Prophet's mind. No doubt it lay behind his religious work from the very start. That was what drove him on to his task.

It was different, I think, with the concrete conceptions of the Judgement Day, and of the Paradise and the Fire which lay beyond it. These were not in his mind to begin with, and it was after he had begun to deliver the Qur'an that they wove themselves into the texture of his thought. They came to him from without, but none the less they made a tremendous impression upon him personally. The agitated, semi-poetical character of his early descriptions of the End of all things shows how the Prophet himself was moved. That argues at once for the recent acquisition of these ideas, and for the personal response which they called forth in himself. They were in line with his own fundamental beliefs, and they came to him from a source which to him was invested with authority.

What that was we shall perhaps understand better if we turn to another of his fundamental ideas. Muhammad's prophecies took the form of a Qur'an. He uses the term practically from the start. In these early passages it does not of course mean the whole collection of prophecies, as it now means when we speak of "the Qur'an". Each separate deliverance is in fact a qur'an. There has been some discussion as to the meaning of the verb qara' and the related word qur'an. But there can be no doubt, and it is now agreed that they belong to that religious vocabulary which Christianity had introduced into Arabia. Qara' means to read or solemnly recite sacred texts,

while qur'an is the Syriac qeryana used to denote the "reading" or Scripture lesson.¹ We have seen that Muhammad's first enterprise was the reform of religion in Mecca. There was only One God, who had claims upon the grateful worship of man. He knew that the worship of the One God prevailed all round Arabia, and especially in that great Roman Empire which must have seemed to an intelligent Arab, dissatisfied with the condition of his own people, the seat of enlightenment, culture, and civilisation. What more natural than that he should turn thither for information as to what the worship of the one God involved? May we suppose him to have seen Christian services on some youthful visit to Syria, or should we suppose him simply to have made inquiries when his own plan began to take shape in his mind? In either case he would come to realise that the worship of the one God included stated services or prayers. Thus he instituted the salat, the formal prayer or divine service. The word which denotes it is a borrowed Christian word. It is not quite clear that the salat was practised from the very beginning, but it is certain that it was a very early institution of Islam, though the five prayers at stated times of the day were not regulated until much later. In any case the religion of the One God implied the possession of a Holy Scripture. Even if he had never been out of Mecca Muhammad could not have been ignorant of the
possession by Christians of a Book which was believed to have been directly revealed. For as