front cover

TRÜBNER’S
ORIENTAL SERIES.
VII.

Ballantyne Press
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.
EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MECCA

SELECTIONS FROM THE ḲUR-ÁN

BY
EDWARD WILLIAM LANE,

HON. DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, LEYDEN;
CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE;
HON. MEMBER OF THE GERMAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY,
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE, ETC.;
AUTHOR OF “THE MODERN EGYPTIANS,” AND “AN ARABIC-ENGLISH LEXICON;”
TRANSLATOR OF “THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS.”

A New Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
WITH AN INTRODUCTION,
BY
STANLEY LANE POOLE.
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1879.
[All rights reserved.]

PREFACE.

There are several translations of the Ḳur-án in several languages; but there are very few people who have the strength of mind to read any of them through. The chaotic arrangement and frequent repetitions, and the obscurity of the language, are sufficient to deter the most persistent reader, whilst the nature of a part of its contents renders the Ḳur-án unfit for a woman’s eye.

Yet there always has been a wish to know something about the sacred book of the Mohammadans, and it was with the design of satisfying this wish, whilst avoiding the weariness and the disgust which a complete perusal of the Ḳur-án must produce, that Mr. Lane arranged the ‘Selections’ which were published in 1843. In spite of many printer’s errors, due to the author’s absence from England, the book was so far successful that the edition was exhausted, and it is now very difficult to obtain a copy. But partly owing to the obstructions to the reading offered by an interwoven native commentary, and partly by reason of the preference shown for the doctrinal over the poetical passages, the book went into scholars’ hands rather than into the libraries of the general reading public. It has proved of considerable service to students of Arabic, who have found it the most accurate rendering in existence of a large part of the Ḳur-án; and even native Muslims of India, ignorant of Arabic, have used Lane’s ‘Selections’ as their Bible.

In this edition I have endeavoured rather to carry out the original intention of the translator. Experience has shown that the first plan was over-learned to commend itself to the average reader, for whom Mr. Lane had destined the book; in this edition I have therefore omitted many of the notes, which will not be missed by the reader for whom the book is intended, and for which the Arabic scholar has only to refer to the first edition, or to Sale’s Koran, whence most of them were derived. Again, the text of the first edition was obscured and interrupted by an interwoven commentary, which destroyed the pleasure of the language and often made the meaning less intelligible than before. This commentary has been thinned. Where it added nothing to the text, it has been erased; where it gave a curious or valuable explanation, it has been thrown into a footnote; where it merely supplied a necessary word to complete the sense, that word has been left in the text distinguished by a different type[1]. Once more, the early and wilder soorahs were almost wholly omitted in the first edition, whilst the later more dogmatic and less poetical soorahs were perhaps too fully represented. I have endeavoured to establish the balance between the two.

In this edition the Selections are divided into two parts. The first is Islám; the second, other religions as regarded in Islám. In the first are grouped, under distinctive headings, the more important utterances of Moḥammad on what his followers must believe and do; in the second are his versions of the history of the patriarchs and other personages of the Jewish and Christian writings.

It is only in the First Part that I have made much alteration, either by adding fresh extracts (distinguished by a sign), or by making a few merely verbal alterations in the original extracts, or by the suppression or transposition of the commentary. Any alterations that go beyond this—new renderings, for instance—are duly recorded in the footnotes.

The Second Part is almost unchanged from the first edition. In this part the interwoven commentary is left entire, for the traditions of the commentators about Abraham and Moses and Christ are as curious as the traditions of Moḥammad, and about as credible; and the narrative style of the Second Part allows the introduction of parentheses more easily than the rhetorical form which many of the extracts in the First Part present.

Mr. Lane’s Introduction was abridged from Sale’s Preliminary Discourse, with but little addition from his own knowledge. Sale’s Discourse abounds in information, but it is too detailed and lengthy for the purpose of this volume. I have, then, substituted a short sketch of the beginnings of Islám. I have tried to bring home to the reader the little we know of the early Arabs; then to draw the picture of the great Arab prophet and his work; to show what are the salient points of Islám; and finally to explain something of the history of the Ḳur-án and its contents. I am conscious of having drawn the picture with a weak hand, but I hope the sketch may serve as a not quite useless introduction to a volume of typical selections from a book which, in the peculiar character of its contents and the extraordinary power of its influence, has not its parallel in the world.

S. L. P.

June 1878.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

I.—THE ARABS BEFORE MOḤAMMAD.

‘Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour! No spirit feels waste,

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in the pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine,

And the locust flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell

That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.

How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!’

—Browning, Saul.

Between Egypt and Assyria, jostled by both, yielding to neither, lay a strange country, unknown save at its marches even to its neighbours, dwelt-in by a people that held itself aloof from all the earth—a people whom the great empires of the ancient world in vain essayed to conquer, against whom the power of Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium was proven impotence, and at whose hands even the superb Alexander, had he lived to test his dream, might for once have learnt the lesson of defeat. Witnessing the struggle and fall of one and another of the great tyrannies of antiquity, yet never entering the arena of the fight;—swept on its northern frontier by the conflicting armies of Khusru and Cæsar, but lifting never a hand in either cause;—Arabia was at length to issue forth from its silent mystery, and after baffling for a thousand years the curious gaze of strangers, was at last to draw to itself the fearful eyes of all men. The people of whom almost nothing before could certainly be asserted but its existence was finally of its own free will to throw aside the veil, to come forth from its fastnesses, and imperiously to bring to its feet the kingdoms of the world.

It is not all Arabia of which I speak. The story to tell has nothing as yet to say to the ‘happy’ tilled lands of the south, nor to the outlying princedoms of El-Ḥeereh and Ghassán bordering the territories and admitting the suzerainty of Persia and Rome. These lands were not wrapped in mystery: the Himyerite’s kingdom in the Yemen, the rule of Zenobia at Palmyra, were familiar to the nations around. But the cradle of Islám was not here.

Along the eastern coast of the Red Sea, sometimes thrusting its spurs of red sandstone and porphyry into the waves, sometimes drawing away and leaving a wide stretch of lowland, runs a rugged range of mountain. One above another, the hills rise from the coast, leaving here and there between them a green valley, where you may see an Arab settlement or a group of Bedawees watering their flocks. Rivers there are none; and the streams that gather from the rainfall are scarcely formed but they sink into the parched earth. Yet beneath the dried-up torrent-beds a rivulet trickles at times, and straightway there spreads a rich oasis dearly prized by the wanderers of the desert. All else is bare and desolate. Climb hill after hill, and the same sight meets the eye—barren mountain-side, dry gravelly plain, and the rare green valleys. At length you have reached the topmost ridge; and you see, not a steep descent, no expected return to the plain, but a vast desert plateau, blank, inhospitable, to all but Arabs unindwellable. You have climbed the Ḥijáz—the ‘barrier’—and are come to the steppes of the Nejd—the ‘highland.’ In the valleys of this barrier-land are the Holy Cities, Mekka and Medina. Here is the birthplace of Islám: the Arab tribes of the Ḥijáz and the Nejd were the first disciples of Moḥammad.

One may tell much of a people’s character from its home. Truism as it seems, there is yet a meaning in the saying that the Arabs are peculiarly the people of Arabia. Those who have travelled in this wonderful land tell us of the quickening influence of the air and scene of the desert. The fresh breath of the plain, the glorious sky, the still of the wide expanse, trod by no step but your own, looked upon only by yourself and perhaps yonder solitary eagle or the wild goat leaping the cliffs you have left behind, the absolute stillness and aloneness, bring about a strange sense of delight and exultation, a bounding-up of spirits held in long restraint, an unknown nimbleness of wit and limb. The Arabs felt all this and more in their bright imaginative souls. A few would settle in villages, and engage in the trade which came through from India to the West; but such were held in poor repute by the true Bedawees, who preferred above all things else the free life of the desert. It is a relief to turn from the hurry and unrest of modern civilisation, from the never-ending strife for wealth, for ‘position,’ for pleasure, even for knowledge, and look for a moment on the careless life of the Bedawee. He lived the aimless, satisfied life of some child; he sought no change; he was supremely content with the exquisite sense of simple existence; he was happy because he lived. He wished no more. He dreaded the dark After-death; he thrust it from his thoughts as often as it would force itself unwelcome upon him. Utterly fearless of man and fortune, he took no thought for the morrow: whatever it brought forth, he felt confidently his strength to enjoy or endure; only let him seize the happiness of to-day while it shall last, and drain to the dregs the overbrimming cup of his life. He was ambitious of glory and victory, but it was not an ambition that clouded his joy. Throughout a life that was full of energy, of passion, of strong endeavour after his ideal of desert perfectness, there was yet a restful sense of satisfied enjoyment, a feeling that life was of a surety well worth living.

For the Arab had his ideal of life. The true son of the desert must in the old times do more than stretch his limbs contentedly under the shade of the overhanging rock. He must be brave and chivalrous, generous, hospitable; ready to sacrifice himself and his substance for his clan; prompt to help the needy and the traveller; true to his word, and, not least, eloquent in his speech.

Devotion to the clan was the strongest tie the Arab possessed. Though tracing their descent from a common traditional ancestor, the great northern family of Bedawees was split up into numerous clans, owning no central authority, but led, scarcely governed, each by its own chief, who was the most valiant and best-born man in it. The whole clan acted as one being; an injury done to one member was revenged by all, and even a crime committed by a clansman was upheld by the whole brotherhood. Though a small spark would easily light-up war between even friendly clans, it was rarely that those of kin met as enemies. It is told how a clan suffered long and oft-repeated injuries from a kindred clan without one deed of revenge. ‘They are our brothers,’ they said; ‘perhaps they will return to better feelings; perhaps we shall see them again as they once were.’ To be brought to poverty or even to die for the clan, the Arab deemed his duty—his privilege. To add by his prowess or his hospitality or his eloquence to the glory of the clan was his ambition.

A mountain[2] we have where dwells he whom we shelter there,

lofty, before whose height the eye falls back blunted:

Deep-based is its root below ground, and overhead there soars

its peak to the stars of heaven whereto no man reaches.

A folk are we who deem it no shame to be slain in fight,

though that be the deeming thereof of Salool and ´Ámir;

Our love of death brings near to us our days of doom,

but their dooms shrink from death and stand far distant.

There dies among us no lord a quiet death in his bed,

and never is blood of us poured forth without vengeance.

Our souls stream forth in a flood from the edge of the whetted swords:

no otherwise than so does our spirit leave its mansion.

Pure is our stock, unsullied: fair is it kept and bright

by mothers whose bed bears well, and fathers mighty.

To the best of the uplands we wend, and when the season comes

we travel adown to the best of fruitful valleys.

Like rain of the heaven are we: there is not in all our line

one blunt of heart, nor among us is counted a niggard.

We say nay when so we will to the words of other men,

but no man to us says nay when we give sentence.

When passes a lord of our line, in his stead there rises straight

a lord to say the say and do the deeds of the noble.

Our beacon is never quenched to the wanderer of the night,

nor has ever a guest blamed us where men meet together.

Our Days[3] are famous among our foemen, of fair report,

branded and blazed with glory like noble horses.

Our swords have swept throughout all lands both west and east,

and gathered many a notch from the steel of hauberk-wearers;

Not used are they when drawn to be laid back in the sheaths

before that the folk they meet are spoiled and scattered.

If thou knowest not, ask men what they think of us and them

—not alike are he that knows and he that knows not.

The children of Ed-Dayyán are the shaft of their people’s mill,

—around them it turns and whirls, while they stand midmost.[4]

The renown of the clan was closely wrapped up with the Arab chieftain’s personal renown. He was keenly sensitive on the point of honour, and to that notion he attached a breadth of meaning which can scarcely be understood in these days. Honour included all the different virtues that went to make up the ideal Bedawee. To be proved wanting in any of these was to be dishonoured. Above all things, the man who would ‘keep his honour and defile it not’ must be brave and hospitable—

A rushing rain-flood when he gave guerdons:

when he sprang to the onset, a mighty lion.

