In this edition the Selections are divided into two parts. The first is Islám; the second, other religions as regarded in Islám. In the first are grouped, under distinctive headings, the more important utterances of Mohammad on what his followers must believe and do; in the second are his versions of the history of the patriarchs and other personages of the Jewish and Christian writings.

It is only in the First Part that I have made much alteration, either by adding fresh extracts (distinguished by a sign), or by making a few merely verbal alterations in the original extracts, or by the suppression or transposition of the commentary. Any alterations that go beyond thisnew renderings, for instance-are duly recorded in the footnotes.

The Second Part is almost unchanged from the first edition. In this part the interwoven commentary is left entire, for the traditions of the commentators about Abraham and Moses and Christ are as curious as the traditions of Moḥammad, and about as credible; and the narrative style of the Second Part allows the introduction of parentheses more easily than the rhetorical form which many of the extracts in the First Part present.

Mr. Lane's Introduction was abridged from Sale's Preliminary Discourse, with but little addition from his own knowledge. Sale's Discourse abounds in information, but it is too detailed and lengthy for the purpose of this volume. I have, then, substituted a short sketch of the beginnings of Islám. I have tried to bring home to the reader the little we know of the early Arabs; then to draw the picture of the great Arab prophet and his work; to

show what are the salient points of Islám; and finally to explain something of the history of the Kurán and its contents. I am conscious of having drawn the picture with a weak hand, but I hope the sketch may serve as a not quite useless introduction to a volume of typical selections from a book which, in the peculiar character of its contents and the extraordinary power of its influence, has not its parallel in the world.

June 1878.

S. L. P.

IV. MOHAMMAD AND THE KUR-ÁN

V. THE RESURRECTION, PARADISE, AND HELL

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INTRODUCTION.

I. THE ARABS BEFORE MOHAMMAD.

'Oh, our manhood's prime vigour ! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in the pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine,
And the locust flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!'

-BROWNING, Saul.

BETWEEN Egypt and Assyria, jostled by both, yielding to neither, lay a strange country, unknown save at its marches even to its neighbours, dwelt-in by a people that held itself aloof from all the earth-a people whom the great empires of the ancient world in vain essayed to conquer, against whom the power of Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium was proven impotence, and at whose hands even the superb Alexander, had he lived to test his dream, might for once have learnt the lesson of defeat. Witnessing the struggle and fall of one and another of the great tyrannies of antiquity, yet never entering the arena of the fight ;swept on its northern frontier by the conflicting armies of Khusru and Cæsar, but lifting never a hand in either cause;-Arabia was at length to issue forth from its silent mystery, and after baffling for a thousand years the curious gaze of strangers, was at last to draw to itself the fearful eyes of all men. The people of whom almost