁. It is already at work, in the highest form, between Jibril ﵇ and the Prophet ﷺ himself, year after year, throughout twenty-three years of revelation. And in the last year something remarkable happens: the Mu’arada is doubled, twice instead of once, as though the definitive recitation were sealed.

Ibn Mas’ud ﵁ later told that after that final Mu’arada he recited the Quran once more to the Prophet ﷺ and was told that his recitation was eloquent; Al-Azami, who cites this tradition, honestly notes alongside it that its chain is very weak. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ too recited with the Prophet ﷺ after his last session with Jibril ﵇. Thus the chain of confirmation stretches from the angel to the Prophet ﷺ, from the Prophet ﷺ to the most learned Companions ﵃, and from them to the next generation.

All of this begins, in seed, in the cave of Hira. The threefold grip of Jibril ﵇, three times iqra, three times an answer, may in hindsight be read as a first form of what would later be called Mu’arada: a text that is anchored in a heart that received it for the first time. What was ushered in on that night was not only the first revelation; it was the whole protocol of preservation, in miniature, in a single scene.

The Birth of a Science

When Waraqah recognized the Namus that had descended to Musa ﵇, he spoke from the science of the ancient Scriptures, but what was given to the Prophet ﷺ was no repetition of those Scriptures: it was the completion. Al-Azami observes that the Quran consistently announces itself with verbs of tilawa and qira’a: to recite, to recite aloud, to read. In verse after verse, from 2:129 to 62:2, Allah ﷻ describes the task of His Messenger ﷺ as the reciting of His signs.

But recitation alone, writes Al-Azami, is insufficient if it is not accompanied by teaching. Therefore the prayer of Ibrahim ﵇ in Surah Al-Baqarah runs: Our Lord, send among them a Messenger from themselves who will recite to them Your verses and will teach them the Book and the Wisdom and will purify them. To recite, to teach, to purify: three tasks, not one.

Here lies the quiet birth of the whole Islamic scholarly tradition. Not as an academic undertaking, not as philosophical speculation, but as an immediate necessity: the text must be recited, it must be taught, and it must work purifyingly in the lives of those who hear it. No recitation without explanation, no explanation without transformation, no transformation without a text that is passed on unblemished across the generations.

The first five verses lay the foundations, the following twenty-three years complete the edifice, and in the centuries thereafter the sciences flourish around it: qira’at, tafsir, naskh, asbab an-nuzul, 'ulum al-Qur’an in a hundred branches. But every branch runs back to the same root, to the same voice in the same cave, to the same threefold iqra followed by the same threefold ma ana bi-qari’, until the words came that ended the waiting of six centuries.

The Difference From What Came Before

Waraqah knew the ancient Scriptures and knew how a Scripture sounded in the mouth of a scholar, but what the Prophet ﷺ told him did not fit the categories he knew. The Arabs possessed a grand oral tradition and could immediately hear whether a text was poetry, or the saj’ of a soothsayer, or the eloquence of an orator. When the Prophet ﷺ later recited in public in Mecca, Quraysh fell into bewilderment, precisely because the text refused to let itself be categorized.

Al-Azami cites the famous deliberation that Al-Walid ibn Al-Mughirah held with the leaders of Quraysh, when before the pilgrimage season a unanimous verdict about the Prophet ﷺ had to be presented to the visiting tribes. They proposed: he is a kahin. Al-Walid rejected it: there is no incoherent muttering and no rhymed spell in his speech. A man possessed, then. Al-Walid rejected it: no choking, no convulsions, no whispering. A poet, then. Al-Walid rejected it: we know poetry in all its forms and metres, and this is no poetry. A sorcerer, then. Al-Walid hesitated and in the end chose “sorcerer”, for his word separates a man from his father, his brother, his wife and his tribe; but he added: his speech is sweet, his root is a palm tree, his branches bear fruit, and everything you might say about him would be recognized as a lie.

A sorcerer out of necessity, then, not out of conviction. The enemies of the revelation, men who had everything to gain by belittling the text, could find no fitting box in which to store it. And this is what Khadijah ﵂ had already sensed in the very first hour: that her husband did not fit into one of the boxes they knew. No poet, no kahin, no madman, no liar; a Messenger.

What Al-Azami emphasizes in his analysis is that the Book came to the very first hearers as a miracle of a different order than the miracles of the earlier prophets. Musa ﵇ had his staff, Isa ﵇ had healings and the raising of the dead, and Muhammad ﷺ had Words. No serpents, no plagues, no cured lepers belonged to his abiding signs; he had a text, and that text was its own proof. The Quran testified for itself, and the fact that no human pen had brought forth such a thing was itself the witness.

Therefore, says Al-Azami, the Prophet ﷺ could not but cherish every word of that text as a sacred trust. Whether one accepts him as a prophet or regards him as an impostor, in both cases it is unthinkable that he would have been indifferent to its preservation. As an impostor he would have to seize every chance to protect his creation from ruin, so as not to let his fraud be exposed. As a prophet he would have to secure Allah’s ﷻ sacred Book with all his strength. Both hypotheses lead to the same conclusion: the care for the text was absolute from the very first day.