The Arab warrior was a mighty man of valour. He would spend whole days in the saddle, burdened with heavy armour, in the pursuit of a foe, seeking the life of the slayer of his kin, or sweeping down upon the caravan of rich merchandise which his more peaceful countrymen of the towns were carrying through the deserts. The Arab lived mainly by plunder. His land did not yield him food—unless it were dates, the Bedawee’s bread—and he relied on the success of his foraging expeditions for his support. These he conducted with perfect good-breeding; he used no violence when it could be avoided; he merely relieved the caravan from the trouble of carrying any further the goods that he was himself willing to take charge of, urging, if necessary, the unfair treatment of his forefather Ishmael as an excellent reason for pillaging the sons of Isaac. ‘When a woman is the victim, no Bedouin brigand, however rude, will be ill-mannered enough to lay hands upon her. He begs her to take off the garment on which he has set his heart, and he then retires to a distance and stands with eyes averted, lest he should do violence to her modesty.’

The poems of the early Arabs are full of the deeds of their warriors, the excitement of the pitched battle, the delight of the pursuit, the nightly raid on the camp, the trial of skill between rival chiefs, and the other pictures of a warrior’s triumph. Here we find little of the generosity of war: mercy was rarely exercised and hatred was carried to its extremest limits; quarter was neither asked nor given; to despatch a wounded man was no disgrace; the families of the vanquished were enslaved. Notwithstanding his frank genial nature, the Arab was of a dangerously quick temper, derived, he boasted, from the flesh he lived on of the camel, the surliest and most ill-conditioned of beasts. If he conceived himself insulted, he was bound to revenge himself to the full, or he would have been deemed dishonoured for ever. And since his fiery temper easily took offence, the history of the early Arabs is full of the traditions of slight quarrels and their horrible results—secret assassination and the long-lasting blood-feud.

Many the warriors, noon-journeying, who, when

night fell, journeyed on and halted at dawning—

Keen each one of them, girt with a keen blade

that when one drew it flashed forth like the lightning—

They were tasting of sleep by sips, when, as

they nodded, thou didst fright them, and they were scattered.

Vengeance we did on them: there escaped us

of the two houses none but the fewest.

And if Hudheyl[5] broke the edge of his[6] sword-blade—

many the notch that Hudheyl gained from him!

Many the time that he made them kneel down on

jagged rocks where the hoof is worn with running!

Many the morning he fell on their shelter,

and after slaughter came plunder and spoiling!

Hudheyl has been burned by me, one valiant

whom Evil tires not though they be wearied—

Whose spear drinks deep the first draught, and thereon

drinks deep again of the blood of foemen.

Forbidden was wine, but now it is lawful:

hard was the toil that made it lawful!

Reach me the cup, O Sawád son of ´Amr!

my body is spent with gaining my vengeance.

To Hudheyl we gave to drink Death’s goblet,

whose dregs are disgrace and shame and dishonour.

The hyena laughs over the slain of Hudheyl, and

the wolf—see thou—grins by their corpses,

And the vultures flap their wings, full-bellied

treading their dead, too gorged to leave them.

The contempt which the Arab, with a few noble exceptions, felt for the gentler virtues is seen in these lines:—

Had I been a son of Mázin, there had not plundered my herds

the sons of the Child of the Dust, Dhuhl son of Sheybán!

There had straightway arisen to help me a heavy-handed kin,

good smiters when help is needed, though the feeble bend to the blow:

Men who, when Evil bares before them his hindmost teeth,

fly gaily to meet him, in companies or alone.

They ask not their brother, when he lays before them his wrong

in his trouble, to give them proof of the truth of what he says.

But as for my people, though their number be not small,

they are good for nought against evil, however light it be;

They requite with forgiveness the wrong of those that do them wrong,

and the evil deeds of the evil they meet with kindness and love;

As though thy Lord had created among the tribes of men

themselves alone to fear Him, and never one man more.

Would that I had in their stead a folk who, when they ride forth,

strike swiftly and hard, on horse or on camel borne!

A point on which the temper of the Bedawee was easily touched was his family pride. The Arab prized good blood as much in men as in his horses and camels. In these he saw the importance of breed, and in men he firmly believed the same principle held good. With the tenacious memory of his race, he had no difficulty in remembering the whole of a complicated pedigree, and he would often proudly dwell on the purity of his blood and the gallant deeds of his forefathers. He would challenge another chief to prove a more noble descent, and hot disputes and bitter rivalries often came of these comparisons.

But if noble birth brought rivalry and hatred, it brought withal excellent virtues. The Arab nobleman was not a man who was richer and more idle and luxurious than his inferiors: his position, founded upon descent, depended for its maintenance on personal qualities. Rank brought with it onerous obligations. The chief, if he would retain and carry on the repute of his line, must not only be fearless and ready to fight all the world; he must be given to hospitality, generous to kith and kin, and to all who cry unto him. His tent must be so pitched in the camp that it shall not only be the first that the enemy attacks, but also the first the wayworn stranger approaches; and at night fires must be kindled hard by to guide wanderers in the desert to his hospitable entertain ment. If a man came to an Arab noble’s tent and said, ‘I throw myself on your honour,’ he was safe from his enemies until they had trampled on the dead body of his host. Nothing was baser than to give up a guest; the treachery was rare, and brought endless dishonour upon the clan in which the shame had taken place. The poet extols the tents—

Where dwells a kin great of heart, whose word is enough to shield

whom they shelter when peril comes in a night of fierce strife and storm;

Yea, noble are they: the seeker of vengeance gains not from them

the blood of his foe, nor is he that wrongs them left without help.

The feeling lasted even under the debased rule of Muslim despots; for it is related that a governor was once ordering-out some prisoners to execution, when one of them asked for a drink of water, which was immediately given him. He then turned to the governor and said, ‘Wilt thou slay thy guest?’ and was forthwith set free. A pledge of protection was inferred in the giving of hospitality, and to break his word was a thing not to be thought upon by an Arab. He did not care to give an oath; his simple word was enough, for it was known to be inviolable. Hence the priceless worth of the Arab chief’s word of welcome: it meant protection, unswerving fidelity, help, and succour.

There was no bound to this hospitality. It was the pride of the Arab to place everything he possessed at the service of the guest. The last milch-camel must be killed sooner than the duties of hospitality be neglected. The story is told of Ḥátim, a gallant poet-warrior of the tribe of Ṭayyi, which well illustrates the Arab ideal of hostship. Ḥátim was at one time brought to the brink of starvation by the dearth of a rainless season. For a whole day he and his family had eaten nothing, and at night, after soothing the children to sleep by telling them some of those stories in which the Arabs have few rivals, he was trying by his cheerful conversation to make his wife forget her hunger. Just then they heard steps without, and a corner of the tent was raised. ‘Who is there?’ said Ḥátim. A woman’s voice replied, ‘I am such a one, thy neighbour. My children have nothing to eat, and are howling like young wolves, and I have come to beg help of thee.’ ‘Bring them here,’ said Ḥátim. His wife asked him what he would do, for if he could not feed his own children, how should he find food for this woman’s? ‘Do not disturb thyself,’ he answered. Now Ḥátim had a horse renowned far and wide for the purity of his stock and the fleetness and beauty of his paces. He would not kill his favourite for himself nor even for his own children; but now he went out and slew him, and prepared him with fire for the strangers’ need. And when he saw them eating with his wife and children, he exclaimed, ‘It were a shame that you alone should eat whilst all the camp is perishing of hunger;’ and he went and called the neighbours to the meal, and in the morning there remained of the horse nothing but his bones. But as for himself, wrapped in his mantle, he sat apart in a corner of the tent.

This Ḥátim is a type of the Arab nature at its noblest. Though renowned for his courage and skill in war, he never suffered his enmity to overcome his generosity. He had sworn an oath never to take a man’s life, and he strictly observed it, and always withheld the fatal last blow. In spite of his clemency, he was ever successful in the wars of his clan, and brought back from his raids many a rich spoil, only to spend it at once in his princely fashion. His generosity and faithful observance of his word at times placed him in positions of great danger; but the alternative of denying his principles seems never to have occurred to his mind. For instance, he had imposed upon himself as a law never to refuse a gift to him that asked it of him. Once, engaged in single combat, he had disarmed and routed his opponent, who then turned and said, ‘Ḥátim, give me thy spear.’ At once he threw it to him, leaving himself defenceless; and had he not met an adversary worthy of himself, this had been the last of his deeds. Happily Ḥátim was not the only generous warrior of the Arabs, and his foe did not avail himself of his advantage. When Ḥátim’s friends remonstrated with him on the rashness of an act which, in the spirit of shopkeepers, they regarded as quixotic, Ḥátim said, ‘What would you have me to do? He asked of me a gift!’

It was Ḥátim’s practice to buy the liberty of all captives who sought his aid: it was but another application of the Arab virtue of hospitality. Once a captive called to him when he was on a journey and had not with him the means of paying the ransom. But he was not wont to allow any difficulties to baulk him of the exercise of his duty, and he had the prisoner released, stepping meanwhile into his chains until his own clan should send the ransom.

Brave, chivalrous, faithful, and generous beyond the needful of Arab ideal—so that his niggard wife, using the privilege of high dames, repudiated him because he was ever ruining himself and her by his open hand—Ḥátim filled up the measure of Arab virtue by his eloquence, and such of his poems as have come down to us reflect the nobility of his life. As a youth he had shown a strong passion for poetry, and would spare no means of doing honour to poets. His grandfather, in despair at the boy’s extravagance, sent him away from the camp to guard the camels, which were pastured at a distance. Sitting there in a state of solitude little congenial to his nature, Ḥátim lifted his eyes and saw a caravan approaching. It was the caravan of three great poets who were travelling to the court of the King of El-Ḥeereh. Ḥátim begged them to alight and to accept of refreshment after the hot and dreary journey. He killed them a camel each, though one would have more than sufficed for the three; and in return they wrote him verses in praise of himself and his kindred. Overjoyed at the honour, Ḥátim insisted on the poets each accepting a hundred camels; and they departed with their gifts. When the grandfather came to the pasturing and asked where the camels were gone, Ḥátim answered, ‘I have exchanged them for a crown of honour, which will shine for all time on the brow of thy race. The lines in which great poets have celebrated our house will pass from mouth to mouth, and will carry our glory over all Arabia.’ [7]

This story well illustrates the Arab’s passionate love of poetry. He conceived his language to be the finest in the world, and he prized eloquence and poetry as the goodliest gifts of the gods. There were three great events in Arab life, when the clan was called together and great feastings and rejoicings ensued. One was the birth of a son to a chief; another the foaling of a generous mare; the third was the discovery that a great poet had risen up among them. The advent of the poet meant the immortality of the deeds of the clansmen and the everlasting contumely of their foes; it meant the raising up of the glory of the tribe over all the clans of Arabia, and the winning of triumphs by bitterer weapons than sword and spear—the weapons of stinging satire and scurrilous squib. No man might dare withstand the power of the poets among a people who were keenly alive to the point of an epigram, and who never forgot an ill-natured jibe if it were borne upon musical verse. Most of the great heroes of the desert were poets as well as warriors, and their poesy was deemed the chiefest gem in their crown, and, like their courage, was counted a proof of generous birth. The Khalif ´Omar said well, ‘The kings of the Arabs are their orators and poets, those who practise and who celebrate all the virtues of the Bedawee.’

This ancient poetry of the Arabs is the reflection of the people’s life. Far away from the trouble of the world, barred by wild wastes from the stranger, the Bedawee lived his happy child’s life, enjoying to the uttermost the good the gods had sent him, delighting in the face that Nature showed him, inspired by the glorious breath of the deserts that were his home. His poetry rings of that desert life. It is emotional, passionate, seldom reflective. Not the end of life, the whence and the whither, but the actual present joy of existence, was the subject of his song. Vivid painting of nature is the characteristic of this poetry: it is natural, unpolished, unlaboured. The scenes of the desert—the terrors of the nightly ride through the hill-girdled valley where the Ghools and the Jinn have their haunts; the gloom of the barren plain, where the wolf, ‘like a ruined gamester,’ roams ululating; the weariness of the journey under the noonday sun; the stifling of the sand-storm, the delusions of the mirage; or again, the solace of the palm-tree’s shade, and the delights of the cool well;—such are the pictures of the Arab poet. The people’s life is another frequent theme: the daily doings of the herdsman, the quiet pastoral life, on the one hand; on the other, the deeds of the chiefs—war, plunder, the chase, wassail, revenge, friendship, love. There were satires on rival tribes, panegyrics on chiefs, laments for the dead. This poetry is wholly objective, artless, childlike; it is the outcome of a people still in the freshness of youth, whom the mysteries and complications of life have not yet set a-thinking. ‘Just as his language knows but the present and the past, so the ancient Arab lived but in to-day and yesterday. The future is nought to him; he seizes the present with too thorough abandonment to have an emotion left for anything beyond. He troubles himself not with what fate the morrow may bring forth, he dreams not of a beautiful future,—only he revels in the present, and his glance looks backward alone. Rich in ideas and impressions, he is poor in thought. He drains hastily the foaming cup of life; he feels deeply and passionately; but it is as if he were never conscious of the coming of the thoughtful age which, while it surveys the past, as often turns an anxious look to the unknown future.’

