[Footnote 104:  Sales:  Koran and Preliminary Discourse, Wherry’s edition, p. 89.  One of the chief religious duties under the Koran was the giving of alms (Zakat), and under this euphonious name was included the tax by which Mohammed maintained the force that enabled him to keep up his predatory raids on the caravans of his enemies.]

[Footnote 105:  Mohammed and Mohammedanism, p. 123.]

[Footnote 106:  Dr. Koelle gravely questions this.]

[Footnote 107:  One of the most wicked and disastrous of all Mohammed’s laws was that which allowed the free practice of capturing women and girls in war, and retaining them as lawful chattels in the capacity of concubines.  It has been in all ages a base stimulus to the raids of the slave-hunter.  Sir William Muir has justly said, that so long as a free sanction to this great evil stands recorded on the pages of the Koran, Mohammedans will never of their own accord cease to prosecute the slave-trade.]

[Footnote 108:  According to Dr. Koelle, the number of women and children who fell to the prophet’s share of captives at the time of his great slaughter of the surrendered Jewish soldiers, was two hundred.]

[Footnote 109:  Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, p. 112.]

[Footnote 110:  Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ.]

[Footnote 111:  Ibid, p. 112.]

[Footnote 112:  Says Sir William Muir:  “Three radical evils flow from the faith, in all ages and in every country, and must continue to flow so long as the Koran is the standard of belief. First, polygamy, divorce, and slavery are maintained and perpetuated, striking at the root of public morals, poisoning domestic life, and disorganizing society. Second, freedom of thought and private judgment in religion is crushed and annihilated.  The sword still is, and must remain, the inevitable penalty for the denial of Islam.  Toleration is unknown. Third, a barrier has been interposed against the reception of Christianity.  They labor under a miserable delusion who suppose that Mohammedanism paves the way for a purer faith.  No system could have been devised with more consummate skill for shutting out the nations over which it has sway from the light of truth. Idolatrous Arabia (judging from the analogy of other nations) might have been aroused to spiritual life and to the adoption of the faith of Jesus. Mohammedan Arabia is to the human eye sealed against the benign influences of the Gospel....  The sword of Mohammed and the Koran are the most stubborn enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth which the world has yet known.”—­Church Missionary Intelligencer, November, 1885.]

[Footnote 113:  Osborne, in his Islam under the Arabs, and Marcus Dodds, in Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, have emphasized the fact that Islam, however favorably it might compare with the Arabian heathenism which it overthrew, was wholly out of place in forcing its semi-barbarous cultus upon civilizations which were far above it.  It might be an advance upon the rudeness and cruelty of the Koreish, but the misfortune was that it stamped its stereotyped and unchanging principles and customs upon nations which were in advance of it even then, and which, but for its deadening influence, might have made far greater progress in the centuries which followed.