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.