"O thou enfolded in thy mantle, stand up all night, except a small portion of it, for prayer. Half; or curtail the half a little,—or add to it: and with measured tone intone the Koran, for we shall devolve on thee weighty words. Verily, at the coming of night are devout (Italics, here and elsewhere, in Rodwell) impressions strongest, and words are most collected; but in the daytime thou hast continual employ—and commemorate the name of thy Lord, and devote thyself to him with entire devotion.... Of a truth, thy Lord knoweth that thou prayest almost two-thirds, or half, or a third of the night, as do a part of thy followers" (K., p. 7.—Sura, 73).
This is the opening Sura of the Koran:—
"Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds! the compassionate! the merciful! King on the day of reckoning! Thee only do we worship, and to thee do we cry for help. Guide thou us on the straight path, the path of those to whom thou hast been gracious; with whom thou art not angry, and who go not astray" (K., p. 11.—Sura, 1).
In the Sura now to be quoted we find an allusion to one of the prophets whom Mahomet regarded as precursors—the prophet Saleh, who had sent them to a people called Themoud to bid them worship God. The legend associated with his name is, that he appealed to a she-camel as a proof of his divine mission, commanding the people to let her go at large and do her no hurt. Some of the Themoudites believed; but they were ridiculed by the skeptical chiefs of the nation, whose wickedness went so far as actually to hamstring the apostolic camel. Hereupon an earthquake overtook them by night, and they were all found dead in the morning (K., p. 376.—Sura, 7. 71-77). Such things were Mahomet's stock-in-trade; and the following Sura exemplifies the mixture of his early poetic thoughts with the prosaic narratives which did duty so constantly during the maturity of his apostleship:—
"By the Sun and his noonday brightness! by the Moon when she followeth him! by the Day when it revealeth his glory! by the Night when it enshroudeth him! by the Heaven and him who built it! by the Earth and him who spread it forth! by a Soul and him who balanced it, and breathed into it its wickedness and its piety! blessed now is he who hath kept it pure, and undone is he who hath corrupted it!
"Themoud in his impiety rejected the message of the Lord, when the greatest wretch among them rushed up:—Said the apostle of God to them,—The camel of God! let her drink. But they treated him as an imposter and hamstrung her. So their Lord destroyed them for their crime, and visited all alike: nor feared he the issue" (K., p. 24.—Sura, 91).
The same Sura which contains the history of Saleh, prophet of Themoud, refers also to various other divine messengers who had fulfilled the same office of announcing the judgments of God. Mahomet's general view of the prophetic function seems to be expressed in these words:—
"Every nation hath its set time. And when their time is come they shall not retard it an hour; and they shall not advance it. O children of Adam! there shall come to you Apostles from among yourselves, rehearsing my signs to you; and whoso shall fear God and do good works, no fear shall be upon them, neither shall they be put to grief. But they who charge our signs with falsehood, and turn away from them in their pride, shall be inmates of the fire; for ever shall they abide therein" (K., p. 371.—Sura, 7. 32-34).
The prophets whom he mentions in this Sura are Noah, who was sent to warn his people of the Deluge; Houd, sent to Ad, an unbelieving nation whom God cut off, with the exception of those who had accepted Houd; Saleh, sent to Themoud as above related; Lot, sent to Sodom to warn it against sin; Shoaib, sent to Madian, a people of which the unbelieving members were destroyed by earthquakes; Moses, sent with signs to Pharaoh and his nobles, as also to the Israelites, of whom some worshiped the calf, and were overtaken by the wrath of their Lord (K., p. 375-386.—Sura, 7. 57-154). In another Sura he makes mention of other prophets besides these: namely, of John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth, Abraham, Ishmael, and Enoch (K., p. 127 ff.—Sura, 19).
His view of Jesus Christ is peculiar and interesting. He invariably treats him with the highest respect as a servant of God and his own precursor, but he is careful to protest that the opinion of his divinity was not held by Jesus, and was a baseless invention of his followers. The notion that God could have a son seems to him a gross profanation, and he often recurs to it in terms of the strongest reprobation. Thus he endeavors to claim Christ as a genuine Moslem, and to include Christianity within the pale of the new faith. A Christian who adopted it might continue, indeed must continue, to believe everything in the Old and New Testaments, except such passages as expressly assert the incarnation and divinity of Jesus. Yet Mahomet's own version of this prophet's conception involves a supernatural element, and only differs from that of Luke in not asserting the paternity of God.