he had proclaimed himself to be. Jesus and John were in the
second or third--he was not quite sure which--Moses was in the sixth,
while Abraham alone had the supreme distinction of residing in the
Seventh Heaven. There, at the apex of indescribable glory, Mohammed had
entered the awful presence of his Maker, Who, after some chit-chat,
charged him to see that all Moslems should hereafter prostrate
themselves in prayer toward the Temple of Solomon five times a day. The
truth of this narrative rests upon two solid facts: from that day to
this, all devout Moslems have continued to bow themselves five times
daily in prayer, and sceptics may still see, upon the rock where stands
the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, the identical print of the Prophet's
foot where he leaped upon the Heavenly Charger.

His thoughts, whether conceived in a white heat of frenzy, or with
deliberate coolness and sly calculations for the main chance, were
probably not written down in any definite manner during his lifetime. It
is not even certain whether he could read or write. He delighted in the
appellation, "The Illiterate Prophet," possibly on account of his
humility and possibly because he knew that inspired ignorance had been
the indisputable prerogative of all successful prophets in the past.
Indeed, the very fact that he was unlearned was rightly supposed to
increase the miraculous nature of his revelations. As he tossed the
divine emanations from his lips, they were sometimes recorded by
hireling scribes upon palm leaves, leather, stones, the shoulder blades
or ribs of camels and goats. But often they were not immediately written
down at all; the Prophet would go around spouting forth his utterances
to his followers, who, trained from infancy to memorize verses and songs
of every sort with infallible precision, would piously commit them to
memory. Such is the Koran, and through its instrumentality, Allah the
Wise, The Only Wise, revealed his immutable decrees: to the good, the
rewards of a Paradise that utterly beggared the Christian Heaven; to the
bad, the punishments of a Hell that contained an infinity of such
refined tortures of heat, and even of cold as neither the most
imaginatively gifted Jew or Christian had yet conceived.

Reinach aptly states, "It is humiliating to the human intellect to think
that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable
commentaries and that millions of men are still wasting time in
absorbing it.