FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM [1002]
§ 1
The freethinking of Mohammed may be justly said to begin and end with
his rejection of popular polytheism and his acceptance of the idea of
a single God. That idea he ostensibly held as a kind of revelation,
not as a result of any traceable process of reasoning; and he affirmed
it from first to last as a fanatic. One of the noblest of fanatics
he may be, but hardly more. Denouncing all idolatry, he anchored
his creed to the Ka'aba, the sacred black stone of the remote past,
which is to this day its most revered object.
That the monotheistic idea, in its most vivid form, reached him in
middle age by way of a vision is part of the creed of his followers;
and that it derived in some way from Jews, or Persians, or Christians,
as the early unbelievers declared, [1003] is probable enough. But
there is evidence that among his fellow-Arabs the idea had taken some
slight root before his time, even in a rationalistic form, and it is
clear that there were before his day many believers, though also many
unbelievers, in a future state. [1004] There is no good ground for the
oft-repeated formula about the special monotheistic and other religious
proclivities of "the Semite"; [1005] Semites being subject to religious
influences like other peoples, in terms of culture and environment. The
Moslems themselves preserved a tradition that one Zaid, who died
five years before the Prophet received his first inspiration, had
of his own accord renounced idolatry without becoming either Jew or
Christian; but on being told by a Jew to become a Hanyf, [1006] that
is to say, of the religion of Abraham, who worshipped nothing but God,
he at once agreed. [1007] In the oldest extant biography of Mohammed
an address of Zaid's has been preserved, of which six passages are
reproduced in the Koran; [1008] and there are other proofs [1009]
that the way had been partly made for Mohammedanism before Mohammed,
especially at Medina, to which he withdrew (the Hej'ra) with his
early followers when his fellow-tribesmen would not accept his
message. He uses the term Hanyf repeatedly as standing for his own
doctrine. [1010] In some of the Arab poetry of the generation before
Mohammed, again, there is "a deep conviction of the unity of God,
and of his elevation over all other beings," as well as a clearly
developed sense of moral responsibility. [1011] The doctrine of a
Supreme God was indeed general; [1012] and Mohammed's insistence on
the rejection of the lesser deities or "companions of God" was but
a preaching of unitarianism to half-professed monotheists who yet
practised polytheism and idolatry. The Arabs at his time, in short,
were on the same religious plane as the Christians, but with a good
deal of unbelief; "Zendekism" or rationalistic deism (or atheism)
being charged in particular on Mohammed's tribe, the Koreish;
[1013] and the Prophet used traditional ideas to bring them to
his unitary creed. In one case he even temporarily accepted their
polytheism. [1014] The several tribes were further to some extent
monolatrous, [1015] somewhat as were the Semitic tribes of Palestine;
and before Mohammed's time a special worshipper of the star Sirius
sought to persuade the Koreish to give up their idols and adore
that star alone. Thus between their partially developed monotheism,
their partial familiarity with Hanyf monotheism, and their common
intercourse with the nominally monotheistic Jews and Christians, many
Arabs were in a measure prepared for the Prophet's doctrine; which,
for the rest, embodied many of their own traditions and superstitions
as well as many orally received from Christians and Jews.
