compromises in the West, and was materially modified by Teutonic
influence and the revival of classicism. It might therefore be
supposed that in Islam Christian theory underwent similar modification
or disappeared entirely. But the fact is not so. At the outset, we
stated, as will be remembered, that Muhammedan scholars were
accustomed to propound their dicta as utterances given by Muhammed
himself, and in this form Christian ideas also came into circulation
among Muhammedans. When attempts were made to systematise these
sayings, all were treated as alike authentic, and, as traditional,
exerted their share of influence upon the formation of canon law. Thus
questions of temporary importance to mediaeval Christianity became
permanent elements in Muhammedan theology.
One highly instructive instance may be given. During the century which
preceded the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy, the whole of nearer
Asia was disturbed by the question whether the erection and veneration
of images was permissible. That Constantinople attempted to prohibit
such veneration is well known: but after a long struggle the church
gained its wishes. Islam was confronted with the problem and decided
for prohibition, doubtless under Jewish influence. Sayings of Muhammed
forbid the erection of images. This prohibition became part of canon
law and therefore binding for all time: it remains obligatory at the
present day, though in practice it is often transgressed. Thus the
process of development which was continued in Christendom, came to a
standstill in Islam, and many similar cases might be quoted.
Here begins the development of Muhammedan jurisprudence or, more
exactly, of the doctrine of duty, which includes every kind of human
activity, duties to God and man, religion, civil law, the penal code,
social morality and economics. This extraordinary system of moral
obligations, as developed in Islam, though its origin is obscure, is
doubtless rooted in the ecclesiastical law of Christendom which was
then first evolved. I have no doubt that the development of Muhammedan
tradition, which precedes the code proper, was dependent upon the
growth of canon law in the old Church, and that this again, or at
least the purely legal part of it, is closely connected with the
pre-Justinian legislation. Roman law does not seem to me to have
influenced Islam immediately in the form of Justinian's _Corpus
Juris_, but indirectly from such ecclesiastical sources as the
Romano-Syrian code. This view, however, I would distinctly state, is
merely my conjecture. For our present purpose it is more important to
establish the fact that the doctrine of duty canonised the manifold
expressions of the theory that life is a religion, with which we have
met throughout the traditional literature: all human acts are thus
legally considered as obligatory or forbidden when corresponding with
religious commands or prohibitions, as congenial or obnoxious to the
law or as matters legally indifferent and therefore permissible. The
arrangement of the work of daily life in correspondence with these
religious points of view is the most important outcome of the
Muhammedan doctrine of duties. The religious utterances which also
cover the whole business of life were first made duties by this
doctrine: in practice their fulfilment is impossible, but the theory
of their obligatory nature is a fundamental element in Muhammedanism.
Where the doctrine of duties deals with legal rights, its application
was in practice confined to marriage and the affairs of family life:
the theoretical demands of its penal clauses, for instance, raise
impossible difficulties. At the same time, it has been of great
importance to the whole spiritual life of Islam down to the present
day, because it reflects Muhammedan ideals of life and of man's place
in the world. Even to-day it remains the daily bread of the soul that
desires instruction, to quote the words of the greatest father of the
Muhammedan church. It will thus be immediately obvious to what a vast
extent Christian theory of the seventh and eighth centuries still
remains operative upon Muhammedan thought throughout the world.
Considerable parts of the doctrine of duties are concerned with the
forms of Muhammedan worship. It is becoming ever clearer that only
slight tendencies to a form of worship were apparent under Muhammed.
The mosque, the building erected for the special purpose of divine
service, was unknown during the prophet's lifetime; nor was there any
definite church organisation, of which the most important parts are
the common ritual and the preaching. Tendencies existed but no system,
was to be found: there was no clerical class to take an interest in
the development of an order of divine service. The Caliphs prayed
before the faithful in the capital, as did the governors in the
provinces. The military commanders also led a simple service in their
own stations.
It was contact with foreign influence which first provided the impulse
to a systematic form of worship. Both Christians and Jews possessed
such forms. Their example was followed and a ritual was evolved, at
first of the very simplest kind. No detailed organisation, however,
was attempted, until Christian influence led to the formation of the
class which naturally took an interest in the matter, the professional
theologians. These soon replaced the military service leaders. This
change denoted the final stage in the development of ritual. The
object of the theologians was to subject the various occupations of
life to ritual as well as to religion. The mediatorial or sacramental
theories of the priestly office were unknown to Islam, but ritual
customs of similar character were gradually evolved, and are
especially pronounced in the ceremonies of marriage and burial.
