Returned from Mecca, he occupied himself again with the carrying out of his expe dition against Syria, but fell dangerously ill very soon after his return. One night, while suffering from an attack of fever, he went to the cemetery of Medina, and prayed and wept upon the tombs, praising the dead, and wishing that he himself might soon be delivered from flag • storms of this world; For a few More days he went about ; at last, to weak further' to visit his wives, lie obese Cue house of 'AYesliah, situated near a mosque, as his abode during his sickness. He continued to take port in the pnblie pray. crs as long as he could; until at last, feeling that his hour had come, lie once more preached to the people, recommending Alm Bekr and Usma, the son of Zaid, as the generals whom he had chosen for the army. lie then asked, like Moses, whether he had wronged any one, and read to them passages from the Koran, preparing the minds of his hearers for his death, and exhorting them to peace among themselves, and to strict obedience to the tenets of the faith. A few days afterwards, he asked for writing materials, proba bly in order to fix a successor to his office as chief of the faithful; but Omar, fearing he might chose Ali, while he himself inclined to Abu Bekr, would not allow him to be fur nished with them. In his last wanderings he only spoke of angels and heaven. He died is the lap of Aveshah, about noon of Monday the 12th (11th) of the third month, in the year 11 of the hegira (8th of June, 032). His death caused an immense excitement and distress among the faithful, and Omar, who himself would not believe in it, tried to persuade the people of his still being alive. But Abu Bekr said to the assembled multi tude: "Whoever among you has served Mohammed, let him know that Mohammed is dead; but he who has served the God of Mohammed, let him continue in his service, for he is still alive, and never dies." While his corpse was yet unburied, the quarrels about his successor, whom lie had not definitively been able to appoint, commenced; and finally Abu Bekr received the homage of the principal Moslems at Medina. Mohammed was then buried in the night from the 9th to the 10th of June, after long discussions, in the house of Ayeshah, where he had died, and which afterwards became part of the adjoining mosque.
This, in briefest outline, is Mohammed's career. We have not been able to dwell, as We could have wished to do, with any length, either on the peculiar circumstances of his inner life, which preceded and accompanied his " prophetic " course, nor on the part which idolatry, Judaism, Christianity, and his own reflection respectively, bore in the formation of his religion; nor have we been able to trace the process by which his "mission " grew upon him, as it were, and he, from ft simple admonisher of his family, became the founder of a faith to which now above 130,000,000 are said to adhere. The
articles Koit.& and MOHAMMEDANISM contain some further details on his doctrine and its history. We have, in addition to the few observations on the points indicated at the beginning, only to reiterate that it man of Mohammed's extraordinary powers and gifts is not to be judged by a modern commonplace standard; and that the manners and morals of his own time and country must also be taken into consideration. We are far from overrating his character. He was at times deceitful, cunning, even revengeful and cowardly; and generally addicted beyond limit to sensuality. But all this does not justify the savage and silly abuse which has been heaped upon his name for centuries by ignorance and fanaticism. Not only his public station as prophet, preacher, and prince, but also his private character, his amiability, his faithfulness toward friends, his tender ness toward his family, and the frequent readiness to forgive an enemy, besides the extreme simplicity of his domestic life (he lived, when already in full power, in a miser able hut. mended his own clothes, and freed all his slaves), must be taken into consider ation; and to do him full justice, his melancholic temperament, his nervousness, often bordering on frenzy, and which brought him to the brink of suicide, and his being a poet of the highest order, with all the weaknesses of a poet developed to excess, must not be forgotten. Altogether, his mind contained the strangest mixture of right and wrong, of truth and error, Although his self-chosen mission was the abolition of superstition, he yet believed in Jins, omens, charms, and dreams, and this is an additional reason against the, as we said, now generally abandoned notion that he was a vulgar designer, who by no means deceived himself about those revelations which he pretended to have received. And however much the religion of Islam may, rightly or wrongly, be considered the bane and prime cause of the rottenness of eastern states and nations in our day, it must, in the first place, not be forgotten that it is not necessarily Islam which has caused the corrup tion, as indeed its ethics are for the most part of the highest order; and in the second place, that Mohammed is not to be made responsible for all the errors of his successors Take him all in all, the history of humanity has seen few more earnest, noble, and sin cere " prophets "—using the word prophet in the broad human sense of one irresistibly impelled by an inner power to admonish, and to teach, and to utter austere and sublime truths, the full ‘-mrport of which is often unknown tc himself.
The most iktmrtant European biographies of Mohammed are those of Sprenger, Weil, Muir, NOL.ItAss:, Reinaud. See also KORAN, MOHAMMEDANISM, SUNNA.