The archangel vanished, but Mahomet remained rooted to the spot, until Khadijah's messengers found him and brought him to her. The simple story of Mahomet's call to the prophetic office from the lips of the old chroniclers is peculiarly fragrant, but it leaves us in considerable doubt as to the real means by which he attained his faith and was emboldened to preach to his people. It is certain that he had no idea at the time when he received his inspiration, of the ultimate political role in store for him. He was now simply the man who warned the people of their sins, and who insisted upon the sovereignty of one God. Very little argument is ever used by Mahomet to spread his faith. He spoke a plain message, and those who disregarded it were infallibly doomed. He saw himself in the forefront as the man who knew God, and strove to win his countrymen to right ways of life; he did not see himself at the head of earthly armies, controlling the nucleus of a mighty and united Arabia, and until his flight from Mecca to Medina he regarded himself merely as a religious teacher, the political side of his mission growing out of the exigencies of circumstance, almost without his own volition.
His exaltation upon the mountain of light soon faded into uncertainty and fearfulness before the influence of the world's harsh wisdom. Mahomet entered upon a period of hesitation and dreariness, doubtful of himself, of his vision, and of the divine favour. His soul voyaged on dark and troubled seas and gazed into abysmal spaces. At one time he would receive the light of the seven Heavens within his mind, and feel upon him the fervour of the Hebrew prophets of old, and again he would call in vain upon God, and, and seeking, would be flung back upon a darkness of doubt more terrible than the lightnings of divine wrath.
In all those exaltations and glooms Khadijah had part; she comforted his distress and shared his elation until the sorrowful period of the Fattrah, the pause in the revelation, was past. The period is variously estimated by the chroniclers, and there are many nebulous and spurious legends attaching to it, but whatever its length it seems certain that Mahomet gained within it a fuller knowledge of Jewish and Christian tenets, probably through Zeid, the Christian slave in his household, and most accounts agree that the Fattrah was ended by the revelation of the sura entitled "The Enwrapped," the mandate of the angel Gabriel:
"O thou enwrapped in thy mantle,
Arise and warn!"
The explanation of the term "enwrapped in thy mantle" shows the prevailing belief in good and evil spirits characteristic of Mahomet's time. Wandering on the mountain, he saw in a vision the angel Gabriel seated on a throne between heaven and earth, and afraid before so much glory, ran to Khadijah, beseeching her to cover him with his mantle that the evil spirits whom he felt so near him might be avoided. Thereupon Gabriel came down to earth and revealed the Sura of Admonition. This supernatural command would appear to be the translation into the imaginative world of the peace of mind that descended upon Mahomet, and the conviction as to the reality of his inspiration following on a time of despair.
The command fell to one who was peculiarly fitted by nature and circumstance to obey it effectively. To Mahomet, who knew somewhat the chaos of religions around him—Pagan, Jewish, and Christian struggling together in unholy strife—the conception of God's unity, once it attained the strength of a conviction, necessarily resolved itself into an admonitory mission. "There is no God but God," therefore all who believe otherwise have incurred His wrath; hasten then to warn men of their sins. So his conviction passed out of the region of thought into action and received upon it the stamp of time and place, becoming thereby inevitably more circumscribed and intense.
From now onwards the course of Mahomet's life is rendered indisputably plainer by our possession of that famous and much-maligned document, the Kuran, virtually a record of his inspired sayings as remembered and written down by his immediate successors. Apart from its intrinsic value as the universally recognised vehicle of the Islamic creed, it is of immense importance as a commentary upon Mahomet's career. When allowance has been made for its numberless contradictions and repetitions, it still remains the best means of tracing Mahomet's mental development, as well as the course of his religious and political dominance. Although the original document was compiled regardless of chronology, expert scholarship has succeeded in determining the order of most of it contents, and if we cannot say the precise sequence of every sura, at least we can classify each as belonging to one of the two great periods, the Meccan and Medinan, and may even distinguish with comparative accuracy three divisions within the former.
After Mahomet's mandate to preach and warn his fellow-men of their peril, the suras continue intermittently throughout his life. Those of the first period, when his mission was hardly accepted outside his family, bear upon them the stamp of a fiery nature, obsessed with its one idea; but behind the wild words lies a store of energy as yet undiscovered, which will find no fulfilment but in action. That zeal for an idea which caused the Kuran to be, expressed itself at first in words alone, but later was translated into political action, and it is the emptying of this vitality from his words into his works that is responsible for the contrasting prose of the later suras.
But no lack of poetic fire is discernible in the suras immediately following his call to the prophetic office, and from them much may be gathered as to the depth and intensity of his faith. They are almost strident with feeling; his sentences fall like blows upon an anvil, crude in their emphasis, and so swiftly uttered forth from the flame of his zeal, that they glow with reflected glory:
"Say, he is God alone,
God the Eternal,
He begetteth not and is not begotten,
There is none like to Him."