Mahomet - Founder of Islam | Page 4

and beliefs;
for these, together with his conception of fate, are perhaps the most
personal of all his institutions.

Mahomet has suffered not a little at the hands of his immediate
successors. They have sought to record the full sum of his personality,
and finding the subject elude them, as the translation of actions into
words must ever fall short of finality, they have overloaded their
narrative with minutest and almost always apocryphal details which
leave the main outlines blurred. Only two biographies can be said to be
in the nature of sources, that of Muhammad ibn Hischam, written on
the model of an earlier biography, undertaken about 760 for the
Abbasside Caliph Mansur, and of Wakidi, written about 820, which is
important as containing the text of many treaties made by Mahomet
with various tribes. Al-Tabari, too, included the life of Mahomet in his
extensive history of Arabia, but his work serves only as a check,
consisting, as it does, mainly of extracts from Wakidi. By far the more
valuable is the Kuran and the Sunna of tradition. But even these are
fragmentary and confused, bearing upon them the ineradicable stamp of
alien writers and much second-hand thought.
In the dim, pregnant dawn of religions, by the transfusing power of a
great idea, seized upon and made living by a single personality, the
world of imagination mingles with the world of fact as we perceive it.
The real is felt to be merely the frail shell of forces more powerful and
permanent. Legend and myth crowd in upon actual life as imperfect
vehicles for the compelling demand made by that new idea for
expression. Moreover, personality, that subtle essence, exercises a kind
of centripetal force, attracting not only the devotion but the
imaginations of those who come within its influence.
Mahomet, together with all the men of action in history, possessed an
energy of will so vast as to bring forth the creative faculties of his
adherents, and the legends that cluster round him have a special
significance as the measure of his personality and influence. The story,
for instance, of his midnight journey into the seven heavens is the
symbol of an intense spiritual experience that, following the mental
temper of the age in which he lived, had to be translated into the
concrete. All the affirmations as to his intercourse with Djinn, his
inspiration by the angel Gabriel, are inherent factors in the
manifestation of his ceaseless mental activity. His marvellous birth and
the myths of his childhood are the sum of his followers' devotion, and
reveal their reverence translated into terms of the imagination.

Character was the mysterious force that his co-religionists tried
unconsciously to portray in all those legends relative to his life at
Medina, his ruthlessness and cruelty finding a place no less than his
humility, and steadfastness under discouragement.
But beneath the weight of the marvellous the real man is almost buried.
He has stood for so long with the mists of obscure imaginings about
him that his true lineaments are almost impossible to reproduce. The
Western world has alternated between the conception of him as a devil,
almost Antichrist himself, and a negligible impostor whose power is
transient. It has seldom troubled to look for the human energy that
wrought out his successes, the faith that upheld them, and the
enthusiasm that burned in the Prophet himself with a sombre flame,
lighting his followers to prayer and conquest.
And indeed it is difficult, if not impossible, to re-create effectively the
world in which he lived. It is so remote from the seas of the world's
progression, an eddy in the tide of belief which loses itself in the larger
surging, that it makes no appeal of familiarity. But that a study of the
period and Mahomet's own personality operating no less through his
deeds, faith, and institutions than in the one doubtfully reliable record
of his teachings, will result in the perception of the Prophet of Islam as
a man among men, has been the central belief during the writing of this
biography. Mahomet's personality is revealed in his dealing with his
fellows, in the belief and ritual that he imposed upon Arabia, in the
mighty achievement of a political unity and military discipline, and
therein he shows himself inexorable, cruel, passionate, treacherous, bad,
subject to depression and overwhelming doubt, but never weak or
purposeless, continually the master of his circumstances, whom no
emergency found unprepared, whose confidence in himself nothing
could shake, and who by virtue of enthusiasm and resistless activity
wrested his triumphs from the hands of his enemies, and bequeathed to
his followers his own unconquerable faith and the means wherewith
they might attain wealth and sovereignty.

CHAPTER I
MAHOMET'S BIRTHPLACE

"And how many cities were mightier in strength than thy