MOHAMMED, p. 6, note 2; Sprenger, Leben und Lehre des Μ., i. 155 sq. ) The name is found, although it was not common, among the heathen Arabs. Renan has shown it to occur on a Greek inscription of the early part of the 2d century of the Christian era (Boeckh, C. I. G., 4500), and Mohammed ibn Maslama of Medina, a contemporary of the Prophet, bore it as his original name, as appears from the fact that his brother was called Mahmud, it being a favourite practice to give to brothers variations of the same name, as Anas and Mιinis, Sahl and Sohail, Monabbih and Nobaih (Sprenger, i. 158, note 2). That Mohammed calls himself Ahmad, in sur. Ixi. 6, in order to adapt his name to a supposed prophecy, proves nothing; on the other hand, the men of Mecca, on occasion of a treaty with the Moslems, demanded that the Prophet should not call himself messenger of God, but Mohammed ibn 'Abdallah, using his old familiar name; see J. Wellhausen, VaJndi ’ s Kit&b al-Maghazi in verkürzter deutscher Wiedergabe (Berl. 1882), p. 257. ] or MAHOMET, the founder of Islam, first appears in the full light of history with his Flight to Medina (The Hijra), a.d. 622; and this date, not that of his birth, has been fittingly chosen as the epoch of the Moslem Era. The best-attested tradition places his first appearance as a prophet in Mecca some twelve years earlier (circa 610). He was then forty years old: the forty must be taken as a round number, but as such is doubtless trustworthy. Thus the birth of Mohammed falls about 570 a.d. : it is said to have fallen in the year when Abrahâ, the Abyssinian viceroy of Yemen, made the expedition against Mecca, mentioned in the Koran, when the Arabs first saw the elephant and first suffered from smallpox.

At the time of Mohammed’s birth and youth nothing seemed less likely than that the Arabs should presently make their triumphal entrance into the history of the world as victors over the Greeks and Persians. Nowhere in the Peninsula was there an independent state of any considerable power and importance. At the beginning of the 6th century indeed the princes of Kinda had attempted to form a national kingdom, uniting in particular the tribes of central Arabia; but this kingdom was nothing more than an epic prelude to the true history of the Arabs, which begins with Islam. After the fall of the Kindite dynasty, the old anarchy reigned again among the nomads of the Nejd and the Hijâz; in all other quarters Greek or Persian influence predominated, extending from the frontier deep into the interior by the aid of two vassal states—the kingdom of the Ghassanids in the Haurân under Greek suzerainty, and that of the Lakhmids in Hira and Anbâr under the Persian empire. The antagonism between Byzantium and Ctesiphon was reflected in the feuds of these Arab lordships; but indeed the rivalry of Greek and Persian exercised its influence even on the distant South of the Peninsula. Urged on by the Greeks, the Abyssinians had overthrown the Christian-hating realm of the Himyarites, the sunken remnant of the ancient might of the Sabaeans (a.d. 526), the Persians had helped a native prince again to expel the Christians (circa 570), and since then the Persians had retained a footing in the land. Toward the close of the 6th century, their direct and indirect influence in Arabia greatly surpassed that of the Greeks; and since the Kindites had fallen before the kings of Hira, it extended right through the Nejd into Yemen.

In the Hijâz and western Nejd, the district from which Islam and the Arab empire took their beginning, Greeks and Persians, Ghassanids and Lakhmids, had not much influence; the nomad tribes, and the few urban commonwealths that existed there, lived free from foreign interference, after the manner of their fathers. Mohammed’s city was Mecca, where the Banù Kinâna had formed a settlement round the Ka'ba, the sanctuary of a number of confederate tribes (Aliâbish) belonging to that district. The feast annually observed in the days before the full moon of the month Dhff Ί-Hijja at Mecca and at 'Arafa and Kozah in the vicinity, presented strong attractions for all inhabitants of the Hijâz, and grew into a great fair, at which the Meccans sold to the Bedouins the goods they imported from Syria. Feast and fair gave the city the prosperity which it shared with other cities which, like Mecca, had the advantage of lying near the meeting-place of the two great natural roads to Yemen—that from the north-west along the Red Sea coast, and that from the north-east fol lowing the line of the mountains that traverse the Nejd.

