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The Kibla had long since been changed to Mecca; thither at prayer every Muslim turned his face and directed his thoughts, and now every possible detail of ancient Meccan ritual was performed in scrupulous deference to the one God, so that when the time came and in fulfilment of his desires he set foot on its soil, no part of the ceremonies, with the lingering enthusiasm of his youth still sweet upon them, might be omitted or be allowed to lose its savour through disuse.
Along these age-old routes Meccan merchandise still travelled its devious way, at the mercy of sun and desert storms and the unheeding fierceness of that cataclysmic country, a prey to any marauding tribes, and dependent for its existence upon the strength of its escort.
He had a mysterious reverence for that country. A wealthy Meccan widow Chadizah, had intrusted him with the care of her Syrian trade. The female heart in all ages and countries is the same. She caused a slave to intimate to him what was passing in her mind, and, for the remaining twenty-four years of her life, Mohammed was her faithful husband.
This was undesirable, because they might allow the Meccan caravan to pass through in safety, and the Prophet had resolved that it should be despoiled by whichever route it journeyed, coast road or arid tableland.
And since plunder is sweeter than labour, every chief with swift riders and good spearmen hoped to gain his riches at Meccan expense. But their attempts were for the most part abortive, chiefly because of the lack of cohesion and generalship; until Mahomet none really constituted a serious menace to the Kureischite wealth.
This was obviously an adaptation of Western nationalism to the traditional Arab ideal of a theocratic democracy already realized in the Meccan caliphate and the Wahabi government of the Nejd. This second stirring of Arab nationalism was likewise of short duration. Turkey was now ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid, and Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic policy looked toward good relations with his Arab subjects.
He then brought Abraham into connection with the ancient Meccan Ka'ba worship: the Ka'ba or die was a sacred stone edifice, in one corner of which the "black stone" had been built in: this stone was an object of reverence to the ancient Arabs, as it still is to the Muhammedans.
"Knowest thou not that the dominion of the Heavens and of the Earth is God's? and that ye have neither patron nor helper save God?" The Kuran. The expectancy which burned like revivifying fire in the hearts of the Meccan Muslim, kindled and nourished by their leader himself, was to culminate at the time of the yearly pilgrimage in 622.
The vapour subsided, and moving out of it we discerned a slow procession. First rode a detachment of the Black Guard, mounted on black horses, and, comically fierce in their British scarlet and Meccan green, a uniform invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a retired English army officer.
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