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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[OCTOBER, 1903.
Muhammad's inspirations began in this, that he saw "true" visions in sleep; visions which stole on bim like the first glow of the dawn. Next he was seized with an ungovernable passion for solitude. He was wont to pass every year a long month on Hira, a hill near Mecca, and there practise, after the vogue of the heathen Meccans, the rite known as the tahannyth.14 At the end of the month he would go through the sacred ceremony of encircling the Kaabs and return home. In the first year of the "revelation," in the month of Ramadhan, he had once more left Mecca with his family, when one night the angel Jibril (Gabriel) approached him at God's command with a piece of writing and cried : Read. Muhammad did not obey and replied "I do not read."'16 Upon this the visitant pressed him so bard that he thought he would succumb. The angel repeated his demand a second time, and a second time Muhammad stuck to his refusal. But at last he was pleased to interrogate: “What must I read ?" Jibril recited : Read in the name of thy Lord who created - man from clotted blood created - read thy Lord is the richest in honour - who taught with the pen - taught men what they knew not." (Súra 96.)
Muhammad repeated it and the angel vanished. He awoke from his trance, rushed out into the open, ran np the middle of the hill, where again his ear was assailed by a voice, "O Muhammad tbou art the Apostle of God and Jibril am I." Wrapt in wonderment at this apocalypse he stood rooted to the spot, till found by some men whom Khadija had sent after him.
With a throbbing heart Muhammad confided to his wife his experience of the apparition, and received in reply words of comfort and encouragement. Waraka bin Naufal, kinsman of Khadija, who had perused the holy books of the Christians and Jews, and who was himself a Christian convert 16 gave it as his conviction that the great Nomos, which had descended on Moses, was now sent down to Mubammad. Soon after, Muhammad, quitting Hira, was encompassing the Kaaba, when Naufal predicted to the Prophet that he would be decried and persecuted.
From the familiar's now frequently visiting Mubanımad, the wise Khadija argued his genuineness. Ho must be an angel indeed, and no shaitan or satan. She professed herself his first believer and laboured to persuade the Prophet out of his uneasy misgivings.17
To the intense annoyance of Muhammad for a time the apparition or revelation' ceased, but at last Jibril, once more appearing, announced the commencensent of an era of grace with the 93rd Sira. At the same time the Prophet was charged with the duty of prayer, the good spirit coming down every day and training him to punctual devotions at stated hours.
The above is a synopsis of the narrative of Ibn Ishaq. He, too, is no original writer in a strict sense of the term. He goes to work with scissors and paste to harmonise the discrepancies between the elder and the latter-day tradition, as collected by Bukhari, Muslim, &c. But it can be redicated of his and all other accounts of Muhammad's first revelations, no matter whether they are manufactured wholesale or are simply touched up by later chroniclers, that they have next to no value for us and conduce to no trustwori hy exposition of Islam in the nascent stages. Let alone the fact that the outlines in them can be rejected without exte, sive research, as the result of a Qoranic exegesis, either superticisl or tortuous and lar-fetched, the ground is cut away from under their feet by the circnmstances that none of the authors of these relations were in a position to correctly know the events as they happened. Among the so-called authorities we miss all along the old Meccan companions of Muhammad, and this locuna cannot be bridged over by the ples.santries and gossip of even the most favourite of Muhammaul's Blouses, Aiysha, whose name is a apled with the most
* No satisfactory explanation of the term is forthcoming, bot sne Baklari, 1.4 18 Not an inability to read, but refowl to do so underlies Muhammad's reply. ** (Nöldeke is inclined to hold that Waraka was a convert to Judaism. - TR.)
11 (Muhammad was tormented with the ballucination that he was possessed with demoniac spirit and was driven to the verge of laying violent hands on himself. cf. the received authorities, Weil, Sprenger, Muir, Nöldeke. -T..]
