When Adam had been driven from the terrestrial paradise and sent into

the world, he lamented to God: “Alas! I shall hear no more the angels’

voices.” “That,” said God, “is the result of your sin. But build me a

temple and walk around it thinking of me as you have seen the angels do

around my throne.” Adam arrived in the neighbourhood of Mecca, and laid

there the foundations of the holy temple whilst the angels, aiding him,

brought large blocks of rock from five mountains. It was on to these

foundations that the temple itself descended from heaven. Adam also

received from paradise a tent formed of red hyacinth, in which the place

of repose was the angular stone. Also a white hyacinth, only blackened

because sinners had touched it. This is the famous Black Stone.

At the time of the deluge both temple and tent were taken up to heaven,

but the Black Stone was hidden in the mountain of Abu Kobais, which is

near Mecca. Afterwards the spot where the temple had stood remained

known to men and was visited as a sacred place. It was there, in fact,

that Abraham came with Hagar and Ishmael and left them to their fate.

The water which Hagar had brought being soon exhausted, she and her son

suffered greatly from thirst. As far as her eyes could see there was no

living being near. So to get a wider view she climbed Mount Safa, then

the Merwa heights which are opposite, but still saw no one. On returning

she found her son dying of thirst. Not knowing what to do, she returned

in haste to the two hills, and in her misery ran several times from one

to the other. When in desperation she returned, there was water bubbling

near her son. She hastened to pile sand round that it should not escape

before she had filled her pitcher; then she and her son drank. This

spring ran in that place where the wells of Zemzem were afterwards dug.

When on a visit to Ishmael, Abraham told him that God had ordered him to

build a temple in a certain spot; father and son set immediately to work,

and in digging came across the old foundations laid by Adam. Abraham

wanted to set in one of the angles a recognisable stone to mark the spot

where the procession should begin round the temple; but while Ishmael

was seeking a suitable stone the angel Gabriel brought Abraham the Black

Stone, which he had been to fetch from Mount Abu Kobais. Abraham took and

placed it in the angle. When the wall was too high for him to reach up he

mounted on a big stone which Ishmael placed before him and removed when

necessary.

The temple finished, both father and son on Gabriel’s order walked round

it seven times, carefully touching the four corners each time. Then,

bowing twice, they prayed behind the large stone on which Abraham had

stood. Gabriel also taught them the rites which they had to accomplish in

other sacred spots. First they had to hurry rapidly seven times on the

path between the two hills of Safa and Merwa, in memory of the journeys

Hagar had made in her agony. Then he led them to the valley of Mina; but

on their arrival the devil (Iblis) showed himself. “Throw something at

him,” said Gabriel. Abraham obeyed by throwing seven little stones, upon

which Iblis went away. In the middle and at the foot of the valley he

was seen again, but each time Abraham drove him away with little stones.

Thence arose the custom of throwing stones in the Mina valley during the

pilgrimage. But when, led by Gabriel, he had also visited Mozdalifa and

Arafa and learned what ceremonies there were to be performed he received

orders to tell all men they were to go on a pilgrimage to the Kaaba and

other sacred spots. “My voice cannot reach to them,” he answered. “Do

what I command you,” then said God; “I know what to do so that they may

hear.”

Abraham stood up on the big stone, and it rose so high that it was above

all the mountains. Turning himself successively to the four cardinal

points, he cried, “O men, a pilgrimage to the ancient house is ordered.

Obey your Lord.” Then from all countries came the answer: “_Labbaika,

Allahomma, labbaika_;” which means, according to the explanation which

the Arabs love to give to this old formula: “We are ready to serve

thee, O God, we are ready.” It is in perpetual memory of this fact that

the print of Abraham’s feet have remained on this stone. Even to this

day it is called Makam Ibrahim or “Abraham’s station.” This is how the

theologians, aided by a well-known story in Genesis and a Jewish legend

which speaks of Abraham making a journey into Arabia, came to resolve

the difficult problem of making very old customs agree with the new

religion and explain it. The explanation has not satisfied everyone,

but it has sufficed for the majority, and must certainly be praised

for its ingenuity. Being acquainted with what the majority think about

pilgrimages and the meaning they set on ceremonies, we will here give a

brief description of these customs:

First when the boundaries of the sacred territory are crossed and the

pilgrim is purified, the ordinary clothes are doffed and the pilgrim’s

garment or _ihram_ is put on. This is composed of two pieces of linen,

wool, or cotton; one tied round the loins, the other thrown over the neck

and shoulders so as to leave bare a part of the right arm. All head-dress

is forbidden, save for old men and invalids, who have to purchase this

dispensation with alms. Instead of shoes sandals are worn, or the upper

part of the boot is cut away so as to form a kind of sandal. The _ihram_

for women is composed of a mantle and veil.

[Illustration: ARABIC BRONZE TAP]

On the seventh day of the month of Dhul-Hija, the fête is opened by a

sermon which the kadi of Mecca delivers after the midday prayer, and

in which he reminds the worshippers of the ceremonies they have to

accomplish. On the eighth all repair to Mina, arriving there after a

slow walk of two hours. The journey continues to Mount Arafa, which is

six hours’ march from Mecca. It is on this sacred mountain and in the

long valley, that the night is passed, but very few think of sleep.

The devout pray aloud, the others sing joyful songs, or pass the time

in the cafés. The grand ceremony at Arafa consists in a long preaching

which begins on the ninth at three in the afternoon and continues till

sunset. This is regarded as so important that those who have not heard

it, even if they have visited all the sacred spots in Mecca, cannot

pretend to the title of _haji_ (pilgrim). The preacher, who is generally

the kadi of Mecca, is seated on a camel and reads his sermon in Arabic.

Every four or five minutes he stops and raises his arms to implore the

benediction of heaven. During this interval the audience flap the folds

of their pilgrim’s garment and make the air resound with their cries of

“_Labbaika, Allahomma, labbaika_.” According to the law the preacher must

show visible signs of emotion, so he seldom ceases wiping his eyes with

his handkerchief. The audience must also be deeply moved, recognise their

deep sinfulness, and shed abundant tears.

When at last the sun has set behind the mountains, the preacher closes

his book and the pilgrims run with all their might towards Mozdalifa. A

scene of indescribable confusion arises, for everyone runs as hard as he

can, and the caravans from different countries make it a point of honour

to arrive first at the destination. Foot-travellers, litters, camels

are always being knocked over, there is fighting with sticks and other

weapons. At night there is a magnificent illumination, “so grand that one

might imagine that all the stars from heaven had come down to earth.”

On the tenth is the greatest fête of the year, the “day of sacrifice,” or

the great _bairam_ of the Turks. At daybreak the kadi delivers another

sermon of the same kind as that of the previous day, except that it is

shorter; then the prayers for the fête are read, and when finished all go

slowly to the narrow Mina valley, where there is a village. There they

begin to throw stones about the size of a kidney bean, which, strictly,

ought to have been picked up at Mozdalifa. But many get them in Mina or

use them a second time, although this is forbidden by law. The first

seven little stones are aimed against a species of pillar or altar of

rough stone which is at the entrance of the valley, in the middle of the

route, and which measures six or seven feet in height. Then seven stones

are thrown in the middle of the valley against a pillar of the same kind,

and seven more at the western end against a stone wall. At the same time

they cry: “In the name of God! God is great! We throw stones to be safe

against the devil and his hosts.”

After this the sacrifices begin. The pilgrims immolate the victims

they have brought; and all Mohammedans, in whatsoever part of the

world, sacrifice at the same time. That, generally speaking, ends the

pilgrimage. The pilgrims’ robes may now be doffed, everyday clothes

resumed, and many return to Mecca to make a tour of the Kaaba. But

ordinarily a stay of another two days is made at Mina, and stone-throwing

is recommenced. The eleventh is the day of rest, and a return to Mecca

is made on the twelfth. The pilgrim goes to the Kaaba, which in the

interval has received its new veil, says some prayers, stands in front

of the Black Stone, touches it with the right hand or kisses it, if

not hindered by the crowd, and begins the seven tours, the first three

being made rapidly. To each tour belong certain prescribed prayers to

be said; at the end of each one he again touches or kisses the stone.

Then, asking pardon for his sins, he goes to the station of Abraham,

which is quite near, and prays again. Thence he goes to the sacred well

of Zemzem, from which he drinks as much as he wishes, or as much as the

crowd permits; finally he runs seven times rapidly from the Safa to the

Merwa hill. This done, he has accomplished all the ceremonies, which are

so regulated as to their least details that few pilgrims know them by

heart. The strangeness of these ceremonies has even struck some pious

Moslem theologians who do not put very great faith in the legends. They

admit that the act of walking round a temple, running swiftly between two

hills, throwing little stones, etc., does not increase piety; but they

get out of the difficulty by saying the ceremonies are a sign of divine

wisdom, impenetrable to our weak understanding, or a trial of man’s

submission to the mysterious and incomprehensible will of God.

We can pass over the other moral duties imposed by the Moslem religion,

for morals do not vary much in any religion. There is just one peculiar

duty, the holy war, of which we will say a few words.

THE HOLY WAR

European opinion for a long time has not been exact. The _Koran_, if

its sequence of ideas is well studied, gives no order relative to this

war against all infidels; and Mohammed, to begin with, shows himself

extremely tolerant, admitting the possibility of salvation for all those

who believe in God and the last judgment and practice virtue, whatever

may be their form of worship. But the opposition he met with modified

his way of looking at things, and it was then that Islamism became the

only religion that could save. Nevertheless the holy war is not imposed

as a duty except and only in the case of enemies to Islamism being the

aggressors. Only an arbitrary interpretation by theologians can take the

orders otherwise.

Another equal error is to think that Islamism has been propagated by

force. Political power, certainly, has been extended in that way, not

religion. The caliphs, far from seeking to make proselytes, for reasons

of pecuniary interest saw with much displeasure the conversion of

conquered peoples.

Mohammed also forbade games of chance and wine. As events then stood,

he had to ask for all in order to obtain anything. The Arabs were great

drinkers and took a certain pride in being so. Even among Mohammed’s

disciples at Medina there were those who came drunk to the mosque. It was

then necessary to agitate against drunkenness, and as warnings on the

subject of this abuse of wine did not produce any effect, he forbade it

altogether. Omar sanctioned the prohibition by adding the penalty of the

whip. The success has not been great. All the time Islamism has existed

wine has been drunk, a great deal of it, indeed; only, out of respect

for the law, it has not been done openly. The alimentary laws are much

less rigorous than with the Jews. Pork, for which moreover the Arabs had

a repugnance, has been forbidden, and as the use of fat generally causes

fearful and hideous diseases in hot countries, it must be recognised that

the prohibition in question is a very wise law in Eastern religions.[c]

ARAB CULTURE

In the Middle Ages the Arabs were the sole representatives of

civilisation. They opposed that barbarism which spread over Europe,

shaken as it was by invasions of northern peoples, and went back to “the

perennial source of Greek philosophy”; far from resting content with

acquired treasures, they enlarged and opened up new ways to the study of

nature.

Wars of invasion, scarcely interrupted by civil discord, far-away

expeditions, and striking triumphs, filled the first century of the

Hegira. Even in 760, after the fall of the Omayyads, there was no

evidence that to the tumult of arms would succeed in the caliph empire

a period noted only for intellectual progress. But under the Abbasids

a noble emulation, and above all the example and protection of the

sovereigns, dissipated the ignorance and coarseness with which the

disciples of Mohammed were justly charged. Men’s minds were permeated

with new ideas, a number of writings of all kinds sprang into existence

and in their turn gave birth to an infinity of others, which made Arabic

the medium of learning for the East and all the Moslem states. Nearly all

these writings are still extant, and form one of the vastest literatures

ever known.

To the caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur belongs the credit of the first impulse

given to the study of exact science. Among the confused and incomplete

traditions that exist concerning the ancient Arabs, one catches a glimpse

of notions of practical astronomy. The spectacle of the heavens had

attracted their attention, as it does that of all peoples enjoying a

mild climate and clear air, although without invariably inspiring to

consideration of the celestial laws. All that they had gathered in their

intercourse with surrounding nations was a knowledge of the names of

planets and certain stars, which they deified, an exact indication of

the dwellings in the moon, and purely astrological learning. They went

by the lunar year, but it does not appear they had ever tried to mark

time by eras and epochs in general usage. Thus it is almost impossible to

establish a regular order in the long series of facts which make up the

Arabian annals, until that epoch when a timely revolution broke up the

various beliefs of its nomad populations, writing them under the law of

the _Koran_ and developing new desires.

“The Arabs,” says Humboldt,[d] “were admirably adapted to the rôle of

mediator and to influence the peoples included in the area between the

Euphrates and the Guadalquivir and the southern part of central Africa.

