God is telling Muhammad not to obey Abu Jahl, but to obey only Him.

This verse is important in the context of Islam’s history. The Qur'an and the message of Islam had as an immediate audience the Arab people, especially in the city of Mecca. One of the biggest challenges in proselytization was the fact that, since Mecca was a big trade city, most people practiced some sort of polytheistic paganism. Abu Jahl was one polytheistic leader that particularly opposed the prophet Muhammad’s work in Mecca.

Pitty Sing, the cat, gets his name from Pitti-Sing, a character in the nineteenth century comic opera The Mikado. In the opera, Pitti-Sing (along with Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah) are falsely blamed for the death of Nanki-Poo, and the trio is condemned to death. However, they are able to prove their innocence eventually and are pardoned.

This being falsely blamed for death, inherited in the cat’s name, plays more of a role as the story unfolds.

This is the physical incident that causes the car to crash: the cat is let out of its basket!

Of course, this physical tragedy (this accident where “nobody’s killed”) foreshadows the bigger tragedy in the story. The idiom “letting the cat out of the bag” means inadvertently revealing a secret. When the grandmother metaphorically lets the cat out of the bag and tells the Misfit she recognizes him, he goes on his killing spree.