Nevertheless, the first few months at Medina were on the whole happy and auspicious. The elements of disaffection that lurked among the Jews and the unbelievers bided their day; the refugees and the citizen converts, or allies, gladly rushed to fulfill the smallest desire of the Prophet, whose fascinating personality completely charmed his friends and even intrigued his enemies--for a time. Who could resist the appeal of a man who gracefully bestowed names of good omen upon converts previously burdened with inauspicious Pagan titles, and who dignified those of his subordinates who were enslaved in the ignoble calling of “hucksters” by altering the forbidding word to “Merchants”? In an excess of praiseworthy devotion, they quaffed the sacred water in which the Prophet had bathed, and piously treasured his hairs and nail-parings as charms and forget-me-nots. And Mohammed, ever extraordinarily swift to take hints, soon formed the habit of wrapping up these personal relics and bestowing them upon new converts as a peculiar evidence of his esteem. While his worshipers thus fawned and his foes maintained an ominously quiet peace, the Prophet calmly assumed the attributes of a sovereign and sacerdotal office. As self-appointed ruler of the city, he exercised the right of deposing and selecting whatever chiefs he desired; as priestly dictator of all Islam, he established those multitudinous rules and ordinances that still defy the assaults of time. Motivated probably by a statesmanlike, if rather cautious, wish to win or at least placate the Jews, he inaugurated a complicated system of devotion based principally upon the famous precepts that had been given to Moses. The detractors of Islam have so exaggerated its largely fictitious sensuality that its rigorous rites have too often been forgotten: its lustrations, its fastings, its prodigality of genuflections. The business of lustration, for example, was very complicated. Before prayer the Moslem must wash his face from the top of the forehead to the chin and sideways as far as both ears, bathe his arms and hands as far as the elbows, and cleanse his feet as far as the ankles; and all this must be done in the strictest silence, broken only by such prayers as the votary might think appropriate. While scrubbing his teeth, he might say if he chose: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, as I clean my teeth, to purify me from my faults, and accept my homage, O Lord! May the purity of my teeth be for me a pledge of the whiteness of my face at the Day of Judgment.” If, through a momentary lapse into sin, the hapless believer had defiled his body, he thus washed away his iniquity: three successive times he poured water upon his right and left shoulders, and a like number of times on the top of his head; and should one hair on the entire body be left untouched, the act of purification was wholly vain.