passage may have an eschatological reference. But in Surah lv. v. 8 we have the command:

Weigh therefore with fairness and scant not the balance,

and again in Surah lxxxiii. vv. 1 ff, the giving of stinted measure is condemned:

Woe to those who stint the measure,
Who when they take by measure from others exact the full,
But when they mete to them or weigh to them, minish.¹

In an early Surah (lxxxi. vv. 8, 9) we find included in a description of the Last Day, a reference to female infanticide:

When the buried child shall be asked
For what sin she was put to death.

But I think that is a later insertion suggested by conditions in Desert Arabia rather than by those of Mecca.

There is a Biblical ring about some of these passages, and the collocation of the poor, the orphan, and the prisoner has a familiar sound to a reader of the Bible. Yet there is nothing so close to the Bible as to suggest direct borrowing. One cannot avoid the impression that Muhammad had felt independently the abuses, injustices, and cruelties which prevailed, though his conscience was no doubt formed by that Jewish Christian atmosphere which had penetrated Arabia. In that perception of social abuses we may see one

of the motive impulses which inspired him to his mission. It is in line with the prophetic tradition that it should have been so.

The passages in which specific abuses are attacked are, however, not to my mind the earliest. The quickening of the religious interest was the first thing in his mind. That to him included generosity and almsgiving. It was when he found an obstacle to this in the worldly temper of the wealthy Quraish that he began to denounce the rich and to point out the specific injustices and inhumanities of which they were guilty. Perhaps as Casanova has suggested there may have been some influence of Christianity in his denunciation of the wealthy and their pride of riches. That is at least more probable than that the influence should have come from the side of Judaism. For the Jews of Arabia were probably as wealthy and as immersed in the pursuit of gain as the Quraish. But if there is any outside influence in the matter, it found support in his own personal experience of the wealthy amongst the Quraish. He sought to move them, found them unsympathetic, even hostile, and so turned from them. But this was a gradual process. The change of attitude is perhaps marked by a passage of which tradition has made a good deal, in which the Prophet is taken to task for having treated with scant courtesy a blind man who interrupted him in a conversation with a wealthy citizen. Whether it is the Prophet himself who is apostrophised is not quite so clear as tradition represents it. But at any rate the passage does indicate a recognition that he or some of his