They possessed an unexampled activity which marked a distinct epoch in

the world’s history, a tendency opposed to the intolerant spirit of the

Jews, which led them to mingle with conquered peoples without always

abjuring their national character or traditional remembrances of their

native country, and this in spite of a perpetual change of land. Whilst

the German races did not acquire polish until a long time after their

migrations, the Arabs brought with them not only their religion but also

a perfected language and a wealth of poetry, which was not to be forever

lost but was to be found again among the troubadours and minnesingers of

Provence.”

M. Girault de Prangey[e] has studied carefully Arab art, and compared

the architectural monuments of Spain and the East. In the peninsula he

distinguishes three successive epochs. The first, from the eighth to the

tenth century, shows a badly disguised imitation of Christian and Roman

buildings. The mosque of Cordova is doubtless in the same style as that

of Damascus, which it surpassed in magnificence. There is no doubt that

the churches described by Eusebius of Cæsarea,[f] with courts, porticoes,

fountains, and priests’ lodgings, served as models for the mosques of

Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Byzantine mosaics are found in them. But

already in 965 a sumptuous Greek ornamentation seemed insufficient.

Details were multiplied, arches were complicated with festoons and

varied curves, such as one sees at Cordova in the Villaviciosa chapel

constructed in the caliphate of Hakim.

The second epoch, from the tenth to the twelfth century, marks the first

development of that Moorish architecture encouraged by the Almoravid

and Almohad princes. The Arabs then strayed from the beaten path. The

ogee arch, porcelain mosaics, fantastic embroideries, ornaments run in

stucco, became fashionable. Inscriptions abounded and became part of the

decorations.

Finally the third epoch, when Arab art attained its apogee, was

contemporary with the splendour of the kingdom of Granada. The Alhambra

is the highest expression of it. The exterior of the palace, so simple

yet imposing, is in conformity with the Moorish habit of hiding from the

eyes of strangers. The entrance is only an immense arch decorated with

some emblems and an inscription recording the founder’s name. The walls

are of a species of mortar mixed with little pebbles which glint in the

sunlight. In the interior, on the contrary, man’s genius has expended

its utmost resources. Vast painted and gilded galleries, adorned with

arcades of every shape cut up with festoons, in stalactites, and loaded

with stucco open-work, the rooms lighted by uncasemented windows, the

Ambassadors’ hall, that of the Two Sisters, the Infantes room, the

Comares tower, the court and fountain of Lions, the Alberca court, below

which are baths modelled in the ancient style--all offer admirable

effects. Here water gushes among millions of beautiful little columns

isolated or grouped picturesquely, there it flows in marble trenches,

now forming cascades, now jets thrown in spray to feed the basins in

the patios surrounded by shrubs and flowers. Everywhere inscriptions

skilfully combined with sculptures express noble and elevated sentiments,

adding fresh charm to the marvel of a palace which Christian kings partly

destroyed.

The interior ornaments of the principal halls of this ancient residence

of Moorish kings are in plaster. The fashion of the relief is

geometrical, and although constantly repeated has none the less beauty

and delicacy. The paintings, artfully distributed and protected by

the Andalusian climate, are to-day as they were in the times of the

Abencerrages. In some of the halls which surround the court of Lions the

colours put on by the Arabs still retain their lustre. They are very

pure, composed only of reds, blues, yellows, and greens. In a recent

analysis the blue and red matter was found to be of ultramarine and

vermilion or sulphate of mercury.

It is, moreover, to be regretted that a general study has not been made

of the Arabic buildings in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and even India, of

the different epochs of Arabic rule. It would offer peculiar characters

useful in an exact determination of style. We have reason to hope that

skilful artists will soon supply this want.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY

The empire of the caliphs, in its extent, its rich soil, varied climate,

people, and regulated condition of its provinces, naturally excited

commercial speculation. The productions of Spain, Barbary, Egypt,

Abyssinia, Arabia, Persia, and Russia, those of countries bordering on

the Caspian Sea, as well as all Indian and China merchandise, came to

Mecca, Medina, Cufa, Bassorah, Damascus, Baghdad, Mosul, and Madain

(Modein). The founding of colonies had created new business centres and

opened up important routes.

The Arabs were, moreover, devoted to industry by that same law which made

of work a duty, and commended commerce and agriculture as meritorious and

pleasing to God. Merchants and their callings elicited equal respect.

Governors of provinces, generals, and servants did not blush to be known

as Khayat the tailor, Atari the druggist, Jauhari the jeweller, etc. Free

passage for merchandise through armies and the safety of the high-roads

were maintained at all points. Wells and cisterns were dug in the desert,

caravanseries were built at certain distances where travellers could find

necessary help at a moderate cost.

Relations existed between Spain and the limits of eastern Asia; an Arab

fleet had gone through the Straits of Gibraltar, and a tempest which

drove them ashore hindered the possible honour of discovering the Azores,

and perhaps America. But though restricted to the old world, the Moslems

gave a strong impulse to every kind of human industry. Spain enriched

herself with the products of Arabian agriculture and manufactures. Cane

sugar, rice, cotton, saffron, ginger, myrrh, ambergris, pistachio,

bananas, henna for dyeing, mohaleb to promote plumpness, were objects of

exchange in the peninsula; tapestry of Cordova leather, Toledo blades,

Murcia cloth made from beautiful wool, Granadan, Almerian, and Sevillian

silks, and gun-cotton were sought in all parts of the world. Sulphur,

mercury, copper, iron were exploited successfully; the finely tempered

Spanish steel caused the helmets and cuirasses coming from its foundries

to be quickly bought up. The environs of Seville were covered with olive

trees, and contained one hundred thousand oil farms or oil-mills. The

province of Valencia gave to Europe southern fruits. From the ports of

Malaga, Cartagena, Barcelona, and Cadiz there were large exportations;

and Christian nations patterned their maritime regulations upon those of

the Arabs.

Under the Moors, as M. Darny has said, Toledo had 200,000 inhabitants and

Seville 300,000; to-day the population is rated at 21,000 for the one,

and 143,000 for the other. Cordova was eight leagues in circumference,

had 60,000 palaces, and 283,000 houses. To-day she has scarcely 56,000

inhabitants. The diocese of Salamanca then included 125 towns or

boroughs; this number is now reduced to 13. Seville had 6000 workers on

silk alone, yet in 1742 only 10,000 could be counted in the peninsula

among both silk and wool factories.

The geographer Edrisi, who visited Spain in the middle of the eleventh

century, assures us there were in the royal kingdom of Jaen more than

600 towns and hamlets working in silk. The expulsion of the Moors had

for Spain as disastrous results as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes

had for French commerce; and Cardinal Ximenes, desiring that even the

remembrance of the service they had rendered should be destroyed, ordered

in a decree worthy of barbarous times 84,000 Arabian manuscripts to be

burned in the public squares of Granada.

The northerly coasts of Africa had also shown great commercial

development. Numerous factories arose, and the Mauretanian Tingitana

rivalled the peninsula in its manufacturing and rural activity.

The country of Sous recalled Andalusia in its fertility and in the

intelligence of its inhabitants. The East caught the infection of this

general industry; at Siraf and Aden there was an exchange of goods

between China, India, Persia, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Nubian slaves and

Habasch, tiger skins, silk, cotton, ivory, and gold-dust from Zanzibar

came from Ethiopia. India and China sent stuffs, saddles, sandalwood,

spices, ebony, lead, tin, pearls, and precious stones. From Aden these

goods were transported to Jiddah, then to Suez, and shared among Egyptian

ports and Syrian coast towns. Countries bordering on the Caspian Sea

bought stores at the Cabul fair; caravans from Samarcand to Aleppo

distributed Chinese silks, cashmere cloth, musk, and medicinal drugs of

Turkestan.

We have set forth the causes and principal effects of the great wave of

civilisation poured forth in the Middle Ages by the Arabs, which rolled

from the columns of Hercules to the confines of Asia. It remains, to

complete this vast picture, only to say a few words on certain Arabian

discoveries, which altered the literary, political, and military

conditions of the entire world. These were paper, the compass, and

gunpowder.

PAPER, COMPASS, AND GUNPOWDER

One has already seen how many useful and important inventions have been

transmitted to us by the Arabs, and even although they were not perhaps

the originators they must not be refused the glory of having brought them

to the light and of having propagated them from one end of the world to

the other. This is really what they did with paper, the compass, and

gunpowder.

A belief, founded on certain apocryphal writing, that the Chinese knew

the use thereof at a far distant epoch, has been considered sufficient

to rob the Arabs of the honour of having bequeathed these inventions to

Europe, but this is an injustice. It might be said that printing existed

in China from the eighth century; yet the names of Gutenberg, Faust, and

Schoeffer are not less illustrious. Would not the Arabs, if they had

taken tissue paper from them, have also borrowed the art of printing had

it then been known? Would those of the Celestial Empire ever practically

have used chance discoveries? What use have they made of the compass,

they who still believed in 1850 that there was a burning furnace at the

South Pole; and have they ever applied gunpowder and utilized its power

in as many ways as the Arabs?

It must be remembered that at the siege of Mecca in 690 a kind of bomb

was already in use, and that in Egypt in the thirteenth century powdered

nitre was used to throw projectiles to a great distance with a noise like

thunder. It is also mentioned on the occasion of a naval battle between

the king of Tunis and the emir of Seville in the eleventh century, in

1308 at the siege of Gibraltar, in 1324 at that of Baeza; also as used by

Ismail, king of Granada in 1340 and by Algeciras in 1342, and Ferreras

says positively that the balls were shot by means of powder. The Spanish

thenceforth made use of it, and one sees the European armies little by

little provided with cannon, while no mention is made of their trials

and attempts which would necessarily have preceded the organisation

of artillery if the actual invention of gunpowder had originated with

Christian nations as some writers and historians have long claimed.

[Illustration: EARLY BRONZE CANNON]

With regard to the compass, nothing proves that the Chinese used it for

navigation, while we find the Arabs using it in the eleventh century, not

only for sea voyages, but in caravan journeys through the desert, and to

determine the azimuth of the Kiblah, that is the direction of the Moslem

oratories towards Mecca. It was the same with paper. Towards the year 650

silk paper was already being made at Samarcand and Bokhara. In 706 Jusuf

Amron at Mecca thought of substituting cotton for silk; hence the “damask

paper,” of which Greek historians speak. In Spain, where linen and hemp

were more common, arose factories for linen paper. “The Xativa paper,”

says the geographer Edrisi, “is excellent and incomparable.” Valencia and

Catalonia soon afterwards proved formidable rivals to Xativa (Jativa).

In the thirteenth century Arabian paper was used at Castile, whence

it penetrated into France, Italy, England, and Germany. But Arabian

manuscripts always led in the fineness and glossiness of their paper, as

well as in the choice of ornamentation in lively and brilliant colours.

It was thus that the influence exercised by the Arabs manifested itself

in every branch of modern civilisation. From the ninth to the fifteenth

century the most voluminous literature extant was formed, productions

were multiplied; valuable inventions attested the wonderful activity of

men’s minds at this epoch; and their influence, felt throughout Christian

Europe, justified the opinion that the Arabs have led us in all things.

On the one hand we find inestimable material for a history of the

Middle Ages--narratives of voyages, the happy idea of the biographical

dictionary; on the other, unequalled industry, buildings grandiose in

thought and execution, important discoveries in the arts. Does not all

this reveal the work of a people too long disdained?[g]

INFLUENCE OF THE ARABS ON EUROPEAN CIVILISATION

“The nations of Europe,” says Bailly in one of his letters to Voltaire,

“after having grown old in barbarism, were only enlightened by the

invasion of the Moors and the arrival of the Greeks.” We venture to

add--and far more by the invasion of the Moors, or of those to whom

Bailly gives the name, than by the arrival of the Greeks of the Lower

Empire. And, indeed, one of the distinctive and prominent characteristics

of the influence which the Arabs exercised on all branches of modern

civilisation, is precisely that of having restored to Europe a knowledge

of the ancient Greek authors, whose language, works, and even names, were

completely forgotten.

It may be boldly asserted that the numerous translations and still more

numerous commentaries which the Arabs wrote on all the works of Ancient

Greece, and which makes their literature the second daughter of Greek

literature, served to give the modern peoples their first notions of

the sciences and letters of antiquity. It was only after having known

them through the versions of the Arabs that the desire to possess and

understand the original writers took shape, and that the language of

Homer and Plato found several diligent interpreters. Indeed, “The greater

part of Greek erudition,” according to Hyde,[h] “which we have to-day

from those sources, we received first from the hands of the Arabs.”

In order to justify this assertion, which may seem a little paradoxical,

it will be sufficient to call attention to the fact that the Arabs had

transmitted to Europe, without disguising its origin, the knowledge

they borrowed from the Greeks, long before Boccaccio’s guest, Leontius

Pilatus, had started a course on the Greek language at Florence (about

1360), and the dispersal of the inhabitants of Constantinople, after the

taking of that town by Muhammed II (1453), had rendered their idiom a

common study in Europe. Indeed many Greek books, and notably those which

treated of the sciences, were originally translated from Arab into Latin.

