The Islam which Muḥammad brought with him to Medína was almost entirely derived by oral tradition from Christianity and Judaism, and just for this reason it made little impression on the heathen Arabs, whose religious ideas were generally of the most primitive kind. Notwithstanding its foreign character and the absence of anything which appealed to Arabian national sentiment, it spread rapidly in Medína, where, as we have seen, the soil was already prepared for it; but one may well doubt whether it could have extended its sway over the peninsula unless the course of events had determined Muḥammad to associate the strange doctrines of Islam with the ancient heathen sanctuary at Mecca, the Ka‘ba, which was held in universal veneration by the Arabs and formed the centre of a worship that raised no difficulties in their minds. Before he had lived many months in Medína the Prophet realised that his hope of converting the Jews was doomed to disappointment. Accordingly he instructed his followers that they should no longer turn their faces in prayer towards the Temple at Jerusalem, as they had been accustomed to do since the Flight, but towards the Ka‘ba; while, a year or two later, he incorporated in Islam the superstitious ceremonies of the pilgrimage, which were represented as having been originally prescribed to Abraham, the legendary founder of the Ka‘ba, whose religion he professed to restore. [Sidenote: Antagonism of Islamic and Arabian ideals.] These concessions, however, were far from sufficient to reconcile the free-living and freethinking people of the desert to a religion which restrained their pleasures, forced them to pay taxes and perform prayers, and stamped with the name of barbarism all the virtues they held most dear. The teaching of Islam ran directly counter to the ideals and traditions of heathendom, and, as Goldziher has remarked, its originality lies not in its doctrines, which are Jewish and Christian, but in the fact that it was Muḥammad who first maintained these doctrines with persistent energy against the Arabian view of life.[340] While we must refer the reader to Dr. Goldziher's illuminating pages for a full discussion of the conflict between the new Religion (_Dín_) and the old Virtue (_Muruwwa_), it will not be amiss to summarise the chief points at which they clashed with each other.[341] In the first place, the fundamental idea of Islam was foreign and unintelligible to the Bedouins. "It was not the destruction of their idols that they opposed so much as the spirit of devotion which it was sought to implant in them: the determination of their whole lives by the thought of God and of His pre-ordaining and retributive omnipotence, the prayers and fasts, the renouncement of coveted pleasures, and the sacrifice of money and property which was demanded of them in God's name." In spite of the saying, _Lá dína illá bi ’l-muruwwati_ ("There is no religion without