II

Busily occupied though he had been for several years with the gradual subjugation of the Koreish, Mohammed had yet found time to compel a motley group of less important enemies to bow meekly beneath the yoke of Islam. The extinction of the Beni Koreiza had been but one link in the long chain of his conquests. His Meccan kinsmen had naturally been the first to be imperiously brushed aside; but other temporary impediments had occasionally blocked his way.

Among them the few Christians who were scattered here and there throughout Arabia were of least moment. Split asunder as they were into various warring sects—the Monothelites, Jacobites, Melchites and Nestorians—they worried the Prophet but little; he seems to have regarded them with a tolerant and mildly amused eye. Having had scanty intercourse with them, he was probably quite ignorant of their disputatious creeds; therefore, while the Koran always speaks respectfully of the Saviour, Who is invariably designated “Jesus, Son of Mary,” it makes many deplorable errors when it discusses the tenets and theogony of Christianity. It expressly denies that Jesus is the Son of God and completely repudiates the established doctrine of the Holy Trinity: “Wherefore believe in God, and in the Apostles; and say not, There are Three. Refrain: it will be better for you. Verily the Lord is one God. Glory be to Him! far be it from Him, that there should be to Him a Son.” And Mohammed seems to have made the even more egregious error of supposing that the Trinity which he condemned was composed of the Father, Jesus and Mary; for the Koran utterly fails to recognize the incontrovertible existence of the Holy Ghost. Thus, while it has been reasonably urged that the Prophet both comprehended and hated Roman Catholicism, it may just as plausibly be argued that the conception of the Holy Spirit as a separate and distinct entity was too subtle for his eminently practical mind to grasp.

With Judaism, however, the case was very different. Though the Koran might place Christ on par with Abraham, Moses, David and other Hebrew prophets, it was to the customs and rites of the Jews that Mohammed paid obeisance rather than to those that had clustered around Christianity. Scarcely had he taken up his residence in Medina when he deliberately humbled himself in an effort to placate and win over the Jews; for, knowing their numbers and their power, he strongly desired to enter into a lasting union with them. To that end, he bound himself and his adherents to the Jews in a contract whose obligations were relatively mutual: “The Jews will profess their religion, the Moslems theirs.... No one shall go forth to war excepting with the permission of Mohammed; but this shall not hinder any from seeking lawful revenge.... If attacked, each shall come to the assistance of the other.... War and Peace shall be made in common.” There is also every reason to suppose that the command promulgated by Allah, when the Prophet visited Him in the Seventh Heaven, to the effect that all loyal Moslems must henceforth direct their prayers five times daily toward Jerusalem, was given because Mohammed expected that the Jews, seeing the Moslems thus busily engaged, would be insidiously flattered and insensibly led to look favorably upon Islam. Nor did his efforts stop here. The period of fasting which he had decreed for the Moslems coincided with that time during which the Hebrews also abstained from food; when Jewish funeral processions passed, the Prophet and his brethren honored them by standing until they had disappeared; and the rite of circumcision—commonly practised by all Arabs out of deference to Abraham, the supposed founder of their holy city, Mecca—was also submitted to by the Moslems to the further pleasure of the Jews, who, however, remained in mystified ignorance as to whether Mohammed himself had undergone that ceremony. It is furthermore likely that the Hebraic horror of Christianity made the Jews look favorably upon this newcomer who, while he might not correspond exactly with the prophet who had been so long and so unsuccessfully anticipated by them, at least appeared to approximate their ideal. What else could be thought of a man who formulated the amazing doctrine that a Jew might synchronously be a devout follower of Abraham and Allah, and might therefore attend both the services of the Mosque and the Synagogue with equal impunity? Indeed, there is much evidence to support the view that, had the Jews saluted Mohammed as the prophet who had at last arrived among them, Islam would have been rapidly absorbed by Hebraism.

But Allah had other plans. A year’s commingled residence in Medina taught the members of both sects many, many things. Inasmuch as the Jews literally owned the city, the needy Moslems were compelled to turn to them for positions, provisions and for money to borrow; and they soon learnt that their creditors were as merciless as they were devout. Abu Bekr, having approached a certain Pinchas with the quaint request, “Who will lend God a good loan?” was rebuffed with the quick retort, “If God wants a loan, He must be in distressed circumstances”; whereupon Abu, who had absolutely no flair for repartee, won some slight consolation by knocking Pinchas down. The Prophet himself—who, even after he began to extirpate the Hebrews, invariably turned to them when his financial credit was bad—had experiences similar to Abu’s; and it is a matter of interest that he now for the first time began to notice that the odors arising from the Jewish habitations were decidedly offensive to his ever-fastidious nose. Another thing that fanned the rising fires of disaffection was the fact that, for more than a year after the Hegira, no Moslem woman gave birth to a child; and the Jews openly bragged that their secret sorceries and enchantments had produced this barrenness. The Moslems, completely upset over this unheard-of catastrophe, exhausted themselves in the attempt to discover an adequate remedy; and the Prophet was so much concerned that he probably composed two Suras especially designed to frustrate the Jewish spells. Yet, in spite of the Hebraic incantations, a Moslem child was born fourteen months after the flight to Medina, and never again was there any doubt as to the fertility of the Moslem women.

