The chapter
Approaching forty, the man whom Makkah called al-Amin, the Trustworthy, began to withdraw. Aisha's narration in Bukhari sets the sequence: first, true dreams: "he never saw a dream but it came like the break of dawn", six months of them, the tradition counts. Then "solitude was made beloved to him," and he took himself to the cave of Hira on Jabal an-Nur, the Mountain of Light, to practice tahannuth: nights of devotion, alone, before any revelation had defined what devotion should be.
The cave itself is barely a room of rock, yet its mouth faces the Kaaba. A man dissatisfied with his city's idols, unwilling to join their rites, unable yet to name the alternative, sitting night after night facing the House Ibrahim built, in the posture of waiting. Khadijah provisioned these retreats; he would return to her for supplies and go back up. The scholars note what this arrangement means: the greatest spiritual preparation in history ran on the quiet care of a believing wife.
What was he doing? The word tahannuth carries the sense of the hunafa', the remnant seekers of Ibrahim's way. He did not invent a liturgy; he watched, reflected, and grieved for his people. Surah ad-Duha names this interval with a tenderness the tradition treasures: "And He found you searching, and guided." Lost here is not error, it is the honest state of a sound heart in a corrupt age, before revelation arrives.
The Codex gives this quiet node full standing because everything explosive in the next node depends on it. Revelation did not fall on a distracted man; it fell on a man whose habits had been bent toward heaven for years, solitude, reflection, disgust with false gods, love of the true one not yet named. When Jibril finally seized him in that same cave, the vessel had been carried to the exact coordinates of the meeting, by his own feet, night after night, for years.