Muhammad The Great Exemplar — Page 52
Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad 52 any considerable portions of it converted. He abandoned his early convictions; for the uncompromising severity of inflexible principle, he substituted the alluring designs of expediency and compromise; and then, with consummate skill, he devised a machinery, by the plastic power and adaptive energy of which, he gradually shaped the broken and disconnected masses of the Arab race into a harmonious whole, — a body politic endowed with life and vigour. To the Christian, he was a Christian; — to the Jew he became a Jew: — to the Meccan idolator, as a reformed worshipper of the Kaaba. And thus, by unparalleled art, and a rare supremacy of mind, he persuaded the whole of Arabia, Pagan, Jew and Christian, to follow his steps with docile submission. Such a process is that of the workman shaping his material. It is not that of the material shaping its own form, much less (as some would hold) moulding the workman himself. It was Mahomet that formed Islam: it was not Islam, or any pre-existing Moslem spirit, that moulded Mahomet. 21 Whether walking the earth or soaring across the 21 William Muir, The Life of Mahomet , vol. I, p. ccxl,ccxli [Publishers]