Selections from the Kur-an
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Title: Selections from the Kur-an
Editor: Edward William Lane
Author of introduction, etc.: Stanley Lane-Poole
Release date: December 26, 2013 [eBook #44515]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTIONS FROM THE KUR-AN ***
TRÜBNER’S
ORIENTAL SERIES.
VII.
Ballantyne Press
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
[Illustration: MECCA.]
SELECTIONS FROM THE ḲUR-ÁN
BY
EDWARD WILLIAM LANE,
HON. DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, LEYDEN;
CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE;
HON. MEMBER OF THE GERMAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY,
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE, ETC.;
AUTHOR OF “THE MODERN EGYPTIANS,” AND “AN ARABIC-ENGLISH LEXICON;”
TRANSLATOR OF “THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS.”
A New Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION_,
BY
STANLEY LANE POOLE.
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1879.
[_All rights reserved._]
PREFACE.
There are several translations of the Ḳur-án in several languages; but
there are very few people who have the strength of mind to read any of
them through. The chaotic arrangement and frequent repetitions, and
the obscurity of the language, are sufficient to deter the most
persistent reader, whilst the nature of a part of its contents renders
the Ḳur-án unfit for a woman’s eye.
Yet there always has been a wish to know something about the sacred
book of the Mohammadans, and it was with the design of satisfying this
wish, whilst avoiding the weariness and the disgust which a complete
perusal of the Ḳur-án must produce, that Mr. Lane arranged the
‘Selections’ which were published in 1843. In spite of many printer’s
errors, due to the author’s absence from England, the book was so far
successful that the edition was exhausted, and it is now very
difficult to obtain a copy. But partly owing to the obstructions to
the reading offered by an interwoven native commentary, and partly by
reason of the preference shown for the doctrinal over the poetical
passages, the book went into scholars’ hands rather than into the
libraries of the general reading public. It has proved of
considerable service to students of Arabic, who have found it the most
accurate rendering in existence of a large part of the Ḳur-án; and
even native Muslims of India, ignorant of Arabic, have used Lane’s
‘Selections’ as their Bible.
In this edition I have endeavoured rather to carry out the original
intention of the translator. Experience has shown that the first plan
was over-learned to commend itself to the average reader, for whom Mr.
Lane had destined the book; in this edition I have therefore omitted
many of the notes, which will not be missed by the reader for whom the
book is intended, and for which the Arabic scholar has only to refer
to the first edition, or to Sale’s _Koran_, whence most of them were
derived. Again, the text of the first edition was obscured and
interrupted by an interwoven commentary, which destroyed the pleasure
of the language and often made the meaning less intelligible than
before. This commentary has been thinned. Where it added nothing to
the text, it has been erased; where it gave a curious or valuable
explanation, it has been thrown into a footnote; where it merely
supplied a necessary word to complete the sense, that word has been
left in the text distinguished by a different type[1]. Once more, the
early and wilder _soorahs_ were almost wholly omitted in the first
edition, whilst the later more dogmatic and less poetical _soorahs_
were perhaps too fully represented. I have endeavoured to establish
the balance between the two.
In this edition the Selections are divided into two parts. The first
is Islám; the second, other religions as regarded in Islám. In the
first are grouped, under distinctive headings, the more important
utterances of Moḥammad on what his followers must believe and do; in
the second are his versions of the history of the patriarchs and other
personages of the Jewish and Christian writings.
It is only in the First Part that I have made much alteration, either
by adding fresh extracts (distinguished by a sign), or by making a few
merely verbal alterations in the original extracts, or by the
suppression or transposition of the commentary. Any alterations that
go beyond this—new renderings, for instance—are duly recorded in the
footnotes.
The Second Part is almost unchanged from the first edition. In this
part the interwoven commentary is left entire, for the traditions of
the commentators about Abraham and Moses and Christ are as curious as
the traditions of Moḥammad, and about as credible; and the narrative
style of the Second Part allows the introduction of parentheses more
easily than the rhetorical form which many of the extracts in the
First Part present.
Mr. Lane’s Introduction was abridged from Sale’s Preliminary
Discourse, with but little addition from his own knowledge. Sale’s
Discourse abounds in information, but it is too detailed and lengthy
for the purpose of this volume. I have, then, substituted a short
sketch of the beginnings of Islám. I have tried to bring home to the
reader the little we know of the early Arabs; then to draw the picture
of the great Arab prophet and his work; to show what are the salient
points of Islám; and finally to explain something of the history of
the Ḳur-án and its contents. I am conscious of having drawn the
picture with a weak hand, but I hope the sketch may serve as a not
quite useless introduction to a volume of typical selections from a
book which, in the peculiar character of its contents and the
extraordinary power of its influence, has not its parallel in the
world.
S. L. P.
_June 1878._
CONTENTS.
_INTRODUCTION._
PAGE
I. THE ARABS BEFORE MOḤAMMAD xi
II. MOḤAMMAD xxxvii
III. ISLÁM lxxvii
IV. THE ḲUR-ÁN c
_PART THE FIRST._
I. THE OPENING PRAYER 3
II. PREMONITION 4
III. GOD 5
IV. MOḤAMMAD AND THE ḲUR-ÁN 13
V. THE RESURRECTION, PARADISE, AND HELL 21
VI. PREDESTINATION 32
VII. ANGELS AND JINN 33
VIII. TRUE RELIGION AND FALSE 34
IX. BELIEVERS AND UNBELIEVERS 38
_PART THE SECOND._
I. PROPHETS, APOSTLES, AND DIVINE BOOKS 47
II. ADAM AND EVE 49
III. ABEL AND CAIN 53
IV. NOAH AND THE FLOOD 55
V. ´ÁD AND THAMOOD 60
VI. DHU-L-ḲARNEYN 63
VII. ABRAHAM, ISHMAEL, ISAAC 66
VIII. JACOB, JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 77
IX. JOB 93
X. SHO´EYB 95
XI. MOSES AND HIS PEOPLE 97
XII. SAUL, DAVID, SOLOMON 132
XIII. JONAH 146
XIV. EZRA 148
XV. THE MESSIAH 149
INDEXES 167
INTRODUCTION.
I.—_THE ARABS BEFORE MOḤAMMAD._
‘Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in the pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust divine,
And the locust flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!’
—BROWNING, _Saul_.
Between Egypt and Assyria, jostled by both, yielding to neither, lay a
strange country, unknown save at its marches even to its neighbours,
dwelt-in by a people that held itself aloof from all the earth—a
people whom the great empires of the ancient world in vain essayed to
conquer, against whom the power of Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium was
proven impotence, and at whose hands even the superb Alexander, had he
lived to test his dream, might for once have learnt the lesson of
defeat. Witnessing the struggle and fall of one and another of the
great tyrannies of antiquity, yet never entering the arena of the
fight;—swept on its northern frontier by the conflicting armies of
Khusru and Cæsar, but lifting never a hand in either cause;—Arabia was
at length to issue forth from its silent mystery, and after baffling
for a thousand years the curious gaze of strangers, was at last to
draw to itself the fearful eyes of all men. The people of whom almost
nothing before could certainly be asserted but its existence was
finally of its own free will to throw aside the veil, to come forth
from its fastnesses, and imperiously to bring to its feet the kingdoms
of the world.
It is not all Arabia of which I speak. The story to tell has nothing
as yet to say to the ‘happy’ tilled lands of the south, nor to the
outlying princedoms of El-Ḥeereh and Ghassán bordering the territories
and admitting the suzerainty of Persia and Rome. These lands were not
wrapped in mystery: the Himyerite’s kingdom in the Yemen, the rule of
Zenobia at Palmyra, were familiar to the nations around. But the
cradle of Islám was not here.
Along the eastern coast of the Red Sea, sometimes thrusting its spurs
of red sandstone and porphyry into the waves, sometimes drawing away
and leaving a wide stretch of lowland, runs a rugged range of
mountain. One above another, the hills rise from the coast, leaving
here and there between them a green valley, where you may see an Arab
settlement or a group of Bedawees watering their flocks. Rivers there
are none; and the streams that gather from the rainfall are scarcely
formed but they sink into the parched earth. Yet beneath the dried-up
torrent-beds a rivulet trickles at times, and straightway there
spreads a rich oasis dearly prized by the wanderers of the desert. All
else is bare and desolate. Climb hill after hill, and the same sight
meets the eye—barren mountain-side, dry gravelly plain, and the rare
green valleys. At length you have reached the topmost ridge; and you
see, not a steep descent, no expected return to the plain, but a vast
desert plateau, blank, inhospitable, to all but Arabs unindwellable.
You have climbed the Ḥijáz—the ‘barrier’—and are come to the steppes
of the Nejd—the ‘highland.’ In the valleys of this barrier-land are
the Holy Cities, Mekka and Medina. Here is the birthplace of Islám:
the Arab tribes of the Ḥijáz and the Nejd were the first disciples of
Moḥammad.
One may tell much of a people’s character from its home. Truism as it
seems, there is yet a meaning in the saying that the Arabs are
peculiarly the people of Arabia. Those who have travelled in this
wonderful land tell us of the quickening influence of the air and
scene of the desert. The fresh breath of the plain, the glorious sky,
the still of the wide expanse, trod by no step but your own, looked
upon only by yourself and perhaps yonder solitary eagle or the wild
goat leaping the cliffs you have left behind, the absolute stillness
and aloneness, bring about a strange sense of delight and exultation,
a bounding-up of spirits held in long restraint, an unknown nimbleness
of wit and limb. The Arabs felt all this and more in their bright
imaginative souls. A few would settle in villages, and engage in the
trade which came through from India to the West; but such were held in
poor repute by the true Bedawees, who preferred above all things else
the free life of the desert. It is a relief to turn from the hurry and
unrest of modern civilisation, from the never-ending strife for
wealth, for ‘position,’ for pleasure, even for knowledge, and look for
a moment on the careless life of the Bedawee. He lived the aimless,
satisfied life of some child; he sought no change; he was supremely
content with the exquisite sense of simple existence; he was happy
because he lived. He wished no more. He dreaded the dark After-death;
he thrust it from his thoughts as often as it would force itself
unwelcome upon him. Utterly fearless of man and fortune, he took no
thought for the morrow: whatever it brought forth, he felt confidently
his strength to enjoy or endure; only let him seize the happiness of
to-day while it shall last, and drain to the dregs the overbrimming
cup of his life. He was ambitious of glory and victory, but it was not
an ambition that clouded his joy. Throughout a life that was full of
energy, of passion, of strong endeavour after his ideal of desert
perfectness, there was yet a restful sense of satisfied enjoyment, a
feeling that life was of a surety well worth living.
For the Arab had his ideal of life. The true son of the desert must in
the old times do more than stretch his limbs contentedly under the
shade of the overhanging rock. He must be brave and chivalrous,
generous, hospitable; ready to sacrifice himself and his substance for
his clan; prompt to help the needy and the traveller; true to his
word, and, not least, eloquent in his speech.
Devotion to the clan was the strongest tie the Arab possessed. Though
tracing their descent from a common traditional ancestor, the great
northern family of Bedawees was split up into numerous clans, owning
no central authority, but led, scarcely governed, each by its own
chief, who was the most valiant and best-born man in it. The whole
clan acted as one being; an injury done to one member was revenged by
all, and even a crime committed by a clansman was upheld by the whole
brotherhood. Though a small spark would easily light-up war between
even friendly clans, it was rarely that those of kin met as enemies.
It is told how a clan suffered long and oft-repeated injuries from a
kindred clan without one deed of revenge. ‘They are our brothers,’
they said; ‘perhaps they will return to better feelings; perhaps we
shall see them again as they once were.’ To be brought to poverty or
even to die for the clan, the Arab deemed his duty—his privilege. To
add by his prowess or his hospitality or his eloquence to the glory of
the clan was his ambition.
A mountain[2] we have where dwells he whom we shelter there,
lofty, before whose height the eye falls back blunted:
Deep-based is its root below ground, and overhead there soars
its peak to the stars of heaven whereto no man reaches.
A folk are we who deem it no shame to be slain in fight,
though that be the deeming thereof of Salool and ´Ámir;
Our love of death brings near to us our days of doom,
but their dooms shrink from death and stand far distant.
There dies among us no lord a quiet death in his bed,
and never is blood of us poured forth without vengeance.
Our souls stream forth in a flood from the edge of the whetted swords:
no otherwise than so does our spirit leave its mansion.
Pure is our stock, unsullied: fair is it kept and bright
by mothers whose bed bears well, and fathers mighty.
To the best of the uplands we wend, and when the season comes
we travel adown to the best of fruitful valleys.
Like rain of the heaven are we: there is not in all our line
one blunt of heart, nor among us is counted a niggard.
We say nay when so we will to the words of other men,
but no man to us says nay when we give sentence.
When passes a lord of our line, in his stead there rises straight
a lord to say the say and do the deeds of the noble.
Our beacon is never quenched to the wanderer of the night,
nor has ever a guest blamed us where men meet together.
Our Days[3] are famous among our foemen, of fair report,
branded and blazed with glory like noble horses.
Our swords have swept throughout all lands both west and east,
and gathered many a notch from the steel of hauberk-wearers;
Not used are they when drawn to be laid back in the sheaths
before that the folk they meet are spoiled and scattered.
If thou knowest not, ask men what they think of us and them
—not alike are he that knows and he that knows not.
The children of Ed-Dayyán are the shaft of their people’s mill,
—around them it turns and whirls, while they stand midmost.[4]
The renown of the clan was closely wrapped up with the Arab
chieftain’s personal renown. He was keenly sensitive on the point of
honour, and to that notion he attached a breadth of meaning which can
scarcely be understood in these days. Honour included all the
different virtues that went to make up the ideal Bedawee. To be proved
wanting in any of these was to be dishonoured. Above all things, the
man who would ‘keep his honour and defile it not’ must be brave and
hospitable—
A rushing rain-flood when he gave guerdons:
when he sprang to the onset, a mighty lion.
The Arab warrior was a mighty man of valour. He would spend whole days
in the saddle, burdened with heavy armour, in the pursuit of a foe,
seeking the life of the slayer of his kin, or sweeping down upon the
caravan of rich merchandise which his more peaceful countrymen of the
towns were carrying through the deserts. The Arab lived mainly by
plunder. His land did not yield him food—unless it were dates, the
Bedawee’s bread—and he relied on the success of his foraging
expeditions for his support. These he conducted with perfect
good-breeding; he used no violence when it could be avoided; he merely
relieved the caravan from the trouble of carrying any further the
goods that he was himself willing to take charge of, urging, if
necessary, the unfair treatment of his forefather Ishmael as an
excellent reason for pillaging the sons of Isaac. ‘When a woman is the
victim, no Bedouin brigand, however rude, will be ill-mannered enough
to lay hands upon her. He begs her to take off the garment on which he
has set his heart, and he then retires to a distance and stands with
eyes averted, lest he should do violence to her modesty.’
The poems of the early Arabs are full of the deeds of their warriors,
the excitement of the pitched battle, the delight of the pursuit, the
nightly raid on the camp, the trial of skill between rival chiefs, and
the other pictures of a warrior’s triumph. Here we find little of the
generosity of war: mercy was rarely exercised and hatred was carried
to its extremest limits; quarter was neither asked nor given; to
despatch a wounded man was no disgrace; the families of the vanquished
were enslaved. Notwithstanding his frank genial nature, the Arab was
of a dangerously quick temper, derived, he boasted, from the flesh he
lived on of the camel, the surliest and most ill-conditioned of
beasts. If he conceived himself insulted, he was bound to revenge
himself to the full, or he would have been deemed dishonoured for
ever. And since his fiery temper easily took offence, the history of
the early Arabs is full of the traditions of slight quarrels and their
horrible results—secret assassination and the long-lasting blood-feud.
