again attack you and commit aggressions.]

[Footnote 193: Meaning those who were defeated at Badr.]

[Footnote 194: The Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, p. 319.]

[Footnote 195: The Life of Mahomet, Vol. III, p. 282.]

[Footnote 196: There is only one instance of intolerance, _i.e._, making
converts at the point of sword, which Sir W. Muir, so zealous in
accusing Mohammad of religious persecution during the Medina period, has
succeeded in finding out during the ten eventful years of Mohammad's
sojourn in Medina. I refer to the story of Khalid's mission in the
beginning of the tenth year A.H., to Bani Haris, a Christian tribe at
Najran, whose people had entered into a covenant of peace with Mohammad,
and to whom an ample pledge had been guaranteed to follow their own
faith. According to Sir W. Muir, Khalid was instructed to call on the
people to embrace Islam, and if they declined, he was, after three days,
to attack and force them to submit (Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, p.
224). The version of the story thus given by the Biographers of Mohammad
is too absurd to be believed; because it is a well-established fact that
the Bani Haris, or the Christians of Najran, had sent a deputation to
Mohammad only a year ago, _i.e._, in A.H. 9, and obtained terms of
security from him (Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. II, p. 299; Ibn Hisham,
p. 401). It is quite an unfounded, though a very ingenious, excuse of
Sir W. Muir to make the Bani Haris consist of two sects,--one of
Christians, and the other of idolators,--and to say that the operations
of Khalid were directed against the portion of Bani Haris still
benighted with paganism; thus reconciling the apocryphal tradition with
the fact of the Bani Haris being at a treaty of security, toleration and
freedom, with Mohammad.

"I conclude," he writes in a note, "the operations of Khalid were
directed against the portion of Bani Harith still idolaters:--at all
events not against the Christian portion already under treaty" (The Life
of Mahomet, Vol. IV, foot-note, p. 224). See the account of the
conversion of Bani Harith to Christianity long before Islam in Hishamee,
pp. 20-22. Gibbon, Chapter XLII, Vol. V, p. 207, foot-note; and Muir's
Vol. I, p. ccxxviii.]

[Footnote 197: A name applied to an idol or idols--especially Allat and
Ozza, the ancient idols of the Meccans.]

[Footnote 198: The past tense, third person plural, of the infinitive
_Fitnah_.]

_The Ninth Chapter, or Sura Barat._