religious direction. His enterprise was, in my opinion, from the very start quite a rational and practical one, though as it turned out not immediately practicable. It is acknowledged that it was a local enterprise directed upon Mecca and upon Mecca alone. The evidence for that runs through half the Qur'an. His idea was that a prophet is "sent" to his own people, to his own qurya or town as he sometimes expresses it. (We shall see later at what stage he modified that idea.) In his stories of former prophets, in which every one recognises that his own experience in Mecca forms always the background, the prophet is always represented as coming to his people, not with a message of immediate judgement, but with an appeal to recognise and worship the true God and to show thankfulness for His bounties. It is when that appeal is rejected that the threat of judgement and punishment to come is delivered. That corresponds, I think, to what happened in Mecca. Study of the early portions of the Qur'an leads to the same conclusion.

Among the short surahs at the end of the Qur'an there is a curious fragment which perhaps throws light on the nature of this first enterprise; Surah cvi.:

For the bringing together by the Quraish,
For their bringing together the winter and the summer caravan
Let them serve the Lord of this House,
Who has given them provision against famine, and made them secure against fear.

It is the only passage in which the Quraish (the

tribe which inhabited Mecca) are mentioned by name; at a later stage they are frequently referred to by the phrase alladhina kafaru, those who have disbelieved. Unlike the rest of the Qur'an the passage has no rhyme, and it is rather more prosaic in style than the earliest portions of it. But it cannot very well be late, because at no time after the early years of his mission would Muhammad have referred to the trade of the Quraish and their organisation of the caravans as a ground of thankfulness to God; except, perhaps, at the very end after the conquest of Mecca. By that time, however, his phraseology was stereotyped, and he would almost certainly have said, "Let them serve (worship) Allah", not "Let them serve the Lord of this House". Nowhere else does he refer to God in that way.¹ One cannot be dogmatic on such a point, and the passage may be very late instead of very early, but I should like to regard it as an early formulation of his own enterprise. It was to be a revival, perhaps a purification in the direction of Monotheism, of religion in Mecca, with the Ka'ba as the centre of it. The appeal was to be to the sense of gratitude to God for His bounties. That is quite in line with the whole career of the man who set out to be an Arab prophet, who, in spite of his experience of persecution by and his hostility to the Meccans at one period of his life, so loved his native town that the people of