necessary to cut off the social system from the religion. At the
beginning, among a people who had advanced but a little way on the
road of civilisation, the defects of the social system were not so
apparent; but now, when Easterns are endeavouring to mix on equal
terms with Europeans, and are trying to adopt the manners and customs
of the West, it is clear that the condition of their women must be
radically changed if any good is to come of the Europeanising
tendency. The difficulty lies in the close connection between the
religious and social ordinances in the Ḳur-án: the two are so
intermingled that it is hard to see how they can be disentangled
without destroying both. The theory of revelation would have to be
modified. Muslims would have to give up their doctrine of the syllabic
inspiration of the Ḳur-án and exercise their moral sense in
distinguishing between the particular and the general, the temporary
and the permanent: they would have to recognise that there was much in
Moḥammad’s teaching which, though useful at the time, is inapplicable
to the present conditions of life; that his knowledge was often
partial, and his judgment sometimes at fault; that the moral sense is
capable of education as much as the intellect, and, therefore, that
what was apparently moral and wise in the seventh century may quite
possibly be immoral and suicidal in a society of the nineteenth
century. Moḥammad himself said, according to tradition, ‘I am no more
than a man: when I order you anything respecting religion, receive it;
and when I order you about the affairs of the world, then I am nothing
more than man.’ And he seemed to foresee that the time would come when
his minor regulations would call for revision: ‘Ye are in an age,’ he
said, ‘in which, if ye abandon one-tenth of what is ordered, ye will
be ruined. After this, a time will come when he who shall observe
one-tenth of what is now ordered will be redeemed.’[21]
If Muslims would take these warnings of their prophet to heart, there
would be some hope for Islám. Some few of the higher intellects among
them have already admitted the principle of moral criticism applied to
the Ḳur-án; but it is very doubtful whether ‘rational Islám’ will ever
gain a wide following, any more than ‘rational Christianity.’ People
in general do not care to think for themselves in matters religious.
They like their creed served up to them as cooked meat, not raw flesh.
They must have definite texts and hard-and-fast commandments to appeal
to. They will not believe in the spirit, but prefer the letter. They
will have nothing to say to tendencies, but must have facts. It is of
no avail to speak to them of the spirit of a life or of a whole book;
they must hang their doctrine on a solitary sentence. They will either
believe every letter of their scripture, or they will believe nothing.
Such people make up the majority of the professors of Islám; and with
them no reform, within Islám, seems possible. Among the upper (I will
not call them the higher) classes, they are either fanatics or
concealed infidels; and their lives are a proof of the
incompatibility of ordinary Mohammadanism, real or nominal, with a
high social and national life. Among the poorer classes, the social
system has a more restricted field of operation, for the poor are
naturally less able to avail themselves of the permissions of their
Prophet. In a poor community Islám exerts an eminently salutary
influence, as the condition of the Mohammadan converts in Western
Africa conclusively proves. An able observer,[22] whose African birth
and training qualify him in a high degree for properly understanding
the true state of his countrymen, whilst his Christian profession
serves as a guarantee against excessive prejudice in favour of Islám,
has recorded his experience of the work of Mohammadan missionaries in
Liberia and the neighbouring parts of Africa. ‘All careful and candid
observers,’ he remarks, ‘agree that the influence of Islám in Central
and West Africa has been, upon the whole, of a most salutary
character.... As an eliminatory and subversive agency it has displaced
or unsettled nothing as good as itself.’ It has inculcated habits of
moderation and soberness over the whole of the vast region covered by
its emissaries; and so great is the influence of its teaching, that
where there are Muslim inhabitants, even in pagan towns, it is a very
rare thing to see a person intoxicated. The Mohammadan converts drink
nothing but water. ‘From Senegal to Lagos, over two thousand miles,
there is scarcely an important town on the seaboard where there is not
at least one mosque and active representatives of Islám, side by side
with the Christian teacher. And as soon as a pagan, however obscure or
degraded, embraces the Muslim faith, he is at once admitted as an
equal to the society.... The pagan village possessing a Muslim teacher
is always found to be in advance of its neighbours in all the elements
of civilisation.... The introduction of Islám into Central and West
Africa has been the most important, if not the sole, preservative
against the desolations of the slave trade. Mohammadanism furnished a
protection to the tribes who embraced it, by effectually binding them
together in one strong religious fraternity, and enabling them by
their united efforts to baffle the attempts of powerful slave-hunters.
