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.