Speaking of religion, while wandering about the streets and byways of
Constantinople I used often to wonder whether, were it not for the
voice of the muezzin, Christians would see anything to remind them
that there was any difference between the religion of this people
and their own. The Byzantine architecture of the mosques makes them
seem very like churches; of the Islam rites there is no external
evidence; while Turkish soldiers may be seen escorting the viaticum
through the streets. An uneducated Christian might remain a year in
Constantinople without being aware that Mohammed, not Christ, claimed
the allegiance of the greater part of the population; and this led me
on to reflect upon the slight nature of the fundamental difference--the
blade of grass, as the Abyssinian Christians called it in speaking
to the first followers of Mohammed--which divides the two religions,
and the trifling cause which led Arabia to adopt Islamism instead of
Christianity, or, if not Christianity, at all events something so
closely resembling it that, even had it never developed into that
outright, it would have seriously altered the destinies of the entire
Eastern world. This slight cause was nothing more or less than the
voluptuous nature of a certain handsome young Arabian, tall, fair,
ardent, with black eyes and musical voice--he lacked the force to
dominate his own passions, and so, instead of cutting at the root of
his people’s prevailing sin, he contented himself with pruning the
branches, and in lieu of proclaiming conjugal unity as he proclaimed
the unity of God, merely confined within somewhat narrower bounds, and
then proceeded to give the countenance of religion to, the dissolute
selfishness of men. No doubt he would have had to encounter a more
determined opposition in the one case than in the other, but that it
was in his power to succeed who can question when it is remembered
that in order to establish the worship of one sole God among a people
given over to idolatry he was obliged to first overthrow an enormous
superstructure of tradition and superstition, including innumerable
grants and privileges all closely interlaced, the result of centuries
of growth, and that he made them accept, as one of the dogmas of his
religion for which millions of believers subsequently died, a paradise
which at its first announcement aroused a universal feeling of scorn
and indignation? Unfortunately, however, this handsome young Arab
temporized with his passions, and as a consequence the face of half
the globe is changed, since polygamy was, without doubt, the besetting
vice of his rule and the principal cause of the decadence of all those
races who have adopted his religion. It is the degradation of one sex
for the benefit of the other, the open sanction of a glaring injustice
which disturbs the entire course of human rights, corrupts the rich,
oppresses the poor, encourages ignorance, breaks up the family, and by
causing endless complications in the rights of birth among the reigning
dynasties overturns kingdoms and states, finally placing an insuperable
barrier in the way of the union of Mussulman society with the people
of other faiths who populate the East. If, to return to the original
proposition, that handsome young Arab had only been endowed with a
little more strength of character, had the spiritual in his nature but
outweighed, by ever so small an amount, the animal, who knows?--perhaps
we would now have an Orient orderly, well-governed, and the world be a
century nearer universal civilization.