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 half the army is to pray while the other half remains at its post.  Instances may be multiplied without ceasing of this building up of a whole social code upon the most casual foundations.  But unheeding as was its genesis, it was in the main effective for those times, and in any case it substituted definite laws for the measureless wastes of tradition and custom.

It is probable that Mahomet relied a great deal upon existing usages.  He was too wise to disturb them unnecessarily.  His was a nature of extremes combined with a wisdom that came as a revelation to his followers.  Where he hates it is with a hurricane of wrath and destruction, where he loves it is with the same impetuous tenacity.  His denunciations of the infidels, of his enemies among the Kureisch, of the laggards within his own city, of the defamers of holy things, of drunkards, of the unclean, of those who even copy the features of their kindred or picture their idea of God, are written in the most violent words, whose fury seems to smite upon the ear with the rushing of flame.

And so the prevailing stamp upon Muslim institutions is fanaticism and intolerance.  As the Prophet drew up hard-and-fast rules, so his followers insisted upon their remorseless continuance.  Mahomet found himself compelled to issue ordinances, often hurried and unreflecting, to meet immediate needs, to settle disputes whose prolongation would have meant his ruin.  He possessed the qualities of poet, seer, and religious mystic, but these in his later life were overshadowed by the characteristics of lawgiver, soldier, and statesman demanded by his position as head of a body of men.