Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/37

 30 there was no leisure for such work. Our own conventional insincerities differ so much—externally at least—from those of that date, that it is difficult for us to realize a spiritual atmosphere where "pious fraud" was practised on such a scale. Yet this is literally true: in the first centuries of Islâm no one could have dreamt of any other way of gaining acceptance for a doctrine or a precept than by circulating a tradition, according to which Mohammed had preached the doctrine or dictated it or had lived according to the precept. The whole individual, domestic, social, and political life as it developed in the three centuries during which the simple Arabian religion was adjusted to the complicated civilization of the great nations of that time, that all life was theoretically justified by representing it as the application of minute laws supposed to have been elaborated by Mohammed by precept and example.

Thus tradition gives invaluable material for the knowledge of the conflict of opinions in the first centuries, a strife the sharpness of which has been blunted in later times by a most resourceful harmonistic method. But, it is vain to endeavour to construct the life and teaching of Mohammed from such spurious accounts; they cannot even afford us a reliable illustration of his life in the form of "table talk," as an English scholar rather naïvely tried to derive from them. In a collection of this sort, supported by good external evidence,