MOHAMMEDAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
ISLAM has been a mighty power in the earth since the middle of the
seventh century. A more energetic and trenchant faith than it was
for eight hundred years has not appeared among men. Finally
expelled from its startling encampments in Spain and the
Archipelago, it still rules with tenacious hold over Turkey, a
part of Tartary, Palestine, Persia, Arabia, and large portions of
Africa. At this moment, as to adherence and influence, it is
subordinate only to the two foremost religious systems in the
world, Buddhism and Christianity. The dogmatic structure of Islam
as a theology and its practical power as an experimental religion
offer a problem of the gravest interest. But we must hasten on to
give an exposition of merely those elements in it which are
connected with its doctrine of a future life.
It is a matter of entire notoriety that there is but the least
amount of originality in the tenets of the Mohammedan faith. The
blending together of those tenets was distinctive, the unifying
soul breathed into them was a new creation, and the great aim to
which the whole was subordinated was peculiar; but the component
doctrines themselves, with slight exception, existed before as
avowed principles in the various systems of belief and practice
that prevailed around. Mohammed adopted many of the notions and
customs of the pagan Arabs, the central dogma of the Jews as to
the unity of God, most of the traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures,
innumerable fanciful conceits of the Rabbins,1 whole doctrines of
the Magians with their details, some views of the Gnostics, and
extensive portions of a corrupted Christianity, grouping them
together with many modifications of his own, and such additions as
his genius afforded and his exigencies required. The motley
strangely results in a compact and systematic working faith.
The Islamites are divided into two great sects, the Sunnees and
the Sheeahs. The Arabs, Tartars, and Turks are Sunnees, are
dominant in numbers and authority, are strict literalists, and are
commonly considered the orthodox believers. The Persians are
Sheeahs, are inferior in point of numbers, are somewhat freer in
certain interpretations, placing a mass of tradition, like the
Jewish Mischna, on a level with the Koran,2 and are usually
regarded as heretical. To apply our own ecclesiastical phraseology
to them, the latter are the Moslem Protestants, the former the
Moslem Catholics. Yet in relation to almost every thing which
should seem at all fundamental or vital they agree in their
teachings. Their differences in general are upon trivial opinions,
or especially upon ritual particulars. For instance, the Sheeahs
send all the Sunnees to hell because in their ablutions they wash
from the elbow to the finger tips; the Sunnees return the
compliment to their rival sectarists because they wash from the
finger tips to the elbow. Within these two grand denominations of
Sheeah and
1 Rabbi Abraham Geiger, Prize Essay upon the question, proposed by
the University of Bonn, "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum
aufgenommen?"
2 Merrick, Translation of the Sheeah Traditions of Mohammed in the
Hyat ul Kuloob, note x.
Sunnee are found a multitude of petty sects, separated from each
other on various questions of speculative faith and ceremonial
practice. Some take the Koran alone, and that in its plain literal
sense, as their authority. Others read the Koran in the
explanatory light of a vast collection of parables, proverbs,
legends, purporting to be from Mohammed. There is no less than a
score of mystic allegorizing sects3 who reduce almost every thing
in the Koran to symbol, or spiritual signification, and some of
whom as the Sufis are the most rapt and imaginative of all the
enthusiastic devotees in the world.
A cardinal point in the Mohammedan faith is the asserted existence
of angels, celestial and infernal. Eblis is Satan. He was an angel
of lofty rank; but when God created Adam and bade all the angels
worship him, Eblis refused, saying, "I was created of fire, he of
clay: I am more excellent and will not bow to him."4 Upon this God
condemned Eblis and expelled him from Paradise. He then became the
unappeasable foe and seducing destroyer of men. He is the father
of those swarms of jins, or evil spirits, who crowd all hearts and
space with temptations and pave the ten thousand paths to hell
with lures for men.