More important, however, was the development of the official service,
the arrangement of the day and the hour of obligatory attendance and
the introduction of preaching: under Muhammed and his early followers,
and until late in the Omajjad period, preaching was confined to
addresses, given as occasion demanded, but by degrees it became part
of the regular ritual. With it was afterwards connected the
intercession for the Caliphs, which became a highly significant part
of the service, as symbolising their sovereignty. It seems to me very
probable that this practice was an adoption, at any rate in theory, of
the Christian custom of praying for the emperor. The pulpit was then
introduced under Christian influence, which thus completely
transformed the chair (_mimbar_) of the ancient Arab judges and rulers
and made it a piece of church furniture; the Christian _cancelli_ or
choir screens were adopted and the mosque was thus developed. Before
the age of mosques, a lance had been planted in the ground and prayer
offered behind it: so in the mosque a prayer niche was made, a
survival of the pre-existing custom. There are many obscure points in
the development of the worship, but one fact may be asserted with
confidence: the developments of ritual were derived from pre-existing
practices, which were for the most part Christian.
But the religious energy of Islam was not exclusively devoted to the
development and practice of the doctrine of duties; at the same time
this ethical department, in spite of its dependency upon Christian and
Jewish ideas, remains its most original achievement: we have pursued
the subject at some length, because its importance is often overlooked
in the course of attempts to estimate the connection between
Christianity and Islam. On the other hand, affinities in the regions
of mysticism and dogma have long been matter of common knowledge and a
brief sketch of them will therefore suffice. If not essential to our
purpose within the limits of this book, they are none the less
necessary to complete our treatment of the subject.
By mysticism we understand the expression of religious emotion, as
contrasted with efforts to attain righteousness by full obedience to
the ethical doctrine of duties, and also in contrast to the
hair-splitting of dogmatic speculation: mysticism strove to reach
immediate emotional unity with the Godhead. No trace of any such
tendency was to be found in the Qoran: it entered Islam as a complete
novelty, and the affinities which enabled it to gain a footing have
been difficult to trace.
Muhammedan mysticism is certainly not exclusively Christian: its
origins, like those of Christian mysticism, are to be found in the
pantheistic writings of the Neoplatonist school of Dionysius the
Areopagite: but Islam apparently derived its mysticism from Christian
sources. In it originated the idea, with all its capacity for
development, of the mystical love of God: to this was added the theory
and practice of asceticism which was especially developed by
Christianity, and, in later times, the influence of Indian philosophy,
which is unmistakable. Such are the fundamental elements of this
tendency. When the idea of the Nirwana, the Arab _fan[=a]_, is
attained, Muhammedanism proper comes to an end. But orthodoxy controls
the divergent elements: it opposes any open avowal of the logical
conclusion, which would identify "God" and the "ego," but in practice
this group of ideas, pantheistic in all but name, has been received
and given a place side by side with the strict monotheism of the Qoran
and with the dogmatic theology. Any form of mysticism which is pushed
to its logical consequences must overthrow positive religion. By
incorporating this dangerous tendency within itself, Islam has averted
the peril which it threatens. Creed is no longer endangered, and this
purpose being secured, thought is free.
Union with God is gained by ecstasy and leads to enthusiasm. These
terms will therefore show us in what quarter we must seek the
strongest impulses to mysticism. The concepts, if not the actual
terms, are to be found in Islam: they were undoubtedly transmitted by
Christianity and undergo the wide extension which results in the
dervish and fakir developments. _Dervish_ and _fakir_ are the Persian
and Arabic words for "beggar": the word _sufi_, a man in a woollen
shirt, is also used in the same sense. The terms show that asceticism
is a fundamental element in mysticism; asceticism was itself an
importation to Islam. Dervishes are divided into different classes or
orders, according to the methods by which they severally prefer to
attain ecstasy: dancing and recitation are practised by the dancing
and howling dervishes and other methods are in vogue. It is an
institution very different from monasticism but the result of a course
of development undoubtedly similar to that which produced the monk:
dervishism and monasticism are independent developments of the same
original idea.
Among these Muhammedan companies attempts to reach the point of
ecstasy have developed to a rigid discipline of the soul; the believer
must subject himself to his master, resigning all power of will, and
so gradually reaches higher stages of knowledge until he is eventually
led to the consciousness of his absolute identity with God. It seems
to me beyond question that this method is reflected in the _exercitiis
spiritualibus_ of Ignatius Loyola, the chief instrument by which the
Jesuits secured dominion over souls. Any one who has realised the
enormous influence which Arab thought exerted upon Spanish
Christianity so late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, will
not regard the conjecture as unfounded.
