There are few things to-day more magnificent than the zeal of the average Moslem for his Faith.
The 'Method' of Islam.
Such was the spirit that stirred in the heart of these Moslem hosts and sent them forth upon the world.
Let us see these Moslems at work in the countries that they conquered. Mohammed himself was far more than a warrior, or even than a ruler—first and foremost, he had stood forth as theProphet. And we shall never understand Islam if we regard it only as a battle-cry. The task which Islam set itself was more than the conquest of the nations. That might have left them Zoroastrian or Pagan, Jew or Christian still. Its task was not merely to defeat armies, but toproclaim a creedand win adherents to it. Therefore, as the Caliph's armies marched, conquering province after province, the inhabitants were summoned to declare their faith in Islam and to repeat the creed.
Settlement of Conquered Countries.
TheKorânwas set up as the law of the land, governing, besides questions of morality and religious ritual, all matters of politics, and government, and administration; and taxation, economy, and criminal and civil law.Mosqueswere quickly built in every city, from which the call to prayer sounded five times daily. Within a day or two of the capture of Jerusalem, Omar, the second Caliph, laid the foundation stone of the 'Mosque of Omar' upon the rock of Mount Zion. This mosque to-day marks the Moslem's possession of one of the most sacred spots of historic Christianity.Moslem governors, or viziers, were appointed to each province to carry out the policy of the Caliph and to collect the tribute for him.Teacherswere sent to every country to instruct the people in the Korân and in the observances of the new Faith.Magistrateswere ordered to insist that all, whether old or young, were regular in their attendance at public prayer on Fridays, and to see to the observance of the Fast of Ramadân.
The 'conversion' of simple pagan tribes under such conditions was an easy matter. The Zoroastrians of Persia were, for the most part, readily won. The invasion ofChristian states came at the time when faith was at a low ebb. Indeed, the one only worthy object of faith was almost hidden by false teaching. Therefore the Church's grip was weak. In Africa, in Arabia, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in Syria, and, afterwards, in Spain, whole tribes or local states abandoned Christianity for the new Faith, and even joined the ranks of the Moslem army.
Here and there small Christian states and Churches stood bravely against the rushing tide, like lonely fortresses amid a surging, hostile sea. But the old and illustrious Mediterranean citadels of the Christian faith—Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople—fell into the hands of the Moslems, and Christendom fell back to build her capitals anew on the Atlantic shores—in Gaul, Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia.
Treatment of Jews and Christians.
In their administration of these conquered provinces the Moslems displayed some measure of good sense and humanity, though Christians and Jews who refused to become Moslems were by the Korân ordered 'to be brought low by the sword.' They paid tribute, and received in returnthe protection of the Islamic state for themselves and for their churches.[2] In most provinces Christians were, however, debarred from holding civil office, everywhere they were forbidden to make converts, and Islam then, as, indeed, in many countries to-day, punished with death those who turned from the Prophet to Christ. Conditions changed with the times, and with the character of the Caliph in power. Seldom, however, were Christians left quite unmolested by the Mohammedans around; vexatious and humiliating conditions were imposed upon them, increasing more and more as time went on; pressure of many sorts was brought to bear upon them. For instance, 'Bokhara struggled desperately against the new Faith, and every Bokharan was compelled to share his dwelling with a Moslem Arab, and those who prayed and fasted like good Moslems were rewarded with money.' The position takenby the Moslem conquerors was one which offered many material enticements to those who wavered in their allegiance to the Gospel, and, as we have said, Islam never cared about a man's motives. Above all, there was the force and pressure of such a strong current of opinion, of conviction, of numbers, of obvious success, as has no parallel in history. Had not even Jerusalem fallen to the new religion?
Within a century of the Hegira, the Caliphs of Islam were not only undisputed rulers of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, but the heads of a religion numbering many million followers. Truly, they could say, the world was at their feet. The wealth of Asia, of Africa, of Europe poured into their treasury. The court of the Caliphs, first at Damascus, and then at Baghdad, was one of the most magnificent and lavish in history. Within 150 years of the Hegira, Islam had reached the zenith of its power.
Rule of the Caliphs of Baghdad.
The Caliphs of Baghdad especially gave their patronage to science, literature, and art; men of learning gathered round them; not only Arabian and Persian literature was exploited, but the sages of the Greekswere translated into Arabic, and splendid libraries were collected. Scholars and talented translators and scribes were held in high honour. 'The ink of the doctor is equally valuable with the blood of the martyr,' it was said. While Byzantium suppressed medicine, Baghdad cultivated it. The foundation of the science of modern chemistry may be said to have been laid there by the discovery of the acids. A great college was founded and endowed in Baghdad, where it is said 6000 students, from the son of the noble to the son of the mechanic, were taught; and instruction was given in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, alchemy, law, and medicine. Nor was it in the capital only that a new impetus was given to learning, the sciences, and art. One Caliph made a law that, wherever a mosque was built, a school should be founded beside it, and colleges and schools sprang up in the bigger cities of the empire. Spain formed a library of 600,000 volumes, and bears marks to-day of Moslem vigour, taste, and influence in what is still spoken of as 'Moorish architecture.'
But at the same time it should beremembered that both at Baghdad and in Spain the advocates of learning were 'rationalists,' not orthodox Moslems.
The story of the magnificent pomp of the Caliphs of Baghdad in the days of its tawdry glory reads like the fairy picture of another world. Barges and boats of the most superb decoration floated on the Tigris. A tree of gold and silver stood before the palace, upon whose eighteen branches sat birds fashioned with precious stones. The walls of the palace were hung with 38,000 pieces of tapestry, a great number of which were of silk, embroidered with gold. The costly carpets on the floors were 12,000. The Caliph was surrounded by state officers and slaves. Wives, concubines, and eunuchs to the number of several thousand attended on his person. When he took the field he was guarded by 12,000 horsemen whose belts and scimitars were studded with gold.
Islam's Opportunity.
