Page:The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930).pdf/18

 reached a suburb of Yathrib, whither, for weeks past, the people of the city had been going every morning, watching for the Prophet till the heat drove them to shelter. The travellers arrived in the heat of the day, after the watchers had retired. It was a Jew who called out to the Muslims in derisive tones that he whom they expected had at last arrived.

Such was the Hijrah, the Flight from Mecca to Yathrib, which counts as the beginning of the Muslim era. The thirteen years of humiliation, of persecution, of seeming failure, of prophecy still unfulfilled, were over. The ten years of success, the fullest that has ever crowned one man's endeavour, had begun. The Hijrah makes a clear division in the story of the Prophet's Mission, which is evident in the Koran. Till then he had been a preacher only. Thenceforth he was the ruler of a State, at first a very small one, which grew in ten years to the empire of Arabia. The kind of guidance which he and his people needed after the Hijrah was not the same as that "which they had before needed. The Madînah sûrahs differ, therefore, from the Meccan sûrahs. The latter give guidance to the individual soul and to the Prophet as warner; the former give guidance to a growing social and political community and to the Prophet as example, lawgiver and reformer.

For classification the Meccan sûrahs are here subdivided into four groups: Very Early, Early, Middle and Late. Though the historical data and traditions are insufficient for a strict chronological grouping, the very early sûrahs are, roughly speaking, those revealed before the beginning of the persecution; the early sûrahs those revealed between the beginning of the persecution and the conversion of Omar; the middle sûrahs those revealed between the conversion of Omar and the destruction of the deed of ostracism; and the late sûrahs those revealed between the raising of the ban of ostracism and the Hijrah.