"The Koran itself," says Palmer, "is, indeed, less the invention
or conception of Mohammed than a collection of legends and moral
axioms borrowed from desert lore and couched in the language
and rhythm of desert eloquence, but adorned with the additional
charm of enthusiasm. Had it been merely Mohammed's own invented
discourses, bearing only the impress of his personal style, the
Koran could never have appealed with so much success to every
Arab-speaking race as a miracle of eloquence." [1016]
Kuenen challenges Sprenger's conclusions and sums up: "We need
not deny that Mohammed had predecessors; but we must deny that
tradition gives us a faithful representation of them, or is correct
in calling them hanyfs. [1017] On the other hand, he concedes that
"Mohammed made Islam out of elements which were supplied to him
very largely from outside, and which had a whole history behind
them already, so that he could take them up as they were without
further elaboration." [1018]
"During the first century of Islam the forging of Traditions
became a recognized political and religious weapon, of which
all parties availed themselves. Even men of the strictest piety
practised this species of fraud, and maintained that the end
justified the means." [1019]
The final triumph of the religion, however, was due neither to the
elements of its Sacred Book nor to the moral or magnetic power of
the Prophet. This power it was that won his first adherents, who were
mostly his friends and relatives, or slaves to whom his religion was a
species of enfranchisement. [1020] From that point forward his success
was military--thanks, that is, to the valour of his followers--his
fellow citizens never having been won in mass to his teaching. [1021]
Such success as his might conceivably be gained by a mere military
chief. Nor could the spread of Islam after his death have taken place
save in virtue of the special opportunities for conquest lying before
its adherents--opportunities already seen by Mohammed, either with the
eye of statesmanship or with that of his great general, Omar. [1022]
It is an error to assume, as is still commonly done, that it was the
unifying and inspiring power of the religion that wrought the Saracen
conquests. Warlike northern barbarians had overrun the Western Empire
without any such stimulus; the prospect of booty and racial kinship
sufficed them for the conquest of a decadent community; and the same
conditions existed for the equally warlike Saracens, [1023] who also,
before Mohammed, had learned something of the military art from the
Græco-Romans. [1024] Their religious ardour would have availed them
little against the pagan legions of the unbelieving Cæsar; and as
a matter of fact they could never conquer, though they curtailed,
the comparatively weak Byzantine Empire; its moderate economic
resources and traditional organization sufficing to sustain it, despite
intellectual decadence, till the age of Saracen greatness was over. Nor
did their faith ever unify them save ostensibly for purposes of common
warfare against the racial foe--a kind of union attained in all ages
and with all varieties of religion. Fierce domestic strifes broke out
as soon as the Prophet was dead. It would be as true to say that the
common racial and military interest against the Græco-Roman and Persian
States unified the Moslem parties, as that Islam unified the Arab
tribes and factions. Apart from the inner circle of converts, indeed,
the first conquerors were in mass not at all deeply devout, and many of
them maintained to the end of their generation, and after his death,
the unbelief which from the first met the Prophet at Mecca. [1025]
Against the creed of Mohammed "the conservative and material instincts
of the people of the desert rose in revolt; and although they became
Moslems en masse, the majority of them neither believed in Islam nor
knew what it meant. Often their motives were frankly utilitarian:
they expected that Islam would bring them luck.... If things went ill,
they blamed Islam and turned their backs on it." [1026] It is told of
a Moslem chief of the early days that he said: "If there were a God,
I would swear by his name that I did not believe in him." [1027]
A general fanaticism grew up later. But had there been no Islam,
enterprising Arabs would probably have overrun Syria and Persia and
Africa and Spain all the same. [1028] Attila went further, and he is
not known to have been a monotheist or a believer in Paradise. Nor
were Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane indebted to religious faith for
their conquests.
On the other hand, when a Khalifate was anywhere established
by military force, the faith would indeed serve as a nucleus of
administration, and further as a means of resisting the insidious
propaganda of the rival faith, which might have been a source of
political danger. It was their Sacred Book and Prophet that saved
the Arabs from accepting the religion of the states they conquered
as did the Goths and Franks. The faith thus so far preserved their
military polity when that was once set up; but it was not the faith
that made the polity possible, or gave the power of conquest, as is
conventionally held. At most, it partly facilitated their conquests
by detaching a certain amount of purely superstitious support from
the other side. And it never availed to unify the race, or the Islamic
peoples. On the fall of Othman "the ensuing civil wars rent the unity
of Islam from top to bottom, and the wound has never healed." [1029]
The feud between Northern and Southern Arabs "rapidly developed and