If we could close our eyes, our memories, our knowledge, and open them on the Mediterranean sea-board in those days—no more history written, no more historymade—looking out upon the elaborate administration of the empire and upon its splendid pomp, what a future we should have predicted! Islam had a fair field before it, if ever religion had. How in the slow march of the centuries strongly and progressively it could work out its faith! To what sublime heights could it not lead a civilized world in six centuries of time!
Has Islam Failed?
We open our eyes again in these early years of the twentieth century, when the history of a thousand years has been written, to see whereto this thing has grown, and what its achievements on behalf of mankind. The religion of Islam has more adherents than it had; its dominion is marked by three Moslem empires: Turkey, Persia, and Morocco; it is the religion of Arabia still; its followers predominate in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Afghanistan, in the East Indies. It numbers many millions throughout Africa, India, China, Russia, and the Philippines; but nowhere, unless it be possibly in some of the most degraded districts of pagan Africa, do Moslems stand above their fellows in enlightenment, in morality, in progress.Has Islam, then, failed to meet men? No, it has touched man, indeed, in some of the deeper regions of his consciousness. But it has met men on their own level, and so it has left them where they were. Why? How?
QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER VII
1. Sketch the successes of Islam for 100 years after the death of Mohammed. Why are they surprising?
2. Give the chief motives which inspired the Moslem hosts. To which of these motives do you attach most importance, and why?
3. Which of these motives are right for Christians?
4. Describe the settlement of conquered countries.
5. Give some account of Baghdad in its greatest days.
[1]The Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. i.
[2] This description applies more accurately only to the early centuries of Saracen conquests, e.g. in later years the treasuries of the Christian churches and monasteries of Spain were a temptation the Saracens could not refuse. And instances are common enough, even in the early centuries, of Christians persecuted—even to death—for their faith.
'As we conceive God, we conceive the Universe; a being incapable of loving is incapable of being loved.'—PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN.
Another View of Baghdad.
Before we set ourselves such questions as these, we should, perhaps, have peered a little more closely into the Caliph's palace. We might have gone round to the back door, and not to the front; we might (at the risk of our lives, though!) have watched him in his private life. We might have had an interview (if we could summon up the courage) with his ever-ready staff of state executioners, whose work was carried out at his caprice and not at the dictates of imperial justice, and have heard the tale of banquets where all the guests were murdered. We might have discovered in what fear he lived, how perilous a throne was his. Of the fifty-nine Caliphs of Baghdad, thirty-eight met violent deaths. We might have heard the confession ofCaliph Abdalrahman, who reigned for the record period of fifty years, perhaps the most splendid of all the line:
'I have now reigned above fifty years in victory and peace, beloved of my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honours, power and pleasure have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot; they amount to fourteen. O man! Place not thy confidence in this present world.'[1]
We might have discovered that the physicians, scientists, metaphysicians, and 'literati,' who, to their credit, the Caliphs drew around them, were not Moslems, but Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and even that the most enlightened of the Caliphs, heads of the religion of the Prophet, were not Mohammedans in heart, but infidels. There was much food for thought there.
However, without lingering any longer about the precincts of the Court of Baghdad, we will pursue our inquiry, asking, with allseriousness, what, all down the centuries, have been the marks of Islam upon the countries it has conquered? What have been its fruits among the nations that adopted Islam as their faith? What are the fruits of Islam to-day?
We stand upon a pinnacle of 1200 years, looking out upon the world, and looking back upon the history of twelve centuries of Islam. Can we not find some features, so common that we may call themcharacteristic features, of Mohammedanism, which will help us in forming an estimate of the influence of Islam upon mankind?
Fruits of Islam.
Let us then try to bring Islam to the test, as we are able to examine its influence in this twentieth century. For after all the ultimate test of a religion must be its continuous fitness to elevate the faith and character of man.
Let us take, to begin with, the estimate not of a missionary enthusiast, but of a deliberately unbiassed writer in a secular magazine.[2] Discussing the situation inthose countries where 'Islam has had a free hand,' he says:
'For centuries it had had a fair field for developing its principles and exhibiting its spirit under the most favourable circumstances of climate, soil, natural resources, geographical position, together with a variety of races, unsurpassed in Christendom in all the qualities which go to the making of capable citizens.... And what is the result? Barbarism, oppression, lawlessness, corruption, cruelty, ignorance, decadence, have settled like an incurable blight on all the lands of Islam. There is no exception, not a single bright spot anywhere; no green oasis in all that wilderness of savage desolation. And those lands were once fertile, populous and flourishing homes of the arts, of science, and of literature! ... What became of these rich and civilized lands under Islam? Let the degraded, impoverished, and savage condition of Persia and the Khanites of Central Asia answer. Every vestige has disappeared of their flourishing condition before Islam invaded them. It exterminated all alien influences, gave free scope to its own spirit, and we see the result.'
As it is not possible to cover the whole field, let us take a closer look at the three Moslem empires of to-day, where Islam has for long years held undisputed sway.
First, then, let us see Islam in theTurkish Empire, ruling from Constantinople, the successor of Baghdad. What is the story of the rule of the Moslem there? Again we will consult unprejudiced witnesses. Professor Freeman, the historian, says of him:
'His rule during all that time has been the rule of cruelty, faithlessness, and brutal lust: it has not been government, but organized brigandage.... While all other nations get better, the Turk gets worse and worse.'[3]
Or again, Mr. Bosworth Smith, most determined of apologists of Mohammed and Mohammedanism, is forced to admit that
'the system of government, never an enlightened one, has, at all events since the so-called reforms of the Sultan Mahmoud, been rotten at the core. Stamboul has become an asylum for the rascality of East and West alike; the finest peasantry in the world, the inhabitants of Asia Minor, are dying by starvation, partly, no doubt, owing to bad harvests, but still more owing to the neglect of the most ordinary precautions and duties of Government. Roads unmade, bridges broken down, mines unworked, unprincipled and exorbitant provincial Pashas, wastefulness and disorder and excessivecentralization—such is the picture which travellers give us of these fair regions of the earth, and, unfortunately, we know it to be a true picture.'[4]
It was this same Sultan Mahmoud who issued in 1827 a protest against the interference of the Christian Powers in the administration of the Turkish Empire, 'the affairs of which,' as he truly said, 'are conducted upon the principles of sacred legislation, and all the regulations of which are strictly connected with the principles of religion.' The unending record of massacres, and of even more vile atrocities perpetrated upon Armenian Christians within that Empire are but another witness to its degradation, and are hardly past history yet. The war has brought us terrible reminders that the Moslem is no less a Moslem for his German alliance.