Enjoying this comparative immunity from sudden hostile incursion,
industry was stimulated among them; industry diminished their poverty;
and as they increased in worldly substance, they also increased in
desire for knowledge. Receiving a desire of letters by a study of the
Arabic language, they acquired loftier views, wider tastes, and those
energetic habits which so pleasingly distinguish them from their pagan
neighbours.’ Students often travel on foot from the west coast right
across Africa to study at the great mosque of the Azhar in Cairo. It
must be remembered that these results were observed in the very centre
of African Christianity, in Sierra Leone and other coast settlements.
It is said that in Sierra Leone three-fourths of the Muslim population
were not born Muslims, but were converted from Christianity or
paganism; and this, although ‘all liberated Africans are always handed
over to Christian missionaries for instruction, and their children are
baptized and brought up at the public expense in Christian schools,
and are thus, in a sense, ready-made Christians.’
These facts show that, even in the present day, and with the
competition of Christian missionary societies, Islám may be a power
for good in poor communities—that it can not only give them a pure
instead of a degraded faith, but can raise them socially and
intellectually. The effects of a simple form of Islám on these African
converts may give one some notion of its influence on its hearers in
the early days, before the theologians had corrupted it.
But this good influence is very partial and limited, even among the
poorer classes. In communities where all are poor, Islám is an
excellent agent for improvement; but in countries where there are
many grades of wealth and rank, the poor only ape in a humble manner
the vices of those whom they are taught to regard as their ‘betters.’
In all civilised and wealthy countries the social system of Islám
exerts a ruinous influence on all classes, and if there is to be any
great future for the Mohammadan world, that system of society must be
done away.
THE WOMAN’S CAUSE IS MAN’S; THEY RISE OR SINK
TOGETHER, DWARFED OR GODLIKE, BOND OR FREE.
IV.—_THE ḲUR-ÁN._
The Muslim who reads the Ḳur-án is like the orange-fruit,
whose smell and taste are sweet; and the Muslim who reads not
the Ḳur-án is like the date, which hath no smell, but its
taste is sweet; and the Hypocrite who reads not the Ḳur-án is
like the colocynth, without a smell, and with a bitter taste;
and the Hypocrite who reads it is like the sweet bazil, whose
smell is sweet, but its taste bitter.—_Tradition._
It is an immense merit in the Ḳur-án that there is no doubt as to its
genuineness. The ‘Word of the Lord’ came to Moḥammad, and he uttered
it, and the people wrote it down or committed it to memory; and that
very word we can now read with full confidence that it has remained
unchanged through nearly thirteen hundred years.
The revelations came to Moḥammad in many ways and at all times, but
never ‘in visions bright, transcendant, exalted. They came ghastly,
weird, most horrible. After long solitary broodings, a something used
to move Moḥammad, all of a sudden, with frightful vehemence. He
“roared like a camel,” his eyes rolled and glowed like red coals, and
on the coldest day terrible perspirations would break out all over his
body. When the terror ceased, it seemed to him as if he had heard
bells ringing, “the sound whereof seemed to rend him to pieces”—as if
he had heard the voice of a man—as if he had seen Gabriel—or as if
words _had been written in his heart_. Such was the agony he endured,
that some of the verses revealed to him well-nigh made his hair turn
white.’
No collection of these revelations was made during Moḥammad’s
lifetime; at his death, the Ḳur-án existed only as scattered
chaotically among the believers. But about a year later, the death in
battle of some of the men who had specially committed passages of the
Ḳur-án to memory, and the dread that the whole of Moḥammad’s teaching
might vanish at the end of a generation or two, induced Aboo-Bekr to
make the innovation from which every one shrank, and he gave orders to
the Prophet’s secretary, Zeyd ibn Thábit, to collect the fragments of
the Ḳur-án in one book. So Zeyd gathered the Ḳur-án from palm-leaves,
skins, shoulder-blades, stones, and the hearts of men, arranged the
chapters in a certain order, and presented Aboo-Bekr with a Ḳur-án
which probably differed in no essential particular from the book we
have now. All scholars are agreed that Zeyd did his work faithfully,
and neither inserted nor omitted anything from party motives. But he
seems to have occasionally mixed up fragments of very different date
in one chapter—Moḥammad himself countenanced this—and may possibly
have omitted some portions that were not found till afterwards.
