The chapter
When shirk first entered the world, it entered through grief. The people of Nuh had righteous men, Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, Nasr. When they died, Shaytan suggested images to remember them by; when that generation died, the images were worshipped. Ibn Abbas preserved the chain of that slide in Bukhari, and those same idols, he noted, later passed to the tribes of Arabia, waiting for the Path at Jahiliyya.
Against that first idolatry Allah sent His first messenger to the people of the earth, Nuh. The people of the great intercession on the Last Day will say to him exactly that: "You are the first messenger Allah sent to the people of the earth." He called them night and day, openly and secretly, for nine hundred and fifty years. The Qur'an compresses the longest da'wah in history into one devastating line: "He remained among them a thousand years less fifty, and the flood seized them while they were wrongdoers."
They mocked him. They put their fingers in their ears and drew their garments over their heads. The chiefs said only the lowest followed him, and demanded he expel the poor believers to make faith respectable. He refused: "I will not drive away those who believe. It is not for me to say I know the unseen."
Then the command came: build the ark. Build it under Our eyes and Our revelation, and do not address Me concerning the wrongdoers. A ship of planks and nails on dry land, far from any sea, while every chief who passed by laughed. "If you mock us," he said, "we will mock you as you mock, and you will know upon whom comes a punishment that disgraces."
Of all mankind, only a few believed, a handful in a thousand years, his own son and his own wife not among them. The Codex counts his node among the heaviest: the patience of centuries with almost nothing to show for it, and heaven counting it a triumph. Allah called him "a grateful servant" and made his name a greeting among the worlds: "Peace upon Nuh among all peoples."