"It is related that the Angel Gabriel, who thus far had labored only in the field of Christian endeavor, was chosen by Allah as bearer of the divine revelation to Mohammed. One day, while the trader-poet was wrestling with his doubts among the foothills of Mount Hira, he saw a wondrous apparition floating downward on celestial wings. 'Thou art God's Prophet, and I am Gabriel,' announced the awe-inspiring guest before he departed to receive the blessing of Allah for having so successfully executed the heavenly command. Gabriel was a very valuable ambassador, for through the to-and-fro journeying of this indefatigable messenger Allah was able to remain at ease in heaven, thus keeping up the appearance of intangible, majestic remoteness so necessary for dignified gods. And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment Mohammed looked upon himself as Allah's vice regent, through whom Allah's incontestable decrees were to be given to man." (Mohammed—R. F. Dibble.) Mohammed's every doubt had now vanished, his soul was completely at ease, and from his lips there burst the wildly exultant chant, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet."
The obliging Gabriel, he said, had borne him on a winged steed over Medina to the Temple of Jerusalem, and from there he continued his celestial journey until he was carried completely out of this world to those ethereal realms of bliss where the Seven Heavens are. Up and up he flew, while he carefully noted the order of precedence of those prophets whose model he had proclaimed himself to be. Jesus and John were in the second or third—he was not quite sure which—Moses was in the sixth, while Abraham alone had the supreme distinction of residing in the Seventh Heaven. There, at the apex of indescribable glory, Mohammed had entered the awful presence of his Maker, Who, after some chit-chat, charged him to see that all Moslems should hereafter prostrate themselves in prayer toward the Temple of Solomon five times a day. The truth of this narrative rests upon two solid facts: from that day to this, all devout Moslems have continued to bow themselves five times daily in prayer, and sceptics may still see, upon the rock where stands the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, the identical print of the Prophet's foot where he leaped upon the Heavenly Charger.
His thoughts, whether conceived in a white heat of frenzy, or with deliberate coolness and sly calculations for the main chance, were probably not written down in any definite manner during his lifetime. It is not even certain whether he could read or write. He delighted in the appellation, "The Illiterate Prophet," possibly on account of his humility and possibly because he knew that inspired ignorance had been the indisputable prerogative of all successful prophets in the past. Indeed, the very fact that he was unlearned was rightly supposed to increase the miraculous nature of his revelations. As he tossed the divine emanations from his lips, they were sometimes recorded by hireling scribes upon palm leaves, leather, stones, the shoulder blades or ribs of camels and goats. But often they were not immediately written down at all; the Prophet would go around spouting forth his utterances to his followers, who, trained from infancy to memorize verses and songs of every sort with infallible precision, would piously commit them to memory. Such is the Koran, and through its instrumentality, Allah the Wise, The Only Wise, revealed his immutable decrees: to the good, the rewards of a Paradise that utterly beggared the Christian Heaven; to the bad, the punishments of a Hell that contained an infinity of such refined tortures of heat, and even of cold as neither the most imaginatively gifted Jew or Christian had yet conceived.
Reinach aptly states, "It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." Over one hundred and sixty million are adherents of the Koran.
In an objective analysis, excluding the emotional factors of religious bias, Mohammed would as unquestionably be considered a victim of mental disturbances as an individual living in our own day and manifesting the same symptoms.
Mohammed was the subject of illusions, hallucinations, and delusions. He had suicidal tendencies, and he had alternating periods of exhilaration and depression. To simply assert that he was an epileptic does not explain these symptoms. For epileptics cannot throw a fit at will. However, we know that ten per cent of epileptics develop mental diseases, no particular psychosis but a loss of mental and moral sense.
There are two types of individuals who can produce seizures such as Mohammed was wont to evoke at will. One type is the hysterical, and the other is that degraded individual who for the sake of collecting alms will place a piece of soap in his mouth, enter a crowded street, fall to the ground, and proceed to foam at the mouth and twist and contort himself as an epileptic does. That is the charlatan, the faker, and that brings us to the second aspect of his (Mohammed's) character.
"Outside of Arabia, Paganism was in general disrepute. The dissolute and declining Romans were cracking lewd jokes in the very faces of their gods, the myriad followers of Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster were either too remote or too helpless to matter in one way or another. Talmudic Judaism and Oriental Christianity despised idolatry and worshipped the same Jehovah, even though they disputed with each other, and indeed, among themselves, concerning the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Now, to one who chose to regard himself as a prophet, Monotheism had distinct advantages over Polytheism." (Mohammed—R. F. Dibble.)
In the first place, it was rather confusing to attempt to obey the behests of conflicting deities; in the second place, the different prophets of Jehovah in Judaism and Christendom had, so far as Mohammed knew, been uniformly successful, for he was familiar with the glorious history of Abraham, Moses, and David, and he always held to the perverse conception that Jesus was not crucified. However deep in the dumps prophets may have been on occasion, they have invariably believed one thing: victory for their particular cause would inevitably come. Neither an unbroken series of worldly failures nor the chastisement of his god have ever shaken the faith of a first-class prophet in himself or, as he would doubtless prefer to say, in his Divinity. Arabia, broken, unorganized, inglorious, idolistic Arabia, obviously lacked one Supreme Being whose prerogative was greater than all other Supreme Beings, and that Being, in turn, needed a messenger to exploit His supremacy. The messengers who had served Jehovah had certainly prospered well; but Jehovah Himself appeared to be on the decline. His Unity was steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical Trinity. Why, therefore, not give Allah, the leading icon in Arabia, an opportunity? Such considerations quite probably never entered the head of Mohammed with any definiteness; yet his behavior for the rest of his days seems to indicate that these, or similar conceptions, were subconsciously egging him on.
Of certain facts, moreover, he was definitely aware. He may have had little or no formal education, but his memory was retentive and capacious, and his caravan journeys, together with the scores of conversations he had held at the yearly fairs, as well as at Mecca, with many cultivated strangers, had packed his mind with a mass of highly valuable matter. In these ways he had learned both the strength and the weakness of the Jews and Christians; their fanatical enthusiasm and despairs; their spasmodic attempts to proselytize as well as the widespread defection from their faiths. "Since his conception of religion was largely personal, for he looked upon Moses, Jesus, and the rest of the prophets as merely capable men who had founded and promulgated religions; and since Arabia had no pre-eminent ruler, why should he not seize the reins of power and carry on the great tradition of prophethood? What a magnificent opportunity beckoned, and how fortunate that he had been the first to recognize the call! By keeping only what was best of the Arabic faith, the Kaaba and the Black Stone, and by a judicious selection of the most feasible ideas which lay imbedded in Jewish and Christian precepts, he might establish a code that would supersede all others, and then might dictate to all Arabs alike. What prophets had done, he would also do and do better." (Mohammed—R. F. Dibble.)