FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Genesis, x. 25. Eber signifies a nomadic shepherd, one leading a roving pastoral life; it signifies, also, in Hebrew, beyond, yon-side, the other side: hence the name Hebrew, or Ebrew, has been supposed also to be intended to designate immigrants into Canaan or Palestine from beyond the Euphrates.
[2] A species of millet, which compensates to some extent the scarcity of European grains.
[3] “The Arabian tribes are equally addicted to commerce and rapine,” as Pliny has it.
[4] True, in the Arabic tongue the meaning of the words, of which the name Saracens may be compounded, will bear out the signification of an Oriental situation. But the western position of the Saracen tribe mentioned by Ptolemy, negatives the assumption of the Arabic origin of the word as applied in this sense. As Gibbon sagaciously remarks, the appellation being imposed by strangers, its meaning must be sought, not in the Arabic, but in a foreign language.
[5] It would even appear that the confusion consequent upon the death of the great Macedonian, and upon the feuds and struggles for empire among his generals, was taken advantage of by the princes in the north of Arabia, to extend their dominion beyond the frontier of the peninsula. From the earliest times the wandering tribes had been in the habit, more particularly during the scarcity of winter, to extort the dangerous license of encamping on the skirts of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and had often extended their incursions to the very heart of Chaldæa, or Babylonia (Irak). They now took formal possession of a part of the latter country (hence called to the present day Irak-Arabi), and established in it a new Arabian state, the kingdom of Hira. Tribes from Yemen emigrated to the territory of Syria, and established the state of Gassan, in the country north of Damascus. We must not omit to mention, however, that some historians place the establishment of the states of Hira and Gassan at a much later period.
[6] So named from Makkabi, i.e., the hammer; the appellation bestowed upon Judas, the liberator of the Jews from the Syrian yoke.
[7] Dunaan, prince of the Homerites, had been gained over to the Mosaic faith by the Jewish exiles who had found an asylum in Yemen. The new proselyte carried on a most vigorous persecution of the Christians in his dominions, and more particularly in the city of Negra, or Nag’ran, (situated between Saana and Mecca). The Christian king of Abyssinia, who preferred an hereditary claim to the crown of Yemen, as a descendant of Balkis, Queen of Sheba, came to the rescue of his oppressed fellow-believers, and speedily deprived the Jewish proselyte of crown and life. He allied himself also with the Emperor Justinian for the overthrow of the Persian power; but he failed in his subsequent enterprise, and found himself incapable even of defending his Arabian conquests, which were wrested from him by the revolt and usurpation of Abrahah, once the slave of a Roman merchant of Adulis. The payment of a slight tribute alone acknowledged the supremacy of the Ethiopian prince. After a long and prosperous reign, the power of Abrahah was overthrown before the gates of Mecca, by Abdul Motalleb, the grandfather of Mohammed; and his children were finally despoiled by Chosroes Nushirvan, of Persia.
[8] The Axumites, or Abyssinians, were, most probably, originally a colony of Arabs who had settled in Africa.
[9] The same independence from the yoke of a foreign ruler is still preserved to the present day by the Arabians. The Sultan of Turkey exercises but a nominal sovereignty over Hedjaz and Neged; and the rise and exploits of that formidable sect of religious reformers, the Wahabys, during the latter half of the last and in the present century, indicate sufficiently that it may only require the appearance of a great man among the Arabs, or the occurrence of some great event, to unite the wild sons of the desert once more into a mighty nation that may make its influence felt in the destinies of the world. Had not Egypt’s great ruler, Mehemet Ali, and his warlike son Ibrahim, stemmed for a time the progress, and crippled the power of the Wahabys, who knows but that the champion of Greek orthodoxy might have found his present ambitious projects opposed by a fiercer and more formidable antagonist than the effete race of Osman?
[10] Called Medjid-el-Haram, i.e., the holy Mosch.
[11] A visible point of the horizon.
[12] Gibbon.