The next consideration preliminary to a clear exhibition of our
special subject, is the doctrine of predestination, the
unflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. The
breath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and its
very name of Islam means "Submission." In heaven the prophet saw a
prodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table," on which were
written the decrees of all events between the morning of creation
and the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preaching
was the proclamation of the one true God whose volition bears the
irresistible destiny of the universe; and inseparably associated
with this was an intense hatred of idolatry, fanned by the wings
of God's wrath and producing a fanatic sense of a divine
commission to avenge him on his insulters and vindicate for him
his rightful worship from every nation. There is an apparent
conflict between the Mohammedan representations of God's absolute
predestination of all things, and the abundant exhortations to all
men to accept the true faith and bring forth good works, and thus
make sure of an acceptable account in the day of judgment. The
former make God's irreversible will all in all. The latter seem to
place alternative conditions before men, and to imply in them a
power of choice. But this is a contradiction inseparable from the
discussion of God's infinite sovereignty and man's individual
freedom. The inconsistency is as gross in Augustine and Calvinism
as it is in the Arabian lawgiver and the creed of the Sunnees. The
Koran, instead of solving the difficulty, boldly cuts it, and does
that in exactly the same way as the thorough Calvinist. God has
respectively elected and reprobated all the destined inhabitants
of heaven and hell, unalterably, independently of their choice or
action. At the same time, reception of the true faith, and a life
conformed to it, are virtually necessary for salvation, because it
is decreed that all the elect shall profess and obey the true
faith. Their obedient reception of it proves them to be elected.
On the other hand, it is foreordained that none of the reprobate
shall become disciples and followers of the Prophet. Their
rejection of
3 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. i. ch. xv.
4 Sale's Translation of the Koran, ch. vii.
him, their wicked misbelief, is the evidence of their original
reprobation. As the Koran itself expresses it, salvation is for
"all who are willing to be warned; but they shall not be warned
unless God please:"5 "all who shall be willing to walk uprightly;
but they shall not be willing unless God willeth."6
But such fine drawn distinctions are easily lost from sight or
spurned in the eager affray of affairs and the imminent straits of
the soul. While in dogma and theory the profession of an orthodox
belief, together with scrupulous prayer, fasting, alms, and the
pilgrimage to Mecca, or the absence of these things, simply
denotes the foregone determinations of God in regard to the given
individuals, in practice and feeling the contrasted beliefs and
courses of conduct are held to obtain heaven and hell. And we
find, accordingly, that Mohammed spoke as if God's primeval
ordination had fixed all things forever, whenever he wished to
awaken in his followers reckless valor and implicit submission.
"Whole armies cannot slay him who is fated to die in his bed." On
the contrary, when he sought to win converts, to move his hearers
by threatenings and persuasions, he spoke as if every thing
pertaining to human weal and woe, present and future, rested on
conditions within the choice of men. Say, "'There is but one God,
and Mohammed is his prophet,' and heaven shall be your portion;
but cling to your delusive errors, and you shall be companions of
the infernal fire." Practically speaking, the essence of
propagandist Islam was a sentiment like this. All men who do not
follow Mohammed are accursed misbelievers. We are God's chosen
avengers, the commissioned instruments for reducing his foes to
submission. Engaged in that work, the hilts of all our scimitars
are in his hand. He snatches his servant martyr from the battle
field to heaven. Thus the weapons of the unbelievers send their
slain to paradise, while the weapons of the believers send their
slain to hell. Up, then, with the crescent banner, and, dripping
with idolatrous gore, let it gleam over mountain and plain till
our sickles have reaped the earth! "The sword is the key of heaven
and the key of hell. A drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a
night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting
and prayer. Whoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven. In the
day of judgment his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion and
odoriferous as musk."7 An infuriated zeal against idolaters and
unbelievers inflamed the Moslem heart, a fierce martial enthusiasm
filled the Moslem soul, and tangible visions of paradise and hell
floated, illuminate, throughtheMoslem imagination. And so from the
Persian Gulf to the Caucasus, from Sierra Leone to the Pyrenees,
the polity of Mohammed overran the nations, with the Koran in its
left hand, the exterminating blade in its right, one thunder shout
still breaking from its awful lips: "Profess Islam, and live, with
the clear prospect of eternal bliss beyond life; reject it, and
die, with the full certainty of eternal anguish beyond death."
When the crusading Christians and the Saracenic hosts met in
battle, the conflict was the very frenzy of fanaticism. "There the
question of salvation or damnation lay on the ground between the
marshalled armies, to be fought for and carried by the stronger."
