I
The steps by which Mohammed emerged from obscurity into the
full glow of his messianic mission can never be traced with any
certainty. Explanations and interpretations in plenty--economic,
rationalistic, psychological, mediumistic, and so on--have too
often been advanced with placid and perfect assurance; but
unfortunately they have not overcome the main difficulty: Mohammed
himself. The enigma of his character--a fusion of the furthest
limits of charlatanism, demagoguery, bombastic egotism, and general
intellectual incompetency, with the opposite extremes of willing
martyrdom, unaffected simplicity and sincerity, and lightning flashes
of divine poetry--still remains essentially unchallenged and intact.
He used tricks common to fakirs--was he therefore a complete and
unabashed fakir? He began as a humble religious leader, and he ended
as an adroit politician and powerful general--was he therefore
dishonest from the start? He hid himself during battles--was he
therefore always a coward? He often broke faith with friend and foe
alike--was he therefore utterly unscrupulous? And yet.... He quite
certainly believed in the divinity of his mission--was he therefore
wholly sincere? He wrote some passages almost incomparable in their
emotional beauty--was he therefore inspired? He kept Allah in the
foreground while he himself remained in the background--why, then,
did the influence of Allah wane as the prestige of Mohammed waxed?
In short, was he a vicious paranoiac who developed into a maniacal
monster, or an unrivaled genius who was all that his worshipers
claimed--or both?
Such interrogations face the tracker of Mohammed’s career at every
turn of the journey, and, in avoiding the pitfalls on one side, he
is very likely to stumble into the abysses on the other. For the
facts of his life are at once too abundant and too few; and he who
ponders them is ever apt to discover that, just at the moment when
he confidently believes he is on the right path, he knows both
too much and too little. The rainbow’s end is forever at hand and
yet forever distant; and similarly the intangible, chameleon-like
personality of Mohammed constantly eludes and mocks one at the
precise time when one is most confident of touching and cornering the
flitting phantom. Under the circumstances, a rapid recapitulation
of such concrete events as have been handed down with a minimum of
bias is perhaps least likely to lead one too far astray.