When a man's profession or position prevented him from practising
these mystical exercises, he satisfied his religious needs by
venerating persons who were nearer to the deity and whose intercession
was effectual even after their death and sometimes not until they were
dead: hence arose the veneration of saints, a practice as alien as
pantheistic dogma to primitive Islam. The adoption of Christian saint
worship was not possible until the person of Muhammed himself had been
exalted above the ordinary level of humanity. Early Muhammedans
observed that the founder of Christianity was regarded by popular
opinion as a miracle worker of unrivalled power: it was impossible for
the founder of Islam to remain inferior in this respect. Thus the
early biographies of the prophet, which appeared in the first century
of Muhammedanism, recount the typical miracles of the Gospels, the
feeding of multitudes, healing the sick, raising the dead and so
forth. Two methods of adoption may be distinguished. Special features
are directly borrowed, or the line of advance is followed which had
introduced the worship of saints and relics to Christianity a short
time before. The religious emotions natural to any people produced a
series of ideas which pass from one religion to another. Outward form
and purport may be changed, but the essential points remain unaltered
and are the living expression of that relation to God in which a
people conceives itself to stand. Higher forms of religion--a fact as
sad as it is true--require a certain degree not only of moral but of
intellectual capacity.
Thus we have traversed practically the whole circle of religious life
and have everywhere found Islam following in the path of Christian
thought. One department remains to be examined, which might be
expected to offer but scanty opportunity for borrowings of this kind;
this is dogma. Here, if anywhere, the contrast between the two
religions should be obvious. The initial divergencies were so
pronounced, that any adoption of Christian ideas would seem
impossible. Yet in those centuries, Christianity was chiefly agitated
by dogmatic questions, which occupied men's minds as greatly as social
problems at the present day. Here we can observe most distinctly, how
the problems at least were taken over by Islam.
Muhammedan dogmatic theology is concerned only with three main
questions, the problem of free-will, the being and attributes of God,
and the eternal uncreated nature of God's word. The mere mention of
these problems will recall the great dogmatic struggles of early
Christianity. At no time have the problems of free-will and the nature
of God, been subjects of fiercer dispute than during the
Christological and subsequent discussions. Upholders of freedom or of
determinism could alike find much to support their theories in the
Qoran: Muhammed was no dogmatist and for him the ideas of man's
responsibility and of God's almighty and universal power were not
mutually exclusive. The statement of the problem was adopted from
Christianity as also was the dialectical subtlety by which a solution
was reached, and which, while admitting the almighty power of God,
left man responsible for his deeds by regarding him as free to accept
or refuse the admonitions of God. Thus the thinkers and their demands
for justice and righteous dealing were reconciled to the blind
fatalism of the masses, which again was not a native Muhammedan
product, but is the outcome of the religious spirit of the East.
The problem of reconciling the attributes of God with the dogma of His
unity was solved with no less subtlety. The mere idea that a
multiplicity of attributes was incompatible with absolute unity was
only possible in a school which had spent centuries in the desperate
attempt to reconcile the inference of a divine Trinity with the
conception of absolute divine unity.
Finally, the third question, "Was the Qoran, the word of God, created
or not?" is an obvious counterpart of the Logos problem, of the
struggle to secure recognition of the Logos as eternal and uncreated
together with God. Islam solved the question by distinguishing the
eternal and uncreated Qoran from the revealed and created. The eternal
nature of the Qoran was a dogma entirely alien to the strict
monotheism of Islam: but this fact was never realised, any more than
the fact that the acceptance of the dogma was a triumph for
Graeco-Christian dialectic. There can be no more striking proof of the
strength of Christian influence: it was able to undermine the
fundamental dogma of Islam, and the Muhammedans never realised the
fact.
In our review of these dogmatic questions, we have met with a novel
tendency, that to metaphysical speculation and dialectic. It was from
Christendom, not directly from the Greek world, that this spirit
reached Islam: the first attitude of Muhammedanism towards it was that
which Christianity adopted towards all non-religious systems of
thought. Islam took it up as a useful weapon for the struggle against
heresy. But it soon became a favourite and trusted implement and
eventually its influence upon Muhammedan philosophy became paramount.
Here we meet with a further Christian influence, which, when once
accepted, very largely contributed to secure a similar development of
mediaeval Christian and Muhammedan thought. This was Scholasticism,
which was the natural and inevitable consequence of the study of Greek
dialectic and philosophy. It is not necessary to sketch the growth of
scholasticism, with its barrenness of results in spite of its keen
intellectual power, upon ground already fertilised by ecclesiastical
pioneers. It will suffice to state the fact that these developments of
the Greek spirit were predominant here as in the West: in either case
important philosophies rise upon this basis, for the most part
professedly ecclesiastical, even when they occasionally struck at the
roots of the religious system to which they belonged. In this
department, Islam repaid part of its debt to Christianity, for the
Arabs became the intellectual leaders of the middle ages.
