to their ritual in the hope of establishing with their aid a ceremonial
which should incorporate their system with his own fervent faith. Now,
finding no middle road between separatism and absorption possible with
such a people as the Jews, and unconsciously divining that in no great
length of time Islam would be sufficient unto itself, he turned again to
the practices of his native religion and ancestral ceremonies. Henceforth
he puts forward definitely his conception of Islam as a purified and
divinely regulated form of the worship followed by his Arabian forbears,
purged of its idol-worship and freed from numerous age-long corruptions.

Not only in ritual did his mind turn towards Mecca. It looms before his
eyes still as the Chosen City, the city of his dreams, whose conquest and
rendering back purified to the guidance of Allah he sets before his mind
as the ultimate, dim-descried goal of all his intermediary wars. The
Kibla had long since been changed to Mecca; thither at prayer every
Muslim turned his face and directed his thoughts, and now every possible
detail of ancient Meccan ritual was performed in scrupulous deference to
the one God, so that when the time came and in fulfilment of his desires
he set foot on its soil, no part of the ceremonies, with the lingering
enthusiasm of his youth still sweet upon them, might be omitted or be
allowed to lose its savour through disuse.

The third year of the Hegira began favourably for Mahomet. During the
first month, Muharram, there were three small expeditions against unruly
desert tribes. The Beni Ghatafan on the eastern Babylonian route were
friendly to the Kureisch. This was undesirable, because they might allow
the Meccan caravan to pass through in safety, and the Prophet had
resolved that it should be despoiled by whichever route it journeyed,
coast road or arid tableland. When therefore he received news that they
were assembling in force at Carcarat-al-Kadr, a desert oasis on the