A strong reason for the veneration which was felt for the spoken word in Arabia, as elsewhere in Semitic lands, is the innate conviction that the burden or message of the word is an entity for good or ill, independent of the human personality which serves as a medium. For it is thought that in the utterance of blessings or cursings supernatural powers seize upon the mind or the organs of speech of possessed personalities and speak effectively through them. Thus if a curse can be held back, or a blessing restrained, there is a non-existence of that fact instead of its existence to be reckoned with. The sting of satire set free by a poet’s eloquence is a veritable wound more serious than a physical stab. The humiliation and despair of an early Arab who fell under the shafts of a real poet were without remedy unless there was a superior poet to wreak adequate revenge. Certain of the old poets were warriors as well and represented the complete ideal. They were hardy rangers of the desert wastes, patient, chivalrous, vindictive, devotees of the claims of blood-kinship. The flourishing period of classical Arabian poetry was during the century and a half preceding the death of Muhammad. Muhammad was born in Mecca and spent the last ten years of his life at Medina. Both cities are in the rough highland, between the district of Nejd and the coast. This highland ridge goes by the name of the Hijaz or Barrier and is near the route of the traders’ caravans from South Arabia to Syria and the Mediterranean. Mecca and Yathrib (original name of Medina) on account of this caravan route rose to be cities of prominence. Mecca was specially important because it was also a place of resort for pilgrims long before the rise of Islam. At first this may have been because of the presence there of a remarkable meteoric stone, which still remains, sheltered by the Ka’ba and venerated by the whole Moslem world. Moslem tradition began early to elaborate the traditions of Mecca and has put them beyond the disentanglement of criticism. To the Moslem, Mecca was the city of Abraham who, with all the good saints of old, was a Moslem. The Moslems claim that the Jews and Christians have so perverted the original sacred scriptures of the Old Testament and the original faith, which was the Moslem faith, that not until Muhammad’s time were things seen in their true light. However, there were in Arabia in the period a little earlier than Muhammad forerunners, who were essentially monotheists, the so-called haneefs. Muhammad was, therefore, the renewer, not the inventor of Islam, the prophet to destroy the idolatries of Arabia which had accumulated in the jahiliyya, or uncivilized period. Certain members of Muhammad’s own household and tribe were among his earliest converts. His wife may have been the first. He seemed, to many of his own kinsfolk and townspeople, to be a dangerous innovator. They must have feared the effect of his