Note 521 — Chapter VI

Muhammed, in the fifty-second year of his age and the twelfth of his preaching (A. D. 621), whilst lying asleep between the mountains Al Safa and Merva, in the vicinity of Mecca, had a vision in which he proceeded from earth through the seven heavens to the throne of God. Muhammed himself alludes to it twice in the Koran, the seventeenth chapter of which is entitled “the night journey;” but he mentions nothing else but a vision: it was the fanaticism of his followers which wrought the most strange circumstances into an absurd fable, according to which their prophet was visited by the angel Gabriel, and in his company carried first from Mecca to Jerusalem, and then, upon a ladder of light, to the presence of God.