Some twenty years later a second recension was ordered by the Khalif
´Othmán. Slight varieties of reading, mainly dialectal, had arisen;
swords were near being drawn over them; and it was evident that a
serious schism would come about if a uniform authorised text of the
Ḳur-án were not provided. These slight dialectal differences were not
sufficiently settled, it would seem, in Aboo-Bekr’s edition, so this
new recension was made by Zeyd and three men of the Ḳureysh, for they
would best know the original dialect of the Ḳur-án. The new edition
followed the first one, apparently, both in order and in matter;
definitely fixing, however, the true text in the dialect of the
Ḳureysh, and possibly adding any verses that might have been
discovered since Zeyd’s first edition. This second recension was
conducted with the same careful fidelity and scrupulous impartiality
as the first; and it was accepted by all the different parties that
were then disputing the supremacy. Copies of this edition were then
distributed to the principal cities of the empire, and the old copies
and fragments were called-in and burned.
This edition of ´Othmán, made about A.D. 660, is the one that has ever
since been the authorised and only version of the Ḳur-án throughout
the Muslim world and in the studies of European linguists. The only
differences that have since crept into the text are certain
unimportant varieties in vocalisation and orthography and in the
division of verses.
It was a singular system these early revisers went upon. They seem,
indeed, to have established the authenticity of each saying
satisfactorily; but in the arrangement of them they showed an
extraordinary dulness. The tradition of the year when each revelation
was spoken appears to have been lost even in the short time that had
elapsed since it had been spoken. People remembered the words, but
seldom the occasion of the words. Hence the revisers had to devise an
artificial order; not according to subject, nor after the development
of the style, but simply in order of length! They put the longest
chapters first and the shortest last; that is to say, they inverted,
roughly speaking, the true order, for the early soorahs were short and
the later ones long.
Read in this order, the Ḳur-án is an unintelligible jumble. Carlyle
may well say that ‘nothing but a sense of duty could carry any
European through the Ḳur-án.’ You can trace no development of mind or
doctrine in the present arrangement; it is indeed a confused mass of
‘endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement, most crude,
incondite.’ But scholars have long discovered certain signs of a true
order—several kinds of evidence by which a chronological arrangement
of the Ḳur-án may be attempted. These are—(1.) The _references to
historical events_ in the Ḳur-án, as identified by tradition. These,
however, are but few, and occur chiefly in quite the latest soorahs;
and tradition is apt to identify any reference with any event it
chooses. A much more important test is (2.) the _style_; for a
distinct development can be traced in the rime, in the length of
verses, and in the words employed. And then there is (3.) the
_matter_ test, based on what we know of Moḥammad’s life, from which we
can argue a certain change in his preaching at Mekka, and still more
when, from addressing idolaters in his birthplace, he came to preach
to Jews and Christians at Medina. The danger of this last test is that
each man forms his own theory of Moḥammad’s mental and religious
growth, and may arrange the soorahs in accordance with that theory.
Even with these three tests, used by the most accomplished critics, it
is impossible to arrive at an exact order, and to determine the
precise chronological position of each soorah. But whilst it is
admitted that an exact chronological arrangement of each individual
chapter of the Ḳur-án is impossible, it is yet no less certain that
the soorahs may be roughly grouped together, and that these groups can
be definitely assigned to certain periods of Moḥammad’s career.
Professor Th. Nöldeke’s _Geschichte des Qorâns_ has established his
right to the first place in this science of Ḳur-án arrangement, and
his order of soorahs may fairly be accepted as authoritative. Of this
order Mr. Rodwell’s English version of the Ḳur-án is an example,
except that a few of the earliest soorahs are transposed. Nöldeke has
two great divisions of the soorahs: those revealed at Mekka, and those
revealed during the Medina period. Further, he divides the Mekkan
division into three groups.[23]
{ I. A.D. 612-617 (Rodwell, pp. 1-64)—To the Abyssinian
{ exile (fifth year).