It is very difficult for a Western mind to enter into the real beauty of the old Arab poetry. The life it depicts is so unlike any we can now witness, that it is almost removed beyond the pale of our sympathies. The poetry is loaded with metaphors and similes, which to us seem far-fetched, though they are drawn from the simplest daily sights of the Bedawee. Moreover, it is only in fragments that we can read it; for the change in the whole character of Arab life and in the current of Arab ideas which followed the conquests of Islám extinguished the old songs, which were no longer suitable to the new conditions of things; and as they were seldom recorded in writing, we possess but a little remnant of them.[8] Yet ‘these fragments may be broken, defaced, dimmed, and obscured by fanaticism, ignorance, and neglect; but out of them there arises anew all the freshness, bloom, and glory of desert-song, as out of Homer’s epics rise the glowing spring-time of humanity and the deep blue heavens of Hellas. It is not a transcendental poetry, rich in deep and thoughtful legend and lore, or glittering in the many-coloured prisms of fancy, but a poetry the chief task of which is to paint life and nature as they really are; and within its narrow bounds it is magnificent. It is chiefly and characteristically full of manliness, of vigour, and of a chivalrous spirit, doubly striking when compared with the spirit of abjectness and slavery found in some other Asiatic nations. It is wild and vast and monotonous as the yellow seas of its desert solitudes; it is daring and noble, tender and true.’ [9]

There was one place where, above all others, the Ḳaṣeedehs of the ancient Arabs were recited: this was ´Okáḍh, the Olympia of Arabia, where there was held a great annual Fair, to which not merely the merchants of Mekka and the south, but the poet-heroes of all the land resorted. The Fair of ´Okáḍh was held during the sacred months,—a sort of ‘God’s Truce,’ when blood could not be shed without a violation of the ancient customs and faiths of the Bedawees. Thither went the poets of rival clans, who had as often locked spears as hurled rhythmical curses. There was little fear of a bloody ending to the poetic contest, for those heroes who might meet there with enemies or blood-avengers are said to have worn masks or veils, and their poems were recited by a public orator at their dictation. That these precautions and the sacredness of the time could not always prevent the ill-feeling evoked by the pointed personalities of rival singers leading to a fray and bloodshed is proved by recorded instances; but such results were uncommon, and as a rule the customs of the time and place were respected. In spite of occasional broils on the spot, and the lasting feuds which these poetic contests must have excited, the Fair of ´Okáḍh was a grand institution. It served as a focus for the literature of all Arabia: every one with any pretensions to poetic power came, and if he could not himself gain the applause of the assembled people, at least he could form one of the critical audience on whose verdict rested the fame or the shame of every poet. The Fair of ´Okáḍh was a literary congress, without formal judges, but with unbounded influence. It was here that the polished heroes of the desert determined points of grammar and prosody; here the seven Golden Songs were recited, although (alas for the charming legend!) they were not afterwards ‘suspended’ on the Kaạbeh; and here ‘a magical language, the language of the Ḥijáz,’ was built out of the dialects of Arabia, and was made ready to the skilful hand of Moḥammad, that he might conquer the world with his Ḳur-án.

The Fair of ´Okáḍh was not merely a centre of emulation for Arab poets: it was also an annual review of Bedawee virtues. It was there that the Arab nation once-a-year inspected itself, so to say, and brought forth and criticised its ideals of the noble and the beautiful in life and in poetry. For it was in poetry that the Arab—and for that matter each man all the world over—expressed his highest thoughts, and it was at ´Okáḍh that these thoughts were measured by the standard of the Bedawee ideal. The Fair not only maintained the highest standard of poetry that the Arabic language has ever reached: it also upheld the noblest idea of life and duty that the Arab nation has yet set forth and obeyed. ´Okáḍh was the press, the stage, the pulpit, the Parliament, and the Académie Française of the Arab people; and when, in his fear of the infidel poets (whom Imra-el-Ḳeys was to usher to hell), Moḥammad abolished the Fair, he destroyed the Arab nation even whilst he created his own new nation of Muslims;—and the Muslims cannot sit in the places of the old pagan Arabs.

It is very difficult for the Western mind to dissociate the idea of Oriental poetry from the notion of amatory odes, and sonnets to the lady’s eyebrow: but even the few extracts that have been given in this chapter show that the Arab had many other subjects besides love to sing about, and though the divine theme has its place in almost every poem, it seldom rivals the prominence of war and nature-painting, and it is treated from a much less sensual point of view than that of later Arab poets. Many writers have drawn a gloomy picture of the condition of women in Arabia before the coming of Moḥammad, and there is no doubt that in many cases their lot was a miserable one. There are ancient Arabic proverbs that point to the contempt in which woman’s judgment and character were held by the Arabs of ‘the Time of Ignorance,’ and Moḥammad must have derived his mean opinion of women from a too general impression among his countrymen. The marriage tie was certainly very loose among the ancient Arabs. The ceremony itself was of the briefest. The man said khiṭb (i.e. I am an asker-in-marriage), and the giver-away answered nikḥ (i.e., I am a giver-in-marriage), and the knot was thus tied, only to be undone with equal facility and brevity. The frequency of divorce among the Arabs does not speak well for their constancy, and must have had a degrading effect upon the women. Hence it is argued that women were the objects of contempt rather than of respect among the ancient Arabs.

Yet there is reason to believe that the evidence upon which this conclusion is founded is partial and one-sided. There was a wide gulf between the Bedawee and the town Arab. It is not impossible that the view commonly entertained as to the state of women in preïslamic times is based mainly on what Moḥammad saw around him in Mekka, and not on the ordinary life of the desert. To such a conjecture a curiously uniform support is lent by the ancient poetry of the desert; and though the poets were then—as they always are—men of finer mould than the rest, yet their example, and still more their poems passing from mouth to mouth, must have created a widespread belief in their principles. It is certain that the roaming Bedawee, like the mediæval knight, entertained a chivalrous reverence for women, although he, too, like the knight, was not always above a career of promiscuous gallantry; but there was always a certain glamour of romance about the intrigues of the Bedawee. He did not regard the object of his love as a chattel to be possessed, but as a divinity to be assiduously worshipped. The poems are full of instances of the courtly respect displayed by the heroes of the desert toward defenceless maidens, and the mere existence of so general an ideal of conduct in the poems is a strong argument for Arab chivalry: for with the Arabs the abyss between the ideal accepted of the mind and the attaining thereof in action was narrower than it is among ‘more advanced’ nations.

Whatever was the condition of women in the trading cities and villages, it is certain that in the desert woman was regarded as she has never since been among Muslims. The modern ḥareem system was there as yet undreamt of; the maid of the desert was unfettered by the ruinous restrictions of modern life in the East. She was free to choose her own husband, and to bind him to have no other wife than herself. She might receive male visitors, even strangers, without suspicion: for her virtue was too dear to her and too well assured to need the keeper. It was the bitterest taunt of all to say to a hostile clan that their men had not the heart to give nor their women to deny; for the chastity of the women of the clan was reckoned only next to the valour and generosity of the men. In those days bastardy was an indelible stain. It was the wife who inspired the hero to deeds of glory, and it was her praise that he most valued when he returned triumphant. The hero of desert song thought himself happy to die in guarding some women from their pursuers. Wounded to the death, ´Antarah halted alone in a narrow pass, and bade the women press on to a place of safety. Planting his spear in the ground, he supported himself on his horse, so that when the pursuers came up they knew not he was dead, and dared not approach within reach of his dreaded arm. At length the horse moved, and the body fell to the ground, and the enemies saw that it was but the corpse of the hero that had held the pass. In death, as in a life sans peur et sans reproche, ´Antarah was true to the chivalry of his race.

There are many instances like this of the knightly courtesy of the Arab chief in ‘the Time of Ignorance.’ In the old days, as an ancient writer says, the true Arab had but one love, and her he loved till death, and she him. Even when polygamy became commoner, especially in the towns, it was not what is meant by polygamy in a modern Muslim state: it was rather the patriarchal system of Abram and Sarai.

There is much in the fragments of the ancient poetry which reflects this fine spirit. It is ofttimes ‘tender and true,’ and even Islám could not wholly root out the real Arab sentiment, which reappears in Muslim times in the poems of Aboo-Firás. Especially valuable is the evidence of the old poetry with regard to the love of a father for his daughters. Infanticide, which is commonly attributed to the whole Arab nation of every age before Islám, was in reality exceedingly rare in the desert, and after almost dying out only revived about the time of Moḥammad. It was probably adopted by poor and weak clans, either from inability to support their children, or in order to protect themselves from the stain of having their children dishonoured by stronger tribes, and the occasional practice of this barbarous and suicidal custom affords no ground for assuming an unnatural hatred and contempt for girls among the ancient Arabs. These verses of a father to his daughter tell a different story:—

If no Umeymeh were there, no want would trouble my soul,

no labour call me to toil for bread through pitchiest night;

What moves my longing to live is but that well do I know

how low the fatherless lies, how hard the kindness of kin.

I quake before loss of wealth lest lacking fall upon her,

and leave her shieldless and bare as flesh set forth on a board.

My life she prays for, and I from mere love pray for her death—

yea death, the gentlest and kindest guest to visit a maid.

I fear an uncle’s rebuke, a brother’s harshness for her;

my chiefest end was to spare her heart the grief of a word.

Once more, the following lines do not breathe the spirit of infanticide:—

Fortune has brought me down (her wonted way)

from station great and high to low estate;

Fortune has rent away my plenteous store:

of all my wealth, honour alone is left.

Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft

did Fortune make me laugh with what she gave!

But for these girls, the Ḳaṭa’s downy brood,

unkindly thrust from door to door as hard,

Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread

in earth that has no lack of breadth and length;

Nay, but our children in our midst, what else

but our hearts are they walking on the ground?

If but the wind blow harsh on one of them,

mine eye says no to slumber all night long.

Hitherto we have been looking at but one side of Arab life. The Bedawees were indeed the bulk of the race, and furnished the swords of the Muslim conquests; but there was also a vigorous town-life in Arabia, and the citizens waxed rich with the gains of their trafficking. For through Arabia ran the trade-route between East and West: it was the Arab traders who carried the produce of the Yemen to the markets of Syria; and how ancient was their commerce one may divine from the words of a poet of Judæa spoken more than a thousand years before the coming of Moḥammad.

Wedan and Javan from San´a paid for thy produce:

sword-blades, cassia, and calamus were in thy trafficking.

Dedan was thy merchant in saddle-cloths for riding;

Arabia and all the merchants of Kedar, they were the merchants of thy hand:

in lambs and rams and goats, in these were they thy merchants.

The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants,

with the chief of all spices, and with every precious stone, and gold, they paid for thy produce.

Haran, Aden, and Canneh, the merchants of Sheba, Asshur and Chilmad were thy merchants;

They were thy merchants in excellent wares,

in cloth of blue and broidered work,

in chests of cloth of divers colours, bound with cords and made fast among thy merchandize.[10]

Mekka was the centre of this trading life, the typical Arab city of old times—a stirring little town, with its caravans bringing the silks and woven stuffs of Syria and the far-famed damask, and carrying away the sweet-smelling produce of Arabia, frankincense, cinnamon, sandal-wood, aloe, and myrrh, and the dates and leather and metals of the south, and the goods that come to the Yemen from Africa and even India; its assemblies of merchant-princes in the Council Hall near the Kaạbeh; and again its young poets running over with love and gallantry; its Greek and Persian slave-girls brightening the luxurious banquet with their native songs, when as yet there was no Arab school of music, and the monotonous but not unmelodious chant of the camel-driver was the national song of Arabia; and its club, where busy men spent their idle hours in playing chess and draughts, or in gossiping with their acquaintance. It was a little republic of commerce, too much infected with the luxuries and refinements of the states it traded with, yet retaining enough of the free Arab nature to redeem it from the charge of effeminacy.