Many the warriors, noon-journeying, who, when
night fell, journeyed on and halted at dawning—
Keen each one of them, girt with a keen blade
that when one drew it flashed forth like the lightning—
They were tasting of sleep by sips, when, as
they nodded, thou didst fright them, and they were scattered.
Vengeance we did on them: there escaped us
of the two houses none but the fewest.
And if Hudheyl[5] broke the edge of his[6] sword-blade—
many the notch that Hudheyl gained from him!
Many the time that he made them kneel down on
jagged rocks where the hoof is worn with running!
Many the morning he fell on their shelter,
and after slaughter came plunder and spoiling!
Hudheyl has been burned by me, one valiant
whom Evil tires not though they be wearied—
Whose spear drinks deep the first draught, and thereon
drinks deep again of the blood of foemen.
Forbidden was wine, but now it is lawful:
hard was the toil that made it lawful!
Reach me the cup, O Sawád son of ´Amr!
my body is spent with gaining my vengeance.
To Hudheyl we gave to drink Death’s goblet,
whose dregs are disgrace and shame and dishonour.
The hyena laughs over the slain of Hudheyl, and
the wolf—see thou—grins by their corpses,
And the vultures flap their wings, full-bellied
treading their dead, too gorged to leave them.
The contempt which the Arab, with a few noble exceptions, felt for the
gentler virtues is seen in these lines:—
Had I been a son of Mázin, there had not plundered my herds
the sons of the Child of the Dust, Dhuhl son of Sheybán!
There had straightway arisen to help me a heavy-handed kin,
good smiters when help is needed, though the feeble bend to the blow:
Men who, when Evil bares before them his hindmost teeth,
fly gaily to meet him, in companies or alone.
They ask not their brother, when he lays before them his wrong
in his trouble, to give them proof of the truth of what he says.
But as for my people, though their number be not small,
they are good for nought against evil, however light it be;
They requite with forgiveness the wrong of those that do them wrong,
and the evil deeds of the evil they meet with kindness and love;
As though thy Lord had created among the tribes of men
themselves alone to fear Him, and never one man more.
Would that I had in their stead a folk who, when they ride forth,
strike swiftly and hard, on horse or on camel borne!
A point on which the temper of the Bedawee was easily touched was his
family pride. The Arab prized good blood as much in men as in his
horses and camels. In these he saw the importance of breed, and in men
he firmly believed the same principle held good. With the tenacious
memory of his race, he had no difficulty in remembering the whole of a
complicated pedigree, and he would often proudly dwell on the purity
of his blood and the gallant deeds of his forefathers. He would
challenge another chief to prove a more noble descent, and hot
disputes and bitter rivalries often came of these comparisons.
But if noble birth brought rivalry and hatred, it brought withal
excellent virtues. The Arab nobleman was not a man who was richer and
more idle and luxurious than his inferiors: his position, founded upon
descent, depended for its maintenance on personal qualities. Rank
brought with it onerous obligations. The chief, if he would retain and
carry on the repute of his line, must not only be fearless and ready
to fight all the world; he must be given to hospitality, generous to
kith and kin, and to all who cry unto him. His tent must be so pitched
in the camp that it shall not only be the first that the enemy
attacks, but also the first the wayworn stranger approaches; and at
night fires must be kindled hard by to guide wanderers in the desert
to his hospitable entertainment. If a man came to an Arab noble’s
tent and said, ‘I throw myself on your honour,’ he was safe from his
enemies until they had trampled on the dead body of his host. Nothing
was baser than to give up a guest; the treachery was rare, and brought
endless dishonour upon the clan in which the shame had taken place.
The poet extols the tents—
Where dwells a kin great of heart, whose word is enough to shield
whom they shelter when peril comes in a night of fierce strife
and storm;
Yea, noble are they: the seeker of vengeance gains not from them
the blood of his foe, nor is he that wrongs them left without
help.
The feeling lasted even under the debased rule of Muslim despots; for
it is related that a governor was once ordering-out some prisoners to
execution, when one of them asked for a drink of water, which was
immediately given him. He then turned to the governor and said, ‘Wilt
thou slay thy guest?’ and was forthwith set free. A pledge of
protection was inferred in the giving of hospitality, and to break his
word was a thing not to be thought upon by an Arab. He did not care to
give an oath; his simple word was enough, for it was known to be
inviolable. Hence the priceless worth of the Arab chief’s word of
welcome: it meant protection, unswerving fidelity, help, and succour.
There was no bound to this hospitality. It was the pride of the Arab
to place everything he possessed at the service of the guest. The last
milch-camel must be killed sooner than the duties of hospitality be
neglected. The story is told of Ḥátim, a gallant poet-warrior of the
tribe of Ṭayyi, which well illustrates the Arab ideal of hostship.
Ḥátim was at one time brought to the brink of starvation by the dearth
of a rainless season. For a whole day he and his family had eaten
nothing, and at night, after soothing the children to sleep by telling
them some of those stories in which the Arabs have few rivals, he was
trying by his cheerful conversation to make his wife forget her
hunger. Just then they heard steps without, and a corner of the tent
was raised. ‘Who is there?’ said Ḥátim. A woman’s voice replied, ‘I am
such a one, thy neighbour. My children have nothing to eat, and are
howling like young wolves, and I have come to beg help of thee.’
‘Bring them here,’ said Ḥátim. His wife asked him what he would do,
for if he could not feed his own children, how should he find food for
this woman’s? ‘Do not disturb thyself,’ he answered. Now Ḥátim had a
horse renowned far and wide for the purity of his stock and the
fleetness and beauty of his paces. He would not kill his favourite for
himself nor even for his own children; but now he went out and slew
him, and prepared him with fire for the strangers’ need. And when he
saw them eating with his wife and children, he exclaimed, ‘It were a
shame that you alone should eat whilst all the camp is perishing of
hunger;’ and he went and called the neighbours to the meal, and in the
morning there remained of the horse nothing but his bones. But as for
himself, wrapped in his mantle, he sat apart in a corner of the tent.
This Ḥátim is a type of the Arab nature at its noblest. Though
renowned for his courage and skill in war, he never suffered his
enmity to overcome his generosity. He had sworn an oath never to take
a man’s life, and he strictly observed it, and always withheld the
fatal last blow. In spite of his clemency, he was ever successful in
the wars of his clan, and brought back from his raids many a rich
spoil, only to spend it at once in his princely fashion. His
generosity and faithful observance of his word at times placed him in
positions of great danger; but the alternative of denying his
principles seems never to have occurred to his mind. For instance, he
had imposed upon himself as a law never to refuse a gift to him that
asked it of him. Once, engaged in single combat, he had disarmed and
routed his opponent, who then turned and said, ‘Ḥátim, give me thy
spear.’ At once he threw it to him, leaving himself defenceless; and
had he not met an adversary worthy of himself, this had been the last
of his deeds. Happily Ḥátim was not the only generous warrior of the
Arabs, and his foe did not avail himself of his advantage. When
Ḥátim’s friends remonstrated with him on the rashness of an act which,
in the spirit of shopkeepers, they regarded as quixotic, Ḥátim said,
‘What would you have me to do? He asked of me a gift!’
It was Ḥátim’s practice to buy the liberty of all captives who sought
his aid: it was but another application of the Arab virtue of
hospitality. Once a captive called to him when he was on a journey and
had not with him the means of paying the ransom. But he was not wont
to allow any difficulties to baulk him of the exercise of his duty,
and he had the prisoner released, stepping meanwhile into his chains
until his own clan should send the ransom.
Brave, chivalrous, faithful, and generous beyond the needful of Arab
ideal—so that his niggard wife, using the privilege of high dames,
repudiated him because he was ever ruining himself and her by his open
hand—Ḥátim filled up the measure of Arab virtue by his eloquence, and
such of his poems as have come down to us reflect the nobility of his
life. As a youth he had shown a strong passion for poetry, and would
spare no means of doing honour to poets. His grandfather, in despair
at the boy’s extravagance, sent him away from the camp to guard the
camels, which were pastured at a distance. Sitting there in a state of
solitude little congenial to his nature, Ḥátim lifted his eyes and saw
a caravan approaching. It was the caravan of three great poets who
were travelling to the court of the King of El-Ḥeereh. Ḥátim begged
them to alight and to accept of refreshment after the hot and dreary
journey. He killed them a camel each, though one would have more than
sufficed for the three; and in return they wrote him verses in praise
of himself and his kindred. Overjoyed at the honour, Ḥátim insisted on
the poets each accepting a hundred camels; and they departed with
their gifts. When the grandfather came to the pasturing and asked
where the camels were gone, Ḥátim answered, ‘I have exchanged them for
a crown of honour, which will shine for all time on the brow of thy
race. The lines in which great poets have celebrated our house will
pass from mouth to mouth, and will carry our glory over all Arabia.’
[7]
This story well illustrates the Arab’s passionate love of poetry. He
conceived his language to be the finest in the world, and he prized
eloquence and poetry as the goodliest gifts of the gods. There were
three great events in Arab life, when the clan was called together and
great feastings and rejoicings ensued. One was the birth of a son to a
chief; another the foaling of a generous mare; the third was the
discovery that a great poet had risen up among them. The advent of the
poet meant the immortality of the deeds of the clansmen and the
everlasting contumely of their foes; it meant the raising up of the
glory of the tribe over all the clans of Arabia, and the winning of
triumphs by bitterer weapons than sword and spear—the weapons of
stinging satire and scurrilous squib. No man might dare withstand the
power of the poets among a people who were keenly alive to the point
of an epigram, and who never forgot an ill-natured jibe if it were
borne upon musical verse. Most of the great heroes of the desert were
poets as well as warriors, and their poesy was deemed the chiefest gem
in their crown, and, like their courage, was counted a proof of
generous birth. The Khalif ´Omar said well, ‘The kings of the Arabs
are their orators and poets, those who practise and who celebrate all
the virtues of the Bedawee.’
This ancient poetry of the Arabs is the reflection of the people’s
life. Far away from the trouble of the world, barred by wild wastes
from the stranger, the Bedawee lived his happy child’s life, enjoying
to the uttermost the good the gods had sent him, delighting in the
face that Nature showed him, inspired by the glorious breath of the
deserts that were his home. His poetry rings of that desert life. It
is emotional, passionate, seldom reflective. Not the end of life, the
whence and the whither, but the actual present joy of existence, was
the subject of his song. Vivid painting of nature is the
characteristic of this poetry: it is natural, unpolished, unlaboured.
The scenes of the desert—the terrors of the nightly ride through the
hill-girdled valley where the Ghools and the Jinn have their haunts;
the gloom of the barren plain, where the wolf, ‘like a ruined
gamester,’ roams ululating; the weariness of the journey under the
noonday sun; the stifling of the sand-storm, the delusions of the
mirage; or again, the solace of the palm-tree’s shade, and the
delights of the cool well;—such are the pictures of the Arab poet. The
people’s life is another frequent theme: the daily doings of the
herdsman, the quiet pastoral life, on the one hand; on the other, the
deeds of the chiefs—war, plunder, the chase, wassail, revenge,
friendship, love. There were satires on rival tribes, panegyrics on
chiefs, laments for the dead. This poetry is wholly objective,
artless, childlike; it is the outcome of a people still in the
freshness of youth, whom the mysteries and complications of life have
not yet set a-thinking. ‘Just as his language knows but the present
and the past, so the ancient Arab lived but in to-day and yesterday.
The future is nought to him; he seizes the present with too thorough
abandonment to have an emotion left for anything beyond. He troubles
himself not with what fate the morrow may bring forth, he dreams not
of a beautiful future,—only he revels in the present, and his glance
looks backward alone. Rich in ideas and impressions, he is poor in
thought. He drains hastily the foaming cup of life; he feels deeply
and passionately; but it is as if he were never conscious of the
coming of the thoughtful age which, while it surveys the past, as
often turns an anxious look to the unknown future.’
It is very difficult for a Western mind to enter into the real beauty
of the old Arab poetry. The life it depicts is so unlike any we can
now witness, that it is almost removed beyond the pale of our
sympathies. The poetry is loaded with metaphors and similes, which to
us seem far-fetched, though they are drawn from the simplest daily
sights of the Bedawee. Moreover, it is only in fragments that we can
read it; for the change in the whole character of Arab life and in the
current of Arab ideas which followed the conquests of Islám
extinguished the old songs, which were no longer suitable to the new
conditions of things; and as they were seldom recorded in writing, we
possess but a little remnant of them.[8] Yet ‘these fragments may be
broken, defaced, dimmed, and obscured by fanaticism, ignorance, and
neglect; but out of them there arises anew all the freshness, bloom,
and glory of desert-song, as out of Homer’s epics rise the glowing
spring-time of humanity and the deep blue heavens of Hellas. It is not
a transcendental poetry, rich in deep and thoughtful legend and lore,
or glittering in the many-coloured prisms of fancy, but a poetry the
chief task of which is to paint life and nature as they really are;
and within its narrow bounds it is magnificent. It is chiefly and
characteristically full of manliness, of vigour, and of a chivalrous
spirit, doubly striking when compared with the spirit of abjectness
and slavery found in some other Asiatic nations. It is wild and vast
and monotonous as the yellow seas of its desert solitudes; it is
daring and noble, tender and true.’ [9]
There was one place where, above all others, the Ḳaṣeedehs of the
ancient Arabs were recited: this was ´Okáḍh, the Olympia of Arabia,
where there was held a great annual Fair, to which not merely the
merchants of Mekka and the south, but the poet-heroes of all the land
resorted. The Fair of ´Okáḍh was held during the sacred months,—a sort
of ‘God’s Truce,’ when blood could not be shed without a violation of
the ancient customs and faiths of the Bedawees. Thither went the poets
of rival clans, who had as often locked spears as hurled rhythmical
curses. There was little fear of a bloody ending to the poetic
contest, for those heroes who might meet there with enemies or
blood-avengers are said to have worn masks or veils, and their poems
were recited by a public orator at their dictation. That these
precautions and the sacredness of the time could not always prevent
the ill-feeling evoked by the pointed personalities of rival singers
leading to a fray and bloodshed is proved by recorded instances; but
such results were uncommon, and as a rule the customs of the time and
place were respected. In spite of occasional broils on the spot, and
the lasting feuds which these poetic contests must have excited, the
Fair of ´Okáḍh was a grand institution. It served as a focus for the
literature of all Arabia: every one with any pretensions to poetic
power came, and if he could not himself gain the applause of the
assembled people, at least he could form one of the critical audience
on whose verdict rested the fame or the shame of every poet. The Fair
of ´Okáḍh was a literary congress, without formal judges, but with
unbounded influence. It was here that the polished heroes of the
desert determined points of grammar and prosody; here the seven Golden
Songs were recited, although (alas for the charming legend!) they were
_not_ afterwards ‘suspended’ on the Kaạbeh; and here ‘a magical
language, the language of the Ḥijáz,’ was built out of the dialects of
Arabia, and was made ready to the skilful hand of Moḥammad, that he
might conquer the world with his Ḳur-án.
