In our valuation of Mohammed’s sayings we cannot lay too much stress upon his incapability of looking far ahead.  The final aims which Mohammed set himself were considered by sane persons as unattainable.  His firm belief in the realization of the vague picture of the future which he had conceived, nay, which Allah held before him, drove him to the uttermost exertion of his mental power in order to surmount the innumerable unexpected obstacles which he encountered.  Hence the variability of the practical directions contained in the Qoran; they are constantly altered according to circumstances.  Allah’s words during the last part of Mohammed’s life:  “This day have I perfected your religion for you, and have I filled up the measure of my favours towards you, and chosen Islam for you as your religion,” have in no way the meaning of the exclamation:  “It is finished,” of the dying Christ.  They are only a cry of jubilation over the degradation of the heathen Arabs by the triumph of Allah’s weapons.  At Mohammed’s death everything was still unstable; and the vital questions for Islam were subjects of contention between the leaders even before the Prophet had been buried.

The expedient of new revelations completing, altering, or abrogating former ones had played an important part in the legislative work of Mohammed.  Now, he had never considered that by his death the spring would be stopped, although completion was wanted in every respect.  For, without doubt, Mohammed felt his weakness in systematizing and his absence of clearness of vision into the future, and therefore he postponed the promulgation of divine decrees as long as possible, and he solved only such questions of law as frequently recurred, when further hesitation would have been dangerous to his authority and to the peace of the community.

At Mohammed’s death, all Arabs were not yet subdued to his authority.  The expeditions which he had undertaken or arranged beyond the northern boundaries of Arabia, were directed against Arabs, although they were likely to rouse conflict with the Byzantine and Persian empires.  It would have been contrary to Mohammed’s usual methods if this had led him to form a general definition of his attitude towards the world outside Arabia.

As little as Mohammed, when he invoked the Meccans in wild poetic inspirations to array themselves behind him to seek the blessedness of future life, had dreamt of the possibility that twenty years later the whole of Arabia would acknowledge his authority in this world, as little, nay, much less, could he at the close of his life have had the faintest premonition of the fabulous development which his state would reach half a century later.  The subjugation of the mighty Persia and of some of the richest provinces of the Byzantine Empire, only to mention these, was never a part of his program, although legend has it that he sent out written challenges to the six princes of the world best known to him.  Yet we may say