Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/50

 Rh compelled all Arabs to "obedience to Allah and His messenger."

In our own society, real enthusiasm in the propagation of an idea generally considered as absurd, if crowned by success may, in the course of time, end in cold, prosaic calculation without a trace of hypocrisy. Nowhere in the life of Mohammed can a point of turning be shown; there is a gradual changing of aims and a readjustment of the means of attaining them. From the first the outcast felt himself superior to the well-to-do people who looked down upon him; and with all his power he sought for a position from which he could force them to acknowledge his superiority. This he found in the next and better world, of which the Jews and Christians knew. After a crisis, which some consider as psychopathologic, he knew himself to be sent by Allah to call the materialistic community, which he hated and despised, to the alternative, either in following him to find eternal blessedness, or in denying him to be doomed to eternal fire.

Powerless against the scepticism of his hearers, after twelve years of preaching followed only by a few dozen, most of them outcasts like himself, he hoped now and then that Allah would strike the recalcitrant multitude with an earthly doom, as he knew from revelations had happened before. This hope was also unfulfilled. As other messengers of God had done in similar circumstances,