{
{ II. A.D. 617-619 (Rodwell, pp. 64-192)—Fifth and sixth
Mekka { years of Moḥammad’s mission.
{
{ III. A.D. 619-622 (Rodwell, pp. 193-366)—From the
{ seventh year to the Flight.
Medina A.D. 622-633 (Rodwell, pp. 366-555)—At Medina.
Read in this order the Ḳur-án becomes intelligible. It is still
confused in its progression and strangely mixed in its contents; but
the development of Moḥammad’s faith can be traced in it, and we can
see dimly into the workings of his mind, as it struggles with the deep
things of God, wrestles with the doubts which echoed the cavils of the
unbelievers, soars upwards on the wings of ecstatic faith, till at
last it gains the repose of fruition. Studied thus, the Ḳur-án is no
longer dull reading to one who cares to look upon the working of a
passionate troubled human soul, and who can enter into its trials and
share in the joy of its triumphs.
In the soorahs revealed at Mekka, Moḥammad has but one theme—God; and
one object—to draw his people away from their idols and bring them to
the feet of that God. He tells them of Him in glowing language, that
comes from the heart’s white heat. He points to the glories of nature,
and tells them these are God’s works. With all the brilliant imagery
of the Arab, he tries to show them what God is, to convince them of
His power and His wisdom and His justice. The soorahs of this period
are short, for they are pitched in too high a key to be long
sustained. The language has the ring of poetry, though no part of the
Ḳur-án complies with the demands of Arab metre. The sentences are
short and full of half-restrained energy, yet with a musical cadence.
The thought is often only half expressed; one feels the speaker has
essayed a thing beyond words, and has suddenly discovered the
impotence of language, and broken off with the sentence unfinished.
There is the fascination of true poetry about these earliest soorahs;
as we read them we understand the enthusiasm of the Prophet’s
followers, though we cannot fully realise the beauty and the power,
inasmuch as we cannot hear them hurled forth with Moḥammad’s fiery
eloquence. From first to last the Ḳur-án is essentially a book to be
heard, not read, but this is especially the case with the earliest
chapters.
In the soorahs of the second period of Mekka we begin to trace the
decline of the Prophet’s eloquence. There are still the same earnest
appeals to the people, the same gorgeous pictures of the Last Day and
the world to come; but the language begins to approach the quiet of
prose, the sentences become longer, the same words and phrases are
frequently repeated, and the wearisome stories of the Jewish prophets
and patriarchs, which fill so large a place in the later portion of
the Ḳur-án, now make their appearance. The fierce passion of the
earliest soorahs, that could not out save in short burning verses,
gives place to a calmer more argumentative style. Moḥammad appeals
less to the works of God as proofs of his teaching, and more to the
history of former teachers, and the punishments of the people who
would not hear them. And the characteristic oaths of the first period,
when Moḥammad swears by all the varied sights of nature as they
mirrored themselves in his imagination, have gone, and in their place
we find only the weaker oath ‘by the Ḳur-án.’ And this declension is
carried still further in the last group of the soorahs revealed at
Mekka. The style becomes more involved and the sentences longer, and
though the old enthusiasm bursts forth ever and anon, it is rather an
echo of former things than a new and present intoxication of faith.
The fables and repetitions become more and more dreary, and but for
the rich eloquence of the old Arabic tongue, which gives some charm
even to inextricable sentences and dull stories, the Ḳur-án at this
period would be unreadable. As it is, we feel we have fallen the whole
depth from poetry to prose, and the matter of the prose is not so
superlative as to give us amends for the loss of the poetic thought
of the earlier time and the musical fall of the sentences.
In the soorahs of the Medina period these faults reach their climax.
