When the three days were over, Moḥammad and his party peaceably returned to Medina; and the Mekkans re-entered their homes. But this pilgrimage, and the self-restraint of the Muslims therein, advanced the cause of Islám among its enemies. Converts increased daily, andsome leading men of the Ḳureysh now went over to Moḥammad. The clans around were sending in their deputations of homage. But the final keystone was set in the eighth year of the flight (a.d.630), when a body of Ḳureysh broke the truce by attacking an ally of the Muslims; and Moḥammad forthwith marched upon Mekka with ten thousand men, and the city, defence being hopeless, surrendered. Now was the time for the Prophet to show his bloodthirsty nature. His old persecutors are at his feet. Will he not trample on them, torture them, revenge himself after his own cruel manner? Now the man will come forward in his true colours: we may prepare our horror, and cry shame beforehand.
But what is this? Is there no blood in the streets? Where are the bodies of the thousands that have been butchered? Facts are hard things; and it is a fact that the day of Moḥammad’s greatest triumph over his enemies was also the day of his grandest victory over himself. He freely forgave the Ḳureysh all the years of sorrow and cruel scorn they had inflicted on him: he gave an amnesty to the whole population of Mekka. Four criminals, whom justice condemned, made up Moḥammad’s proscription list when he entered as a conqueror the city of his bitterest enemies. The army followed his example, and entered quietly and peaceably; no house was robbed, no woman insulted. One thing alone suffered destruction. Going to the Kaạbeh, Moḥammad stood before each of the three hundred and sixty idols and pointed to it with his staff, saying, ‘Truth is come and lying is undone,’ and at these words his attendants hewed it down; and all the idols and household gods of Mekka and round about were destroyed.
It was thus that Moḥammad entered again his native city. Through all the annals of conquest, there is no triumphant entry like unto this one.
The taking of Mekka was soon followed by the adhesion of all Arabia. Every reader knows the story of the spreadof Islám. The tribes of every part of the peninsula sent embassies to do homage to the Prophet. Arabia was not enough: the Prophet had written in his bold uncompromising way to the great kings of the East, to the Persian Khusru, and the Greek Emperor; and these little knew how soon his invitation to the faith would be repeated, and how quickly Islám would be knocking at their doors with no faltering hand.
The Prophet’s career was near its end. In the tenth year of the Flight, twenty years after he had first felt the Spirit move him to preach to his people, he resolved once more to leave his adopted city and go to Mekka to perform a farewell pilgrimage. And when the rites were done in the valley of Miná, the Prophet spoke unto the multitude—the forty thousand pilgrims—with solemn last words.16
‘Ye People!Hearken to my words; for I know not whether after this year I shall ever be amongst you here again.
‘Your Lives and your Property are sacred and inviolable amongst one another until the end of time.
‘The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his inheritance: a Testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs.
‘The child belongeth to the Parent; and the violator of Wedlock shall be stoned.
‘Ye people! Ye have rights demandable of your Wives, and they have rights demandable of you. Treat your women well.
‘And your Slaves, see that you feed them with such food as ye eat yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a fault which ye are not willing to forgive, then sell them, for they are the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented.
‘Ye people! Hearken unto my speech and comprehend it. Know that every Muslim is the brother of every other Muslim. All of you are on the same equality: ye are one Brotherhood.’
Then, looking up to heaven, he cried, ‘O Lord! I have delivered my message and fulfilled my mission.’ And all the multitude answered, ‘Yea, verily hast thou’!—‘O Lord! I beseech Thee, bear Thou witness to it’! and, like Moses, he lifted up his hands and blessed the people.
Three months more and Moḥammad was dead.
a.h.11. June, 632.
It is a hard thing to form a calm estimate of the Dreamer of the Desert. There is something so tender and womanly, and withal so heroic, about the man, that one is in peril of finding the judgment unconsciously blinded by the feeling of reverence and well-nigh love that such a nature inspires. He who, standing alone, braved for years the hatred of his people, is the same who was never the first to withdraw his hand from another’s clasp, the beloved of children, who never passed a group of little ones without a smile from his wonderful eyes and a kind word for them, sounding all the kinder in that sweet-toned voice. The frank friendship, the noble generosity, the dauntless courage and hope of the man, all tend to melt criticism in admiration.
In telling in brief outline the story of Moḥammad’s life I have endeavoured to avoid controversial points. I have tried to convey in the simplest manner the view of that life which a study of the authorities must force upon every unbiassed mind. Many of the events of Moḥammad’s life have been distorted and credited with ignoble motives by European biographers; but on the facts they mainly agree, and these I have narrated, without encumbering them with the ingenious adumbrations of their learned recorders. But there are some things in the Prophet’s life which have given rise to charges too weighty to be dismissed without discussion. He has been accused of cruelty, sensuality, and insincerity; he has been called a ‘bloodthirsty tyrant,’ a voluptuary, and an impostor.
The charge of cruelty scarcely deserves consideration. I have already spoken of the punishment of the Jews, which forms the ground of the accusation. One has but to refer to Moḥammad’s conduct to the prisoners after the battle of Bedr, to his patient tolerance towards his enemies at Medina, his gentleness to his people, his love of children and the dumb creatures, and above all, his bloodless entry into Mekka, and the complete amnesty he gave to those who had been his bitter enemies during eighteen years of insult and persecution and finally open war, to show that cruelty was no part of Moḥammad’s nature.
