Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/59

 52 Mecca. But if Mohammed had been able to foresee how the unity of Arabia, which he nearly accomplished, was to bring into being a formidable international empire, we should expect some indubitable traces of this in the Qorân; not a few verses of dubious interpretation, but some certain sign that the Revelation, which had repeatedly, and with the greatest emphasis, called itself a "plain Arabic Qorân," intended for those "to whom no warner had yet been sent," should in future be valid for the ʿAjam, the Barbarians, as well as for the Arabs.

Even if we ascribe to Mohammed something of the universal program, which the later tradition makes him to have drawn up, he certainly could not foresee the success of it. For this, in the first place, the economic and political factors to which some scholars of our day would attribute the entire explanation of the Islâm movement, must be taken into consideration. Mohammed did to some extent prepare the universality of his religion and make it possible. But that Islâm, which came into the world as the Arabian form of the one, true religion, has actually become a universal religion, is due to circumstances which had little to do with its origin." This extension of the domain to be