[13] The constant repetition of this act of pious devotion by so many myriads of pilgrims has had the effect of rendering the surface of the stone quite uneven.
[14] Gibbon.
[15] It was in the time when Abdol Motalleb held the sacerdotal office that Mecca was invested by an army of Africans, under the command of the Christian usurper of Yemen, Abrahah, the nominal vassal of the Abyssinian Negus. The valor of the Koreishites, or perhaps the want of provisions, compelled the investing host to a disgraceful retreat, and broke the power of the Abyssinians so effectually that the kingdom of Yemen became soon after an easy prey to the victorious arms of the great Chosroes of Persia. Had the Christian Abrahah prevailed, the early feeble efforts of Mohammed to propagate his new doctrine would certainly have been crushed in the bud, and the fate of the world would have been changed.
[16] Sabianism, though also based upon the adoration of the heavenly bodies, must not be confounded with the primitive and simple faith of the Arabians in the sun, the moon, and the stars; it was of a much more complex and recondite nature.
[17] Some historians assign the year 569, others 570 (10th November), as the date of Mahomet’s birth. The date given in the text is, however, supported by the greater weight of historic authorities.
[18] This Syrian city has been most strangely confounded by many historians with Bassora, or Basra, on the Shat-el-Arab, in Irak-Arabi. The latter city was only founded in 636, A.D., by the Khalif Omar, which makes the mistake the more glaring and inexplicable.
[19] Some historians make Mohammed at the age of fourteen fight in defence of the Kaaba, which a hostile tribe threatened to snatch from the custody of the Koreish. They relate, also, how, at a later period of his life, when the Kaaba, having been tumbled down by a formidable torrent of rain, was rebuilding, the honor of fixing the sacred black stone in the wall devolved upon him; and they endeavour to trace a kind of causal connection between these incidents in the earlier life of Mohammed and the religious bias of his later years. But the facts relied upon here partake too much of the nature of fiction, to make these speculative notions of much moment. Before his marriage with Cadijah, Mohammed was in a humble and dependent position; and from the time of his marriage up to when he took upon himself the apostolic office, he was simply a wealthy but obscure citizen.
[20] Here, again, historians have sent Mohammed on a great many journeys through Syria, Irak-Arabi, and to the adjoining provinces of Persia and the Eastern Empire. They make him visit the courts, the camps, and the temples of the East, and hold converse with princes, bishops, and priests, more particularly with the Christian monks Bahira, Sergius, and Nestor. An attentive study of the historic sources at our command, and a careful examination of the life and writings of Mohammed, tend to negative altogether the truth of these pretended journeys and visits, which look very much like fictions got up by imaginative historians to supply some plausible explanation of the origin of Mohammed’s pretended mission—an explanation which may be found much nearer home, as I shall endeavour to show in the text. Here I will simply add that Mohammed, with all his talent, genius, and eloquence, was, like the immense majority of his fellow-citizens, an illiterate barbarian, who had not even been taught to read and write, and was totally unacquainted with any but his native tongue, and not likely, therefore, to profit much from converse with other nations.
[21] The assertion that Mohammed was subject to epileptic fits is a base invention of the Greeks, who would seem to impute that morbid affection to the apostle of a novel creed as a stain upon his moral character deserving the reprobation and abhorrence of the Christian world. Surely, these malignant bigots might have reflected that if Mohammed had really been afflicted with that dread disorder, Christian charity ought to have commanded them to pity his misfortune, rather than rejoice over it or pretend to regard it in the light of a sign of Divine wrath.
[22] Sonna, custom or rule; the oral law of the Mohammedans,—or, more correctly speaking, of the four orthodox sects of the Sonnites—a collection of 7275 traditions of the sayings and doings of Mohammed, made about 200 years after the Hegira, by Al Bochari, who selected them from a mass of three hundred thousand reports of a more doubtful or spurious character.
[23] The so-called Marianites are even stated to have attempted the introduction of a heretical trinity into the church, by substituting the Virgin for the Holy Ghost.
