was by no means uniform), but also the indubitable impress of contemporary rabbinic Judaism and distorted Christianity. Regarding the details of the Christian contact Dr. Mann is much more hesitant than most other writers. He rules out of court the stories of the Prophet's visits to Syrian monks, and dismisses as unproven the sui;>posed influence from the Gnostic Elkesites of Syria and East Jordan. Candor inhibits him from setting down any reliably attested facts about the Prophet's personal relations with the Christians of Yemen or Abyssinia, or Mecca, or even with the surviving northern communities of the former Christian states of Hira and Palmyra. Dr. Mann has a keen scent for legend and pious story. To suspect is to eliminate. There is no mention of Mary, the Christian Coptic maid. But the numerous Christian references and parallels {sic) in the Koran and in the Hadith are acknowledged as convincing evidence that the Prophet's acquaintance with Christians and with Christian traditions must have been extensive (p. 28).
With these guarded admissions of Islam's debt to religious influences antecedent and extant. Dr. Mann hastens to affirm Mohammed's originality. The epoch-making power of the Prophet's mission, he declares, lay not in its syncretistic absorption but in its antithesis to the past (p. 3). .
In estimating the personality of Mohammed, the author is equally determined to beat his own path between the diverging highways of enthusiasts. He will walk with neither the detractors nor the panegyrists. He has, it is intimated, severely analysed the results of the latest researches, has sifted fact from fantasy, and has divested himself of those occidental presuppositions which, he thinks, have lead astray other Western biographers in their attempts to interpret the "differently fashioned Oriental." With this preparation he will limn for us the real maker of the new religion which, in the 7th century A. D., set all the East aflame.
According to Dr. Mann, Mohammed was neither the highly idealized "God-impacted mediator" {Gott-ergriffener Griibler) of Lamartine, nor the sordid monstrosity of the Crusaders. He is not to be dismissed as an hallucinated epileptic (as, e. g., by Sprenger), or an idle dreamer; on the other hand, his "revelations" are no more to be dogmatically spurned than is Paul's vision on the Damascus road. Dr. Mann defends the Prophet from gross sensuality, hails him as a herald of righteousness, but straightway pulls him down from the pedestal of Carlyle. A hero he will certainly not allow him to be, much less a saint. Neither was he a conscious falsifier (bewuszter Liigner), nor a self-deluded impostor; yet his compromises are undenied. Against Sir William Muir, it is held, he was sincere from first to last. A man of many faults, conceiving himself to be the chosen of Allah, "a mighty devotee of God and eternity," he confounded the human and the divine by unconsciously yielding to the temptation which Christ withstood with the words, "My kingdom is not of this world." He is finally summed up as "the powerfully stirred man of God who became a politician, or, rather, a genuine Arabian robber-prince"—{ein echt arabischer Raubfiirst)—himself unaware of his spiritual decline (pp. 44-47). So, in the end, Dr. Mann gives us quite as paradoxical and mysterious a Mohammed as does the Koran itself; in the words of the Oxford historian, "the strangest of moral enigmas."* But the portrayal is interesting, since it stirs up anew the whole question of the Prophet's character.
♦C. W. C. Oman: The Byzantine Empire, p. 159.