Among others may be cited the earliest versions of Euclid and Ptolemy.

A not less certain proof that Greek letters first received an asylum

from the Arabs, is that several works of Ancient Greece have been

preserved by them, and discovered in their own works. Mathematicians, for

instance, would never have possessed the _Sphericals_ of the geometrician

Menelaus of Alexandria, who was antecedent to Ptolemy, but for the Arab

translation (_Kitab al-Okar_), which was afterwards translated into

Latin, nor the eight books of Apollonius of Perga’s _Conic Sections_, if

the Maronite, Abraham Ecchellensis, had not copied and translated (1661)

the missing fifth and sixth and seventh books from an Arab manuscript in

the Medici library in Florence; neither would the doctors have been able

to complete Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’ _Epidemics_ without the

Arab translation discovered in the Escurial, and the naturalists would

not even possess an abridgement of Aristotle’s _Treatise on Stones_ but

for the Arab manuscript in our (the French) National library.

If we trace the whole history of human knowledge, and recall the fact

that Greece survived Rome in Alexandria, we may well assign the Arabs

the position of guardians to that sacred depôt between Greece and the

Renaissance. “They merit,” says M. Libri,[i] “eternal gratitude for

having been the preservers of the learning of the Greeks and Hindus,

when those people were no longer producing anything and Europe was still

too ignorant to undertake the charge of the precious deposit. Efface the

Arabs from history and the Renaissance of letters will be retarded in

Europe by several centuries.”

[Illustration: BRONZE CANNON AND MOUNTING]

In the matter of science especially, and far more than their forerunners

the Romans, the Arabs were the heirs of the Greeks. If they far preferred

Aristotle’s philosophy to that of Plato, it may have been because they

saw in Plato what he actually was, namely one of the fathers of the

Christian church, but it was certainly because Aristotle mingled the

positive sciences with metaphysical speculation. Nevertheless Plato

(Aflathoun), as well as Aristotle (Aristhathlis or Aristou), received

from them the surname of _Al-Elahi_, or the Divine. It was not only

on the masters, _principes Scriptores_, on Aristotle, Hippocrates,

Dioscorides, Euclid, Ptolemy, Strabo, that their studies were directed

and concentrated; there is no grammarian so mediocre, no rhetorician

so poor, no sophist so subtle, that the Arabs have not translated and

commented on him.

SCHOLASTICISM

It was in passing through their hands that the peripatetic doctrine

engendered scholasticism. It is certain that, in the interminable wrangle

between Realists and Nominalists the former leaned on the authority of

Avicenna, the others on that of Averrhoës; it is certain, according

to the observation of M. Hauréau,[j] that the philosopher Al-Kendi is

often quoted by Alexander of Hales, Henry of Ghent and St. Bonaventura,

whilst Al-Farabi furnished his aphorisms to William d’Auvergne, Vincent

de Beauvais, and Albertus Magnus; and that this same William d’Auvergne

prefers the Arabs far above the Greeks, finding the Greeks too much of

philosophers and the Arabs more of theologians. Doubtless scholasticism

was a vain and regrettable learning, for the schools of the Middle Ages,

as Condillac says, resembled the knights’ tournaments, but, all the

same, it produced some free thinkers, such as Johannes Scotus Erigena,

Berengarius, Abélard, and William of Occam; and it was from it that,

in after time, proceeded John Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Bruno, and

Campanella.

After having laid hands on the various branches of the knowledge

possessed by the ancient Greeks, who had remained superior to the Latins,

in the sciences even more than in letters and not less than in the arts,

and after having enlarged its domain in all directions, the Arabs laid

it open to the nations of Europe, all of whom they had outdistanced.

Spain was naturally the first to receive and spread their gifts. In the

tenth century, in the most profound darkness of the Middle Ages, that

country “to which,” says Haller,[o] “the humanities fled together,” was

the only one which accepted and welcomed those solid studies, which were

everywhere else repelled and destroyed, even in Constantinople, since the

time of Leo the Isaurian (717). Indeed, as early as the tenth century,

when the Muzarab, John of Seville, translated the Holy Scriptures into

Arabic, and when another Muzarab, Alvaro of Cordova, reproached his

compatriots with forgetting their language and their law (_legem suam

nesciunt christiani et linguam propriam non advertunt Latini_), in order

to train themselves in the Arab doctrine (_Arabico eloquio sublimati_),

Spain counted several illustrious scholars, Ayton, bishop of Vich, a

Lupit of Barcelona, and a Joseph, who instructed Adalbero, archbishop of

Rheims, all versed in mathematics and astronomy.

MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE

To Spain then came the small number of foreigners who were tormented by

the desire to know. Gerbert (born in Auvergne about 930, elected pope in

999, under the name of Silvester II, died in 1003), so celebrated for

his adventures, his learning, and his labours, after going through all

the schools of France, Italy, and Germany without being able to satisfy

the passion for instruction which possessed him, came finally to Spain

to seek that physical and mathematical knowledge which raised such

admiration in France, Germany, and Italy, whither he returned to spread

them, that the prodigies of his learning could only be explained by the

accusation of having delivered himself over to the devil.

Gerbert is unanimously credited with having been the first to introduce

the use of Arabic figures into these countries, and with having added

some elementary notions of algebra to the calculations of arithmetic. He

also passes as the first constructor of clocks. Whether, as most of his

biographers affirm, Gerbert pursued his studies as far as the homes of

the Arabs in Cordova and Seville, or whether he only made a long sojourn

in Catalonia and associated with the scholars of that country, as is

witnessed to by his collection of _Epistles_, addressed in great part to

Catalans like Borrell, count of Barcelona, Ayton, Joseph, and Lupit, it

is none the less certain that Gerbert learned all he knew from the Arabs,

and that that knowledge, so prodigious as to appear supernatural, was, as

William of Malmesbury says, “stolen from the Saracens.”

His example and his success roused other foreigners to come and glean,

where he had made so ample a harvest. The German Hermannus-Contractus

(who died in 1054), author of the book, _De Compositione Astrolabii_;

the English Adelard, who translated the first Arabic _Euclid_ into Latin

(about 1130); the Italian Campano of Novara, who published a _Theory of

the Planets_; Daniel Morley; Otto of Freising; with Hermann the German;

Plato of Tivoli; Gerard of Cremona, who translated at Toledo itself,

Alhazen; Avicenna, Rhazes, Albucasis, and even Ptolemy’s _Almagest_, not

from the Greek, but from the Arabic--that Gerard of Cremona of whom it

was said: “At Toledo he lived, Toledo he raised to the stars”--all went

in succession to gather in Spain the elements of mathematics, physics,

and astronomy, which they carried thence to their compatriots.

Montucla[k] not only says that “the Arabs were long the sole depositaries

of learning, and that it is to their commerce that we owe the first rays

of light which came to chase away the darkness of the eleventh, twelfth,

and thirteenth centuries”; he adds that “during this period, all who

obtained the greatest reputation in mathematics had been to acquire their

knowledge amongst the Arabs.” It is asserted that all the authors who

wrote on the exact sciences before the fifteenth century did nothing

but copy the Arabs, or, at the most, enlarge upon their lessons. Such

were the Italian Leonardo da Pisa, the Polish Vitellio, the Spaniard

Raymond Lully, the English Roger Bacon, and finally the French Arnauld de

Villeneuve, who is credited with having discovered spirits of wine, oil

of turpentine, and other chemical preparations.

During the same period, the whole of European geography was limited

to the _Seven Climates_ of Edrisi, and, in the seventeenth century,

when correcting by Abu Ishak Ibrahim ben Yahya certain geographical

errors, Abraham Hinckelmann was able to say: “The greatest assistance

and illumination for posterity we owe to Arabism.” As to the famous

_Astronomical Tables_ of Alfonso X, they, like his book on _Armillaries_

or celebrated spheres, only sum up the discoveries of the Arabs previous

to the thirteenth century. It was from their works that all his learning

was drawn by that celebrated monarch, who received the surname of the

Wise (or learned), and who did indeed effect some advancement in science,

between the system of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus. The _Alphonsine

Tables_ are borrowed from the various _Ziji_ or tables of the Arab

astronomers, and reproduce their form and substance.

When Louis XIV had a degree of the meridian measured geometrically, in

order to determine the size of the earth, he doubtless did not know that

five centuries before, the caliph Al-Mamun had ordered the same operation

to be performed by his astronomers at Baghdad. In the Middle Ages,

according to Bailly,[l] “the first step taken towards the revival of

learning was the translation of Alfergan’s _Elements of Astronomy_.” That

famous Spanish rabbi, Aben-hezra (or Esdra), who was surnamed the Great,

the Wise, the Admirable, on account of his book on _The Sphere_, was born

at Toledo, in 1119, and had been a disciple of the Arabs in astronomy. He

spread his masters’ lessons throughout Europe. It was from Albategnius,

more than from Ptolemy, that Sacrobosco (John of Holywood) had drawn the

materials for his book _De Sphera Mundi_; it was in Albategnius, too,

that the commentator on that great astronomer, Regiomontanus (Johann

Müller, of Königsberg, _Regius Mons_), had found the first notion of

tangents. It was from Alhazen’s _Twilight_ that the illustrious Kepler

took his ideas of atmospheric refraction; and it may be that Newton

himself owes to the Arabs, rather than to the apple in his orchard at

Woolsthorpe, the first apperception of the system of the universe; for

Muhammed ben Musa (quoted in the _Bibliot. arab. Philosophorum_) seems,

when writing his books on _The Movement of the Celestial Bodies_ and on

_The Force of Attraction_, to have had an inkling of the great law of

general harmony.

MEDICINE

The influence of the Arabs on all the natural sciences, chemical

or medical, is not less incontestable than their influence on the

mathematical sciences. Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully were as much their

pupils in the attempted science of alchemy, the “grand art,” as in the

actual science of numerical calculations. It was by them also that

Albertus Magnus (Albrecht Grotus or Gross, born in Swabia in 1193), that

universal scholar, the eminent master of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom, like

Gerbert, men called “the magician,” was initiated into all the learning

of the Aristotelian school. And even after the year 1600, Fabricius

Acquapendente could say, “Celsus amongst the Latins, Paulus Ægineta

amongst the Greeks, and Albucasis amongst the Arabs, form a triumvirate

to whom I confess that I am under the greatest obligations.”

Even as the astronomer Albategnius in the domain of heaven, or the

geographer Edrisi in that of the earth, so Avicenna and Averrhoës reigned

supreme over medicine, during six hundred years, down to the sixteenth

century. At Montpellier and Louvain, commentaries on Avicenna were still

being made in the last century. Both Boerhaave and Haller concede this

long predominance to Arab medicine, and Brucker could say with perfect

truth: “Until the renascence of literature, not only among the Arabs, but

also indeed among the Christians, Avicenna rules all but alone.” When, in

the very beginning of the thirteenth century, the Portuguese doctor Pedro

Juan, who was archbishop of Braga and then pope under the title of John

XXI, wrote his _Treasury of the Poor_, or _Remedies for all Maladies_,

his _Treatise on Hygiene_, and his _Treatise on the Formation of Man_, he

was copying the Arabs.

It was from Spain then that all the doctors of Europe came, and that,

through them, the taste for science and letters was extended. “The

Spanish doctors,” says Haller, “while their people were gradually

recovering the country, communicated the love of letters to the

Italians.” It was to Spain, at all events, that the Jews, then so

renowned for their healing art, went to study, to afterwards scatter,

like young doctors leaving the university, through the various countries

of Europe. Kings and popes took their doctors from the Jews. To cite only

a few famous instances, we call attention to the fact that the physician

of Alfonso the Fighter, king of Aragon, Pedro Alfonso, author of some

Latin tales, part of which were translated in Francesco Sansovino’s

_Cento Novelle Antiche_, was a converted Jew; and Paul Ricius, physician

to the emperor Maximilian I, was a Jew who remained a Jew. The latter had

studied in Spain, where he translated the _at-Takrif_ of Albucasis, the

book which Haller calls the “common fountain” of modern medicine. We have

seen that the Arabs practised a multitude of surgical operations, unknown

to the ancients, and in like manner enriched pharmacy by a multitude of

new medicaments.

But one fact sums up in itself all the proofs of the influence which the

Arabs exerted on the medical art, and that is that the famous school

of Salerno, whose laws were once followed throughout Europe, owes its

origin to the Arabs. When (about 1000) the Norman, Robert Guiscard, took

Salerno from the people called Saracens, who had occupied the south

of Italy for more than two centuries, he found a school of medicine

established there by these infidels. He had the wisdom to preserve it,

enrich it, and to give it Constantine Africanus as chief. This man was a

Moor from Carthage, whom travels and adventures flung, like Edrisi, into

the power of the Normans of Sicily; who took the cowl at the monastery

of Monte Cassino under the celebrated abbot Desiderius, afterwards

Pope Victor III; and, in his retreat, translated into Latin all his

compatriots’ works on the healing art. He thus ended by founding the

school of Salerno, for it was from his works that all the aphorisms of

the _Medicina Salertina_ were taken. As the University of Montpellier had

for founders (about 1200) the Aragonese, to whom that town, which was

then almost modern and had not yet inherited the bishopric of Maguelonne,

at that time belonged, it may be asserted, according to the generally

received tradition, that its faculty of medicine was founded at least

indirectly by the Arabs, and that it was in that sense grounded on their

teaching--the sole adopted, the sole reigning one, the most enlightened

and scientific of the age.

