The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah
(usually known as Mohammed, or ``he who will be praised,'';
reads like a chapter in the ``Thousand and One Nights.'' He
was a camel-driver, born in Mecca. He seems to have been an
epileptic and he suffered from spells of unconsciousness when
he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of the angel
Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book
called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him
all over Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish
merchants and with Christian traders, and he came to see that
the worship of a single God was a very excellent thing. His
own people, the Arabs, still revered queer stones and trunks
of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of thousands of
years before. In Mecca, their holy city, stood a little square
building, the Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends
of Hoo-doo worship.
Mohammed decided to be the Moses of the Arab people. He
could not well be a prophet and a camel-driver at the same time.
So he made himself independent by marrying his employer, the
rich widow Chadija. Then he told his neighbours in Mecca
that he was the long-expected prophet sent by Allah to save the
world. The neighbours laughed most heartily and when Mohammed
continued to annoy them with his speeches they decided to kill him.
They regarded him as a lunatic and a public bore who deserved no mercy.
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