extended into a permanent racial enmity." [1030] And when, after
the Ommayade dynasty had totally failed to unify Semite and Aryan in
Persia, the task was partially accomplished by the Abassides, it was
not through any greater stress of piety, but by way of accepting the
inevitable, after generations of division and revolt. [1031]
§ 2
It may perhaps be more truly claimed for the Koran that it was the
basis of Arab scholarship; since it was in order to elucidate its
text that the first Arab grammars and dictionaries and literary
collections were made. [1032] Here again, however, the reflection
arises that some such development would have occurred in any case, on
the basis of the abundant pre-Islamic poetry, given but the material
conquests. The first conquerors were illiterate, and had to resort
to the services and the organization of the conquered [1033] for
all purposes of administrative writings, using for a time even the
Greek and Persian languages. There was nothing in the Koran itself
to encourage literature; and the first conquerors either despised or
feared that of the conquered. [1034]
When the facts are inductively considered, it appears that the Koran
was from the first rather a force of intellectual fixation than one
of stimulus. As we have seen, there was a measure of rationalism as
well as of monotheism among the Arabs before Mohammed; and the Prophet
set his face violently against all unbelief. The word "unbeliever"
or "infidel" in the Koran normally signifies merely "rejector of
Mohammed"; but a number of passages [1035] show that there were
specific unbelievers in the doctrine of a future state as well as in
miracles; and his opponents put to him challenges which showed that
they rationally disbelieved his claim to inspiration. [1036] Hence,
clearly, the scarcity of miracles in his early legend, on the Arab
side. On a people thus partly "refined, skeptical, incredulous,"
[1037] much of whose poetry showed no trace of religion, [1038]
the triumph of Islam gradually imposed a tyrannous dogma, entailing
abundance of primitive superstition under the ægis of monotheistic
doctrine. Some moral service it did compass, and for this the credit
seems to be substantially due to Mohammed; though here again he
was not an innovator. Like previous reformers, [1039] he vehemently
denounced the horrible practice of burying alive girl children; and
when the Koran became law his command took effect. His limitation of
polygamy too may have counted for something, despite the unlimited
practice of his latter years. For the rest, he prescribes, in the
traditional eastern fashion, liberal almsgiving; this, with normal
integrity and patience, and belief in "God and the Last Day, and the
Angels, and the Scriptures, and the Prophets," [1040] is the gist
of his ethical and religious code, with much stress on hell-fire
and the joys of Paradise, and at the same time on predestination,
and with no reasoning on any issue.
§ 3
The history of Saracen culture is the history of the attainment
of saner ideas and a higher plane of thought. Within a century of
the Hej'ra [1041] there had arisen some rational skepticism in the
Moslem schools, as apart from the chronic schisms and strifes of the
faithful. A school of theology had been founded by Hasan-al-Basri at
Bassorah; and one of his disciples, Wasil ibn Attâ, following some
previous heretics--Mabad al Jhoni, Ghailan of Damascus, and Jonas al
Aswari [1042]--rejected the predestination doctrine of the Koran as
inconsistent with the future judgment; arguing for freewill and at the
same time for the humane provision of a purgatory. From this beginning
dates the Motazileh or class of Motazilites (or Mu`tazilites), [1043]
the philosophic reformers and moderate freethinkers of Islam. Other
sects of a semi-political character had arisen even during the last
illness of the Prophet, and others soon after his death. [1044] One
party sought to impose on the faithful the "Sunna" or "traditions,"
which really represented the old Arabian ideas of law, but were
pretended to be unwritten sayings of Mohammed. [1045] To this the
party of Ali (the Prophet's cousin) objected; whence began the long
dispute between the Shiah or Shîites (the anti-traditionists), and
the Sunnites; the conquered and oppressed Persians tending to stand
with the former, and generally, in virtue of their own thought,
to supply the heterodox element under the later Khalifates. [1046]
Thus Shîites were apt to be Motazilites. [1047] On Ali's side, again,
there broke away a great body of Kharejites or Separatists, who claimed
that the Imaum or head of the Faith should be chosen by election,
while the Shîites stood for succession by divine right. [1048] All
this had occurred before any schools of theology existed.
The Motazilites, once started, divided gradually into a score of
sects, [1049] all more or less given to rationalizing within the
limits of monotheism. [1050] The first stock were named Kadarites,
because insisting on man's power (kadar) over his acts. [1051]
Against them were promptly ranged the Jabarites, who affirmed that
man's will was wholly under divine constraint (jabar). [1052] Yet
another sect, the Sifatites, opposed both of the others, some of them
[1053] standing for a literal interpretation of the Koran, which is
in part predestinationist, and in parts assumes freewill; while the
main body of orthodox, following the text, professed to respect as
insoluble mystery the contradictions they found in it. [1054] The
history of Islam in this matter is strikingly analogous to that of
Christianity from the rise of the Pelagian heresy.