Mekka was a great home of music and poetry, and this characteristic lasted into Muslim times. There is a story of a certain stonemason who had a wonderful gift of singing. When he was at work the young men used to come and importune him, and bring him gifts of money and food to induce him to sing. He would then make a stipulation that they should first help him in his work; and forthwith they would strip off their cloaks, and the stones would gather round him rapidly. Then he would mount a rock and begin to sing, whilst the whole hill was coloured red and yellow with the variegated garments of his audience. Singers were then held in the highest admiration, and the greatest chiefs used to pay their court to ladies of the musical profession. One of them used to give receptions, open to the whole city, in which she would appear in great state, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, each dressed magnificently, and wearing ‘an elegant artificial chignon.’ It was in this town-life that the worse qualities of the Arab came out; it was here that his raging passion for dicing and his thirst for wine were most prominent. In the desert there was little opportunity for indulging in either luxury; but in a town which often welcomed a caravan bringing goods to the value of twenty thousand pound, such excesses were to be looked for. Excited by the song of the Greek slave-girl and the fumes of mellow wine, the Mekkan would throw the dice till, like the Germans of Tacitus, he had staked and lost his own liberty.

But Mekka was more than a centre of trade and of song. It was the focus of the religion of the Arabs. Thither the tribes went up every year to kiss the black stone which had fallen from heaven in the primeval days of Adam, and to make the seven circuits of the Kaạbeh naked,—for they would not approach God in the garments in which they had done their sins,—and to perform the other ceremonies of the pilgrimage. The Kaạbeh, a cubical building in the centre of Mekka, was the most sacred temple in all Arabia, and it gave its sanctity to all the district around. It had been, saith tradition, first built by Adam from a heavenly model, and then rebuilt from time to time by Seth and Abraham and Ishmael, and less reverend persons, and it contained the sacred things of the land. Here was the black stone, here the great god of red agate, Hubal, and the three hundred and sixty idols, one for each day of the year, which Moḥammad afterwards destroyed in one day. Here was Abraham’s stone and that other which marked the tomb of Ishmael, and hard by Zemzem, the god-sent spring which gushed from the sand when the forefather of the Arabs was perishing of thirst.

The religion of the ancient Arabs, little as we know of it, is especially interesting, inasmuch as the Arabs longest retained the original Semitic character, and hence probably the original Semitic religion: and so in the ancient religion of Arabia we see the religion once professed by Chaldeans, Canaanites, Phœnicians. This ancient religion ‘rises little higher than animistic polydaemonism. It is a collection of tribal religions standing side by side, only loosely united, though there are traces of a once closer connection.’ [11] The great objects of worship were the sun and the stars and the three moon-goddesses—El-Lát the bright moon, Menáh the dark, and El-´Uzzà the union of the two; whilst a lower cultus of trees, stones, and mountains, supposed to be dwelt-in by souls, shows that the religion had not yet quite risen above simple fetishism. At the time of Moḥammad the Arabs worshipped numerous images, which may have been merely a development from the previous stone-worship, or may have been introduced from intercourse with Christians. There are traces of a belief in a supreme God behind this pantheon, and the moon-goddesses and other divinities were regarded as daughters of the most high God (Alláh ta´ála)—a conception also possibly derived from Christianity. The various deities (but not the Supreme Allah) had their fanes, where human sacrifices, though rare, were not unknown; and their cultus was superintended by a hereditary line of seers, who were held in great reverence, but never developed into a priestly caste.

Besides the tribal gods, individual households had their special Penates, to whom was due the first and the last salám of the returning or outgoing host. But in spite of all this superstitious apparatus the Arabs were never a religious people. In the old days, as now, they were reckless, skeptical, materialistic. They had their gods and their divining-arrows, but they were ready to demolish both if the responses proved contrary to their wishes. A great majority believed in no future life nor in a reckoning-day of good and evil. If a few tied camels to the graves of the dead that the corpse might ride mounted to the judgment-seat, it must have been the exception; and if there are some doubtful traces of the doctrine of metempsychosis, this again must have been the creed of the very few.

Christianity and Judaism had made but small impress upon the Arabs. There were Jewish tribes in the north, and there is evidence in the Ḳur-án and elsewhere that the traditions and rites of Judaism were widely known in Arabia. But the creed was too narrow and too exclusively national to commend itself to the majority of the people. Christianity fared even worse. Whether or not St. Paul went there, it is at least certain that very little effect was produced by the preaching of Christianity in Arabia. We hear of Christians on the borders, and even two or three among the Mekkans, and bishops and churches are spoken of at Dhafár and Nejrán. But the Christianity that the Arabs knew was, like the Judaism of the northern tribes, a very imperfect reflection of the faith it professed to set forth. It had become a thing of the head instead of the heart, and the refinements of monophysite and monothelite doctrines gained no hold upon the Arab mind.

Thus Judaism and Christianity, though they were well known, and furnished many ideas and ceremonies to Islám, were never able to effect any general settlement in Arabia. The common Arabs did not care much about any religion, and the finer spirits found the wrangling dogmatism of the Christian and the narrow isolation of the Jew little to their mind. For there were before the time of Moḥammad men who were dissatisfied with the low fetishism in which their countrymen were plunged, and who protested emphatically against the idle and often cruel superstitions of the Arabs. Not to refer to the prophets, who, as the Ḳur-án relates, were sent in old time to the tribes of ´Ád and Thamood to convert them, there was, immediately before the preaching of Moḥammad, a general feeling that a change was at hand; a prophet was expected, and women were anxiously hoping for male children if so be they might mother the Apostle of God; and the more thoughtful minds, tinged with traditions of Judaism, were seeking for what they called ‘the religion of Abraham.’ These men were called ‘Ḥaneefs,’ or skeptics, and their religion seems to have consisted chiefly in a negative position, in denying the superstition of the Arabs, and in only asserting the existence of one sole-ruling God whose absolute slaves are all mankind, without being able to decide on any minor doctrines, or to determine in what manner this one God was to be worshipped. So long as the Ḥaneefs could give their countrymen no more definite creed than this, their influence was limited to a few inquiring and doubting minds. It was reserved for Moḥammad to formulate the faith of the Ḥaneefs in the dogmas of Islám. For the leader of these few ‘skeptics’ was Zeyd ibn ´Amr, to whom Moḥammad often resorted, and another, Waraḳah, was the cousin of the Prophet and his near neighbour: and thus the Ḥaneefs were the forerunners of the man who was to change the destinies of the Arabs.

We can no longer see the true Arab as he was in ‘the Time of Ignorance,’ and we cannot but regret our loss; for the Pagan Arab is a noble type of man, though there be nobler. There is much that is admirable in his high mettle, his fine sense of honour, his knightliness, his ‘open-handed, both-handed,’ generosity, his frank friendship, and his manly independent spirit; and the faults of this wild reckless nature are not to be weighed against its many excellencies. When Moḥammad turned abroad the current of Arab life, he changed the character of the people. The mixture with foreign nations, and the quiet town-life that succeeded to the tumult of conquest, gradually effaced many of the leading ideas of the old Arab nature, and the remnant that still dwell in the land of their fathers have lost much of that nobleness of character which in their ancestors covered a multitude of sins. Moḥammad in part destroyed the Arab and created the Muslim. The last is no amends for the first. The modern Bedawee is neither the one nor the other; he has lost the greatness of the old type without gaining that of the new. As far as the Arabs alone are concerned, Moḥammad effected a temporary good and a lasting harm. As to the world at large, that is matter for another chapter.

II.—MOḤAMMAD.

For every fiery prophet in old times,

And all the sacred madness of the bard,

When God made music through them, could but speak

His music by the framework and the chord;

And as he saw it he hath spoken truth.

—The Holy Grail.

A prophet for the Arabs must fulfil two conditions if he will bring with his good tidings the power of making them accepted: he must spring from the traditional centre of Arabian religion, and he must come of a noble family of pure Arab blood. Moḥammad fulfilled both. His family was that branch of the Ḳureysh which had raised Mekka to the dignity of the undisputed metropolis of Arabia, and which, though impoverished, still held the chief offices of the sacred territory. Moḥammad’s grandfather was the virtual chief of Mekka; for to him belonged the guardianship of the Kaạbeh, and he it was who used the generous privilege of giving food and water to the pilgrims who resorted to the ‘House of God.’ His youngest son, after marrying a kinswoman belonging to a branch of the Ḳureysh, settled at Yethrib (Medina), died before the birth of his son (571), and this son, Moḥammad, lost his mother when he was only six years old. The orphan was adopted by his grandfather, ´Abd-el-Muṭṭalib; and a tender affection sprang up between the chief of eighty years and his little grandson. Many a day the old man might be seen sitting at his wonted place near the Kaạbeh, and sharing his mat with his favourite. He lived but two years more; and at his dying request, his son Aboo-Ṭálib took charge of Moḥammad, for whom he too ever showed a love as of father and mother.

Such is the bare outline of Moḥammad’s childhood; and of his youth we know about as little, though the Arabian biographies abound in legends, of which some may be true and most are certainly false. There are stories of his journeyings to Syria with his uncle, and his encounter with a mysterious monk of obscure faith; but there is nothing to show for this tale, and much to be brought against it. All we can say is, that Moḥammad probably assisted his family in the war of the Fijár, and that he must many a time have frequented the annual Fair of ´Oḳádh, hearing the songs of the desert chiefs and the praise of Arab life, and listening to the earnest words of the Jews and Christians and others who came to the Fair. He was obliged at an early age to earn his own living; for the noble family of the Háshimees, to which he belonged, was fast losing its commanding position, whilst another branch of the Ḳureysh was succeeding to its dignities. The princely munificence of Háshim and ´Abd-el-Muṭṭalib was followed by the poverty and decline of their heirs. The duty of providing the pilgrims with food was given up by the Háshimees to the rival branch of Umeyyeh, whilst they retained only the lighter office of serving water to the worshippers. Moḥammad must take his share in the labour of the family, and he was sent to pasture the sheep of the Ḳureysh on the hills and valleys round Mekka; and though the people despised the shepherd’s calling, he himself was wont to look back with pleasure to these early days, saying that God called never a prophet save from among the sheep-folds. And doubtless it was then that he developed that reflective disposition of mind which at length led him to seek the reform of his people, whilst in his solitary wanderings with the sheep he gained that marvellous eye for the beauty and wonder of the earth and sky which resulted in the gorgeous nature-painting of the Ḳur-án. Yet he was glad to change this menial work for the more lucrative and adventurous post of camel-driver to the caravans of his wealthy kinswoman Khadeejeh; and he seems to have taken so kindly to the duty, which involved responsibilities, and to have acquitted himself so worthily, that he attracted the notice of his employer, who straightway fell in love with him, and presented him with her hand. The marriage was a singularly happy one, though Moḥammad was scarcely twenty-five and his wife nearly forty, and it brought him that repose and exemption from daily toil which he needed in order to prepare his mind for his great work. But beyond that, it gave him a loving woman’s heart, that was the first to believe in his mission, that was ever ready to console him in his despair and to keep alive within him the thin flickering flame of hope when no man believed in him—not even himself—and the world was black before his eyes.

We know very little of the next fifteen years. Khadeejeh bore him sons and daughters, but only the daughters lived. We hear of his joining a league for the protection of the weak and oppressed, and there is a legend of his having acted with wise tact and judgment as arbitrator in a dispute among the great families of Mekka on the occasion of the rebuilding of the Kaạbeh. During this time, moreover, he relieved his still impoverished uncle of the charge of his son ´Alee—afterwards the Bayard of Islám,—and he freed and adopted a certain captive, Zeyd; and these two became his most devoted friends and disciples. Such is the short but characteristic record of these fifteen years of manhood. We know very little about what Moḥammad did, but we hear only one voice as to what he was. Up to the age of forty his unpretending modest way of life had attracted but little notice from his townspeople. He was only known as a simple upright man, whose life was severely pure and refined, and whose true desert sense of honour and faith-keeping had won him the high title of El-Emeen, ‘the Trusty.’

