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Some passages of the Qoran may perhaps be interpreted in such a way that we hear the subtler strings of religious emotion vibrating in them. The chief impression that Mohammed's Allah makes before the Hijrah is that of awful majesty, at which men tremble from afar; they fear His punishment, dare hardly be sure of His reward, and hope much from His mercy.
In the first place it has become ever more evident that the thousands of traditions about Mohammed, which, together with the Qoran, form the foundation upon which the doctrine and life of the community are based, are for the most part the conventional expression of all the opinions which prevailed amongst his followers during the first three centuries after the Hijrah.
When, after a most careful investigation of thousands of traditions which all appear equally old, we have selected the oldest, then we shall see that we have before us only witnesses of the first century of the Hijrah. The connecting threads with the time of Mohammed must be supplied for a great part by imagination.
Even Ghazali's ethical mysticism is not for the multitude. The development of Islam as a whole, from the Hijrah on, has always been greater in breadth than in depth; and, consequently, its pedagogics have remained defective. Even some of the noblest minds in Islam restrict true religious life to an aristocracy, and accept the ignorance of the multitude as an irremediable evil.
Especially after the Hijrah, when the prophet had to provide the state established by him at Medina with inspired regulations, the words of God became in almost every respect different from what they had been at first. Only the form was retained.
This implied an interpretation of the oldest sources independent from the catholic development of Islam, and in contradiction with the general opinion of the canonists, according to whom, since the fourth or fifth century of the Hijrah, no one is qualified for such free research.
As other messengers of God had done in similar circumstances, he sought for a more fruitful field than that of his birthplace; he set out on the Hijrah, i.e., emigration to Medina. Here circumstances were more favourable to him: in a short time he became the head of a considerable community.
The white tent was there no longer. It had vanished. Then he remembered having stirred in his sleep. The bells he had heard were the bells on the animals which were carrying the frightened Millicent. Her hijrah had not been achieved without affecting his subconscious mind. Meanwhile, Abdul was studying his master's mind.
God's world was as it had been before the creation of man. Since his Hijrah, as Freddy called his flight from the valley, he had ceased to think about his own standing on his head. He had accepted the fact that a man must work out his own life as truly as he must work out his own salvation.
In the first centuries it was the duty of Mohammedans who had become isolated, and who had for instance been conquered by "unbelievers," to do "hijrah," i.e., emigration for Allah's sake, as the converted Arabs had done in Mohammed's time by emigrating to Medina to strengthen the ranks of the Faithful.
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