If God is not our Father, then we are not His children, and cannot be. If He is but an Almighty Despot, we can only be His subjects, His slaves at best. And the Korân gives man no better place than that of the highest of the living beings inhabiting the earth. No breath of God is in him, no spark that is divine. And so it came about that during his life Mohammed never taught men to think; he gave not principles, but precepts, and religion became a thing of ritual and not a religion of the heart. We have seen how Islam in its propagation sought to win men's allegiance and asked no questions as to motives. Its very religious observances are not concerned with righteousness of life. For instance, in its teaching about prayer the Korân contains the most explicit instructions about the manner of prayer, about the previous washing, about the direction, the posture, the language, the form, but there is hardly a word about its meaning or its spirit. 'In the 10,000 verses of the Korân there are not as many petitions as there are in the Lord's Prayer.' {131} So completely do spirituality and righteousness seem to have got divorced in the Moslem mind, that there seems nothing incongruous, at least to many Moslems, in lying, cheating, swearing, and praying almost in the same breath.[14] [Sidenote: (b) Woman.] It is not hard to understand that such a God as Mohammed preached might be conceived to make a distinction between man and woman. And the blackest of all the blots which besmirch the name and memory of Mohammed was his teaching about Woman and his relations with her. True, his teaching may have been in advance of what was commonly accepted by the Arabs of his day, but he left her still the chattel and not the companion 'meet' for man. Women were to him an inferior grade of beings, whose sole destiny was to serve their husbands and be the mothers of children. Woman's honour, he said, was not to be trusted. He instituted the veil (which women in Moslem lands wear to this day to cover their faces whenever they are in the presence of men) and consigned her to the harem. He gave 'divine' {132} sanction to a Mohammedan to have four wives and as many concubines as he could afford, to beat them when they displeased him, and divorce them if he wished.