The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization	13
seek another home; and after receiving overtures from merchants
of Madina (then called Yathrib), some 200 miles to the north of
Mecca, where the presence of a substantial minority of the Jewish
faith offered a more sympathetic milieu than conservative Mecca,
he followed his three hundred adherents thither in a.d. 622. From
this Flight (Hijra) the Muslim world dates the beginning of its era.
It was now that Mohammed first found it necessary to act as
lawgiver for his little community of refugees from Mecca (Muha-
jirun), and for the converts that he made among the people of
Madina (Ansar). He had hoped to receive cordial support from
the Jewish community in Madina, since he regarded himself as the
successor of the major Hebrew prophets, notably Abraham, and
he adopted some Jewish forms of worship, including especially that
[of facing Jerusalem when at prayer. But it soon became obvious
that the Jews of Madina had no use for this new revelation, and
they ridiculed his misunderstanding of various Old Testament
narratives and Jewish rituals. He retaliated by denouncing them as
concealing or falisfying parts of the divine revelation given to
them; and since he had already begun to regard current Christian
doctrine as a perversion of the original teaching of Jesus, in so far as
he had any clear idea of either of these two tilings, he underwent a
sharp revulsion from the two religions which had hitherto inspired
him., and instead proclaimed the true and uncorrupted revelation
of God to himself as the 'seal of the prophets'; this revelation he
termed Islam, resignation to the will of God. Reverting to his
Meccan traditions, he transferred the direction of prayer to the
Ka'ba and proclaimed the Hajj one of the obligations of the Mus-
lim faith. He revived or invented a tradition that the Ka'ba and the
rites connected with it, though since corrupted by polytheism and
idol-worship, had been founded by none other than Abraham and
his son Ishrnael, the ancestor of the Arabs. It was his mission to
restore this cult in its original purity.
From this time onwards it appears that Mohammed experienced
little in the way of spiritual exaltation, and that the rest of his career
was devoted to the more mundane tasks of regulating the public
and private conduct of his devoted Muslim followers at Madina,
and of asserting his supreme authority over the townsmen of
Mecca who had rejected him. Faced by this striking change in the
motivation of the Prophet's teaching, some European writers1
1 Summarized by Tor Andrae: Mohammed, the Man and his Faith> ch, VII.