The Fair of ´Okáḍh was not merely a centre of emulation for Arab
poets: it was also an annual review of Bedawee virtues. It was there
that the Arab nation once-a-year inspected itself, so to say, and
brought forth and criticised its ideals of the noble and the beautiful
in life and in poetry. For it was in poetry that the Arab—and for that
matter each man all the world over—expressed his highest thoughts, and
it was at ´Okáḍh that these thoughts were measured by the standard of
the Bedawee ideal. The Fair not only maintained the highest standard
of poetry that the Arabic language has ever reached: it also upheld
the noblest idea of life and duty that the Arab nation has yet set
forth and obeyed. ´Okáḍh was the press, the stage, the pulpit, the
Parliament, and the Académie Française of the Arab people; and when,
in his fear of the infidel poets (whom Imra-el-Ḳeys was to usher to
hell), Moḥammad abolished the Fair, he destroyed the Arab nation even
whilst he created his own new nation of Muslims;—and the Muslims
cannot sit in the places of the old pagan Arabs.
It is very difficult for the Western mind to dissociate the idea of
Oriental poetry from the notion of amatory odes, and sonnets to the
lady’s eyebrow: but even the few extracts that have been given in this
chapter show that the Arab had many other subjects besides love to
sing about, and though the divine theme has its place in almost every
poem, it seldom rivals the prominence of war and nature-painting, and
it is treated from a much less sensual point of view than that of
later Arab poets. Many writers have drawn a gloomy picture of the
condition of women in Arabia before the coming of Moḥammad, and there
is no doubt that in many cases their lot was a miserable one. There
are ancient Arabic proverbs that point to the contempt in which
woman’s judgment and character were held by the Arabs of ‘the Time of
Ignorance,’ and Moḥammad must have derived his mean opinion of women
from a too general impression among his countrymen. The marriage tie
was certainly very loose among the ancient Arabs. The ceremony itself
was of the briefest. The man said _khiṭb_ (_i.e._ I am an
asker-in-marriage), and the giver-away answered _nikḥ_ (_i.e._, I am a
giver-in-marriage), and the knot was thus tied, only to be undone with
equal facility and brevity. The frequency of divorce among the Arabs
does not speak well for their constancy, and must have had a degrading
effect upon the women. Hence it is argued that women were the objects
of contempt rather than of respect among the ancient Arabs.
Yet there is reason to believe that the evidence upon which this
conclusion is founded is partial and one-sided. There was a wide gulf
between the Bedawee and the town Arab. It is not impossible that the
view commonly entertained as to the state of women in preïslamic times
is based mainly on what Moḥammad saw around him in Mekka, and not on
the ordinary life of the desert. To such a conjecture a curiously
uniform support is lent by the ancient poetry of the desert; and
though the poets were then—as they always are—men of finer mould than
the rest, yet their example, and still more their poems passing from
mouth to mouth, must have created a widespread belief in their
principles. It is certain that the roaming Bedawee, like the mediæval
knight, entertained a chivalrous reverence for women, although he,
too, like the knight, was not always above a career of promiscuous
gallantry; but there was always a certain glamour of romance about the
intrigues of the Bedawee. He did not regard the object of his love as
a chattel to be possessed, but as a divinity to be assiduously
worshipped. The poems are full of instances of the courtly respect
displayed by the heroes of the desert toward defenceless maidens, and
the mere existence of so general an ideal of conduct in the poems is a
strong argument for Arab chivalry: for with the Arabs the abyss
between the ideal accepted of the mind and the attaining thereof in
action was narrower than it is among ‘more advanced’ nations.
Whatever was the condition of women in the trading cities and
villages, it is certain that in the desert woman was regarded as she
has never since been among Muslims. The modern ḥareem system was there
as yet undreamt of; the maid of the desert was unfettered by the
ruinous restrictions of modern life in the East. She was free to
choose her own husband, and to bind him to have no other wife than
herself. She might receive male visitors, even strangers, without
suspicion: for her virtue was too dear to her and too well assured to
need the keeper. It was the bitterest taunt of all to say to a hostile
clan that their men had not the heart to give nor their women to deny;
for the chastity of the women of the clan was reckoned only next to
the valour and generosity of the men. In those days bastardy was an
indelible stain. It was the wife who inspired the hero to deeds of
glory, and it was her praise that he most valued when he returned
triumphant. The hero of desert song thought himself happy to die in
guarding some women from their pursuers. Wounded to the death,
´Antarah halted alone in a narrow pass, and bade the women press on to
a place of safety. Planting his spear in the ground, he supported
himself on his horse, so that when the pursuers came up they knew not
he was dead, and dared not approach within reach of his dreaded arm.
At length the horse moved, and the body fell to the ground, and the
enemies saw that it was but the corpse of the hero that had held the
pass. In death, as in a life _sans peur et sans reproche_, ´Antarah
was true to the chivalry of his race.
There are many instances like this of the knightly courtesy of the
Arab chief in ‘the Time of Ignorance.’ In the old days, as an ancient
writer says, the true Arab had but one love, and her he loved till
death, and she him. Even when polygamy became commoner, especially in
the towns, it was not what is meant by polygamy in a modern Muslim
state: it was rather the patriarchal system of Abram and Sarai.
There is much in the fragments of the ancient poetry which reflects
this fine spirit. It is ofttimes ‘tender and true,’ and even Islám
could not wholly root out the real Arab sentiment, which reappears in
Muslim times in the poems of Aboo-Firás. Especially valuable is the
evidence of the old poetry with regard to the love of a father for his
daughters. Infanticide, which is commonly attributed to the whole Arab
nation of every age before Islám, was in reality exceedingly rare in
the desert, and after almost dying out only revived about the time of
Moḥammad. It was probably adopted by poor and weak clans, either from
inability to support their children, or in order to protect themselves
from the stain of having their children dishonoured by stronger
tribes, and the occasional practice of this barbarous and suicidal
custom affords no ground for assuming an unnatural hatred and contempt
for girls among the ancient Arabs. These verses of a father to his
daughter tell a different story:—
If no Umeymeh were there, no want would trouble my soul,
no labour call me to toil for bread through pitchiest night;
What moves my longing to live is but that well do I know
how low the fatherless lies, how hard the kindness of kin.
I quake before loss of wealth lest lacking fall upon her,
and leave her shieldless and bare as flesh set forth on a board.
My life she prays for, and I from mere love pray for her death—
yea death, the gentlest and kindest guest to visit a maid.
I fear an uncle’s rebuke, a brother’s harshness for her;
my chiefest end was to spare her heart the grief of a word.
Once more, the following lines do not breathe the spirit of
infanticide:—
Fortune has brought me down (her wonted way)
from station great and high to low estate;
Fortune has rent away my plenteous store:
of all my wealth, honour alone is left.
Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft
did Fortune make me laugh with what she gave!
But for these girls, the Ḳaṭa’s downy brood,
unkindly thrust from door to door as hard,
Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread
in earth that has no lack of breadth and length;
Nay, but our children in our midst, what else
but our hearts are they walking on the ground?
If but the wind blow harsh on one of them,
mine eye says no to slumber all night long.
Hitherto we have been looking at but one side of Arab life. The
Bedawees were indeed the bulk of the race, and furnished the swords of
the Muslim conquests; but there was also a vigorous town-life in
Arabia, and the citizens waxed rich with the gains of their
trafficking. For through Arabia ran the trade-route between East and
West: it was the Arab traders who carried the produce of the Yemen to
the markets of Syria; and how ancient was their commerce one may
divine from the words of a poet of Judæa spoken more than a thousand
years before the coming of Moḥammad.
Wedan and Javan from San´a paid for thy produce:
sword-blades, cassia, and calamus were in thy trafficking.
Dedan was thy merchant in saddle-cloths for riding;
Arabia and all the merchants of Kedar, they were the merchants
of thy hand:
in lambs and rams and goats, in these were they thy merchants.
The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants,
with the chief of all spices, and with every precious stone,
and gold,
they paid for thy produce.
Haran, Aden, and Canneh, the merchants of Sheba, Asshur and
Chilmad were thy merchants;
They were thy merchants in excellent wares,
in cloth of blue and broidered work,
in chests of cloth of divers colours, bound with cords
and made fast among thy merchandize.[10]
Mekka was the centre of this trading life, the typical Arab city of
old times—a stirring little town, with its caravans bringing the silks
and woven stuffs of Syria and the far-famed damask, and carrying away
the sweet-smelling produce of Arabia, frankincense, cinnamon,
sandal-wood, aloe, and myrrh, and the dates and leather and metals of
the south, and the goods that come to the Yemen from Africa and even
India; its assemblies of merchant-princes in the Council Hall near the
Kaạbeh; and again its young poets running over with love and
gallantry; its Greek and Persian slave-girls brightening the luxurious
banquet with their native songs, when as yet there was no Arab school
of music, and the monotonous but not unmelodious chant of the
camel-driver was the national song of Arabia; and its club, where busy
men spent their idle hours in playing chess and draughts, or in
gossiping with their acquaintance. It was a little republic of
commerce, too much infected with the luxuries and refinements of the
states it traded with, yet retaining enough of the free Arab nature to
redeem it from the charge of effeminacy.
Mekka was a great home of music and poetry, and this characteristic
lasted into Muslim times. There is a story of a certain stonemason who
had a wonderful gift of singing. When he was at work the young men
used to come and importune him, and bring him gifts of money and food
to induce him to sing. He would then make a stipulation that they
should first help him in his work; and forthwith they would strip off
their cloaks, and the stones would gather round him rapidly. Then he
would mount a rock and begin to sing, whilst the whole hill was
coloured red and yellow with the variegated garments of his audience.
Singers were then held in the highest admiration, and the greatest
chiefs used to pay their court to ladies of the musical profession.
One of them used to give receptions, open to the whole city, in which
she would appear in great state, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting,
each dressed magnificently, and wearing ‘an elegant artificial
chignon.’ It was in this town-life that the worse qualities of the
Arab came out; it was here that his raging passion for dicing and his
thirst for wine were most prominent. In the desert there was little
opportunity for indulging in either luxury; but in a town which often
welcomed a caravan bringing goods to the value of twenty thousand
pound, such excesses were to be looked for. Excited by the song of the
Greek slave-girl and the fumes of mellow wine, the Mekkan would throw
the dice till, like the Germans of Tacitus, he had staked and lost his
own liberty.
But Mekka was more than a centre of trade and of song. It was the
focus of the religion of the Arabs. Thither the tribes went up every
year to kiss the black stone which had fallen from heaven in the
primeval days of Adam, and to make the seven circuits of the Kaạbeh
naked,—for they would not approach God in the garments in which they
had done their sins,—and to perform the other ceremonies of the
pilgrimage. The Kaạbeh, a cubical building in the centre of Mekka, was
the most sacred temple in all Arabia, and it gave its sanctity to all
the district around. It had been, saith tradition, first built by Adam
from a heavenly model, and then rebuilt from time to time by Seth and
Abraham and Ishmael, and less reverend persons, and it contained the
sacred things of the land. Here was the black stone, here the great
god of red agate, Hubal, and the three hundred and sixty idols, one
for each day of the year, which Moḥammad afterwards destroyed in one
day. Here was Abraham’s stone and that other which marked the tomb of
Ishmael, and hard by Zemzem, the god-sent spring which gushed from the
sand when the forefather of the Arabs was perishing of thirst.
The religion of the ancient Arabs, little as we know of it, is
especially interesting, inasmuch as the Arabs longest retained the
original Semitic character, and hence probably the original Semitic
religion: and so in the ancient religion of Arabia we see the religion
once professed by Chaldeans, Canaanites, Phœnicians. This ancient
religion ‘rises little higher than animistic polydaemonism. It is a
collection of tribal religions standing side by side, only loosely
united, though there are traces of a once closer connection.’ [11]
The great objects of worship were the sun and the stars and the three
moon-goddesses—El-Lát the bright moon, Menáh the dark, and El-´Uzzà
the union of the two; whilst a lower cultus of trees, stones, and
mountains, supposed to be dwelt-in by souls, shows that the religion
had not yet quite risen above simple fetishism. At the time of
Moḥammad the Arabs worshipped numerous images, which may have been
merely a development from the previous stone-worship, or may have been
introduced from intercourse with Christians. There are traces of a
belief in a supreme God behind this pantheon, and the moon-goddesses
and other divinities were regarded as daughters of _the most high God_
(Alláh ta´ála)—a conception also possibly derived from Christianity.
The various deities (but not the Supreme Allah) had their fanes, where
human sacrifices, though rare, were not unknown; and their cultus was
superintended by a hereditary line of seers, who were held in great
reverence, but never developed into a priestly caste.
Besides the tribal gods, individual households had their special
Penates, to whom was due the first and the last salám of the returning
or outgoing host. But in spite of all this superstitious apparatus the
Arabs were never a religious people. In the old days, as now, they
were reckless, skeptical, materialistic. They had their gods and their
divining-arrows, but they were ready to demolish both if the responses
proved contrary to their wishes. A great majority believed in no
future life nor in a reckoning-day of good and evil. If a few tied
camels to the graves of the dead that the corpse might ride mounted to
the judgment-seat, it must have been the exception; and if there are
some doubtful traces of the doctrine of metempsychosis, this again
must have been the creed of the very few.
Christianity and Judaism had made but small impress upon the Arabs.
There were Jewish tribes in the north, and there is evidence in the
Ḳur-án and elsewhere that the traditions and rites of Judaism were
widely known in Arabia. But the creed was too narrow and too
exclusively national to commend itself to the majority of the people.
Christianity fared even worse. Whether or not St. Paul went there, it
is at least certain that very little effect was produced by the
preaching of Christianity in Arabia. We hear of Christians on the
borders, and even two or three among the Mekkans, and bishops and
churches are spoken of at Dhafár and Nejrán. But the Christianity that
the Arabs knew was, like the Judaism of the northern tribes, a very
imperfect reflection of the faith it professed to set forth. It had
become a thing of the head instead of the heart, and the refinements
of monophysite and monothelite doctrines gained no hold upon the Arab
mind.
Thus Judaism and Christianity, though they were well known, and
furnished many ideas and ceremonies to Islám, were never able to
effect any general settlement in Arabia. The common Arabs did not care
much about any religion, and the finer spirits found the wrangling
dogmatism of the Christian and the narrow isolation of the Jew little
to their mind. For there were before the time of Moḥammad men who were
dissatisfied with the low fetishism in which their countrymen were
plunged, and who protested emphatically against the idle and often
cruel superstitions of the Arabs. Not to refer to the prophets, who,
as the Ḳur-án relates, were sent in old time to the tribes of ´Ád and
Thamood to convert them, there was, immediately before the preaching
of Moḥammad, a general feeling that a change was at hand; a prophet
was expected, and women were anxiously hoping for male children if so
be they might mother the Apostle of God; and the more thoughtful
minds, tinged with traditions of Judaism, were seeking for what they
called ‘the religion of Abraham.’ These men were called _‘Ḥaneefs,’_
or skeptics, and their religion seems to have consisted chiefly in a
negative position, in denying the superstition of the Arabs, and in
only asserting the existence of one sole-ruling God whose absolute
slaves are all mankind, without being able to decide on any minor
doctrines, or to determine in what manner this one God was to be
worshipped. So long as the Ḥaneefs could give their countrymen no more
definite creed than this, their influence was limited to a few
inquiring and doubting minds. It was reserved for Moḥammad to
formulate the faith of the Ḥaneefs in the dogmas of Islám. For the
leader of these few ‘skeptics’ was Zeyd ibn ´Amr, to whom Moḥammad
often resorted, and another, Waraḳah, was the cousin of the Prophet
and his near neighbour: and thus the Ḥaneefs were the forerunners of
the man who was to change the destinies of the Arabs.