Let us see what fashion of man this was, who was about to work a revolution among his countrymen, and change the conditions of social life in a vast part of the world. The picture[12] is drawn from an older man than we have yet seen; but Moḥammad at forty and Moḥammad at fifty or more were probably very little different. ‘He was of the middle height, rather thin, but broad of shoulders, wide of chest, strong of bone and muscle. His head was massive, strongly developed. Dark hair, slightly curled, flowed in a dense mass down almost to his shoulders. Even in advanced age it was sprinkled by only about twenty grey hairs—produced by the agonies of his “Revelations.” His face was oval-shaped, slightly tawny of colour. Fine, long, arched eyebrows were divided by a vein which throbbed visibly in moments of passion. Great black restless eyes shone out from under long, heavy eyelashes. His nose was large, slightly aquiline. His teeth, upon which he bestowed great care, were well set, dazzling white. A full beard framed his manly face. His skin was clear and soft, his complexion “red and white,” his hands were as “silk and satin,” even as those of a woman. His step was quick and elastic, yet firm, and as that of one “who steps from a high to a low place,” In turning his face he would also turn his full body. His whole gait and presence were dignified and imposing. His countenance was mild and pensive. His laugh was rarely more than a smile....

‘In his habits he was extremely simple, though he bestowed great care on his person. His eating and drinking, his dress and his furniture, retained, even when he had reached the fulness of power, their almost primitive nature. The only luxuries he indulged in were, besides arms, which he highly prized, a pair of yellow boots, a present from the Negus of Abyssinia. Perfumes, however, he loved passionately, being most sensitive of smell. Strong drinks he abhorred.

‘His constitution was extremely delicate. He was nervously afraid of bodily pain; he would sob and roar under it. Eminently unpractical in all common things of life, he was gifted with mighty powers of imagination, elevation of mind, delicacy and refinement of feeling. “He is more modest than a virgin behind her curtain,” it was said of him. He was most indulgent to his inferiors, and would never allow his awkward little page to be scolded, whatever he did. “Ten years,” said Anas, his servant, “was I about the Prophet, and he never said as much as ‘uff’ to me.” He was very affectionate towards his family. One of his boys died on his breast in the smoky house of the nurse, a blacksmith’s wife. He was very fond of children. He would stop them in the streets and pat their little cheeks. He never struck any one in his life. The worst expression he ever made use of in conversation was, “What has come to him?—may his forehead be darkened with mud!” When asked to curse some one he replied, “I have not been sent to curse, but to be a mercy to mankind.” “He visited the sick, followed any bier he met, accepted the invitation of a slave to dinner, mended his own clothes, milked his goats, and waited upon himself,” relates summarily another tradition. He never first withdrew his hand out of another man’s palm, and turned not before the other had turned.... He was the most faithful protector of those he protected, the sweetest and most agreeable in conversation; those who saw him were suddenly filled with reverence; those who came near him loved him; they who described him would say, “I have never seen his like either before or after.” He was of great taciturnity; but when he spoke it was with emphasis and deliberation, and no one could ever forget what he said. He was, however, very nervous and restless withal, often low-spirited, downcast as to heart and eyes. Yet he would at times suddenly break through these broodings, become gay, talkative, jocular, chiefly among his own. He would then delight in telling little stories, fairy tales, and the like. He would romp with the children and play with their toys.’

‘He lived with his wives in a row of humble cottages, separated from one another by palm-branches, cemented together with mud. He would kindle the fire, sweep the floor, and milk the goats himself. ´Áïsheh tells us that he slept upon a leathern mat, and that he mended his clothes, and even clouted his shoes, with his own hand. For months together ... he did not get a sufficient meal. The little food that he had was always shared with those who dropped in to partake of it. Indeed, outside the Prophet’s house was a bench or gallery, on which were always to be found a number of the poor, who lived entirely on his generosity, and were hence called the “people of the bench.” His ordinary food was dates and water or barley-bread; milk and honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which he rarely allowed himself. The fare of the desert seemed most congenial to him, even when he was sovereign of Arabia.’ [13]

Moḥammad was full forty before he felt himself called to be an apostle to his people. If he did not actually worship the local deities of the place, at least he made no public protest against the fetish worship of the Ḳureysh. Yet in the several phases of his life, in his contact with traders, in his association with Zeyd and other men, he had gained an insight into better things than idols and human sacrifices, divining-arrows and mountains and stars. He had heard a dim echo of some ‘religion of Abraham;’ he had listened to the stories of the Haggadah: he knew a very little about Jesus of Nazareth. He seems to have suffered long under the burden of doubt and self-distrust. He used to wander about the hills alone, brooding over these things; he shunned the society of men, and ‘solitude became a passion to him.’

At length came the crisis. He was spending the sacred months on Mount Ḥirá, ‘a huge barren rock, torn by cleft and hollow ravine, standing out solitary in the full white glare of the desert sun, shadowless, flowerless, without well or rill.’ Here in a cave Moḥammad gave himself up to prayer and fasting. Long months or even years of doubt had increased his nervous excitable disposition. He had had, they say, cataleptic fits during his childhood, and was evidently more delicately and finely constituted than those around him. Given this nervous nature, and the grim solitude of the hill where he had almost lived for long weary months, blindly feeling after some truth upon which to rest his soul, it is not difficult to believe the tradition of the cave, that Moḥammad heard a voice say, ‘Cry!’ ‘What shall I cry?’ he answers—the question that has been burning his heart during all his mental struggles—

Cry[14]! in the name of thy Lord, who hath created;

He hath created man from a clot of blood.

Cry! and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful,

Who hath taught [writing] by the pen:

He hath taught man that which he knew not.

Moḥammad arose trembling, and went to Khadeejeh, and told her what he had seen; and she did her woman’s part, and believed in him and soothed his terror, and bade him hope for the future. Yet he could not believe in himself. Was he not perhaps mad, possessed by a devil? Were these voices of a truth from God? And so he went again on his solitary wanderings, hearing strange sounds, and thinking them at one time the testimony of Heaven, at another the temptings of Satan or the ravings of madness. Doubting, wondering, hoping, he had fain put an end to a life which had become intolerable in its changings from the heaven of hope to the hell of despair, when again he heard the voice, ‘Thou art the messenger of God, and I am Gabriel.’ Conviction at length seized hold upon him; he was indeed to bring a message of good tidings to the Arabs, the message of God through His angel Gabriel. He went back to Khadeejeh exhausted in mind and body. ‘Wrap me, wrap me,’ he said; and the word came unto him—

O thou enwrapped in thy mantle

Arise and warn!

And thy Lord,—magnify Him!

And thy raiment,—purify it!

And the abomination,—flee it!

And bestow not favours that thou mayest receive again with increase,

And for thy Lord wait thou patiently.

There are those who see imposture in all this; for such I have no answer. Nor does it matter whether in a hysterical fit or under any physical disease soever Moḥammad saw these visions and heard these voices. We are not concerned to draw the lines of demarcation between enthusiasm and ecstasy and inspiration. It is sufficient that Moḥammad did see these things—the subjective creations of a tormented mind. It is sufficient that he believed them to be a message from on high, and that for years of neglect and persecution and for years of triumph and conquest he acted upon his belief.

Moḥammad now (612) came forward as the Apostle of the One God to the people of Arabia: he was at last well assured that his God was of a truth the God, and that He had indeed sent him with a message to his people, that they too might turn from their idols and serve the living God. He was in the minority of one, but he was no longer afraid; he had learnt that self-trust which is the condition of all true work. At first he spoke to his near kinsmen and friends; and it is impossible to overrate the importance of the fact that his closest relations and those who lived under his roof were the first to believe and the staunchest of faith. The prophet who is with honour in his own home need appeal to no stronger proof of his sincerity, and that Moḥammad was ‘a hero to his own valet’ is an invincible argument for his earnestness. The motherly Khadeejeh had at once, with a woman’s instinct, divined her husband’s heart and confirmed his fainting hope by her firm faith in him. His dearest friends, Zeyd and ´Alee, were the next converts; and though, to his grief, he could never induce his lifelong protector, Aboo-Ṭálib, to abandon the gods of his fathers, yet the old man loved him none the less, and said, when he heard of ´Alee’s conversion, ‘Well, my son, he will not call thee to aught save what is good; wherefore thou art free to cleave unto him.’ A priceless aid was gained in the accession of Aboo-Bekr, who succeeded Moḥammad as the first Khalif of Islám, and whose calm judgment and quick sagacity, joined to a gentle and compassionate heart, were of incalculable service to the faith. Aboo-Bekr was one of the wealthiest merchants of Mekka, and exercised no small influence among his fellow-citizens, no less by his character than his position. Like Moḥammad, he had a nickname, Eṣ-Ṣiddeeḳ, ‘The True:’ The True and The Trusty,—no mean augury for the future of the religion!

Five converts followed in Aboo-Bekr’s steps; amongṢ them ´Othmán, the third Khalif, and Ṭalḥah, the man of war. The ranks of the faithful were swelled from humbler sources. There were many negro slaves in Mekka, and of them not a few had been predisposed by earlier teaching to join in the worship of the One God; and of those who were first converted was the Abyssinian Bilál, the original Muëddin of Islám, and ever a devoted disciple of the Prophet. These and others from the Ḳureysh raised the number of Muslims to more than thirty souls by the fourth year of Moḥammad’s mission—thirty in three long years, and few of them men of influence!

This small success had been achieved with very little opposition from the idolaters. Moḥammad had not spoken much in public; and when he did speak to strangers, he restrained himself from attacking their worship, and only enjoined them to worship the One God who had created all things. The people were rather interested, and wondered whether he were a soothsayer or madman, or if indeed there were truth in his words. But now (a.d. 615) Moḥammad entered upon a more public career. He summoned the Ḳureysh to a conference at the hill of Eṣ-Ṣafá, and said, ‘I am come to you as a warner, and as the forerunner of a fearful punishment.... I cannot protect you in this world, nor can I promise you aught in the next life, unless ye say, There is no God but Alláh.’ He was laughed to scorn, and the assembly broke up; but from this time he ceased not to preach to the people of a punishment that would come upon the unbelieving city. He told them, in the fiery language of the early soorahs, how God had punished the old tribes of the Arabs who would not believe in His messengers, how the Flood had swallowed up the people who would not hearken to Noah. He swore unto them, by the wonderful sights of nature, by the noonday brightness, by the night when she spreadeth her veil, by the day when it appeareth in glory, that a like destruction would assuredly come upon them if they did not turn away from their idols and serve God alone. He enforced his message with every resource of language and metaphor, till he made it burn in the ears of the people. And then he told them of the Last Day, when a just reckoning should be taken of the deeds they had done; and he spoke of Paradise and Hell with all the glow of Eastern imagery. The people were moved, terrified; conversions increased. It was time the Ḳureysh should take some step. If the idols were destroyed, what would come to them, the keepers of the idols, and their renown throughout the land? How should they retain the allegiance of the neighbouring tribes who came to worship their several divinities at the Kaạbeh? That a few should follow the ravings of a madman or magician who preferred one god above the beautiful deities of Mekka was little matter; but that some leading men of the city should join the sect, and that the magician should terrify the people in open day with his denunciations of the worship which they superintended, was intolerable. The chiefs were seriously alarmed, and resolved on a more active policy. Hitherto they had merely ridiculed the professors of this new faith; they would now take stronger measures. Moḥammad himself they dared not touch; for he belonged to a noble family, which, though it was reduced and impoverished, had deserved well of the city, and which, moreover, was now headed by a man who was reverenced throughout Mekka, and was none other than the adoptive father and protector of Moḥammad himself. Nor was it safe to attack the other chief men among the Muslims, for the blood-revenge was no light risk. They were thus compelled to content themselves with the mean satisfaction of torturing the black slaves who had joined the obnoxious faction. They exposed them on the scorching sand, and withheld water till they recanted—which they did, only to profess the faith once more when they were let go. The first Muëddin alone remained steadfast: as he lay half stifled he would only answer, ‘Aḥad! Aḥad!’—‘One [God]! One!’—till Aboo-Bekr came and bought his freedom, as he was wont to do for many of the miserable victims. Moḥammad was very gentle with these forced renegades: he knew what stuff men are made of, and he bade them be of good cheer for their lips, so that their hearts were sound.