By their trading journeys the Koraish had acquired a knowledge of the world, especially of the Graeco-Syrian world: the relative superiority of their culture raised them not only above the Bedouins, but above the agricultural population of such a city as Medina; the art of reading and writing was pretty widely diffused among them. The Koraish within the city were the Banff Ka'b ibn Loay, those in the surrounding country Banff 'Amir ibn Loay; the townsmen proper were again subdivided into Motayya-bffn and Ahlâf—the latter were the new citizens, who wero distinguished from the old settlers by the same name in other Arabian towns, as in Tâif and Hira. The community was a mere confederation of neighbouring septs, each occupying its own quarter; there was no magistracy, the town as such had no authority. All political action centred in the several septs and their heads; if they held together against outsiders, this was due to interest and a sense of honour, a voluntary union strengthened by the presence of public opinion. In the time of Mohammed, the most numerous and wealthy sept was that of the Banff Makhzffm; but that of the Banff 'Abdshams was the most distinguished. The Banff Omayya were the most powerful house of 'Abdshams; their head, Abff Sofyân ibn Harb, exercised a decisive influence in the concerns of the whole community. Mohammed himself was of the Banff Hâshim; it is affirmed that these had formerly enjoyed and claimed of right th 3 position actually enjoyed by the Banff Omayya, but th: ’ > assertion seems to have had its origin in the claims to the Caliphate which the Hashimites (the house of 'AH and the 'Abbâsids) subsequently set up against the Omayyads.

Mohammed’s father, 'Abdallâh b. 'Abdalmottalib, did not live to see the son’s birth, and his mother Àmina died while he was still a child. Mohammed was then cared for first by his grandfather, 'Abdalmottalib, and after his death by his oldest paternal uncle, Abù Tâlib b. 'Abdalmottalib. He was kindly treated, but shared the hardships of a numerous and very poor family; he herded sheep and gathered wild berries in the desert. This is all that we know of his youth (sur. xciii. 6), all else is legend, containing at most an occasional fragment of truth.

It was, we are told, in his twenty-fifth year that Mohammed, on the recommendation of his uncle, entered the house and business of a wealthy widow named Khadija. For her he made commercial journeys, thus learning to know part of Palestine and Syria, and perhaps receiving impressions which fructified in his soul. By and by he married the -widow, who was much his senior; he was a shrewd man, with prepossessing countenance, fair of skin, and black-haired. The marriage was happy, and blessed with several children. The two sons, however, died young; from the elder the father received the surname Abfi Ί-Kâsim. The most famous of the daughters was Fâtima, who married her father’s cousin, 'All b. Abi Tâlib.

During his married life with Khadija, Mohammed came in contact with a religious movement which had laid hold on some thoughtful minds in Medina, Mecca, and Tâif. In Mecca, as elsewhere, Arabian heathenism was a traditional form of worship, chiefly concentrated in great feasts at the holy places; it was clung to because it had come down from the fathers. The gods were many; their importance was not due to the attributes ascribed to them, but to their connection with special circles in which they were worshipped. They were the patrons of septs and tribes, and symbolized, so to speak, the holy unity which united the present and past members of these. Above them all stood Allâh, the highest and universal God. By him the holiest oaths were sworn; in his name (Bismika Λllahummd') treaties and covenants were sealed; the lower gods were not fit to be invoked in such cases, as they belonged to one party instead of standing over both. The enemy was reminded of Allâh to deter him from inhuman outrage; enemy of Allâh ('aduw Allah, 0eoστυγ^s) was the name of opprobrium for a villain. But, since Allâh ruled over all and imposed duties on all, it was not thought that one could enter into special relations with him. In worship he had the last place, those gods being preferred who represented the interests of a specific circle, and fulfilled the private desires of their worshippers. Neither the fear of Allâh, however, nor reverence for the gods had much influence. The chief practical consequence of the great feasts was the observance of a truce in the holy months, and this in course of time had become mainly an affair of pure practical convenience. In general, the disposition of the heathen Arabs, if it is at all truly reflected in their poetry, was profane in an unusual degree. Wine, the chase, gaming, and love on the one side; vengeance, feuds, robbery, and glory on the other, occupy all the thoughts of the old poets. Their motives to noble deeds are honour and family feeling; they hardly name the gods, much less feel any need of them. The man sets all his trust on himself: he rides alone through the desert, his sword helps him in danger, no God stands by him, he commends his soul to no saint. His reckless egoism may expand to noble self-sacrifice for the family and the tribe; but in this heroism religious impulses have no part, there is nothing mystical in these hard, clear, and yet so passionate natures. The only vein of what can in any sense be called religious feeling appears when the volcano has burned itself out and the storm of life is over; then, it may be, a wail is heard over the vanity of all the restless activity that is now spent. It is very possible that religion meant more to the sedentary Arabs than to the nomads, to whom almost all the ancient poetry belongs; but the difference cannot have been great. The ancient inhabitants of Mecca practised piety essentially as a trade, just as they do now; their trade depended on the feast, and its fair on the inviolability of the Haram and on the truce of the holy months. τ