ARCHITECTURE

As to the influence of Arabs on architecture, the only one of the fine

arts which religion permitted Moslems to cultivate, it seems that

it cannot be set in doubt that it appears with as much certainty as

distinction. The question has often been asked: Whence came it that the

architecture of the close of the Middle Ages, that which passed from

the round to the pointed arch, and from basilicas to cathedrals, was

called Gothic? As this name, if it implied a northern origin, would be

in flagrant contradiction with the facts, the question has remained

unanswered.

But we must remind ourselves that the name Gothic has not been given

only to the architecture which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

saw prevailing. The handwriting and the missal, which in the year 1091

were replaced in Spain by the Latin (then called French) characters,

and by the Roman ritual, were also called Gothic. They had received and

preserved this name of Gothic because their use dated from the time when

Spain was the domain of the Goths. Might it not also be because the first

lessons in the new architecture came to Europe through Spain, that this

architecture, _e.g._, like the Spanish handwriting and liturgy, was named

Gothic?

This perfectly simple and natural explanation is, moreover, in complete

accordance with history. The conjectures of men versed in the matter

are agreed on this point--that modern architecture had its birth at

Byzantium, that second Rome where the arts took refuge when they were

driven out of Italy. The Byzantine architects, who were the first to

mingle the capricious and flowery style of the East with the sober and

regular style of ancient Greece, had two sorts of pupils--the Arabs and

the Germanic peoples. The former first founded the architecture called

Moorish or Saracen; and afterwards the latter, that which later on was

called Gothic. Starting from the same point the two architectures remain

analogous, almost similar, during two centuries, both preserving, with

the differences imposed by the climate, the traditions of their common

origin. Thus the mosque of Cordova, raised by a prince of Syria, and

the old basilicas of Germany are equally sprung from the Byzantine

style. Then they separate, to take each a style of its own. The Moslem

architecture preserves the system of surbased naves, and takes as its

special characteristic the horseshoe arch, that is to say, one narrowing

at its base, and having the form of an inverted crescent.

Christian architecture adopts the system of high, pointed naves, and its

distinctive characteristic becomes the pointed arch, substituted for the

pagan round arch. But it must be noticed that the Arabs had employed

the pointed arch before the Christians; that, in Spain especially, a

multitude of monuments prove their use of this form which was unknown to

antiquity; and that it is doubtless because the pointed arch, now become

the striking and characteristic feature of Christian architecture, had

passed from Spain into Europe, that the whole system was named Gothic.

Finally, these two architectures derived from Byzantium, the Arab and

the Germanic, becoming ever more and more assimilated, end by merging,

at the close of eight centuries, into the style called Renaissance.

No one denies, no one disputes, the striking resemblance which exists

between the Arab monuments and those of Europe in the Middle Ages. This

resemblance is not only found in the great edifices of the capitals, for

the construction of which Saracen architects were sometimes called in, as

happened in the case of Notre Dame de Paris itself. It can be traced even

in the humblest buildings of the little towns.

“Thus,” says Viardot,[m] “I have found the multilobar arch of the

Mezquita at Cordova in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, and the

delicate colonnette of the Alhambra in the church of Notre Dame at Dijon.

This resemblance was, then, not merely casual and fortuitous; it was

general and permanent. Nothing further is needed to prove the thesis.

If Christian and Arab art resembled each other, and if one preceded the

other, it is evident that of the two one was imitated and the other the

imitator. Was it the Arab art which imitated the Christian art? No; for

the priority of its works is manifest and incontestable; for Europe, in

the Middle Ages, received all its knowledge from the Arabs, and must

also have received from them the only art whose cultivation the law of

religion permitted.”

MUSIC

The impossibility which exists, in spite of the efforts of all modern

scholars, of our having an acquaintance, even an imperfect and

approximate one, with the music of the Greeks, must teach and give a

conception of the great difficulty of procuring proofs of the state

of this art, or discovering and understanding monuments of it, once

the traditions are interrupted. It is a dead language in which none

can now read. In the preceding section we have had to limit ourselves

to demonstrating that the Arabs cultivated music as a very important

and very advanced art. In the archives of the chapter of Toledo, there

exists a precious monument of the influence which they exercised on

modern music. This is a manuscript, annotated in the hand of Alfonso the

Wise himself, and including the canticles (_cantigas_) composed by that

prince, with the music to which they were sung. In it we find not only

the six notes _ut_, _re_, _mi_, _fa_, _sol_, _la_, invented, towards

1030, by the monk Guido of Arezzo, but also the seventh note, the five

lines, and the keys, whose discovery was subsequent, and even the upward

and downward tails of the notes, the use of which was not introduced

into the musical writing of the rest of Europe until much later. Up till

then music had served only for the psalmodies of the church, for the

plain chant of hymns and antiphons. This manuscript, copied and cited in

the _Paleographia Castellana_ is, according to all appearance, the most

ancient monument of the regular application of music to ordinary and

profane poetry.

As Alfonso X owes his prodigious learning chiefly to the study of the

Arabs, it would be scarcely possible to doubt that, for this book as

for all his works, he borrowed from them a science already formed and

even then committed to writing by Al-Farabi, Abul-Faraj, etc., and which

Alfonso might very well have understood with the help of the Muzarabs of

Seville. This supposition, which would attribute to the Arabs a notable

share in the creation of modern music, has all the more the appearance

of truth since the first instruments adopted by the Spaniards, the

French, and the other nations of Europe were named _moresques_ in all

languages. To this day the _chirimia_ and _dulzaina_ of the Moors, so

often mentioned by Cervantes and his contemporaries, are still used in

the country of Valencia. As to the modern stringed instruments, they all

had as model the lute (_al-aoud_, whence _laud_ in Spanish) of the Arabs,

who have also given Spain the _kitara_ (_guitarra_), since become the

national instrument of the people whose masters they were in all things.

Several theorists, J. J. Rousseau amongst others, have proposed to

write music in figures, assuredly without suspecting that the Arabs had

already practised that mode of notation. Kiesewetter[n] calls attention

to the fact that, the Arab scale having seventeen intervals, the Arabs

were able to write and actually did write music with their figures,

employing the numbers one to eighteen for the first octave, one to

thirty-five for two octaves, and so on. May it not be from this ancient

use of the Arab figures in musical writing that the employment of the

same figures for the figured bass, in which a simple number denotes a

chord, came into vogue? It is possible and very probable.

The old Spanish music, that which is preserved in Andalusia under the

name of _cañas_, _rondeñas_, _playeras_, etc., differing greatly from the

_boleros_ of comic operas and eluding the modern notation, is certainly

of Arab origin. Who are they who have preserved it in the tradition of

this country? An eastern race, a nomadic race, that of those Bohemians

who, coming from Egypt about the fourteenth century, and perhaps before

that from India, spread themselves throughout Europe and were called

_gitanos_ in Spain, _zingari_ in Italy, gipsies in England, _zigeuner_ in

Germany, and _tzigani_ in Russia, whilst naming themselves _pharaons_.

These nomads, with their immutable customs, who are still to-day not

only in Spain but in Russia the same in physique and moral character

as Cervantes has depicted them, have carried and retained everywhere

the ancient songs of their problematic country. As the musicians of the

people, formed into troupes of singers and dancers, they have everywhere

spread the form and sentiment of their antique melodies. “It was through

them,” concludes Viardot, “that, in Russia as in Spain, popular music

took or kept the oriental character; it was from them that in Moscow, at

the foot of the towers of the Kremlin, I listened to the same songs as in

the gardens of the Alhambra of Granada. In both places I had heard from

their lips a living echo of the Arab music.”[m]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XI. TRIBAL LIFE OF THE EPIC PERIOD

SPECIALLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE PRESENT WORK

BY DR. JULIUS WELLHAUSEN[41]

Professor in the University at Göttingen

People who are unlearned in the law, are apt to assume that it executes

itself; or at least they think it absolutely necessary that law and the

execution of law should go hand in hand. But in the primitive stages of

human society it was not so. The law existed long before there was any

magistracy to carry it into effect, and even after magisterial authority

had been established, it frequently left, not only the pursuit, but the

execution of law to the parties concerned. An instructive picture of

such a state of things is found in the copious literature that has been

preserved with regard to the Epic Period of the ancient Arabs, _i.e._,

the period immediately preceding their amazing irruption into the world’s

history through the gate of Islam.

The desert has imprinted its stamp upon the Arabs. They are particularly

interesting for this very reason, that by the desert they have, so

to speak, been arrested at what is in many respects a very primitive

stage of development. Yet we must not imagine them roving about it like

wild animals, gathering together for temporary ends and dispersing

just as they please. As a matter of fact, they have no settled abodes,

they are not tied to the soil nor linked with one another by a fixed

domicile, and consequently they are not organised on the basis of

locality, according to districts, towns, and villages. But they have

instead an inner principle of association and organisation, of union and

distinction, inherent in the very elements of race. It is the principle

of consanguinity, of kinship. For the Arab, his political _genus_, his

_differentia specifica_, are innate as indelible characteristics. He

knows the clan to which he belongs, and the stock to which his clan

belongs; the tribe or nation of which the stock is a part, and the larger

group that includes the tribe or nation. Associations are regarded by

them as natural units, founded on consanguinity, and they stand in a

close and natural relationship, one to another, corresponding to nearer

or remoter degrees of consanguinity (by the father’s side) so that their

statistics assume the form of a genealogy.

Among the ancient Hebrews this form survived even after they had settled

in towns and villages; Isaac was the father of the nations of Israel

and Edom, Israel the father of twelve tribes, Judah the father of five

lineages, and each lineage in its turn father or grandfather of clans and

families. Such a principle of organisation is equally serviceable for

settlement or migration, for war or peace; and being independent of all

conditions of fixed localities, it makes the tribe as mobile as an army.

For an army, too, must possess an organisation adaptable to every place,

and as suitable to a hostile country as to its own. But an army is broken

up into artificial divisions; the men may be put into one branch or

another at will, and the place of the individual in the whole scheme is

notified by artificial marks of distinction. With the Arabs, on the other

hand, the form is indistinguishable from the substance, they are born

into their cadres, and their uniform is, as it were, innate to them. The

closer or remoter circles of kindred, from the clan to the nation, are

their companies, battalions, and regiments, which include not only the

fighting men, but their wives and children also, though the latter take

no direct part in any fight.

The two most important stages of the political affinity are the

highest and the lowest, the two poles, as it were, of the system; the

intermediate stages are less important, because they assume the qualities

of one pole or the other, according to circumstances. The highest

association, which we call the tribe, includes all the families which

migrate together regularly, _i.e._, which make the circuit of certain

hunting-grounds, often great distances apart, according to the season

of the year. One tribe will not contain more than a few thousand souls;

if it exceeds that number, it becomes too large for common migration

and pasturage and is obliged to divide. The lowest is the clan, which

consists of families within the nearest degrees of kinship, which

invariably pitch their tents close together in a common quarter (_dâr_).

Beyond the tribe the bond of consanguinity does not break off abruptly;

it embraces also the group of such tribes which stand in any sort of

historic relation to one another. But in this wider circle the ties of

kinship cease to be really effective.

The Arabs as a whole, though linked together by community of speech, of

intellectual acquirements and social forms, are not really a nation;

neither can the larger groups into which they have split up be called

nations; the nation is the tribe. The tribe is the source and the limit

of political obligation; what lies outside the tribe is alien. This does

not mean that a perpetual and open _bellum omnium contra omnes_ prevails

in Arabia; the relations of the tribes among themselves vary greatly,

and may be friendly as a result of kinship and treaty. But inasmuch as

the idea of common duty of man to man does not exist among them, and no

moral law is valid beyond the tribe, everybody alien from the tribe is

an enemy as a matter of course. If he is caught in the hunting-grounds

of the tribe without a special security, he is an outlaw and fair game.

“When I and my people were tormented with hunger,” says an old Bedouin,

“God sent me a man who was travelling alone with his wife and his herd of

camels; I slew him and took his wife and camels for my own.” He considers

the murder perfectly lawful, and is only surprised that a stranger should

presume to rove about the country with his wife and his cattle and

without a strong escort.

Yet the narrow bounds of the tribal community are capable of enlargement.

