m its Cyrus, each lending to his chosen cult
the mighty force of secular authority. Not so Islam. Arising in a desert
land sparsely inhabited by a nomad race previously undistinguished in
human annals, Islam sallied forth on its great adventure with the
slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds. Yet
Islam triumphed with seemingly miraculous ease, and a couple of
generations saw the Fiery Crescent borne victorious from the Pyrenees
to the Himalayas and from the deserts of Central Asia to the deserts of
Central Africa.

This amazing success was due to a number of contributing factors, chief
among them being the character of the Arab race, the nature of
Mohammed's teaching, and the general state of the contemporary Eastern
world. Undistinguished though the Arabs had hitherto been, they were a
people of remarkable potentialities, which were at that moment patently
seeking self-realization. For several generations before Mohammed,
Arabia had been astir with exuberant vitality. The Arabs had outgrown
their ancestral paganism and were instinctively yearning for better
things. Athwart this seething ferment of mind and spirit Islam rang like
a trumpet-call. Mohammed, an Arab of the Arabs, was the very incarnation
of the soul of his race. Preaching a simple, austere monotheism, free
from priestcraft or elaborate doctrinal trappings, he tapped the
well-springs of religious zeal always present in the Semitic heart.
Forgetting the chronic rivalries and blood-feuds which had consumed
their energies in internecine strife, and welded into a glowing unity by
the fire of their new-found faith, the Arabs poured forth from their
deserts to conquer the earth for Allah, the One True God.

Thus Islam, like the resistless breath of the sirocco, the desert wind,
swept out of Arabia and encountered--a spiritual vacuum. Those
neighbouring Byzantine and Persian Empires, so imposing to the casual
eye, were mere dried husks, devoid of real vitality. Their religions
were a mockery and a sham. Persia's ancestral cult of Zoroaster had
degenerated into "Magism"--a pompous priestcraft, tyrannical and
persecuting, hated and secretly despised. As for Eastern Christianity,
bedizened with the gewgaws of paganism and bedevilled by the maddening
theological speculations of the decadent Greek mind, it had become a
repellent caricature of the teachings of Christ. Both Magism and
Byzantine Christendom were riven by great heresies which enge