[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.