Christ and Allah encountered, and the endless fate of their
opposed
5 Koran, ch. lxxiv.
6 Ibid. ch. lxxxi.
7 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of Rome, ch. 1.
followers hung on the swift turning issue. "Never have the
appalling ideas of the invisible world so much and so distinctly
mingled with the fury of mortal strife as in this instance. To the
eyes of Turk and Arab the smoke of the infernal pit appeared to
break up from the ground in the rear of the infidel lines. As the
squadrons of the faithful moved on to the charge, that pit yawned
to receive the miscreant host; and in chasing the foe the
prophet's champions believed they were driving their antagonists
down the very slopes of perdition. When at length steel clashed
upon steel and the yell of death shook the air, the strife was not
so much between arm and arm as between spirit and spirit, and each
deadly thrust was felt to pierce the life at once of the body and
of the soul."8
That terrible superstition prevails almost universally among the
Mussulmans, designated the "Beating in the Sepulchre," or the
examination and torture of the body in the grave. As soon as a
corpse is interred, two black and livid angels, called the
Examiners, whose names are Munkeer and Nakeer, appear, and order
the dead person to sit up and answer certain questions as to his
faith. If he give satisfactory replies, they suffer him to rest in
peace, refreshed by airs from paradise; but if he prove to have
been an unbeliever or heretic, they beat him on the temples with
iron maces till he roars aloud with pain and terror. They then
press the earth on the body, which remains gnawed and stung by
dragons and scorpions until the last day. Some sects give a
figurative explanation of these circumstances. The utter denial of
the whole representation is a schismatic peculiarity of the sect
of Motozallites. But all true believers, both Sunnee and Sheeah,
devoutly accept it literally. The commentators declare that it is
implied in the following verse of the Koran itself: "How,
therefore, will it be with them when they die and the angels shall
strike their faces and their backs?" 9
The intermediate state of souls from the time of death until the
resurrection has been the subject of extensive speculation and
argument with the Islamites. The souls of the prophets, it is
thought, are admitted directly to heaven. The souls of martyrs,
according to a tradition received from Mohammed, rest in heaven in
the crops of green birds who eat of the fruits and drink of the
rivers there. As to the location of the souls of the common crowd
of the faithful, the conclusions are various. Some maintain that
they and the souls of the impious alike sleep in the dust until
the end, when Israfil's blasts will stir them into life to be
judged. But the general and orthodox impression is that they tarry
in one of the heavens, enjoying a preparatory blessedness. The
souls of the wicked, it is commonly held, after being refused a
place in the tomb and also being repulsed from heaven, are carried
down to the lower abyss, and thrown into a dungeon under a green
rock, or into the jaw of Eblis, there to be treated with
foretastes of their final doom until summoned to the judgment.10
A very prominent doctrine in the Moslem creed is that of the
resurrection of the body. This is a central feature in the
orthodox faith. It is expounded in all the emphatic details of its
gross literality by their authoritative doctors, and is dwelt upon
with unwearied reiteration by the Koran. True, some minor
heretical sects give it a spiritual interpretation; but the great
8 Taylor, Hist. of Fanaticism, sect. vii.
9 Ch. xlvii.
10 Sale, Preliminary Discourse, sect. iv.
body of believers accept it unhesitatingly in its most physical
shape. The intrinsic unnaturalness and improbability of the dogma
were evidently felt by Mohammed and his expositors; and all the
more they strove to bolster it up and enforce its reception by
vehement affirmations and elaborate illustrations. In the second
chapter of the Koran it is related that, in order to remove the
skepticism of Abraham as to the resurrection, God wrought the
miracle of restoring four birds which had been cut in pieces and
scattered. In chapter seventh, God says, "We bring rain upon a
withered country and cause the fruits to spring forth. Thus will
we bring the dead from their graves." The prophet frequently
rebukes those who reject this belief. "What aileth them, that they
believe not the resurrection?"11 "Is not He who created man able
to quicken the dead?"12 "The scoffers say, 'Shall we be raised to
life, and our forefathers too, after we have become dust and
bones? This is nothing but sorcery.'"13 First, Israfil will blow
the blast of consternation. After an interval, he will blow the
blast of examination, at which all creatures will die and the
material universe will melt in horror. Thirdly, he will blow the
blast of resurrection. Upon that instant, the assembled souls of
mankind will issue from his trumpet, like a swarm of bees, and
fill the atmosphere, seeking to be reunited to their former
bodies, which will then be restored, even to their very hairs.
