Have We not opened thy mind,
Removed the burden
Which broke thy back,
And raised thy reputation?
Surely ease accompanies hardness
Surely ease accompanies hardness
So when thou art free labour
And to thy Lord make supplication.

If we were to translate the repeated verse, "Surely in the hardest days there is leisure", we should probably not be far from the sense, and we might have a picture of Muhammad, perhaps before he became definitely a prophet, labouring while still daily engaged in business, to bring the reality of devotion into the religion of the Quraish and the Ka'ba.

Again in Surah xciii. he seems to be experiencing the difficulty of his enterprise and encouraging himself:

By the early day,
By the night when it is dark,
Thy Lord has not left thee nor despised thee.
Verily the end will be better for thee than the beginning.
Thy Lord will give thee thy satisfaction.
Did He not find thee an orphan and give thee shelter,
Find thee erring and lead thee,
Find thee poor and give thee riches?

to which he adds, perhaps at some later stage, when he made use of this publicly:

As for the orphan then be not overbearing;
As for the beggar scold him not;
As for the grace of thy Lord make it known.

Whence this idea of the bounteous Creator came to Muhammad we cannot say. In the background of men's minds it is common the world over and has long been so. It was the common property of Judaism and Christianity. Whether any contact with either of these religions had helped to make it real in his mind we cannot be sure. All we can say is that both these religions had helped to form the atmosphere of thought in which any Arab of intelligence, who was dissatisfied with the pagan idolatry, would find himself. What distinguished Muhammad among his countrymen was that he took the idea with absolute seriousness and made it the ground of an appeal to his people to show thankfulness to the One God, the creator of all things. This appeal runs through the Qur'an from its earliest to its latest passages. All things come from God; man himself is God's creature. All that he is and all that he has, his children and his wealth, come from God. It is man's duty therefore to worship his Creator, and to be generous with what God has given him.

It is probable that from the first the religious reform which he aimed at included social and moral reform. Not only worship of the true God, but almsgiving and beneficence as well were included in the duty of thankfulness. Grimme 1 indeed regarded the social side of Muhammad's mission as even more fundamental than the religious, and treated his social programme as virtually complete when he began his work. In particular, he regarded the word