Decorative barIIIALLAH AND MOHAMMED
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The steps by which Mohammed emerged from obscurity into the full glow of his messianic mission can never be traced with any certainty. Explanations and interpretations in plenty—economic, rationalistic, psychological, mediumistic, and so on—have too often been advanced with placid and perfect assurance; but unfortunately they have not overcome the main difficulty: Mohammed himself. The enigma of his character—a fusion of the furthest limits of charlatanism, demagoguery, bombastic egotism, and general intellectual incompetency, with the opposite extremes of willing martyrdom, unaffected simplicity and sincerity, and lightning flashes of divine poetry—still remains essentially unchallenged and intact. He used tricks common to fakirs—was he therefore a complete and unabashed fakir? He began as a humble religious leader, and he ended as an adroit politician and powerful general—was he therefore dishonest from the start? He hid himself during battles—was he therefore always a coward? He often broke faith with friend and foe alike—was he therefore utterly unscrupulous? And yet....He quite certainly believed in the divinity of his mission—was he therefore wholly sincere? He wrote some passages almost incomparable in their emotional beauty—was he therefore inspired? He kept Allah in the foreground while he himself remained in the background—why, then, did the influence of Allah wane as the prestige of Mohammed waxed? In short, was he a vicious paranoiac who developed into a maniacal monster, or an unrivaled genius who was all that his worshipers claimed—or both?
Such interrogations face the tracker of Mohammed’s career at every turn of the journey, and, in avoiding the pitfalls on one side, he is very likely to stumble into the abysses on the other. For the facts of his life are at once too abundant and too few; and he who ponders them is ever apt to discover that, just at the moment when he confidently believes he is on the right path, he knows both too much and too little. The rainbow’s end is forever at hand and yet forever distant; and similarly the intangible, chameleon-like personality of Mohammed constantly eludes and mocks one at the precise time when one is most confident of touching and cornering the flitting phantom. Under the circumstances, a rapid recapitulation of such concrete events as have been handed down with a minimum of bias is perhaps least likely to lead one too far astray.
When Mohammed was about thirty-five, the holy Kaba, beaten and broken by a violent flood, was in sad need of repair. A Grecian ship, that had been providentially wrecked on the coast of the Red Sea near by, furnished the materials necessary for its reconstruction. So great was the reverence emanating from the sacred walls, however, that the Koreish feared the imposition of heavenly wrath on those who made bold to tear the building down; but one fellow, braver than the rest, raised an apologetic prayer to Allah and simultaneously struck a heavy blow with a pickaxe. All those present, including the assaulter, then fled and lingered timorously until morning, when the incredible fact was noted that Allah had not spoken one way or the other, and so the structure was rapidly demolished. All went well with the building operations until the time came to replace the Black Stone in the eastern corner—an honor so great that each branch of the Koreish contended for it, until bloodshed was imminent. Finally the eldest patriarch in the city arose and advanced this ingenious solution: “O Koreish, hearken unto me! My advice is that the man who chanceth first to enter the court of the Kaba by yonder gate, he shall be chosen either to decide the difference amongst you, or himself to placethe stone.” Universal applause followed and everyone waited to learn who should be the lucky man. Just at this moment the unostentatious yet dignified form of Mohammed was seen to approach, and all the people shouted in unison: “Here comes the faithful arbiter; we are content to abide by his decision.” Mohammed, ever cool and composed in public, calmly accepted the appointment and immediately devised a supremely clever diplomatic scheme that would certainly be satisfactory to all. He removed his cloak and laid it on the ground; then, putting the awful stone on it, he said: “Now let one from each of your four divisions come forward, and raise a corner of this mantle.” This was done and, when the rock was level with the cavity, he himself thrust it in position. Thus the unpretentious tradesman rose in the twinkling of an eye to high eminence in the esteem of his townsmen. Since Mohammed’s mind always took to omens and auguries as a duck takes to water, it is possible that this occurrence marked the vague inception of his mission.
At all events, about five years later his neighbors became much mystified by his behavior. He would retire, for days at a stretch, to a cave in the foothills of Mount Hira, a conical hill several miles north of Mecca, whither Khadija too sometimes went with him. Meanwhile his business languished, and various conjectureswere advanced to account for his odd conduct—was the fellow crazy, or afflicted with some loathsome disease, or was he perchance engaged in some such nefarious occupation as counterfeiting? As the months passed, he still continued to act in the same incomprehensible manner, and it was noticed that, little by little, certain members of his immediate family attended him to his refuge, or gathered with him in some one of their own houses. This sort of thing went on for several years, until it was noised abroad that the quondam merchant and camel-driver was confidently claiming the honor of having made the epochal discovery which he phrased thus: “La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah”—which, freely interpreted, means: “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.”
