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.