If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill

“If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill” is the proverb attached to the story of James Murray’s long-delayed meeting with William Chester Minor. In the book’s account, it gives a memorable shape to Murray’s supposed response to Minor’s absence from the dictionary dinner: if Minor could not come to him, Murray would go to Minor.

Form and Meaning

The proverb makes a meeting problem into an image of initiative. Rather than continue to wait for the absent person to travel, the speaker proposes to cross the distance himself. The saying is described as an axiom from the hadith that Francis Bacon wrote in English in 1625; the passage identifies that lineage while using the expression to illuminate a later episode.

The Story Attached to the Proverb

The attribution is explicitly qualified. The account calls it received wisdom and introduces the episode as one version of the story: Murray was supposedly perplexed, perhaps irritated, by Minor’s failure to attend the dinner, and vowed to take a leaf from Bacon. It then says that Murray promptly wrote to Minor. The proverb thus leads into the claimed initiative, not a documented certainty about Murray’s exact thoughts or words.

Narrative Function

In the anecdote, the expression converts absence into action. Minor’s nonappearance had left the two men, despite years of correspondence, without a face-to-face meeting; the proverbial reversal supplies the logic for Murray to propose a visit. Its force here depends on the contrast between the hill that does not move and the person who does. The book preserves that neat explanation while signaling that the familiar account may be a story rather than a fully verified record.