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common art and address, and by the temporal power which he 
had acquired in Arabia, Mahomed not only spread his religion in 
that country, but throughout Egypt, Syria, and Persia: his pos- 
terity were looked upon as holy, and reigned over some of the 
most considerable kingdoms in Asia. 
About ten years after the commencement of Ids religious 
career, some of his more enlightened countrymen, who had known 
the prophet from his youth, but neither approved of his life or 
doctrine, resolved to destroy him, and deliver the world from such 
an impostor: Mahomed, apprized of their design, fled from Mecca 
to Medina, where the fame of his sanctity procured him a favour- 
able reception. This event, winch happened in the six hundred 
and twenty-second year of the Chrisian rnra, is called the hegirah, 
or flight; and from this period the Mahomedans compute their 
time, dating every thing from the first year of the hegirah. 
Mahomed not only distributed to his followers the spoils of 
the earth, as a reward for their faithfulness in propagating his 
doctrines, but promised them a paradise in the world to come, so 
luxurious, that it wrought powerfully on their minds, and worked 
them up to a high degree of enthusiasm. A description of this 
sensual Eden has been given by an English poet, with as much 
delicacy as the subject admits of. 
“ There, in the gardens of eternal spring, 
<{ While birds of paradise around you sing, 
“ Each with his blooming beauty by his side, 
“ Shall drink rich wines that in full rivers glide ; 
Breathe fragrant gales o’er fields of spice that blow, 
“ And gather fruits immortal as they grow : 
“ Ecstatic bliss shall your whole powers employ. 
And every sense be lost in every joy 1” Hughes. 
