[131] "Let us for a moment look back to the period when a ban was proclaimed at Mecca against all the citizens, whether professed converts or not, who espoused his cause; when they were shut up in the Sheb or quarter of Abu Tâlib, and there for three years without prospect of relief endured want and hardship. Those must have been steadfast and mighty motives which enabled him amidst all this opposition and apparent hopelessness of success, to maintain his principles unshaken. No sooner was he relieved from confinement, than, despairing of his native city, he went forth to Tâyif and summoned its rulers and inhabitants to repentance; he was solitary and unaided, but he had a message, he said, from his Lord. On the third day he was driven out of the town with ignominy, blood trickling from the wounds inflicted on him by the populace. He retired to a little distance, and there poured forth his complaint to God: then he returned to Mecca, there to carry on the same outwardly hopeless cause with the same high confidence in its ultimate success. We search in vain through the pages of profane history for a parallel to the struggle in which for thirteen years the Prophet of Arabia in the face of discouragement and threats, rejection and persecution retained his faith unwavering, preached repentance, and denounced God's wrath against his godless fellow-citizens. Surrounded by a little band of faithful men and women, he met insults, menaces, dangers, with a high and patient trust in the future. And when at last the promise of safety came from a distant quarter, he calmly waited until his followers had all departed, and then disappeared from amongst his ungrateful and rebellious people."—Muir, Vol. IV, pages 314-15.
[132] "That he was the impostor pictured by some writers is refuted alike by his unwavering belief in the truth of his own mission, by the loyalty and unshaken confidence of his companions, who had ample opportunity of forming a right estimate of his sincerity, and finally, by the magnitude of the task which he brought to so successful an issue. No impostor, it may safely be said, could have accomplished so mighty a work. No one unsupported by a living faith in the reality of his commission, in the goodness of his cause, could have maintained the same consistent attitude through long years of adverse fortune, alike in the day of victory and in the hour of defeat, in the plenitude of his power and at the moment of death."—Islam and its Founder, by J.W.H. Stobart, M.A., page 23.
"Of the sincerity of his belief in his own mission there can be no doubt. The great merit is his that among a people given up to idolatry he rose to a vivid perception of the Unity of God, and preached this great doctrine with firmness and constancy, amid ridicule and persecution. But there it seems to me that the eulogy of the Prophet ought to cease."—Islam under the Arabs by R.D. Osborn. London 1876, p. 90.
[133] The Life of Mahomet by Sir W. Muir, LL.D., Vol. II, pp. 269-71.
[134] The Life of Mahomet by Sir W. Muir, Vol. IV, pp. 320-21.
[135] Mohammed, Buddha and Christ, by Marcus Dods, D.D., pp. 17-19 & 119.
[136] Christianity and Islam: The Bible and the Koran, by Rev. W.R.W. Stephens, pp. 94, 104, 112, London, 1877.
[137] Christianity and Islam: The Bible and the Koran, by the Rev. W.R.W. Stephens, pp. 129-30, London, 1877.
[138] "We may readily admit that at the first Mahomet did believe, or persuaded himself to believe, that his revelations were dictated by a divine agency. In the Meccan period of his life there certainly can be traced no personal ends or unworthy motives to belie this conclusion. The Prophet was there, what he professed to be, 'a simple Preacher and a Warner;' he was the despised and rejected teacher of a gainsaying people; and he had apparently no ulterior object but their reformation. Mahomet may have mistaken the right means to effect this end, but there is no sufficient reason for doubting that he used those means in good faith and with an honest purpose.
"But the scene altogether changes at Medîna. There the acquisition of temporal power, aggrandisement, and self-glorification mingled with the grand object of the Prophet's previous life, and they were sought after and attained by precisely the same instrumentality. Messages from Heaven were freely brought forward to justify his political conduct, equally with his religious precepts. Battles were fought, wholesale executions inflicted, and territories annexed, under pretext of the Almighty's sanction. Nay, even baser actions were not only excused, but encouraged by the pretended divine approval or command. A special license was produced, allowing Mahomet a double number of wives; the discreditable affair of Mary the Coptic slave was justified in a separate Sura; and the passion for the wife of his own adopted son and bosom friend was the subject of an inspired message in which the Prophet's scruples were rebuked by God; a divorce permitted, and marriage with the object of his unhallowed desires enjoined."—Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, pp. 317-8.