To say that Moḥammad, or any other Arab, was sensual in a higher degree than an ordinary European is simply to enounce a well-worn axiom: the passions of the men of the sunland are not as those of the chill north. But to say that Moḥammad was a voluptuary is false. The simple austerity of his daily life, to the very last, his hard mat for sleeping on, his plain food, his self-imposed menial work, point him out as an ascetic rather than a voluptuary in most senses of the word. Two things he loved, perfumes and women; the first was harmless enough, and the special case of his wives has its special answer. A great deal too much has been said about these wives. It is a melancholy spectacle to see professedly Christian biographers gloating over the stories and fables of Moḥammad’s domestic relations like the writers and readers of ‘society’ journals. It is, of course, a fact that whilst the Prophet allowed his followers only four wives he took more than a dozen himself; but be it remembered that, with his unlimited power, he need not have restricted himself to anumber insignificant compared with the ḥareems of some of his successors, that he never divorced one of his wives, that all of them save one were widows, and that one of these widows was endowed with so terrific a temper that Aboo-Bekr and ´Othmán had already politely declined the honour of her alliance before the Prophet married her: the gratification of living with a vixen cannot surely be excessive. Several of these marriages must have been entered into from the feeling that those women whose husbands had fallen in battle for the faith, and who had thus been left unprotected, had a claim upon the generosity of him who prompted the fight. Other marriages were contracted from motives of policy, in order to conciliate the heads of rival factions. It was not a high motive, but one does not look for very romantic ideas about love-matches from a man who regarded women as ‘crooked ribs,’ and whose system certainly does its best to make marriage from love impossible; yet, on the other hand, it was not a sensual motive. Perhaps the strongest reason—one of which it is impossible to over-estimate the force—that impelled Moḥammad to take wife after wife was his desire for male offspring. It was a natural wish that he should have a son who should follow in his steps and carry on his work; but the wish was never gratified, Moḥammad’s sons died young. After all, the overwhelming argument is his fidelity to his first wife. When he was little more than a boy he married Khadeejeh, who was fifteen years older than himself, with all the added age that women gain so quickly in the East. For five-and-twenty years Moḥammad remained faithful to his elderly wife, and when she was sixty-five, and they might have celebrated their ‘silver wedding,’ he was as devoted to her as when first he married her. During all those years there was never a breath of scandal. Thus far Moḥammad’s life will bear microscopic scrutiny. Then Khadeejeh died; and though he married many women afterwards, some of them rich in youth and beauty, he never forgot his old wife, and lovedher best to the end: ‘when I was poor she enriched me, when they called me a liar she alone believed in me, when all the world was against me she alone remained true.’ This loving, tender memory of an old wife laid in the grave belongs only to a noble nature; it is not to be looked for in a voluptuary.17
When, however, all has been said, when it has been shown that Moḥammad was not the rapacious voluptuary some have taken him for, and that his violation of his own marriage-law may be due to motives reasonable and just from his point of view rather than to common sensuality, there remains the fact that some of the soorahs of the Ḳur-án bear unmistakable marks of self-accommodation and personal convenience; that Moḥammad justified his domestic excesses by words which he gave as from God. And hence the third and gravest charge, the charge of imposture. We must clearly understand what is meant by this accusation. It is meant that the Prophetconsciouslyfabricated speeches, and palmed them off upon the people as the very word of God. The question, it will atonce be perceived, has nothing whatever to do with the truth or untruth of the revelations. Many an earnest enthusiast has uttered prophecies and exhortations which he firmly believed to be the promptings of the Spirit, and no man can charge such an one with imposture. He thoroughly believes what he says, and the fault is in the judgment, not the conscience. The question is clearly narrowed to this: Did Moḥammad believe he was speaking the words of God equally when he declared that permission was given him to take unto him more wives, as when he proclaimed ‘There is no god but God’? It is a question that concerns the conscience of man; and each must answer it for himself. How far a man may be deluded into believing everything he says is inspired it is impossible to define. There are men to-day who would seem to claim infallibility; and in Moḥammad’s time it was so much easier to believe in one’s self. Now, one never wants a friend to remind him of his weakness; then, there were hundreds who would fain have made the man think himself God. It is wonderful, with his temptations, how great a humility was ever his, how little he assumed of all the god-like attributes men forced upon him. His whole life is one long argument for his loyalty to truth. He had but one answer for his worshippers, ‘I am no more than a man, I am only human.’ ‘Do none enter Paradise save by the mercy of God?’ asked ´Áïsheh. ‘None, none, none,’ he answered. ‘Not even thou by thy own merits?’ ‘Neither shall I enter Paradise unless God cover me with His mercy.’ He was a man like unto his brethren in all things save one, and that one difference served only to increase his humbleness, and render him the more sensitive to his shortcomings. He was sublimely confident of this single attribute, that he was the messenger of the Lord of the Daybreak, and that the words he spake came verily from Him. He was fully persuaded—and no man dare dispute his right to the belief—that God had sent him to do agreat work among his people in Arabia. Nervous to the verge of madness, subject to hysteria, given to wild dreamings in solitary places, his was a temperament that easily leads itself to religious enthusiasm. He felt a subtle influence within him which he believed to be the movings of the Spirit: he thought he heard a voice; it became real and audible to him, awed and terrified him, so that he fell into frantic fits. Then he would arise and utter some noble saying; and what wonder if he thought it came straight from highest heaven? It was not without a sore struggle that he convinced himself of his own inspiration; but once admitted, the conviction grew with his years and his widening influence for good, and nothing then could shake his belief that he was the literal mouthpiece of the All-Merciful. When a man has come to this point, he cannot be expected to discriminate between this saying and that. As the instrument of God he has lost his individuality; he believes God is ever speaking through his lips; he dare not question the inspiration of the speech lest he should seem to doubt the Giver.
