THIS is really a great work, the fruit of prodigious learning, and of a life
the greater part spent in India in the unwearying search after materials for
the early history of Islam, and in their study. Some twenty years ago,
Sprenger published at Allahabad a Life of Mohammed in English; but,
compared with the present, it was bald and meagre, and also incomplete since
it stopped short at the Flight from Mecca. It was also marked by a love of
paradox, and tendency to strike out theories based on but slender grounds. The
present work labours, to some extent, under the same defect. For example, from
an expression (Hanîf) used in the Coran by Mahomet to signify that he
followed the pure and catholic faith of Abraham, Sprenger, assumes the
existence of an important sect of "Hanîfites," and of Hanîfite
works made use of by the Prophet; and having made the assumption, he proceeds
to use it as the premise for still further conclusions. His estimate of the
Prophet's character is also essentially inadequate; for, a man of a weak and
cunning mind, as Sprenger describes him, could never