The religion of the Arabs before Mohammed was decrepit and effete. Many anecdotes and verses prove that indifference and scoffing neglect of the gods was nothing uncommon. The need for a substitute for the lost religion was not very -widely felt. But there were individuals who were not oontent with a negation, and sought a better religion. Such were Omayya b. Abi ’ l-⅛alt in Tâif, Zaid b. 'Amr in Mecca, Abü Kais b. Abi Anas, and Abù 'Amir in Medina. They were called Hanifs, probably meaning “penitents ”, men who strive to free themselves from sin. They did not constitute a regular sect, and had in fact no fixed and organized views. They had, no doubt, intercourse with one another, but were not a close society; they thought more of their own souls than of propaganda; only in Medina they seem to have been more numerous. They rejected polytheism and acknowledged AllAh, but not so much on intellectual grounds as on grounds of conscience. Faith in the one God was with them identical with pious resignation (Islàm) to his will; their monotheism was most closely allied to the sense of responsibility and of a coming judgment; it stood opposed to the worldly ideas of the idolaters, and was an impulse to upright and sin-avoiding walk. They were not theorists, but ascetics. It was the primitive ideas of Law and Gospel (“the religion of Abraham”) that lived again in them. They felt on the whole less attracted towards the developed forms of the religion of revelation; they rather sought after some new form; few of them attached themselves to existing religious communities.

Mohammed, it would appear, came into connexion with these Hanifs through a cousiμ of his wife, Wara⅛a b. Naufal, who was one of them. Their doctrines found a fruitful soil in his heart; he was seized with a profound sense of dependence on the omnipresent and omnipotent Lord, and of responsibility towards him.' Following the example of old Zaid b. ‘Amr, he now frequently withdrew for considerable periods to the solitude of the bare and desolate Mount HirA, and meditated there with prayer and ascetic exercises. For years, perhaps, he went on in these purely individual exercises, without anything to distinguish him essentially from the others who held similar views. But in him the Hanifite ideas lodged themselves in a natural temperament which had a sickly tendency to excitement and vision, and so produced a fermentation that ended in an explosion. Thus he became a prophet; he felt himself constrained to leave the silent circle of ascetics and make a propaganda for the truth. In t⅛is resolve he was unquestionably influenced by what he knew of the example of the Biblical prophets, perhaps also by the circumstance that a longing after a new founder of religion was diffused among the Hanifs, and found support in some dim acquaintance with the Messianic hopes of the Jews.

