[Sidenote: All the conversions, individual and tribal, without any
compulsion.]

32. Thus all these tribal conversions and the speedy spread of Islam in
the whole of Arabia was accomplished without any resort to arms,
compulsion, threat, or "the scymitar in one hand and the Koran in the
other." The Pagan Arabs, the Christians and the Jews, those who embraced
Islam, adopted it joyfully and voluntarily. Islam had been much
persecuted for many years from the third year of its Prophet's mission
to the sixth year after the Hegira--a period of about sixteen years, but
it flourished alike during persecutions and oppositions as well as
during periods of peace and security of the Moslems. It was the result
of Mohammad's staunch adherence to the uncompromising severity of his
inflexible principles of preaching the divine Truth and his sincere
belief in his own mission that he bore steadfastly all the hardships of
persecutions at Mecca and the horrors of the aggressive wars of the
Koreish and others at Medina, and persuaded the whole of Arabia, Pagan,
Jewish and Christian, to adopt Islam voluntarily.[126]

[Footnote 126: The rebellion of almost the whole of Arabia--wrongly
called apostasy--after the death of Mohammad was chiefly against the
Government of Abu Bakr, the first Khalifa of the Republic of Islam. No
such paramount power over the whole of Arabia was ever vested in the
chiefs of Mecca, and the Arabs were unaccustomed to this new form of
Government. They had neither rebelled against Islam, nor apostatized
from their religion, except a very few of them who had attached
themselves to Moseilama for a short time.]

[Sidenote: Mohammad was not favoured with circumstances round him.]

33. It was not an easy task for Mohammad to have converted the Arabs
from their national idolatry to a religion of pure and strict
monotheism. The aspect of Arabia was strictly conservative, and there
were no prospects of hopeful changes. The indigenous idolatry and
deep-rooted superstition, the worship of visible and material objects of
devotion,--idols and unshaped stones,--something that the eyes can see
and the hands can handle,--and the dread of invisible genii and other
evil spirits, held the Arab mind in a rigorous and undisputed thraldom.
Arabia was obstinately fixed in the profession of idolatry which the
Peninsula being thickly overspread, widely diffused and thoroughly
organized, was supported by national pride and latterly by the s