We can no longer see the true Arab as he was in ‘the Time of
Ignorance,’ and we cannot but regret our loss; for the Pagan Arab is a
noble type of man, though there be nobler. There is much that is
admirable in his high mettle, his fine sense of honour, his
knightliness, his ‘open-handed, both-handed,’ generosity, his frank
friendship, and his manly independent spirit; and the faults of this
wild reckless nature are not to be weighed against its many
excellencies. When Moḥammad turned abroad the current of Arab life, he
changed the character of the people. The mixture with foreign nations,
and the quiet town-life that succeeded to the tumult of conquest,
gradually effaced many of the leading ideas of the old Arab nature,
and the remnant that still dwell in the land of their fathers have
lost much of that nobleness of character which in their ancestors
covered a multitude of sins. Moḥammad in part destroyed the Arab and
created the Muslim. The last is no amends for the first. The modern
Bedawee is neither the one nor the other; he has lost the greatness
of the old type without gaining that of the new. As far as the Arabs
alone are concerned, Moḥammad effected a temporary good and a lasting
harm. As to the world at large, that is matter for another chapter.
II.—_MOḤAMMAD._
For every fiery prophet in old times,
And all the sacred madness of the bard,
When God made music through them, could but speak
His music by the framework and the chord;
And as _he_ saw it _he hath_ spoken truth.
—THE HOLY GRAIL.
A prophet for the Arabs must fulfil two conditions if he will bring
with his good tidings the power of making them accepted: he must
spring from the traditional centre of Arabian religion, and he must
come of a noble family of pure Arab blood. Moḥammad fulfilled both.
His family was that branch of the Ḳureysh which had raised Mekka to
the dignity of the undisputed metropolis of Arabia, and which, though
impoverished, still held the chief offices of the sacred territory.
Moḥammad’s grandfather was the virtual chief of Mekka; for to him
belonged the guardianship of the Kaạbeh, and he it was who used the
generous privilege of giving food and water to the pilgrims who
resorted to the ‘House of God.’ His youngest son, after marrying a
kinswoman belonging to a branch of the Ḳureysh, settled at Yethrib
(Medina), died before the birth of his son (571), and this son,
Moḥammad, lost his mother when he was only six years old. The orphan
was adopted by his grandfather, ´Abd-el-Muṭṭalib; and a tender
affection sprang up between the chief of eighty years and his little
grandson. Many a day the old man might be seen sitting at his wonted
place near the Kaạbeh, and sharing his mat with his favourite. He
lived but two years more; and at his dying request, his son Aboo-Ṭálib
took charge of Moḥammad, for whom he too ever showed a love as of
father and mother.
Such is the bare outline of Moḥammad’s childhood; and of his youth we
know about as little, though the Arabian biographies abound in
legends, of which some may be true and most are certainly false. There
are stories of his journeyings to Syria with his uncle, and his
encounter with a mysterious monk of obscure faith; but there is
nothing to show for this tale, and much to be brought against it. All
we can say is, that Moḥammad probably assisted his family in the war
of the Fijár, and that he must many a time have frequented the annual
Fair of ´Oḳádh, hearing the songs of the desert chiefs and the praise
of Arab life, and listening to the earnest words of the Jews and
Christians and others who came to the Fair. He was obliged at an early
age to earn his own living; for the noble family of the Háshimees, to
which he belonged, was fast losing its commanding position, whilst
another branch of the Ḳureysh was succeeding to its dignities. The
princely munificence of Háshim and ´Abd-el-Muṭṭalib was followed by
the poverty and decline of their heirs. The duty of providing the
pilgrims with food was given up by the Háshimees to the rival branch
of Umeyyeh, whilst they retained only the lighter office of serving
water to the worshippers. Moḥammad must take his share in the labour
of the family, and he was sent to pasture the sheep of the Ḳureysh on
the hills and valleys round Mekka; and though the people despised the
shepherd’s calling, he himself was wont to look back with pleasure to
these early days, saying that God called never a prophet save from
among the sheep-folds. And doubtless it was then that he developed
that reflective disposition of mind which at length led him to seek
the reform of his people, whilst in his solitary wanderings with the
sheep he gained that marvellous eye for the beauty and wonder of the
earth and sky which resulted in the gorgeous nature-painting of the
Ḳur-án. Yet he was glad to change this menial work for the more
lucrative and adventurous post of camel-driver to the caravans of his
wealthy kinswoman Khadeejeh; and he seems to have taken so kindly to
the duty, which involved responsibilities, and to have acquitted
himself so worthily, that he attracted the notice of his employer, who
straightway fell in love with him, and presented him with her hand.
The marriage was a singularly happy one, though Moḥammad was scarcely
twenty-five and his wife nearly forty, and it brought him that repose
and exemption from daily toil which he needed in order to prepare his
mind for his great work. But beyond that, it gave him a loving woman’s
heart, that was the first to believe in his mission, that was ever
ready to console him in his despair and to keep alive within him the
thin flickering flame of hope when no man believed in him—not even
himself—and the world was black before his eyes.
We know very little of the next fifteen years. Khadeejeh bore him sons
and daughters, but only the daughters lived. We hear of his joining a
league for the protection of the weak and oppressed, and there is a
legend of his having acted with wise tact and judgment as arbitrator
in a dispute among the great families of Mekka on the occasion of the
rebuilding of the Kaạbeh. During this time, moreover, he relieved his
still impoverished uncle of the charge of his son ´Alee—afterwards the
Bayard of Islám,—and he freed and adopted a certain captive, Zeyd; and
these two became his most devoted friends and disciples. Such is the
short but characteristic record of these fifteen years of manhood. We
know very little about what Moḥammad did, but we hear only one voice
as to what he was. Up to the age of forty his unpretending modest way
of life had attracted but little notice from his townspeople. He was
only known as a simple upright man, whose life was severely pure and
refined, and whose true desert sense of honour and faith-keeping had
won him the high title of El-Emeen, ‘the Trusty.’
Let us see what fashion of man this was, who was about to work a
revolution among his countrymen, and change the conditions of social
life in a vast part of the world. The picture[12] is drawn from an
older man than we have yet seen; but Moḥammad at forty and Moḥammad at
fifty or more were probably very little different. ‘He was of the
middle height, rather thin, but broad of shoulders, wide of chest,
strong of bone and muscle. His head was massive, strongly developed.
Dark hair, slightly curled, flowed in a dense mass down almost to his
shoulders. Even in advanced age it was sprinkled by only about twenty
grey hairs—produced by the agonies of his “Revelations.” His face was
oval-shaped, slightly tawny of colour. Fine, long, arched eyebrows
were divided by a vein which throbbed visibly in moments of passion.
Great black restless eyes shone out from under long, heavy eyelashes.
His nose was large, slightly aquiline. His teeth, upon which he
bestowed great care, were well set, dazzling white. A full beard
framed his manly face. His skin was clear and soft, his complexion
“red and white,” his hands were as “silk and satin,” even as those of
a woman. His step was quick and elastic, yet firm, and as that of one
“who steps from a high to a low place,” In turning his face he would
also turn his full body. His whole gait and presence were dignified
and imposing. His countenance was mild and pensive. His laugh was
rarely more than a smile....
‘In his habits he was extremely simple, though he bestowed great care
on his person. His eating and drinking, his dress and his furniture,
retained, even when he had reached the fulness of power, their almost
primitive nature. The only luxuries he indulged in were, besides arms,
which he highly prized, a pair of yellow boots, a present from the
Negus of Abyssinia. Perfumes, however, he loved passionately, being
most sensitive of smell. Strong drinks he abhorred.
‘His constitution was extremely delicate. He was nervously afraid of
bodily pain; he would sob and roar under it. Eminently unpractical in
all common things of life, he was gifted with mighty powers of
imagination, elevation of mind, delicacy and refinement of feeling.
“He is more modest than a virgin behind her curtain,” it was said of
him. He was most indulgent to his inferiors, and would never allow his
awkward little page to be scolded, whatever he did. “Ten years,” said
Anas, his servant, “was I about the Prophet, and he never said as much
as ‘uff’ to me.” He was very affectionate towards his family. One of
his boys died on his breast in the smoky house of the nurse, a
blacksmith’s wife. He was very fond of children. He would stop them in
the streets and pat their little cheeks. He never struck any one in
his life. The worst expression he ever made use of in conversation
was, “What has come to him?—may his forehead be darkened with mud!”
When asked to curse some one he replied, “I have not been sent to
curse, but to be a mercy to mankind.” “He visited the sick, followed
any bier he met, accepted the invitation of a slave to dinner, mended
his own clothes, milked his goats, and waited upon himself,” relates
summarily another tradition. He never first withdrew his hand out of
another man’s palm, and turned not before the other had turned.... He
was the most faithful protector of those he protected, the sweetest
and most agreeable in conversation; those who saw him were suddenly
filled with reverence; those who came near him loved him; they who
described him would say, “I have never seen his like either before or
after.” He was of great taciturnity; but when he spoke it was with
emphasis and deliberation, and no one could ever forget what he said.
He was, however, very nervous and restless withal, often low-spirited,
downcast as to heart and eyes. Yet he would at times suddenly break
through these broodings, become gay, talkative, jocular, chiefly among
his own. He would then delight in telling little stories, fairy tales,
and the like. He would romp with the children and play with their
toys.’
‘He lived with his wives in a row of humble cottages, separated from
one another by palm-branches, cemented together with mud. He would
kindle the fire, sweep the floor, and milk the goats himself. ´Áïsheh
tells us that he slept upon a leathern mat, and that he mended his
clothes, and even clouted his shoes, with his own hand. For months
together ... he did not get a sufficient meal. The little food that he
had was always shared with those who dropped in to partake of it.
Indeed, outside the Prophet’s house was a bench or gallery, on which
were always to be found a number of the poor, who lived entirely on
his generosity, and were hence called the “people of the bench.” His
ordinary food was dates and water or barley-bread; milk and honey were
luxuries of which he was fond, but which he rarely allowed himself.
The fare of the desert seemed most congenial to him, even when he was
sovereign of Arabia.’ [13]
Moḥammad was full forty before he felt himself called to be an apostle
to his people. If he did not actually worship the local deities of the
place, at least he made no public protest against the fetish worship
of the Ḳureysh. Yet in the several phases of his life, in his contact
with traders, in his association with Zeyd and other men, he had
gained an insight into better things than idols and human sacrifices,
divining-arrows and mountains and stars. He had heard a dim echo of
some ‘religion of Abraham;’ he had listened to the stories of the
Haggadah: he knew a very little about Jesus of Nazareth. He seems to
have suffered long under the burden of doubt and self-distrust. He
used to wander about the hills alone, brooding over these things; he
shunned the society of men, and ‘solitude became a passion to him.’
At length came the crisis. He was spending the sacred months on Mount
Ḥirá, ‘a huge barren rock, torn by cleft and hollow ravine, standing
out solitary in the full white glare of the desert sun, shadowless,
flowerless, without well or rill.’ Here in a cave Moḥammad gave
himself up to prayer and fasting. Long months or even years of doubt
had increased his nervous excitable disposition. He had had, they say,
cataleptic fits during his childhood, and was evidently more
delicately and finely constituted than those around him. Given this
nervous nature, and the grim solitude of the hill where he had almost
lived for long weary months, blindly feeling after some truth upon
which to rest his soul, it is not difficult to believe the tradition
of the cave, that Moḥammad heard a voice say, ‘Cry!’ ‘What shall I
cry?’ he answers—the question that has been burning his heart during
all his mental struggles—
Cry[14]! in the name of thy Lord, who hath created;
He hath created man from a clot of blood.
Cry! and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful,
Who hath taught [writing] by the pen:
He hath taught man that which he knew not.
Moḥammad arose trembling, and went to Khadeejeh, and told her what he
had seen; and she did her woman’s part, and believed in him and
soothed his terror, and bade him hope for the future. Yet he could not
believe in himself. Was he not perhaps mad, possessed by a devil? Were
these voices of a truth from God? And so he went again on his solitary
wanderings, hearing strange sounds, and thinking them at one time the
testimony of Heaven, at another the temptings of Satan or the ravings
of madness. Doubting, wondering, hoping, he had fain put an end to a
life which had become intolerable in its changings from the heaven of
hope to the hell of despair, when again he heard the voice, ‘Thou art
the messenger of God, and I am Gabriel.’ Conviction at length seized
hold upon him; he was indeed to bring a message of good tidings to
the Arabs, the message of God through His angel Gabriel. He went back
to Khadeejeh exhausted in mind and body. ‘Wrap me, wrap me,’ he said;
and the word came unto him—
O thou enwrapped in thy mantle
Arise and warn!
And thy Lord,—magnify Him!
And thy raiment,—purify it!
And the abomination,—flee it!
And bestow not favours that thou mayest receive again with increase,
And for thy Lord wait thou patiently.
There are those who see imposture in all this; for such I have no
answer. Nor does it matter whether in a hysterical fit or under any
physical disease soever Moḥammad saw these visions and heard these
voices. We are not concerned to draw the lines of demarcation between
enthusiasm and ecstasy and inspiration. It is sufficient that Moḥammad
_did_ see these things—the subjective creations of a tormented mind.
It is sufficient that he believed them to be a message from on high,
and that for years of neglect and persecution and for years of triumph
and conquest he acted upon his belief.
Moḥammad now (612) came forward as the Apostle of the One God to the
people of Arabia: he was at last well assured that his God was of a
truth _the_ God, and that He had indeed sent him with a message to his
people, that they too might turn from their idols and serve the living
God. He was in the minority of one, but he was no longer afraid; he
had learnt that self-trust which is the condition of all true work. At
first he spoke to his near kinsmen and friends; and it is impossible
to overrate the importance of the fact that his closest relations and
those who lived under his roof were the first to believe and the
staunchest of faith. The prophet who is _with_ honour in his own home
need appeal to no stronger proof of his sincerity, and that Moḥammad
_was_ ‘a hero to his own valet’ is an invincible argument for his
earnestness. The motherly Khadeejeh had at once, with a woman’s
instinct, divined her husband’s heart and confirmed his fainting hope
by her firm faith in him. His dearest friends, Zeyd and ´Alee, were
the next converts; and though, to his grief, he could never induce his
lifelong protector, Aboo-Ṭálib, to abandon the gods of his fathers,
yet the old man loved him none the less, and said, when he heard of
´Alee’s conversion, ‘Well, my son, he will not call thee to aught save
what is good; wherefore thou art free to cleave unto him.’ A priceless
aid was gained in the accession of Aboo-Bekr, who succeeded Moḥammad
as the first Khalif of Islám, and whose calm judgment and quick
sagacity, joined to a gentle and compassionate heart, were of
incalculable service to the faith. Aboo-Bekr was one of the wealthiest
merchants of Mekka, and exercised no small influence among his
fellow-citizens, no less by his character than his position. Like
Moḥammad, he had a nickname, Eṣ-Ṣiddeeḳ, ‘The True:’ _The True_ and
_The Trusty_,—no mean augury for the future of the religion!
Five converts followed in Aboo-Bekr’s steps; among them ´Othmán, the
third Khalif, and Ṭalḥah, the man of war. The ranks of the faithful
were swelled from humbler sources. There were many negro slaves in
Mekka, and of them not a few had been predisposed by earlier teaching
to join in the worship of the One God; and of those who were first
converted was the Abyssinian Bilál, the original Muëddin of Islám, and
ever a devoted disciple of the Prophet. These and others from the
Ḳureysh raised the number of Muslims to more than thirty souls by the
fourth year of Moḥammad’s mission—thirty in three long years, and few
of them men of influence!
