of the story which tells that when Muhammad first spoke to God he was commissioned to prescribe fifty prayers a day for his people. On his way back he passed near Moses who asked him how many prayers had been prescribed, and learning the number advised Muhammad to return and beg for a reduction of the number. This he did several times until the number was reduced to five.¹

Thus we see even in the first two centuries, the biography of Muhammad being decked out with all the kinds of miraculous and legendary stories with which we are familiar in the case of the Christian saints and Jewish rabbis, and having ascribed to him also that direct mystic vision which ascetics both Jewish and Christian have enjoyed. These things opened the way for that religious veneration of the Prophet (and of the later walis) which is so characteristic of, and such a strength to, popular Islam; and also to that mysticism which has provided Moslems with a relief from the hard intellectuality of their orthodox theology.

Mysticism and Asceticism in Islam form a subject too wide and important to be treated here. Muhammad was certainly not an ascetic, though there was in his teaching from the first the great motive which lies behind all asceticism, an intense fear of God and His Judgement. That persisted in Islam, and afforded congenial soil upon which asceticism might flourish. But there is no doubt that the seed of the growth of ascetic practices came from the outside. All sorts of

influences have no doubt gone to the production of Sufi'ism; Western and Oriental, Neo-Platonic and Buddhist as well as native Moslem. Still, it seems to be true that in its first beginnings Muhammadan Mysticism was simply a quietistic asceticism such as was so commonly practised by Christian monks. The word Sufi used to denote these ascetics, which has clung to the movement through all its wonderful development, practical and philosophical, is derived from suf, a word meaning wool, and "was originally applied to those Moslem ascetics who, in imitation of Christian hermits, clad themselves in coarse woollen garb as a sign of penitence and renunciation of worldly vanities".¹ So that it was originally through the channel of popular Christianity with its practice of, and reverence for, asceticism, that this ascetic and mystic movement which has played such a part in Islam received the stimulus which caused it to germinate. The truth of this is confirmed by the fact that Moslem theologians were at first bitterly hostile to it. The grafting of Mysticism upon the intellectualism of Moslem theology was the work of Ghazzali, the greatest of the theologians of Islam, who lived in the latter half of the fifth century.

Another direction in which Christian influence is manifest is in the traditions bearing on Eschatology and the signs of the End of the World. We know what a part these things have always played in popular Christianity, and we have seen also that Muhammad himself was deeply impressed by ideas of that kind. Around the signs of the