Early Muslims

Over time, in his hometown of Mecca, Muhammad gathered a small following of those who embraced his message of Islam (lit.

[1] While Khadija is universally recognized as the first female convert to Islam, the identity of the second male Muslim, after Muhammad himself, is disputed.

[3][2] Shia and some Sunni sources identify him as Muhammad's cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib, aged between nine and eleven at the time.

[8] Among contemporary authors, this is also the view of Hassan Abbas,[6] John Esposito,[9] Clément Huart,[10] Betty Kelen,[11] John McHugo,[12] Moojan Momen,[13] Hossein Nasr and Asma Afsaruddin,[14] and Reza Shah-Kazemi,[15] while W. Montgomery Watt (d. 2006) regards the aforementioned list of early Muslims in al-Sira al-nabawiya as "roughly accurate.

[4] Nevertheless, the Sunni–Shia disagreement over this matter has an obvious polemical dimension,[17][4] and Abu Bakr's status after the death of Muhammad might have been reflected back into the early Islamic records.

[21] Alternatively, the Shia jurist Ibn Shahrashub (d. 1192) counters that Ali grasped the message of Muhammad despite his youth, which he views as a merit for Ali, adding that Jesus and John the Baptist were similarly bestowed with divine wisdom in childhood, according to the Quran, the central religious text in Islam.

[16] Many of them were young and middle-class men, surmises Watt, some of whom did not enjoy any clan protection and were thus susceptible to harassment by Meccan pagans.

[25] Besides Abu Bakr, a young Talha ibn Ubayd Allah was another early convert from the Banu Taym clan in Mecca.