Persia.
Or if we turn to Persia, we find no relief from the gloom into which a survey of the history and condition of Moslem lands has plunged us. An observant traveller, after a journey across Persia, thus describes its condition:
Like a wreck, a ruin, a memory of far distant greatness, the Persian nation lies in evidence of the paralysis of Islam. There are no schools, save here and there chattering groups around a village priest, or worse than medieval groups around a mesjid and a mujtahid. The few schools of the Government in Tabriz and Teheran are chiefly opportunities for officials to eat up public revenues. Charitable institutions are practically unknown. Prisons are mere places of torture until the demanded money fine is paid. Houses of permanent detention or reformation for evil-doers do not exist. Death or payment or torture are the end of the law. The courts, half civil, half ecclesiastical, are irregular, with no written codes, no jury system, no pleading, no testimony, save the eloquence and evidence of bribes. The sects of Shiahism[5] riot when they please in internecine strife, plunder and murder. The attempts to imitate some of the external ways of civilization have ended in bathos. The postal system is a despair, the couriers lounging idly along the road, taking often a week to go 200 miles, while postmasters take letters from the mail when they please, and are the tools of the Government. The telegraph system is yet more of a farce. Whole sentences were omitted from our messages. The posts lie on the ground with the wires under the feet of the caravans. Telegrams are often as long on the road as letters, and the senders frequently arrive before their messages. The roads are meretrails. One or two were built once, but they are falling into ruin.... The army, with wages of two cents a day, and pay a year in arrears, tattered and sickly, is too sad a sight to be ludicrous.... The land lies smitten and in despair.... Saddest of all is the decadence of religious perception, the want of moral stamina, the prevalence of deceit, falsehood, rottenness of life, of all of which there is no stronger evidence than the throngs of dervishes, the holy men of Islam, who wander up and down the land, loathsome beyond words.'[6]
Morocco.
Of the third Mohammedan empire, Morocco, let Hall Caine the novelist, who on occasion can go great lengths as the friend and flatterer of Islam, speak:
'Within sight of an English port and within hail of English ships, as they pass on to our Empire in the East, there is a land where the ways of life are the same to-day as they were a thousand years ago, a land wherein government is oppression, wherein law is tyranny, wherein justice is bought and sold, wherein it is a terror to be rich and a danger to be poor, wherein man may still be the slave of man, and woman is no more than a creature of lust—a reproach to Europe, a disgrace to the century, an outrage on humanity, a blight on religion! That land is Morocco.'[7]
Or, again, Joseph Thomson, the African explorer, who confessed that he thought favourably of Mohammedanism before he visited that country:
'It was difficult to grasp the fact which has been gradually boring its way into our minds, that absolutely the most religious nation on the face of the earth was also the most grossly immoral.... Among no people are prayers so commonly heard or religious duties more rigidly attended to. Yet, side by side with it all, rapine and murder, mendacity of the most advanced type, and brutish and nameless vices exist to an extraordinary degree. From the Sultan down to the loathsome beggar, from the most learned to the most illiterate, from the man who enjoys his reputation of utmost sanctity to his openly infamous opposite, all are alike morally rotten.'
Arabia.
Arabia, the home of the Prophet, cradle of Islam, presents a sadder picture still. 'The torch burns lowest nearest to the stump,' says the Arab proverb by way of excuse. Palgrave, who has penetrated to its heart, and returned to tell the tale, sickened by the memory of sights he saw around its sacred places, burst forth in indignation:
'When the Korân and Mecca shall have disappeared from Arabia, then, and then only, can weseriously expect to see the Arab assume that place in the ranks of civilization from which Mohammed and his book have, more than any other individual cause, held him back.'[8]
Reaction of Moslem Degradation on other Lands.
It is facts such as these which give to the problem of Islam its urgent and insistent importance. One-seventh of the world is in its grip. Humanity, after all, is one great whole, and it is impossible for some races to be in this decadent condition and for all the others not to feel it. Circulation goes on fast in this modern world, with its railways, telegraphs, and telephones, its greyhound 'liners' and its aeroplanes; and the interaction of one country on another is more quickly and deeply felt. What is happening in the streets of Stamboul, and Teheran, and Morocco, must inevitably affect us, however unconsciously, in the streets of London and Edinburgh.[9] Therefore, ifonly for selfish reasons, it is a problem which concerns us. Moreover, among the subject races of the Empire over which we rule, there are ninety and a half million Moslems,[10] and we have a duty to them which we can never pay until we understand them and have tried to face the problem.
MOSLEMS IN THE GREAT MOSQUE, DELHI 'It is a problem which concerns us ... we have a duty to them.'MOSLEMS IN THE GREAT MOSQUE, DELHI'It is a problem which concerns us ... we have a duty to them.'
How is it, then, that a religion that began with such earnestness, that was propagated with such success, that so quicklyreached such magnificent proportions, has been as a blight upon the nations upon which it fell?
We shall not satisfy ourselves unless we carry our investigation back to the source, to Mohammed and his teaching, not this time, as in our last chapter, to discover the cause of its success, but the secret of its failure.
With this in mind we ask again, 'What was the essence of Mohammed's teaching?'
Mohammed's teaching. 1. God.
