How, then, are we to explain the starting-point of it all—­Mohammed’s sense of vocation?  Was it a disease of the spirit, a kind of madness?  At all events, the data are insufficient upon which to form a serious diagnosis.  Some have called it epilepsy.  Sprenger, with an exaggerated display of certainty based upon his former medical studies, gave Mohammed’s disorder the name of hysteria.  Others try to find a connection between Mohammed’s extraordinary interest in the fair sex and his prophetic consciousness.  But, after all, is it explaining the spiritual life of a man, who was certainly unique, if we put a label upon him, and thus class him with others, who at the most shared with him certain abnormalities?  A normal man Mohammed certainly was not.  But as soon as we try to give a positive name to this negative quality, then we do the same as the heathens of Mecca, who were violently awakened by his thundering prophecies:  “He is nothing but one possessed, a poet, a soothsayer, a sorcerer,” they said.  Whether we say with the old European biographers “impostor,” or with the modern ones put “epileptic,” or “hysteric” in its place, makes little difference.  The Meccans ended by submitting to him, and conquering a world under the banner of his faith.  We, with the diffidence which true science implies, feel obliged merely to call him Mohammed, and to seek in the Qoran, and with great cautiousness in the Tradition, a few principal points of his life and work, in order to see how in his mind the intense feeling of discontent during the misery of his youth, together with a great self-reliance, a feeling of spiritual superiority to his surroundings, developed into a call, the form of which was largely decided by Jewish and Christian influence.

While being struck by various weaknesses which disfigured this great personality and which he himself freely confessed, we must admire the perseverance with which he retained his faith in his divine mission, not discouraged by twelve years of humiliation, nor by the repudiation of the “People of Scripture,” upon whom he had relied as his principal witnesses, nor yet by numbers of temporary rebuffs during his struggle for the dominion of Allah and His Messenger, which he carried on through the whole of Arabia.

Was Mohammed conscious of the universality of his mission?  In the beginning he certainly conceived his work as merely the Arabian part of a universal task, which, for other parts of the world, was laid upon other messengers.  In the Medina period he ever more decidedly chose the direction of “forcing to comply.”  He was content only when the heathens perceived that further resistance to Allah’s hosts was useless; their understanding of his “clear Arabic Qoran” was no longer the principal object of his striving. Such an Islam could equally well be forced upon non-Arabian heathens.  And, as regards the “People of Scripture,” since Mohammed’s endeavour to be recognized