There are means whereby even the alien can attain the security of a

member of the tribe. If he seizes the hem of his enemy’s garment from

behind, or ties a knot in the end of his turban, or knots his rope with

his own, he has nothing further to fear. If he succeeds in creeping

into the other’s tent, or in being introduced and entertained there by

the wife or child, his life is sacred. The sanctity of the hearth is

unknown among the Arabs, even their altar is not a hearth and is without

any fire; but, on the other hand, the tent and those within it are

sacred, and even to touch the tent-cords from outside renders a stranger

safe from attack. By a sacramental act, accompanied with a simple form

of words, he disarms his enemy and assures his own safety. Of course

protection is not always stolen, as it were, in this fashion, it may

be extended voluntarily; for example, there are cases when the man who

grants protection flings his mantle over the one who implores it, thus

making him out as his own property which no man may injure.

If a foreign trader desires to travel through the tribe without peril,

one of its members must give him a safe-conduct; very often he merely

gives him some recognisable piece of his own property to take with him as

a passport or charter of legitimation. The relations which arise in this

manner are, for the most part, transitory.[42]

But there are also permanent and hereditary relations of this sort, based

in part upon contract and oath. A member of a tribe may allow a stranger

to sojourn permanently with his clan, and by adoption into the clan the

sojourner is considered naturalised by the whole tribe. Not individuals

only, but whole clans and families can thus be naturalised, and instances

thereof are not uncommon. A fresh element is consequently grafted on the

pure tribal stock in these sojourners or protégés. In a few generations

they may amalgamate with the tribal stock, but as fresh batches are

constantly coming in from without, the distinction between the two

elements within the tribe remains.

Consanguinity and contiguity combine to weld the tribe together; external

bonds there are none. Blood-relationship is the higher and stronger

principle, and neighbourhood passes into brotherhood. All political and

military duties are looked upon as obligations of blood or brotherhood.

The relations of the individual to larger associations and the community

as a whole are precisely the same in character, though less intimate

in degree, as those which bind him to his own family. There is no _res

publica_ in contradistinction to domestic concerns, no difference, in

fact, between what is public and what is private. In principle, at least,

all men have the same rights and duties, and no man has one-sided rights

or duties. Everything is based on reciprocity, on loyalty and fellowship,

and the complementary notions of duty and right, of ruler and subject,

of patron and client, are expressed by one and the same word. There are

neither officers nor officials, neither jailers nor executioners. There

is no magisterial authority, no sovereign power, separable from the

association and the individual, with a revenue of its own drawn from

taxation and an independent administration by official organisation. The

functions of the community are exercised by all its members equally. The

prerogative and obligations of the state as we understand it, which can

only be fitly discharged by its civil officers, are to the Arab things

that the individual is bound to do, not under compulsion from without,

but from the corporate feeling of neighbourhood and brotherhood. By his

own active exertions the individual has constantly to create afresh those

things which with us are permanent organisations and institutions, which

lead or seem to lead an independent life of their own. The Arabs stop at

the foundations, building no upper story upon them which could be handed

over ready-made to their heirs and in which they might live at their ease.

In other words, among the Arabs political relations are moral, for

morality is confined within the limits of the tribe. Political

organisation is represented by the corporate feeling which finds

expression in the exercise of the duties of brotherhood. These require

a man to say “good day” to his fellows, or “God bless you,” if anyone

sneezes, not to shut himself up from others, nor to take offence easily,

to visit the sick, to pay the last honours to the dead, to feed the poor

in time of dearth, to protect and care for the widow and the orphan;

likewise to slaughter a camel now and again in winter, to arrange sports

and there regale the rest with its flesh, for no man slaughters for

himself alone, and every such occasion is a feast for the whole company.

Such are the common demonstrations of brotherly kindness by which

corporate spirit is kept alive under ordinary circumstances. But the

greatest duty in which all others culminate is to help a brother in need.

Political duty therefore occupies an essentially subordinate place. The

great thing in all cases is that the individual should act and should

see himself how to get along, but, of course, he is quite at liberty to

concert measures with his comrades. The rest are only bound to assist him

in time of need, and then they must answer to his call without asking

whether he is right or wrong; as he has brewed, so they must drink. The

whole tribe does not always rise at once, the primary obligation rests

with the clan. The clan has the right of inheritance together with the

next duty of paying the debts of any member of it, delivering him from

captivity, acting as his compurgators, and assisting him in procuring

vengeance or paying mulcts. The larger associations only become involved

when the need is great, and more particularly in cases of enmity with

another tribe.

It will readily be imagined that a community based so exclusively on

mutual fellowship does not fulfil its tasks very satisfactorily, and

that the system is not particularly workable. There are many indolent or

refractory members who do not fulfil their duties towards the community

for lack of coercion from without, and because the only pressure that

can be brought to bear upon them, the shame of falling short in the

eyes of their kinsfolk or in public opinion, is of no avail against

their cowardice or perverse obstinacy. Moreover, individual liberty of

action is too little restricted by a due regard for the interests of the

community. There is nothing to prevent a man from undertaking on his own

account a raid which may kindle a flame of war that will wrap his whole

tribe in its conflagration and even spread beyond. Or by the admittance

of a stranger into his tent and his clan, which he regards as an

obligation of honour and of religion, he may involve his tribe in great

difficulties by imposing on them the burden of henceforth protecting the

said stranger against his pursuers who may be seeking to arrest him for

some crime.

But a more fruitful source of discord than individual cases of friction

is the competition between the tribe and the clan. There is no doubt that

these polar associations did not spring from the same root, but differ

in their very origin; the tribe probably coalesced under the rule of a

communistic matriarchal system (endogamous), while the clan is based on

an aristocratic patriarchal system (exogamous). At the present time the

tribe is regarded as merely an expansion of the clan, both being held

together by the same paternal consanguinity. But the degrees of political

kinship vary, the ties of blood have not the same force throughout; they

act far more effectively in the smaller circle than in the larger. The

individual stands in no direct relation to the tribe; his connection

with it is through the intermediate links of the clan and the family;

his membership in the community is conditioned by his membership of the

subordinate groups. As a rule, therefore, the individual finds that his

skin is nearer to him than his shirt whenever the interests of tribe and

clan diverge. And it goes without saying that this is very often the case.

The defects of the system are to some extent compensated by certain

rudiments of government to be found among the Arabs. There is a leading

aristocracy; the clans have their chief, and a head chief, the _said_,

is at the head of every tribe. The position of all these chiefs depends

upon voluntary recognition of the fact that they are fitted to hold it

by their personal qualities and their fortune. They are spontaneously

appointed by the common voice, without election or any similar process,

and though there is an inclination to make the authority hereditary and

the sons reap the advantage of gratitude felt toward their fathers,

yet each man must, by his own ability, anew make good his claim to the

honours he has inherited if he is to remain in power and public esteem.

The word of these chieftains carries most weight in the assemblies

in which they meet every evening to talk, dispute, and deliberate.

The _said_ gives the casting vote. He decides, for instance, when the

tribe shall start on its migrations and when it shall encamp. Generally

speaking, however, the chiefs and the _said_ have no advantage over the

rest in privilege, but only in obligation. Among the Arabs _noblesse

oblige_ is no empty phrase, but a substantial truth. The nobles must

distinguish themselves above the rest in the duties incumbent upon all;

they must take on their shoulders the burden which others pass by, and

out of their own abundance make good the deficit caused by lack of

corporate feeling in the multitude. They must be liberal in all things;

must not spare their blood in feud nor their goods in peace; they must

entertain the stranger, maintain the widow and the orphan, feed the

hungry and help the debtor to pay. The principal share in bearing the

common burden falls to the _said_. In return he receives the fourth part

of all booty, but he nevertheless often spends his whole fortune for the

common stock; his position brings him honour and reputation, but never

gain, and therefore does not procure him the envy of baser natures.

But his most important duty is to maintain the unity of the tribe and

to check the disintegration to which it is liable from individual

selfishness and the particularism of the various clans. He is there to

step into the breach, as the biblical phrase has it. He is the born

mediator and peacemaker.

For all that, he can only negotiate and apply moral pressure. He is but

the first among equals; he has great authority but no supreme power, and

in the last resort that is not enough either for the external or internal

affairs of the community. In war there is no thought of compulsory

service, no idea of discipline, of absolute command and obedience. If one

clan will not go out with the rest, it separates from them and hardens

its heart against their mockery and contempt. If the men will not follow

their leader, he sometimes has recourse to an attempt to put them to

shame by setting up his sword and threatening to fall upon it, unless

he is obeyed. Danger from without is, however, the readiest means of

inducing them to submit to a single will, whereas the lack of a central

sovereign authority is much more sorely felt in internal affairs.

The only function of the ancient community, apart from self-defence,

is the maintenance of peace within its own borders, and the means to

this end is the law. The Old Testament, for instance, knows nothing of

administration as a function of the state; to rule is to judge, and the

generic term for ruler is judge.

The Arabs are not without law, though with them its limits are wider and

less strictly defined than with us and include the decision of questions

which do not lead to impeachments and law-suits, but refer to duties, not

rights.

They also have judges who administer justice. Disputes between fellow

tribesmen are brought under discussion in the daily palaver and are

there settled without any legal formalities. But international disputes,

_i.e._, matters disputed between members of different tribes, may also

be settled by law, if both parties agree to choose an arbitrator to

whom they will refer the decision. Anyone may undertake this office; in

difficult cases a seer or priest is frequently applied to, or some other

man who enjoys general confidence and has a reputation for exceptional

wisdom. The arbitrator sometimes makes the parties swear to accept his

verdict, whatever it may be, but his business is merely to discover and

interpret the law, and he has no power to enforce it. The disputants

consequently apply to the judge merely to learn the rules of the law, not

to sue for and obtain their rights. His judgment has no legal force and

does not entail the execution of the sentence, with which, in fact, it

has nothing to do.

An instance of what appears to us so singular a state of things, may make

the matter clearer. Shortly before Mohammed’s arrival at Medina, a man

of that city went to law with a Bedouin from the neighbourhood before a

wise woman about a sum of money, _i.e._, camels. The woman decided in

favour of the man of Medina; he was a well-known person, Suwaid, the son

of Samit, by name. When they came to the parting of the ways, Suwaid said

to the Bedouin, “Who will be surety that thou wilt pay me the camels?”

The other promised to send them as soon as he reached home. But Suwaid,

not satisfied with this, wrestled with his debtor, threw him, and bound

him. He then carried him off to Medina and kept him in custody, until his

kinsmen redeemed him by paying him what he owed.

Criminal jurisdiction, as we understand it, is rendered impossible by

the absence of a supreme authority, a magisterial tribunal. Although

fidelity to one’s kindred is a moral law and the violation of it a

sin, yet the Arabs have not reached the abstract conception of crime

against the community at large, still less of punishment inflicted by

the community--since for the community to cast off a troublesome or

unworthy member is not, strictly speaking, a punishment. They only

recognise private offences, and the punishment of these is the business

of the individual. There is no official process of investigation with the

coercive methods of vigorous cross-examination. If anything is stolen,

the owner proclaims his loss aloud and lays the thief under a curse

unless he restores the missing article, and all his accomplices likewise,

unless they tell what they know of it. If murder or manslaughter has been

committed by an unknown hand and this or that man is suspected of being

the perpetrator, his clan takes an oath of purgation for him, which may,

however, be counterbalanced by an oath to the opposite effect on the part

of the dead man’s clan.

The punishment of an offence is of course left to the sufferer. It is

his business to see how he can best get compensation for the wrong done

him and to seek for help wherever he may find it. He is not forbidden to

take vengeance into his own hands, nor is there any compulsion to make

him have recourse to law instead of so doing. The individual may, of

his own free will, refrain from violent measures, if he pleases, and

may enter into negotiations, which are then conducted on the basis of a

legal principle, of an inner material law. But if, instead of avenging

himself, he resorts to legal proceedings, the question is never one of

the punishment of a crime,--which, indeed, could hardly be settled by

agreement between the contending parties,--but merely of compensation

for a loss. Compensation can be given for everything for which vengeance

might be exacted. All crimes are treated in the same manner by the law,

and assessed as economic damage. Every loss of honour, property, or life

can be appraised by agreement; they all have their price in camels.

Vengeance is not thereby appeased, but if revenge is relinquished, the

law demands no more.

The worst and most serious crime is bloodshed. Malice or accident, war or

peace, make no difference to this. Its natural and primary consequence is

blood-revenge. This is, in the first place, the duty of the next heir,

but it quickly extends to others, for the clan of the slayer does not

desert him, but takes his part, and consequently also the slain man’s

whole clan naturally helps the avenger against them. The result is a

state of war between the two clans, which finds expression in occasional

murders, often at long intervals. All members of the clan are considered

accomplices; they espouse one another’s quarrel as in war, and fall

victims to vengeance without distinction of persons. Every new member

is a fresh motive for vengeance, and thus revenge incessantly breeds

revenge. Thus blood-revenge necessarily results in blood-feud between

the clans. It has been supposed that blood-feuds are only carried on

between two hostile tribes, and not between kindred clans belonging to

the same tribe, as that would constitute a breach of tribal unity. But

the preservation of tribal unity is a moral axiom only, and incapable of

keeping the centrifugal forces under effective control. The clan’s right

of feud is undisputed, and, as a matter of fact, blood-feuds are carried

on also within the tribe as well as without. The duty of vengeance is

more vividly realised than duty to the tribe; it is a sacred primary law

which takes precedence of all political considerations. Even if brother

slays brother in the same clan, the result is a blood-feud, though the

cases on record are as a rule supposititious, not real, just as similar

cases are treated by the Greeks as tragic problems in the _Oresteia_ and

the _Œdipodeia_.