I.His teaching about God.—There are two qualities or attributes of Allah that we have heard, in fancy, from a myriad minarets all down thirteen long centuries, proclaiming the Allah whom the Moslem worships—'God is One,' and 'God is Great.' Those are the thoughts that call the Moslem daily to worship, that make for him his idea of God. They tower above, and almost overshadow, all else that he knows of Him; they fill his mind until God becomes to him but little more than an unlovable and loveless despot. He is a God above him, but not with him, still less with him and in him. True, Moslemtradition teaches ninety-nine names of God, but not one brings Him near, not one calls Him Father. 'The Merciful' is again and again used of Him in the Korân, but as we listen more closely it is the mercy of a despot, not of a loving Father, which it proclaims, and there isallthe difference.
Moreover, the Moslem's Allah is absoluteWill, neither bound nor directed by any law of right or wrong, and in His dealings with the world there is, there can be, nothing moral. 'God,' we are told, 'misleadeth whom He willeth, and guideth aright whom He willeth,'[11] and, 'As for man, we have firmly fixed his fate about his neck.'[12] Therefore, to the Moslem there can be no true sense of sin, for what his conscience condemns may be the will of Allah,[13] and the only sin he can conceive is to transgress an arbitrary degree of Allah's pleasure, or deny his Prophet.
Therefore, because Allah to the Moslem is not a Father, because He is not Love, He does not yearn for the love of men.
Because He is not holy, He does not yearn for men to be Godlike, holy as Himself.
So because He is not Love and Holiness, He does not seek to redeem men from sin, to draw them to Himself.
There is no bridge needed, no bridge possible, no sacrifice, no 'wall of partition' to be broken down, no Atonement, no Calvary, no thought of God sharing our life, that we may share His in holiness and love through all eternity, no Incarnation.
It is as though the Allah of the Moslem says, 'I have called you slaves'; not the words of infinite love and infinite glory, 'I have called you friends.' Islam denies, in fact, those eternal truths in which man's only hope of a redeemed life can lie—the divine life of our Lord on earth and His path through the Sacrifice of Himself, to the glory of His resurrection.
2. Man and Woman. (a) Man.
II.His teaching about Man.—Because the Moslem's view of God is out of focus, discoloured, distorted, and false, thereforehis view of man is false and out of focus too.
If God is not our Father, then we are not His children, and cannot be. If He is but an Almighty Despot, we can only be His subjects, His slaves at best. And the Korân gives man no better place than that of the highest of the living beings inhabiting the earth. No breath of God is in him, no spark that is divine. And so it came about that during his life Mohammed never taught men to think; he gave not principles, but precepts, and religion became a thing of ritual and not a religion of the heart. We have seen how Islam in its propagation sought to win men's allegiance and asked no questions as to motives. Its very religious observances are not concerned with righteousness of life. For instance, in its teaching about prayer the Korân contains the most explicit instructions about the manner of prayer, about the previous washing, about the direction, the posture, the language, the form, but there is hardly a word about its meaning or its spirit. 'In the 10,000 verses of the Korân there are not as many petitions as there are in the Lord's Prayer.'So completely do spirituality and righteousness seem to have got divorced in the Moslem mind, that there seems nothing incongruous, at least to many Moslems, in lying, cheating, swearing, and praying almost in the same breath.[14]
[Sidenote:Woman.]
It is not hard to understand that such a God as Mohammed preached might be conceived to make a distinction between man and woman. And the blackest of all the blots which besmirch the name and memory of Mohammed was his teaching about Woman and his relations with her. True, his teaching may have been in advance of what was commonly accepted by the Arabs of his day, but he left her still the chattel and not the companion 'meet' for man. Women were to him an inferior grade of beings, whose sole destiny was to serve their husbands and be the mothers of children. Woman's honour, he said, was not to be trusted. He instituted the veil (which women in Moslem lands wear to this day to cover their faces whenever they are in the presence of men) and consigned her to the harem. He gave 'divine'sanction to a Mohammedan to have four wives and as many concubines as he could afford, to beat them when they displeased him, and divorce them if he wished.
We do not need to follow the horrible details of Mohammed's own life, and the story of how, breaking his own law after Khadîjah's death, he had not four wives but nine. Instinctively we turn to a wholly different picture, to the story of the Life that gave Woman for ever her charter of emancipation and her place of honour. We see Him sitting weary on the side of Jacob's well, listening to and telling the sad story of a woman's sins; or accepting the offering of an alabaster box of ointment, very precious, which a woman broke upon His feet; we see Him comforting the sisters of Lazarus in the home at Bethany; and Himself comforted upon the cross by women braver than His Apostles. Were not women, too, the first to approach the tomb in the early dawn of Easter morning? Yes, something greater than the most beautiful of sentiments is written there. It has proved itself in history the secret of national greatness. For, as Dr. Fairbairn says, 'A religion that does not purify thehome cannot regenerate the race; one that depraves the home is certain to deprave humanity. Motherhood is to be sacred if manhood is to be honourable. Spoil the wife of sanctity, and for the man the sanctities of life have perished. And so it has been with Islam.'
3. Paradise.
III.Teaching about Paradise.—Every religion has a Heaven—a goal of some sort towards which the faithful slowly wend their way across the earthly span of human life. Each has its own 'joy set before' man, to nerve, inspire, and direct him in his earthly course, a Heaven for which he is being fitted, where he shall reach the perfection of his life. What, then, was the Heaven that Mohammed painted, towards which the Moslem sets his face?
It was little different from a glorified Arabia—a land where men still keep the lower natures which were their bondage here, where their cravings and baser appetites and passions are satisfied. That is the Heaven where the Moslem would be; no note of triumph for a hard-won victory over self, no robes washed white of alldefilement, no joyful service, for which this life was but the probation, in the presence of the King.
Revelation without Redemption.
It is enough. The causes of Islam's failure lie not far below the surface. To lift the eyes of Arabia above its poor idols was indeed something: it is something to believe and bear that witness to one God in an unbelieving world to-day. But it is not all, or nearly all. 'Dost thou believe in the one God?' 'The devils also believe,' and are devils still, although they 'tremble.' A 'revelation' without a redemption must for ever mock man. It calls him to aspire, but 'whither?' It teaches him he has a duty, but what? As one of our great administrators of a Moslem land has said: 'Islam may mean progress, but certainly it is progress up a blind alley.' Man can only raise his ladder on this earth, and though he climb a little, it will not reach to Heaven.
QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER VIII
1. What has been the past effect of Mohammedan rule in the Turkish Empire? What is the present position?
2. What was the condition of Persia in 1895?
3. Account for the fact that degradation in Moslem lands reacts upon Britain. Illustrate from Morocco.
4. What does Mohammed teach about GOD?
5. What position does Mohammed assign to man, and what to woman?
6. Contrast the Moslem idea of Paradise with that of the Christian.
7. What seem to you the most striking points of contrast between Islam and Christianity?
[1] Gibbon, vi. 29. (Frowde.)
[2]Quarterly Review, July 1895.
[3] Freeman'sThe Turk in Europe.
[4] Bosworth Smith,Mohammed and Mohammedanism.
[5] The Moslem sects which include the great majority of the Mohammedans of Persia.
[6]Missions and Politics in Asia, R. E. Speer, pp. 49-50. For recent developments in Persia also seeinfra, chap. xii.
[7] Hall Caine inThe Scapegoat.
[8] Palgrave,Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, vol. i. p. 175.
[9] Whatever may be the rearrangement of the map of Europe and Western Asia to which the Great War will lead, it is clear already that the problem of Islam will have assumed a new importance and a new urgency. For Moslem Turkey has been courted and won in alliance by great European powers, and armed and organized for their support. It has already been terribly proved that Germany feels herself unable to curb the passions she has roused—witness the wholesale massacre of Armenian Christian populations in the Turkish Empire, of which Lord Bryce, speaking in the House of Lords (on 6th October, 1915), said: 'It would seem that three-fourths or four-fifths of the whole nation has been wiped out. There is no case in history, certainly not since the time of Tamerlane, in which any crime so hideous and upon so large a scale has been recorded.'
It is clear enough that for Germany, or for us, or for any other nation, there is only one means ultimately of making the Turk a healthy influence in the world and a worthy member of the commonwealth of nations, and that is to change his heart—which indeed is the programme of the Christian Gospel.
[10] See Appendix D. King George V. has at least twenty million more Moslem than Christian subjects. Great Britain holds the highways and gateways of the Moslem world, and every great Moslem metropolis, save Constantinople, is under her power.
[11] Sura LXXIV.
[12] Sura XVII.
[13] One of the Moslem commentators on the Korân (Ibn Khaldun) says: 'Dieu a implanté le bien et le mal dans la nature humaine, ainsi qu'il l'a dit lui-même dans le Korân: la perversité et la vertu arrivent à l'âme humaine par l'inspiration de Dieu.'—French translation from the Arabic inNotices et Extraits de la Bibliothèque Impériale de France, vol. xix. p. 268.
[14] Dr. Porter,Five Years in Damascus, vol. i. p. 141.
'Man's partIs plain, to send love forth, astray, perhaps,No matter:—He has done his part.'ROBERT BROWNING.
If this book has carried its readers along any distance at all they will have recognized two facts: Islam's tremendous power, not only as a sword, but as a creed, and Islam's failure to lift nations and men up to a higher life.
There is one truth yet which we must face, and perhaps we shall see its meaning best if we turn it into parable.
A Parable.
There was a great university once that numbered many teachers and a myriad scholars. The teachers were, for the most part, wise and good and apt to teach, but the wisest would confess that there was much he did not know, whole realms of knowledge he had never seen. Their teachings varied very greatly; but most of thewisest and best agreed in foretelling a Teacher to come, wiser and truer than them all, teaching not as they from their own little corners of the truth, but gathering up, as it were, the light of their shaded and coloured lanterns into the white light of a glorious sun. So they foretold Him, and so He came. And when He taught, the scholars said: 'Did ever man speak like this Man?' and as they read His life they saw the Truth in practice. Men were no more just creatures of this earth: they had come from God, and God had come from Heaven to win them back to Himself.
The good and the wise teachers of the university then no longer pointed on to the One Who should come: rather they took up His words and His life, taught them and expounded them, and ever found new meaning and new teaching there, and pointed ever up to Him.
Till at last there arose another teacher, who, learning something of what the Great Teacher had taught, began to think that because he knew a little he was all-wise—yes, even wiser than He. Men gathered to listen to his teaching. And what did he proclaim? Something of the truths ofthe Great Teacher, with a difference. And what was that difference? No thoughtful man has ever yet been found to maintain that his teaching was more sublime,but it was easier.
Had the Great Teacher taught that there was one God? So did he—the later teacher—but his God was more of a despot than a Father.
Had the Great Teacher taught a Heaven of spiritual life? He promised a Heaven too, but one of carnal pleasure.
Had the Great Teacher taught men to worship in spirit and in truth? He taught prayer, but he added that a prayer at Mecca was worth more than elsewhere.
Had the Great Teacher taught men to pray without ceasing? He taught men to pray five times a day.
Had the Great Teacher called men to be pure in heart? He made provision for men unwilling to be pure.
Had the Great Teacher raised Woman's position? He gave her certain rights over property, but no honour.
Had the Great Teacher sent his followers out to preach the kingdom and heal the sick? He sent his followers ona similar errand, by the method of raiding caravans.
Had the Great Teacher taught men to rule their bodies? He only forbade his followers to take strong drink.
The Great Teacher had bidden men, 'Love your enemies.' He instituted a brotherhood embracing 'believers.'
The Great Teacher had sought men's hearts. He was content with a confession of belief.
The Great Teacher had taught principles. He left precepts for the guidance of his followers.
The Great Teacher had been tempted as all men are tempted, but had never faltered, never stumbled, never failed. The later teacher claimed a 'divine' indulgence for his sins.
The Great Teacher suffered and laid down His life for men—the other decreed that his dominion should be extended by the sword.
Mohammed's Claim to supersede Christ.
Islam is the one religion which throws down a challenge to the Gospel; others came before and knew not the Christ. Mohammed alone of all religious teachers has measured himself beside the holy JESUS,and, coming after Him,claims to supersede Him. That is Islam's challenge to the Church of Christ to-day.