Thus we come to the concluding section of this treatise; before we
enter upon it, two preliminary questions remain for consideration. If
Islam was ready to learn from Christianity in every department of
religious life, what was the cause of the sudden superiority of
Muhammedanism to the rising force of Christianity a few centuries
later? And secondly, in view of the traditional antagonism between the
Christian and Muhammedan worlds, how was Christianity able to adopt so
large and essential a portion of Muhammedan thought?
The answer in the second case will be clear to any one who has
followed our argument with attention. The intellectual and religious
outlook was so similar in both religions and the problem requiring
solution so far identical that nothing existed to impede the adoption
of ideas originally Christian which had been developed in the East.
The fact that the West could accept philosophical and theological
ideas from Islam and that an actual interchange of thought could
proceed in this direction, is the best of proofs for the soundness of
our argument that the roots of Muhammedanism are to be sought in
Christianity. Islam was able to borrow from Christianity for the
reason that Muhammed's ideas were derived from that source: similarly
Christianity was able to turn Arab thought to its own purposes because
that thought was founded upon Christian principles. The sources of
both religions lie in the East and in Oriental thought.
No less is true of Judaism, a scholastic system which was excellently
adapted by its international character, to become a medium of
communication between Christianity and Muhammedanism during those
centuries. In this connection special mention must be made of the
Spanish Jews; to their work, not only as transmitting but also as
originating ideas a bare reference must here suffice. But of greater
importance was the direct exchange of thought, which proceeded through
literary channels, by means of translations, especially by word of
mouth among the Christians and Muhammedans who were living together in
Southern Italy, Sicily, and Spain, and by commercial intercourse.
The other question concerns the fundamental problem of European
medievalism. We see that the problems with which the middle ages in
Europe were confronted and also that European ethics and metaphysics
were identical with the Muhammedan system: we are moreover assured
that the acceptance of Christian ideas by Islam can only have taken
place in the East: and the conclusion is obvious that mediaeval
Christianity was also primarily rooted in the East. The transmission
of this religious philosophy to the non-Oriental peoples of the West
at first produced a cessation of progress but opened a new
intellectual world when these peoples awoke to life in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. But throughout the intermediate period
between the seventh and thirteenth centuries the East was gaining
political strength and was naturally superior to the West where
political organisation and culture had been shattered by the Germanic
invasions; in the East again there was an organic unity of national
strength and intellectual ideals, as the course of development had not
been interrupted. Though special dogmatic points had been changed, the
general religious theory remained unaltered throughout the nearer
East. Thus the rising power of Islam, which had high faculties of
self-accommodation to environment, was able to enter upon the heritage
of the mixed Graeco-Oriental civilisation existing in the East; in
consequence it gained an immediate advantage over the West, where
Eastern ideas were acclimatised with difficulty.
The preponderance of Muhammedan influence was increased by the fact
that Islam became the point of amalgamation for ancient Eastern
cultures, in particular for those of Greece and Persia: in previous
centuries preparation had been made for this process by the steady
transformation of Hellenism to Orientalism. Persia, however, had been
the main source of Eastern civilisation, at any rate since the
Sassanid period: the debt of Byzantine culture to Persia is well
known. Unfortunately no thorough investigation has been made of these
various and important changes, but it is clear that Persian
civilisation sent its influence far westward, at first directly and
later through the medium of Muhammedanism. The same facts hold good
with regard to the diffusion of intellectual culture from Persia. How
far Persian ideas may have influenced the development of Muhammedan
and even of Christian eschatology, we need not here discuss: but the
influence of the great Graeco-Christian schools of Persia was
enormous: they made the Arabs acquainted with the most important works
in Greek and Persian literature. To this fact was due the wide
influence of Islam upon Christian civilisation, which is evidenced
even to-day by the numerous words of Arab origin to be found in modern
European languages; it is in fact an influence the strength of which
can hardly be exaggerated. Not only the commercial products of the
East, but important economic methods, the ideals of our so-called
European chivalry and of its love poetry, the foundations of our
natural sciences, even theological and philosophical ideas of high
value were then sent to us from the East. The consequences of the
crusades are the best proof of the enormous superiority of the
Muhammedan world, a fact which is daily becoming more obvious. Here we
are concerned only with the influence exerted by Muhammedan
philosophy. It would be more correct to speak of post-classical than
of Muhammedan philosophy. But as above, the influence of Christianity
upon Islam was considered, so now the reverse process must be
outlined. In either case it was the heir to the late classical age, to
the mixed Graeco-Oriental culture, which influenced Islam at first in
Christian guise. Islam is often able to supplement its borrowings from
Christianity at the original sources, and when they have thus been
deepened and purified, these adaptations are returned to Christianity
in Muhammedan form.