Yet there must surely be a limit to this delusion. There are some passages in the Ḳur-án which it is difficult to think Moḥammad truly believed to be the voice of the Lord of the Worlds. Moḥammad’s was a sensitive conscience in the early years of his teaching, and it is hard to think that it could have been so obscured in later times that he could really believe in the inspired source of some of his revelations. He may have thought the commands they conveyed necessary, but he could hardly have deemed them divine. In some cases he could scarcely fail to be aware that the object of the ‘revelation’ was his own comfort or pleasure or reputation, and not themajor Dei gloria, nor the good of the people.
The truth would seem to be that in the latter part of his life Moḥammad was forced to enlarge the limits of his revelations as the sphere of his influence increased. From a private citizen of Mekka he had become the Emeer, thechief of the Arabs, the ruler of a factious, jealous, turbulent people; and the change must have had its effect upon his character. The man who from addressing a few devout followers in a tent in the desert finds himself the head of a nation of many tribes, king of a country twice the size of France, will find many things difficult that before seemed easy. As a statesman Moḥammad was as great as he was as a preacher of righteousness; but as his field of work enlarged, his mind had to accommodate itself to the needs of commoner minds. He learnt to see the expedient where before he knew only the right. His revelations now deal with the things of earth, when before they looked only towards the things of heaven; and petty social rules, ‘general orders,’ selfish permissions, are promulgated with the same authority and as from the same divine source as the command to worship one God alone. He governed the nation as a prophet and not as a king, and as a prophet his ordinances must be endorsed with the divine afflatus. He found he must regulate the meanest details of the people’s life, and he believed he could only do this by using God’s name for his decrees. He doubtless argued himself into the belief that even these petty, and to us sometimes immoral, regulations, being for the good of the people, as he conceived the good, were really God’s ordinances; but even thus he had lowered the standard of his teaching, and alloyed with base metal the pure gold of his early ideal. It was a temptation that few men have withstood, but it was, nevertheless, a falling-off from the Moḥammad we loved at Mekka, the simple truth-loving bearer of good tidings to the Arabs.
Yet behind this engrafted character, formed by the difficulties of his position, by the invincible jealousy and treachery of the tribes he governed, the old nature still lived, and ever and anon broke forth in fervid words of faith and hope in the cause and the promises that had been the light and support of his early years of trial. In the late chapters of the Ḳur-án, among complicateddirections for the Muslim’s guidance in all the circumstances of life, we suddenly hear an echo of the old fiery eloquence and the expression of the strong faith which never deserted him.
Surely the character of Moḥammad has been misjudged. He was not the ambitious schemer some would have him, still less the hypocrite and sham prophet others have imagined. He was an enthusiast in that noblest sense when enthusiasm becomes the salt of the earth, the one thing that keeps men from rotting whilst they live. Enthusiasm is often used despitefully, because it is joined to an unworthy cause, or falls upon barren ground and bears no fruit. So was it not with Moḥammad. He was an enthusiast when enthusiasm was the one thing needed to set the world aflame, and his enthusiasm was noble for a noble cause. He was one of those happy few who have attained the supreme joy of making one great truth their very life-spring. He was the messenger of the One God, and never to his life’s end did he forget who he was, or the message which was the marrow of his being. He brought his tidings to his people with a grand dignity, sprung from the consciousness of his high office, together with a most sweet humility, whose roots lay in the knowledge of his own weakness. Well did Carlyle choose him for his prophet-hero! There have been purer lives and higher aspirations than Moḥammad’s; but no man was ever more thoroughly filled with the sense of his mission or carried out that mission more heroically.
‘Your turning your faces in prayer towards the east and the west is not piety; but the pious is he who believeth in God and the Last Day, and in the Angels, and the Scripture, and who giveth money, notwithstanding his love thereof, to relations and orphans, and to the needy and the son of the road, and to the askers, and for the freeing of slaves, and who performeth prayer and giveth the appointed alms; and those who perform their covenant when they covenant, and the patient in adversity and affliction and in the time of violence. These are they who have been true: and these are they who fear God.’—Ḳur-án, ii. 172.
‘Your turning your faces in prayer towards the east and the west is not piety; but the pious is he who believeth in God and the Last Day, and in the Angels, and the Scripture, and who giveth money, notwithstanding his love thereof, to relations and orphans, and to the needy and the son of the road, and to the askers, and for the freeing of slaves, and who performeth prayer and giveth the appointed alms; and those who perform their covenant when they covenant, and the patient in adversity and affliction and in the time of violence. These are they who have been true: and these are they who fear God.’—Ḳur-án, ii. 172.
