Ma'arif al-Qur'an
Mufti Muhammad ShafiOn Spreading the Religious Message Stage by Stage as Convenient
Before the revelation of the verse (94): فَاصْدَعْ بِمَا تُؤْمَرُ (Now, proclaim what you are commanded to), the Holy Prophet ﷺ and his noble Sahabah ؓ used to make Salah and recite Qur'an secretly (lest they are seen and harmed). The process of passing on the religious message to others and the mission of teaching and training was also kept secret being limited to a counted few. The reason was that doing so openly would have given the disbelievers the opportunity to bring harm to them. In this verse (95), Allah Ta` ala has Himself taken the responsibility of seeing that they stay safe against those who deride their faith and bring harm to them. Therefore, from that time onwards, the mission was pursued openly and publicly in all its aspects, recitation of the Qur'an, acts of worship, the call, the propagation, everything.