and despicable, that in the other world they would be the
outcasts, which opened the floodgates of irony and scorn against Mohammed.
And it was Mohammed's anxiety for his own lot and that of those who were
dear to him in that future life, that forced him to seek a solution of the
question: who shall bring my people out of the darkness of antithesis into
the light of obedience to Allah?

We should, _a posteriori_, be inclined to imagine a simpler answer to the
question than that which Mohammed found; he might have become a missionary
of Judaism or of Christianity to the Meccans. However natural such
a conclusion may appear to us, from the premises with which we are
acquainted, it did not occur to Mohammed. He began--the Qoran tells us
expressly--by regarding the Arabs, or at all events _his_ Arabs, as
heretofore destitute of divine message[1]: "to whom We have sent no warner
before you." Moses and Jesus--not to mention any others--had not been sent
for the Arabs; and as Allah would not leave any section of mankind without
a revelation, their prophet must still be to come. Apparently Mohammed
regarded the Jewish and Christian tribes in Arabia as exceptions to the
rule that an ethnical group (_ummah_) was at the same time a religious
unity. He did not imagine that it could be in Allah's plan that the Arabs
were to conform to a revelation given in a foreign language. No; God must
speak to them in Arabic.[2] Through whose mouth?

[Footnote 1: _Qoran_, xxxii., 2; xxxiv., 43; xxxvi., 5, etc.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., xii., 2; xiii., 37; XX., 112; XXVI., 195; xli., 44,
etc.]

A long and severe crisis preceded Mohammed's call. He was convinced that,
if he were the man, mighty signs from Heaven must be revealed to him, for
his conception of revelation was mechanical; Allah Himself, or at least
angels, must speak to him. The time of waiting, the process of objectifying
the subjective, lived through by the help of an overstrained imagination,
all this laid great demands upon the psychical and physical constitution of
Mohammed. At length he saw and heard that which he thought he ought to hear
and see. In feverish dreams he found the form for the revelation, and he
did not in the least realize that the contents of his inspiration from
Heaven were nothing but the result of what he had himself absorbed. He
realized it so little, that the identity of what was revealed to him with
what he held to be the contents of the Scriptures of Jews