This brief, twofold credo demands considerable attention. The first postulate was not entirely new, for Allah had hitherto been a well-behaved deity Who was highly regarded by many Arabs; yet, after all, He had been but one of many idols. By what process of thought had Mohammed come to exalt Allah not merely above all Arabian gods, but above the gods of all time? and furthermore, why was he so certain of his own intimate association with Allah?
Various explanations were offered by his simple-minded followers. According to one account, as Mohammedwas wandering near the cave, “an angel from the sky cried to him, ‘O Mohammed, I am Gabriel!’ He was terrified, for as often as he raised his head, there was the apparition of the angel. He hurried home to tell his wife. ‘O Khadija,’ he said, ‘I have never abhorred anything as I do these idols and soothsayers; and now verily I fear lest I should become a soothsayer myself.’ ‘Never,’ replied his faithful wife, ‘the Lord will never suffer it thus to be.’” So she made haste to get the opinion of her own relative, the aged visionary Waraka, who, after listening attentively to her tale, cried aloud: “By the Lord he speaketh truth! Doubtless it is the beginning of prophecy, and there shall come upon him theGreat Namus, like as it came upon Moses.” According to another story that is even more edifying, Khadija discreetly tested the genuineness of the angelic guest by making Mohammed sit first on her right knee, and then on her left; and the spirit did not object to either procedure. But when she took Mohammed in her lap and started to remove some of her garments, the virtuous apparition departed in great haste, and the crafty Khadija then exultantly cried: “Rejoice ... for by the Lord! it is an angel, and no devil.”
These enlightening tales, however, deserve to be supplemented by certain other considerations. Outside ofArabia, Paganism was in general disrepute. The dissolute and declining Romans were cracking lewd jokes in the very faces of their gods; the myriad followers of Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster were either too remote or too helpless to matter one way or another; Talmudic Judaism and Oriental Christianity despised idolatry and worshiped the same Jehovah, even though they disputed with each other, and indeed among themselves, concerning the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Now, to one who chose to regard himself as a prophet, monotheism had distinct advantages over polytheism. For one thing, it was rather confusing to attempt to obey the behests of conflicting deities; and for another, the different prophets of Jehovah in Judaism and Christendom had, so far as Mohammed knew, been uniformly successful—for he was familiar with the glorious history of Abraham, Moses and David, and he always held to the perverse belief that Jesus was not crucified. However deep in the dumps prophets may have been on occasion, they have invariably believed one thing: victory for their particular cause will inevitably come. Neither an unbroken series of worldly failures nor the chastisements of his God have ever shaken the faith of a first-class prophet in himself—or, as he would doubtless prefer to say, in his Divinity. Arabia—broken,unorganized, inglorious, idolistic Arabia—obviously lacked one Supreme Being whose prerogative was greater than all other Supreme Beings; and that Being, in turn, needed a messenger to exploit His supremacy. The messengers who had served Jehovah had certainly prospered well; but Jehovah Himself appeared to be on the decline—His Unity was steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical Trinity. Why, therefore, not give Allah, perhaps the leading icon in Arabia, an opportunity? Such considerations quite probably never entered the head of Mohammed with any definiteness; yet his behavior for the rest of his days seems to indicate that these, or similar conceptions, were subconsciously egging him on.
Of certain facts, moreover, he was definitely aware. He may have had little or no formal education, but his memory was retentive and capacious, and his caravan journeys, together with the scores of conversations he had held at the yearly fairs, as well as at Mecca, with many cultivated strangers, had packed his mind with a mass of highly valuable if heterogeneous matter. In these ways he had learnt both the strength and the weakness of the Jews and Christians: their fanatical enthusiasms and despairs; their spasmodic attempts to proselytize as well as the widespread defections from their faiths; the loftiness of their moral and politicalcodes—a loftiness that remained fruitless from their lack of cohesion and effectual leadership. Since his conception of religion was largely personal—for he looked upon Moses, Jesus and the rest merely as capable men who had founded and promulgated religions—and since Arabia had no preëminent ruler, why shouldhenot seize the reins of power and carry on the great tradition of prophethood? What a magnificent opportunity beckoned, and how fortunate that he had been the first to recognize the call! By keeping only what was best in the Arabic faith—the Kaba and the Black Stone—and by a judicious selection of the most feasible ideas that lay imbedded in Jewish and Christian precepts, he might establish a code that would supersede all others, and might then dictate to all Arabs alike. What prophets had done, he would also do—and do better. Furthermore, he knew something else: he had a wealthy wife and four intimates who were already prepared to fight for him to the death.
