AyaSeerah

Year 8 of prophethood · 6 BH (617 CE)

The first year in the valley

Hunger in the ravine — and a correction over a blind man who wanted to learn.

His age
47
Where
Shiʿb Abī Ṭālib, Makkah
Counted as
6 BH

The year

The clan lived in the ravine for three years, buying food only at the seasons when fighting was forbidden, and even then Quraysh outbid them. Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ رضي الله عنه described eating leaves; the children's crying was heard outside the valley. Revelation kept coming, and the pilgrimage seasons remained the one opening through which the message still reached the tribes.

In this Makkan period the incident of ʿAbasa is placed: a blind man, ʿAbdullāh ibn Umm Maktūm, interrupted him while he was working on the chiefs, and he frowned. The Qur'an corrected him in a whole sūrah that his community would then recite for ever — a correction preserved rather than quietly dropped, which is itself evidence that he ﷺ was not the author.

Take from this year that the pressure was economic, aimed at families and children, and that the standards of the religion did not bend under it.

What happened, event by event

Three years in the valley

c. 7–5 BH · Shiʿb Abī Ṭālib

For about three years they lived shut in, buying only what sympathisers smuggled in at night at cruel prices, sometimes eating tree leaves. The call did not pause: he ﷺ used the Ḥajj seasons, when the boycott lifted, to keep meeting pilgrims.

Chapter: The boycott and the Year of Sorrow

ʿAbasa — the blind man and the noblemen

c. 8 BH · Makkah

He ﷺ was busy with the chiefs of Quraysh, hoping they would believe, when a blind companion came asking to be taught, and he frowned and turned away. Sūrat ʿAbasa was revealed correcting him in public. Afterwards he would greet that man with, 'Welcome to the one on whose account my Lord reproached me.'

Chapter: Going public — and the persecution

The Qur'an alongside this year

  • 80. ʿAbasa — ʿAbasa — the correction over the blind man.

Answer from memory