This is the theory of the prophetic office which pervades the Koran, wherein the doctrine is formulated that every nation had its divine guide and that Mecca before Mahomet's time had none. This place, then, Mahomet felt a divine call to fill. But we are never likely to ascertain what first put the idea into his mind. The fables which his biographers tell on this subject are not worth repeating; his own system, in which he is brought into direct communication with the Deity, though at a later period the angel Gabriel appears to have acted as intermediary, naturally leaves no room for such speculations; and since his dispensation was thought to be absolutely new, and to make a _tabula rasa_ of the pagan past, his first followers, having broken with that past, left no intelligible account of the state of affairs which preceded their master's call. Some generations therefore elapsed before that past was studied with any sort of sympathy, and details could not then be recovered, any more than they can now be supplied by conjecture. So far as Mahomet may be said from the first to have formulated a definite notion of his work, we should probably be right in thinking it to be the restoration of the religion of Abraham, or (as the Koran calls him) Ibrahim. Though we have no reason for supposing the name of Abraham or Ishmael to have been known in Mecca generally before Mahomet's time, the Biblical ethnology was not apparently questioned by those who were told of it, and there are stories, not necessarily apocryphal, of precursors of Mahomet going abroad in search of the "religion of Abraham." One feature of that system, associated in the Bible with the name of Ishmael as well, was circumcision, which was actually observed by the Meccan tribes, though it would appear with technical differences from the Jewish method; the association of monotheism with it would seem reasonable enough, in view of Jewish traditions, such as Mahomet may have heard on his travels; why the doctrine of the future life should be coupled with it is less obvious. That the Meccan temple and its rites had been founded by these two patriarchs appears to have been deduced by Mahomet himself, but perhaps at a later stage of his career. That these rites, so far as they were idolatrous, were in flagrant defiance of the religion of Abraham must have struck any one who accepted the accounts of it which were current among Jews and Christians. The precursors, however, appear to have felt no call to reform their fellow-citizens; whereas it is evident that Mahomet regarded himself as charged with a message, which he was bound to deliver, and which his God would in some way render effective.