Medina:  they were excluded from political life when the capital was transferred from Medina to Damascus and were left in peace to elaborate their theory of the Muhammedan divine polity.  The influence of these groups was paramount:  but of almost equal importance was the influence of the proselytes in the conquered lands who were Christians for the most part and for that reason far above their Arab contemporaries in respect of intellectual training and culture.  We find that the details of jurisprudence, dogma, and mysticism can only be explained by reference to Christian stimulus, nor is it any exaggeration to ascribe the further development of Muhammed’s views to the influence of thinkers who regarded the religious polity of Islam as the realisation of an ideal which Christianity had hitherto vainly striven to attain.  This ideal was the supremacy of religion over life and all its activities, over the state and the individual alike.  But it was a religion primarily concerned with the next world, where alone real worth was to be found.  Earthly life was a pilgrimage to be performed and earthly intentions had no place with heavenly.  The joy of life which the ancient world had known, art, music and culture, all were rejected or valued only as aids to religion.  Human action was judged with reference only to its appraisement in the life to come.  That ascetic spirit was paramount, which had enchained the Christian world, that renunciation of secular affairs which explains the peculiar methods by which mediaeval views of life found expression.

Asceticism did not disturb the course of life as a whole.  It might condemn but it could not suppress the natural impulse of man to propagate his race:  it might hamper economic forces, but it could not destroy them.  It eventually led to a compromise in every department of life, but for centuries it retained its domination over men’s minds and to some material extent over their actions.

Such was the environment in which Islam was planted:  its deepest roots had been fertilised with Christian theory, and in spite of Muhammed’s call to repentance, its most characteristic manifestations were somewhat worldly and non-ascetic.  “Islam knows not monasticism” says the tradition which this tendency produced.  The most important compromise of all, that with life, which Christianity only secured by gradual steps, had been already attained for Islam by Muhammed himself and was included in the course of his development.  As Islam now entered the Christian world, it was forced to pass through this process of development once more.  At the outset it was permeated with the idea of Christian asceticism, to which an inevitable opposition arose, and found expression in such statements as that already quoted.  But Muhammed’s preaching had obviously striven to honour the future life by painting the actual world in the gloomiest colours, and the material optimism of the secular-minded was unable to check the advance