One word

The early Muslims who came from strong families were protected by their clans. It was an unpleasant kind of protection — it did not stop the insults or the boycott — but it kept them alive.

Bilal had none of it. He was enslaved in the household of Umayyah ibn Khalaf, and when it became known that he had accepted Islam, he was taken out into the heat of the day and punished in public. The point was not only to make him recant. It was to be seen.

The reports say he answered with one word, repeated: Ahad. One.

That is the whole of it. He was not making an argument. He was being asked to say there were many gods, and he said the opposite, and kept saying it.

Abu Bakr saw this happening, and bought him, and freed him. Which is how the man being punished in the dust of Makkah came, a few years later, to be the man whose voice called the whole of Madinah to prayer.