they began. Then Abu Bakr ate of it, saying that his vow had been from Satan. In the morning he took it to the Prophet. It happened that a treaty had expired and an expedition was gathered consisting of twelve leaders and 'God knows how many men'. It sufficed for them all.¹

It is as certain as anything in his life can be, that Muhammad did not claim the power of working miracles. Sorely tempted as he must have been to produce a "sign" of his own, he was content to point to the "signs" of God's intervention in former times and the revelation of the Qur'an to himself. But to the Moslem community he was the last and greatest of the prophets. If other prophets worked miracles he must surely have performed equal and greater. Quite early, miracle stories began to grow around his name. The motif of the miraculous increase of food was as we would expect, transferred directly to him. Perhaps even more frequently, the miraculous production of water was ascribed to him, as, for instance, in the incident of the expedition to Tabuk related already by the earliest biographers.² In the course of that expedition, the Prophet came to a little trickle of water from the hillside, the accumulation of which had been drunk out by some who had preceded him. Moistening his hand with the water he anointed the rock and prayed over it, whereupon the water came down in a torrent which had a sound like that of thunder. Many incidents of the same kind are associated with the Prophet.

If miracle stories found their way so early to the accounts of the Prophet's expeditions where one would have expected the light of history to be fairly clear, the early part of his life offered even more scope for them. They gather numerously round his birth, his escape from Mecca at the Hijra, and round his call to the prophetic office. Of all perhaps the nightjourney is the most remarkable and the one which has had the greatest consequences in Islam. It finds a nucleus in the Qur'an (Surah xvii. v. 1) "Glory to him who by night carried his servant from the Mosque of the Haram, to the further Mosque". The ground of this may have been a dream in which the Prophet saw himself transported to the Temple of Jerusalem. But it has grown into a wonderful story of a night-journey in the company of Gabriel, first to Jerusalem, and then through the seven heavens to the very presence of God, whom Muhammad is said to have seen and spoken to. The Apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity has probably supplied most of the motifs for this story.¹ I only mention two details which seem to show direct Biblical influence. In a less developed form of the legend Muhammad is simply said to have met the prophets Adam, Idris, Moses, Jesus, and Abraham. (The later story tells in which heaven each was met and the conversation which passed with each.) That may have been suggested by the Transfiguration story of the Gospels. Again, we have a reminiscence of Abraham's bargaining with God for the sparing of Sodom in that part