AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN DESERT
AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD FOR THE
GREATER GLORY OF ALLAH, THE ONLY TRUE GOD
SINCE the days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said nothing of the
Semitic people. You will remember how they filled all the chapters
devoted to the story of the Ancient World. The Babylonians, the
Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all
of them Semites, had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty
centuries. They had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had
come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who had come from the
west. A hundred years after the death of Alexander the Great, Carthage,
a colony of Semitic Phoenicians, had fought the Indo-European Romans
for the mastery of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and
destroyed and for eight hundred years the Romans had been masters of the
world. In the seventh century, however, another Semitic tribe appeared
upon the scene and challenged the power of the west. They were the
Arabs, peaceful shepherds who had roamed through the desert since the
beginning of time without showing any signs of imperial ambitions.
Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and in less than
a century they had pushed to the heart of Europe and proclaimed the
glories of Allah, "the only God," and Mohammed, "the prophet of the only
God," to the frightened peasants of France.
The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah (usually known as
Mohammed, or "he who will be praised,"); reads like a chapter in the
"Thousand and One Nights." He was a camel-driver, born in Mecca.
He seems to have been an epileptic and he suffered from spells of
unconsciousness when he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of
the angel Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book
called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him all over
Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish merchants and with
Christian traders, and he came to see that the worship of a single God
was a very excellent thing. His own people, the Arabs, still revered
queer stones and trunks of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of
thousands of years before. In Mecca, their holy city, stood a little
square building, the Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends of
Hoo-doo worship.
Mohammed decided to be the Moses of the Arab people. He could not well
be a prophet and a camel-driver at the same time. So he made himself
independent by marrying his employer, the rich widow Chadija. Then he
told his neighbours in Mecca that he was the long-expected prophet sent
by Allah to save the world. The neighbours laughed most heartily and
when Mohammed continued to annoy them with his speeches they decided to
kill him. They regarded him as a lunatic and a public bore who deserved
no mercy. Mohammed heard of the plot and in the dark of night he fled to
Medina together with Abu Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened in the
year 622. It is the most important date in Mohammedan history and is
known as the Hegira--the year of the Great Flight.
In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier to proclaim
himself a prophet than in his home city, where every one had known him
as a simple camel-driver. Soon he was surrounded by an increasing number
of followers, or Moslems, who accepted the Islam, "the submission to the
will of God," which Mohammed praised as the highest of all virtues.
For seven years he preached to the people of Medina. Then he believed
himself strong enough to begin a campaign against his former neighbours
who had dared to sneer at him and his Holy Mission in his old
camel-driving days. At the head of an army of Medinese he marched across
the desert. His followers took Mecca without great difficulty, and
having slaughtered a number of the inhabitants, they found it quite easy
to convince the others that Mohammed was really a great prophet.
From that time on until the year of his death, Mohammed was fortunate in
everything he undertook.
There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the first place,
the creed which Mohammed taught to his followers was very simple. The
disciples were told that they must love Allah, the Ruler of the World,
the Merciful and Compassionate. They must honour and obey their parents.
They were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their neighbours
and were admonished to be humble and charitable, to the poor and to the
sick. Finally they were ordered to abstain from strong drink and to be
very frugal in what they ate. That was all. There were no priests, who
acted as shepherds of their flocks and asked that they be supported at
the common expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques were merely large
stone halls without benches or pictures, where the faithful could gather
(if they felt so inclined) to read and discuss chapters from the Koran,
the Holy Book. But the average Mohammedan carried his religion with him
and never felt himself hemmed in by the restrictions and regulations
of an established church. Five times a day he turned his face towards
Mecca, the Holy City, and said a simple prayer. For the rest of the time
he let Allah rule the world as he saw fit and accepted whatever fate
brought him with patient resignation.
Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage the Faithful
to go forth and invent electrical machinery or bother about railroads
and steamship lines. But it gave every Mohammedan a certain amount of
contentment. It bade him be at peace with himself and with the world in
which he lived and that was a very good thing.
The second reason which explains the success of the Moslems in their
warfare upon the Christians, had to do with the conduct of those
Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do battle for the true faith.
The Prophet promised that those who fell, facing the enemy, would go
directly to Heaven. This made sudden death in the field preferable to
a long but dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans an
enormous advantage over the Crusaders who were in constant dread of a
dark hereafter, and who stuck to the good things of this world as long
as they possibly could. Incidentally it explains why even to-day Moslem
soldiers will charge into the fire of European machine guns quite
indifferent to the fate that awaits them and why they are such dangerous
and persistent enemies.
Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now began to enjoy
his power as the undisputed ruler of a large number of Arab tribes. But
success has been the undoing of a large number of men who were great in
the days of adversity. He tried to gain the good will of the rich people
by a number of regulations which could appeal to those of wealth.
He allowed the Faithful to have four wives. As one wife was a costly
investment in those olden days when brides were bought directly from
the parents, four wives became a positive luxury except to those who
possessed camels and dromedaries and date orchards beyond the dreams of
avarice. A religion which at first had been meant for the hardy hunters
of the high skied desert was gradually transformed to suit the needs
of the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars of the cities. It was a
regrettable change from the original program and it did very little good
to the cause of Mohammedanism. As for the prophet himself, he went on
preaching the truth of Allah and proclaiming new rules of conduct until
he died, quite suddenly, of a fever on June the seventh of the year 632.
His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was his
father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers of the
prophet's life. Two years later, Abu-Bekr died and Omar ibn Al-Khattab
followed him. In less than ten years he conquered Egypt, Persia,
Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine and made Damascus the capital of the
first Mohammedan world empire.
Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed's daughter, Fatima,
but a quarrel broke out upon a point of Moslem doctrine and Ali was
murdered. After his death, the caliphate was made hereditary and the
leaders of the faithful who had begun their career as the spiritual head
of a religious sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built a
new city on the shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of Babylon and
called it Bagdad, and organising the Arab horsemen into regiments of
cavalry, they set forth to bring the happiness of their Moslem faith to
all unbelievers. In the year 700 A.D. a Mohammedan general by the name
of Tarik crossed the old gates of Hercules and reached the high rock on
the European side which he called the Gibel-al-tarik, the Hill of Tarik
or Gibraltar.
Eleven years later in the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, he defeated
the king of the Visigoths and then the Moslem army moved northward
and following the route of Hannibal, they crossed the passes of the
Pyrenees. They defeated the Duke of Aquitania, who tried to halt them
near Bordeaux, and marched upon Paris. But in the year 732 (one hundred
years after the death of the prophet,) they were beaten in a battle
between Tours and Poitiers. On that day, Charles Martel (Charles with
the Hammer) the Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan
con-quest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they maintained
themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the Caliphate of
Cordova, which became the greatest centre of science and art of
mediaeval Europe.
This Moorish kingdom, so-called because the people came from Mauretania
in Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was only after the capture of
Granada, the last Moslem stronghold, in the year 1492, that Columbus
received the royal grant which allowed him to go upon a voyage of
discovery. The Mohammedans soon regained their strength in the new
conquests which they made in Asia and Africa and to-day there are as
many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ.