"God has created the world; but who has created God?"
This put Mohammed in so violent a rage that he turned quite pale, and, from zeal for God, seized them by the head. Then came Gabriel to quiet him, saying: "Restrain thyself, O Mohammed!" and conveyed to him this answer to their question about God: "Say, God is one, God is strong. He never begets nor is begotten, and nothing is like unto Him." When Mohammed read out this communication to them, they said: "Describe to us the form of God and His arm." Thereupon Mohammed's anger grew still more violent, and he seized them a second time. But Gabriel returned, and quieting him as before, brought this reply to their request "They have no correct notion about God's power. On the day of the resurrection He taketh the whole earth with one hand and the heavens, rolled up, lie in the other. Praised be the Lord and exalted above their idolatry."'

They also, in the hope of injuring Mohammed's cause, tried to rekindle the ancient jealousies between the Arab tribes of Medina, by reminding them of their former bloody conflicts; and they sought to rouse their self-interest, by exhortations like this: 'Waste not your wealth: you might fall into poverty. Be not in such a hurry to part with your money, without knowing for what purpose.' Of the Jews who had apostatised to the new faith, they spoke thus: 'Only the worst of us follow Mohammed and believe in him. Did they belong to the better class of us, they would not apostatise from the religion of their fathers, to embrace another.'

Thus Mohammed's temporary coquetting with the Jews, by which he hoped to gain them over in a body to his cause and to purchase their united testimony to his being the Great Prophet foretold in their sacred books, proved a complete failure, and terminated in a mutual alienation of a deeply hostile character. Thenceforth the Jews were determinately anti-Mohammedan and Mohammed intensely anti-Jewish. But such a state of things, amongst the population of a single city, could not last long without leading to open war, to a conflict of life and death, in which the prophet took the initiative, and from which the strongest and most unscrupulous party came forth victorious. This will form the subject of a subsequent paragraph.

(4.) Mohammed, unsuccessful in his efforts to convert the Christians by way of theological disputation, seeks to degrade their religion and reduces them to a state of vassalage. He shows himself positively anti-Christian.

Mohammed, in his endeavour to make Islam the paramount power of Arabia, could not afford to be more tolerant to Christianity than to Judaism, although the former did not confront him in Medina with such compact force and political organisation, as the latter. We have already seen (cp. P. 126) that the monk Abu Amir and his ten or sixty fellow-Christians, the representatives of the slender beginning of Christianity in Medina, could not maintain themselves against his growing and overbearing power, but were compelled to quit their home and seek for security, free from molestation, in the more liberal heathen city of Mecca. At a somewhat later period, when Mohammed's victorious warriors extended his dominion through the length and breadth of the country, they, in an interior district of Najran, came in contact with Christianity, as the openly professed religion of whole communities. These also, despite Mohammed's professed regard for the Christians and the Gospel, had to yield their independence and to acknowledge the supreme power of Islam, by submitting to the payment of an annual tribute.

Ibn Ishak gives us an account of the deputation which the Christians of Najran felt themselves necessitated by the march of events to despatch to Mohammed, in order to regulate their position with regard to what was then rapidly becoming the dominant power of all Arabia. The deputation consisted of sixty individuals, of whom fourteen were leading men and three the religious and civil chiefs who mainly conducted the negotiations. They are described as 'Christians according to the Emperor's faith,' that is, as belonging to the orthodox Catholic Church, in contradistinction to the semi-Christian sects of the Arians and others. The Mohammedan historian informs us that the leading man amongst them, Abu Haritha, their bishop and the director of their schools, had studied much, and was highly esteemed as a learned theologian. The Christian kings of the Greeks, hearing of his pious zeal and great learning, showed their