It is to be noted that, while the heretics in time came under Greek
and other foreign influences, their criticism of the Koran was
at the outset their own. [1055] The Shîites, becoming broadly the
party of the Persians, admitted in time Persian, Jewish, Gnostic,
Manichæan, and other dualistic doctrines, and generally tended
to interpret the Koran allegorically. [1056] A particular school
of allegorists, the Bathenians, even tended to purify the idea of
deity in an agnostic direction. [1057] All of these would appear
to have ranked genetically as Motazilites; and the manifold play
of heretical thought gradually forced a certain habit of reasoning
on the orthodox, [1058] who as usual found their advantage in the
dissidences of the dissenters. On the other hand, the Motazilites
found new resources in the study and translation of Greek works,
scientific and philosophical. [1059] They were thus the prime factors,
on the Arab side, in the culture-evolution which went on under the
earlier of the Abasside Khalifs (750-1258). Greek literature reached
them mainly through the Syrian Christians, in whose hands it had been
put by the Nestorians, driven out of their scientific school at Edessa
and exiled by Leo the Isaurian (716-741); [1060] possibly also in part
through the philosophers who, on being exiled from Athens by Justinian,
settled for a time in Persia. [1061] The total result was that already
in the ninth century, within two hundred years of the beginning of
Mohammed's preaching, the Saracens in Persia had reached not only a
remarkable height of material civilization, their wealth exceeding
that of Byzantium, but a considerable though quasi-secret measure of
scientific knowledge and rational thought, [1062] including even some
measure of pure atheism. All forms of rationalism alike were called
zendekism by the orthodox, the name having the epithetic force of
the Christian terms "infidelity" and "atheism". [1063]
Secrecy was long imposed on the Motazilites by the orthodoxy
of the Khalifs, [1064] who as a rule atoned for many crimes and
abundant breaches of the law of the Koran by a devout profession
of faith. Freethinking, however, had its periods of political
prosperity. Even under the Ommayade dynasty, the Khalif Al Walid Ibn
Yazid (the eleventh of the race) was reputed to be of no religion,
but seems to have been rather a ruffian than a rationalist. [1065]
Under the Abassides culture made much more progress. The Khalif
Al Mansour, though he played a very orthodox part, [1066] favoured
the Motazilites (754-775), being generally a patron of the sciences;
and under him were made the first translations from the Greek. [1067]
Despite his orthodoxy he encouraged science; and it was as insurgents
and not as unbelievers that he destroyed the sect of Rewandites (a
branch of the anti-Moslem Ismailites), who are said to have believed
in metempsychosis. [1068] Partly on political but partly also on
religious grounds his successor Al Mahdi made war on the Ismailites,
whom he regarded as atheists, and who appear to have been connected
with the Motazilite "Brethren of Purity," [1069] destroying their
books and causing others to be written against them. [1070] They were
anti-Koranites; hardly atheists; but a kind of informal rationalism
approaching to atheism, and involving unbelief in the Koran and the
Prophet, seems to have spread considerably, despite the slaughter
of many unbelievers by Al Mahdi. Its source seems to have been
Persian aversion to the alien creed. [1071] The great philosophic
influence, again, was that of Aristotle; and though his abstract
God-idea was nominally adhered to, the scientific movement promoted
above all things the conception of a reign of law. [1072] Al Hadi,
the successor of Al Mahdi, persecuted much and killed many heretics;
and Haroun Al Raschid (Aaron the Orthodox) menaced with death those
who held the moderately rational tenet that "the Koran was created,"
[1073] as against the orthodox dogma (on all fours with the Brahmanic
doctrine concerning the Veda) that it was eternal in the heavens and
uncreated. One of the rationalists, Al Mozdar, accused the orthodox
party of infidelity, as asserting two eternal things; and there was
current among the Motazilites of his day the saying that, "had God
left men to their natural liberty, the Arabians could have composed
something not only equal but superior to the Koran in eloquence,
method, and purity of language." [1074]
Haroun's crimes, however, consisted little in acts of persecution. The
Persian Barmekides (the family of his first Vizier, surnamed Barmek)
were regarded as protectors of Motazilites; [1075] and one of the
sons, Jaafer, was even suspected of atheism, all three indeed being
charged with it. [1076] Their destruction, on other grounds, does not
seem to have altered the conditions for the thinkers; but Haroun's
incompetent son Emin was a devotee and persecutor. His abler brother
and conqueror Al Mamoun (813-833), on the other hand, directly favoured
the Motazilites, partly on political grounds, to strengthen himself
with the Persian party, but also on the ground of conviction. [1077]
He even imprisoned some of the orthodox theologians who maintained that
