His achievement as religious reformer rests largely upon the state of
preparation in which he found his medium, but it owes its efficiency to
one force alone. Mahomet was possessed of one central idea, the
indivisibility of God, and it was sufficient to uphold him against all
calamities. The Kuran sounds the note of insistence which rings the
clarion call of his message. With eloquence of mind and soul, with a
repetition that is wearisome to the outsider, he forces that dominant
truth into the hearts of his hearers. It cannot escape them, for he will
not cease to remind them of their doom if they do not obey. What he set
out to do for the religious life of Arabia he accomplished, chiefly
because he concentrated the whole of his demands into one formula, "There
is no God but God"; then when success had shown him the measure of his
ascendancy, "There is no God but God, and Mahomet is His prophet."
At the end of his life idolatry was uprooted from his native country. The
tribes might rebel against the heaviness of his political yoke, and were
often held to him by the slenderest of diplomatic threads, but their
monotheistic beliefs remained intact once Islam had gained the ascendancy
over them. At the end of the Farewell Pilgrimage, he realised with one
grand uplifting of his soul in thanksgiving that he had indeed caught up
the errant attempts of Arabia to remodel its unsatisfying faith, and had
made of them a triumphant reality, in which the conception of Allah's
unity was the essential belief.
Besides his religious and political attainments, he gave to Arabia as a
whole its first written social and moral code. Here the estimate of his
accomplishment is difficult to render, bemuse comparison with the
existing state is almost impossible. Extensively in the Kuran, but to a
greater degree in the mass of his traditional sayings, crystallised into
a standard edition by Al-Bokhari, when due allowance has been made
for the additions and exaggerations of his followers, the chief
characteristic is the casual nature of his laws.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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