At last, moved by the sufferings of his lowly followers, he advised them to seek a refuge in Abyssinia—‘a land of righteousness, wherein no man is wronged;’ and in the fifth year of his mission (616) eleven men and four women left Mekka secretly, and were received in Abyssinia with welcome and peace. These first emigrants were followed by more the next year, till the number reached one hundred. The Ḳureysh were very wroth at the escape of their victims, and sent ambassadors to the Nejáshee, the Christian king of Abyssinia, to demand that the refugees should be given up to them. But the Nejáshee assembled his bishops and sent for the Muslims and asked them why they had fled; and one of them answered and said—

‘O king! we lived in ignorance, idolatry, and unchastity; the strong oppressed the weak; we spoke untruth; we violated the duties of hospitality. Then a prophet arose, one whom we knew from our youth, with whose descent and conduct and good faith and morality we are all well acquainted. He told us to worship one God, to speak truth, to keep good faith, to assist our relations, to fulfil the rights of hospitality, and to abstain from all things impure, ungodly, unrighteous. And he ordered us to say prayers, give alms, and to fast. We believed in him; we followed him. But our countrymen persecuted us, tortured us, and tried to cause us to forsake our religion; and now we throw ourselves upon thy protection. Wilt thou not protect us?’ And he recited a chapter of the Ḳur-án, which spoke of Christ; and the king and the bishops wept upon their beards. And the king dismissed the messengers and would not give up the men.

The Ḳureysh, foiled in their attempt to recapture the slaves, vented their malice on those believers who remained. Insults were heaped upon the Muslims, and persecution grew hotter each day. For a moment Moḥammad faltered in his work. Could he not spare his people these sufferings? Was it impossible to reconcile the religion of the city with the belief in one supreme God? After all, was the worship of those idols so false a thing? did it not hold the germ of a great truth? And so Moḥammad made his first and last concession. He recited a revelation to the Ḳureysh, in which he spoke respectfully of the three moon-goddesses, and asserted that their intercession with God might be hoped for: ‘Wherefore bow down before God and serve Him;’ and the whole audience, overjoyed at the compromise, bowed down and worshipped at the name of the God of Moḥammad—the whole city was reconciled to the double religion. But this Dreamer of the Desert was not the man to rest upon a lie. At the price of the whole city of Mekka he would not remain untrue to himself. He came forward and said he had done wrong—the devil had tempted him. He openly and frankly retracted what he had said: and ‘As for their idols, they were but empty names which they and their fathers had invented.’

Western biographers have rejoiced greatly over ‘Moḥammad’s fall.’ Yet it was a tempting compromise, and few would have withstood it. And the life of Moḥammad is not the life of a god, but of a man: from first to last it is intensely human. But if for once he was not superior to the temptation of gaining over the whole city and obtaining peace where before there was only bitter persecution, what can we say of his manfully thrusting back the rich prize he had gained, freely confessing his fault, and resolutely giving himself over again to the old indignities and insults? If he was once insincere—and who is not?—how intrepid was his after-sincerity! He was untrue to himself for a while, and he is ever referring to it in his public preaching with shame and remorse; but the false step was more than atoned for by his magnificent recantation.

Moḥammad’s influence with the people at large was certainly weakened by this temporary change of front, and the opposition of the leaders of the Ḳureysh, checked for the moment by the Prophet’s concession, now that he had repudiated it, broke forth into fiercer flame. They heaped insults upon him, and he could not traverse the city without the encounter of a curse. They threw unclean things at him, and vexed him in his every doing. The protection of Aboo-Ṭálib alone saved him from personal danger. This refuge the Ḳureysh determined to remove. They had attempted before, but had been turned back with a soft answer. They now went to the chief, of fourscore years, and demanded that he should either compel his nephew to hold his peace, or else that he should withdraw his protection. Having thus spoken they departed. The old man sent for Moḥammad, and told him what they had said. ‘Now therefore save thyself and me also, and cast not upon me a burden heavier than I can bear;’ for he was grieved at the strife between his family and his wider kindred, and would fain have seen Moḥammad temporize with the Ḳureysh. But though the Prophet believed that at length his uncle was indeed about to abandon him, his courage and high resolve never faltered. ‘Though they should set the sun on my right hand and the moon on my left to persuade me, yet while God commands me I will not renounce my purpose.’ But to lose his uncle’s love!—he burst into tears, and turned to go. But Aboo-Ṭálib called aloud, ‘Son of my brother, come back.’ So he came. And he said, ‘Depart in peace, my nephew, and say whatsoever thou desirest; for, by the Lord, I will never deliver thee up.’

The faithfulness of Aboo-Ṭálib was soon to be tried. At first, indeed, things looked brighter. The old chief’s firm bearing overawed the Ḳureysh, and they were still more cowed by two great additions that were now joined to the Muslim ranks. One was Moḥammad’s uncle, Ḥamzeh, ‘the Lion of God,’ a mighty hunter and warrior of the true Arab mettle, whose sword was worth twenty of weaker men to the cause of Islám. The other was ´Omar, afterwards Khalif, whose fierce impulsive nature had hitherto marked him as a violent opponent of the new faith, but who afterwards proved himself one of the mainstays of Islám. The gain of two such men first frightened then maddened the Ḳureysh. The leaders met together and consulted what they should do. It was no longer a case of an enthusiast followed by a crowd of slaves and a few worthy merchants; it was a faction led by stout warriors, such as Ḥamzeh, Ṭalḥah, ´Omar,—half-a-dozen picked swordsmen; and the Muslims, emboldened by their new allies, were boldly surrounding the Kaạbeh, and performing the rites of their religion in the face of all the people. The Ḳureysh resolved on extreme measures. They determined to shut off the obnoxious family of the Háshimees from the rest of their kindred. The chiefs drew up a document, in which they vowed that they would not marry with the Háshimees, nor buy and sell with them, nor hold with them any communication soever; and this they hung up in the Kaạbeh.

The Háshimees were not many enough to fight the whole city, so they went every man of them, save one, to the shi-b (or quarter) of Aboo-Ṭálib,—a long, narrow mountain defile on the eastern skirts of Mekka, cut off by rocks or walls from the city, except for one narrow gateway,—and there shut themselves up. For though the ban did not forbid them to go about as heretofore, they knew that no soul would speak with them, and that they would be subject to the maltreatment of any vagabond they met. So they collected their stores and waited. Every man of the family, Muslim or Pagan, cast in his lot with their common kinsman, Moḥammad, saving only his own uncle, Aboo-Lahab, a determined enemy to Islám, to whom a special denunciation is justly consecrated in the Ḳur-án.

For two long years the Háshimees remained shut up in their quarter. Only at the pilgrimage-time—when the blessed institution of the sacred months made violence sacrilege—could Moḥammad come forth and speak unto the people of the things that were in his heart to say. Scarcely any converts were made during this weary time; and most of those who had previously been converted, and did not belong to the doomed clan, took refuge in Abyssinia; so that in the seventh year of Moḥammad’s mission there were probably not more than twelve Muslims of any weight who remained by him. Still the Háshimees remained in their quarter. It seemed as if they must all perish: their stores were almost gone, and the cries of starving children could be heard outside. Kind-hearted neighbours would sometimes smuggle-in a camel’s load of food, but it availed little. The Ḳureysh themselves were getting ashamed of their work, and were wishing for an excuse for releasing their kinsmen. The excuse came in time. It was discovered that the deed of ban was eaten up by worms, and Aboo-Ṭálib turned the discovery to his advantage. The venerable old chief went out and met the Ḳureysh at the Kaạbeh, and pointing to the crumbling leaf he bitterly reproached them with their hardness of heart towards their brethren: then he departed. And straightway there rose up five chiefs, heads of great families, and, amid the murmurs of the fiercer spirits who were still for no quarter, they put on their armour, and going to the shi-b of Aboo-Ṭálib, bade the Háshimees come forth in peace. And they came forth.

It was now the eighth year of Moḥammad’s mission; and for the last two years, wasted in excommunication, Islám had almost stood still, at least externally. For though Moḥammad’s patient bearing under the ban had gained over a few of his imprisoned clan to his side, he had made no converts beyond the walls of his quarter. During the sacred months he had gone forth to speak to the people,—to the caravans of strangers and the folk at the fairs,—but he had no success; for hard behind him followed Aboo-Lahab, the squinter, who mocked at him, and told the people he was only ‘a liar and a sabian.’ And the people answered that his own kindred must best know what he was, and they would hear nothing from him. The bold conduct of the five chiefs had indeed secured for Moḥammad a temporary respite from persecution; but this relief was utterly outweighed by the troubles that now fell upon him and fitly gave that year the name of ‘The Year of Mourning.’ For soon after the revoking of the ban Aboo-Ṭálib died, and five weeks later Khadeejeh. In the first Moḥammad lost his ancient protector, who, though he would never give up his old belief, had yet faithfully guarded the Prophet from his childhood upwards, and, with the true Arab sentiment of kinship, had subjected himself and his clan to years of persecution and poverty in order to defend his brother’s son from his enemies. The death of Khadeejeh was even a heavier calamity to Moḥammad. She first had believed in him, and she had ever been his angel of hope and consolation. To his death he cherished a tender regret for her; and when his young bride ´Áïsheh, the favourite of his declining years, jealously abused ‘that toothless old woman,’ he answered with indignation, ‘When I was poor, she enriched me; when they called me a liar, she alone believed in me; when all the world was against me, she alone remained true.’

Moḥammad might well feel himself alone in the world. Most of his followers were in Abyssinia; only a few tried friends remained at Mekka. All the city was against him; his protector was dead, and his faithful wife. Dejected, almost hopeless, he would try a new field. If Mekka rejected him, might not Et-Ṭáïf give him welcome? He set out on foot on his journey of seventy miles, taking only Zeyd with him; and he told the people of Et-Ṭáïf his simple message. They stoned him out of the city for three miles. Bleeding and fainting, he paused to rest in an orchard, to recover strength before he went back to the insults of his own people. The owners of the place sent him some grapes; and he gathered up his strength once more, and bent his weary feet towards Mekka. On the way, as he slept, his fancy called up a strange dream: men had rejected him, and now he thought he saw the Jinn, the spirits of the air, falling down and worshipping the One God, and bearing witness to the truth of Islám. Heartened by the vision, he pushed on; and when Zeyd asked him if he did not fear to throw himself again into the hands of the Ḳureysh, he answered, ‘God will protect His religion and help His prophet.’

So this lonely man came back to dwell among his enemies. Though a brave Arab gentleman, compassionating his aloneness, gave him the Bedawee pledge of protection, yet he well knew that the power of his foes made such protection almost useless, and at any time he might be assassinated. But the Ḳureysh had not yet come to think of the last resource, and meanwhile a new prospect was opening out for Moḥammad. That same year, as he was visiting the caravans of the pilgrims who had come from all parts of Arabia to worship at the Kaạbeh, he found a group of men of Yethrib who were willing to listen to his words. He expounded to them the faith he was sent to preach, and he told them how his people had rejected him, and asked them whether Yethrib would receive him. The men were impressed with his words and professed Islám, and promised to bring news the next year; then they returned home and talked of this matter to their brethren. Now at Yethrib, besides two pagan tribes that had migrated upwards from the south, there were three clans of Jewish Arabs. Between the pagans and Jews, and then between the two pagan clans, there had been deadly wars; and now there were many parties in the city, and no one was master. The Jews, on the one hand, were expecting their Messiah; the pagans looked for a prophet. If Moḥammad were not the Messiah, the Jews thought that he might at least be their tool to subdue their pagan rivals. ‘Whether he is a prophet or not,’ said the pagans, ‘he is our kinsman by his mother, and will help us to overawe the Jews; and if he is the coming prophet, it is our policy to recognise him before those Jews who are always threatening us with their Messiah.’ The teaching of Moḥammad was so nearly Jewish, that a union of the two creeds might be hoped for; whilst to the pagan Arabs of Yethrib monotheism was no strange doctrine. All parties were therefore willing to receive Moḥammad and at least try the experiment of his influence. As a peace-maker, prophet, or messiah, he would be equally welcome in a city torn asunder by party jealousies.

