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XLIII Muhammad and Islam A PROPHETIC amateur of history surveying the world in the opening of the seventh century might have concluded very ^ reasonably that it was only a question of a few centuries before the whole of Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian domination. There were no signs of order or union in Western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian Empires were manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction. India also was divided and wasted. On the other hand China was a steadily expanding empire which probably at that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish people who were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed to work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would not have been an altogether vain one. A time was to come in the thirteenth century when a Mongolian overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and Persian Empires, over Egypt and most of India. Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred would have been in under-estimating the recuperative power of the Latin end of Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia would have seemed what it had been for time immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had founded an empire now for more than a thousand years. Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of splen- dour. They spread their rule and language from Spain to the boun- daries of China. They gave the world a new culture. They created a religion that is still to this day one of the most vital forces in the world. The man, Muhammad, who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the young husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of Mecca. Until he was forty he did very little 237