His position with regard to the political institution of other countries is unique. His temporal power grew almost in spite of himself, and he unconsciously adopted ideas in connection with it which arose out of the circumstances involved. Any form of government except despotism was impossible among so heterogeneous and unruly a people; despotism also bore out his own idea as to the nature of God's governance. Political ideas were largely built upon religious conceptions, sometimes outstripping, sometimes lagging behind them, but always with some irrefragable connection. Despotism, therefore, was the form best suited to Islam, and becomes its chief legacy to posterity, since without the religious sanction Islam politically could not exist. Together with despotism and inextricably mingled with it is the second great Islamic enthusiasm--the belief in the supremacy of force. With violence the Muslim kingdom was to be attained. Mahomet gave to the battle lust of Arabia the approval of his puissant deity, bidding his followers put their supreme faith in the arbitrament of the sword. He knew, too, the value of diplomacy and the use of well-calculated treachery, but chief of all he bade his followers arm themselves to seize by force what they could not obtain by cunning. In the insistence upon these two factors, complete obedience to his will as the revelation of Allah's decrees and the justification of violence to proclaim the merits of his faith, we gain the nearest approach to his character and beliefs; for these, together with his conception of fate, are perhaps the most personal of all his institutions. Mahomet has suffered not a little at the hands of his immediate successors. They have sought to record the full sum of his personality, and finding the subject elude them, as the translation of actions into words must ever fall short of finality, they have overloaded their narrative with minutest and almost always apocryphal details which leave the main outlines blurred. Only two biographies can be said to be in the nature of sources, that of Muhammad ibn Hischam, written on the model of an earlier biography, undertaken about 760 for the Abbasside Caliph Mansur, and of Wakidi, written about 820, which is important as containing the text of many treaties made by Mahomet with various tribes. Al-Tabari, too, included the life of Mahomet in his extensive history of Arabia, but his work serves only as a check, consisting, as it does, mainly of extracts from Wakidi. By far the more valuable is the Kuran and the Sunna of tradition. But even these are fragmentary and confused, bearing upon them the ineradicable stamp of alien writers and much second-hand thought.