Law can be substituted for revenge in murder as in other crimes, that

is to say, even blood-guiltiness can be paid off in money, _i.e._, in

camels. This is done by agreement between debtor and creditor or between

the clans of both; and when the agreement is brought about, the source

of the blood-feud is estopped. In quarrels within the tribe it is the

duty of the chiefs, and of the head chief more particularly, to induce

the disputants to consent to an accommodation by law. They then negotiate

as between two belligerent powers; they can only mediate for peace, not

impose it. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not. Mecca and Medina

furnish the best instances of both results. Very often the disputants

do not make peace until their strength is utterly exhausted. Then the

balance-sheet is drawn up, the debit and credit in dead and wounded

compared, and the difference made up in camels.

But it is obvious that in this case the incongruity between what

vengeance demands and what the law accords is too glaring. The Arabs are

keenly alive to this fact, and it is not considered honourable to accept

camels as satisfaction for a murder--to sell blood for milk, as their

phrase goes. Vengeance is far better appeased by positive amends on a

less unequal scale, by blood for blood, an eye for an eye, and a tooth

for a tooth. This is sometimes made by peaceful means, and that is what

is called _talio_. The criminal is not sheltered by his own people, but

is handed over to the avenger that he may requite him for what he has

done. If the heritage of vengeance has passed to a child, the execution

is often deferred till his majority.

By this means the quarrel is confined to the parties immediately

concerned, the clans are not implicated, blood-revenge does not

degenerate into blood-feud, nor does it exceed in the heat of passion

the measure of strict retribution. As a matter of fact talio appears to

have been common in cases of mere bodily injury. An amusing instance is

recorded in the life of Mohammed. At the battle of Bedr he ranged his

men in a long straight row, forming them into line with the shaft of a

spear. In so doing he struck somewhat heavily upon the body of a man

whose figure projected beyond the straight line, and the individual,

whose name and race are exactly recorded, complained of his violence.

Mohammed promptly offered his own body and said, “Take unto thyself the

talio,” which, however, the other magnanimously declined to do. From this

we see that also a military commander in the exercise of his official

functions differs in nothing from a private person in the eyes of the

law. Imagine a scene of this sort between officer and private on a modern

parade-ground!

If, however, it is not a question of satisfaction for mere corporeal

injuries, but of blood for blood, the situation becomes far more

difficult; for if mulct is unwillingly taken, talio is far more

unwillingly given. It is the direst disgrace for any clan to give up one

of its members, no matter what his crime, into the hands of another clan

which intends to put him to death; rather will they slay him themselves.

Hence the talio, though an efficacious means of keeping blood-revenge

within bounds and blunting its dangerous edges as far as the peace and

unity of the tribe are concerned, cannot be practically enforced in the

ancient Arabic community, because it has no sovereign power over the

tribe.

The first Arabic community with sovereign powers was established by

Mohammed in the city of Medina, not upon the basis of blood, which

naturally tends to diversity, but upon that of religion, which is equally

binding on all. There for the first time the talio becomes effective,

there it can be enforced. The community, at the head of which God

stands, and the prophet as God’s representative, has power to deliver

the shedder of blood over to the avenger, and it is the duty of the

community to see that this is done. “In the talio ye have the life,”

says the _Koran_; and a commentary is provided by the hideous anarchy,

conjured up by blood-feuds, which prevailed in Medina before the coming

of Mohammed--life was then indeed impossible. And in another place the

_Koran_ says, “If a man have slain one person unlawfully, it is as if

he had slain all men.” In other words the murder of an individual is to

be regarded as a crime committed against the whole community, and the

whole body must see to it that lawful vengeance may have its course. The

execution of vengeance is, however, still left to the rightful avenger;

and he is at liberty to exercise his right or renounce it, either freely

or for a price. The talio is not yet a punishment, it is only the

transition stage to it from revenge.

Originally even Islam knew nothing of the capital punishment publicly

inflicted, of a ritual execution by the community and its officers,

at least not in cases of murder or manslaughter. Even in the earlier

caliphate there were enormous difficulties in the way of the execution

of a Moslem who had not shed innocent blood. Apart from the talio the

official infliction of capital punishment was hardly possible, for

as long as Arab sentiment survived, the people could not grasp the

distinction between an executioner and a murderer. A change did not

take place until with the accession of the Abbasids the Iranians took

the reins of government from the Arabs and brought with them Iranian

conceptions of state and law.

On the other hand, the Hebrews, near kinsmen of the Arabs, arrived at

just conceptions of capital crime and capital punishment fifteen hundred

years earlier than they. According to the Hebrew view, the guilt of

sin, which is held to be an offence against the Deity, weighs upon the

whole community, until the actual perpetrator of the crime is extirpated

or purged out of its midst. The sentence of death is carried out by

the whole community and takes the form of stoning, its characteristic

features being that every man of the congregation takes part in it

and casts his stone. Murder and manslaughter, indeed, are not as yet

classed among the offences against God, for which capital punishment at

the hands of the community is due; bloodshed is in the main a private

wrong still, and its punishment is left to the injured person. But it is

not associated with blood-feud between clans, and the criminal is not

protected by his family. Blood-revenge is tamed already and restricted

by law to what we know as the talio. The shedder of blood is abandoned

by his family, the heir and avenger may pursue and slay him. Should he

take refuge in a sanctuary, he is safe if he has shed blood by mischance

only. Otherwise the sanctuary affords him no protection. It is the

right and duty of the community, represented by its elders, to drag

him away from the altar and hand him over to the avenger. The act of

slaughter is always left to the latter; the ceremonial infliction of

capital punishment, execution by the congregation, is never the penalty

assigned for murder or manslaughter. But the avenger is not allowed to

take a ransom for the murderer or give him his life. For here the idea

insinuates itself that bloodshed is not only a wrong and injury done to

the individual, but a crime, that is to say an offence against God. The

murderer has sinned also against the Deity, and his guilt lies upon the

whole community, until they are rid of him.

Thus the religious obligation of the community, to wash away the blood

shed within its borders, goes hand in hand with the individual obligation

of vengeance. If the murderer cannot be discovered, vengeance is

impossible; but a symbolical ceremony is substituted for the purification

of the community, and the city within whose borders a man is found dead

by an unknown hand must slay a cow in place of the murderer.

We see that among the Hebrews the ideas of crime and punishment had their

root in religion; the crime is an offence against God, and its punishment

is the purging of the community from this offence; execution is the only

real punishment, and must be distinguished from talio on the one hand and

mere chastisement on the other.

Among the Arabs the religious root of the penal law has withered away

and nothing but human vengeance is left. This can hardly be the ancient

conception. Vengeance itself is in its origin not a human passion merely,

it is likewise a religious duty. True, this duty was originally believed

to have been imposed, not by the Almighty, but by a demon. And this demon

was the wrathful spirit of the murdered man himself, who would not let

his clan rest until they had given him to drink the murderer’s blood for

which he thirsted. We can still find traces of this belief among the

Arabs. Amongst them the avenger of blood is under a solemn vow, exactly

like the man who has to offer sacrifice or fulfil any other religious

duty; he may not wash nor comb his hair, nor drink wine, with many other

prohibitions of the same kind. As he accomplishes the act of vengeance,

he must call upon the name of him for whom he takes it, in a brief form

of words; then he is free and returned from the state of sanctification

and uncleanness to that of cleanness and common life; exactly like a

sacrificer after he has made a sacrifice.

But these are petrified remains, as it were, of a motive that has no

present potency. The poetry which has come down to us invariably speaks

only of the ungovernable rage of the avenger, not of the person to be

avenged; of burning pain in the breast of the survivor, which demands

relief at any price; and of the shame which weighs him down as long

as the murderer still treads the earth alive. Moreover--and this is a

particularly striking point--religion has not retained any influence upon

actual law amongst the ancient Arabs, apart, perhaps, from the process of

inquiry by curse and oath.

Ancient Arab law is singularly profane, dry, and formless; it is

throughout a matter of bargain and contract, for even the penal law

operates only through compensation and payment.

Such, in brief outline, is the picture of the Arabic community, a

community devoid of supreme authority and executive power. We are fond

of calling it patriarchal, but what do we mean by the phrase? Of the

amenities of family life we find no trace, nor any trace of patriarchal

guardianship. Each man has to give his help, if anything is to be done.

There is more scope in such a community for the display of courage,

self-sacrifice, and brotherly kindness than in our own, where the state

seems to work like a machine for which we have merely to provide the

fuel. It is a pity, however, that so fair an opportunity is not put to

the fullest use. In critical cases, the corporate feeling on which the

whole system depends is often shown by but few. There are hitches and

difficulties everywhere, though in the desert the conditions of life are

very simple, narrow, and easy to understand, its interests very uniform.

No progressive civilisation can develop in this fashion; the desert is

enough in itself to render development difficult. These weak foundations

will bear no aspiring superstructure. Not even individual liberty, as we

understand it, reaps advantage from the absence of the coercion of the

state. For if the sense of kinship be too weak to control the wicked and

force the indolent to fulfil the duties incumbent upon them, yet it is

strong enough to prevent the growth of intellectual freedom in circles

that possess and exercise it. Such liberty can only thrive in a state

which, like Noah’s ark, contains all kinds of animals and lets them do as

they please, not in a society of kinsmen which lays a spell upon their

members from within, though it can impose no coercion from without.

The communities of Europe started, as there are many evidences to show,

from primitive conditions like those in which the Arabs of the desert

have remained. It is well that we should bear this in mind, and so

estimate, _quantæ molis erat romanam condere gentem_, what amount of

labour was required to create a stable system of law, independent of the

individual.

FOOTNOTES

[41] [The subject-matter of this article originally appeared as an

address delivered January 27th, 1900, at the university at Göttingen. It

was published in pamphlet form, but is now for the first time translated

and given wider currency by special arrangement with the author.]

[42] A guest whom the shadow of the tent has rendered sacred is after a

certain time dismissed and resumes his journey.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XII. THE PRINCIPLES OF LAW IN ISLAM

WRITTEN SPECIALLY FOR THE PRESENT WORK

BY DR. I. GOLDZIHER

Professor in the University of Vienna, etc.

In studying the lines along which Islam has developed we are confronted

with a singular antithesis within the faith itself. It is the outcome of

a revolutionary movement which arose to declare war against the past of

the Arab nation and of all other nations which it subdued by the ruthless

sword of Islam. Yet it had scarcely taken the first step in its career,

before investing with little short of sacramental importance an idea so

wholly alien to the spirit of subversion and revolution that it seems to

us rather a palladium of the most rigid conservatism. This is the idea of

the sunna.

Sunna means traditional usage, or custom hallowed by ancestral use, by

practice transmitted through past generations. He who violates this

custom trespasses against the Holy of holies, against something far above

any article of a legal code drawn up with all the mature consideration

and cool deliberation of the judicial mind; he had sinned against the

pious reverence due to the days of old. This is the view which underlies

the sanctity of the sunna. Translated into legal phraseology sunna might

accordingly be denominated right by custom, but a better idea of its

meaning may be gained by comparing it with the _mores majorum_ or _usus

longævus_ of the Romans. For the determining factor in it is not its

established character but the high esteem in which it has been held from

remote antiquity.

All this (to return to the proposition from which we started) is little

in accord with a system which originated with a prophet of revolution who

could not say, as Jesus said of himself, that he was “not come to destroy

but to fulfil”--at least, not as far as the traditional institutions of

the Arabs were concerned. Mohammed does, indeed, represent himself as

restoring what has been lost, as bringing back the golden age of religion

to man, the rule of the _din Ibrahim_ (the religion of Abraham) which had

been lost by corruption and wickedness, and obscured by gross heathenism

on its own native soil (for according to Mohammed the Kaaba at Mecca is

the temple of Abraham and Ishmael). But it is not this pretension which

will enable us to grasp the significance of the idea of the sunna in

Islam.

Amazing as it may sound, and accustomed as we are to associate the idea

of the sunna with the sheikhs who keep jealous watch over the holy places

of Islam, sunna is not primarily an Islamite word, nor is the idea it

expresses peculiar to Islam. It is deeply rooted in the ethical sentiment

of the very heathenism which the prophet arose to overthrow. Sunna is

an idea which Islam adopted from Arab heathenism, and which, in the

change of meaning it underwent in this new sphere, became one of the main

pillars of the new system.