We read a singularly varied collection of criminal laws, social
regulations, orders for battle, harangues to the Jews, first
conciliatory, then denunciatory, and exhortations to spread the faith,
and such-like heterogeneous matters. Happily the Jewish stories
disappear in the latest soorahs, but their place is filled by scarcely
more palatable materials. The chapters of this period are interesting
chiefly as containing the laws which have guided every Muslim state,
regulated every Muslim society, and directed in their smallest acts
every Mohammadan man and woman in all parts of the world from the
Prophet’s time till now. The Medina part of the Ḳur-án is the most
important part for Islám, considered as a scheme of ritual and a
system of manners; the earliest Mekka revelations are those which
contain what is highest in a great religion and what was purest in a
great man.
The word _Ḳur-án_ means the _crying_, _reciting_, _reading_, and is
applied not only to the whole book, but to any chapter or section of
it. The Ḳur-án is also called El-Furḳán, ‘the Distinguisher,’ and
El-Muṣḥaf, ‘the Volume,’ and El-Kitáb, ‘the Book,’ and Edh-Dhikr, ‘the
Admonition.’ The Ḳur-án contains, in its ordinary form, 114 chapters
(_soorahs_), 6616 verses (_áyát_, literally ‘signs’ or ‘wonders’),
77,934 words, and 323,671 letters, according to the estimates of
laborious Muslim divines, which differ, however, in a slight manner in
consequence of the various divisions of verses. After the first
chapter, which is a short prayer (the Fátiḥah), the soorahs gradually
decrease in length from 289 verses in the second to from three to six
in the ten concluding chapters. Each chapter is headed by a title,
taken from same prominent word in it (as the ‘Chapter of the
Striking,’ ‘of the Cow,’ &c.); beneath which is noted whether it was
promulgated (according to tradition) at Mekka or Medina, and the
number of its verses. Then follow the words:—‘In the Name of God, the
Compassionate, the Merciful;’ after which the chapter begins. To
twenty-nine chapters are prefixed certain letters (_e.g._, ch. ii. on
p. 4), or a single letter, which have never been successfully
interpreted. The Muslims believe them to conceal profound mysteries.
In Soorah 55 a refrain is found, and traces of a like imitation in
Soorahs 54 and 17. It is probable that the Ḳur-án was originally
_chanted_ in somewhat the same manner as it is in the present day.
The Ḳur-án is also divided in thirty sections, and these are again
subdivided; and from this division rather than from chapter and verse
do the Muslims generally quote.
‘The Muslims absolutely deny that the Ḳur-án was composed by their
Prophet himself, or by any other for him; it being their general and
orthodox belief that it is of divine original; nay, that it is eternal
and uncreated, remaining, as some express it, in the very essence of
God; that the first transcript has been from everlasting by God’s
throne, written on a tablet of vast size, called the Preserved Tablet,
in which are also recorded the divine decrees, past and future; that a
copy from this tablet, in one volume on paper, was, by the ministry of
the angel Gabriel, sent down to the lowest heaven, in the month of
Ramaḍán, on the Night of Power;[24] whence Gabriel revealed it to
Moḥammad by parcels, some at Mekka, and some at Medina, at different
times during the space of twenty-three years, as the exigency of
affairs required; giving him, however, the consolation to show him the
whole (which they tell us was bound in silk, and adorned with gold and
precious stones of Paradise) once a year; but in the last year of his
life he had the favour to see it twice. They say that few chapters
were delivered entire, the most part being revealed piecemeal, and
written down from time to time by the Prophet’s amanuensis, in such or
such a part of such or such a chapter, till they were completed,
according to the directions of the angel. The first parcel that was
revealed is generally agreed to have been the first five verses of the
ninety-sixth chapter. After the new revealed passages had been from
the Prophet’s mouth taken down in writing by his scribe, they were
published to his followers, several of whom took copies for their
private use; but the far greater number got them by heart. The
originals, when returned, were put promiscuously into a chest, without
regard to any order of time, for which reason it is uncertain when
many passages were revealed.
‘The Ḳur-án being the Muslims’ rule of faith and practice, it is no
wonder its expositors and commentators are so very numerous; and it
may not be amiss to take notice of the rules they observe in
expounding it.
‘One of the most learned commentators distinguishes the contents of
the Ḳur-án into allegorical and literal. The former comprehends the
more obscure, parabolical, and enigmatical passages, and such as are
repealed or abrogated; the latter, those which are plain, perspicuous,
liable to no doubt, and in full force.