So in defiance they began to pray in front of the holy Kabah and they would encourage other Muslims to pray with them. Sometimes they would gather in a large body of the faithful before the sacred sanctuary, and on such occasions the leaders of Quraysh kept away.
It would have been a loss of dignity for them to stand by and let this happen, yet if they resisted they knew that Muslims would stop at nothing.
Thus a boycott document was drawn up according to which it was undertaken that no one would marry a woman of Bani Hashim or give his daughter in marriage to a man of Bani Hashim; and no one was to sell anything to them, or buy anything from them.
In other words to totally isolate and dissociate the Bani Hashim from all the other Quraysh families in Mecca. This was to continue until the clan of Hashim themselves outlawed Mohammad, or until he renounced his claim to the Prophethood.
No less than forty leaders of Quraysh set their seal to this boycott agreement though not all of them were equally in favour of it, and some of them had to be won over.
The document was solemnly placed inside the Kabah for the sake of mutual security. And the Bani Hashim gathered around their old clan chief Abe Taleb in that quarter of the hollow of Mecca where he and most of the clan lived.
At the arrival of the holy Prophet and his devoted wife Khadeejah with their household, Abe Lahab and his wife moved away and went to live in a house which he owned elsewhere, to demonstrate their solidarity with Quraysh as a whole.
However the boycott could not always be so rigorously enforced, nor was it possible to close all the loopholes owing to the fact that a woman was still a member of her own family after marrying into another clan. Abul Jahl was determined to enforce the Ban, and so he was continually on the watch but he could not always impose his will.
Abul Jahl stopped them and subsquently accused them of taking food to the enemy and threatened to denunce Hakim before Quraysh. While they were arguing, Abul Bakhtari, another man of Asad, came and asked what was the matter, and when it was explained to him, he turned and said to Abul Jahl:
"It is his aunt's flour and she hath sent him for it. Let the man go on his way."Neither Hakim nor Abul Bakhtari were Muslims, but the passing of this bag of flour from one member of the clan of Asad to another could concern no one outside that clan.
The interference of the Makhzumite was outrageous and intolerable; and when Abul Jahl still persisted, Abul Bakhtari became angery and picked up a camel's jawbone from the ground before him and brought it down on Abul Jahl's head with such force that he was half stunned and fell to the ground, whereupon they both trampled Abul Jahl heavily underfoot, to the gratification and delight of Hamzah who happened to come by at that moment.
Hakim was within his rights, but others simply defied the boycott out of sheer sympathy for its victims.
Then he would take off its halter and strike it a blow on the flank so that it would go past their houses; and another night he would load it with clothes and other gifts.
When two years had passed, despite such help there was perpetual shortage of food amongst the two victimised clans, and sometimes the shortage bordered on famine.