When the time of pilgrimage again came round, Moḥammad waited at the appointed place in a secluded glen, and there met him men from the two pagan tribes of Yethrib—the clans of Khazraj and Aws—ten from one and two from the other. They told him of the willingness of their people to embrace Islám, and their hope to make ready the city for his welcome. They plighted their faith with him in these words: ‘We will not worship save one God; we will not steal, nor commit adultery, nor kill our children; we will in nowise slander, nor will we disobey the prophet in anything that is right.’ This is the first pledge of the ´Aḳabeh.

The twelve men of Yethrib went back and preached Islám to their people. ‘So prepared was the ground, so zealous the propagation, and so apt the method, that the new faith spread rapidly from house to house and from tribe to tribe. The Jews looked on in amazement at the people, whom they had in vain endeavoured for generations to convince of the errors of Polytheism and dissuade from the abominations of idolatry, suddenly and of their own accord casting away their idols and professing belief in God alone.’ They asked Moḥammad to send them a teacher versed in the Ḳur-án, so anxious were they to know Islám truly; and Muṣ´ab was sent, and taught them and conducted their worship; so that Islám took deep root at Yethrib.

Meanwhile Moḥammad was still among the Ḳureysh at Mekka. His is now an attitude of waiting; he is listening for news from his distant converts. Resting his hopes upon them, and despairing of influencing the Mekkans, he does not preach so much as heretofore. He holds his peace mainly, and bides his time. One hears little of this interval of quietude. Islám seems stationary at Mekka, and its followers are silent and reserved. The Ḳureysh are joyful at the ceasing of those denunciations which terrified whilst they angered them, yet they are not quite satisfied. The Muslims have a waiting look, as though there were something at hand.

It was during this year of expectation that the Prophet’s celebrated ‘Night Journey’ took place. This Mi´ráj has been the subject of extravagant embellishments on the part of the traditionists and commentators, and the cause of much obloquy to the Prophet from his religious opponents. Moḥammad dreamed a dream, and referred to it briefly and obscurely in the Ḳur-án. His followers persisted in believing it to have been a reality—an ascent to heaven in the body—till Moḥammad was sick of repeating his simple assertion that it was a dream. The traditional form of this wonderful vision may be read in any life of Moḥammad, and though it is doubtless very different from the story the Prophet himself gave, it is still a grand vision, full of glorious imagery, fraught with deep meaning.

Again the time of pilgrimage came round, and again Moḥammad repaired to the glen of the Mountain-road. Muṣ´ab had told him the good tidings of the spread of the faith at Yethrib, and he was met at the rendezvous by more than seventy men. They came by twos and threes secretly for fear of the Ḳureysh, ‘waking not the sleeper, nor tarrying for the absent.’ Then Moḥammad recited to them verses from the Ḳur-án, and in answer to their invitation that he should come to them, and their profession that their lives were at his service, he asked them to pledge themselves to defend him as they would their own wives and children. And a murmur of eager assent rolled round about from the seventy, and an old man, one of their chiefs, stood forth and said, ‘Stretch out thy hand, O Moḥammad.’ And the chief struck his own hand into Moḥammad’s palm in the frank Bedawee fashion, and thus pledged his fealty. Man after man the others followed, and struck their hands upon Moḥammad’s. Then he chose twelve of them as leaders over the rest, saying, ‘Moses chose from among his people twelve leaders. Ye shall be the sureties for the rest, even as the apostles of Jesus were; and I am the surety for my people.’ A voice of some stranger was heard near by, and the assembly hastily dispersed and stole back to their camp. This is the second pledge of the ´Aḳabeh.

The Ḳureysh knew that some meeting had taken place, and though they could not bring home the offence to any of the Yethrib pilgrims, they kept a stricter watch on the movements of Moḥammad and his friends after the pilgrims had returned homeward. It was clear that Mekka was no longer a safe place for the Muslims, and a few days after the second pledge Moḥammad told his followers to betake themselves secretly to Yethrib. For two months at the beginning of the eleventh year of the mission (622) the Muslims were leaving Mekka in small companies to make the journey of 250 miles to Yethrib. One hundred families had gone, and whole quarters of the city were deserted, left with empty houses and locked doors, ‘a prey to woe and wind.’ There were but three believers now remaining in Mekka—these were Moḥammad, Aboo-Bekr, and ´Alee. Like the captain of a sinking ship, the Prophet would not leave till all the crew were safe. But now they were all gone save his two early friends, and everything was ready for the journey; still the Prophet did not go. But the Ḳureysh, who had been too much taken by surprise to prevent the emigration, now prepared measures for a summary vengeance on the disturber of their peace and the emptier of their city. They set a watch on his house, and, it is said, commissioned a band of armed youths of different families to assassinate him together, that the blood recompense might not fall on one household alone. But Moḥammad had warning of his danger, and leaving ´Alee to deceive the enemy, he was concealed with Aboo-Bekr in a narrow-mouthed cave on Mount Thór, an hour-and-a-half’s journey from Mekka, before the Ḳureysh knew of his escape. For three days they remained hidden there, while their enemies were searching the country for them. Once they were very near, and Aboo-Bekr trembled:—‘We are but two.’ ‘Nay,’ answered Moḥammad, ‘we are three, for God is with us.’ And a spider, they say, wove its web over the entrance of the cave, so that the Ḳureysh passed on, thinking that no man had entered there.

On the third night the pursuit had been almost given over, and the two fugitives took up their journey again. Mounted on camels they journeyed to Yethrib. In eight days they reached the outskirts of the city (September 622). Moḥammad was received with acclamation, and took up his residence among his kindred. The seat of Islám was transferred from Mekka to Yethrib, henceforward to be known as Medina,—Medeenet-en-Nebee, ‘the City of the Prophet.’

This is the Hijreh, or Flight of the Prophet, from which the Muslims date their history. Their first year began on the 16th day of June of the Year of Grace 622.

A great change now comes over the Prophet’s life. It is still the same man, but the surroundings are totally different; the work to be done is on a wider, rougher stage. Thus far we have seen a gentle, thoughtful boy tending the sheep round Mekka;—a young man of little note, of whom the people only knew that he was pure and upright and true;—then a man of forty whose solitary communion with his soul has pressed him to the last terrible questions that each man, if he will think at all, must some time ask himself—What is life? What does this world mean? What is reality, what is truth? Long months, years perhaps, we know not how long and weary, filled with the tortures of doubt and the despair of ever attaining to the truth, filled with the dreary thought of his aloneness in the relentless universe, and the longing to end it all, brought at last their fruits—sure conviction of the great secret of life, a firm belief in the Creator in whom all things live and move and have their being, whom to serve is man’s highest duty and privilege, the one thing to be done. And then ten years of struggling with careless, unthinking idolators; ten years of slow results, the gaining over of a few close friends, the devoted attachment of some slaves and men of the meaner rank; finally, the conversion of half-a-dozen great citizen chiefs, ending in the flight of the whole brotherhood of believers from their native city and their welcome to a town of strangers, where the faith had forced itself home to the hearts of perhaps two hundred citizens. It was but little that was done; so many years of toil, of indomitable courage and perseverance and long-suffering, and only about three hundred converts at the end! But it was the seed of a great harvest. Moḥammad had shown men what he was; the nobility of his character, his strong friendship, his endurance and courage, above all, his earnestness and fiery enthusiasm for the truth he came to preach,—these things had revealed the hero, the master whom it was alike impossible to disobey and impossible not to love. Henceforward it is only a question of time. As the men of Medina come to know Moḥammad, they too will devote themselves to him body and soul; and the enthusiasm will catch fire and spread among the tribes till all Arabia is at the feet of the Prophet of the One God. ‘No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of His own clouting.’ He had the gift of influencing men, and he had the nobility only to influence them for good.

We have now to see Moḥammad as king. Though he came as a fugitive, rejected as an impostor by his own citizens, yet it was not long before his word was supreme in his adopted city. He had to rule over a mixed and divided people, and this must have helped him to the supreme voice. There were four distinct parties at Medina. First, the ‘Refugees’ (Muḥájiroon), who had fled from Mekka; on these Moḥammad could always rely with implicit faith. But he attached equal importance to the early converts of Medina, who had invited him among them and given him a home when the future seemed very hopeless before him, and who were thenceforward known by the honourable title of the ‘Helpers’ (Anṣár). How devoted was the affection of these men is shown by the well-known scene at El-Ji´ráneh, when the Helpers were discontented with their share of the spoils, and Moḥammad answered, ‘Why are ye disturbed in mind because of the things of this life wherewith I have sought to incline the hearts of these men of Mekka into Islám, whereas ye are already steadfast in the faith? Are ye not satisfied that others should obtain the flocks and the camels, while ye carry back the Prophet of the Lord unto your homes? Nay, I will not leave you for ever. If all mankind went one way, and the men of Medina went another way, verily I would go the way of the men of Medina. The Lord be favourable unto them, and bless them, and their sons, and their sons’ sons, for ever!’ And the ‘Helpers’ wept upon their beards, and cried with one voice, ‘Yea, we are well satisfied, O Prophet, with our lot.’ To retain the allegiance of the Refugees and the Helpers was never a trouble to Moḥammad; the only difficulty was to rein in their zeal and hold them back from doing things of blood and vengeance on the enemies of Islám. To prevent the danger of jealousy between the Refugees and the Helpers, Moḥammad assigned each Refugee to one of the Anṣár to be his brother; and this tie of gossipry superseded all nearer ties, till Moḥammad saw the time was over when it was needed. The third party in Medina was that of the ‘Disaffected,’ or in the language of Islám the ‘Hypocrites’ (Munáfiḳoon). This was composed of the large body of men who gave in their nominal allegiance to Moḥammad and his religion when they saw they could not safely withstand his power, but who were always ready to turn about if they thought there was a chance of his overthrow. Moḥammad treated these men and their leader ´Abdallah ibn Ubayy (who himself aspired to the sovranty of Medina) with patient courtesy and friendliness, and, though they actually deserted him more than once at vitally critical moments, he never retaliated, even when he was strong enough to crush them, but rather sought to win them over heartily to his cause by treating them as though they were what he would have them be. The result was that this party gradually diminished and became absorbed in the general mass of earnest Muslims, and though up to its leader’s death it constantly called forth Moḥammad’s powers of conciliation, after that it vanished from the history of parties.

The fourth party was the real thorn in the Prophet’s side. It consisted of the Jews, of whom three tribes were settled in the suburbs of Medina. They had at first been well disposed to Moḥammad’s coming. He could not indeed be the Messiah, because he was not of the lineage of David; but he would do very well to pass off upon their neighbours, the pagan Arabs, as, if not the Messiah, at least a great prophet; and by his influence the Jews might regain their old supremacy in Medina. Moḥammad’s teaching was very nearly Jewish—they had taught him the fables of their Haggadah, and he believed in their prophets—why should he not be one of them and help them to the dominion? When Moḥammad came, they found out their mistake; instead of a tool they had a master. He told the people, indeed, the stories of the Midrash, and he professed to revive the religion of Abraham: but he added to this several damning articles; he taught that Jesus was the Messiah, and that no other Messiah was to be looked for; and, moreover, whilst reverencing and inculcating the doctrine of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ, as he knew it, he yet insisted on his own mission as in nowise inferior to theirs—as, in fact, the seal of prophecy by which all that went before was confirmed or abrogated. The illusion was over; the Jews would have nothing to say to Islám: they set themselves instead to oppose it, ridicule it, and vex its Preacher in every way that their notorious ingenuity could devise.

The step was false: the Jews missed their game, and they had to pay for it. Whether it was possible to form a coalition,—whether the Jews might have induced Moḥammad to waive certain minor points if they recognised his prophetic mission,—it is difficult to say. It seems most probable that Moḥammad would not have yielded a jot to their demands, and would have accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender to his religion. And it is at least doubtful whether Islám would have gained anything by a further infusion of Judaism. It already contained all that it could assimilate of the Hebrew faith; the rest was too narrow for the universal scope of Islám. The religion of Moḥammad lost little, we may be sure, by the standing aloof of the Arabian Jews; but the Jews themselves lost much. Moḥammad, indeed, treated them kindly so long as kindness was possible. He made a treaty with them, whereby the rights of the Muslims and the Jews were defined. They were to practise their several religions unmolested; protection and security were promised to all the parties to the treaty, irrespective of creed; each was to help the other if attacked; no alliance was to be made with the Ḳureysh; war was to be made in common, and no war could be made without the consent of Moḥammad: crime alone could do away with the protection of this treaty.