This small success had been achieved with very little opposition from
the idolaters. Moḥammad had not spoken much in public; and when he did
speak to strangers, he restrained himself from attacking their
worship, and only enjoined them to worship the One God who had
created all things. The people were rather interested, and wondered
whether he were a soothsayer or madman, or if indeed there were truth
in his words. But now (A.D. 615) Moḥammad entered upon a more public
career. He summoned the Ḳureysh to a conference at the hill of
Eṣ-Ṣafá, and said, ‘I am come to you as a warner, and as the
forerunner of a fearful punishment.... I cannot protect you in this
world, nor can I promise you aught in the next life, unless ye say,
There is no God but Alláh.’ He was laughed to scorn, and the assembly
broke up; but from this time he ceased not to preach to the people of
a punishment that would come upon the unbelieving city. He told them,
in the fiery language of the early soorahs, how God had punished the
old tribes of the Arabs who would not believe in His messengers, how
the Flood had swallowed up the people who would not hearken to Noah.
He swore unto them, by the wonderful sights of nature, by the noonday
brightness, by the night when she spreadeth her veil, by the day when
it appeareth in glory, that a like destruction would assuredly come
upon them if they did not turn away from their idols and serve God
alone. He enforced his message with every resource of language and
metaphor, till he made it burn in the ears of the people. And then he
told them of the Last Day, when a just reckoning should be taken of
the deeds they had done; and he spoke of Paradise and Hell with all
the glow of Eastern imagery. The people were moved, terrified;
conversions increased. It was time the Ḳureysh should take some step.
If the idols were destroyed, what would come to them, the keepers of
the idols, and their renown throughout the land? How should they
retain the allegiance of the neighbouring tribes who came to worship
their several divinities at the Kaạbeh? That a few should follow the
ravings of a madman or magician who preferred one god above the
beautiful deities of Mekka was little matter; but that some leading
men of the city should join the sect, and that the magician should
terrify the people in open day with his denunciations of the worship
which _they_ superintended, was intolerable. The chiefs were seriously
alarmed, and resolved on a more active policy. Hitherto they had
merely ridiculed the professors of this new faith; they would now take
stronger measures. Moḥammad himself they dared not touch; for he
belonged to a noble family, which, though it was reduced and
impoverished, had deserved well of the city, and which, moreover, was
now headed by a man who was reverenced throughout Mekka, and was none
other than the adoptive father and protector of Moḥammad himself. Nor
was it safe to attack the other chief men among the Muslims, for the
blood-revenge was no light risk. They were thus compelled to content
themselves with the mean satisfaction of torturing the black slaves
who had joined the obnoxious faction. They exposed them on the
scorching sand, and withheld water till they recanted—which they did,
only to profess the faith once more when they were let go. The first
Muëddin alone remained steadfast: as he lay half stifled he would only
answer, ‘Aḥad! Aḥad!’—‘One [God]! One!’—till Aboo-Bekr came and bought
his freedom, as he was wont to do for many of the miserable victims.
Moḥammad was very gentle with these forced renegades: he knew what
stuff men are made of, and he bade them be of good cheer for their
lips, so that their hearts were sound.
At last, moved by the sufferings of his lowly followers, he advised
them to seek a refuge in Abyssinia—‘a land of righteousness, wherein
no man is wronged;’ and in the fifth year of his mission (616) eleven
men and four women left Mekka secretly, and were received in Abyssinia
with welcome and peace. These first emigrants were followed by more
the next year, till the number reached one hundred. The Ḳureysh were
very wroth at the escape of their victims, and sent ambassadors to the
Nejáshee, the Christian king of Abyssinia, to demand that the refugees
should be given up to them. But the Nejáshee assembled his bishops
and sent for the Muslims and asked them why they had fled; and one of
them answered and said—
‘O king! we lived in ignorance, idolatry, and unchastity; the strong
oppressed the weak; we spoke untruth; we violated the duties of
hospitality. Then a prophet arose, one whom we knew from our youth,
with whose descent and conduct and good faith and morality we are all
well acquainted. He told us to worship one God, to speak truth, to
keep good faith, to assist our relations, to fulfil the rights of
hospitality, and to abstain from all things impure, ungodly,
unrighteous. And he ordered us to say prayers, give alms, and to fast.
We believed in him; we followed him. But our countrymen persecuted us,
tortured us, and tried to cause us to forsake our religion; and now we
throw ourselves upon thy protection. Wilt thou not protect us?’ And he
recited a chapter of the Ḳur-án, which spoke of Christ; and the king
and the bishops wept upon their beards. And the king dismissed the
messengers and would not give up the men.
The Ḳureysh, foiled in their attempt to recapture the slaves, vented
their malice on those believers who remained. Insults were heaped upon
the Muslims, and persecution grew hotter each day. For a moment
Moḥammad faltered in his work. Could he not spare his people these
sufferings? Was it impossible to reconcile the religion of the city
with the belief in one supreme God? After all, was the worship of
those idols so false a thing? did it not hold the germ of a great
truth? And so Moḥammad made his first and last concession. He recited
a revelation to the Ḳureysh, in which he spoke respectfully of the
three moon-goddesses, and asserted that their intercession with God
might be hoped for: ‘Wherefore bow down before God and serve Him;’ and
the whole audience, overjoyed at the compromise, bowed down and
worshipped at the name of the God of Moḥammad—the whole city was
reconciled to the double religion. But this Dreamer of the Desert was
not the man to rest upon a lie. At the price of the whole city of
Mekka he would not remain untrue to himself. He came forward and said
he had done wrong—the devil had tempted him. He openly and frankly
retracted what he had said: and ‘As for their idols, they were but
empty names which they and their fathers had invented.’
Western biographers have rejoiced greatly over ‘Moḥammad’s fall.’ Yet
it was a tempting compromise, and few would have withstood it. And the
life of Moḥammad is not the life of a god, but of a man: from first to
last it is intensely human. But if for once he was not superior to the
temptation of gaining over the whole city and obtaining peace where
before there was only bitter persecution, what can we say of his
manfully thrusting back the rich prize he had gained, freely
confessing his fault, and resolutely giving himself over again to the
old indignities and insults? If he was once insincere—and who is
not?—how intrepid was his after-sincerity! He was untrue to himself
for a while, and he is ever referring to it in his public preaching
with shame and remorse; but the false step was more than atoned for by
his magnificent recantation.
Moḥammad’s influence with the people at large was certainly weakened
by this temporary change of front, and the opposition of the leaders
of the Ḳureysh, checked for the moment by the Prophet’s concession,
now that he had repudiated it, broke forth into fiercer flame. They
heaped insults upon him, and he could not traverse the city without
the encounter of a curse. They threw unclean things at him, and vexed
him in his every doing. The protection of Aboo-Ṭálib alone saved him
from personal danger. This refuge the Ḳureysh determined to remove.
They had attempted before, but had been turned back with a soft
answer. They now went to the chief, of fourscore years, and demanded
that he should either compel his nephew to hold his peace, or else
that he should withdraw his protection. Having thus spoken they
departed. The old man sent for Moḥammad, and told him what they had
said. ‘Now therefore save thyself and me also, and cast not upon me a
burden heavier than I can bear;’ for he was grieved at the strife
between his family and his wider kindred, and would fain have seen
Moḥammad temporize with the Ḳureysh. But though the Prophet believed
that at length his uncle was indeed about to abandon him, his courage
and high resolve never faltered. ‘Though they should set the sun on my
right hand and the moon on my left to persuade me, yet while God
commands me I will not renounce my purpose.’ But to lose his uncle’s
love!—he burst into tears, and turned to go. But Aboo-Ṭálib called
aloud, ‘Son of my brother, come back.’ So he came. And he said,
‘Depart in peace, my nephew, and say whatsoever thou desirest; for, by
the Lord, I will never deliver thee up.’
The faithfulness of Aboo-Ṭálib was soon to be tried. At first, indeed,
things looked brighter. The old chief’s firm bearing overawed the
Ḳureysh, and they were still more cowed by two great additions that
were now joined to the Muslim ranks. One was Moḥammad’s uncle, Ḥamzeh,
‘the Lion of God,’ a mighty hunter and warrior of the true Arab
mettle, whose sword was worth twenty of weaker men to the cause of
Islám. The other was ´Omar, afterwards Khalif, whose fierce impulsive
nature had hitherto marked him as a violent opponent of the new faith,
but who afterwards proved himself one of the mainstays of Islám. The
gain of two such men first frightened then maddened the Ḳureysh. The
leaders met together and consulted what they should do. It was no
longer a case of an enthusiast followed by a crowd of slaves and a few
worthy merchants; it was a faction led by stout warriors, such as
Ḥamzeh, Ṭalḥah, ´Omar,—half-a-dozen picked swordsmen; and the Muslims,
emboldened by their new allies, were boldly surrounding the Kaạbeh,
and performing the rites of their religion in the face of all the
people. The Ḳureysh resolved on extreme measures. They determined to
shut off the obnoxious family of the Háshimees from the rest of their
kindred. The chiefs drew up a document, in which they vowed that they
would not marry with the Háshimees, nor buy and sell with them, nor
hold with them any communication soever; and this they hung up in the
Kaạbeh.
The Háshimees were not many enough to fight the whole city, so they
went every man of them, save one, to the shi-b (or quarter) of
Aboo-Ṭálib,—a long, narrow mountain defile on the eastern skirts of
Mekka, cut off by rocks or walls from the city, except for one narrow
gateway,—and there shut themselves up. For though the ban did not
forbid them to go about as heretofore, they knew that no soul would
speak with them, and that they would be subject to the maltreatment of
any vagabond they met. So they collected their stores and waited.
Every man of the family, Muslim or Pagan, cast in his lot with their
common kinsman, Moḥammad, saving only his own uncle, Aboo-Lahab, a
determined enemy to Islám, to whom a special denunciation is justly
consecrated in the Ḳur-án.
For two long years the Háshimees remained shut up in their quarter.
Only at the pilgrimage-time—when the blessed institution of the sacred
months made violence sacrilege—could Moḥammad come forth and speak
unto the people of the things that were in his heart to say. Scarcely
any converts were made during this weary time; and most of those who
had previously been converted, and did not belong to the doomed clan,
took refuge in Abyssinia; so that in the seventh year of Moḥammad’s
mission there were probably not more than twelve Muslims of any weight
who remained by him. Still the Háshimees remained in their quarter. It
seemed as if they must all perish: their stores were almost gone, and
the cries of starving children could be heard outside. Kind-hearted
neighbours would sometimes smuggle-in a camel’s load of food, but it
availed little. The Ḳureysh themselves were getting ashamed of their
work, and were wishing for an excuse for releasing their kinsmen. The
excuse came in time. It was discovered that the deed of ban was eaten
up by worms, and Aboo-Ṭálib turned the discovery to his advantage. The
venerable old chief went out and met the Ḳureysh at the Kaạbeh, and
pointing to the crumbling leaf he bitterly reproached them with their
hardness of heart towards their brethren: then he departed. And
straightway there rose up five chiefs, heads of great families, and,
amid the murmurs of the fiercer spirits who were still for no quarter,
they put on their armour, and going to the shi-b of Aboo-Ṭálib, bade
the Háshimees come forth in peace. And they came forth.
It was now the eighth year of Moḥammad’s mission; and for the last two
years, wasted in excommunication, Islám had almost stood still, at
least externally. For though Moḥammad’s patient bearing under the ban
had gained over a few of his imprisoned clan to his side, he had made
no converts beyond the walls of his quarter. During the sacred months
he had gone forth to speak to the people,—to the caravans of strangers
and the folk at the fairs,—but he had no success; for hard behind him
followed Aboo-Lahab, the squinter, who mocked at him, and told the
people he was only ‘a liar and a sabian.’ And the people answered that
his own kindred must best know what he was, and they would hear
nothing from him. The bold conduct of the five chiefs had indeed
secured for Moḥammad a temporary respite from persecution; but this
relief was utterly outweighed by the troubles that now fell upon him
and fitly gave that year the name of ‘The Year of Mourning.’ For soon
after the revoking of the ban Aboo-Ṭálib died, and five weeks later
Khadeejeh. In the first Moḥammad lost his ancient protector, who,
though he would never give up his old belief, had yet faithfully
guarded the Prophet from his childhood upwards, and, with the true
Arab sentiment of kinship, had subjected himself and his clan to years
of persecution and poverty in order to defend his brother’s son from
his enemies. The death of Khadeejeh was even a heavier calamity to
Moḥammad. She first had believed in him, and she had ever been his
angel of hope and consolation. To his death he cherished a tender
regret for her; and when his young bride ´Áïsheh, the favourite of his
declining years, jealously abused ‘that toothless old woman,’ he
answered with indignation, ‘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.’
Moḥammad might well feel himself alone in the world. Most of his
followers were in Abyssinia; only a few tried friends remained at
Mekka. All the city was against him; his protector was dead, and his
faithful wife. Dejected, almost hopeless, he would try a new field. If
Mekka rejected him, might not Et-Ṭáïf give him welcome? He set out on
foot on his journey of seventy miles, taking only Zeyd with him; and
he told the people of Et-Ṭáïf his simple message. They stoned him out
of the city for three miles. Bleeding and fainting, he paused to rest
in an orchard, to recover strength before he went back to the insults
of his own people. The owners of the place sent him some grapes; and
he gathered up his strength once more, and bent his weary feet towards
Mekka. On the way, as he slept, his fancy called up a strange dream:
men had rejected him, and now he thought he saw the Jinn, the spirits
of the air, falling down and worshipping the One God, and bearing
witness to the truth of Islám. Heartened by the vision, he pushed on;
and when Zeyd asked him if he did not fear to throw himself again into
the hands of the Ḳureysh, he answered, ‘God will protect His religion
and help His prophet.’
So this lonely man came back to dwell among his enemies. Though a
brave Arab gentleman, compassionating his aloneness, gave him the
Bedawee pledge of protection, yet he well knew that the power of his
foes made such protection almost useless, and at any time he might be
assassinated. But the Ḳureysh had not yet come to think of the last
resource, and meanwhile a new prospect was opening out for Moḥammad.
That same year, as he was visiting the caravans of the pilgrims who
had come from all parts of Arabia to worship at the Kaạbeh, he found a
group of men of Yethrib who were willing to listen to his words. He
expounded to them the faith he was sent to preach, and he told them
how his people had rejected him, and asked them whether Yethrib would
receive him. The men were impressed with his words and professed
Islám, and promised to bring news the next year; then they returned
home and talked of this matter to their brethren. Now at Yethrib,
besides two pagan tribes that had migrated upwards from the south,
there were three clans of Jewish Arabs. Between the pagans and Jews,
and then between the two pagan clans, there had been deadly wars; and
now there were many parties in the city, and no one was master. The
Jews, on the one hand, were expecting their Messiah; the pagans looked
for a prophet. If Moḥammad were not the Messiah, the Jews thought that
he might at least be their tool to subdue their pagan rivals. ‘Whether
he is a prophet or not,’ said the pagans, ‘he is our kinsman by his
mother, and will help us to overawe the Jews; and if he is the coming
prophet, it is our policy to recognise him before those Jews who are
always threatening us with their Messiah.’ The teaching of Moḥammad
was so nearly Jewish, that a union of the two creeds might be hoped
for; whilst to the pagan Arabs of Yethrib monotheism was no strange
doctrine. All parties were therefore willing to receive Moḥammad and
at least try the experiment of his influence. As a peace-maker,
prophet, or messiah, he would be equally welcome in a city torn
asunder by party jealousies.
