nce of warfare as a means of propaganda.
Henceforth the sword becomes to him the bright but awful instrument
through which the will of Allah is achieved. In the measure that he
trusted its power and confided to it his own destiny and that of his
followers, so did war exact of him its ceaseless penalty, urging him on
continually, through motives of policy and self-defence, until he became
its slave, compelled to continue along the path appointed him, or perish
by that very instrument by which his power had been wrought. Henceforward
his activities consist chiefly of wars aggressive and defensive, while
the religion actuating them receives slighter notice, because the main
thesis has been established in his own state and requires the force of
arms to obtain its supremacy over alien races.

After Bedr, the poet and Prophet becomes the administrator and Prophet.
The quietude and meditation of the Meccan hill-slopes are exchanged for
the council-chamber and the battlefield, and appear upon the background
of his anxious life with the glamour and aloofness of a dream-country;
the inevitable turmoil and preoccupation which accompanies the direction
of affairs took hold upon his life. The fervour of his nature, its
remorseless activity, compelled him to legislate for his followers with
that minute attention to detail almost inconceivable to the modern mind
with its conceptions of the various "departments" of state.

We see him mainly through tradition, but also to a great extent in the
Kuran directing the humblest details in the lives of the Muslim,
organising their ritual, regulating their commerce, their usury laws,
their personal cleanliness, their dietary, their social and moral
relations. Regarding the multifarious duties and cares of his growing
state, its almost complete helplessness in its hands, for he alone was
its guiding force, it is the clearest testimony to his vital energy, his
strength and sanity of brain, that he was not overwhelmed by them, and
that the creative side of his nature was not crushed beyond recovery;
although confronted by the clamorous demands of government and warfare,
these could not touch his spiritual enthusiasm nor his glowing and
changeless devotion to Allah and his cause. At the end of his long years
of rule he could still say with perfect truth, "My chief delight is in
prayer."

CHAPTER XII

THE JEWS AT MEDINA

"And if the people of the Book had believed, it had surely been be