vanished peoples, and may have given them a prophetic turn. He refers to other peoples who perished for their unbelief, for whom it is difficult to find any Biblical prototypes. He may have heard some vague Arab stories about them. But they never acquire any detail. I think it probable also that he heard something about the destruction of Pharaoh, and of the overwhelming of the Cities of the Plain, from general Arab sources before he realised that the stories were in the Bible. But he soon taps some source of information as to definitely Biblical stories, and finds there a rich mine of material for his purpose. It confirms the supposition that his information came in answer to his own inquiries that the stories evidently reached him piecemeal with no indication of any connection amongst them or of the order in which they stood in the Bible. What interests him is the prophetic stories, those of Moses, Noah, Abraham, Lot, and others. The general outline of these stories, Biblical and non-Biblical alike, becomes in his hands much the same for all. To each people God sends a Messenger, one of themselves. Even Moses and Lot are at first assumed to have been sent to their own people. The Prophet appeals to his people to worship the true God. They refuse to listen to him. Then he announces the coming of the divine punishment upon their unbelief. As they refuse to repent the punishment falls, and the unbelievers are destroyed. Such are the "signs" (ayat). The Qur'an now contains the ayat or signs of God.

It is worth while looking a little further at

the meaning of this word. The word aya has come to be used as the technical word for a verse of the Qur'an, and it is often stated that Muhammad set forth these verses as his "signs" or miracles. That is not correct, at any rate not for the Meccan period of the Qur'an. It was natural that the Meccans should ask a sign, and at a certain stage Muhammad is much occupied with the problem of what signs he can offer. Sorely tempted as he must have been to profess power to work miracles, he never does so. The most that he alleges of a miraculous kind is the having seen one or two visions. The signs he offers are of two kinds: first, what we may call the natural evidences of God's power, such as the creation of the heavens and the earth, the formation of man in the womb, the sending of rain and the production of food; second — and it is on this that he falls back at the acute stage of the question — what we may call the historical examples of God's miraculous intervention. That is what he is in search of in inquiring into these prophetic stories. When in the earlier Surahs we meet the phrase, idha tutla ayatuna . . . , "when our ayat are recited . . .", where it seems natural to take ayat in the sense of "verses", the reference is really not to verses but to the recounting of these signs.

These prophetic stories are at first limited to those connected with the Old Testament. What we may call the native Arabian ones are pushed entirely into the background — another indication of the paramount authority which Muhammad ascribed to what he conceived to belong to