Looking before there was anything to find

Sa'id's father was a man called Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, and he is one of the strangest figures in the whole period, because he arrived at a conclusion with almost nothing to go on.

He decided that the idols of Makkah were not worth worshipping. Not as a philosophical position — as a practical one. He stopped eating meat that had been sacrificed to them, which in that city was a public act and an insulting one.

The report in the collections has him meeting the Prophet ﷺ before the revelation had begun, being offered food, and declining it on exactly those grounds.

What he was doing instead was looking. He said he was after the religion of Ibrahim, and he travelled trying to find someone who still had it. He does not seem to have found it. He died before the first revelation came.

So his son grew up in a household that had already rejected what everyone else in Makkah accepted, and was already waiting for something. When it arrived, Sa'id was among the first to take it — and so was his wife, whose brother would spend the next few years as one of the Muslims' most dangerous enemies before joining them himself.

It is a useful corrective to a tidy version of this history. Some people were persuaded. Some, like this family, had been standing in the doorway for years.