The beginning of the night is strongest in impression
and most just in speech.
Truly in the day-time long toil is thine,
But remember the name of thy Lord, and devote thyself
entirely to Him.
Moslem piety interprets that passage differently, and
makes it refer to the recitation of the Qur'an in devotion.
That adaptation is already made in the Surah as it stands,
and must have been made by Muhammad himself. But the
phrase, "We shall cast upon thee a weighty word",
seems to imply a different situation originally; and
v. 5, the sense of which seems to be that the early
part of the night is the time when truths are most clearly
apprehended and the right words to express them most
easily found, can hardly apply to the devotional repetition
of words already known.
Summing up these impressions of the beginnings of Muhammad's
work, we have, I think, to conceive of him as a man
of great natural endowment, but little in advance of
fellow-citizens in actual knowledge; with strong personal
convictions, reached without much external help, impressed
upon him by his own meditations upon Nature and the
meaning of life, aided by such notions from a higher
religion as had found their way into the minds of his
countrymen. He knows that this higher religion prevails
all around Arabia, and impelled by some inner call of
duty he sets his hand to the task of establishing it
in his own city, and as a corollary begins to produce
what worship according to this religion required, |
