The financial requirements of Mahomet’s state were of the simplest kind, for there is no trace of any form of governmental department having been instituted by him, even when he was master of the peninsula; nor can we Mahomet’s Administration. name any permanent officials in his employ except his muaddhin Bilal, and perhaps his court-poet Hassān. A staff of scribes was finally required both to take down his revelations and to conduct correspondence; but although he encouraged the acquisition of penmanship (indeed some of the prisoners at Badr are said to have been allowed to ransom themselves by teaching it to the Medinese), we know of no regular secretaries in his employ. As despot of Medina he combined the functions of legislator, administrator, general and judge; his duties in the last three capacities were occasionally delegated to others, as when he appointed a governor of Medina during his absence, or leaders for expeditions, with provision for successors in case of their falling, but we hear of no permanent or regular delegation of them. Till near the end of his career at Medina he maintained the principle that migration to that city was a condition of conversion; but when, owing to the extension of his power, this was no longer practicable, his plan was in the main to leave the newly converted communities to manage their internal affairs as before, only sending occasional envoys to discharge special duties, especially instruction in the Koran and the principles of Islam, and to collect the Alms; quite towards the end of his life he appears to have sent persons to the provinces to act as judges, with instructions to judge according to the Koran, and where that failed, the practice (sunna), i.e. the practice of the community, for which a later generation substituted the practice of the Prophet. There were, therefore, no regular payments to permanent officials; and the taxation called Alms, which developed into an income-tax, but was at first a demand for voluntary contributions, was wholly for the support of the poor Moslems; it might not be used for the maintenance of the state, i.e. Mahomet and his family. For them, and for public business, e.g. the purchase of war material and gratuities to visitors, provision was made out of the booty, of which Mahomet claimed one-fifth (the chieftain’s share had previously, we are told, been one-fourth), while the remainder—or at least the bulk of it—was distributed among the fighting men; the Prophet appears to have prided himself on the justice of his distribution on these occasions, and doubtless won popularity thereby, though we hear occasionally of grumbling; for difficulties occurred when a defeated tribe embraced Islam, and so could claim equality with their conquerors, or when portions of the spoil were irregularly employed by Mahomet to allay resentment: the persons whose allegiance was thus purchased were euphemistically termed “those whose hearts were united.” What afterwards proved the main source of revenue in Islamic states dates from the taking of Khaibar; for the rent paid to the state by tolerated communities for the right to work their land developed long after Mahomet’s time into a poll-tax for Unbelievers (see [Caliphate], e.g. B. § 8 and [Mahommedan Institutions]), and a land-tax for all owners of land. Immediately after the taking of Khaibar certain communities, of which the most notable was Fadak, sent tribute before they had been attacked and reduced; their land was regarded by Mahomet as his private domain, but after his death it was withdrawn from his heirs by his successor Abū Bekr, in virtue of a maxim that Prophets left no inheritance, which in the opinion of Fāṭima was contrary to Koranic doctrine, and invented by Ayesha’s father expressly for the purpose of excluding her and her husband from their rights; and this is likely to have been the case.
As a military organizer Mahomet, as has been seen, was anxious to adopt the most advanced of contemporary methods, and more than once is said to have scandalized the Arabs by foreign innovations, as at a later time the Moslem chiefs who first used gunpowder scandalized their co-religionists. The unit in his armies seems to have been, as of old, the tribe, under its natural leader; that he introduced no more scientific division, and nothing like a hierarchy of officers was perhaps due to the difficulty of reconciling such a system with the equality of all Moslems.
As has been seen, the Koran only assumed the character of a civil code as the need for one arose; and for some time after Mahomet’s arrival at Medina old-fashioned methods of settling disputes continued in use, and doubtless in accordance with precedent where such was known. For difficult cases, even in Arab opinion, divine inspiration was required; and since Mahomet naturally claimed to be in sole enjoyment of this, his utterances soon became the unique source of law, though he did not at first think of organizing a code. Such a plan is said to have occurred to him, and he even wished to dictate a code upon his deathbed; but his friends supposed or professed to suppose him to be delirious. A table regulating the “Alms” was left by him, it is said, in the possession of Abū Bekr; but other traditions assign another origin to this document.
Just as there were no regular officials for the arrangement of business, so there were none for its execution; when punishment was to be administered, any follower of Mahomet might be called upon to administer it. In the case of the massacre of the Banū Quraiẓah care was taken to see that some of the heads were struck off by their former allies, in order that the latter might be unable at any time to bring a demand for vengeance. The Prophet hoped by the mere terror of his name to make complete security reign throughout Arabia, and there is no evidence that any system of policing either it or even Medina occurred to him.
Until the death of Khadija the Prophet’s private life seems to have been normal and happy, for though the loss of his sons in infancy is said to have earned him a contemptuous epithet, he was fortunate in his adoption of Zaid b. Ḥarithah, apparently Domestic Life. a prisoner ransomed by Khadija or one of her relatives, who appears as dutiful almost to excess and competent in affairs. The marriages of his daughters seem all to have been happy, with, curiously, the exception of that between Fatima and Ali. His domestic troubles, to which an unreasonable amount of space seems to be devoted, even in the Koran, began after the Migration, when, probably in the main for political reasons, he instituted a royal harem. One of these political motives was the principle which long survived, that the conquest of a state was consummated by possession of the former monarch’s wife, or daughter; another, as has been seen, the desire to obtain the securest possible hold on his ministers. In his marriage with the daughter of his arch-enemy Abū Sofiān, before the latter’s conversion, we can see a combination of the two. Few, therefore, of these marriages occasioned scandal; yet public morality seemed to be violated when the Prophet took to himself the wife of his adopted son Zaid, whose name has in consequence the honour of mention in the Koran in the revelation which was delivered in defence of this act. Its purpose was, according to this, to establish the difference between adoptive and real filiation. Serious trouble was occasioned by a charge of adultery brought against the youthful favourite Ayesha, and this had to be refuted by a special revelation; the charge, which was backed up apparently by Ali, seems to have been connected with some deeper scheme for causing dissension between the Prophet and his friends. Yet another revelation is concerned with a mutiny in the harem organized by Omar’s daughter Hafsa, owing to undue favour shown to a Coptic concubine (Mary, mother of a son called Ibrahim, who died in infancy; his death was marked by an eclipse, January 27, 632); and various details of factions within the harem are told us by Mahomet’s biographers.