When it was noised abroad that the Prophet was dead, ´Omar, the fiery-hearted, the Simon Peter of Islám, rushed among the people, and fiercely told them they lied, it could not be true, Moḥammad was not dead. And Aboo-Bekr came and said, ‘Ye people! he that hath worshipped Moḥammad, let him know that Moḥammad is dead; but he that hath worshipped God,—that the Lord liveth, and doth not die.’
Many have sought to answer the questions—Why was the triumph of Islám so speedy and so complete? Why have so many millions embraced the religion of Moḥammad, and scarcely a hundred ever recanted? Why do a thousand Christians become Muslims to one Muslim who adopts Christianity? Why do a hundred and fifty millions of human beings still cling to the faith of Islám? Some have attempted to explain the first overwhelming success of the Moḥammadan religion by the argument of the sword. They forget Carlyle’s laconic reply, ‘First get your sword.’ You must win men’s hearts before you can induce them to peril their lives for you, and the first conquerors of Islám must have been made Muslims before they were made ‘fighters on the path of God.’ Others allege the low morality of the religion and the sensualparadise it promises as a sufficient cause for the zeal of its followers; but even were these admitted to the full, to say that such reasons could win the hearts of millions of men who have the same hopes and longings after the right and the noble as we, is to libel mankind. No religion has ever gained a lasting hold upon the souls of men by the force of its sensual permissions and fleshly promises. It is urged, again, that Islám met no fair foe, that the worn-out forms of Christianity and Judaism it encountered were no test of its power as a quickening faith, and that it prevailed simply because there was nothing to prevent it; and this was undoubtedly a help to the progress of the new creed, but it could not have been the cause of its victory.
In all these reasons the religion itself is left out of the question. Decidedly Islám itself was the main cause of its triumph. By some strange intuition Moḥammad succeeded in finding the one form of Monotheism that has ever commended itself to any wide section of the Eastern world. It was only a remnant of the Jews that learned to worship the one God of the prophets after the hard lessons of the Captivity. Christianity has never gained a hold upon the East. Islám not only was at once accepted (partly in earnest, partly in name, but accepted) by Arabia, Syria, Persia, Egypt, Northern Africa, and Southern Spain at its first outburst, but, with the exception of Spain, it has never lost its vantage-ground; it has seen no country that has once embraced its doctrine turn to another faith; it has added great multitudes in India and China and Turkestan to its subjects; and in quite recent times it has been spreading in wide and swiftly—following waves over Africa, and has left but a small part of that vast continent unconverted to its creed. Admitting the mixed causes that contributed to the rapidity of the first torrent of Moḥammadan conquest, they do not account for the duration of Islám. There must be something in the religion itself to explain its persistence and increase, and toaccount for its present hold over so large a proportion of the dwellers on the earth.
Men trained in European ideas of religion have always found a difficulty in understanding the fascination which the Muslim faith has for so many minds in the East. ‘There is no god but God, and Moḥammad is His Prophet.’ There is nothing in this, they say, to move the heart. Yet this creed has stirred an enthusiasm that has never been surpassed. Islám has had its martyrs, its self-tormentors, its recluses, who have renounced all that life offered and have accepted death with a smile for the sake of the faith that was in them. It is idle to say the eternity of happiness will explain this. The truest martyrs of Islám, as well as of Christianity, did not die to gain paradise. And if they did, the belief in the promises of the creed must follow the hearty belief in the creed. Islám must have possessed a power of seizing men’s belief before it could have inspired them with such a love of its paradise.
Moḥammad’s conception of God has, I think, been misunderstood, and its effect upon the people consequently under-estimated. The God of Islám is commonly represented as a pitiless tyrant, who plays with humanity as on a chessboard, and works out his game without regard to the sacrifice of the pieces; and there is a certain truth in the figure. There is more in Islám of the potter who shapes the clay than of the father pitying his children. Moḥammad conceived of God as the Semitic mind has always preferred to think of Him: his God is the All-Mighty, the All-Knowing, the All-Just. Irresistible Power is the first attribute he thinks of: the Lord of the Worlds, the Author of the Heavens and the Earth, who hath created Life and Death, in whose hand is Dominion, who maketh the Dawn to appear and causeth the Night to cover the Day, the Great, All-Powerful Lord of the glorious Throne; the Thunder proclaimeth His perfection, the whole earth is His handful, and the Heavens shall be folded together in His right hand. And with the PowerHe conceives the Knowledge that directs it to right ends. God is the Wise, the Just, the True, the Swift in reckoning, who knoweth every ant’s weight of good and of ill that each man hath done, and who suffereth not the reward of the faithful to perish.
‘God! There is no God but He, the Ever-Living, the Ever-Subsisting. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him belongeth whatsoever is in the Heavens and whatsoever is in the Earth. Who is he that shall intercede with Him, save by His permission? He knoweth the things that have gone before and the things that follow after, and men shall not compass aught of His knowledge, save what He willeth. His Throne comprehendeth the Heavens and the Earth, and the care of them burdeneth Him not. And He is the High, the Great.’—Ḳur-án, ii. 256.
