The Medína Súras faithfully reflect the marvellous change in Muḥammad's fortunes, which began with his flight from Mecca. He was now recognised as the Prophet and Apostle of God, but this recognition made him an earthly potentate and turned his religious activity into secular channels. One who united in himself the parts of prince, legislator, politician, diplomatist, and general may be excused if he sometimes neglected the Divine injunction to arise and preach, The Medína Súras. or at any rate interpreted it in a sense very different from that which he formerly attached to it. The Revelations of this time deal, to a large extent, with matters of legal, social, and political interest; they promulgate religious ordinances—e.g., fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage—expound the laws of marriage and divorce, and comment upon the news of the day; often they serve as bulletins or manifestoes in which Muḥammad justifies what he has done, urges the Moslems to fight and rebukes the laggards, moralises on a victory or defeat, proclaims a truce, and says, in short, whatever the occasion seems to require. Instead of the Meccan idolaters, his opponents in Medína—the Jews and Hypocrites—have become the great rocks of offence; the Jews especially are denounced in long passages as a stiff-necked generation who never hearkened to their own prophets of old. However valuable historically, the Medína Súras do not attract the literary reader. In their flat and tedious style they resemble those of the later Meccan period. Now and again the ashes burst into flame, though such moments of splendour are increasingly rare, as in the famous 'Throne-verse' (Áyatu ’l-Kursí):—
"God, there is no god but He, the living, the self-subsistent. Slumber takes Him not, nor sleep. His is what is in the heavens The 'Throne-verse.' and what is in the earth. Who is it that intercedes with Him save by His permission? He knows what is before them and what behind them, and they comprehend not aught of His knowledge but of what He pleases. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and it tires Him not to guard them both, for He is high and grand."[339]
The Islam which Muḥammad brought with him to Medína was almost entirely derived by oral tradition from Christianity and Judaism, and just for this reason it made little impression on the heathen Arabs, whose religious ideas were generally of the most primitive kind. Notwithstanding its foreign character and the absence of anything which appealed to Arabian national sentiment, it spread rapidly in Medína, where, as we have seen, the soil was already prepared for it; but one may well doubt whether it could have extended its sway over the peninsula unless the course of events had determined Muḥammad to associate the strange doctrines of Islam with the ancient heathen sanctuary at Mecca, the Ka‘ba, which was held in universal veneration by the Arabs and formed the centre of a worship that raised no difficulties in their minds. Before he had lived many months The nationalisation of Islam. in Medína the Prophet realised that his hope of converting the Jews was doomed to disappointment. Accordingly he instructed his followers that they should no longer turn their faces in prayer towards the Temple at Jerusalem, as they had been accustomed to do since the Flight, but towards the Ka‘ba; while, a year or two later, he incorporated in Islam the superstitious ceremonies of the pilgrimage, which were represented as having been originally prescribed to Abraham, the legendary founder of the Ka‘ba, whose religion he professed to restore.
These concessions, however, were far from sufficient to reconcile the free-living and freethinking people of the desert to a religion which restrained their pleasures, forced them to pay taxes and perform prayers, and stamped with the name of barbarism all the virtues they held most dear. The teaching of Islam ran directly counter to the ideals and traditions of heathendom, and, as Goldziher has remarked, its originality lies not in its doctrines, which are Jewish and Christian, but in the fact that it was Muḥammad who first maintained these doctrines with persistent energy against the Arabian view of life.[340] While we must refer the reader to Dr. Goldziher's illuminating pages for a full discussion of the conflict between the new Religion (Dín) and the old Virtue (Muruwwa), it will not be amiss to summarise the chief points at which they clashed with each Antagonism of Islamic and Arabian ideals. other.[341] In the first place, the fundamental idea of Islam was foreign and unintelligible to the Bedouins. "It was not the destruction of their idols that they opposed so much as the spirit of devotion which it was sought to implant in them: the determination of their whole lives by the thought of God and of His pre-ordaining and retributive omnipotence, the prayers and fasts, the renouncement of coveted pleasures, and the sacrifice of money and property which was demanded of them in God's name." In spite of the saying, Lá dína illá bi ’l-muruwwati ("There is no religion without virtue"), the Bedouin who accepted Islam had to unlearn the greater part of his unwritten moral code. As a pious Moslem he must return good for evil, forgive his enemy, and find balm for his wounded feelings in the assurance of being admitted to Paradise (Kor. iii, 128). Again, the social organisation of the heathen Arabs was based on the tribe, whereas that of Islam rested on the equality and fraternity of all believers. The religious bond cancelled all distinctions of rank and pedigree; it did away, theoretically, with clannish feuds, contests for honour, pride of race—things that lay at the very root of Arabian chivalry. "Lo," cried Muḥammad, "the noblest of you in the sight of God is he who most doth fear Him" (Kor. xlix, 13). Against such doctrine the conservative and material instincts of the desert people rose in revolt; and although they became Moslems en masse, the majority of them neither believed in Islam nor knew what it meant. Often their motives were frankly utilitarian: they expected that Islam would bring them luck; and so long as they were sound in body, and their mares had fine foals, and their wives bore well-formed sons, and their wealth and herds multiplied, they said, "We have been blessed ever since we adopted this religion," and were content; but if things went ill they blamed Islam and turned their backs on it.[342] That these men were capable of religious zeal is amply proved by the triumphs which they won a short time afterwards over the disciplined armies of two mighty empires; but what chiefly inspired them, apart from love of booty, was the conviction, born of success, that Allah was fighting on their side.
We have sketched, however barely and imperfectly, the progress of Islam from Muḥammad's first appearance as a preacher to the day of his death. In these twenty years the seeds were sown of almost every development which occurs in the political and intellectual history of the Arabs during the ages to come. More than any man that has ever lived, Muḥammad shaped the destinies of his people; and though they left him far behind as they moved along the path of civilisation, they still looked back to him for guidance and authority at each step. This is not the place to attempt an estimate of his character, which has been so diversely judged. Personally, I feel convinced that he was neither a shameless impostor nor a neurotic degenerate nor a socialistic reformer, but in the beginning, at all events, a sincere religious enthusiast, as truly inspired as any prophet of the Old Testament.
"We find in him," writes De Goeje, "that sober understanding which distinguished his fellow-tribesmen: dignity, tact, and equilibrium; Character of Muḥammad. qualities which are seldom found in people of morbid constitution: self-control in no small degree. Circumstances changed him from a Prophet to a Legislator and a Ruler, but for himself he sought nothing beyond the acknowledgment that he was Allah's Apostle, since this acknowledgment includes the whole of Islam. He was excitable, like every true Arab, and in the spiritual struggle which preceded his call this quality was stimulated to an extent that alarmed even himself; but that does not make him a visionary. He defends himself, by the most solemn asseveration, against the charge that what he had seen was an illusion of the senses. Why should not we believe him?"[343]