incongruous sanctity with which his commonplace utterances and petty
actions were invested would have caused fear lest it became derogatory
to his creed of divine unity.



TRADITION.


As a source of information, the traditions are obviously unreliable,
for they are coloured by the excessive zeal and irrational bias of
men whose judgment was warped by irrepressible fanaticism. They
attributed to their hero elements that are grotesquely impossible. His
advent was in their estimation, so portentous that it was celebrated
by events which, for the time, upset all natural law. And his whole
life has been linked with miraculous happenings of a most ludicrous
type. More reasonable men have exalted the prophet because they have
convinced themselves that he was what he ought to have been. This may
account for the pious confidence of some of the more intelligent, who,
accepting tradition as historical, have exalted their hero to the
ideal, and have received the imagined glory as real. This tendency to
exalt their master is well illustrated by the maxim of Shafy--"In the
exaltation of Mohammed it is lawful to exaggerate"--a maxim invaluable
to men who were seeking to glorify the prophet, and the usefulness of
which was fully appreciated by the legislators and doctors when they
were called upon to cope with the new relations and exigencies that
came into being after his death. The conquests and progress of Islam
necessitated almost daily the framing of new rules, while in the
application of the old, constant modification and adaptation were
required. To meet these needs, actual or supposed sayings and actions