ation ends with a repetition of the restrictions imposed upon
women and an injunction to the Muslim not to enter each other's houses
until they have asked leave. This was a necessary ordinance in that
primitive community, where bolts were little used and there was virtually
no privacy, and was designed, in common with most of his present
utterances, to encourage the leading of decent, well-regulated lives by
the followers of so magnificent a faith. Ayesha's defamers were publicly
scourged, and the matter dismissed from the Muslim mind, save that
regulations had once more been framed upon personal feelings and specific
events, and were to constitute the whole future law regarding an
important and difficult question.

Mahomet was justly content with the position of affairs after the
dispersion of the Beni Mustalik. He had shown his strength to the
surrounding desert tribes; by systematically crushing each rebellion as
it arose, he had demonstrated to them the impossibility of alliance
against him. He knew they were each prone to self-seeking and distrustful
of each other, and he played unhesitatingly upon their jealousies and
passions. Thus he kept them disunited and fearful, afraid even to ally
with his powerful enemy the Kureisch. For after all, the Meccans were his
chief obstacle; their opposition was spirited and urged on by the memory
of past humiliations and triumphs. They alone were really worthy of his
steel, and he knew that, as far as the intermediary wars were concerned,
they were but the prelude to another encounter in the year-long warfare
with his native city.

The drama closes in now upon the protagonists; save for the expulsion of
the last Jewish tribe in the neighbourhood of Medina, there is little to
compare with that central causal hatred. The final hour was not yet, but
the struggle grew in intensity with the passage of time--the struggle
wherein one fought for revenge and future freedom from molestation, but
the other for the establishment of a faith in its rightful environment,
the manifestation before men of that Faith's determined achievement, the
symbol of its destined conquests and divinely appointed power.

CHAPTER XV

THE WAR OF THE DITCH

"And God drove back the Infidels in their wrath; they won no
advantage; God sufficed the Faithful in the fight, for God is strong,
mighty."--_The Kuran._

The Kureischite plans for the annihilation of Mahomet were now complete.
They had a