with fabulous additions; others are wholly false, having no foundation in fact. 3.  Admonitions:  under which head are comprised exhortations to receive Islamism; to fight for it, to practise its precepts, prayers, alms, etc.; the moral duties, such as justice, temperance, etc., promises of everlasting felicity to the obedient, dissuasives from sin, threatenings of the punishments of hell to the unbelieving and disobedient.  Many of the threatenings are levelled against particular persons, and those sometimes of Mahomet’s own family, who had opposed him in propagating his religion.

In the Koran God is brought in saying, “We have given you a book.”  By this it appears that the impostor published early, in writing, some of his principal doctrines, as also some of his historical relations.  Thus, in his life of himself we find his disciples reading the twentieth chapter of the Koran, before his flight from Mecca; after which he pretended many of the revelations in other chapters were brought to him.  Undoubtedly, all those said to be revealed at Medina must be posterior to what he had then published at Mecca; because he had not yet been at Medina.  Many parts of the Koran he declared were brought to him by the angel Gabriel, on special occasions, of which we have already met with several instances in his biography.  Accordingly, the commentators on the Koran often explain passages in it by relating the occasion on which they were first revealed.  Without such a key many of them would be perfectly unintelligible.

There are several contradictions in the Koran.  To reconcile these, the Mussulman doctors have invented the doctrine of abrogation, i.e., that what was revealed at one time was revoked by a new revelation.  A great deal of it is so absurd, trifling, and full of tautology that it requires no little patience to read much of it at a time.  Notwithstanding, the Koran is cried up by the Mussulmans as inimitable; and in the seventeenth chapter of the Koran Mahomet is commanded to say, “Verily if men and genii were purposely assembled, that they might produce anything like the Koran, they could not produce anything like unto it, though they assisted one another.”  Accordingly, when the impostor was called upon, as he often was, to work miracles in proof of his divine mission, he excused himself by various pretences, and appealed to the Koran as a standing miracle.[65] Each chapter of the Koran is divided into verses, that is, lines of different length, terminated with the same letter, so as to make a different rhyme, but without any regard to the measure of the syllables.