The Cave of Hira

Before the revelation, before the prophethood, before the Quran there was a man in Makkah whom everyone knew by a special name: Al-Amin. The Trustworthy.

Muhammad ibn Abdullah ﷺ had never told a lie. He had never broken a promise. Even his harshest enemies people who disagreed with him about everything trusted him completely with their money and valuables.

He was gentle with the weak. Generous with the poor. He could not bear injustice. And he could not bear the world around him a city of idols, of buried daughters, of cruelty to slaves and find peace in it.

So he did what his heart drove him to do. He went to think. To be alone. To search for the truth that the world around him seemed to have forgotten.

Outside Makkah stands a mountain called Jabal al-Nour the Mountain of Light. Near its summit is a small, narrow cave: Ghar Hira.

The Prophet ﷺ used to climb this mountain alone and spend days and sometimes weeks in the cave. He would take dates and water, sit in the silence, and worship Allah in the way his heart knew was right, even before he had the words to describe it fully.

He was searching. Thinking. Turning away from the noise of the city below and turning toward something greater.

The cave is so narrow that two people can barely sit in it. It faces the direction of the Ka'bah. From its opening, you can see the rooftops of Makkah far below and the vast sky above.

It was here, in the month of Ramadan, in his 40th year that everything changed.

One night in Ramadan, the Prophet ﷺ was alone in the cave when something extraordinary happened.

The angel Jibreel (as) came to him and held him in a tight embrace so tight the Prophet felt squeezed then released him and said: "Iqra!" Read!

The Prophet ﷺ said: "I cannot read."

Jibreel embraced him again, tightly, then released him and said: "Iqra!"

"I cannot read."

A third embrace. A third release. And then the first words of the Quran descended:

اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ

"Read in the name of your Lord who created. Created man from a clinging substance. Read and your Lord is the Most Generous who taught by the pen taught man that which he knew not." (96:1-5)

The Prophet ﷺ came home from the cave shaking his heart pounding, his body trembling. He went to his wife Khadijah (ra) and said: "Cover me! Cover me!"

She wrapped him in a cloak. She held him. She waited until the trembling passed. Then she listened as he told her what had happened.

And then she said something that has echoed through Islamic history ever since:

"Never by Allah will He disgrace you. You uphold ties of kinship. You carry the burdens of the weak. You give to those who have nothing. You honour your guests. You help those struck by calamity."

She did not ask for proof. She did not need a miracle. She knew his character and she knew that a man like this could only be touched by something true.

Khadijah (ra) was the first Muslim. The first human to believe in the message of the Prophet ﷺ. And she believed before he even knew what his mission was.

Khadijah took the Prophet ﷺ to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal an elderly man who had studied the ancient scriptures and was one of the few people in Arabia who knew the Torah and the Gospel in their original form.

The Prophet ﷺ told Waraqa what had happened in the cave. Waraqa listened carefully. Then he said:

"This is the Namus the same angel of revelation that Allah sent to Musa. Would that I were young and could live to see the day when your people will drive you out."

The Prophet ﷺ was surprised: "Will they drive me out?"

Waraqa said: "Yes no man has ever brought what you have brought except that his people turned against him. If I am still alive on that day, I will support you with all my strength."

Waraqa a Christian scholar who had spent his life studying the ancient prophecies recognised immediately what the Prophet had been given. He had read about it. He had been waiting for it.

The first word of the Quran was Iqra Read. Not "pray." Not "fight." Not "rule." Read.

In a society where most people could not read, where knowledge was hoarded by the powerful, where women had no rights and the poor had no voice the first command from Allah to humanity was to read. To learn. To know.

Over the next 23 years, the Quran would be revealed piece by piece, in moments of joy and grief, in Makkah and Madinah until it was complete. Every word memorised by companions. Every word written down. Every word preserved.

Today, the Quran is the most widely memorised book in human history. Billions of people have read those same first five verses that descended in a tiny cave on a mountain outside Makkah, on a night in Ramadan, over 1400 years ago.

It began with one word: Iqra.