The steps by which Mohammed emerged from obscurity into the full glow of his messianic mission can never be traced with any certainty. Explanations and interpretations in plenty--economic, rationalistic, psychological, mediumistic, and so on--have too often been advanced with placid and perfect assurance; but unfortunately they have not overcome the main difficulty: Mohammed himself. The enigma of his character--a fusion of the furthest limits of charlatanism, demagoguery, bombastic egotism, and general intellectual incompetency, with the opposite extremes of willing martyrdom, unaffected simplicity and sincerity, and lightning flashes of divine poetry--still remains essentially unchallenged and intact. He used tricks common to fakirs--was he therefore a complete and unabashed fakir? He began as a humble religious leader, and he ended as an adroit politician and powerful general--was he therefore dishonest from the start? He hid himself during battles--was he therefore always a coward? He often broke faith with friend and foe alike--was he therefore utterly unscrupulous? And yet.... He quite certainly believed in the divinity of his mission--was he therefore wholly sincere? He wrote some passages almost incomparable in their emotional beauty--was he therefore inspired? He kept Allah in the foreground while he himself remained in the background--why, then, did the influence of Allah wane as the prestige of Mohammed waxed? In short, was he a vicious paranoiac who developed into a maniacal monster, or an unrivaled genius who was all that his worshipers claimed--or both? Such interrogations face the tracker of Mohammed’s career at every turn of the journey, and, in avoiding the pitfalls on one side, he is very likely to stumble into the abysses on the other. For the facts of his life are at once too abundant and too few; and he who ponders them is ever apt to discover that, just at the moment when he confidently believes he is on the right path, he knows both too much and too little. The rainbow’s end is forever at hand and yet forever distant; and similarly the intangible, chameleon-like personality of Mohammed constantly eludes and mocks one at the precise time when one is most confident of touching and cornering the flitting phantom. Under the circumstances, a rapid recapitulation of such concrete events as have been handed down with a minimum of bias is perhaps least likely to lead one too far astray. II