Early Muslims

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

This increasingly drew the ire of the Meccan elite, who persecuted the early converts, especially the slaves and social outcasts.

[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.