That Muhammad had only won over some one hundred followers after a decade of peaceful preaching in Mecca—but nearly the whole of Arabia after a decade of successful raiding, “an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually”5—speaks for itself. As Edward Gibbon observed, Muhammad “employ[ed] even the vices of mankind as the instruments of their salvation,” and the “use of fraud and perfidy, of cruelty and injustice, were often subservient to the propagation of the faith.”