Khadija rated first. From the beginning she had stood faithfully by his side, and whenever he was low-spirited and his heavenly visitations were temporarily suspended, she would tenderly comfort him—for the sad memories of her first marriage had made her determined that her second husband should succeed in whatever business he undertook. Her cousin, the learnedmystic Waraka, readily abandoned his firm conviction that Christ was the only true prophet in favor of his cousin-in-law’s exclusive claim to the same honor; and it is probable that he, more than any other person, enlightened Mohammed’s many-sided ignorance of religious history. Mohammed had early adopted his youthful cousin Ali, son of Abu Talib, and the attachment between them had come to be mutually strong. He had also assumed control of Zeid, a Christian slave, who became so devoted to his master that, when he was offered his freedom, he replied: “I will not leave thee; thou art in the place to me of father and of mother.” This pleased Mohammed so much that he immediately escorted Zeid to the Black Stone and said: “Bear testimony, all ye that are present. Zeid is my son; I will be his heir, and he shall be mine.” In his thirty-ninth year Mohammed had become acquainted with Abu Bekr—commonly called either “the Sighing” or “the True”—a rich cloth merchant who was middle-aged and short, and who had deep-set eyes. Shrewd and penetrating in business concerns, mentally stable, and untroubled by too many disturbing ideas and emotions, he was just the sort of person Mohammed most needed: a devoted adherent who would serve as business agent for the new faith.
But in the beginning these were all. Some of hisimmediate relatives did not take him very seriously: Abu Lahab grimaced in his face, and even the charitable Abu Talib smiled rather derisively at his curious actions. We are told that Abu Talib, chancing to apprehend his son Ali and Mohammed contorting themselves according to the precepts of Islam, thereupon remarked that he would not care to twist himself so that his middle portion would be higher than his head—a flippancy that Ali cherished and chuckled over years after his father’s death. Meanwhile the great bulk of the Koreish were too contemptuously indifferent to pay any heed to Mohammed’s strange yarnings, though occasionally, as he passed cliques of them on the streets, they would lazily point him out as a harmless and but mildly amusing dunce.
Without applauding or deprecating this Koreishite behavior, we may at any rate impartially consider its origin. The hitherto mentally and emotionally normal trader, husband and father had found himself suddenly swept off his feet and carried irresistibly away on a mighty tide: the perverse, inexplicable desire to write poetry—a fantasy that could not fail to make him the laughing-stock of all right-minded Meccans. Howcurious, how odd, that he, a well-to-do merchant who had looked forward to nothing more exciting than a peaceful and prosperous future, should be summarily wrenched from his moorings and cast adrift upon such a strange, tempest-tossed sea! Surely, surely, there was some marvelous meaning in the business—if he could but find it. And so, stabbed by agonizing doubts or transported with rapturous ecstasies, he plunged blindly on, seeking relief from his vague imaginings in intermittent bursts of formless, rhapsodical verse. His perturbed spirit now soared to the heights of Heaven and now plunged into the chasms of Hell; moments of ethereal bliss would be followed by periods of the profoundest melancholy. In short, he was passing through the throes of an experience closely akin to religious conversion—an experience that can end in but one of three ways: in a relapse into sin, in suicide, or in a more or less enduring catharsis of the spirit. Though Mohammed was too strong a man to return to the fleshpots of Arabia—if, indeed, he had ever tasted them—it is almost certain, as the earliest fragments of the Koran hint, that he meditated self-destruction for a time; but Allah, the All-Compelling, the Mighty One, had other plans.
It is related that the angel Gabriel, who thus far had labored only in the field of Christian employment, waschosen by Allah as bearer of the divine revelation to Mohammed. One day, while the trader-poet was wrestling with his doubts among the foothills of Mount Hira, he saw a wondrous apparition floating downward on celestial wing. Coming within a distance of two bowshots—for the Arabs are very accurate about such things—the divine envoy exposed a tablet covered with heavenly hieroglyphs before Mohammed’s astonished eyes and exclaimed, “Read!” “I cannot read,” replied Mohammed; but again the unearthly voice uttered the word, “Read!” And then, impelled by an irresistible power, Mohammed fixed his entranced eyes upon the document and began to chant thus:
“Recite in the name of the Lord who created—Created Man from nought but congealed blood;—Recite! For thy Lord is beneficent....”