The conception involved in the sunna, as defined at the beginning of this

essay, represents the heathen Arab’s ideal of life and the primitive

idea of laws and morals in tribal life. In this respect there was no

difference between the two classes which went to make up the sum total

of the Arab world, between the Bedouins and the dwellers in towns.

The _mores majorum_ were their law and their religion. The customs of

their forefathers were their dogmas; the practices that had come down

to them from the remote past were their sacraments. To infringe these

was criminal sacrilege. If the cult of tribal fellowship and regard for

the duties arising out of this association constitute the sum total of

morality, how much more imperatively did the principle apply to the

maintenance of a supersensual fellowship with the generations of the past.

Hence, in the persecution with which the world of Arab heathenism

received his preaching, Mohammed was not confronted by opponents who

defended the old state of things by arguments based on religion, or

wielded the weapons of serious controversy to refute his doctrines.

The heathen Arabs had but one argument against the message proclaimed

to them by the visionary of Mecca--it was an innovation. He represents

his heathen fellow-countrymen as putting forward this argument against

himself in exactly the same manner as he represents the heathen nations

of old as hurling it at their prophets. “If one saith to them, ‘Obey the

laws which Allah sends you,’ then they say, ‘We follow the customs of our

fathers.’ If one saith to them, ‘Come and adopt the religion which Allah

hath revealed to his ambassador,’ they answer, ‘We are satisfied with

the religion of our fathers.’ When the evil-doers commit an evil deed

they say, ‘Thus we saw it done by our fathers, it is Allah who commands

such things.’ But they say, ‘We found that our fathers were on this road

and we tread in their steps.’ Speak and say--do I not proclaim to you a

better thing than that whereat ye found your fathers?”

This plea, which constitutes, so to speak, the methodology of the

struggle of the heathen against the prophet, is, as it were, a

constant element that pervades all the laments of the _Koran_ over the

stubbornness of the heathen. They hate the prophet because he insults

their forefathers, who were likewise his own. He is lacking in filial

piety. And the touchstone of his error is his antagonistic attitude

towards the remote past. To the heathen his idols are dear as “heritages

from the worthies who have bequeathed this inheritance.”

Only a few decades elapsed before Islam had its own sunna. The element of

antiquity in this case was, of course, a figment; it anticipated for its

justification the generations yet to be born, who should look up to this

new standard as to something hallowed by tradition. It had no warrant

in the actual experience of successive generations which had already

regarded it as inviolable.

The _Koran_, the oldest and most authoritative document of the Islamite

movement, is not a book which offers to the believer a comprehensive

body of religious instruction sufficient to satisfy all inquiries.

What it pre-eminently does is to predispose religious sentiment to the

acceptance of the religion which arose on this foundation. Nor is it more

complete if regarded as a statutory guide in questions of law, since

it takes note of only a small and very limited department of juridical

needs. What it does is to predispose ethical sentiment in favour of the

new aspects in which social life and the legal relations it involves are

to be considered.

While these sentiments gave precision to the form of these new standards,

investing them with the character of divinely instituted laws, their

substance drew its nourishment from alien sources, from new views,

which were a consequence of the great career in history upon which the

new Islamite community entered soon after it came into existence. Much

fresh territory was conquered. It was impossible that contact with

foreign elements should fail to implant fresh ideas in the Semitic mind,

singularly receptive as it is--ideas which were destined to give its

final shape to the faith of Islam with which its adherents had embarked

on their conquering career.

Without the effect produced on the religious sentiment of Mohammedans

by questions that arose under the influence of Greek philosophy, there

would have been no formulated system of Mohammedan dogmatics, and in like

manner the first impulse towards the creation of a Mohammedan system of

law was given by contact with two great spheres of civilisation--the

Romaic and the Persian, the former in Syria and the latter in

Mesopotamia. It has already been remarked that the influence of Roman

law on the sources of a legal system in Islam is attested by the very

name given to jurisprudence in Islam from the beginning. It is called

_al Fikh_, reasonableness; and those who pursue the study of it are

designated _Fukaha_ (singular _Fakih_). These terms, which, as we cannot

fail to see, are Arabic translations of the Roman (_juris_) _prudentia_,

and _prudentes_, would be a clear indication of one of the chief sources

of Islamite jurisprudence, even if we had no positive data to prove that

this influence extended both to questions of the principle of legal

deduction and to particular legal provisions.

The positive laws of the _Koran_, and the few legal decisions made

in particular cases by the first caliphs and other companions of the

prophet at Medina in the early days of Islam, together with all the

legal customs retained from heathen days, were inadequate to serve for

the state of things brought about by the great conquests and immense

expansion of the Moslem empire. Even if all elements which had previously

and all which had come into being to meet the primary requirements of

the new Mohammedan society had sufficed for an Arab commonwealth on an

Islamite basis, the sum total of it all would nevertheless have been

inadequate to the needs of the new political fabric of Islam in countries

subject to entirely different economic and social conditions, and amidst

conquered peoples whose lives were ordered on a systematic legal basis.

When Islam subdued such ancient civilised peoples with the edge of the

sword, it could not impose upon them the primitive conditions of life

under which it had come forth into the wide world from the steppes and

oases of Arabia. It could mould the results of the historic past into

harmony with its own religious sentiment; but it could not destroy it,

if for no other reason than that it had nothing to put in its place.

Hence it had to leave many institutions in the conquered countries

substantially as it found them. The problem first presented itself in

Syria, the first halting-place of the victorious advance of Islam. The

_Koran_ and its earliest applications in practice made provision for

family and matrimonial rights and rights of succession, but proved

worse than meagre when applied to the privileges attaching to landed

property in a great agricultural state, or to the laws of contract and

obligation which, in the countries conquered by Islam, were ordered by

the fixed standards of Roman law. In this department the heads of the new

government had to take over very many ordinances of Roman law.

But, even apart from the adoption of legal standards, Roman law exercised

a notable influence upon the legal thought of the new intruders into a

country whose jurists had been trained in the scientific jurisprudence of

the school of Berytus. The influence exercised by the Roman legal methods

on the system of legal deduction in Islam is a more important factor

in the history of Moslem civilisation than even the direct adoption of

particular points of law. By what systematic rules or what devices can

deductions be drawn from positive laws, written or traditional, which

shall apply to newly arising cases at law and to the decision of legal

questions for which the positive written law provides no answer? In

dealing with this juridical problem the Arab _Fukha_ took their stand

entirely upon the instruction they had gained from circles familiar

with the work of Rome in the domain of law. The dualism of written law

(Arabic, _nazz_) and unwritten law is a mere reflection of the dualism of

_leges scriptæ_ (_chakhamim_), and _leges non scriptæ_. Just so, about

half a century before, the Jewish jurists (a word which in its legal

application is likewise a translation of the Roman term _jurisprudentes_)

had been moved by their intercourse with the Romans to make the hitherto

unrecognised distinction between the _tora she-bitche-thab_, or written

law, and the _tora she-be’al-peh_, or oral law.

The application of principles and rules borrowed from the methodology

of Roman jurisprudence first made it possible to extend the limited

legal material supplied by the _Koran_ and the old decisions which were

accepted as the basis of the law, to other departments of juridical

activity, of which these authorities had had no prevision. The _ratio

legis_ (_illa_), the principle of presumption was applied to analogies

(_kyas_) in words and things; nay, just as Roman legal practice gave

great weight to the _opinio prudentium_ in legal deduction, so the

Islamite _prudentes_ assumed the prerogative of an authoritative

subjective _opinio_; for _ra’j_, as it is called in Arabic, is a

literal translation of the Latin term. Of all these principles (which

are not exhausted by the examples just cited) none more strikingly

demonstrates the profound influence of Roman law on the development of

legal opinion in Islam, than that which is known in Arabic as _maclaha_

or _istilah_,--_i.e._, the public weal and regard for the same. The

significance of this principle lies in the license it grants to the

interpreter of the law to apply the legal standard in the manner best

fitted to serve the public weal and interests. Here we recognise the

Roman standard of the _utilitas publica_, which gives the interpreter of

the law the right, by interpretation, an application to wrest a plain and

unambiguous law into something quite different from its original meaning,

in the interests of the public weal.

Such principles, derived from foreign instructors, served for the

deduction of Mohammedan law, as soon as the teachers of the people felt

the necessity of withdrawing the domain of law from the capricious

action of the sovereign and his instruments in the administration and

judicature, which had free play by reason of the meagreness of positive

legal matter based upon generally recognised authority. The Islamite

jurists declared that the conclusions at which they had arrived on the

basis of these principles (which, as we have seen, were no part of Islam)

were in harmony with the true spirit of Islam, the rightful outcome of

its original character. This phenomenon, which early came to maturity

and was widely accepted in Mohammedan theological circles as legal and

of indubitable authority, is of profound importance to our historic

estimate and judgment of Islam. Whatever the ignorant men who stood by

its cradle may have thought to be the meaning of the new word which they

were charged to proclaim to the oriental world, the first step which

conquering Islam took on its victorious career taught it to accommodate

itself to an alien spirit, and to mould its own intellectual heritage by

influences which seem absolutely heterogeneous to a superficial observer.

In more than one point of its doctrinal fabric, Islam in its early

days was a borrower. Its founders were anxious, it is true, to avoid

the appearance of appropriating other men’s property. But loudly as

they trumpet the principle, “Be different from them in all things”

(_Chalifuhum_) the reference here being chiefly to Jews and Christians,

their documents are crammed with borrowings from the Scriptures of the

very confessions which, on their own assertion, it was their leading

principle to oppose. The stubborn antagonism of Islam to the rest of the

world, its inflexible protest against the influence of foreign elements,

is an illusion which historical study of the movement must dissipate

if it is to rise to a scientific comprehension of this great historic

phenomenon.

Though contact with the Romæi was the influence which caused the first

seeds of law in Islam to germinate, we must not overlook another side

upon which Islam in its early days came into direct contact with a

foreign national element, the influence of which was very important

in the development of its legal system. We refer to its contact with

the people and the religion of Persia. This can be traced back to

pre-Islamite times, and even Mohammed himself was not absolutely free

from the influence of the religious ideas of the Parsees (_madjus_,

magians), whom he classes in the _Koran_ with Jews and Christians, and

contrasts with the heathen as confessors of more favoured religions.

But Persian nationality did not become a formative element in Islam until

the latter subjugated the geographical sphere of the old Parsee religion,

and by the right of conquest imposed the faith of the prophet of Mecca

and Medina upon the followers of Zoroaster. The Mohammedan occupation of

’Irak is one of the most telling factors in the religious and juridical

development of Islam.

Persian theologians carried their inherited views into the new religion

they had adopted, the conquering power enriched the poverty of its own

religious store with elements supplied by the experience of a profound

religious life, such had been a native growth among the conquered

Persians from of old. Hence it is hardly possible to overestimate

the importance of the part played in the development of Islam by the

spiritual movement which came to birth in ’Irak and is associated with

the schools of Bacra and Kufa. In analysing the elements of which Islam

is composed we are not surprised to find many of Persian origin, the

outcome of this connection.[43]

These influences are brought into fullest play by the great revolution

which befel the Moslem empire in about the hundred and twenty-eighth

year of its existence--the fall of the Omayyads and the usurpation of

the sceptre of the caliphs by the Abbasids. The worldly spirit which

had guided the policy of the fallen dynasty--a spirit genuinely

Arab, devoid of any real comprehension of the religious aims and the

transcendental interests of Islam--now makes way for a theocratic bias,

which drew its ideas in the main from the character of the Persian

“divine monarchy.” It is the Sassanid spirit in an Islamite garb. The

indifferentism of the ruling powers gives place to the encouragement of

religious tendencies. The religious tolerance of earlier days is at an

end. Sectarianism, pietism, harsh dogmatism, and, linked with them, the

persecuting spirit--are the dominant notes of public life. Disputations

concerning matters of religion impress their characteristic stamp upon

the intellectual tendencies which find favour in high places. Opposing

religious parties come into the field and frame their subtlest arguments.

Moreover, this was the opportune moment for working up into practical

juridical systems the suggestions in the department of jurisprudence

derived in earlier days from Roman law. In the second century of the

Hegira, Islamite jurisprudence enters upon the classic period of its

efflorescence and completion. The scene of its glory is the scholarly

world of Mesopotamia, which sheds its rays upon every quarter of the

Mohammedan empire. Even such advances in the sphere of law as come to

light outside this birthplace of systematised jurisprudence are the fruit

of the intellectual movement on the soil of the ancient empire of Persia.

And even the demonstrations of antagonism to the aspirations which took

shape there (for it aroused tremendous opposition) are affected by its

influence.

