than the Unity of God; and it was against his revelations concerning
Doomsday that his opponents directed their satire during the first twelve
years. It was not love of their half-dead gods but anger at the wretch who
was never tired of telling them, in the name of Allah, that all their
life was idle and despicable, that in the other world they would be the
outcasts, which opened the floodgates of irony and scorn against Mohammed.
And it was Mohammed's anxiety for his own lot and that of those who were
dear to him in that future life, that forced him to seek a solution of the
question: who shall bring my people out of the darkness of antithesis into
the light of obedience to Allah?

We should, _a posteriori_, be inclined to imagine a simpler answer to the
question than that which Mohammed found; he might have become a missionary
of Judaism or of Christianity to the Meccans. However natural such
a conclusion may appear to us, from the premises with which we are
acquainted, it did not occur to Mohammed. He began--the Qorân tells us
expressly--by regarding the Arabs, or at all events _his_ Arabs, as
heretofore destitute of divine message[1]: "to whom We have sent no warner
before you." Moses and Jesus--not to mention any others--had not been sent
for the Arabs; and as Allah would not leave any section of mankind without
a revelation, their prophet must still be to come. Apparently Mohammed
regarded the Jewish and Christian tribes in Arabia as exceptions to the
rule that an ethnical group (_ummah_) was at the same time a religious
unity. He did not imagine that it could be in Allah's plan that the Arabs
were to conform to a revelation given in a foreign language. No; God must
speak to them in Arabic.[2] Through whose mouth?

[Footnote 1: _Qorân_, xxxii., 2; xxxiv., 43; xxxvi., 5, etc.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., xii., 2; xiii., 37; XX., 112; XXVI., 195; xli., 44,