the reality of his inspiration following on a time
of despair.

The command fell to one who was peculiarly fitted by nature and
circumstance to obey it effectively. To Mahomet, who knew somewhat the
chaos of religions around him--Pagan, Jewish, and Christian struggling
together in unholy strife--the conception of God's unity, once it
attained the strength of a conviction, necessarily resolved itself into
an admonitory mission. "There is no God but God," therefore all who
believe otherwise have incurred His wrath; hasten then to warn men of
their sins. So his conviction passed out of the region of thought into
action and received upon it the stamp of time and place, becoming thereby
inevitably more circumscribed and intense.

From now onwards the course of Mahomet's life is rendered indisputably
plainer by our possession of that famous and much-maligned document, the
Kuran, virtually a record of his inspired sayings as remembered and
written down by his immediate successors. Apart from its intrinsic value
as the universally recognised vehicle of the Islamic creed, it is of
immense importance as a commentary upon Mahomet's career. When allowance
has been made for its numberless contradictions and repetitions, it still
remains the best means of tracing Mahomet's mental development, as well
as the course of his religious and political dominance. Although the
original document was compiled regardless of chronology, expert
scholarship has succeeded in determining the order of most of it
contents, and if we cannot say the precise sequence of every sura, at
least we can classify each as belonging to one of the two great periods,
the Meccan and Medinan, and may even distinguish with comparative
accuracy three divisions within the former.

After Mahomet's mandate to preach and warn his fellow-men of their peril,
the suras continue intermittently throughout his life. Those of the first
period, when his mission was hardly accepted outside his family, bear
upon them the stamp of a fiery nature, obsessed with its one idea; but
behind the wild words lies a store of energy as yet undiscovered, which
will find no fulfilment but in action. That zeal for an idea which caused
the Kuran to be, expressed itself at first in words alone, but later was
translated into political action, and it is the emptying of this vitality
from his words into his works that is responsible for the contrasting
prose of the later suras.

But no lack of poet