When the time of pilgrimage again came round, Moḥammad waited at the
appointed place in a secluded glen, and there met him men from the two
pagan tribes of Yethrib—the clans of Khazraj and Aws—ten from one and
two from the other. They told him of the willingness of their people
to embrace Islám, and their hope to make ready the city for his
welcome. They plighted their faith with him in these words: ‘We will
not worship save one God; we will not steal, nor commit adultery, nor
kill our children; we will in nowise slander, nor will we disobey the
prophet in anything that is right.’ This is the first pledge of the
´Aḳabeh.
The twelve men of Yethrib went back and preached Islám to their
people. ‘So prepared was the ground, so zealous the propagation, and
so apt the method, that the new faith spread rapidly from house to
house and from tribe to tribe. The Jews looked on in amazement at the
people, whom they had in vain endeavoured for generations to convince
of the errors of Polytheism and dissuade from the abominations of
idolatry, suddenly and of their own accord casting away their idols
and professing belief in God alone.’ They asked Moḥammad to send them
a teacher versed in the Ḳur-án, so anxious were they to know Islám
truly; and Muṣ´ab was sent, and taught them and conducted their
worship; so that Islám took deep root at Yethrib.
Meanwhile Moḥammad was still among the Ḳureysh at Mekka. His is now an
attitude of waiting; he is listening for news from his distant
converts. Resting his hopes upon them, and despairing of influencing
the Mekkans, he does not preach so much as heretofore. He holds his
peace mainly, and bides his time. One hears little of this interval of
quietude. Islám seems stationary at Mekka, and its followers are
silent and reserved. The Ḳureysh are joyful at the ceasing of those
denunciations which terrified whilst they angered them, yet they are
not quite satisfied. The Muslims have a waiting look, as though there
were something at hand.
It was during this year of expectation that the Prophet’s celebrated
‘Night Journey’ took place. This Mi´ráj has been the subject of
extravagant embellishments on the part of the traditionists and
commentators, and the cause of much obloquy to the Prophet from his
religious opponents. Moḥammad dreamed a dream, and referred to it
briefly and obscurely in the Ḳur-án. His followers persisted in
believing it to have been a reality—an ascent to heaven in the
body—till Moḥammad was sick of repeating his simple assertion that it
was a dream. The traditional form of this wonderful vision may be read
in any life of Moḥammad, and though it is doubtless very different
from the story the Prophet himself gave, it is still a grand vision,
full of glorious imagery, fraught with deep meaning.
Again the time of pilgrimage came round, and again Moḥammad repaired
to the glen of the Mountain-road. Muṣ´ab had told him the good tidings
of the spread of the faith at Yethrib, and he was met at the
rendezvous by more than seventy men. They came by twos and threes
secretly for fear of the Ḳureysh, ‘waking not the sleeper, nor
tarrying for the absent.’ Then Moḥammad recited to them verses from
the Ḳur-án, and in answer to their invitation that he should come to
them, and their profession that their lives were at his service, he
asked them to pledge themselves to defend him as they would their own
wives and children. And a murmur of eager assent rolled round about
from the seventy, and an old man, one of their chiefs, stood forth and
said, ‘Stretch out thy hand, O Moḥammad.’ And the chief struck his own
hand into Moḥammad’s palm in the frank Bedawee fashion, and thus
pledged his fealty. Man after man the others followed, and struck
their hands upon Moḥammad’s. Then he chose twelve of them as leaders
over the rest, saying, ‘Moses chose from among his people twelve
leaders. Ye shall be the sureties for the rest, even as the apostles
of Jesus were; and I am the surety for my people.’ A voice of some
stranger was heard near by, and the assembly hastily dispersed and
stole back to their camp. This is the second pledge of the ´Aḳabeh.
The Ḳureysh knew that some meeting had taken place, and though they
could not bring home the offence to any of the Yethrib pilgrims, they
kept a stricter watch on the movements of Moḥammad and his friends
after the pilgrims had returned homeward. It was clear that Mekka was
no longer a safe place for the Muslims, and a few days after the
second pledge Moḥammad told his followers to betake themselves
secretly to Yethrib. For two months at the beginning of the eleventh
year of the mission (622) the Muslims were leaving Mekka in small
companies to make the journey of 250 miles to Yethrib. One hundred
families had gone, and whole quarters of the city were deserted, left
with empty houses and locked doors, ‘a prey to woe and wind.’ There
were but three believers now remaining in Mekka—these were Moḥammad,
Aboo-Bekr, and ´Alee. Like the captain of a sinking ship, the Prophet
would not leave till all the crew were safe. But now they were all
gone save his two early friends, and everything was ready for the
journey; still the Prophet did not go. But the Ḳureysh, who had been
too much taken by surprise to prevent the emigration, now prepared
measures for a summary vengeance on the disturber of their peace and
the emptier of their city. They set a watch on his house, and, it is
said, commissioned a band of armed youths of different families to
assassinate him together, that the blood recompense might not fall on
one household alone. But Moḥammad had warning of his danger, and
leaving ´Alee to deceive the enemy, he was concealed with Aboo-Bekr in
a narrow-mouthed cave on Mount Thór, an hour-and-a-half’s journey from
Mekka, before the Ḳureysh knew of his escape. For three days they
remained hidden there, while their enemies were searching the country
for them. Once they were very near, and Aboo-Bekr trembled:—‘We are
but two.’ ‘Nay,’ answered Moḥammad, ‘we are three, for God is with
us.’ And a spider, they say, wove its web over the entrance of the
cave, so that the Ḳureysh passed on, thinking that no man had entered
there.
On the third night the pursuit had been almost given over, and the two
fugitives took up their journey again. Mounted on camels they
journeyed to Yethrib. In eight days they reached the outskirts of the
city (September 622). Moḥammad was received with acclamation, and took
up his residence among his kindred. The seat of Islám was transferred
from Mekka to Yethrib, henceforward to be known as
Medina,—_Medeenet-en-Nebee_, ‘the City of the Prophet.’
This is the _Hijreh_, or Flight of the Prophet, from which the Muslims
date their history. Their first year began on the 16th day of June of
the Year of Grace 622.
* * * * *
A great change now comes over the Prophet’s life. It is still the same
man, but the surroundings are totally different; the work to be done
is on a wider, rougher stage. Thus far we have seen a gentle,
thoughtful boy tending the sheep round Mekka;—a young man of little
note, of whom the people only knew that he was pure and upright and
true;—then a man of forty whose solitary communion with his soul has
pressed him to the last terrible questions that each man, if he will
think at all, must some time ask himself—What is life? What does this
world mean? What is reality, what is truth? Long months, years
perhaps, we know not how long and weary, filled with the tortures of
doubt and the despair of ever attaining to the truth, filled with the
dreary thought of his aloneness in the relentless universe, and the
longing to end it all, brought at last their fruits—sure conviction of
the great secret of life, a firm belief in the Creator in whom all
things live and move and have their being, whom to serve is man’s
highest duty and privilege, the one thing to be done. And then ten
years of struggling with careless, unthinking idolators; ten years of
slow results, the gaining over of a few close friends, the devoted
attachment of some slaves and men of the meaner rank; finally, the
conversion of half-a-dozen great citizen chiefs, ending in the flight
of the whole brotherhood of believers from their native city and their
welcome to a town of strangers, where the faith had forced itself home
to the hearts of perhaps two hundred citizens. It was but little that
was done; so many years of toil, of indomitable courage and
perseverance and long-suffering, and only about three hundred converts
at the end! But it was the seed of a great harvest. Moḥammad had shown
men what he was; the nobility of his character, his strong friendship,
his endurance and courage, above all, his earnestness and fiery
enthusiasm for the truth he came to preach,—these things had revealed
the hero, the master whom it was alike impossible to disobey and
impossible not to love. Henceforward it is only a question of time. As
the men of Medina come to know Moḥammad, they too will devote
themselves to him body and soul; and the enthusiasm will catch fire
and spread among the tribes till all Arabia is at the feet of the
Prophet of the One God. ‘No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this
man in a cloak of His own clouting.’ He had the gift of influencing
men, and he had the nobility only to influence them for good.
We have now to see Moḥammad as king. Though he came as a fugitive,
rejected as an impostor by his own citizens, yet it was not long
before his word was supreme in his adopted city. He had to rule over a
mixed and divided people, and this must have helped him to the supreme
voice. There were four distinct parties at Medina. First, the
‘Refugees’ (Muḥájiroon), who had fled from Mekka; on these Moḥammad
could always rely with implicit faith. But he attached equal
importance to the early converts of Medina, who had invited him among
them and given him a home when the future seemed very hopeless before
him, and who were thenceforward known by the honourable title of the
‘Helpers’ (Anṣár). How devoted was the affection of these men is
shown by the well-known scene at El-Ji´ráneh, when the Helpers were
discontented with their share of the spoils, and Moḥammad answered,
‘Why are ye disturbed in mind because of the things of this life
wherewith I have sought to incline the hearts of these men of Mekka
into Islám, whereas ye are already steadfast in the faith? Are ye not
satisfied that others should obtain the flocks and the camels, while
ye carry back the Prophet of the Lord unto your homes? Nay, I will not
leave you for ever. If all mankind went one way, and the men of Medina
went another way, verily I would go the way of the men of Medina. The
Lord be favourable unto them, and bless them, and their sons, and
their sons’ sons, for ever!’ And the ‘Helpers’ wept upon their beards,
and cried with one voice, ‘Yea, we are well satisfied, O Prophet, with
our lot.’ To retain the allegiance of the Refugees and the Helpers was
never a trouble to Moḥammad; the only difficulty was to rein in their
zeal and hold them back from doing things of blood and vengeance on
the enemies of Islám. To prevent the danger of jealousy between the
Refugees and the Helpers, Moḥammad assigned each Refugee to one of the
Anṣár to be his brother; and this tie of gossipry superseded all
nearer ties, till Moḥammad saw the time was over when it was needed.
The third party in Medina was that of the ‘Disaffected,’ or in the
language of Islám the ‘Hypocrites’ (Munáfiḳoon). This was composed of
the large body of men who gave in their nominal allegiance to Moḥammad
and his religion when they saw they could not safely withstand his
power, but who were always ready to turn about if they thought there
was a chance of his overthrow. Moḥammad treated these men and their
leader ´Abdallah ibn Ubayy (who himself aspired to the sovranty of
Medina) with patient courtesy and friendliness, and, though they
actually deserted him more than once at vitally critical moments, he
never retaliated, even when he was strong enough to crush them, but
rather sought to win them over heartily to his cause by treating them
as though they were what he would have them be. The result was that
this party gradually diminished and became absorbed in the general
mass of earnest Muslims, and though up to its leader’s death it
constantly called forth Moḥammad’s powers of conciliation, after that
it vanished from the history of parties.
The fourth party was the real thorn in the Prophet’s side. It
consisted of the Jews, of whom three tribes were settled in the
suburbs of Medina. They had at first been well disposed to Moḥammad’s
coming. He could not indeed be the Messiah, because he was not of the
lineage of David; but he would do very well to pass off upon their
neighbours, the pagan Arabs, as, if not the Messiah, at least a great
prophet; and by his influence the Jews might regain their old
supremacy in Medina. Moḥammad’s teaching was very nearly Jewish—they
had taught him the fables of their Haggadah, and he believed in their
prophets—why should he not be one of them and help them to the
dominion? When Moḥammad came, they found out their mistake; instead of
a tool they had a master. He told the people, indeed, the stories of
the Midrash, and he professed to revive the religion of Abraham: but
he added to this several damning articles; he taught that Jesus _was_
the Messiah, and that no other Messiah was to be looked for; and,
moreover, whilst reverencing and inculcating the doctrine of the
Hebrew prophets and of Christ, as he knew it, he yet insisted on his
own mission as in nowise inferior to theirs—as, in fact, the seal of
prophecy by which all that went before was confirmed or abrogated. The
illusion was over; the Jews would have nothing to say to Islám: they
set themselves instead to oppose it, ridicule it, and vex its Preacher
in every way that their notorious ingenuity could devise.
The step was false: the Jews missed their game, and they had to pay
for it. Whether it was possible to form a coalition,—whether the Jews
might have induced Moḥammad to waive certain minor points if they
recognised his prophetic mission,—it is difficult to say. It seems
most probable that Moḥammad would not have yielded a jot to their
demands, and would have accepted nothing short of unconditional
surrender to his religion. And it is at least doubtful whether Islám
would have gained anything by a further infusion of Judaism. It
already contained all that it could assimilate of the Hebrew faith;
the rest was too narrow for the universal scope of Islám. The religion
of Moḥammad lost little, we may be sure, by the standing aloof of the
Arabian Jews; but the Jews themselves lost much. Moḥammad, indeed,
treated them kindly so long as kindness was possible. He made a treaty
with them, whereby the rights of the Muslims and the Jews were
defined. They were to practise their several religions unmolested;
protection and security were promised to all the parties to the
treaty, irrespective of creed; each was to help the other if attacked;
no alliance was to be made with the Ḳureysh; war was to be made in
common, and no war could be made without the consent of Moḥammad:
crime alone could do away with the protection of this treaty.
But the Jews would not content themselves with standing aloof; they
must needs act on the offensive. They began by asking Moḥammad hard
questions out of their law, and his answers they easily refuted from
their books. They denied all knowledge of the Jewish stories in the
Ḳur-án—though they knew that they came from their own Haggadah, which
was ever in their mouths in their own quarter,—and they showed him
their Bible, where, of course, the Haggadistic legends were not to be
found. Moḥammad had but one course open to him—to say they had
suppressed or changed their books; and he denounced them accordingly,
and said that his was the true account of the patriarchs and prophets,
revealed from heaven. Not satisfied with tormenting Moḥammad with
questions on that Tórah which they were always wrangling about
themselves, they took hold of the every day formulas of Islám, the
daily prayers and ejaculations, and, ‘twisting their tongues,’
mispronounced them so that they meant something absurd or blasphemous.
When asked which they preferred, Islám or idolatry, they frankly
avowed that they preferred idolatry. To lie about their own religion
and to ridicule another religion that was doing a great and good work
around them was not enough for these Jews; they must set their poets
to work to lampoon the women of the believers in obscene verse, and
such outrages upon common decency, not to say upon the code of Arab
honour and chivalry, became a favourite occupation among the poets of
the Jewish clans.
These were offences against the religion and the persons of the
Muslims. They also conspired against the state. Moḥammad was not only
the preacher of Islám, he was also the king of Medina, and was
responsible for the safety and peace of the city. As a prophet, he
could afford to ignore the jibes of the Jews, though they maddened him
to fury; but as the chief of the city, the general in a time of almost
continual warfare, when Medina was kept in a state of military defence
and under a sort of military discipline, he could not overlook
treachery. He was bound by his duty to his subjects to suppress a
party that might (and nearly did) lead to the sack of the city by
investing armies. The measures he took for this object have furnished
his European biographers with a handle for attack. It is, I believe,
solely on the ground of his treatment of the Jews that Moḥammad has
been called ‘a bloodthirsty tyrant:’ it would certainly be difficult
to support the epithet on other grounds.
The bloodthirstiness consists in this: some half-dozen Jews, who had
distinguished themselves by their virulence against the Muslims, or by
their custom of carrying information to the common enemy of Medina,
were executed; two of the three Jewish clans were sent into exile,
just as they had previously come into exile, and the third was
exterminated—the men killed, and the women and children made slaves.