The Crusades.
That challenge, if not in its full meaning, at least in its terror, was a very real and threatening thing to European Christendom in its early centuries, when Saracens and Turks had almost surrounded the Mediterranean, had conquered Spain, threatened France, sacked Moscow, and held Damascus and Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Olivet. And Christendom took up the gauntlet. If Islam attested its right by its conquests, so then would the Church. And the Christian countries of Europe poured forth their earnest, ignorant rabble and the glory of their chivalry, with crosses on their sword-hilts, and banners with 'Dieu le veult' floating above them, to the Holy War, to recover Jerusalem from the Turks. Hundreds of thousands of the nobility and yeomen of Europe laid down their lives with a feverish zeal in each Crusade, and a long and ghastly line of bones whitened the roads through Hungary to the East.
The Crusades present at once one of the grandest pictures of misguided zeal,and one of the blackest crimes in history; for they were the very denial of the Gospel for which they contended, and the arms of Christian knights were stained with acts of barbarity and cruelty more heathenish than those of their Turkish foes. Christendom was repulsed, fighting with the Moslem weapon, and it seemed to many as though the Church had tried in vain heronlyweapon—the weapon of force. Popes there were, and monks and priests, and those who should have been the shepherds of the flock, yet none saw that the Church had cast aside the one method that never fails.
The Turks were true to their religion, and were following the example and teaching of Mohammed, when they took the sword; the Crusaders claimed to be followers of Him Who said, 'My kingdom is not of this world, else would My servants fight'; 'Love your enemies'; of Whose life it is written that 'He went about doing good,' and Whose disciples learnt and learnt out their Master's lesson—'Love never faileth. The greatest of these is love.'
Did we saynonesaw it? Yes, therewere just a few, a mere handful. For God never leaves Himself without witness. But there was one—for all that history tells us—who had the courage of his faith.
Raymund Lull.
The son of a Christian knight and noble in the Spanish island of Majorca, Raymund 'is acknowledged by all writers on the history of missions to be the main connecting link between the apostles of Northern Europe and the leaders who followed the Reformation.' Read the story of the thirteenth century in Europe, and realize the days in which he lived. The spirit of the Crusades is still alive, the conflict between Islam and Christian Europe is still raging. Tales of knightly purity shine out from a background of gross sensuality, and hymns of devotion are written in strange contrast to Bacchanalian revel songs. The world-power of Rome is declining, the general state of morals, even among popes and clergy, is very low; superstition is rife. The Inquisition has just come into play.
Towering high above his day, like some unexpected mountain peak soaring above an unbroken land of stagnant marsh, stands the figure of this man, Raymund Lull, whodared to believe in love, to preach love, to live love.
{Sidenote: 1. Early Life.]
He was brought up in luxury and ease amid the splendour of the Spanish court, 'popular in the world, a lover of pleasure rather than a lover of God.' 'He had everything this world could give him: brilliant, versatile, splendidly successful; knight, poet, musician, scholar, nobleman, courtier, gallant.' So, till he was in his thirty-second year. To him, then, there came the vision of Christ crucified. In the light of that Cross the glories of this world faded, and a new glory entered his life. The Turkish question lay heavy on his soul; and, full of a great longing towards the Turks, he desired to 'conquer' the Holy Land. But here was his proposal which he boldly set forth to the astonished Crusade-going, Turk-hating Church:
'I see many knights going to the Holy Land beyond the seas, and thinking that they can acquire it by force of arms; but in the end all are destroyed before they attain that which they think to have.Whence it seems to me that the conquest of the Holy Land ought not to be attempted except in the way in which Thou and Thine Apostles acquired it, namely, by love and prayers and the pouring out of tears and blood.'
This marvellous man was, indeed, a missionary of the most up-to-date kind. Nine years of preparation he gave himself, mastering Arabic, studying and writing on Christian philosophy, learning geography, the pioneer 500 years before his day of twentieth-century missionary study! And all this with scarcely a friend who believed that his missionary call was anything more than a piece of chimerical fanaticism!
2. Service.
Long years of hard and lonely service followed, preaching to Moslems, holding friendly discussions with them, writing Christian pamphlets for them, then standing before the leaders of the Roman Church—popes and kings and councils, lecturing before universities on behalf of the Moslem world and the new crusade of love, alternately missionary and missionary deputation! Looking back over these years, he said:
'I had a wife and children; I was tolerably rich; I led a secular life. All these things I cheerfully resigned for the sake of promoting the common good and diffusing abroad the common faith. I learned Arabic. I have several times gone abroad to preach the Gospel to the Saracens. I have, for the sake of the faith, been cast into prison and scourged. I have laboured for forty-five years togain over the shepherds of the Church and the princes of Europe to the common good of Christendom. Now I am old and poor, but still I am intent on the same object. I will persevere in it till death, if the Lord permits it.'
Like some young man, full of the burning fire of a fresh enthusiasm, he sets out for Africa at the age of fifty-six. Yet, like that same young man, he is very human. And it seems to bring Lull very near us when we read that at the last, as his ship was about to cast loose from Genoa, his courage fails and the ship sails without him. 'The agony that his soul was suffering oppressed his body, out of measure even unto death, so much so that his friends carried him away from a second ship in which he had embarked, certain that his life could not last out the voyage. News of yet a third ship was brought, and he finally determined to push forward. From that moment, he tells us, he "was a new man."'
3. Death.
In North Africa he remains two years, disputing, winning, shepherding; is imprisoned, sentenced to death, and finally banished. But only to fresh labour. Much has yet to be filled in to the closing yearsof this long, hard life. He is preaching in Crete, he is exhorting Christians in Armenia, he is back in Africa again, he is shipwrecked on the coast of Italy, then back again in Bugia, in North Africa, where at last a raging mob drags him, like Stephen. outside the city wall and stones him to death on June 30th, 1315.
'The Son of God goes forth to war,A kingly crown to gain;His blood-red banner streams afar;Who follows in His train?
Who best can drink His cup of woe,Triumphant over pain;Who patient bears His cross below,—He follows in His train.