the Koran was not a created thing, though, like certain persecutors of
other faiths, he had expressly declared himself in favour of persuasion
as against coercion. [1078] In one case, following usage, he inflicted
a cruel torture. "His fatal error," says a recent scholar, "was that
he invoked the authority of the State in matters of the intellectual
and religious life." [1079] Compared with others, certainly, he did
not carry his coercion far, though, on being once publicly addressed
as "Ameer of the Unbelievers," he caused the fanatic who said it to
be put to death. [1080] In private he was wont to conduct meetings
for discussion, attended by believers and unbelievers of every shade,
at which the only restriction was that the appeal must be to reason,
and never to the Koran. [1081] Concerning his personal bias, it
is related that he had received from Kabul a book in old Persian,
The Eternal Reason, which taught that reason is the only basis for
religion, and that revelation cannot serve as a standing ground. [1082]
The story is interesting, but enigmatic, the origin of the book being
untraceable. Whatever were his views, his coercive policy against the
orthodox extremists had the usual effect of stimulating reaction on
that side, and preparing the ultimate triumph of orthodoxy. [1083]
The fact remains, however, that Mamoun was of all the Khalifs the
greatest promoter of science [1084] and culture; the chief encourager
of the study and translation of Greek literature; [1085] and, despite
his coercion of the theologians on the dogma of the eternity of the
Koran, tolerant enough to put a Christian at the head of a college
at Damascus, declaring that he chose him not for his religion but for
his science. In the same spirit he permitted the free circulation of
the apologetic treatise of the Armenian Christian Al Kindy, in which
Islam and the Koran are freely criticized. As a ruler, too, he ranks
among the best of his race for clemency, justice, and decency of life,
although orthodox imputations were cast on his subordinates. His
successors Motasim and Wathek were of the same cast of opinion, the
latter being, however, fanatical on behalf of his rationalistic view
of the Koran as a created thing. [1086]
A violent orthodox reaction set in under the worthless and Turk-ruled
Khalif Motawakkel [1087] (847-861), by whose time the Khalifate
was in a state of political decadence, partly from the economic
exhaustion following on its tyrannous and extortionate rule; partly
from the divisive tendencies of its heterogeneous sections; partly
from the corrupting tendency of all despotic power. [1088] Despite
the official restoration of orthodoxy, the private cultivation
of science and philosophy proceeded for a time; the study and
translation of Greek books continued; [1089] and rationalism of a
kind seems to have subsisted more or less secretly to the end. In
the tenth century it is said to have reached even the unlearned; and
though the Motazilites gradually drifted into a scholastic orthodoxy,
downright unbelief came up alongside, [1090] albeit secretly. Faith
in Mohammed's mission and law began again to shake; and the learned
disregarded its prescriptions. Mystics professed to find the way
to God without the Koran. Many decided that religion was useful for
regulating the people, but was not for the wise. On the other side,
however, the orthodox condemned all science as leading to unbelief,
[1091] and developed an elaborate and quasi-systematic theology. It
was while the scientific encyclopedists of Bassorah were amassing the
knowledge which, through the Moors, renewed thought in the West, that
Al Ashari built up the Kalâm or scholastic theology which thenceforth
reigned in the Mohammedan East; [1092] and the philosopher Al Gazzali
(or Gazel), on his part, employed the ancient and modern device of
turning a profession of philosophical scepticism to the account of
orthodoxy. [1093]
In the struggle between science and religion, in a politically
decadent State, the latter inevitably secured the administrative
power. [1094] Under the Khalifs Motamid (d. 892) and Motadhed (d. 902)
all science and philosophy were proscribed, and booksellers were put
upon their oath not to sell any but orthodox books. [1095] Thus, though
philosophy and science had secretly survived, when the political end
came the popular faith was in much the same state as it had been under
Haroun Al Raschid. Under Islam as under all the faiths of the world,
in the east as in the west, the mass of the people remained ignorant
as well as poor; and the learning and skill of the scholars served
only to pass on the saved treasure of Greek thought and science to
the new civilization of Europe. The fact that the age of military and
political decadence was that of the widest diffusion of rationalism
is naturally fastened on as giving the explanation of the decline;
but the inference is pure fallacy. The Bagdad Khalifate declined as
the Christianized Roman Empire declined, from political and external
causes; and the Turks who overthrew it proceeded to overthrow Christian
Byzantium, where rationalism never reared its head.