‘God! There is no God but He, the Ever-Living, the Ever-Subsisting. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him belongeth whatsoever is in the Heavens and whatsoever is in the Earth. Who is he that shall intercede with Him, save by His permission? He knoweth the things that have gone before and the things that follow after, and men shall not compass aught of His knowledge, save what He willeth. His Throne comprehendeth the Heavens and the Earth, and the care of them burdeneth Him not. And He is the High, the Great.’—Ḳur-án, ii. 256.
But with this Power there is also the gentleness that belongs only to great strength. God is the Guardian over His servants, the Shelterer of the orphan, the Guider of the erring, the Deliverer from every affliction; in His hand is Good, and He is the Generous Lord, the Gracious, the Hearer, the Near-at-Hand. Every soorah of the Ḳur-án begins with the words, ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and Moḥammad was never tired of telling the people how God was Very-Forgiving, that His love for man was more tender than the mother-bird for her young.
It is too often forgotten how much there is in the Ḳur-án of the loving-kindness of God, but it must be allowed that these are not the main thoughts in Moḥammad’s teaching. It is the doctrine of the Might of God that most held his imagination, and that has impressed itself most strongly upon Muslims of all ages. The fear rather than the love of God is the spur of Islám. There can be no question which is the higher incentive to good; but it is nearly certain that the love of God is an idea absolutely foreign to most of the races that have accepted Islám, and to preach such a doctrine would have been to mistake the leaning of the Semitic mind.
The leading doctrine of Moḥammad, then, is the belief in One All-Powerful God. Islám is the self-surrender of every man to the will of God. Its danger lies in the stress laid on the power of God, which has brought about the stifling effects of fatalism. Moḥammad taught the foreknowledge of God, but he did not lay down precisely the doctrine of Predestination. He found it, as all have found it, a stumbling-block in the way of man’s progress. It perplexed him, and he spoke of it, but often contradicted himself; and he would become angry if the subject were mooted in his presence: ‘Sit not with a disputer about fate,’ he said, ‘nor begin a conversation with him.’ Moḥammad vaguely recognised that little margin of Free Will which makes life not wholly mechanical.
This doctrine of one Supreme God, to whose will it is the duty of every man to surrender himself, is the kernel of Islám, the truth for which Moḥammad lived and suffered and triumphed. But it was no new teaching, as he himself was constantly saying. His was only the last of revelations. Many prophets—Abraham, Moses, and Christ—had taught the same faith before; but people had hearkened little to their words. So Moḥammad was sent, not different from them, only a messenger, yet the last and greatest of them, the ‘seal of prophecy,’ the ‘most excellent of the creation of God.’ This is the second dogma of Islám: Moḥammad is the apostle of God. It is well worthy of notice that it is not said, ‘Moḥammad is the only apostle of God.’ Islám is more tolerant in this matter than other religions. Its prophet is not the sole commissioner of the Most High, nor is his teaching the only true teaching the world has ever received. Many other messengers had been sent by God to guide men to the right, and these taught the same religion that was in the mouth of the preacher of Islám. Hence Muslims reverence Moses and Christ only next to Moḥammad. All they claim for their founder is thathe was the last and best of the messengers of the one God.18
After the belief in God and his prophets and scriptures, the Muslim must believe in angels, good and evil genii, in the resurrection and the judgment, and in future rewards and punishments. What the teaching of the Ḳur-án is upon these points may be seen in the First Part of the ‘Selections.’ They form a very common weapon of attack on the ground of their superstition, their anthropomorphism, and their sensuality. Yet these minor beliefs have their place in all religions, and they are conceived in scarcely more absurdly realistic a manner in Islám than in any other creed. Every religion seems to need an improbable, almost a ludicrous, side, in order to provide material for the faith of the masses. Moḥammad himself was what is called a superstitious man, and the improbable side thus found its way easily into his creed. With all the fancies floating in Arabia in his time, it would have been strange if he had introduced nothing of the superstitious into Islám. The Jinn, the Afreets, and the other beings of the air and water, have not done much harm to the Mohammadan mind; and they have given so many a delightful fable to the West, that we must feel a certain grateful respect for them. The realistic pictures of paradise and hell have exercised a more serious influence. The minute details of these infernal and celestial pictures must move alternately the disgust and the contemptuous amusement of a Western reader; yet these same things were very real facts to Moḥammad, and have been of the utmost importance to generation after generation of Muslims. In the present day there are culturedmen who receive these descriptions in the same allegorical sense as some Christians accept the Revelation of S. John—which, indeed, in some respects offers a close parallel to the pictorial parts of the Ḳur-án; but the vast majority of believers (like many Christians in the parallel case) take the descriptions literally, and there can be no doubt that the belief founded on such pictures, accepted literally, must work an ill effect on the professors of the faith of which these doctrines form a minor, but a too prominent, part; and it is the aim of rational Muslims to sweep away such cobwebs from their sky.
