, and the first life they took." The
significance of the event was vividly felt throughout Islam, and
Abdallah, its hero, received at Mahomet's hands the title of "Amir-al-
Momirim," Commander of the Faithful--a title which recalls inseparably
the cruelty and magnificence, the glamour and rapacity, of Arabian Bagdad
under Haroun-al-Raschid. The valorous enterprise had now been achieved,
the Kureisch caravan was despoiled, and the Kureisch themselves wrought
into fury against the Prophet's insolence; but more than all, the channel
of Mahomet's policy of warfare became thereby so deeply carved that he
could not have effaced it had he desired. Henceforth his creative genius
limited itself to the deepening of its course and the direction of its
outlet.

The Jews had not rested content with murmuring against Mahomet's rule,
they sought to embarrass him by active sedition. One of their first
attempts against Mahomet's regime was to stir up strife between the
Refugees and Helpers. In this they would have been successful but for
Mahomet's efficient system of espionage, a method upon which he relied
throughout his life. Failing to foment a rebellion in secret they
proceeded to open hostilities, and the Muslim, jealous for their faith,
retaliated by contempt and estrangement. During the winter of 623
personal attack was made by the mob upon Mahomet. The people were hounded
on by their leaders to stone the Prophet, but he was warned in time and
escaped their assaults.

The popular fury was merely the reflex of a fundamental division of
thought between the opposing parties. The Jewish and Muslim systems
could never coalesce, for each claimed the dominance and ignored all
compromise. The age-long, hallowed traditions of the Jews which supported
a theocracy as unyielding as any conception of Divine sovereignty
preached by Mahomet, found themselves faced with a new creative force
rapidly evolving its own legends, and strong enough in its enthusiasm to
overwhelm their own. The Rabbis felt that Mahomet and his warrior
heroes--Ali, Omar, Othman, and the rest--would in time dislodge from
their high places their own peculiar saints, just as they saw Mahomet
with Abu Bekr and his personnel of administrators and informers
already overriding their own councillors in the civil and military
departments of their state. The old regime could not amalgamate with the
new, for that would mean absorption by its more vigorous neighbour, and
the Jewis