Though Mohammed was now actually the spiritual and nominally the temporal ruler of Medina, his position nevertheless was very precarious. The Jews, while completely deficient in martial valor, were openly contemptuous of his prophetical jurisdiction, and the Khazrajite leader, Abdallah ibn Obei, showed overt defiance against his assumption of civil power. Presumably because he feared and respected Abdallah’s influence, the Prophet took pains to treat him with every courtesy; but the compliment was not returned. One day, when Mohammed chanced to observe his rival seated at ease in the cool shade of his house, he alighted from his steed, graciously saluted the sitter, recited some of the most affecting passages in the Koran, and finally invited him to adopt the faith. Abdallah listened composedly until the long harangue was ended; then he spoke. “Nothing could be better than this discourse of thine, if it were true. Now, therefore, do thou sit at home in thine own house, and whosoever cometh to thee preach thus unto him, and he that cometh not unto thee refrain from troubling him with that which he dislikes.” He also casually mentioned the fact that he objected to the smell of the beast that Mohammed bestrode; so the Prophet went on his way, sorely stricken in spirit. In other ways, too, he was equally unfortunate. His fabulous rise from the lowly state of an insignificant trader to the pinnacle of fame appears to have induced him to overestimate his powers; at any rate, soon after his arrival at Medina, he betrayed his ignorance of the simplest facts of Arabian agriculture by forbidding the artificial fecundation of palm trees, with the result that they became almost barren. But when his egregious error was pointed out, he manifested a wisdom rare in prophets by candidly admitting that he was in the wrong. “I am only mortal,” he confessed. “If I give you an order in the domain of your religion then receive it; but if I give you an order from my own opinion then am I but mortal.” In the near famine that had resulted from his bungling interference, there was poetic justice in the fact that he, as well as the rest, could eat only one date per day; yet he gladly shared in the stringent privations that all were forced to endure. While his own face was pinched with hunger, he divided with the most needy Moslems the gifts of food which various people had sent him; on one occasion he was glad to accept a Jew’s offer to partake of a meal of rancid fat and barley bread; and for months, during the dead of winter, he went without any fire on his hearth.