t, flail in hand, to summon
to repentance, but unlike the generality, bearing also the sword and
sceptre of a kingdom.

No other religious leader has ever bound his creed so closely to definite
political conceptions, Mahomet was not only the instrument of divine
revelation, but he was also at the end of his life the head of a temporal
state with minutest laws and regulations--chaotic it may be, but still
binding so that Islamic influence extended over the whole of the lives of
its adherents. This constitutes its strength. Its leader swayed not only
the convictions but the activities of his subjects.

His position with regard to the political institution of other countries
is unique. His temporal power grew almost in spite of himself, and he
unconsciously adopted ideas in connection with it which arose out of the
circumstances involved. Any form of government except despotism was
impossible among so heterogeneous and unruly a people; despotism also
bore out his own idea as to the nature of God's governance. Political
ideas were largely built upon religious conceptions, sometimes
outstripping, sometimes lagging behind them, but always with some
irrefragable connection. Despotism, therefore, was the form best suited
to Islam, and becomes its chief legacy to posterity, since without the
religious sanction Islam politically could not exist.

Together with despotism and inextricably mingled with it is the second
great Islamic enthusiasm--the belief in the supremacy of force. With
violence the Muslim kingdom was to be attained. Mahomet gave to the
battle lust of Arabia the approval of his puissant deity, bidding his
followers put their supreme faith in the arbitrament of the sword. He
knew, too, the value of diplomacy and the use of well-calculated
treachery, but chief of all he bade his followers arm themselves to seize
by force what they could not obtain by cunning. In the insistence upon
these two factors, complete obedience to his will as the revelation of
Allah's decrees and the justification of violence to proclaim the merits
of his faith, we gain the nearest approach to his character and beliefs;
for these, together with his conception of fate, are perhaps the most
personal of all his institutions.

Mahomet has suffered not a little at the hands of his immediate successors.
They have sought to record the full sum of his personality, and finding
the subject elude them, as the translation of actions into words must
ev