However cautiously and acutely Weil and his successors have proceeded, the continual progress of the analysis of the legislative as well as of the historical tradition of Islam since 1870 has necessitated a renewed investigation.  In the first place it has become ever more evident that the thousands of traditions about Mohammed, which, together with the Qoran, form the foundation upon which the doctrine and life of the community are based, are for the most part the conventional expression of all the opinions which prevailed amongst his followers during the first three centuries after the Hijrah.  The fiction originated a long time after Mohammed’s death; during the turbulent period of the great conquests there was no leisure for such work.  Our own conventional insincerities differ so much—­externally at least—­from those of that date, that it is difficult for us to realize a spiritual atmosphere where “pious fraud” was practised on such a scale.  Yet this is literally true:  in the first centuries of Islam no one could have dreamt of any other way of gaining acceptance for a doctrine or a precept than by circulating a tradition, according to which Mohammed had preached the doctrine or dictated it or had lived according to the precept.  The whole individual, domestic, social, and political life as it developed in the three centuries during which the simple Arabian religion was adjusted to the complicated civilization of the great nations of that time, that all life was theoretically justified by representing it as the application of minute laws supposed to have been elaborated by Mohammed by precept and example.

Thus tradition gives invaluable material for the knowledge of the conflict of opinions in the first centuries, a strife the sharpness of which has been blunted in later times by a most resourceful harmonistic method.  But, it is vain to endeavour to construct the life and teaching of Mohammed from such spurious accounts; they cannot even afford us a reliable illustration of his life in the form of “table talk,” as an English scholar rather naively tried to derive from them.  In a collection of this sort, supported by good external evidence, there would be attributed to the Prophet of Mecca sayings from the Old and New Testament, wise saws from classical and Arabian antiquity, prescriptions of Roman law and many other things, each text of which was as authentic as its fellows.

Anyone who, warned by Goldziher and others, has realized how matters stand in this respect, will be careful not to take the legislative tradition as a direct instrument for the explanation of the Qoran.  When, after a most careful investigation of thousands of traditions which all appear equally old, we have selected the oldest, then we shall see that we have before us only witnesses of the first century of the Hijrah.  The connecting threads with the time of Mohammed must be supplied for a great part by imagination.