“Recite in the name of the Lord who created—Created Man from nought but congealed blood;—Recite! For thy Lord is beneficent....”
“Recite in the name of the Lord who created—Created Man from nought but congealed blood;—Recite! For thy Lord is beneficent....”
“Recite in the name of the Lord who created—
Created Man from nought but congealed blood;—
Recite! For thy Lord is beneficent....”
and so on, until the end. “Thou art God’s Prophet, and I am Gabriel,” announced the awe-inspiring guest before he departed to receive the blessing of Allah for having so successfully executed the heavenly command. Gabriel, in truth, was a very valuable ambassador, for, through the to and fro journeyings of this indefatigable messenger, Allah was able to remain at ease in Heaven, thus keeping up that appearance of intangible, majestic remoteness so necessary for dignified gods.
And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment he looked upon himself as Allah’s vicegerent, through whom Allah’s incontestable decrees were to be given to man—although Gabriel, or the Holy Ghost (for Mohammed’s slipshod knowledge of Christian theogony led him into the regrettable error of perpetually confusing those two eminent divinities), continued in his capacity as interpreter of the intermittently revealed series of tablets. And so careful was Allah to eliminate the possibility of merely human invention that He prefaced every Sura, or individual revelation, with the express or implied injunction “SAY” or “SPEAK”—the irrefutable proof of divine authorship. Mohammed’s every doubt had now vanished, his soul was completely at ease; and from his lips there burst the wildly exultant chant: “La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah!”
Such, we may believe if we so desire, was the origin of the Koran, of Mohammed the Prophet, and of Islam itself—those three interacting and inseparable forces (a sort of Pagan Trinity, in fact) which, emerging when Rome was dying and Christianity was barely out of its cradle, convulsed the civilized and uncivilized world for centuries to come. Inasmuch, however, as Mohammed himself, not to mention his commentators, has added certain clarifying details that were touched with anearthiness foreign to the pretty picture, it may not be wholly presumptuous or irreverent to glance briefly at the other side of the canvas.
The conception of a flexible revelation—of one that could be indefinitely extended, amended, expurgated, or even abrogated in part—was excellent in many ways. Christianity and Mormonism, to cite only two counter cases, have both suffered somewhat, perhaps, from the inexorable nature of their scriptures. Woe unto him who alters a jot or tittle of their contents! At the same time, the precise meaning of the Christian creed, in particular, is very indefinite; it permits a latitude of interpretation, even in fundamental matters, that has brought about those lamentable schisms into major, minor and microscopic sects with which everyone is familiar. But, however much civil strife Islam may have endured from political factionalism or antagonism over inconsequential tenets in the Koran, it has remained indissolubly firm in its adherence to its supereminent divinities: Allah and Mohammed. And the credit for this, it is to be suspected, is due principally to the one whom all orthodox Moslems believe—or profess they believe—to be the lesser.
Poetry and oratory—the only forms of literature known to the Arabs—were both oracular and rudely rhythmical; and Mohammed, who from his childhoodhad been familiar with the yearly contests of poets and orators at the fairs, naturally adopted a cognate medium of expression. His thoughts, whether conceived in a white heat of frenzy or with deliberate coolness and sly calculation for the main chance, were probably not written down in any definite way during his life. It is not certain, in fact, that he could either read or write. He delighted in the appellation “the illiterate Prophet,” possibly on account of his humility, and possibly because he knew that inspired ignorance had been the indisputable prerogative of all successful prophets in the past. Indeed, the very fact that he was unlearned was rightly supposed to increase the miraculous nature of his revelations. As he tossed the divine emanations from his lips, they were sometimes recorded by hired or willing scribes upon palm leaves, leather, stones, the shoulder-blades or ribs of camels and goats, or were even tattooed upon the breasts of men. But often they were not immediately written down at all; the Prophet would go around spouting them forth to his followers who, trained from infancy to memorize verses and songs of every sort with infallible precision, would piously commit them to memory. As a result of this divinely haphazard procedure, the time of composition of the different Suras has never been definitely fixed. Two facts, however, are well established: the revelations, atfirst very short, steadily increased in length; and, doubtless for that reason, the interminable later Suras do not even contain ashes—for ashes prove that flame was once present—whereas the earlier songs are occasionally touched with fire.
