we have seen that was common knowledge among the Arabs. What that Book contained was not so generally known and was certainly in my opinion not known to Muhammad. But the existence of the Book itself he must have known about.

How Muhammad came to believe that he was commissioned to produce such a Scripture or Book of Revelation for his own countrymen is difficult for us to understand. Tradition, as I have said, is a very unsafe guide. The Qur'an does contain one or two references to a vision, or perhaps two visions, in passages which are fairly early, but certainly not among the very earliest:

By the declining star,
Your comrade is not astray, nor does he err,
Nor does he speak of his own desire.
It is nothing but a revelation revealed
Taught by one strong in power
Of definite form. With equal poise he stood
While he was on the high horizon.
Then he drew near and came down
Until he was two bow-lengths off or nearer,
And revealed to his servant what he revealed.
The heart does not falsify what it saw.
Do you dispute with it as to what it sees?
He, saw him too when he came down a second time
By the lote-tree at the boundary
Near the garden of the dwelling,
When the lote-tree was enveloped by what enveloped it.
The eye turned not aside nor caused illusion.
Verily he saw one of the great signs of his Lord.
(liii. vv. 1-18.)

But if such a vision lay at the root of his prophetic work, he made curiously little of it, only referring to it in one other passage ; and in Surah xvii. v. 62 we find the curious statement: "We appointed the vision which we showed you only as a test for men, likewise the tree cursed in the Qur'an. We terrify them but they only increase in crass rebellion."

Perhaps we are too ready to follow the Moslem commentators and traditionists in assuming that the idea of the Book sent down from Heaven and revealed to him as occasion required by the intermediary of the Angel Gabriel was in Muhammad's mind from the very beginning. There is no real evidence of that in the Qur'an itself. The word Book (kitab) is used in early Meccan portions of the Qur'an in an entirely different sense from that of the heavenly archetype of the revelation. On the Judgement Day the Book will be produced. Every soul will be brought face to face with its book, which will be put in its right hand or its left, according as it has done well or ill. This is evidently something like the idea of the Book kept in Heaven by the Recording Angel. The idea of the Book as the heavenly archetype of the Qur'an belongs to a later stage. There are indeed frequent references to revelation in the very earliest passages of the Qur'an, but in practically every case it is possible to interpret these as references to the Revelation already in the hands of previous Monotheists. When, for instance, we read in Surah lxxx. vv. 11-15—a passage which has not much connection with what precedes or follows: