There is a depth of truth and reality underlying these sentiments. But it is needful to guard them by two considerations. In the first place, however much the nation was inclined to hand down only those traditions which symbolised with the tendency to glorify Mahomet, and also glorify the reciters themselves, and to throw the rest away,—still there were, fortunately for history, causes at work which to a certain degree counteracted the process. For Mahometan society was, from the earliest period, riven into factions which opposed each other with a mortal strife, and consequently were not indisposed to perpetuate traditions which would aid their cause by depreciating their adversaries; and partizanship has fortunately thus secured for us a large amount of historical fact which would otherwise have sunk unnoticed. Moreover, in the Biographers themselves we are bound to acknowledge the honest endeavour to draw with faithfulness the lineaments of the Prophet's life, though naturally in exaggerated outlines as seen through the medium of a supernatural atmosphere. 

As regards tradition being "the voice of the people," Bunsen would hardly have recognised the applicability of his dictum to a state of society in which the range of thought was sternly circumscribed, and its results dwarfed, by the pains and penalties of a system far more powerful than the Inquisition,—a system which proscribed the free exercise of thought and discussion as incompatible with the profession of Islam. The result is not the vox populi in any intelligible sense 

The plastic period, however, soon passed away, and left the material of tradition in a form which, though it might be worked up into any of the Theological systems, could not henceforward in its own substance be altered. This is well stated by Sprenger in his concluding paragraph:—