Mohammed

Transcriber's Note
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
BY R. F. DIBBLE
THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK ⁘ MCMXXVI
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
“... it may perhaps be expected that I should balance his faults and virtues, that I should decide whether the title of enthusiast or impostor more properly belongs to that extraordinary man. Had I been intimately conversant with the son of Abdallah, the task would still be difficult, and the success uncertain: at the distance of twelve centuries, I darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of religious incense; and, could I truly delineate the portrait of an hour, the fleeting resemblance would not equally apply to the solitary of Mount Hira, to the preacher of Mecca, and to the conqueror of Arabia.”
—Gibbon
Midway between Asia and Africa lies the giant peninsula of Arabia—the vast, immutable, resplendently mysterious country that bridges the Orient and the Occident. Shaped somewhat like a triangle and somewhat like an oblong, she appears to the vulgar eye more like a boot with its toe lopped off. Three bodies of water—the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf—roll their guardian waves against her rocky, mountainous coasts, while her northern domain is staunchly defended by the impassable Syrian Desert.
Perhaps no other country, not even Switzerland, has been so well protected by nature against the assaults—military, economic or religious—of the outside world. Before the seventh century, the fury of the Roman legions and the enthusiasm of martial Christians had been expended in prodigious but wholly futile efforts to subjugate her: the one because its soldiers died of heat and thirst in her almost uninhabitable interior, and the other because its votaries too often restricted their religious zeal to a general consumption of alcohol and to an individual union with more than one wife or concubine. But in any case, inasmuch as the Arabs were fierce and warlike by nature, and were acquainted with such refinements of wine and concupiscence as even the most aspiring Christians had not achieved, the attacks of Pagan Rome and Christian Palestine would probably have come to naught. Even to this day, indeed, Arabia has been left almost entirely alone by the outside world. Timeless, changeless and unromantic save to the capricious imagination of poets and travelers, her interminable, ocean-like billows of arid sand have saved her from all conquests. As she was in the dim and remote beginnings of history, so she largely remains; and the modern wanderer who penetrates her obscure interior cannot be certain whether he will be greeted with affluent hospitality or a frowning hostility that may prove inimical to life itself.