The execution of the half-dozen marked Jews is generally called
assassination, because a Muslim was sent secretly to kill each of the
criminals. The reason is almost too obvious to need explanation. There
were no police or law-courts or even courts-martial at Medina; some
one of the followers of Moḥammad must therefore be the executor of the
sentence of death, and it was better it should be done quietly, as the
executing of a man openly before his clan would have caused a brawl
and more bloodshed and retaliation, till the whole city had become
mixed up in the quarrel. If secret assassination is the word for such
deeds, secret assassination was a necessary part of the internal
government of Medina. The men must be killed, and best in that way. In
saying this I assume that Moḥammad was cognisant of the deed, and that
it was not merely a case of private vengeance; but in several
instances the evidence that traces these executions to Moḥammad’s
order is either entirely wanting or is too doubtful to claim our
credence.
Of the sentences upon the three whole clans, that of exile, passed
upon two of them, was clement enough. They were a turbulent set,
always setting the people of Medina by the ears; and finally a brawl
followed by an insurrection resulted in the expulsion of one tribe;
and insubordination, alliance with enemies, and a suspicion of
conspiracy against the Prophet’s life, ended similarly for the second.
Both tribes had violated the original treaty, and had endeavoured in
every way to bring Moḥammad and his religion to ridicule and
destruction. The only question is whether their punishment was not too
light. Of the third clan a fearful example was made, not by Moḥammad,
but by an arbiter appointed by themselves. When the Ḳureysh and their
allies were besieging Medina, and had well-nigh stormed the defences,
this Jewish tribe entered into negotiations with the enemy, which were
only circumvented by the diplomacy of the Prophet. When the besiegers
had retired, Moḥammad naturally demanded an explanation of the Jews.
They resisted in their dogged way, and were themselves besieged and
compelled to surrender at discretion. Moḥammad, however, consented to
the appointing of a chief of a tribe allied to the Jews as the judge
who should pronounce sentence upon them. The man in question was a
fierce soldier, who had been wounded in the attack on the Jews, and
indeed died from his wound the same day. This chief gave sentence that
the men, in number some six hundred, should be killed, and the women
and children enslaved; and the sentence was carried out. It was a
harsh, bloody sentence, worthy of the episcopal generals of the army
against the Albigenses, or of the deeds of the Augustan age of
Puritanism; but it must be remembered that the crime of these men was
high treason against the State, during time of siege; and those who
have read how Wellington’s march could be traced by the bodies of
deserters and pillagers hanging from the trees, need not be surprized
at the summary execution of a traitorous clan.
Whilst Moḥammad’s supremacy was being established and maintained among
the mixed population of Mekka, a vigorous warfare was being carried on
outside with his old persecutors, the Ḳureysh. On the history of this
war, consisting as it did mainly of small raids and attacks upon
caravans, I need not dwell; its leading features were the two battles
of Bedr and Oḥud, in the first of which three hundred Muslims, though
outnumbered at the odds of three to one, were completely victorious
(A.D. 624, A.H. 2); whilst at Oḥud, being outnumbered in the like
proportion and deserted by the ‘Disaffected’ party, they were almost
as decisively defeated (A.H. 3). Two years later the Ḳureysh,
gathering together their allies, advanced upon Medina and besieged it
for fifteen days; but the foresight of Moḥammad in digging a trench,
and the enthusiasm of the Muslims in defending it, resisted all
assaults, and the coming of the heavy storms for which the climate of
Medina is noted drove the enemy back to Mekka. The next year (A.H. 6)
a ten years’ truce was concluded with the Ḳureysh, in pursuance of
which a strange scene took place in the following spring. It was
agreed that Moḥammad and his people should perform the Lesser
Pilgrimage, and that the Ḳureysh should for that purpose vacate Mekka
for three days. Accordingly, in March 629, about two thousand Muslims,
with Moḥammad at their head on his famous camel El-Ḳaṣwá—the same on
which he had fled from Mekka—trooped down the valley and performed the
rites which every Muslim to this day observes.
‘It was surely a strange sight which at this time presented itself in
the vale of Mekka,—a sight unique in the history of the world. The
ancient city is for three days evacuated by all its inhabitants, high
and low, every house deserted; and, as they retire, the exiled
converts, many years banished from their birthplace, approach in a
great body, accompanied by their allies, revisit the empty homes of
their childhood, and within the short allotted space fulfil the rites
of pilgrimage. The ousted inhabitants, climbing the heights around,
take refuge under tents or other shelter among the hills and glens;
and, clustering on the overhanging peak of Aboo-Ḳubeys, thence watch
the movements of the visitors beneath, as with the Prophet at their
head they make the circuit of the Kaạbeh and the rapid procession
between Eṣ-Ṣafá and Marwah; and anxiously scan every figure if
perchance they may recognise among the worshippers some long-lost
friend or relative. It was a scene rendered possible only by the
throes which gave birth to Islám.’[15]
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, and
some 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 spread of 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 a number
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 loved her 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 Prophet _consciously_ fabricated
speeches, and palmed them off upon the people as the very word of God.
The question, it will at once 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 a great 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 the _major 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, the chief 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 complicated directions 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.
III.—ISLAM.
‘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 sensual
paradise 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 to account 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 Power He 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.
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 that he 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 cultured men 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 by the 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
traditional reverence 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 none wherein 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 Arab _cannot_ ill-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 endeavour to 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 was instituted, 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 should be 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 to do 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 must
not 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:—
‘It is obvious that the home life of any people will depend
almost entirely on the position which is assigned to women. It
is not necessary to inquire what this position is according to
the teaching of the sacred books of a race. Between
Christianity and Islám it is enough to notice that there is
apparently no country where the first is the prevailing
religion in which woman is hindered by religion from obtaining
a position almost, if not quite, on an equality with man, and
similarly, no country where the second prevails where woman is
not in a degraded position.... Under Christianity she is
everywhere free. Under Islám she is everywhere a slave. The
pious Mohammadan, like the pious Jew, thanks God that he has
not been made a woman. The pious Mohammadan woman, like the
pious Jewess, thanks God that she has been made according to
the Creator’s will. Man and woman alike recognise that to be a
woman is to be in an inferior condition. This feeling of the
degradation of woman so pervades Turkey that the poorer
classes of Christians have even become infected by it. When a
son is born there is nothing but congratulations. When a
daughter, nothing but condolences. A polite Turk, if he has
occasion to mention his wife, will do so with an apology....
He regards it as a piece of rudeness to mention the fact to
you, and it would be equally rude for him to inquire after
your wife, or to hint that he knew you were guilty of anything
so unmentionable as to have one. Charles the Twelfth told his
queen that she had been chosen to give children, and not
advice. The Turk regards woman as destined solely for the same
purpose and for his pleasure. Probably polygamy is of itself
sufficient to account for the way in which Mohammadans regard
woman. But whether this is so or not, there is one influence
which polygamy asserts which accounts for the low ideal of
woman prevalent in all Muslim countries. When a man has a
number of wives it is impossible that they can all become his
companions and his confidantes, or that one of them can become
his companion or confidante to the same extent as if the man
had only one wife. Hence a man who is limited to one will not
be contented with beauty alone. He must have a certain amount
of intelligence and education. The Turk, on the other hand,
has no reason whatever to think of anything except beauty. As
he never means to see much of his wife, intelligence or
education is a matter of small account. If he can afford it he
will have a Circassian wife, a woman who has been reared with
the intention of being sold, who has not an idea in her head,
who has seen nothing, and knows nothing. Such a woman would be
as objectionable as a wife to the great majority of Europeans
as a South Sea Island beauty. But she satisfies the ideal of
the Turk. She is beautiful, and beauty is all that he
requires.’
It is this sensual and degraded view of woman that destroys to so
great an extent the good influence which the better part of the
teaching of Islám might exert in the East. So long as women are held
in so light an esteem, they will remain ignorant, and bigoted, and
sensual; and so long as mothers are what most Muslim mothers are now,
their children will be ignorant and fanatical and vicious. In Turkey
there are other influences at work besides the Mohammadan social
system; but Turkish women may serve as an instance of the state of
things which that system encourages. ‘In those early years spent at
home, when the child ought to have instilled into him some germ of
those principles of conduct by which men must walk in the world if
they are to hold up their heads among civilised nations, the Turkish
child is only taught the first steps towards those vicious habits of
mind and body which have made his race what it is. The root of the
evil is partly found in the harem system. So long as that system keeps
Turkish women in their present depressed state, so long will Turkish
boys and girls be vicious and ignorant.’ As I have said elsewhere,[20]
‘It is quite certain that there is no hope for the Turks so long as
Turkish women remain what they are, and home-training is the
initiation of vice.’ If the mother is ignorant and vicious, the son
cannot form a high ideal of womanhood, and thus is barred off from the
chivalrous spirit wherewith alone a man may reach to the highest
love:—that
‘Subtle master under heaven,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.’
The Muslin has no ideal of chivalry like this to make his life pure
and honourable: his religion encourages an opposite view, and the
women among whom he is brought up only confirm it.
If Islám is to be a power for good in the future, it is imperatively
necessary to cut off the social system from the religion. At the
beginning, among a people who had advanced but a little way on the
road of civilisation, the defects of the social system were not so
apparent; but now, when Easterns are endeavouring to mix on equal
terms with Europeans, and are trying to adopt the manners and customs
of the West, it is clear that the condition of their women must be
radically changed if any good is to come of the Europeanising
tendency. The difficulty lies in the close connection between the
religious and social ordinances in the Ḳur-án: the two are so
intermingled that it is hard to see how they can be disentangled
without destroying both. The theory of revelation would have to be
modified. Muslims would have to give up their doctrine of the syllabic
inspiration of the Ḳur-án and exercise their moral sense in
distinguishing between the particular and the general, the temporary
and the permanent: they would have to recognise that there was much in
Moḥammad’s teaching which, though useful at the time, is inapplicable
to the present conditions of life; that his knowledge was often
partial, and his judgment sometimes at fault; that the moral sense is
capable of education as much as the intellect, and, therefore, that
what was apparently moral and wise in the seventh century may quite
possibly be immoral and suicidal in a society of the nineteenth
century. Moḥammad himself said, according to tradition, ‘I am no more
than a man: when I order you anything respecting religion, receive it;
and when I order you about the affairs of the world, then I am nothing
more than man.’ And he seemed to foresee that the time would come when
his minor regulations would call for revision: ‘Ye are in an age,’ he
said, ‘in which, if ye abandon one-tenth of what is ordered, ye will
be ruined. After this, a time will come when he who shall observe
one-tenth of what is now ordered will be redeemed.’[21]
If Muslims would take these warnings of their prophet to heart, there
would be some hope for Islám. Some few of the higher intellects among
them have already admitted the principle of moral criticism applied to
the Ḳur-án; but it is very doubtful whether ‘rational Islám’ will ever
gain a wide following, any more than ‘rational Christianity.’ People
in general do not care to think for themselves in matters religious.
They like their creed served up to them as cooked meat, not raw flesh.
They must have definite texts and hard-and-fast commandments to appeal
to. They will not believe in the spirit, but prefer the letter. They
will have nothing to say to tendencies, but must have facts. It is of
no avail to speak to them of the spirit of a life or of a whole book;
they must hang their doctrine on a solitary sentence. They will either
believe every letter of their scripture, or they will believe nothing.
Such people make up the majority of the professors of Islám; and with
them no reform, within Islám, seems possible. Among the upper (I will
not call them the higher) classes, they are either fanatics or
concealed infidels; and their lives are a proof of the
incompatibility of ordinary Mohammadanism, real or nominal, with a
high social and national life. Among the poorer classes, the social
system has a more restricted field of operation, for the poor are
naturally less able to avail themselves of the permissions of their
Prophet. In a poor community Islám exerts an eminently salutary
influence, as the condition of the Mohammadan converts in Western
Africa conclusively proves. An able observer,[22] whose African birth
and training qualify him in a high degree for properly understanding
the true state of his countrymen, whilst his Christian profession
serves as a guarantee against excessive prejudice in favour of Islám,
has recorded his experience of the work of Mohammadan missionaries in
Liberia and the neighbouring parts of Africa. ‘All careful and candid
observers,’ he remarks, ‘agree that the influence of Islám in Central
and West Africa has been, upon the whole, of a most salutary
character.... As an eliminatory and subversive agency it has displaced
or unsettled nothing as good as itself.’ It has inculcated habits of
moderation and soberness over the whole of the vast region covered by
its emissaries; and so great is the influence of its teaching, that
where there are Muslim inhabitants, even in pagan towns, it is a very
rare thing to see a person intoxicated. The Mohammadan converts drink
nothing but water. ‘From Senegal to Lagos, over two thousand miles,
there is scarcely an important town on the seaboard where there is not
at least one mosque and active representatives of Islám, side by side
with the Christian teacher. And as soon as a pagan, however obscure or
degraded, embraces the Muslim faith, he is at once admitted as an
equal to the society.... The pagan village possessing a Muslim teacher
is always found to be in advance of its neighbours in all the elements
of civilisation.... The introduction of Islám into Central and West
Africa has been the most important, if not the sole, preservative
against the desolations of the slave trade. Mohammadanism furnished a
protection to the tribes who embraced it, by effectually binding them
together in one strong religious fraternity, and enabling them by
their united efforts to baffle the attempts of powerful slave-hunters.
Enjoying this comparative immunity from sudden hostile incursion,
industry was stimulated among them; industry diminished their poverty;
and as they increased in worldly substance, they also increased in
desire for knowledge. Receiving a desire of letters by a study of the
Arabic language, they acquired loftier views, wider tastes, and those
energetic habits which so pleasingly distinguish them from their pagan
neighbours.’ Students often travel on foot from the west coast right
across Africa to study at the great mosque of the Azhar in Cairo. It
must be remembered that these results were observed in the very centre
of African Christianity, in Sierra Leone and other coast settlements.
It is said that in Sierra Leone three-fourths of the Muslim population
were not born Muslims, but were converted from Christianity or
paganism; and this, although ‘all liberated Africans are always handed
over to Christian missionaries for instruction, and their children are
baptized and brought up at the public expense in Christian schools,
and are thus, in a sense, ready-made Christians.’
These facts show that, even in the present day, and with the
competition of Christian missionary societies, Islám may be a power
for good in poor communities—that it can not only give them a pure
instead of a degraded faith, but can raise them socially and
intellectually. The effects of a simple form of Islám on these African
converts may give one some notion of its influence on its hearers in
the early days, before the theologians had corrupted it.
But this good influence is very partial and limited, even among the
poorer classes. In communities where all are poor, Islám is an
excellent agent for improvement; but in countries where there are
many grades of wealth and rank, the poor only ape in a humble manner
the vices of those whom they are taught to regard as their ‘betters.’
In all civilised and wealthy countries the social system of Islám
exerts a ruinous influence on all classes, and if there is to be any
great future for the Mohammadan world, that system of society must be
done away.
THE WOMAN’S CAUSE IS MAN’S; THEY RISE OR SINK
TOGETHER, DWARFED OR GODLIKE, BOND OR FREE.
IV.—_THE ḲUR-ÁN._
The Muslim who reads the Ḳur-án is like the orange-fruit,
whose smell and taste are sweet; and the Muslim who reads not
the Ḳur-án is like the date, which hath no smell, but its
taste is sweet; and the Hypocrite who reads not the Ḳur-án is
like the colocynth, without a smell, and with a bitter taste;
and the Hypocrite who reads it is like the sweet bazil, whose
smell is sweet, but its taste bitter.—_Tradition._
It is an immense merit in the Ḳur-án that there is no doubt as to its
genuineness. The ‘Word of the Lord’ came to Moḥammad, and he uttered
it, and the people wrote it down or committed it to memory; and that
very word we can now read with full confidence that it has remained
unchanged through nearly thirteen hundred years.
