er 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 pl