Khadijah was one of Makkah's most successful merchants, a widow who hired agents to trade on her behalf. She employed the young Muhammad for his legendary honesty, was so struck by his character that she proposed marriage, and for twenty-five years theirs was a marriage of profound devotion; he took no other wife while she lived.

When revelation first descended and he came home shaking, saying "cover me, cover me", it was Khadijah who wrapped him and spoke one of history's great character references: "Never! By God, God will never disgrace you. You keep ties of kinship, you carry the weak, you provide for the destitute, you honour guests, and you help against the blows of fate." She believed instantly, spent her entire fortune on the besieged Muslim community, and died in the persecution years, before a single victory. The Prophet ﷺ grieved her for the rest of his life and called her era "the year of sorrow".

Bilal, an East African slave in Makkah, was among the earliest believers, and his owner tortured him for it: staked on the scorching sand with a boulder on his chest, ordered to renounce the one God. His answer, gasped over and over, became immortal: "Ahad, Ahad": One, One. Abu Bakr bought his freedom.

In Madinah, when a way to call the community to prayer was needed, the Prophet ﷺ chose Bilal for his beautiful voice: the first muezzin. On the day Makkah was conquered, the Prophet ﷺ had Bilal, the once-tortured slave, climb on top of the Kaaba itself, the most honoured place in Arabia, and give the call to prayer over the city that had brutalised him. Aristocrats who had owned slaves stood below, listening to one.

Salman was raised a devout Zoroastrian in Persia, encountered Christianity and was captivated, and ran away to Syria to serve a succession of monks. The last of them, dying, told him of a final prophet soon to appear in a land of date palms, and gave him the signs to know him by: he accepts gifts but not charity, and bears a seal of prophethood between his shoulders.

Travelling toward Arabia, Salman was betrayed, enslaved, and sold to a Jewish landowner of Yathrib (Madinah), the city of date palms. Years later, word came of a man in Makkah claiming prophethood, and when Muhammad ﷺ arrived in Madinah, Salman tested him with the monk's three signs, one by one, and wept as each was confirmed. The community pooled resources to free him. Years on, it was Salman's Persian military knowledge, the defensive trench, that saved Madinah in the Battle of the Ditch, and the Prophet ﷺ honoured him with the words: "Salman is one of us, my household."

Abu Bakr was the Prophet's ﷺ closest friend before Islam and the first free man to accept it, famously without a moment's hesitation, earning the title as-Siddiq, "the ever-affirming of truth". A wealthy merchant, he spent his fortune buying enslaved Muslims like Bilal out of torture, and he was the companion in the cave during the migration, where the Prophet ﷺ calmed him with words the Quran preserved: "Do not grieve; indeed God is with us." (9:40)

His greatest hour was the community's worst: the day the Prophet ﷺ died and even mighty Umar refused to believe it. Abu Bakr entered, kissed his friend's forehead, and addressed the reeling crowd: "Whoever worshipped Muhammad, know that Muhammad has died. Whoever worships God, know that God is Ever-Living and never dies." Chosen as the first caliph, he served two years, drawing a public servant's modest stipend, and asked on his deathbed that even that be repaid from his estate.

Umar was a hard, towering man who despised the new religion, and one day he strapped on his sword to end it. Diverted by news that his own sister had converted, he stormed to her house, struck her, and then, ashamed by her bleeding defiance, asked to see what she had been reciting. It was Surah Ta-Ha. He read, trembled, and walked the same sword straight to the Prophet ﷺ, to submit.

As the second caliph he ruled an empire from Persia to Egypt while owning one patched cloak, sleeping under a tree, and walking the night streets of Madinah to check on the poor; finding a mother boiling stones to soothe her hungry children, he carried the flour sack to her on his own back, refusing to let a servant bear "his burden on the Day of Judgement". When he took Jerusalem, he entered on foot (his servant riding the camel, as it was the servant's turn), declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so that Muslims would never claim it, and guaranteed the Christians their churches by written covenant. He was assassinated while leading the dawn prayer.

Umm Salama and her husband were among the first migrants, to Abyssinia and then Madinah, where the journey cost her, for a time, both her husband's company and her infant son. Widowed after the battle of Uhud, she prayed the du'a of the bereaved, "O Allah, reward me in my affliction and replace it with better", while privately wondering who could be better than her husband. The answer was the Prophet ﷺ himself, who married her.

Her defining moment came at Hudaybiyyah, when the Prophet ﷺ signed a treaty his companions hated, and for the only time in his mission, they hesitated at his command to end the pilgrimage rites. He came into his tent troubled, and Umm Salama gave counsel now studied as a masterpiece: say nothing further; go out, sacrifice your own animal, and shave your own head. He did, and the companions, seeing it, leapt to follow. She lived long after him, transmitting hundreds of hadith and standing among the earliest jurists of Islam.