The conventional view is thus set forth in a popular work (The
Saracens, by Arthur Gilman, 1887, p. 385): "Unconsciously Mamun
began a process by which that implicit faith which had been
at once the foundation and the inspiration of Islam, which had
nerved its warriors in their terrible warfare, and had brought
the nation out of its former obscurity to the foremost position
among the peoples of the world, was to be taken from them." We
have seen that this view is entirely erroneous as regards the
rise of the Saracen power; and it is no less so as regards
the decline. At the outset there had been no "implicit faith"
among the conquerors. The Eastern Saracens, further, had been
decisively defeated by the Byzantines in the very first flush of
their fanaticism and success; and the Western had been routed by
Charles Martel long before they had any philosophy. There was
no overthrow of faith among the warriors of the Khalifate. The
enlistment of Turkish mercenaries by Mamoun and Motasim, by way of
being independent of the Persian and Arab factions in the army and
the State, introduced an element which, at first purely barbaric,
became as orthodox as the men of Haroun's day had been. Yet the
decadence, instead of being checked, was furthered.
Nor were the strifes set up by the rationalistic view of the Koran
nearly so destructive as the mere faction-fights and sectarian
insurrections which began with Motawakkel. The falling-away
of cities and provinces under the feeble Moktader (908-932)
had nothing whatever to do with opinions, but was strictly
analogous to the dissolution of the kingdom of Charlemagne under
his successors, through the rise of new provincial energies;
and the tyranny of the Turkish mercenaries was on all fours with
that of the Pretorians of the Roman Empire, and with that of the
Janissaries in later Turkey. The writer under notice has actually
recorded (p. 408) that the warlike sect of Ismailitic Karmathians,
who did more than any other enemy to dismember the Khalifate, were
unbelievers in the Koran, deniers of revelation, and disregarders
of prayer. The later Khalifs, puppets in the hands of the Turks,
were one and all devout believers.
On the other hand, fresh Moslem and non-Moslem dynasties arose
alternately as the conditions and opportunities determined. Jenghiz
Khan, who overran Asia, was no Moslem; neither was Tamerlane;
but new Moslem conquerors did overrun India, as pagan Alexander
had done in his day. Theological ideas counted for as little in
one case as in the other. Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni (997-1030), who
reared a new empire on the basis of the province of Khorassan and
the kingdom of Bokhara, and who twelve times successfully invaded
India, happened to be of Turkish stock; but he is also recorded
to have been in his youth a doubter of a future state, as well as
of his personal legitimacy. His later parade of piety (as to which
see Baron De Slane's tr. of Ibn Khallikan's Biog. Dict. iii, 334)
is thus a trifle suspect (British India, in Edin. Cab. Lib. 3rd
ed. i, 189, following Ferishta); and his avarice seems to have
animated him to the full as much as his faith, which was certainly
not more devout than that of the Brahmans of Somnauth, whose
hold he captured. (Cp. Prof. E. G. Browne, A Literary History
of Persia, ii (1906), 119.) During his reign, besides, unbelief
was rife in his despite (Weil, Geschichte der Chalifen, iii, 72),
though he burned the books of the Motazilites, besides crucifying
many Ismaïlian heretics (Browne, p. 160). The conventional theorem
as to the political importance of faith, in short, will not bear
investigation. Even Freeman here sets it aside (Hist. and Conq. of
the Saracens, p. 124).