They climb'd the steep ascent of heavenThrough peril, toil, and pain:O God, to us may grace be givenTo follow in their train!'
Comparison of Lull's Methods with those of the Crusaders.
We look back now across nearly twelve centuries to that scene in North Africa: the old, worn-out man preaching, striving, agonizing, praying, loving to the last, stoned by the hands of the Moslems he loved, leaving behind him a few scattered convertshere and there, a number of learned treatises since gone out of date, a Church still heedless of his call, and not one friend to follow him.
Then we turn our eyes to the countries on the other side of the Mediterranean, and think again of the First Crusade, where half a million men poured out their lives to recover Jerusalem, only to have it wrested from their hands again; or to the Crusade of splendour led by Richard of the Lion Heart to ignominious failure. We think of the new 'machine' the Church was then inventing for the heretic and Turk—the Inquisition. Who, then, had found the better way? Which was the right path? Which had found the true solution of the problem of Islam? Which had found the true answer to Islam's challenge—dauntless Crusader, arrogant Pope, or this man with the fire and the devotion of a Crusader, but with a brother's love for the Moslem?
We listen to him again to-day. His message has not gone out of date, and never will. He has left us the motto of his life:
'HE WHO LOVES NOT, LIVES NOT, AND HE WHO LIVES BY THE LIFE CAN NEVER DIE.'
He might have lived in this twentieth century when he wrote the following prayer with which he closes one of his books:
'Lord of heaven, Father of all times, when Thou didst send Thy Son to take upon Him human nature, He and His Apostles lived in outward peace with Jews, Pharisees, and other men.... And so, after Thy example, should Christians conduct themselves to Moslems; but since that ardour of devotion which glowed in Apostles and holy men of old no longer inspires us, love and devotion through almost all the world have grown cold, and, therefore, do Christians expend their efforts far more in the outward than in the spiritual conflict.'
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER IX
1. Contrast the teaching of Christ and Mohammed, as worked out in the parable.
2. By what methods did Mohammed's followers spread their religion?
3. By what methods did the Crusaders seek to withstand the Mohammedans? Illustrate your answer, showing how far a Crusader's life was noble.
4. By what methods did Raymund Lull seek to withstand Islam? Illustrate your answer.
5. What was the motto of Lull's life? Describe his setting out from Genoa on his mission to Africa at the age of fifty-six? How and where did he die?
'The tide of things rolls forward, surge on surge,Bringing the blessed hourWhen in Himself the God of Love shall mergeThe God of will and power.'
The Fruit of Lull's Life.
Where was the fruit of Raymund Lull's life, and the answer to his prayer? His call to the Christian Church fell on deaf or unwilling ears, and his prayer seemed to have been in vain. He left no followers in his Crusade of Love; none caught his spirit or sought his task. One or two short, fitful efforts by men like Francis Xavier and his earnest Jesuits, who stood alone in love and piety, is all that we can trace in the Church's history of the survival of Lull's spirit and Lull's mission as the long centuries pass on from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light of modern times.
To find the fruit and the answer we must take a leap of five centuries fromthe time of Raymund Lull's death, landing in the opening years of the nineteenth century. The spirit of Raymund Lull was now born anew in Christendom, and the spirit of the new Crusade—the Crusade of Love—was growing in the Church. The Moslem needed something better than he had! The Moslem was worth winning! The Moslem was included in the world to which the Church was bidden to go! The Church, the body of Christ, could never be complete until the Turk was won!
It would be slow work. Then so much the more reason for not wasting time! It was dangerous work. What had that to do with it? It was difficult work. Then so much the more were brave hearts zealous to share in it!
These thoughts came slowly and gradually with compelling force to just a few here and there as the years rolled on. And the nineteenth century gave its long thin line of knights to the new Crusade of Love. They were the advance guard of the new army, and right bravely did they do their work. No Moslems wanted them, no Government encouraged them,few even protected them, most of the great Moslem countries were shut and barred and bolted against them.[1]
They took their lives in their hands, they spent long years in study, they mastered the hardest languages in the world and harnessed them for the Gospel, translating the Bible and providing Christian literature. They prayed open doors that were closed, they quietly stole through any that were ajar. Some willingly laid down their lives, more sacrificed their health, all faced lives of apparent failure, confident that in the end the cause of love must triumph.
The Spirit of Christ in the 19th Century.
This era of modern Moslem missions is but another evidence, perhaps the strongest of all, of the spirit to which, in this last hundred years, most wonderful of all in history, Christian men and women have opened their hearts.
The spirit that stopped the slave trade, that reformed our prisons, that regulated our factories, that multiplied our hospitals,that sent Livingstone to Africa, Coleridge Patteson to the South Seas, and Selwyn to New Zealand, that inspired Barnardo and General Booth, that nerves thousands of workers in the slums of our great cities, is the same spirit that impels Christian missionaries forth to the Moslem world to-day.
And what is this spirit? May we not dare to say that it is born of a new understanding of a Life lived among the hills and valleys of Galilee, and a Cross raised on a lonely hill outside Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago? There, at the centre of world-history, men learned to look up into the face of God and say 'Our Father,' and then look out upon mankind and call them 'brothers,' and gazing on that Cross see there the World's Redemption, the Son of God lifted up that He might draw all men to Himself. Every dark corner of the earth, every place of pain and sickness, every haunt of sin and shame, every falsehood and every half-truth seen in that light is but a challenge to the Christian, to lift up Him Who is the Lord of Life and Light and Glory, to catch His Spirit that He may be once more incarnate in the Life of His Church.
So it has been for very many of us in the Great War. It has seemed that so many of the things He died for are at stake—liberty and love and gentleness and the sympathy that appreciates the aspirations of other peoples. And our men and women too have gladly given their lives and yielded of their best that the eternal things might win through and that other generations may live in a better world.