Occasionally ... but only so. The indefeasible privilege of all Holy Writ to be dull—a privilege only too generously exercised—is abused in the Koran with an enthusiasm matched only by the third part of the Pentateuch. The spasmodic structure of the Koran—its absence of cohesion between chapters and even between sentences, its dithyrambic convulsions, its hodge-podge of inchoate and irrelevant ideas, its pervasive lack of charm—may be due, it has been hazarded, to Mohammed’s neurotic idiosyncrasy; yet epileptic men of genius in many branches of mental activity have been by no means uncommon, and it seems simpler to assume that he was not born to be a poet. In any case, it is certain that his predilection for non-didactic poetry showed itself only at rare intervals: perhaps because, as the Koran puts it, “We have not taught him poetry, nor is it meet for him,” perhaps because he had had no genuine love-affair in his youth, and perhaps because he believed that his commission was too serious to allow any protracted indulgence in such a frivolous thing as verse. Like the Hebrew prophets, he was at his bestwhen raining heavenly maledictions on his enemies; like them, too, he was at his worst when he used repetition as a substitute for ideas. But they at least had good stories, taken from a long and rich racial history, to redecorate as they saw fit, whereas Arabia had almost no history worth the telling; and so Mohammed was compelled to fall back on Hebrew literature to help him out. He did fall back—again and again, and yet again. Even if he could not read, it was easy to get the necessary material from friendly Jews in Mecca; but an unfortunate, though apparently disregarded, difficulty attended this procedure: different Jews would tell the same story in different ways. So it came about that, when the Prophet was hard pressed for material, he would use one version; again, when his clock of inspiration had run down or been left unwound, he would use another garbled rendition of the same narrative. While the story of Joseph was his favorite, his collection of trophies pillaged from Biblical folklore included the activities of Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and less important notables; at the same time, he was quite innocent of the common Christian complaint that he had plagiarized the Bible, inasmuch as he had never read it. Carlyle was certainly not a tepid admirer of Mohammed, but, when he read the Koran, even his Berserker rage for great men suffereda serious shock—a shock that might justly be criticized for the very thing it criticizes. “I must say,” he confessed, “it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty would carry any European through the Koran.” And indeed, so far as that volume is concerned, the European sense of duty has been very small.
But with Mohammed’s acolytes the case has been wholly different. For from the beginning they believed in the Koran with an appallingly artless simplicity, at once noble and absurd. Through its instrumentality, Allah the Wise, the Only Wise, revealed his immutable decrees: to the good, the rewards of a Paradise that utterly beggared the Christian Heaven, and to the bad the punishments of a Hell that contained an infinity of such refined tortures of heat, and even of cold, as neither the most imaginatively gifted Jew nor Christian had yet conceived—for Dante was undreamed of. Mohammed of course properly approved of Allah’s decisions and judgments, as an employee should rightly behave toward his employer; and he was especially fond of his superior’s delight in describing Hell—“Iswear,” he gravely announced one day, “that it is one of the most serious things.”
The earlier part of the Koran, or “Recitation,” is mostly concerned with these elemental and primitive things; only at a later day did Allah—or Mohammed?—deal separately with the many matters touching the growth of a definite code of religious, social and governmental precepts. When scoffers poked ridicule at the rather sloppy grammar and metre of the Koran, Mohammed did two things: in the first place, after brandishing the doom of an eternity of roaring flames over their heads, he challenged them to produce better verses than his—or Allah’s?—own; and, in the second place, he incautiously prepared a loophole of escape by revealing, in Sura 69, the fact that the Koran was “not the word of a poet,” but “a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds.” This lofty gesture temporarily squelched his defamers, who promptly dug off with their tails between their legs; but its effect did not last long when they reflected how damaging an admission he had made. It may of course be readily granted that precepts concerned with daily washing, food, taxes, and so on, were not especially well adapted to rhythmical prose; but, after all, that was Allah’s and Mohammed’s lookout. Perhaps, indeed, the confession of non-poeticalpower was scarcely necessary; for the inexplicable man who, in the pristine freshness of poetic glow, could indite this terse stanza, instinct with brooding doom:
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,The King of men,The God of men,From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking devil,Who whispers into the hearts of men,From among the Jinn and the men,”
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,The King of men,The God of men,From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking devil,Who whispers into the hearts of men,From among the Jinn and the men,”
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,The King of men,The God of men,From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking devil,Who whispers into the hearts of men,From among the Jinn and the men,”
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,
The King of men,
The God of men,
From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking devil,
Who whispers into the hearts of men,
From among the Jinn and the men,”
and who conceived the charming fantasy that the lengthened shadows of morning and evening are elongated in obeisance to Allah, was also capable many years later of concocting an effusion designed expressly to make his wives behave themselves.