The day of judgment immediately follows. This is the dreadful day
for which all other days were made; and it will come with
blackness and consternation to unbelievers and evil doers, but
with peace and delight to the faithful. The total race of man will
be gathered in one place. Mohammed will first advance in front, to
the right hand, as intercessor for the professors of Islam. The
preceding prophets will appear with their followers. Gabriel will
hold suspended a balance so stupendous that one scale will cover
paradise, the other hell. "Hath the news of the overwhelming day
of judgment reached thee?"14 "Whoever hath wrought either good or
evil of the weight of an ant shall in that day behold the same."15
An infallible scrutiny shall search and weigh every man's deeds,
and exact justice shall be done, and no foreign help can avail any
one. "One soul shall not be able to obtain any thing in behalf of
another soul."16 "Every man of them on that day shall have
business enough of his own to employ his thoughts."17 In all the
Mohammedan representations of this great trial and of the
principles which determine its decisions, no reference is made to
the doctrine of predestination, but all turns on strict equity.
Reckoning a reception or rejection of the true faith as a crowning
merit or demerit, the only question is, Do his good works
outweigh, by so much as a hair, his evil works? If so, he goes to
the right; if not, he must take the left. The solitary trace of
fatalism or rather favoritism is this: that no idolater, once in
hell, can ever possibly be released, while no Islamite, however
wicked, can be damned eternally. The punishment of unbelievers is
everlasting, that of believers limited. The opposite of this
opinion is a great heresy with the generality of the Moslems. Some
say the judgment will require but the twinkling of an eye; others
that it will occupy fifty thousand years, during which time the
sun will be drawn from its sheath and burn insufferably, and the
wicked will stand looking up, their feet shod with shoes of fire,
and their skulls boiling like pots. At last,
11 Ch. lxxxiv.
12 Ch. lxxv.
13 Ch. xxxvii., lvi.
14 Koran, ch. lxxxviii.
15 Ibid. ch. xcix.
16 Ibid. ch. lxxxii.
17 Ibid. ch. lxxx.
when sentence has been passed on them, all souls are forced to try
the passage of al Sirat, a bridge thinner than a hair, sharper
than a razor, and hotter than flame, spanning in one frail arch
the immeasurable distance, directly over hell, from earth to
paradise. Some affect a metaphorical solution of this air severing
causeway, and take it merely as a symbol of the true Sirat, or
bridge of this world, namely, the true faith and obedience; but
every orthodox Mussulman firmly holds it as a physical fact to be
surmounted in the last day.18 Mohammed leading the way, the
faithful and righteous will traverse it with ease and as quickly
as a flash of lightning. The thin edge broadens beneath their
steps, the surrounding support of convoying angels' wings hides
the fire lake below from their sight, and they are swiftly
enveloped in paradise. But as the infidel with his evil deeds
essays to cross, thorns entangle his steps, the lurid glare
beneath blinds him, and he soon topples over and whirls into the
blazing abyss. In Dr. Frothingham's fine translation from
Ruckert,
"When the wicked o'er it goes, stands the bridge all sparkling;
And his mind bewilder'd grows, and his eye swims darkling.
Wakening, giddying, then comes in, with a deadly fright, Memory of
all his sin, rushing on his sight. But when forward steps the
just, he is safe e'en here: Round him gathers holy trust, and
drives back his fear. Each good deed's a mist, that wide, golden
borders gets; And for him the bridge, each side, shines with
parapets."
Between hell and paradise is an impassable wall, al Araf,
separating the tormented from the happy, and covered with those
souls whose good works exactly counterpoise their evil works, and
who are, consequently, fitted for neither place. The prophet and
his expounders have much to say of this narrow intermediate
abode.19 Its lukewarm denizens are contemptuously spoken of. It is
said that Araf seems hell to the blessed but paradise to the
damned; for does not every thing depend on the point of view?