But the Jews would not content themselves with standing aloof; they must needs act on the offensive. They began by asking Moḥammad hard questions out of their law, and his answers they easily refuted from their books. They denied all knowledge of the Jewish stories in the Ḳur-án—though they knew that they came from their own Haggadah, which was ever in their mouths in their own quarter,—and they showed him their Bible, where, of course, the Haggadistic legends were not to be found. Moḥammad had but one course open to him—to say they had suppressed or changed their books; and he denounced them accordingly, and said that his was the true account of the patriarchs and prophets, revealed from heaven. Not satisfied with tormenting Moḥammad with questions on that Tórah which they were always wrangling about themselves, they took hold of the every day formulas of Islám, the daily prayers and ejaculations, and, ‘twisting their tongues,’ mispronounced them so that they meant something absurd or blasphemous. When asked which they preferred, Islám or idolatry, they frankly avowed that they preferred idolatry. To lie about their own religion and to ridicule another religion that was doing a great and good work around them was not enough for these Jews; they must set their poets to work to lampoon the women of the believers in obscene verse, and such outrages upon common decency, not to say upon the code of Arab honour and chivalry, became a favourite occupation among the poets of the Jewish clans.

These were offences against the religion and the persons of the Muslims. They also conspired against the state. Moḥammad was not only the preacher of Islám, he was also the king of Medina, and was responsible for the safety and peace of the city. As a prophet, he could afford to ignore the jibes of the Jews, though they maddened him to fury; but as the chief of the city, the general in a time of almost continual warfare, when Medina was kept in a state of military defence and under a sort of military discipline, he could not overlook treachery. He was bound by his duty to his subjects to suppress a party that might (and nearly did) lead to the sack of the city by investing armies. The measures he took for this object have furnished his European biographers with a handle for attack. It is, I believe, solely on the ground of his treatment of the Jews that Moḥammad has been called ‘a bloodthirsty tyrant:’ it would certainly be difficult to support the epithet on other grounds.

The bloodthirstiness consists in this: some half-dozen Jews, who had distinguished themselves by their virulence against the Muslims, or by their custom of carrying information to the common enemy of Medina, were executed; two of the three Jewish clans were sent into exile, just as they had previously come into exile, and the third was exterminated—the men killed, and the women and children made slaves. The execution of the half-dozen marked Jews is generally called assassination, because a Muslim was sent secretly to kill each of the criminals. The reason is almost too obvious to need explanation. There were no police or law-courts or even courts-martial at Medina; some one of the followers of Moḥammad must therefore be the executor of the sentence of death, and it was better it should be done quietly, as the executing of a man openly before his clan would have caused a brawl and more bloodshed and retaliation, till the whole city had become mixed up in the quarrel. If secret assassination is the word for such deeds, secret assassination was a necessary part of the internal government of Medina. The men must be killed, and best in that way. In saying this I assume that Moḥammad was cognisant of the deed, and that it was not merely a case of private vengeance; but in several instances the evidence that traces these executions to Moḥammad’s order is either entirely wanting or is too doubtful to claim our credence.

Of the sentences upon the three whole clans, that of exile, passed upon two of them, was clement enough. They were a turbulent set, always setting the people of Medina by the ears; and finally a brawl followed by an insurrection resulted in the expulsion of one tribe; and insubordination, alliance with enemies, and a suspicion of conspiracy against the Prophet’s life, ended similarly for the second. Both tribes had violated the original treaty, and had endeavoured in every way to bring Moḥammad and his religion to ridicule and destruction. The only question is whether their punishment was not too light. Of the third clan a fearful example was made, not by Moḥammad, but by an arbiter appointed by themselves. When the Ḳureysh and their allies were besieging Medina, and had well-nigh stormed the defences, this Jewish tribe entered into negotiations with the enemy, which were only circumvented by the diplomacy of the Prophet. When the besiegers had retired, Moḥammad naturally demanded an explanation of the Jews. They resisted in their dogged way, and were themselves besieged and compelled to surrender at discretion. Moḥammad, however, consented to the appointing of a chief of a tribe allied to the Jews as the judge who should pronounce sentence upon them. The man in question was a fierce soldier, who had been wounded in the attack on the Jews, and indeed died from his wound the same day. This chief gave sentence that the men, in number some six hundred, should be killed, and the women and children enslaved; and the sentence was carried out. It was a harsh, bloody sentence, worthy of the episcopal generals of the army against the Albigenses, or of the deeds of the Augustan age of Puritanism; but it must be remembered that the crime of these men was high treason against the State, during time of siege; and those who have read how Wellington’s march could be traced by the bodies of deserters and pillagers hanging from the trees, need not be surprized at the summary execution of a traitorous clan.

Whilst Moḥammad’s supremacy was being established and maintained among the mixed population of Mekka, a vigorous warfare was being carried on outside with his old persecutors, the Ḳureysh. On the history of this war, consisting as it did mainly of small raids and attacks upon caravans, I need not dwell; its leading features were the two battles of Bedr and Oḥud, in the first of which three hundred Muslims, though outnumbered at the odds of three to one, were completely victorious (a.d. 624, a.h. 2); whilst at Oḥud, being outnumbered in the like proportion and deserted by the ‘Disaffected’ party, they were almost as decisively defeated (a.h. 3). Two years later the Ḳureysh, gathering together their allies, advanced upon Medina and besieged it for fifteen days; but the foresight of Moḥammad in digging a trench, and the enthusiasm of the Muslims in defending it, resisted all assaults, and the coming of the heavy storms for which the climate of Medina is noted drove the enemy back to Mekka. The next year (a.h. 6) a ten years’ truce was concluded with the Ḳureysh, in pursuance of which a strange scene took place in the following spring. It was agreed that Moḥammad and his people should perform the Lesser Pilgrimage, and that the Ḳureysh should for that purpose vacate Mekka for three days. Accordingly, in March 629, about two thousand Muslims, with Moḥammad at their head on his famous camel El-Ḳaṣwá—the same on which he had fled from Mekka—trooped down the valley and performed the rites which every Muslim to this day observes.

‘It was surely a strange sight which at this time presented itself in the vale of Mekka,—a sight unique in the history of the world. The ancient city is for three days evacuated by all its inhabitants, high and low, every house deserted; and, as they retire, the exiled converts, many years banished from their birthplace, approach in a great body, accompanied by their allies, revisit the empty homes of their childhood, and within the short allotted space fulfil the rites of pilgrimage. The ousted inhabitants, climbing the heights around, take refuge under tents or other shelter among the hills and glens; and, clustering on the overhanging peak of Aboo-Ḳubeys, thence watch the movements of the visitors beneath, as with the Prophet at their head they make the circuit of the Kaạbeh and the rapid procession between Eṣ-Ṣafá and Marwah; and anxiously scan every figure if perchance they may recognise among the worshippers some long-lost friend or relative. It was a scene rendered possible only by the throes which gave birth to Islám.’[15]

When the three days were over, Moḥammad and his party peaceably returned to Medina; and the Mekkans re-entered their homes. But this pilgrimage, and the self-restraint of the Muslims therein, advanced the cause of Islám among its enemies. Converts increased daily, and some leading men of the Ḳureysh now went over to Moḥammad. The clans around were sending in their deputations of homage. But the final keystone was set in the eighth year of the flight (a.d. 630), when a body of Ḳureysh broke the truce by attacking an ally of the Muslims; and Moḥammad forthwith marched upon Mekka with ten thousand men, and the city, defence being hopeless, surrendered. Now was the time for the Prophet to show his bloodthirsty nature. His old persecutors are at his feet. Will he not trample on them, torture them, revenge himself after his own cruel manner? Now the man will come forward in his true colours: we may prepare our horror, and cry shame beforehand.

But what is this? Is there no blood in the streets? Where are the bodies of the thousands that have been butchered? Facts are hard things; and it is a fact that the day of Moḥammad’s greatest triumph over his enemies was also the day of his grandest victory over himself. He freely forgave the Ḳureysh all the years of sorrow and cruel scorn they had inflicted on him: he gave an amnesty to the whole population of Mekka. Four criminals, whom justice condemned, made up Moḥammad’s proscription list when he entered as a conqueror the city of his bitterest enemies. The army followed his example, and entered quietly and peaceably; no house was robbed, no woman insulted. One thing alone suffered destruction. Going to the Kaạbeh, Moḥammad stood before each of the three hundred and sixty idols and pointed to it with his staff, saying, ‘Truth is come and lying is undone,’ and at these words his attendants hewed it down; and all the idols and household gods of Mekka and round about were destroyed.

It was thus that Moḥammad entered again his native city. Through all the annals of conquest, there is no triumphant entry like unto this one.

The taking of Mekka was soon followed by the adhesion of all Arabia. Every reader knows the story of the spread of Islám. The tribes of every part of the peninsula sent embassies to do homage to the Prophet. Arabia was not enough: the Prophet had written in his bold uncompromising way to the great kings of the East, to the Persian Khusru, and the Greek Emperor; and these little knew how soon his invitation to the faith would be repeated, and how quickly Islám would be knocking at their doors with no faltering hand.

The Prophet’s career was near its end. In the tenth year of the Flight, twenty years after he had first felt the Spirit move him to preach to his people, he resolved once more to leave his adopted city and go to Mekka to perform a farewell pilgrimage. And when the rites were done in the valley of Miná, the Prophet spoke unto the multitude—the forty thousand pilgrims—with solemn last words.[16]

‘Ye People! Hearken to my words; for I know not whether after this year I shall ever be amongst you here again.

‘Your Lives and your Property are sacred and inviolable amongst one another until the end of time.

‘The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his inheritance: a Testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs.

‘The child belongeth to the Parent; and the violator of Wedlock shall be stoned.

‘Ye people! Ye have rights demandable of your Wives, and they have rights demandable of you. Treat your women well.

‘And your Slaves, see that you feed them with such food as ye eat yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a fault which ye are not willing to forgive, then sell them, for they are the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented.

‘Ye people! Hearken unto my speech and comprehend it. Know that every Muslim is the brother of every other Muslim. All of you are on the same equality: ye are one Brotherhood.’

Then, looking up to heaven, he cried, ‘O Lord! I have delivered my message and fulfilled my mission.’ And all the multitude answered, ‘Yea, verily hast thou’!—‘O Lord! I beseech Thee, bear Thou witness to it’! and, like Moses, he lifted up his hands and blessed the people.

Three months more and Moḥammad was dead.

a.h. 11. June, 632.

It is a hard thing to form a calm estimate of the Dreamer of the Desert. There is something so tender and womanly, and withal so heroic, about the man, that one is in peril of finding the judgment unconsciously blinded by the feeling of reverence and well-nigh love that such a nature inspires. He who, standing alone, braved for years the hatred of his people, is the same who was never the first to withdraw his hand from another’s clasp, the beloved of children, who never passed a group of little ones without a smile from his wonderful eyes and a kind word for them, sounding all the kinder in that sweet-toned voice. The frank friendship, the noble generosity, the dauntless courage and hope of the man, all tend to melt criticism in admiration.

In telling in brief outline the story of Moḥammad’s life I have endeavoured to avoid controversial points. I have tried to convey in the simplest manner the view of that life which a study of the authorities must force upon every unbiassed mind. Many of the events of Moḥammad’s life have been distorted and credited with ignoble motives by European biographers; but on the facts they mainly agree, and these I have narrated, without encumber ing them with the ingenious adumbrations of their learned recorders. But there are some things in the Prophet’s life which have given rise to charges too weighty to be dismissed without discussion. He has been accused of cruelty, sensuality, and insincerity; he has been called a ‘bloodthirsty tyrant,’ a voluptuary, and an impostor.

The charge of cruelty scarcely deserves consideration. I have already spoken of the punishment of the Jews, which forms the ground of the accusation. One has but to refer to Moḥammad’s conduct to the prisoners after the battle of Bedr, to his patient tolerance towards his enemies at Medina, his gentleness to his people, his love of children and the dumb creatures, and above all, his bloodless entry into Mekka, and the complete amnesty he gave to those who had been his bitter enemies during eighteen years of insult and persecution and finally open war, to show that cruelty was no part of Moḥammad’s nature.