And when peace comes to us again, the same call will be there—less strident but no less urgent—summoning every true man to give his life for the world's cleansing, to follow as he may the great Redeemer, who redeemed men by His cross. The ultimate test of Englishmen will be those years of peace. Will there then be a great uprising to the truly holy war of love and unselfish service and the great adventure of the Cross—the war against sin and injustice, against social and national wrong, the war for love and truth and purity and the kingdom of Jesus Christ?
Awakening of the East.
Meanwhile in these opening years of the twentieth century, away in the Far East nations great and ancient are awakening totake part in the life of the world. The Renaissance of Europe in the fifteenth century is dwarfed by the Renaissance of Asia to-day. Japan has claimed a place beside the European peoples in the comity of nations, and has justified her claim. China, awakening from the sleep of ages, claims it too. India—our own Empire, torn by dissensions under many masters in the past—is in the throes of upheaval and unrest. This rising national spirit in the heart of the Eastern nations, of China, Japan, Korea, and India, is a challenge to Christendom. But it is far more. With its lofty, national aspirations it offers to the Church of Christ a greater opportunity than any in history.
The Problem of Islam.
Among all these insistent problems, the problem of Islam is this: That in this modern world of renaissance, reform, movement, and progress, one-seventh of mankind turns to one physical and spiritual centre, a black stone in the Kaaba at Mecca, a city of the past. In that holy city, alas! notorious the world over for its sin and wickedness,[2] pilgrims meet from half theraces of the earth—Tartars and Malays, Russians and Negroes, Indians and Chinese, Arabs, Afghans, Persians, Egyptians, and many more. All this crowd of races, peoples, nationalities, and tongues own one Faith. For all, the limit of aspiration, of morals, of spirituality, was cast hard, fast, unchangeable, in the life of the Prophet and his book in the sixth century of Arabia.
From the far-off Celebes Islands in the East to Rio de Oro, on the Atlantic shore of Africa; from Russia, even from European Russia, in the North down to the British Protectorates of South Africa, that huge Moslem world spreads out like some great octopus, and its peoples turn themselves inwards, westwards, eastwards, southwards, northwards, as they prostrate themselves in prayer towards Mecca, the historic centre of the Faith.[3]
East Indies.
Away in the furthest East the muezzin ushers in the new world's day in the greatluxuriant islands of the East Indies, where, whilst Europe was occupied with the Reformation, Mohammedan traders settled among the simple pagans, winning them to Islam. To-day, in the islands of Celebes, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Straits Settlements, thirty million Moslems of Malay race recite with one accord the creed of Allah and His Prophet.
China.
A few hours later, in the western provinces of China, eight million Moslems are summoned from sleep to prayer. These Chinese Moslems have never been under Moslem rule, nor are they by any means the fanatics we have got to know so well in lands where Islam holds undisputed sway. They are Chinese first and Moslems after, wearing the queue, concurring in many Confucian rites, and joining in ancestral worship, a witness to the power of Islam where it never drew sword or held the sceptre.
India.
Hear, next, the voice of India's sixty-six million Moslems, who, amid the confusion of worship of countless idols, acknowledge with no uncertain sound the one God and His Prophet, and in stately mosque and crowded bazaar and lonelyfield spread themselves in prayer towards the sacred city. These Moslems[4] are successors of the great warriors who ruled and conquered India through a thousand years—men like Mohammed Kasim (711 A.D.), Mahmoud of Ghazni (1019 A.D.), Jenghis Khan (1221 A.D.), Timur (1398 A.D.), and Mogul rulers, such as Akbar, Shah Jehan, and Aurungzeb. They are among the most loyal of our British fellow-subjects, but have never stood in India for the cause of enlightenment or progress up to the present time. They are in the mass far more illiterate than their Hindu compatriots; they are in an undue minority in the schools. The Moslem farmer is thriftless, and in debt to the Hindu money-lender. The Mohammedan population stolidly oppose all the efforts of the Government to stay the ravages ofbubonic plague. Purity in the home and personal life is more rare than among Hindus. Five times a day the muezzin calls one-fifth of India to recite the creed—the creed without a Saviour.
Afghanistan Baluchistan.
Through the great historic passes of the North Indian mountains file down to-day the Afghans and Baluchis, warriors by nature, but in the Pax Britannica merchants with their caravans. These wild and warlike people in their mountain fastnesses know none other than Mohammed, consecrate their matchlocks to his service, and ask the blessing of Allah on their raids. In these rocky uplands every man prays Meccaward, and the dead face Mecca in their graves.
Central Asia.
On, into Central Asia, that great table-land, 'the roof of the world,' where three empires meet. In Bokhara, a centre of Moslem influence and learning for all Central Asia, and in Turkestan, almost wholly Moslem, the faithful spread their prayer-mats towards the south.
We are on the borders of Europe now, but not at the limit of Islam. Among the scattered peoples of the 'Steppes' and beyond in Europe to the very boundary ofSiberia, 'where the winter day is so short that the Moslem can hardly find time to pray all his stated prayers,' still the Prophet of Arabia is acclaimed by eighteen million Moslems scattered among a nominally Christian people. The voices of those who in this vast tract worship JESUS rise but faintly to our ears.
Westward again: and we stand in the vast land of Persia, among the ruins of world-empire, once the home of the worshippers of the sun, and of the hosts of heaven. Persia now turns its back to the rising sun and its face towards Mecca. The Shah, the officers of state, the law, the people, are Moslem, and have been for twelve centuries; in Persia, as in Arabia, the great closed land, Islam has reigned alone.
Turkish Empire.
Across the Euphrates Valley, past the cities of Babylon and Nineveh, whose names are the only relics of their former greatness, and we stand among the Moslem countries bordering the Mediterranean on the north-east, ruled with iron hand according to Korânic Law by the Sultan of Turkey, from Constantinople, the queenly city of the Golden Horn, politicalcentre of the Moslem world. Here, in Asia Minor and Syria, in the historic cities where the Apostle of the Gentiles loved, prayed, laboured, and suffered, and in which he planted Christian Churches, the muezzin's voice is heard to-day. Great Moslem populations proclaiming their simple, confident creed almost drown the feeble praise of the few dispirited Christians, remnant of Churches that have been.