The little peddler, assigning himself a lower place, rode behind on a pack-mule.

Mohammed had come, and was, from the very beginning, a monarch, surrounded by an army of blind devotees, believers in his holy mission, and slavishly obedient to his will.

Amzi took the prophet to his house, and there entertained him as a respected Meccan friend, until Mohammed’s home was erected.  It was at Amzi’s house, too, that the nuptials of Mohammed and the beautiful Ayesha, also those of Ali and the prophet’s daughter Fatimah, took place.

One of Mohammed’s first acts was to have a mosque built, and, from it, morning and night the call to prayers was given: 

“God is great!  There is no God but God!  Mohammed is the prophet of God!  Come to prayers.  Come to prayers!  God is great!”

And from this mosque Mohammed exhorted with wondrous eloquence, the music of his voice falling like a spell on the multitudes, as they listened to teachings new and more living than the old, dead, superstitious idolatry to which they were in bondage; yet, had they known it, teachings whose choicest gems were but crumbs borrowed from the words of One who had preached in all meekness and love on the shores of Galilee and the hills of Palestine more than six hundred years before.

They listened in wonder to condemnation of their belief in polytheism.

“In the name of the most merciful God,” Mohammed would say, “say God is one God, the Eternal God; he begetteth not, neither is he begotten, and there is not anyone like unto him!” Thus did he aim at the foundation of Christianity, seeking to overthrow belief in the “only begotten Son of God” as a divine factor of the Trinity.  Jesus he recognized as a prophet, not as God’s own Son; and, while he borrowed incessantly from the Scriptures, he refused to accept them, declaring that they had become perverted, and that the original Koran was a volume of Paradise, from which Gabriel rendered him transcripts, and was, therefore, the true word of God which had been laid from time everlasting on what he called the “preserved table,” close to the throne of God in the highest heaven.

And yet, during the greater part of his career, the utterances of this strange, incomprehensible man were characterized by a seemingly real glow of philanthropy and an earnest solicitude for the salvation of his countrymen from the depths of moral and spiritual degradation into which they had fallen.  A missionary spirit seemed to be in him, in strange contrast and incompatibility with the sacrilegious words that often fell from his lips.

In all the records of history there is nothing more wonderful than the marvelous success which attended Mohammed at Medina.  Staid and sober merchantmen, men with gray heads, fiery youths, proselytes from the tribes of the desert, even women, flocked to him every day; and he soon realized that he had a vast army of converts ready to live or die for him, ready to fight for him until the last.