The Prophet also instituted various fasts which, with certain alterations, have also endured. These fasts were, if possible, even more laboriously meticulous than lustration. While abstaining from food and drink, the Moslems must take the most scrupulous precaution to see that absolutely nothing entered the body. If they smelled perfumes, bathed, or carelessly swallowed their spittle, the fast was broken; the most ardent disciples would not even open their mouths to converse, for fear of inhaling too much air; and, if a thoughtless faster allowed a particle of food, no matter how small, to become wedged between his teeth, he was deemed to be a backslider from the faith.
December was for a time annually sanctified by fasting, and several rather diverting details followed. In the first place, most of the Moslems took the responsibility with such complete and abject seriousness that they unintentionally disturbed the Prophet’s slumbers. Very late one evening they came to the Mosque for the service of prayer; and, observing that Mohammed was not on hand, they approached his house and coughed loudly before the door. The Prophet, now thoroughly aroused, came forth and addressed them thus: “I have observed for some days your coming for the nightly prayer at the Mosque, until I feared that it would grow by custom into a binding ordinance.... Wherefore, pray ye at eventide in your houses.” He then returned to resume his interrupted repose; but a further trouble awaited him. His humble supporters, it appeared, were obsessed with the monkish idea that they should abstain from every conceivable pleasure during the whole month; but Mohammed was too wise to permit such immoderate asceticism. Allah, it was soon revealed, “willeth not for you that which is difficult.... It is lawful unto you, during the nights of the Fast, to consort with your wives. Now, therefore, sleep with them, and earnestly desire that which God hath ordained for you; and eat and drink until ye can distinguish a white thread from a black thread, by the daybreak. Then keep the fast again until night.... Thus God declareth His signs unto mankind, that they may follow Piety.” The consequent popularity of the fast, indeed, brought new adherents to Islam in great abundance, until an unforeseen contingency arose. Abstinence from food and drink during the short days of December caused little difficulty; but the Prophet, trusting in that quaint omniscience which universally attends the assumption of prophetic robes, introduced an intercalary system based upon the lunar months. The sacred month, therefore, gradually shifted from winter to summer, when the sixteen-hour days made what had previously been a pleasure a great burden; nevertheless, Mohammed persevered in his oddity, for to have done otherwise would have impugned his infallibility. So his faithful zealots groaned and were troubled, and longingly anticipated the new moon, when the fast was joyously broken by the bestowal of alms upon the poor and the resumption of normal bodily activities.
Five times a day the believers, no matter how pleasantly occupied, must turn to prayer: at dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, at sunset, and at the coming of complete darkness. On six days these devotions could be performed anywhere, though preferably in congregation at the Mosque; but every Friday the Moslems, unless detained by extraordinary causes, were commanded to worship in a body at the Mosque. The ever efficient Gabriel informed Mohammed of Allah’s desire that the time for each prayer should be announced by a crier, who must shout: “Great is the Lord! Great is the Lord! I bear witness that there is no God but the Lord: I bear witness that Mohammed is the Prophet of God. Come unto prayer: come unto salvation. God is great! God is great! There is no God but the Lord!” So Mohammed instructed his negro servant, Bilal, to be the public crier; and early every morning Bilal would clamber upon a high house and rouse the slumbering Moslems with these words, adding this salutary invention of his own: “Prayer is better than sleep! Prayer is better than sleep!” Then, climbing down from his lofty perch, he would approach Mohammed’s door and shout: “To prayer, O Apostle of God! to salvation!”
At the special Friday service, the Prophet ascended the pulpit, gave a stereotyped salutation of peace, and then seated himself while Bilal shouted the stentorian summons to prayer. Descending from the pulpit, Mohammed then led the prayers; reascending, he delivered one or two exhortations. The assembly, fixing their rapt glances on his earnest gesticulations, would swallow every word and at the end join in a loud “Amen!” or something like it. When all was over, his mantle of striped material from Yemen, and his girdle of splendid Oman cloth, were carefully folded up and laid away until the next service. The pulpit itself was soon endowed with an awful sanctity. Disputes were settled at its base; and should anyone take a false oath in its presence, “even if the subject were as insignificant as a toothpick”—and toothpicks were not wholly unknown in Islam—he thereby doomed himself to eternal damnation. Before it had been built, Mohammed had supported himself during his sermons by leaning on a post—an object of which he grew so fond that, after it was no longer needed, he commanded it should be interred beneath the pulpit. The post itself reciprocated his touching sentiment; for, when it was abandoned, it moaned loudly and would not stop until the Prophet placed his hand upon it, whereupon its grief was assuaged.
