which peace would reign and incalculable blessings would result.

+551. The Arabs.+ The Arabs in the time of Mohammed were a nation
inhabiting a territory which kept them from feeling any national
sentiment of unity.[1757] The tribe and kin group were their strongest
societal units. At the time of Mohammed's birth blood revenge between
the kin groups was so destructive that all were instinctively struggling
towards devices which might supersede it. In the century preceding
Mohammed's birth the nation had been agitated by social movements in
which the old was falling and the new was pushing out to acceptance and
establishment. "It seemed as if the persons were too big for the
circumstances."[1758] If a tribe ever was a peace group amongst the
Arabs, we have no proof of it. Islam was an attempt to unite the whole
nation into a peace group by religion. The attempt succeeded, and the
nation, in the elan of its new unity and energy, set out to conquer its
neighbors. It had no state organization. The caliph was theological as
well as civil head. The Arabs had no political experience. The leaders
in the kin groups were the only chiefs they had, and they established a
kind of aristocracy in Persia, but the first caliphs were pure despots,
like negro heads of states. The Arabs plundered the conquered states.
The greatest duty known to the Arabs was blood revenge. It was their
only social engine by which to restrain crime and secure some measure of
order. Blood was, in their view, more holy than anything else. It put
religion in the background. The kin group was the realized ideal. The
gods were comparatively insignificant.[1759] In old Arabia a man engaged
in a blood feud must abstain from women, wine, and unguents.[1760]
Within the kin group there was no blood revenge, but a guilty person was
held personally responsible. A guest friend ("stranger within thy
gates") was not liable to blood revenge with his own kin. His status was
in the tribe in which he was a guest, by which he must be defended
against his tribe of origin, if the case arose.[1761] The Arabs thought
it dishonorable to take money for blood guilt. It was, they thought,
like selling the blood of one's kin. Bedouin tribes in the nineteenth
century refused to settle blood feuds by payments. Arbitration was
admitted in the time of Mohammed, at Medina, where old blood feuds had
become intolerable by their consequences.[1762] In Egypt, in the first
half of the nineteenth