Islám lies more in doing than in believing. That ‘faith without works is dead’ is a doctrine which every day’s routine must bring home to the mind of the devout Muslim. The practical duties of the Mohammadan religion, beyond the actual profession of faith, are the performance of prayer, the giving of alms, the keeping of the fasts, and the accomplishing the pilgrimage. Mr. Lane has so minutely described the regular prayers used over all the Mohammadan East, that it is only necessary here to refer to his account of them in the ‘Modern Egyptians.’ There it will be seen that they form no light part of the religious duties of the Muslim, especially since they involve careful preparatory ablutions; for Moḥammad impressed upon his followers the salutary doctrine that cleanliness is an essential part of godliness, and the scrupulous cleanliness of the Mohammadan, which contrasts so favourably with the unsavoury state of Easterns of other creeds, is an excellent feature in the practical influence of Islám. The charge which missionaries and the like are fond of bringing against the Muslim prayers, that they are merely lifeless forms and vain repetitions, is an exaggeration. There is a vast deal of repetition in the Mohammadan ritual, just as the paternoster is repeated again and again in the principal Christian liturgies; but iteration does not necessarily kill devotion. There is plenty of real fervour in the prayers of the Mosque, and they are joined-in bythe worshippers with an earnest attention which shames the listless sleepy bearing of most congregations in England. It is true the greater part of the prayers are laid down in prescribed forms; but there is an interval set apart for private supplication, and the original congregations in the mosques availed themselves of this permission more generally than is now the case, when the old fervour has become comparatively cool; and Moḥammad frequently enjoins private prayer at home, and specially praises him who ‘passeth his night worshipping God.’
Almsgiving was originally compulsory, and the tax was collected by the officers of the Khalif; but now the Muslim is merely expected to give voluntarily about a fortieth part of his income in charity each year. The great fast of Ramaḍán is too well known to need more than a passing mention here; but it is not so well known that Moḥammad, ascetic as he was himself in this as in many other matters, whilst he ordained the month of fasting for the chastening of his able-bodied followers, was a determined enemy to useless mortification of the flesh, and boldly affirmed that God took no pleasure in a man’s wantonly injuring himself; and so if one that was weakly and sick could not keep the fast without bodily detriment he was to omit it. And the same wise leniency was shown by the Arab prophet in respect of prayer,—which may be curtailed or omitted in certain cases,—and with regard to the pilgrimage, which no one was to perform to his hurt. This same pilgrimage is often urged as a sign of Moḥammad’s tendency to superstition and even idolatry. It is asked how the destroyer of idols could have reconciled his conscience to the circuits of the Kaạbeh and the veneration of the black stone covered with adoring kisses. The rites of the pilgrimage cannot certainly be defended against the charge of superstition; but it is easy to see why Moḥammad enjoined them. They were hallowed to him by the memories of his ancestors, who had been the guardians of the sacred temple, and by the traditionalreverence of all his people; and besides this tie of association, which in itself was enough to make it impossible for him to do away with the rites, Moḥammad perceived that the worship in the Kaạbeh would prove of real value to his religion. He swept away the more idolatrous and immoral part of the ceremonies, but he retained the pilgrimage to Mekka and the old veneration of the temple for reasons of which it is impossible to dispute the wisdom. He well knew the consolidating effect of forming a centre to which his followers should gather; and hence he reasserted the sanctity of the black stone that ‘came down from Heaven;’ he ordained that everywhere throughout the world the Muslim should pray looking towards the Kaạbeh, and he enjoined him to make the pilgrimage thither. Mekka is to the Muslim what Jerusalem is to the Jew. It bears with it all the influence of centuries of associations. It carries the Muslim back to the cradle of his faith, the childhood of his prophet; it reminds him of the struggle between the old faith and the new, of the overthrow of the idols, and the establishment of the worship of the One God. And, most of all, it bids him remember that all his brother Muslims are worshipping towards the same sacred spot; that he is one of a great company of believers, united by one faith, filled with the same hopes, reverencing the same things, worshipping the same God. Moḥammad showed his knowledge of the religious emotions in man when he preserved the sanctity of the temple of Islám.
It would take too much space to look closely into the lesser duties of Islám, many of which suggest exceedingly wholesome lessons to Western civilisation. But we must not pass over one of these minor duties, for it reflects the highest credit upon the founder and the professors of Mohammadanism—I mean the humane treatment of animals.