VI
HOLY WARS
I
Though Mohammed was now actually the spiritual and nominally the temporal ruler of Medina, his position nevertheless was very precarious. The Jews, while completely deficient in martial valor, were openly contemptuous of his prophetical jurisdiction, and the Khazrajite leader, Abdallah ibn Obei, showed overt defiance against his assumption of civil power. Presumably because he feared and respected Abdallah’s influence, the Prophet took pains to treat him with every courtesy; but the compliment was not returned. One day, when Mohammed chanced to observe his rival seated at ease in the cool shade of his house, he alighted from his steed, graciously saluted the sitter, recited some of the most affecting passages in the Koran, and finally invited him to adopt the faith. Abdallah listened composedly until the long harangue was ended; then he spoke. “Nothing could be better than this discourse of thine, if it were true. Now, therefore, do thou sit at home in thine own house, and whosoever cometh to thee preach thus unto him, and he that cometh not unto thee refrain from troubling him with that which he dislikes.” He also casually mentioned the fact that he objected to the smell of the beast that Mohammed bestrode; so the Prophet went on his way, sorely stricken in spirit.
In other ways, too, he was equally unfortunate. His fabulous rise from the lowly state of an insignificant trader to the pinnacle of fame appears to have induced him to overestimate his powers; at any rate, soon after his arrival at Medina, he betrayed his ignorance of the simplest facts of Arabian agriculture by forbidding the artificial fecundation of palm trees, with the result that they became almost barren. But when his egregious error was pointed out, he manifested a wisdom rare in prophets by candidly admitting that he was in the wrong. “I am only mortal,” he confessed. “If I give you an order in the domain of your religion then receive it; but if I give you an order from my own opinion then am I but mortal.” In the near famine that had resulted from his bungling interference, there was poetic justice in the fact that he, as well as the rest, could eat only one date per day; yet he gladly shared in the stringent privations that all were forced to endure. While his own face was pinched with hunger, he divided with the most needy Moslems the gifts of food which various people had sent him; on one occasion he was glad to accept a Jew’s offer to partake of a meal of rancid fat and barley bread; and for months, during the dead of winter, he went without any fire on his hearth.
It was obvious that such a state of affairs could not be permitted to continue. No matter how strong the already sorely tried faith of his partisans was, it would not forever withstand the shocks of rampant famine and naked, shivering misery; then too, and even more vital, was the consideration that new converts could never be won over to such a ragged and unkempt faith—Islam would not grow. And other even more subtle ideas were fermenting in Mohammed’s ever restive mind. He, the one and only Prophet of the Most High Allah, was a starving outcast because of the pernicious activities of the overbearing, wealthy and rather cowardly Koreish, whose teeming caravans pursued their unmolested way northward from Mecca, between Medina and the Red Sea, to Syria. But the destitute refugees were pledged to advance the banners of Islam not merely in defensive, but, if Allah so willed, in offensive war; and should any of them see fit to remind him that, in earlier days, he had instructed them not to retaliate against their enemies, he could—and did—allay their squeamishness with a revelation. Furthermore, his henchmen had already been subjected, by chance or design, to a strenuous discipline that had inured them to endure such hardships as a career of pillage and guerrilla warfare would entail. Rigid religious fasts had accustomed them to withstand hunger and thirst; at the daily public salat, or prayer, they had been drilled to stand in rows, to perform what amounted to tough gymnastic exercises, and to expect celestial condemnation unless they scrupulously obeyed the minutest requirements of these incessant manœuvers. The successful plundering of opulent Koreishite caravans—which, under the circumstances, might reasonably be expected—would accomplish four excellent results: it would put a summary end to the ubiquitous suffering at Medina; it would provide a more than adequate outlet for the explosive zeal of his backers; it would conclusively demonstrate the prowess of Islam, thereby winning new members to the fold; and it would enable Mohammed to exult over the salutary discomfiture of his despicable foes.