Together with despotism and inextricably mingled with it is the second
great Islamic enthusiasm--the belief in the supremacy of force. With
violence the Muslim kingdom was to be attained. Mahomet gave to the
battle lust of Arabia the approval of his puissant deity, bidding his
followers put their supreme faith in the arbitrament of the sword. He
knew, too, the value of diplomacy and the use of well-calculated
treachery, but chief of all he bade his followers arm themselves to seize
by force what they could not obtain by cunning. In the insistence upon
these two factors, complete obedience to his will as the revelation of
Allah's decrees and the justification of violence to proclaim the merits
of his faith, we gain the nearest approach to his character and beliefs;
for these, together with his conception of fate, are perhaps the most
personal of all his institutions.

Mahomet has suffered not a little at the hands of his immediate successors.
They have sought to record the full sum of his personality, and finding
the subject elude them, as the translation of actions into words must
ever fall short of finality, they have overloaded their narrative with
minutest and almost always apocryphal details which leave the main
outlines blurred. Only two biographies can be said to be in the nature
of sources, that of Muhammad ibn Hischam, written on the model of
an earlier biography, undertaken about 760 for the Abbasside Caliph
Mansur, and of Wakidi, written about 820, which is important as
containing the text of many treaties made by Mahomet with various tribes.
Al-Tabari, too, included the life of Mahomet in his extensive history of
Arabia, but his work serves only as a check, consisting, as it
does, mainly of extracts from Wakidi. By far the more valuable is the
Kuran and the Sunna of tradition. But even these are fragmentary and
confused, bearing upon them the ineradicable stamp of alien writers and
much second-hand thought.