‘There is no religion which has taken a higher view in its authoritative documents of animal life, and nonewherein the precept has been so much honoured by its practical observance. ‘There is no beast on earth,’ says the Ḳur-án, ‘nor bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a people like unto you—unto the Lord shall they return;’ and it is the current belief that animals will share with men the general resurrection, and be judged according to their works. At the slaughter of an animal, the Prophet ordered that the name of God should always be named; but the words, ‘the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ were to be omitted; for, on the one hand, such an expression seemed a mockery to the sufferer, and, on the other, he could not bring himself to believe that the destruction of any life, however necessary, could be altogether pleasing to the All-Merciful. ‘In the name of God,’ says a pious Musalman before he strikes the fatal blow; ‘God is most great; God give thee patience to endure the affliction which He hath allotted thee!’ In the East there has been no moralist like Bentham to insist in noble words on the extension of the sphere of morality to all sentient beings, and to be ridiculed for it by people who call themselves religious; there has been no naturalist like Darwin, to demonstrate by his marvellous powers of observation how large a part of the mental and moral faculties which we usually claim for ourselves alone we share with other beings; there has been no Oriental ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.’ But one reason of this is not far to seek. What the legislation of the last few years has at length attempted to do, and, from the mere fact that it is legislation, must do ineffectually, has been long effected in the East by the moral and religious sentiment which, like almost everything that is good in that part of the world, can be traced back, in part at least, to the great Prophet of Arabia. In the East, so far as it has not been hardened by the West, there is a real sympathy between man and the domestic animals; they understand one another; and the cruelties which the most humane of our countrymen unconsciously effect in the habitual use, for instance,of the muzzle or the bearing-rein on the most docile, the most patient, the most faithful, and the most intelligent of their companions, are impossible in the East. An Arabcannotill-treat his horse; and Mr. Lane bears emphatic testimony to the fact that in his long residence in Egypt he never saw an ass or a dog (though the latter is there looked upon as an unclean animal) treated with cruelty, except in those cities which were overrun by Europeans.’19
There are some very beautiful traditions of the Prophet, showing the tenderness with which he always treated animals and which he ever enjoined on his people. A man once came to him with a carpet and said, ‘O Prophet, I passed through a wood and heard the voices of the young of birds, and I took and put them into my carpet, and their mother came fluttering round my head.’ And the Prophet said, ‘Put them down;’ and when he had put them down the mother joined the young. And the Prophet said, ‘Do you wonder at the affection of the mother towards her young? I swear by Him who has sent me, Verily God is more loving to his servants than the mother to these young birds. Return them to the place from which ye took them, and let their mother be with them.’ ‘Fear God with regard to animals,’ said Moḥammad; ‘ride them when they are fit to be ridden, and get off when they are tired. Verily there are rewards for our doing good to dumb animals, and giving them water to drink.’
Such, in brief outline, is the religion of Moḥammad. It is a form of pure theism, simpler and more austere than the theism of most forms of modern Christianity, lofty in its conception of the relation of man to God, and noble in its doctrine of the duty of man to man, and of man to the lower creation. There is little in it of superstition, less of complexity of dogmas; it is an exacting religion, without the repulsiveness of asceticism; severe,but not merciless. On the other hand, it is over-rigid and formal; it leaves too little to the believer and too much to his ritual; it places a prophet and a book between man and God, and practically discourages the desire for a direct relation between the Deity and his servant; it draws the picture of that God in too harsh outlines, and leaves out too much of the tenderness and loving-kindness of the God of Christ’s teaching, and hence it has been the source of more intolerance and fanatical hatred than most creeds.
This religion is Islám as understood and taught by its Prophet, so far as we can gather it from the Ḳur-án, aided by those traditions which seem to have the stamp of authenticity. It need hardly be said that it is not identical with the Islám with which the philosophers of Baghdád amused themselves, nor with the fantastic creed which the Fáṭimee Khalifs of Egypt represented, and brought in the person of El-Ḥákim to its limit of extravagance; nor is it the Islám with which as much as with their ferocity the Karmaṭees aroused the fear and abhorrence of all good Muslims. Neither the Soofism of Persia nor the dervish sensation-religion of Turkey conform to this ancient Islám, to which perhaps a modification of the Waḥḥábee puritanism would be the nearest approach. The original faith of Moḥammad has not gained by its development in foreign lands and alien minds, and perhaps the best we can hope for modern Islám is that it may try the experiment of retrogression, or rather seek to regain the simplicity of the old form without losing the advantages (if there be any) which it has acquired from contact with Western civilisation.
Islám is unfortunately a social system as well as a religion; and herein lies the great difficulty of fairly estimating its good and its bad influence on the world. It is but in the nature of things that the teacher who lays down the law of the relation of man to God should also endeavourto appoint the proper relation between man and his neighbour. Christianity was undoubtedly a social even more than a religious reform, but the social regulations were too indefinite, or at all events too impracticable, for any wide acceptance among the professors of the religion. Islám was less fortunate. Moḥammad not only promulgated a religion; he laid down a complete social system, containing minute regulations for a man’s conduct in all circumstances of life, with due rewards or penalties according to his fulfilment of these rules. As a religion Islám is great: it has taught men to worship one God with a pure worship who formerly worshipped many gods impurely. As a social system Islám is a complete failure: it has misunderstood the relations of the sexes, upon which the whole character of a nation’s life hangs, and, by degrading women, has degraded each successive generation of their children down an increasing scale of infamy and corruption, until it seems almost impossible to reach a lower level of vice.
The fatal spot in Islám is the degradation of women. The true test of a nation’s place in the ranks of civilisation is the position of its women. When they are held in reverence, when it is considered the most infamous of crimes to subject a woman to dishonour, and the highest distinction to protect her from wrong; when the family life is real and strong, of which the mother-wife is the heart; when each man’s pulse beats loyal to womanhood, then is a nation great. When women are treated as playthings, toys, drudges, worth anything only if they have beauty to be enjoyed or strength to labour; when sex is considered the chief thing in a woman, and heart and mind are forgotten; when a man buys women for his pleasure and dismisses them when his appetite is glutted, then is a nation despicable.
