For four days Mahomet dwelt in Coba, where he had encountered unfailing support and friendship, and there was joined by Ali.  His memories of Coba were always grateful, for at the outset of his doubtful and even dangerous enterprise he had received a good augury.  Before he set out to Medina he laid the foundations of the Mosque at Coba, where the Faithful would be enabled to pray according to their fashion, undisturbed and beneath the favour of Allah, and decreed that Friday was to be set apart as a special day of prayer, when addresses were to be given at the Mosque and the doctrines of Islam expounded.

Even as early as this Mahomet felt the mantle of sovereignty descending upon him, for we hear now of the first of those ordinances or decrees by which in later times he rules the lives and actions of his subjects to the last detail.  Clearly he perceived himself a leader among men, who had it within his power to build up a community following his own dictates, which might by consolidation even rival those already existent in Arabia.  He was taking command of a weak and factious city, and he realised that in his hands lay its prosperity or downfall; he was, in fact, the arbiter of its fate and of the fate of his colleagues who had dared all with him.

But he could not stay long in Coba, while the final assay upon the Medinans remained to be undertaken, and so we find him on the fourth day of his sojourn making preparations for the entry into the city.  It was undertaken with some confidence of success from the messages already sent to Coba, and proved as triumphal an entry as his former one.  The populace awaited him in expectation and reverence, and hailed him as their Prophet, the mighty leader who had come to their deliverance.  They surrounded his camel Al-Caswa, and the camels of his followers, and when Al-Caswa stopped outside the house of Abu Ayub, Mahomet once more received the beast’s augury and sojourned there until the building of the Mosque.  As Al-Caswa entered the paved courtyard, Mahomet dismounted to receive the allegiance of Abu Ayub and his household; then, turning to the people, he greeted them with words of good cheer and encouragement, and they responded with acclamations.

For seven months the Prophet lodged in the house of Abu Ayub, and he bought the yard where Al-Caswa halted as a token of his first entry into Medina, and a remembrance in later years of his abiding place during the difficult time of his inception.  The decisive step had been taken.  The die was now cast.  It was as if the little fleet of human souls had finally cast its moorings and ventured into the unpathed waters of temporal dominion under the command of one whose skill in pilotage was as yet unknown.  Many changes became necessary in the conduct of the enterprise, of which not the least was the change of attitude between the leader and his followers.  Mahomet, heretofore religious visionary and teacher, became the temporal head of a community, and in time the leader of a political State.  The changed aspect of his mission can never be over-emphasised, for it altered the tenor of his thoughts and the progress of his words.  All the poetry and fire informing the early pages of the Kuran departs with his reception at Medina, except for occasional flashes that illumine the chronicle of detailed ordinances that the Book has now become.