The First Pen

When one now, centuries later, looks back on these first five verses, something stands out that was impossible to see in the moment itself: the revelation did not choose its first words at random. Iqra was no chance command to open a chance text. The whole apparatus of recording that Al-Azami describes in his chapters on the setting-down, the scribes, the dictating, the reading-back, lies already contained in this opening as a promise.

Read it again, verse by verse. Iqra bi-smi rabbika alladhi khalaq. Recite, in the name of your Lord. The revelation opens with a verb of oral recitation. Khalaqa al-insana min 'alaq. Man is created from a clot of blood. The biology of the weak creature is named at once, so that man knows who speaks and who listens. Iqra wa-rabbuka al-akram. Recite, and your Lord is the Most Generous, for without His generosity no teaching exists. Alladhi 'allama bi-l-qalam. Who taught by the pen: the script. 'Allama al-insana ma lam ya’lam. Who taught man what he did not know.

Five verses, two commands to recitation, one direct reference to the pen, and man as the one who is taught. The Quran announces itself as a learned text, a taught text, a written text. Before a second revelation even descends, the whole methodology of preservation lies contained in this opening.

Allah ﷻ did not entrust His final revelation to chance, and no sentence of what followed was left to the fortune of history. Aisha ﵂ relates how the Prophet ﷺ himself described that the revelation sometimes came to him like the ringing of a bell, the hardest of all, and she saw how the sweat broke out on him on the coldest days. And yet, when Jibril ﵇ departed, the Prophet ﷺ carried the verses infallibly within himself, as completely as though they had always been there.

In Surah Al-Qiyamah Allah ﷻ would later make explicit what was implicit in Al-'Alaq. Move not your tongue with it to hasten it; the gathering of it and the making it recited is upon Us. The Prophet ﷺ, in his eagerness to let no word be lost, moved his lips along while Jibril ﵇ was still reciting, and Allah ﷻ reassured him: the gathering is Our task, not yours. Inna 'alayna jam’ahu wa-qur’anah. The word jam’ that is used here means to gather, to bring together, to compile, and Al-Azami notes that At-Tabari ﵀ on the authority of Qatada ﵀ reads this verse precisely so: in this verse jam’ahu means compilation. The compilation of the Quran therefore does not begin only in the caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁; it begins in the heart of the Prophet ﷺ, guaranteed by Allah ﷻ Himself, from the very first verse in the cave of Hira.

And then al-qalam, the pen, the symbol that runs like a red thread through the whole history of the compilation. The Prophet ﷺ was himself unlettered, and remained so his whole life. Al-Azami points out that precisely this fact, far from a deficiency, testifies to the divine origin of what he brought: he had not read, he had not written, he had consulted no ancient Scriptures, and yet he carried within himself a text that surpassed the whole literary tradition of the Arabs.

What he could not write himself, he had others write. Every time a new revelation descended, he called a Companion ﵁ who could write, and dictated; he indicated in which surah the new verse belonged, had what was written down read back, and corrected where correction was needed. The kuttab al-wahy, the scribes of the revelation, would grow into one of the most crucial institutions of the young umma: Al-Azami counts about sixty-five Companions ﵃ who at some point served as scribe for the Prophet ﷺ.

Of that the next part will speak. Of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁, a boy of eleven when the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Medina, who had by then already memorized sixteen surahs. Of Mu’awiyah ﵁ and Ubayy ibn Ka’b ﵁ and the dozens of others who were called, surah after surah, verse after verse, to set the revelation down on leather and parchment, on a wooden plank, on a shoulder blade. Of the threefold certainty that was built into every revelation: an angel who corrects, a Prophet ﷺ who memorizes, a Companion ﵁ who writes. No link was skipped, no link was weakened, no link was superfluous.

The history of the Islamic sciences therefore does not begin with the first madrassah in Baghdad, not with the codification under Uthman ﵁, and not with the mushaf of Abu Bakr ﵁ after Yamamah. It begins in a cave on a mountain near Mecca, on a night in Ramadan in 610 CE, with five verses that teach man that his Lord teaches by the pen. Everything that came thereafter was the carrying-out of what had already been promised in those five verses.

And here lies the answer to the question that hangs over this whole history. Whoever claims that the Quran is a story reconstructed after the fact must get past all that this first night already shows: a revelation that was told that very same night to the first witness, shortly after tested by an expert on the older Scriptures, that announced its own written recording in its opening verses, and that was surrounded by an annually repeated protocol of checking. The Companions ﵃ who did not yet exist as Companions, the huffaz who would carry the whole Quran in their breasts, the scribes who would cut their reed pens in Medina, the scholars ﵏ who would unfold the sciences in Basra and Kufa and Damascus and Cordoba: they all walked in a light that had been kindled in a cave, by an angel who said “Iqra” to a man who answered that he could not read.

And yet he read, and the umma recites today, fourteen centuries later, exactly the same five verses, in the same order, in the same words, in the same language. Not a letter has been lost and not a word has been replaced. The promise that was made in the fourth verse, that the Lord teaches by the pen, has been fulfilled beyond every expectation of human history.

The cave of Hira is still narrow, the mountain still black, the stones still sharp. But the silence of six centuries is broken, and it has not returned since. In the next article we descend the mountain and travel along to Medina, to the men who cut their reed pens when the Messenger ﷺ called them: the scribes of the Prophet ﷺ.