Bilal ibn Rabah: The Formerly Enslaved Ethiopian Who Became Islam's First Muezzin

Bilal ibn Rabah was born in Mecca to an enslaved mother, Hamama, who had been brought from Abyssinia, the region corresponding to modern Ethiopia, and an Arab father, Rabah. Islamic biographical tradition describes Bilal himself growing up enslaved, owned by a prominent Meccan figure, Umayyah ibn Khalaf, in the years before the Prophet Muhammad began preaching Islam in the early seventh century. When Bilal became one of the religion’s earliest converts, his status as an enslaved man with no clan protection made him a direct and unusually vulnerable target for the persecution Mecca’s ruling families directed at the new faith’s followers.

The accounts of his torture are among the most frequently retold episodes in early Islamic history. Umayyah reportedly had Bilal dragged into the desert heat, pinned beneath a heavy stone, and beaten in an effort to force him to renounce Islam and pledge worship to Mecca’s traditional deities, torment tradition holds he endured while repeating a single word, “Ahad,” meaning “One,” an affirmation of monotheism, rather than submit. His ordeal ended when Abu Bakr, a wealthy early follower of Muhammad who would later become the first caliph of Islam, purchased and freed him specifically to end his suffering, an act frequently cited in Islamic tradition as one of Abu Bakr’s defining early contributions to the new faith.

Bilal’s voice became his most consequential attribute once he was free. Described in early accounts as deep and resonant, it led the Prophet Muhammad to select him as Islam’s first muezzin, the person responsible for the adhan, the call to prayer issued aloud to summon believers, a role that placed a formerly enslaved African man at the literal, audible center of the new religion’s daily practice from its earliest years in Medina. Bilal went on to serve as a trusted companion of Muhammad through the religion’s formative military and political conflicts, including the Battle of Badr, and remained closely associated with the Prophet for the rest of Muhammad’s life.

Bilal’s story occupies a specific place in how Islamic tradition talks about race and status within the early Muslim community. Muhammad is recorded in multiple hadith traditions as explicitly rebuking companions who mocked Bilal’s African appearance or enslaved background, teachings later scholars and preachers have repeatedly invoked as textual grounding for Islam’s stated rejection of racial hierarchy among believers. After Muhammad’s death in 632, Bilal reportedly stopped performing the call to prayer regularly, associating it too closely with his grief, resuming only rarely and by request; he died in Damascus sometime in the 630s or 640s, with his exact death date not firmly established in the surviving historical record.