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PREFACE
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shown to be of this type. Several passages are quoted full of such gross
misstatements as could not fail to damage our authority, and bring discredit on
the Christian apologist. A description follows of Native biographies abounding
in the East, whose authors, in entire neglect of early tradition, build their
story on the fanciful fictions of later days. An illustration is given at length
of a remarkable biography, The Ennobled Nativity, which tells us how the
LIGHT of Mohammed, created a thousand years before the world, passed from father
to son, down to the Prophet's birth. The whole forms a kind of celestial
romance, the playful fantasy of an uncontrolled imagination.
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THIRD ESSAY, 1868 A.D. Sprenger on the Sources and Growth of Moslem
Tradition. This is Dr. Sprenger's monograph on Mohammedan tradition,
being a preface of 180 pages to his great work, Das Leben and die Lehre des
Mohammad, and by far, as I think, its most valuable part. It has never been
given to the public in English, and the present resume may therefore with the
greater confidence be commended to the notice of those interested in the life of
Mohammed; for it is only by a thorough acquaintance with the rise and growth of
tradition that we can, with any approach to certainty, distinguish between fact
and fiction. For this end, the special value of each of the great sources of
traditionthe Sunna, Genealogies, Biographies, and Commentaries,
in addition to the Coran itselfhas to be carefully weighed; and this
the researches of Sprenger have enabled us to do.
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The almost incredible mass of matter which has survived must be traced
chiefly to the SUNNA, or "practice" of the Prophet ; for his life and
example, as law to his followers, has been sought out and recorded in every
possible shape and detail. Another cause of the prodigious growth of tradition
is, that the most distant connection with the Propheta word or a
glanceconferred honour on him who could claim it; and so a vast body of all
kinds of tales was ready to the eager collector's hand. Hence the necessity, in
forming an estimate of Mohammed's life and the early rise of Islam, of such a
study as will enable us to test the evidence on which such traditions stand; and
here Sprenger is our guide.
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