Jews, the Nasara and the Sabi'in, whoever believes in God, and the Last Day, and acts uprightly, have their reward with their Lord. There is no fear upon them, neither do they grieve". That is again an attempt to find a common basis amongst Monotheists. Belief in God and in the Last Day, and uprightness of life, are the common requirements. Those who fulfil these conditions, to whatever denomination they belong, are sure of their reward. They do not stand in fear of future punishment.

It is interesting to look at the denominations here mentioned. Concerning the Sabi'in I have already spoken. I shall only repeat here that it seems to me, after all we have learned of the difficulty Muhammad had in acquiring his meagre information about Christians, extremely improbable that he knew anything about an obscure sect of that name. Surah xxxiv. v. 19 seems to imply that he knew that there were "believers" in Saba' or South Arabia, and one jumps to the conclusion that he here refers to them. The objections to this assumption have already been indicated. They are only partly removed by the observation that as he makes play with the names of the other parties, so he may have played with the name Saba'.

The first class mentioned in the above declaration, alladhina amanu, "those who have believed", is not, as it is sometimes taken to be, an inclusive epithet descriptive of the other classes, but is a standing denotation of Muhammad's own followers. The classes which follow are put on the same footing as them.

The Jews are denoted by the curious phrase alladhina hadu, which we might translate by "those who have repented". Whether the phrase was meant to have any such connotation, cannot be determined. But in any case the word hadu is primarily a play upon the word for Jew, Yahud. This, in Arabic, has the form of the imperfect tense of a verb, of which Muhammad takes the perfect tense and combines it with the relative pronoun. The resulting phrase he then uses frequently in the Qur'an as a designation of the Jews. Possibly there was no motive behind this, except that he felt that a cryptic reference of that kind was more suitable to Qur'an style. In composing prayers we ourselves prefer a circumlocution to the direct use of a proper name.

If we could be sure that Sabi'in denoted the Christians of South Arabia, Nasara would then denote specially those of the north. But we shall not in any case go far wrong in taking it as meant to denote Christians in general. The word Nasara is apparently derived from Nazaraioi, which is mentioned as the name of a Jewish-Christian sect. It has, however, become the usual name for Christians in Arabic, and as such was in use amongst the Arabs before Muhammad's time, so that we are not compelled to look for any such special sect existing in his day. As illustrating how Muhammad played with these names and sought to give them Arabic form and sense, as he did with Yahud, there are two passages, worth looking at, which at the same time show him looking with considerable favour upon the Nasara. In iii. v. 45 we read: "And when Jesus