But Mahomet was on his traces.  For five days he pursued the flying Kureisch, whose retreat turned into such a headlong rout that they threw away their sacks of meal so as to travel more lightly.  Therefore the incident has been known ever since, according to the vivid Arab method of description, as the Battle of the Meal-bags.  But the foe was not worthy of his pursuit, and Mahomet made no further attempt to come up with Abu Sofian, but returned at once to Medina.  The attack had ended more or less in fiasco, and as a trial of strength upon either side it was negligible.

The sacred month, Dzul Higg, and the only one in which it was lawful to make the Greater Pilgrimage in far-off Mecca, was now fully upon him, and Mahomet felt drawn irresistibly to the ceremonies surrounding the ancient and now to him distorted faith.  He felt compelled to acknowledge his kinship with the ancient ritual of Arabia, and to this end appointed a festival, Eed-al-Zoha, to be celebrated in this month, which was not only to take the place of the Jewish sacrificial ceremony, but to strengthen his connection with the rites still performed at Mecca, of which the Kaaba and the Black Stone formed the emblem and the goal.

In commemoration of the ceremonial slaying of victims in the vale of Mina at the end of the Greater Pilgrimage, Mahomet ordered two kids to be sacrificed at every festival, so that his people were continually reminded that at Mecca, beneath the infidel yoke, the sacred ritual, so peculiarly their own by virtue of the Abrahamic descent and their inexorable monotheism, was being unworthily performed.

The institution is important, as indicating the development of Mahomet’s religious and ritualistic conceptions.  In the first days of his enthusiasm he was content to enjoin worship of one God by prayer and praise, taking secondary account of forms and ceremonies.  Then came the uprooting of his outward religious life and the demands of his embryo state for the manifestations essential to a communistic faith.  He found Israelite beliefs uncontaminated by the worship of many Gods, and turned to their ritual in the hope of establishing with their aid a ceremonial which should incorporate their system with his own fervent faith.  Now, finding no middle road between separatism and absorption possible with such a people as the Jews, and unconsciously divining that in no great length of time Islam would be sufficient unto itself, he turned again to the practices of his native religion and ancestral ceremonies.  Henceforth he puts forward definitely his conception of Islam as a purified and divinely regulated form of the worship followed by his Arabian forbears, purged of its idol-worship and freed from numerous age-long corruptions.