ack had been made, Abu Sofian
deemed himself absolved and prepared to return.

But Mahomet was on his traces. For five days he pursued the flying
Kureisch, whose retreat turned into such a headlong rout that they threw
away their sacks of meal so as to travel more lightly. Therefore the
incident has been known ever since, according to the vivid Arab method of
description, as the Battle of the Meal-bags. But the foe was not worthy
of his pursuit, and Mahomet made no further attempt to come up with Abu
Sofian, but returned at once to Medina. The attack had ended more or less
in fiasco, and as a trial of strength upon either side it was negligible.

The sacred month, Dzul Higg, and the only one in which it was lawful to
make the Greater Pilgrimage in far-off Mecca, was now fully upon him, and
Mahomet felt drawn irresistibly to the ceremonies surrounding the ancient
and now to him distorted faith. He felt compelled to acknowledge his
kinship with the ancient ritual of Arabia, and to this end appointed a
festival, Eed-al-Zoha, to be celebrated in this month, which was not only
to take the place of the Jewish sacrificial ceremony, but to strengthen
his connection with the rites still performed at Mecca, of which the
Kaaba and the Black Stone formed the emblem and the goal.

In commemoration of the ceremonial slaying of victims in the vale of Mina
at the end of the Greater Pilgrimage, Mahomet ordered two kids to be
sacrificed at every festival, so that his people were continually
reminded that at Mecca, beneath the infidel yoke, the sacred ritual, so
peculiarly their own by virtue of the Abrahamic descent and their
inexorable monotheism, was being unworthily performed.

The institution is important, as indicating the development of Mahomet's
religious and ritualistic conceptions. In the first days of his
enthusiasm he was content to enjoin worship of one God by prayer and
praise, taking secondary account of forms and ceremonies. Then came the
uprooting of his outward religious life and the demands of his embryo
state for the manifestations essential to a communistic faith. He found
Israelite beliefs uncontaminated by the worship of many Gods, and turned
to their ritual in the hope of establishing with their aid a ceremonial
which should incorporate their system with his own fervent faith. Now,
finding no middle road between separatism and absorption possible with
such a people as the Jews, and unconsciously divining that in