The revelations came to Moḥammad in many ways and at all times, but
never ‘in visions bright, transcendant, exalted. They came ghastly,
weird, most horrible. After long solitary broodings, a something used
to move Moḥammad, all of a sudden, with frightful vehemence. He
“roared like a camel,” his eyes rolled and glowed like red coals, and
on the coldest day terrible perspirations would break out all over his
body. When the terror ceased, it seemed to him as if he had heard
bells ringing, “the sound whereof seemed to rend him to pieces”—as if
he had heard the voice of a man—as if he had seen Gabriel—or as if
words _had been written in his heart_. Such was the agony he endured,
that some of the verses revealed to him well-nigh made his hair turn
white.’
No collection of these revelations was made during Moḥammad’s
lifetime; at his death, the Ḳur-án existed only as scattered
chaotically among the believers. But about a year later, the death in
battle of some of the men who had specially committed passages of the
Ḳur-án to memory, and the dread that the whole of Moḥammad’s teaching
might vanish at the end of a generation or two, induced Aboo-Bekr to
make the innovation from which every one shrank, and he gave orders to
the Prophet’s secretary, Zeyd ibn Thábit, to collect the fragments of
the Ḳur-án in one book. So Zeyd gathered the Ḳur-án from palm-leaves,
skins, shoulder-blades, stones, and the hearts of men, arranged the
chapters in a certain order, and presented Aboo-Bekr with a Ḳur-án
which probably differed in no essential particular from the book we
have now. All scholars are agreed that Zeyd did his work faithfully,
and neither inserted nor omitted anything from party motives. But he
seems to have occasionally mixed up fragments of very different date
in one chapter—Moḥammad himself countenanced this—and may possibly
have omitted some portions that were not found till afterwards.
Some twenty years later a second recension was ordered by the Khalif
´Othmán. Slight varieties of reading, mainly dialectal, had arisen;
swords were near being drawn over them; and it was evident that a
serious schism would come about if a uniform authorised text of the
Ḳur-án were not provided. These slight dialectal differences were not
sufficiently settled, it would seem, in Aboo-Bekr’s edition, so this
new recension was made by Zeyd and three men of the Ḳureysh, for they
would best know the original dialect of the Ḳur-án. The new edition
followed the first one, apparently, both in order and in matter;
definitely fixing, however, the true text in the dialect of the
Ḳureysh, and possibly adding any verses that might have been
discovered since Zeyd’s first edition. This second recension was
conducted with the same careful fidelity and scrupulous impartiality
as the first; and it was accepted by all the different parties that
were then disputing the supremacy. Copies of this edition were then
distributed to the principal cities of the empire, and the old copies
and fragments were called-in and burned.
This edition of ´Othmán, made about A.D. 660, is the one that has ever
since been the authorised and only version of the Ḳur-án throughout
the Muslim world and in the studies of European linguists. The only
differences that have since crept into the text are certain
unimportant varieties in vocalisation and orthography and in the
division of verses.
It was a singular system these early revisers went upon. They seem,
indeed, to have established the authenticity of each saying
satisfactorily; but in the arrangement of them they showed an
extraordinary dulness. The tradition of the year when each revelation
was spoken appears to have been lost even in the short time that had
elapsed since it had been spoken. People remembered the words, but
seldom the occasion of the words. Hence the revisers had to devise an
artificial order; not according to subject, nor after the development
of the style, but simply in order of length! They put the longest
chapters first and the shortest last; that is to say, they inverted,
roughly speaking, the true order, for the early soorahs were short and
the later ones long.
Read in this order, the Ḳur-án is an unintelligible jumble. Carlyle
may well say that ‘nothing but a sense of duty could carry any
European through the Ḳur-án.’ You can trace no development of mind or
doctrine in the present arrangement; it is indeed a confused mass of
‘endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement, most crude,
incondite.’ But scholars have long discovered certain signs of a true
order—several kinds of evidence by which a chronological arrangement
of the Ḳur-án may be attempted. These are—(1.) The _references to
historical events_ in the Ḳur-án, as identified by tradition. These,
however, are but few, and occur chiefly in quite the latest soorahs;
and tradition is apt to identify any reference with any event it
chooses. A much more important test is (2.) the _style_; for a
distinct development can be traced in the rime, in the length of
verses, and in the words employed. And then there is (3.) the
_matter_ test, based on what we know of Moḥammad’s life, from which we
can argue a certain change in his preaching at Mekka, and still more
when, from addressing idolaters in his birthplace, he came to preach
to Jews and Christians at Medina. The danger of this last test is that
each man forms his own theory of Moḥammad’s mental and religious
growth, and may arrange the soorahs in accordance with that theory.
Even with these three tests, used by the most accomplished critics, it
is impossible to arrive at an exact order, and to determine the
precise chronological position of each soorah. But whilst it is
admitted that an exact chronological arrangement of each individual
chapter of the Ḳur-án is impossible, it is yet no less certain that
the soorahs may be roughly grouped together, and that these groups can
be definitely assigned to certain periods of Moḥammad’s career.
Professor Th. Nöldeke’s _Geschichte des Qorâns_ has established his
right to the first place in this science of Ḳur-án arrangement, and
his order of soorahs may fairly be accepted as authoritative. Of this
order Mr. Rodwell’s English version of the Ḳur-án is an example,
except that a few of the earliest soorahs are transposed. Nöldeke has
two great divisions of the soorahs: those revealed at Mekka, and those
revealed during the Medina period. Further, he divides the Mekkan
division into three groups.[23]
{ I. A.D. 612-617 (Rodwell, pp. 1-64)—To the Abyssinian
{ exile (fifth year).
{
{ II. A.D. 617-619 (Rodwell, pp. 64-192)—Fifth and sixth
Mekka { years of Moḥammad’s mission.
{
{ III. A.D. 619-622 (Rodwell, pp. 193-366)—From the
{ seventh year to the Flight.
Medina A.D. 622-633 (Rodwell, pp. 366-555)—At Medina.
Read in this order the Ḳur-án becomes intelligible. It is still
confused in its progression and strangely mixed in its contents; but
the development of Moḥammad’s faith can be traced in it, and we can
see dimly into the workings of his mind, as it struggles with the deep
things of God, wrestles with the doubts which echoed the cavils of the
unbelievers, soars upwards on the wings of ecstatic faith, till at
last it gains the repose of fruition. Studied thus, the Ḳur-án is no
longer dull reading to one who cares to look upon the working of a
passionate troubled human soul, and who can enter into its trials and
share in the joy of its triumphs.
In the soorahs revealed at Mekka, Moḥammad has but one theme—God; and
one object—to draw his people away from their idols and bring them to
the feet of that God. He tells them of Him in glowing language, that
comes from the heart’s white heat. He points to the glories of nature,
and tells them these are God’s works. With all the brilliant imagery
of the Arab, he tries to show them what God is, to convince them of
His power and His wisdom and His justice. The soorahs of this period
are short, for they are pitched in too high a key to be long
sustained. The language has the ring of poetry, though no part of the
Ḳur-án complies with the demands of Arab metre. The sentences are
short and full of half-restrained energy, yet with a musical cadence.
The thought is often only half expressed; one feels the speaker has
essayed a thing beyond words, and has suddenly discovered the
impotence of language, and broken off with the sentence unfinished.
There is the fascination of true poetry about these earliest soorahs;
as we read them we understand the enthusiasm of the Prophet’s
followers, though we cannot fully realise the beauty and the power,
inasmuch as we cannot hear them hurled forth with Moḥammad’s fiery
eloquence. From first to last the Ḳur-án is essentially a book to be
heard, not read, but this is especially the case with the earliest
chapters.
In the soorahs of the second period of Mekka we begin to trace the
decline of the Prophet’s eloquence. There are still the same earnest
appeals to the people, the same gorgeous pictures of the Last Day and
the world to come; but the language begins to approach the quiet of
prose, the sentences become longer, the same words and phrases are
frequently repeated, and the wearisome stories of the Jewish prophets
and patriarchs, which fill so large a place in the later portion of
the Ḳur-án, now make their appearance. The fierce passion of the
earliest soorahs, that could not out save in short burning verses,
gives place to a calmer more argumentative style. Moḥammad appeals
less to the works of God as proofs of his teaching, and more to the
history of former teachers, and the punishments of the people who
would not hear them. And the characteristic oaths of the first period,
when Moḥammad swears by all the varied sights of nature as they
mirrored themselves in his imagination, have gone, and in their place
we find only the weaker oath ‘by the Ḳur-án.’ And this declension is
carried still further in the last group of the soorahs revealed at
Mekka. The style becomes more involved and the sentences longer, and
though the old enthusiasm bursts forth ever and anon, it is rather an
echo of former things than a new and present intoxication of faith.
The fables and repetitions become more and more dreary, and but for
the rich eloquence of the old Arabic tongue, which gives some charm
even to inextricable sentences and dull stories, the Ḳur-án at this
period would be unreadable. As it is, we feel we have fallen the whole
depth from poetry to prose, and the matter of the prose is not so
superlative as to give us amends for the loss of the poetic thought
of the earlier time and the musical fall of the sentences.
In the soorahs of the Medina period these faults reach their climax.
We read a singularly varied collection of criminal laws, social
regulations, orders for battle, harangues to the Jews, first
conciliatory, then denunciatory, and exhortations to spread the faith,
and such-like heterogeneous matters. Happily the Jewish stories
disappear in the latest soorahs, but their place is filled by scarcely
more palatable materials. The chapters of this period are interesting
chiefly as containing the laws which have guided every Muslim state,
regulated every Muslim society, and directed in their smallest acts
every Mohammadan man and woman in all parts of the world from the
Prophet’s time till now. The Medina part of the Ḳur-án is the most
important part for Islám, considered as a scheme of ritual and a
system of manners; the earliest Mekka revelations are those which
contain what is highest in a great religion and what was purest in a
great man.
The word _Ḳur-án_ means the _crying_, _reciting_, _reading_, and is
applied not only to the whole book, but to any chapter or section of
it. The Ḳur-án is also called El-Furḳán, ‘the Distinguisher,’ and
El-Muṣḥaf, ‘the Volume,’ and El-Kitáb, ‘the Book,’ and Edh-Dhikr, ‘the
Admonition.’ The Ḳur-án contains, in its ordinary form, 114 chapters
(_soorahs_), 6616 verses (_áyát_, literally ‘signs’ or ‘wonders’),
77,934 words, and 323,671 letters, according to the estimates of
laborious Muslim divines, which differ, however, in a slight manner in
consequence of the various divisions of verses. After the first
chapter, which is a short prayer (the Fátiḥah), the soorahs gradually
decrease in length from 289 verses in the second to from three to six
in the ten concluding chapters. Each chapter is headed by a title,
taken from same prominent word in it (as the ‘Chapter of the
Striking,’ ‘of the Cow,’ &c.); beneath which is noted whether it was
promulgated (according to tradition) at Mekka or Medina, and the
number of its verses. Then follow the words:—‘In the Name of God, the
Compassionate, the Merciful;’ after which the chapter begins. To
twenty-nine chapters are prefixed certain letters (_e.g._, ch. ii. on
p. 4), or a single letter, which have never been successfully
interpreted. The Muslims believe them to conceal profound mysteries.
In Soorah 55 a refrain is found, and traces of a like imitation in
Soorahs 54 and 17. It is probable that the Ḳur-án was originally
_chanted_ in somewhat the same manner as it is in the present day.
The Ḳur-án is also divided in thirty sections, and these are again
subdivided; and from this division rather than from chapter and verse
do the Muslims generally quote.
‘The Muslims absolutely deny that the Ḳur-án was composed by their
Prophet himself, or by any other for him; it being their general and
orthodox belief that it is of divine original; nay, that it is eternal
and uncreated, remaining, as some express it, in the very essence of
God; that the first transcript has been from everlasting by God’s
throne, written on a tablet of vast size, called the Preserved Tablet,
in which are also recorded the divine decrees, past and future; that a
copy from this tablet, in one volume on paper, was, by the ministry of
the angel Gabriel, sent down to the lowest heaven, in the month of
Ramaḍán, on the Night of Power;[24] whence Gabriel revealed it to
Moḥammad by parcels, some at Mekka, and some at Medina, at different
times during the space of twenty-three years, as the exigency of
affairs required; giving him, however, the consolation to show him the
whole (which they tell us was bound in silk, and adorned with gold and
precious stones of Paradise) once a year; but in the last year of his
life he had the favour to see it twice. They say that few chapters
were delivered entire, the most part being revealed piecemeal, and
written down from time to time by the Prophet’s amanuensis, in such or
such a part of such or such a chapter, till they were completed,
according to the directions of the angel. The first parcel that was
revealed is generally agreed to have been the first five verses of the
ninety-sixth chapter. After the new revealed passages had been from
the Prophet’s mouth taken down in writing by his scribe, they were
published to his followers, several of whom took copies for their
private use; but the far greater number got them by heart. The
originals, when returned, were put promiscuously into a chest, without
regard to any order of time, for which reason it is uncertain when
many passages were revealed.
‘The Ḳur-án being the Muslims’ rule of faith and practice, it is no
wonder its expositors and commentators are so very numerous; and it
may not be amiss to take notice of the rules they observe in
expounding it.
‘One of the most learned commentators distinguishes the contents of
the Ḳur-án into allegorical and literal. The former comprehends the
more obscure, parabolical, and enigmatical passages, and such as are
repealed or abrogated; the latter, those which are plain, perspicuous,
liable to no doubt, and in full force.
‘To explain these severally in a right manner, it is necessary, from
tradition and study, to know the time when each passage was revealed,
its circumstances, state, and history, and the reasons or particular
emergencies for the sake of which it was revealed. Or, more
explicitly, whether the passage was revealed at Mekka or at Medina;
whether it be abrogated, or does itself abrogate any other passage;
whether it be anticipated in order of time or postponed; whether it be
distinct from the context or depend thereon; whether it be particular
or general; and lastly, whether it be implicit by intention, or
explicit in words.
‘By what has been said, the reader may easily believe that this book
is held by the Muslims in the greatest reverence and esteem. The more
strict among them dare not touch it without being first washed or
legally purified; which lest they should do by inadvertence, they
sometimes write these words of the book itself on the cover or label,
“None shall touch it but they who are purified.” They read it with
great care and respect, never holding it below their girdles. They
swear by it, consult it in their weighty occasions, carry it with them
to war, inscribe sentences from it on their banners, sometimes adorn
it with gold and precious stones, and knowingly suffer it not to be in
the possession of any person of a different persuasion. It is the
foundation of their education; and the children in the schools are
taught to chant it, and commit the whole of it to memory.’
BOOKS.
In reading a large number of works bearing upon the subjects of this
Introduction, I have remarked a curious freedom of quotation in most
of the writers. I find the same sentence, or at least the same
thought, repeated in several books without any reference to the author
who first put it forth. Each writer seems to have studied his
predecessors with such minuteness that he can quote their very words,
but he does not appear to remember whence the words came. When a
thought has once been perfectly expressed, it were a ridiculous vanity
to seek to frame it in different words, and so far it is undoubtedly
wise to make use of the best of what has preceded us; nevertheless, it
is well to acknowledge our debt. Yet thoughts, and even phrases,
impress themselves on the memory till one unconsciously comes to
appropriate them as his own; and this, I doubt not, is the cause of
much of the plagiarism I have noticed. It is extremely probable that I
have been guilty of the same sin. I have crowded my pages with marks
of quota
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