And so is it in the East. Yet it would be hard to lay the blame altogether on Moḥammad. The real roots of the degradation of women lie much deeper. When Islám wasinstituted, polygamy was almost necessitated by the number of women and their need of support; and the facility of divorce was quite necessitated by the separation of the sexes, and the consequence that a man could not know or even see the woman he was about to marry before the marriage ceremony was accomplished. It is not Moḥammad whom we must blame for these great evils, polygamy and divorce; it is the state of society which demanded the separation of the sexes, and in which it was not safe to allow men and women freely to associate; in other words, it was the sensual constitution of the Arab that lay at the root of the matter. Moḥammad might have done better. He might boldly have swept away the traditions of Arab society, unveiled the women, intermingled the sexes, and punished by the most severe measures any license which such association might at first encourage. With his boundless influence, it is possible that he might have done this, and, the new system once fairly settled, and the people accustomed to it, the good effects of the change would have begun to show themselves. But such an idea could never have occurred to him. We must always remember that we are dealing with a social system of the seventh century, not of the nineteenth. Moḥammad’s ideas about women were like those of the rest of his contemporaries. He looked upon them as charming snares to the believer, ornamental articles of furniture difficult to keep in order, pretty playthings; but that a woman should be the counsellor and companion of a man does not seem to have occurred to him. It is to be wondered that the feeling of respect he always entertained for his first wife, Khadeejeh, (which, however, is partly accounted for by the fact that she was old enough to have been his mother,) found no counterpart in his general opinion of womankind: ‘Woman was made from a crooked rib, and if you try to bend it straight, it will break; therefore treat your wives kindly.’ Moḥammad was not the man to make a social reform affecting women, nor was Arabia the country in which such a change shouldbe made, nor Arab ladies perhaps the best subjects for the experiment. Still he did something towards bettering the condition of women: he limited the number of wives to four; laid his hand with the utmost severity on the incestuous marriages that were then rife in Arabia; compelled husbands to support their divorced wives during their four months of probation; made irrevocable divorce less common by adding the rough, but deterring, condition that a woman triply divorced could not return to her husband without first being married to some one else—a condition exceedingly disagreeable to the first husband; and required four witnesses to prove a charge of adultery against a wife—a merciful provision, difficult to be fulfilled. The evil permitted by Moḥammad in leaving the number of wives four instead of insisting on monogamy was not great. Without considering the sacrifice of family peace which the possession of a large harem entails, the expense of keeping several wives, each of whom must have a separate suite of apartments or a separate house, is so great that not more than one in twenty can afford it. It is not so much in the matter of wives as in that of concubines that Moḥammad made an irretrievable mistake. The condition of the female slave in the East is indeed deplorable. She is at the entire mercy of her master, who can do what he pleases with her and her companions; for the Muslim is not restricted in the number of his concubines, as he is in that of his wives. The female white slave is kept solely for the master’s sensual gratification, and is sold when he is tired of her, and so she passes from master to master, a very wreck of womanhood. Her condition is a little improved if she bear a son to her tyrant; but even then he is at liberty to refuse to acknowledge the child as his own, though it must be owned he seldom does this. Kind as the Prophet was himself towards bondswomen, one cannot forget the unutterable brutalities which he suffered his followers to inflict upon conquered nations in the taking of slaves. The Muslim soldier was allowed todo as he pleased with any ‘infidel’ woman he might meet with on his victorious march. When one thinks of the thousands of women, mothers and daughters, who must have suffered untold shame and dishonour by this license, he cannot find words to express his horror. And this cruel indulgence has left its mark on the Muslim character, nay, on the whole character of Eastern life. Now, as at the first, young Christian girls are dragged away from their homes and given over to the unhallowed lusts of a Turkish voluptuary; and not only to Turks, but to Englishmen; for the contagion has spread, and Englishmen, even those who by their sacred order should know better, instead of uttering their protest, as men of honour and Christians, against the degradation, have followed the example of the Turk, and helped in the ruin of women. Concubinage is the black stain in Islám. With Moḥammad’s views of women, we could hardly expect him to do better; but, on the other hand, he could scarcely have done worse. There are, however, one or two alleviating circumstances. One is the fact that the canker has not eaten into the whole of Eastern society; it is chiefly among the rich that the evil effects of the system are felt. And another fact which shows that the Mohammadan system, bad as it is, is free from a defect which social systems better in other respects than Moḥammad’s are subject to is the extreme rarity of prostitution in Muslim towns. The courtesan forms a very small item in the census of a Mohammadan city, and is retained more for strangers from Europe than for the Muslim inhabitants. Instances are frequently occurring in the Indian law courts which show the strong feeling that exists on the subject among the Mohammadans of India. They consider it quite inconceivable that a Muslim should have illicit intercourse with a free Muslimeh woman, and this inconceivableness of the action is urged as evidence in trials of the legitimacy of children. But whilst admitting the importance of this remarkable feature in Islám, it mustnot be forgotten that the liberty allowed by their law to Muslims in the matter of concubines does not very materially differ from prostitution, and whilst the latter is directly forbidden by the dominant religion of Europe, concubinage is as directly permitted by Islám.
One would think that long intercourse with Europeans might have somewhat raised the estimation of women in the East; but either because travellers in the East are not always the best specimens of Western morality, or because the Eastern mind has an unequalled aptitude for assimilating the bad and rejecting the good in any system it meets, it is certain that women are no better off now than they were in the East. A well-known correspondent of a leading daily print writes thus of Turkish home life:—