"The Infidels, moreover, will say: Thou art not sent of God.
Say: God is witness enough betwixt me and you, and whoever hath
knowledge of the Book."--_The Kuran_.

Mahomet, now established at Medina, at once began that careful planning
of the lives of his followers and the ceaseless fostering of his own
ideas within them that endeared him to the Believers as leader and lord,
and enabled him in time to prosecute his designs against his opponents
with a confidence in their faith and loyalty.

His grasp of detail was wonderful; without haste and without coercion he
subdued the turbulent factions within Medina, and his own perfervid
followers to discipline as despotic as it was salutary; Mahomet became
what circumstances made him; by reason of his mighty gift of moulding
those men and forces that came his way, he impressed his personality upon
his age; but the material fashioning of his energy, the flower of his
creative art, drew its formative sustenance from the soil of his
surroundings. The time for admonition, with the voice of one crying in
the wilderness, the time for praise and poesy, for the expression of that
rapt immortal passion filling his mind as he contemplated God, all these
were past, and had become but a lingering brightness upon the stormy
urgency of his later life.

Now his flock demanded from him organisation, leadership, political and
social prevision. Therefore the full force of his nature is revealed to
us not so much as heretofore in the Kuran, but rather in his institutions
and ordinances, his enmities and conciliations. He has become not only
the Prophet, but the Lawgiver, the Statesman, almost the King.

His first act, after his establishment in the house of Abu Ayub, was the