olatry was uprooted from his native country. The
tribes might rebel against the heaviness of his political yoke, and were
often held to him by the slenderest of diplomatic threads, but their
monotheistic beliefs remained intact once Islam had gained the ascendancy
over them. At the end of the Farewell Pilgrimage, he realised with one
grand uplifting of his soul in thanksgiving that he had indeed caught up
the errant attempts of Arabia to remodel its unsatisfying faith, and had
made of them a triumphant reality, in which the conception of Allah's
unity was the essential belief.

Besides his religious and political attainments, he gave to Arabia as a
whole its first written social and moral code. Here the estimate of his
accomplishment is difficult to render, bemuse comparison with the
existing state is almost impossible. Extensively in the Kuran, but to a
greater degree in the mass of his traditional sayings, crystallised into
a standard edition by Al-Bokhari, when due allowance has been made
for the additions and exaggerations of his followers, the chief
characteristic is the casual nature of his laws.

All his dictates as to the control of marriage, the sale and tenure of
land, commerce, plunder, as well as health and dietary are the result of
definite cases coming within his adjudication. Such an idea as the
deliberate compilation of a code never occurred to him, and there is no
evidence that he ever referred to his former decisions in similar cases,
so that possibilities of contradiction and evasion are limitless. Out of
this jumble of inconsistencies Muslim law and practice has grown. He was
enabled to impose his commands upon the conquered peoples by means of his
military organisation, so that it was not long before Arabia was ruled in
rough fashion by his social and moral precepts enforced by the sword. His
wives offend him, and he forthwith sets down the duties and position of
women in his temporal state. He desires the wife of his friend, and the
result is a Kuranic decree sanctioning the taking of a woman under those
conditions. He is jealous of his younger and more comely associates, and
thereupon ordains the perpetual seclusion of women. He is annoyed at the
untimely visits to his house of assembly, and so he commands that no
Believer shall enter another's apartment uninvited. It is inconvenient to
relinquish the watch night or day during the period of siege in Medina,
therefore he institutes a system whereby