The Jews, too, had experienced a mental revolution. A prophet who, as they had discovered, could not speak Hebrew, and who, when put to the test, betrayed an abysmal ignorance concerning the wealth of intricate information stored in the Pentateuch, did not wholly correspond to their idealized conception of their Messiah. They might blandly admit that his dissertations were satisfactory, but when he pressed his prophetic claims upon them they courteously retorted that their particular prophet must be able to trace his lineage straight back to David. They objected, also, when they noted how great a proportion of his time Mohammed spent in his harem, whereas the Jews, of all people, might well have regarded that harmless idiosyncrasy as a clinching proof that his mission was divine. Again, when the Prophet vainly tried to save the life of one of his earliest converts by cauterizing his sore throat, the Jews poked fun at him. “If this man were a prophet, could he not have warded off sickness from his friend?” they mockingly asked. And all that Mohammed could think of to say was this: “I have no power from my Lord over even mine own life, or over that of any of my followers. The Lord destroy the Jews that speak thus!” From this time on, instead of sitting up night after night, as he had once done, telling affecting tales about the Children of Israel, he began to belabor their descendants in the pages of the Koran. Where it had once iterated and reiterated the manifold virtues of the ancient Hebrews, it now discussed their manifold vices—their idolatries, backslidings, and betrayals—at even greater length; and an almost Christian fervor breathes from those pages where the Prophet asseverates that the wilful stupidity of the Jews caused them to reject him even as they had previously spurned Jesus.

Some faint-hearted Hebrews, who perhaps suspected what was coming, were diplomatic enough to swallow the new faith entire, thereby winning from Mohammed the appellation of “Witnesses.” Abdallah, son of Salam, was a shining example. Having slyly induced his brethren to give him a character testimonial before they knew that he was about to become a renegade, he presented it to the Prophet who was so pleased that he assured Abdallah he was already in Paradise—even Sa’d, chief of the Aus, had not received a comparable congratulation. But Abdallahs among the Jews were rare. Most of them continued to snicker at the hilarious ignorance and bombast revealed in Mohammed’s homiletical discourses, to disregard Allah’s grim warning that they should repent and turn to Islam “before We deface your countenances, turning the face backwards,” and to wax fat on the miseries of the Moslems. On the other hand, the Moslems themselves no longer made any effort to conceal their desire to hold their noses when they were compelled to approach the Jews on business matters; and the Prophet himself shortly decided to put a summary end to all attempts at reconciliation and brotherhood.

Perhaps the success that attended his decision to fight during the sacred months suggested the idea that he was now strong enough to break definitely with the Jews. One day, not long afterward, while he stood at prayer in the Mosque with his face turned as usual toward the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, he received a lightning revelation to turn “toward the holy Temple of Mecca. Wheresoever ye be, when ye pray, turn toward the same.” The divine injunction came just after he had prostrated himself twice toward Jerusalem; quick as a flash he reversed himself—an action instinctively followed by all the automatons in the audience—and faced toward the south until the service was ended. This symbolic event signalized his determination henceforth to separate himself wholly from the Jews, as well as to gratify the atavistic longings of his zealots who had never quite succeeded in relinquishing their love for the Black Stone and the Kaba; then too, Mohammed had grown very tired of listening to a favorite Hebraic taunt: “This Prophet of yours knew not where to find his Kibla [house of worship] till we pointed it out to him.” The Jews, who fully understood the sinister significance of Mohammed’s sudden right-about-face, were much perturbed; and they had reason to be, for he lost no time in sundering every tie that connected the worship of Allah with Hebraic ceremonies. He commanded the Moslems to keep their fast before or after the Jewish Day of Atonement; he once more followed the Arabic custom of combing his hair instead of letting it drift loose, as the Jews did; he altered the Moslem funeral rites so that they again corresponded to the immemorial Pagan ritual; and he changed the regulations pertaining to the lunar indisposition of females to a system that Moses assuredly would not have approved. For it must be demonstrated that Allah was more powerful than Jehovah; that Mohammed, as the last of a long line of prophets, had an ultimate claim upon the sacerdotal office; and that the superior wisdom which the Jews boasted concerning celestial matters over which he had hitherto asserted his sole jurisdiction would be of no use whatever to them—after they were dead.

III

The triumph of Bedr encouraged Mohammed to expedite his plans of revenge against his internal foes; directly or indirectly, he stimulated his accomplices to assassinate them. Peculiarly sensitive as he was to the slurring satires and puns which the Jews had aimed against some of his most cherished speeches, and being wholly incapable of retorting in kind, he was only too pleased when the Moslems showed a demoniacal readiness to avenge his wounded honor with sharper-pointed weapons than epigrams. Asma, a poetess strongly on the side of the Jews, composed some verses that castigated the disaffected Medinese for bowing before an interloper whom she represented as hoping that the city would “be done brown” so that he might enjoy a toothsome banquet; shortly afterward, one of the Prophet’s men stole into her room at midnight and, after taking the trouble to remove her nursing baby, thrust his sword through her breast. Next morning Mohammed paused in his prayers at the Mosque long enough to inquire of the murderer, “Hast thou slain the daughter of Merwan?” “Yes,” was the reply, “but tell me now, is there cause of apprehension?” “None,” the Prophet assured him, “a couple of goats will hardly knock their heads together for it.” Then, turning toward the congregation, he shouted: “If ye desire to see a man that hath assisted the Lord and His Prophet, look ye here!” A second satirist, old Abu Afak, a Jewish convert, foolishly attempted to carry on the work begun by Asma. “Who will rid me of this pestilent fellow?” inquired Mohammed; and within a few hours Abu Afak, while carelessly sleeping in a courtyard, was also transfixed with a sword. Both of these deeds were committed within a week after Bedr.