32. Thus all these tribal conversions and the speedy spread of Islam in the whole of Arabia was accomplished without any resort to arms, compulsion, threat, or "the scymitar in one hand and the Koran in the other." The Pagan Arabs, the Christians and the Jews, those who embraced Islam, adopted it joyfully and voluntarily. Islam had been much persecuted for many years from the third year of its Prophet's mission to the sixth year after the Hegira--a period of about sixteen years, but it flourished alike during persecutions and oppositions as well as during periods of peace and security of the Moslems. It was the result of Mohammad's staunch adherence to the uncompromising severity of his inflexible principles of preaching the divine Truth and his sincere belief in his own mission that he bore steadfastly all the hardships of persecutions at Mecca and the horrors of the aggressive wars of the Koreish and others at Medina, and persuaded the whole of Arabia, Pagan, Jewish and Christian, to adopt Islam voluntarily.[126] [Footnote 126: The rebellion of almost the whole of Arabia--wrongly called apostasy--after the death of Mohammad was chiefly against the Government of Abu Bakr, the first Khalifa of the Republic of Islam. No such paramount power over the whole of Arabia was ever vested in the chiefs of Mecca, and the Arabs were unaccustomed to this new form of Government. They had neither rebelled against Islam, nor apostatized from their religion, except a very few of them who had attached themselves to Moseilama for a short time.] [Sidenote: Mohammad was not favoured with circumstances round him.] 33. It was not an easy task for Mohammad to have converted the Arabs from their national idolatry to a religion of pure and strict monotheism. The aspect of Arabia was strictly conservative, and there were no prospects of hopeful changes. The indigenous idolatry and deep-rooted superstition, the worship of visible and material objects of devotion,--idols and unshaped stones,--something that the eyes can see and the hands can handle,--and the dread of invisible genii and other evil spirits, held the Arab mind in a rigorous and undisputed thraldom. Arabia was obstinately fixed in the profession of idolatry which the Peninsula being thickly overspread, widely diffused and thoroughly organized, was supported by national pride and latterly by the sword. "It was," writes Dr. Marcus Dods, "certainly no hopeful task which Mohammed undertook when he proposed by the influence of religion to combine into one nation tribes so incapable of being deeply influenced by any religion, and so irreconcilably opposed to one another; to abolish customs which had the sanction of immemorial usage; and to root out an idolatry, which, if it had no profound hold upon the spiritual nature, was at least bound up with old family traditions and well-understood tribal interests."[127]