that the creative side of his nature was not crushed beyond recovery;
although confronted by the clamorous demands of government and warfare,
these could not touch his spiritual enthusiasm nor his glowing and
changeless devotion to Allah and his cause. At the end of his long years
of rule he could still say with perfect truth, "My chief delight is in
prayer."




CHAPTER XII


THE JEWS AT MEDINA

"And if the people of the Book had believed, it had surely been better
for them: Believers there are among them, but most of them are perverse."
--_The Kuran_.

The songs of triumph over Bedr had scarcely left the lips of Muslim poets
when the voice of faction was heard again in Medina. The Jews, that
"stiff-necked nation," unimpressed by Mahomet's triumph, careful only of
its probable effect on their own position, which effect they could not
but regard as disastrous, seeing that it augured their own submission to
a superior power, murmured against his success, and tried their utmost to
sow dissension by the publication of contemptuous songs through the
mouths of their poets and prophetesses. Not only did the Jews murmur in
secret against him, but they tried hard to induce members of the original
Medinan tribes to join with them in a desperate effort to throw off the
Muslim yoke.