Abu Hanifa (699-767) of Kufa, the grandson of a Persian, is recognised in

Islam as the father of that jurisprudence which, by the employment of the

free speculative method already described, found ways and means to make

provision for the whole vast sphere of legal activity (which includes

both law and religious ceremonial) out of the scanty stock of positive

legal documents. This completion of the legal system of Islam was arrived

at by laborious development along the lines of its main principles, by

modification of the method evolved in some particular school, by open

contravention of the fundamental ideas of some particular tendency,

and, lastly, by deliberate compromise between antagonistic lines of

thought. It was reached with a rapidity which is characteristic of all

the intellectual creations of Islam. It is a singular feature of the

whole literature of Islam that everything reaches its prime with amazing

rapidity, only to decline as rapidly. In the fourth century of the Hegira

every branch of Arabic literature had come to full maturity, to flourish

for a brief while, and enter upon its period of decadence about the

beginning of the sixth.

By the end of the third century (ninth century A.D.) jurisprudence had

reached its classic prime. Leaving out of account some other heads of

schools who soon retire from the scene, there are four men in particular

to whom it does honour as to its founders and fathers, four men whose

disciples represent the main currents which flow side by side through

the construction of Islamite law: (1) Abu Hanifa (died 767), the true

representative of the ’Irak method; (2) Malik b. Anas (died 795), the

most celebrated imam in the prophet’s city of Medina; (3) Mohammed b.

Idris al-Shafii, a pupil of the latter (died 820), most famous for his

educational work in Egypt, where his sepulchral chapel (in the Karafa at

Cairo) is reverenced by the natives as a place of pilgrimage; and (4)

Akhmed b. Hanbal (died 855), the pious teacher of Baghdad, the principal

champion and valiant apostle of the old conservative views in religion,

whose tomb in the Harbiah graveyard at Baghdad has, in the phrase of

Guy l’Estrange, the writer of the monograph on the ancient city of the

caliphs, “become the object of a devotion savouring of idolatry.”

The views which have been enumerated, borrowed from the method of legal

deduction in Roman law, were not employed to the same extent by all

schools of jurisprudence. While in that of Abu Hanifa the validity of the

_opinio_ goes so far as to accord recognition to the personal inclination

of the administrator of the law, other schools were not disposed to give

such free scope to the subjective judgment. The principle of _istiçhab_

(_præsumptio_) was most fully recognised in the school of Shafii; that of

regard for the public weal (_istiçlah_) in that of Malik.

In the erudite world which busied itself with the theoretical exposition

of the law there were, however, large bodies of scholars, who took up

their parable to proclaim that, generally speaking and on principle, they

could not profess to recognise principles of method which depended for

their authority on the subjective work of the human reason. They would

recognise two things only as the sole basis of legal deduction--Scripture

and tradition; that is to say, the _Koran_ and the traditions or positive

decisions of the prophet, his companions and their successors, of whom

it could be safely assumed that they had acted and given judgment in the

spirit of the founder of the faith. Only in cases of extreme necessity,

and when these authoritative sources obstinately refused to yield an

answer, was it lawful to admit the authority of _ra’j_ (_opinio_), or

more particularly, of _kiga_ (analogy). These latter were “like the

vulture, the eating of which was permitted as an exception in time of

dearth when other food could by no means be obtained.” Under normal

circumstances it was not permissible to reason; the only right course was

to abide by the letter of tradition, since nothing outside of that could

be set on a par with it. Truth manifests itself not in answer to the

question “What is reasonable?” but in answer to “What did the prophet say

and how did he act?”

Here we find ourselves face to face with the idea of the sunna which had

come down from the Arabs of old (the idea explained at the beginning of

this article), in its most rigid form, but with this difference--that the

sunna, as now understood, does not look back to a remote antiquity but to

a very recent past. The genuine sunnist only feels solid ground beneath

his feet when he can base his judgment and conduct on the authentic

text, or on well-accredited tradition concerning the words and deeds of

the earliest authorities recognised by the Islamite world. Of all the

four schools, the Hanoblalite, the one founded by the youngest teacher,

was that in which this rigid view found most favour. In modern times it

has been brought into prominence as a principle of government by the

puritanical state of the Wahabees, the “_Tempelstürmer von Hocharabien_,”

as they are called by Karl von Vincenti in a historical novel in which he

describes their proceedings.

It is, however, an easy thing to say, “Tradition and nothing but

tradition!” But what if, with the best will in the world, no answer can

be wrung from tradition to the most pressing questions of ordinary life?

The judge must give judgment; the shepherd of souls must lay down rules

for his flock on questions which hourly crop up for decision in a state

of life ordered by religious laws in even the most trifling details;

and in doubtful cases the mufti must be able to expound the meaning of

the divine law with no uncertain voice. What, then, if Scripture and

tradition be dumb, and no effort can draw forth the least enlightenment

from them? Where all the sources of tradition ran dry, men had to make

concessions, whether they would or not, to individual opinion and the

right of speculative interpretation. This led to the rise of a school

of thought which endeavoured to reconcile the two sharply antagonistic

tendencies. It was absolutely necessary to discover a middle course

between excessive subjectivism and rigid traditionalism, and to define

accurately the juridical spheres of the two conflicting elements. It was

necessary to discover rules, in accordance with which speculative methods

might be used to supplement tradition in the work of legal deduction, and

to set up standards for the right use of traditional data in the correct

formulation of the law. This work of reconciliation was done by the

founder of the second school on the list, at Shafii.

Moreover there was another point of view from which the systemisation

of the use of speculation as a source of law on the one hand and of

tradition on the other proved an imperative necessity. If, in the

one case, it was requisite to curb the arbitrary exercise of the

subjective reason, it was no less necessary to check the rank growth of

traditional matter, which, as it increased, hampered more and more the

use of authentic tradition. The one-sided partisans of the sunna needed

traditional matter for the establishment of such a legal system as they

desired to see. Nor was any refutation of their theses, nor any opinion

advanced against them, in their eyes worth discussing unless it could

appeal to the authority of tradition. As a result, where no traditional

matter was to be had, men speedily began to fabricate it. The greater

the demand, the busier was invention with the manufacture of apocryphal

traditions in support of the respective theses.

For the verification of didactic records, whether sacred or profane,

Islam has adopted a singular form, which imparts to Islamite tradition a

character altogether peculiar to itself, to which we can find no parallel

(at least in such a mature and consistent shape) in any other literature.

This is the _hadith_. The word _hadith_ means simply communication, or

narrative. If any such narrative is to be put forth with pretensions

to authenticity the actual text must be preceded by what is called the

_sanad_ or _isnad_ (literally, ‘support’). This enumerates in correct

and unbroken sequence the authorities who have handed the narrative down

from mouth to mouth, from the last person responsible for its circulation

up to its original author. The examination of this sanad allows free and

unbiased criticism the opportunity of judging whether these men on whose

authority any particular narrative has been passed from mouth to mouth

and from generation to generation, and set down as an actual occurrence,

were persons deserving of full credit.

From this point of view an unbroken chain of oral tradition constitutes

a surer and more valuable guarantee of authenticity than any written

document, whether contemporary or based upon contemporary records. Even

if a written document bears all the outward tokens of authenticity,

it must be able to show a consistent sanad reaching in uninterrupted

sequence from the first author to the last teller of the tale, if its

claim is to be admitted. Every narrative and every matter of tradition,

without regard to its quantitative or qualitative importance, must be set

forth with its “genealogy.” This genealogy is the sanad. In theological

matters, more particularly, it is the backbone without which no record

can stand upright.

The literature of historic research also avails itself of this form of

verification. Readers of the classic work of Muhammed Jarir al-Tabari,

the “father of Islamite history” are familiar with this method of

historic authentication. Each record takes the form of an appendage to

a chain of tradition which reaches back to some direct authority, and

to this chain the record is appended in the very words of the first

narrator. It sometimes happens that a record of the same event occurs in

narratives that are traced back to different authorities, and not merely

in different words and with trifling variations. The facts themselves

are represented in a totally different fashion, or the narratives of

different authorities set them or their accompanying circumstances in a

different light. All these divergent narratives are simply placed side by

side, in a manner which cannot be compared with the different authorities

for the narratives of the Pentateuch; for, unlike the latter, the

traditional records of Arab history are not anonymous. On the contrary,

they owe their distinctive character to this circumstantial system of

authentication and the enumeration by name of the successive vouchers for

their truth. Again, they show no trace of an attempt on the part of any

editor to reduce conflicting accounts to harmony; they are simply set

side by side, instead of being welded together. This circumstance has

greatly facilitated the critical study of the periods from which such

parallel narratives date. Wellhausen has recently given to the world a

masterly study, in which he skilfully discriminates between the various

points of view, and the particular bias of each of the authorities for

the narrative of the victory at Tabari (_Skizzen und Vorarbeiten_, VI).

The same state of things prevails in the statements of tradition in

matters of law and religion. Each statement, cast into the traditional

form, and relying for authentication in the first instance upon the

testimony of an actual eye-witness, professes to show the practice of

the prophet at certain times of prayer, or what judgment was given by

him or his companions in certain legal questions. During the first

century of Islamism divergencies of practice in minor details of law and

worship had grown up in different congregations of believers. Every one

of these divergent forms can appeal to the authority of a formal and

well-attested traditional account, with a sanad in which the names of the

most trustworthy witnesses are adduced in support of theses diametrically

opposed to one another.

In order to obviate this incongruity, there soon developed in Islam

a science of textual criticism, a study in which Islamite erudition

outstripped that of Europe by several centuries. Its object was to decide

the claims of the various authorities, to judge of the degree of credit

to be given to each, to weigh the possibility that sectarian or party

tendencies might have vitiated the _bona fides_ of men otherwise above

reproach. The climax of this work of criticism is to be found in certain

systematised compilations of traditions, the editors of which start with

the definite object of sifting what appears to them authentic out of

the vast body of obviously spurious material. The most famous of these

compilations are those of Buchari (died 870) and Muslim (died 875). The

general consent of Islam presently invested these compilations with

canonical authority.

Other works of the same kind were also held in great honour. In course of

time other compilations from among those made in the ninth century were

added to the first two, and in these the sifting of tradition was carried

out upon the most liberal principles. From the thirteenth century onward,

six codices have been recognised as the sources of authentic traditional

records. Out of these theological science gathers the evidence of

tradition in questions of law, and with the _Koran_, they constitute the

canonical literature of Islam.

Judged by a scientific criterion, only a very small part, if any, of the

contents of these canonical compilations can be confidently referred

to the early period from which they profess to date. Minute study soon

reveals the presence of the tendencies and aspirations of a later day,

the working of a spirit which wrests the record in favour of one or other

of the opposing theses in certain disputed questions.

What we gather from these traditional authorities is by no means a

homogeneous system of instruction. The voice of thoroughly well-attested

tradition can be quoted in support of the most diverse, nay, of the most

contradictory teachings on certain points of ritual and law. This is

one of the principal causes of divergences of practice in minor details

of religious usage and of the law. These differences, together with the

vexed question of the use of the subjective factor in legal deduction,

lie at the root of the controversies between the four great schools of

law (the founders of which we have already enumerated) which occupy the

whole field of orthodox Islam. These schools are in accord upon the

great fundamental doctrines of religion, and the outward differences in

practice are not regarded as elements of division. The Islamites consider

them of equal validity, with equal claims to pass for orthodox.

Sunnite Islam early formulated and put into the mouth of Mohammed the

doctrine that “Differences of opinion in my congregation are to be

regarded as tokens of the mercy of God.” Like Lessing, the Islamites

think that all trees cannot have the same bark. It is therefore a

great error, and one which leads to a total misunderstanding of the

whole character of Islam, to describe these four currents of thought,

or _madsahib_, as the Mohammedans call them, as “sects,” or use such

language as recently appeared in a widely circulated journal, which said:

“We need only recall the question which resulted in a schism in Islam,

as to whether ablutions should be begun at the elbow or at the wrist.”

(_Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung_, Beilage No. 209, Sept. 12th, 1901.)

The fact that these differences of ritual exist cannot be denied. But

schisms take their rise from dogmatic and juridical questions of a far

more radical character, and lie far beyond the sphere of the points in

controversy between the four schools of the law.

On the other hand, in the present state of the Islamite world, orthodoxy

is wholly confined to these four main schools of thought, which rank as

the right and recognised modalities of correct religious usage and of the

practical interpretation of the law. To borrow an image from philology,

they and they alone are legitimate dialects of the one fundamental

language of Islam. _Quintum non datur._ Zealous religious associations,

which take their stand on the fundamental principles of Islam, yet

cannot be classed in either of these four categories, are looked upon as

dissenters of dubious character, although they themselves regard it as

their one object in life to purify Islam and imbue it with fresh vigour.

They are styled _chums_ or _chawamis_, from a word meaning “fifth,” to

mark their independence of the four parallel streams of orthodoxy. Such,

for example, are the Senussis, a religious association in north Africa,

whose proceedings are at present engaging the serious attention of the

leaders of French colonial policy. They are not adherents of the school

of Malik, which predominates in north Africa, and are therefore regarded

as _chawamis_ by the Moslem “high churchmen” of the locality.