The Mohammedan descriptions of the doom of the wicked, the
torments of hell, are constantly repeated and are copious and
vivid. Reference to chapter and verse would be superfluous, since
almost every page of the Koran abounds in such tints and tones as
the following. "The unbelievers shall be companions of hell fire
forever." "Those who disbelieve we will surely cast to be broiled
in hell fire: so often as their skins shall be well burned we will
give them other skins in exchange, that they may taste the sharper
torment." "I will fill hell entirely full of genii and men." "They
shall be dragged on their faces into hell, and it shall be said
unto them, 'Taste ye that torment of hell fire which ye rejected
as a falsehood.'" "The unbelievers shall be driven into hell by
troops." "They shall be taken by the forelocks and the feet and
flung into hell, where they shall drink scalding water." "Their
only entertainment shall be boiling water, and they shall be fuel
for hell." "The smoke of hell shall cast forth sparks as big as
towers, resembling yellow camels in color." "They who believe not
shall
18 W. C. Taylor, Mohammedanism and its Sects.
19 Koran, ch. viii. Sale, Preliminary Discourse, p. 125.
have garments of fire fitted on them, and they shall be beaten
with maces of red hot iron." "The true believers, lying on
couches, shall look down upon the infidels in hell and laugh them
to scorn."
There is a tradition that a door shall be shown the damned opening
into paradise, but when they approach it, it shall be suddenly
shut, and the believers within will laugh. Pitiless and horrible
as these expressions from the Koran are, they are merciful
compared with the pictures in the later traditions, of women
suspended by their hair, their brains boiling, suspended by their
tongues, molten copper poured down their throats, bound hands and
feet and devoured piecemeal by scorpions, hung up by their heels
in flaming furnaces and their flesh cut off on all sides with
scissors of fire. 20 Their popular teachings divide hell into
seven stories, sunk one under another. The first and mildest is
for the wicked among the true believers. The second is assigned to
the Jews. The third is the special apartment of the Christians.
They fourth is allotted to the Sabians, the fifth to the Magians,
and the sixth to the most abandoned idolaters; but the seventh the
deepest and worst belongs to the hypocrites of all religions. The
first hell shall finally be emptied and destroyed, on the release
of the wretched believers there; but all the other hells will
retain their victims eternally.
If the visions of hell which filled the fancies of the faithful
were material and glowing, equally so were their conceptions of
paradise. On this world of the blessed were lavished all the
charms so fascinating to the Oriental luxuriousness of sensual
languor, and which the poetic Oriental imagination knew so well
how to depict. As soon as the righteous have passed Sirat, they
obtain the first taste of their approaching felicity by a
refreshing draught from "Mohammed's Pond." This is a square lake,
a month's journey in circuit, its water whiter than milk or silver
and more fragrant than to be comparable to any thing known by
mortals. As many cups are set around it as there are stars in the
firmament; and whoever drinks from it will never thirst more. Then
comes paradise, an ecstatic dream of pleasure, filled with
sparkling streams, honeyed fountains, shady groves, precious
stones, all flowers and fruits, blooming youths, circulating
goblets, black eyed houris, incense, brilliant birds, delightsome
music, unbroken peace.21 A Sheeah tradition makes the prophet
promise to Ali twelve palaces in paradise, built of gold and
silver bricks laid in a cement of musk and amber. The pebbles
around them are diamonds and rubies, the earth saffron, its
hillocks camphor. Rivers of honey, wine, milk, and water flow
through the court of each palace, their banks adorned with various
resplendent trees, interspersed with bowers consisting each of one
hollow transparent pearl. In each of these bowers is an emerald
throne, with a houri upon it arrayed in seventy green robes and
seventy yellow robes of so fine a texture, and she herself so
transparent, that the marrow of her ankle, notwithstanding robes,
flesh, and bone, is as distinctly visible as a flame in a glass
vessel. Each houri has seventy locks of hair, every one under the
care of a maid, who perfumes it with a censer which God has made
to smoke with incense without the presence of fire; and no mortal
has ever breathed such fragrance as is there exhaled. 22
20 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. x. p. 206.
21 Koran, ch. lv. ch. lvi.
22 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. xvi. p. 286.
Such a doctrine of the future life as that here set forth, it is
plain, was strikingly adapted to win and work fervidly on the
minds of the imaginative, voluptuous, indolent, passionate races
of the Orient. It possesses a nucleus of just and natural moral
conviction and sentiment, around which is grouped a composite of a
score of superstitions afloat before the rise of Islam, set off
with the arbitrary drapery of a poetic fancy, colored by the
peculiar idiosyncrasies of Mohammed, emphasized to suit his
special ends, and all inflamed with a vindictive and propagandist
animus. Any word further in explanation of the origin, or in
refutation of the soundness, of this system of belief once so
imminently aggressive and still so widely established would seem
to be superfluous.