In either case, to comprehend the matter rightly, the political significance of the Shereefate of Mecca should be understood and the reading public should have a clearer idea of what the title “Grand Shereef of Mecca” covers than is possessed by the majority. Mecca, the birth-place of the Prophet Mohammed, was not the centre from which he extended his sovereignty over a great part of Arabia. The capital of the realm founded by him was Medina, situated a ten-day caravan journey to the north. Moreover, when, about twenty years after his first appearance as Allah’s messenger, Mohammed conquered Mecca, he did not think of transferring the seat of government thither. He had his own good reasons for this, which we can pass over here. Still weightier were the reasons that influenced his successors in the administration of the theocracy of Islam from such a step. Mecca was far too remote from the then existing centres of civilisation to be a convenient vantage point for the world conquest considered by Islam as its appointed task, and as a capital from which to administer the empire which the first Caliphs were able to establish by force of arms. Even Medina seemed unsuited for the purpose, permanently. Then, when the Persian Empire, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain were subjected to Islam, Arabia, regarded politically, became a remote territory with a steadily decreasing significance. The residence of the Caliphs was removed first to Damascus, later to Bagdad, where they remained established for five centuries――down to 1250 A.D. Still the Arabian peninsula, arid though it is in the main, retained its prestige in the Moslem world, not only as the fatherland of the conquerors, but also as the Holy Land of Islam. Mecca might be ill adapted for a political capital, but it was, in the eyes of the faithful, the earth’s centre, where the first human pair had walked, where Abraham had founded the first House of God, the Kaba, where every normal Mohammedan was bound to go once in his life to take part in the religious festival annually celebrated there. While Mecca had already long been a religious centre for the heathen Arabians, after Mohammed’s death Medina was classed with it as a spot where the foundations of Moslem theocracy were laid, where the Prophet had built his first mosque, and where he was buried. The lieutenants of the Caliphs in West Arabia (the Hijaz), with Medina as the first, Mecca as the second, capital, thus had the chief sanctuaries of Islam entrusted to their care, and they were bound to provide for the preservation of order at the enormous international gatherings for which the two holy cities had furnished a stage every year since Mohammed’s death.