That Mohammed did not independently produce his own ideas is indisputable; nor is it to be doubted that he derived them from the Hanifs. But what was the ultimate source of these first motions towards Islam Ί In general they are ascribed to a Jewish source. Jews were very numerous in HijAz and Yemen, and had perfectly free intercourse with the Arabs, to whom they undoubtedly imparted a quantity of Biblical and religious material. Mohammed in particular was indebted to the Jews for almost all the stories and a great part of the laws of the Koran (laws of marriage, purity, etc.), and the theological language of Islam is full of Jewish words. But the original and productive forces of Islam did not spring from Judaism, least of all the ideas of the Judgment and of the inexorable demands set before the creature by his Creator, which are so dominant in the older sûras. A distinction must be drawn between the primitive impulses and the material added later; Mohammed did not get his leaven from the Jews, they only supplied him afterwards with meal. Neither in truth can Christianity be viewed as the proper source of Islam—Christianity, that is, in any of its great historical developments. The Arabs knew Greek, Syrian, and Abyssinian-Himyaritic churches; manifold influences from these doubtless reached Islam, but in none of them did the idea of Judgment still stand as the central point of religion; the living sense of divine reality ruling over the life was half extinguished by the developments of theology. But in the Syro-Babylonian desert, off the line of the church’s main advance, primitive forms of Christianity, perhaps also of Essenism, still survived, which the course of church history had left untouched. To these belong on the one hand the Sabians (“Baptists,” from p□χ), on the other the numerous anchorets of these regions. The connection of Islam with the Sabians appears from the fact that in Mecca and TAif its adherents were simply known as Sabians. From them, however, were derived, it would seem, for the most part only externals, though the importance of these must on no account be undervalued. The deepest influence exercised on the Hanifs, and through them on the Prophet, appears to have come from the anchorite ascetics. How popular they were with the Arabs, appears from the Bedouin poetry; what power they exercised over the minds even of the heathen, is proved by various episodes in the history of GL·assAn and Hira; how well the Arabs knew the difference between them and the shaven clergy, is seen in the instructions of Abùbekr to the commanders in the Syrian campaigns. It was not their doctrine that proved impressive, but the genuine earnestness of their consecrated life, spent in preparation for the life to come, for the day of judgment, and forming the sharpest contrast to the profanity of heathenism. Ascesis and meditation were the chief points with the Hanifs also, and they are sometimes called by the same name with the Christian monks. It can hardly be wrong to conclude that these nameless witnesses of the Gospel, unmentioned in church history, scattered the seed from which sprang the germ of Islam.

The tradition gives a telling story of the way in which Mohammed at length came to proclaim openly what had long been living and working within him; in other words, how he became a prophet. Once, in the month of Ramadan, while he repeated his pious exercises and meditations on Mount HirA, the angel Gabriel came to him by night as he slept, held a silken scroll before him and compelled him, though he could not read, to recite what stood written on it. This was the first descent of a passage of the heavenly book, the source of revelation from which Moses and Jesus and all prophets had drawn; and so Mohammed was called to be a prophet The words with which Gabriel had summoned him to read, remained graven on his heart. They were the beginning of sur. xcvi.—

“Read! in the name of thy Lord, who created, created man from a drop. Read! for thy Lord is the Most High who hath taught by the pen, hath taught to man what he knew not. Nay truly man walketh in delusion, when he deems that he suffices for himself; to thy Lord they must all return.”

What is here recorded is the commencement, not of Mohammed’s knowledge, but of his prophesying. That the latter was due to a vision experienced by him on a night of the month Ramadan (sur. xcvii. 1, ii. 181) is certain, and it is at least very possible that the form of the vision was governed by the traditional conception of revelation and prophecy which Mohammed had learned to accept. It is, of course, uncertain whether the words in which the angel called the Prophet are really contained in sur. xcvi. Certainly this sûra is very early, and its contents are, indeed, the best expression of the original ideas of Islam. Man lives on content with himself, but he must one day return to his Creator and Lord, and give account to him. This is in a sense the material principle of the oldest faith of Islam; the formal principle is the very prominent doctrine of revelation in writing copied from the heavenly book.

When the angel left him—so the tradition runs on— Mohammed came to Khadija and recounted the occurrence to her in much distress; he thought that he was possessed. She however comforted him, and confirmed him in the belief that he had received a revelation and was called as a messenger of God. Yet his doubts returned, when there ensued a break in the revelation, and they reached a distressing height. He was often on the point of seeking death by casting himself down from Mount Hirâ. It is usually assumed that this state of anguish lasted from two to three years. Then the angel is said to have suddenly appeared a second time; he came to Khadija in great excitement and said: “Wrap me up! wrap me up !” This, it must be explained, was done when he fell into one of his swoons; and on this occasion, as often thereafter, the revelation came during an attack. Then was sent down sûra lxxiv. beginning with the address—“O thou enveloped one!” Henceforth there was no interruption and no doubt; the revelations followed without break, and the Prophet was assured of his vocation....