The command fell to one who was peculiarly fitted by nature and circumstance to obey it effectively.  To Mahomet, who knew somewhat the chaos of religions around him—­Pagan, Jewish, and Christian struggling together in unholy strife—­the conception of God’s unity, once it attained the strength of a conviction, necessarily resolved itself into an admonitory mission.  “There is no God but God,” therefore all who believe otherwise have incurred His wrath; hasten then to warn men of their sins.  So his conviction passed out of the region of thought into action and received upon it the stamp of time and place, becoming thereby inevitably more circumscribed and intense.

From now onwards the course of Mahomet’s life is rendered indisputably plainer by our possession of that famous and much-maligned document, the Kuran, virtually a record of his inspired sayings as remembered and written down by his immediate successors.  Apart from its intrinsic value as the universally recognised vehicle of the Islamic creed, it is of immense importance as a commentary upon Mahomet’s career.  When allowance has been made for its numberless contradictions and repetitions, it still remains the best means of tracing Mahomet’s mental development, as well as the course of his religious and political dominance.  Although the original document was compiled regardless of chronology, expert scholarship has succeeded in determining the order of most of it contents, and if we cannot say the precise sequence of every sura, at least we can classify each as belonging to one of the two great periods, the Meccan and Medinan, and may even distinguish with comparative accuracy three divisions within the former.

After Mahomet’s mandate to preach and warn his fellow-men of their peril, the suras continue intermittently throughout his life.  Those of the first period, when his mission was hardly accepted outside his family, bear upon them the stamp of a fiery nature, obsessed with its one idea; but behind the wild words lies a store of energy as yet undiscovered, which will find no fulfilment but in action.  That zeal for an idea which caused the Kuran to be, expressed itself at first in words alone, but later was translated into political action, and it is the emptying of this vitality from his words into his works that is responsible for the contrasting prose of the later suras.

But no lack of poetic fire is discernible in the suras immediately following his call to the prophetic office, and from them much may be gathered as to the depth and intensity of his faith.  They are almost strident with feeling; his sentences fall like blows upon an anvil, crude in their emphasis, and so swiftly uttered forth from the flame of his zeal, that they glow with reflected glory: 

  “Say, he is God alone,
  God the Eternal,
  He begetteth not and is not begotten,
  There is none like to Him.”

  “Verily, we have caused It (the Kuran) to descend on the night of
      power,
  And who shall teach thee what the Night of Power is? 
  The Night of Power excelleth a thousand months,
  Therein descend the angels and the spirit by permission of the Lord.”