[24] The five preceding prophets were, in due gradation, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christus.
[25] The interdiction of wine appeared, however, at a much later period, (628).
[26] By the advice of Moses, it is somewhat inconsistently asserted considering that the founder of the Jewish creed, not being permitted, according to the tradition of the nocturnal journey, to proceed beyond the seventh heaven (if even so far, his proper appointed mansion being the sixth heaven) must have been, on the most moderate calculation, at 140,000,000 years’ distance from the throne of God.
[27] This flight of the prophet, called the Hejira, (i.e., emigration,) was deemed afterwards of such importance that it was instituted by Omar, the second Khalif, as the starting-point of the Mohammedan era, which was, however, made to commence about two months before, on the first day of that Arabian year, which coincides with July 16th, 622, A.D.
[28] The conquered Christians were granted the security of their persons, the freedom of their trade, the property of their goods, and the toleration of their worship. For the treatment which the Jews met with at Mohammed’s hands, see [the text].
[29] Whether 1000, 3000, or 9000, the commentators of the Koran cannot agree. Considering that there were only 1000 Koreish in the field, of whom no more than seventy were slain, it would appear that Mohammed must either have entertained a most exalted idea of the valor of his former fellow-citizens, or rather a humble one of angelic prowess.
[30] It was at the time of the expedition against Chaibar that Mohammed prohibited the eating of pork, and of the flesh of the ass, and also the cutting down of fruit-trees, more especially of palms. “Revere your aunt, the palm-tree,” says the Koran, “for it is made of the remainder of the clay of which Adam was formed.” Here in Chaibar, a Jewish female, named Zainab, avenged the cruelties inflicted by Mohammed upon her nation, by administering a slow poison to the pretended apostle, whose prophetic knowledge was in this instance lamentably at fault. To the effects of this poison he himself attributed the gradual decline of his health from this time, and his increasing infirmities; and both Abulfeda and Al Jannabi, zealous votaries of Islam though they are, frankly admit the humiliating fact. The hatred which he bore to the Jews, did not, however, prevent his adding to the number of his wives the fair Jewess Shafiya, who, upon the capitulation of Chaibar, was presented to him as worthy his acceptance.
[31] The final campaign against Chaibar took place several months after the first attempt upon Mecca; but for the sake of connection it has been given in the text a little out of its chronological order.
[32] Known as the treaty of Hodaibeh.
[33] Chosroes II., who is mentioned in most histories as the monarch who received the envoys of Mohammed, had been murdered by his son Siroes, on the 28th February, 628, and could not therefore well have received the ambassador of Mohammed, who started at a later period of the year.
[34] The sect of the Monophysites asserted one incarnate nature in Christ; the name of Jacobites, by which they are mostly known, is derived from Jacobus Baradæus, Bishop of Edessa, who revived the expiring faction of the Monophysites (about 530).
[35] Some historians dispose of Abdallah on this occasion by the scymitar of Beschr, and assign to the Abdallah who in 647 invaded North Africa, a different origin (some assert the latter to have been the son of the martyr Jaafar who fell in the battle of Muta).
[36] Mohammed’s vices were of a regal cast; avarice, the beggar’s vice, yet which so often sullies crowned heads, was not among his failings.
[37] One of the uncles of the prophet, whose vigorous arm and immensely powerful voice had done good service to the cause in the fight of Honain.
[38] Even this number reads very much like Oriental exaggeration, and may safely be reduced by the half.
[39] Some writers say 90,000, others, 110,000; others, 114,000; some raise the number even to 130, 140, or 150,000; but then due allowance must be made for Oriental exaggeration; I think the number given in the text may be considered to come tolerably near the mark.
[40] Ali was married to Fatima, the only one of Mohammed’s children who survived the prophet.
[41] Some historians give the 6th, others the 8th, and others the 17th of June, as the last day of Mohammed’s life.
[42] Rather a curious comment on the interdiction of wine in this world.