Of the members of this harem the only prominent one is Ayesha, married to the Prophet shortly after the Flight, when she had scarcely passed the period of infancy, but who appears to have been gifted with astuteness and ambition that were quite beyond her years, and who maintained her ascendancy over the Prophet in spite of the fact that many carping criticisms of his revelations are attributed to her. Some of this may have been due to the obligations (including pecuniary obligations) under which her father had laid Mahomet; but her reputation seems to have been greatly enhanced by the sending down of a revelation to exonerate her (A.H. 6), for which she thanked God and not the Prophet. Each accession to the harem rendered the building of a house or room necessary for the newcomer’s accommodation; a fact in which Robertson Smith perhaps rightly saw a relic of the older system whereby the tent was the property of women. The trouble noticed above seems to have arisen from the want of a similar arrangement in the case of slave girls, with whom Mahomet’s system permits cohabitation. When Mahomet, whether in consequence of the fatigue incurred by the “Farewell Pilgrimage,” or, as others thought, by the working of some poison put into his food some years before by a Jewess of Khaibar, was attacked by the illness which proved fatal, it was to the house of Ayesha that he was transferred (from that of another wife) to be nursed; and he apparently died in the arms of the favourite, on whose statements we have to rely for what we know of his last hours.
The traditional description of Mahomet is “of middle height, greyish, with hair that was neither straight nor curly; with a large head, large eyes, heavy eyelashes, reddish tint in the eyes, thick-bearded, broad-shouldered, with thick hands General Characteristics. and feet”; he was in the habit of giving violent expression to the emotions of anger and mirth. The supposition that he at any time suffered from physical weakness seems absolutely refuted by his career as a leader of difficult, dangerous and wearisome expeditions, from his migration to Medina until his death; indeed, during his last years he exhibited a capacity for both physical and intellectual activity which implies a high degree of both health and strength; and without these the previous struggle at Mecca could scarcely have been carried on. The supposition that he was liable to fits (epileptic or cataleptic) was intended to account for certain of the phenomena supposed to accompany the delivery of revelations; some of these however rest on very questionable authority: and the greater number of the revelations give evidence of careful preparation rather than spontaneity.
The literary matter ascribed to the Prophet consists of (1) the Koran (q.v.); (2) certain contracts, letters and rescripts preserved by his biographers; (3) a number of sayings on a vast variety of topics, collected by traditionalists. The references in the Koran to a form of literature called “Wisdom” (ḥikmah) suggest that even in the Prophet’s time some attempts had been made to collect or at least preserve some of the last; the general uncertainty of oral tradition and the length of time which elapsed before any critical treatment of it was attempted, and the variety of causes, creditable and discreditable, which led to the wilful fabrication of prophetic utterances, render the use to which No. 3 can be put very limited. Thus the lengthy description of the journey to heaven which Sprenger was inclined to accept as genuine is regarded by most critics as a later fabrication. It is very much to be regretted that the number of pièces justificatives (No. 2) quoted by the biographers is so small, and that for these oral tradition was preferred to a search for the actual documents, some of which may well have been in existence when the earliest biographies were written. Their style appears to have been plain and straightforward, though the allusions which they contain are not always intelligible.
In his personal relations with men Mahomet appears to have been able to charm and impress in an extraordinary degree, whence we find him able to control persons like Omar and Khalid, who appear to have been self-willed and masterful, and a single interview seems to have been sufficient to turn many an enemy into a devoted adherent. Cases (perhaps legendary) are quoted of his being able by a look or a word to disarm intending assassins.
Although the titles which he took were religious in character, and his office might not be described as sovereignty, his interests appear to have lain far more in the building up and maintenance of empire than in ecclesiastical matters. Thus only can we account for the violent and sudden changes which he introduced into his system, for his temporary lapse into paganism, and for his ultimate adoption of the cult of the Black Stone, which, it is said, gave offence to some of his sincere adherents (e.g. Omar), and seems hard to reconcile with his tirades against fetish-worship. The same is indicated by his remarkable doctrine that the utterance of the creed constituted a Moslem and not its cordial acceptance, and his practice of at times buying adhesion. Even an historian so favourable to the Prophet as Prince Caetani recognizes that ultimately what he regarded as most important was that his subjects should pay their taxes. And in general his system was not favourable to fanaticism (al-ghulū fi‘l-dīn); he repeatedly gave permission for concealment of faith when the profession of it was dangerous; he took care to avoid institutions which, like the Jewish Sabbath, interfered seriously with military expeditions and the conduct of business, and permitted considerable irregularity in the matters of prayer and fasting when circumstances rendered it desirable. In his theory that Koranic texts could be abrogated he made wise provision against the danger of hasty legislation, though some of its usefulness was frustrated by his failure to provide for such abrogation after his death.