§ 4
It is in the later and nominally decadent ages of the Bagdad Khalifate,
when science and culture and even industry relatively prospered by
reason of the personal impotence of the Khalifs, that we meet with
the most pronounced and the most perspicacious of the Freethinkers of
Islam. In the years 973-1057 there dwelt in the little Syrian town
of Marratun-Numan the blind poet Abu'l-ala-al-Ma'arri, who wrote a
parody of the Koran, [1096] and in his verse derided all religions as
alike absurd, and yet was for some reason never persecuted. He has
been pronounced "incomparably greater" than Omar Khayyám "both as
a poet and as an agnostic." [1097] One of his sayings was that "The
world holds two classes of men--intelligent men without religion, and
religious men without intelligence." [1098] He may have escaped on the
strength of a character for general eccentricity, for he was an ardent
vegetarian and an opponent of all parentage, declaring that to bring
a child into the world was to add to the sum of suffering. [1099]
The fact that he was latterly a man of wealth, yet in person an
ascetic and a generous giver, may be the true explanation. Whatever
be the explanation of his immunity, the frankness of his heterodoxy
is memorable. Nourished perhaps by a temper of protest set up in him
by the blindness which fell upon him in childhood after smallpox, the
spirit of reason seems to have been effectually developed in him by a
stay of a year and a-half at Bagdad, where, in the days of Al Mansour,
"Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, Sabians and Sufis,
materialists and rationalists," met and communed. [1100] Before his
visit, his poems are substantially orthodox; later, their burden
changes. He denies a resurrection, and is "wholly incredulous of any
divine revelation. Religion, as he conceives it, is a product of the
human mind, in which men believe through force of habit and education,
never stopping to consider whether it is true." "His belief in God
amounted, as it would seem, to little beyond a conviction that all
things are governed by inexorable Fate." Concerning creeds he sings
in one stave:--
Now this religion happens to prevail
Until by that one it is overthrown;
Because men will not live with men alone,
But always with another fairy-tale [1101]--
a summing-up not to be improved upon here.
A century later still, and in another region, we come upon the (now)
most famous of all Eastern freethinkers, Omar Khayyám. He belonged to
Naishápúr in Khorassan, a province which had long been known for its
rationalism, [1102] and which had been part of the nucleus of the great
Asiatic kingdom created by Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni at the beginning
of the eleventh century, soon after the rise of the Fatimite dynasty
in Egypt. Under that Sultan flourished Ferdusi (Firdausi), one of
the chief glories of Persian verse. After Mahmoud's death, his realm
and parts of the Khalifate in turn were overrun by the Seljuk Turks
under Togrul Beg; under whose grandson Malik it was that Omar Khayyám,
astronomer and poet, studied and sang in Khorassan. The Turk-descended
Shah favoured science as strongly as any of the Abassides; and when he
decided to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight experts he
employed to do it. Thus was set up for the East the Jaláli calendar,
which, as Gibbon has noted, [1103] "surpasses the Julian and approaches
the accuracy of the Gregorian style." Omar was, in fact, one of the
ablest mathematicians of his age. [1104]
His name, Omar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyámi, seems to point to Arab
descent. "Al-Khayyámmi" means "the tent-maker"; but in no biographic
account of him is there the slightest proof that he or his father ever
belonged to that or any other handicraft. [1105] Always he figures
as a scholar and a man of science. Since, therefore, the patronymic
al-Khayyámi is fairly common now among Arabs, and also among the still
nomadic tribes of Khuzistan and Luristan, the reasonable presumption
is that it was in his case a patronymic also. [1106] His father being
a man of some substance, he had a good schooling, and is even described
in literary tradition as having become an expert Koran scholar, by the
admission of the orthodox Al Gazzali, who, however, is represented
in another record as looking with aversion on Omar's scientific
lore. [1107] The poet may have had his lead to freethought during his
travels after graduating at Naishapur, when he visited Samarkhand,
Bokhara, Ispahan, and Balk. [1108] He seems to have practised astrology
for a living, even as did Kepler in Europe five hundred years later;
and he perhaps dabbled somewhat in medicine. [1109] A hostile orthodox
account of him, written in the thirteenth century, represents him as
"versed in all the wisdom of the Greeks," and as wont to insist on
the necessity of studying science on Greek lines. [1110] Of his prose
works, two, which were of standard authority, dealt respectively with
precious stones and climatology. [1111]
Beyond question the poet-astronomer was undevout; and his astronomy
doubtless helped to make him so. One contemporary writes: "I did not
observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions;
nor have I seen or heard of any of the great (scientists) who had such
belief." [1112] The biographical sketch by Ibn al Kifti, before cited,
declares that he "performed pilgrimages not from piety but from fear,"
having reason to dread the hostility of contemporaries who knew or
divined his unbelief; and there is a story of a treacherous pupil
who sought to bring him into public odium. [1113] In point of fact he
was not, any more than Abu' l-Ala, a convinced atheist, but he had no
sympathy with popular religion. "He gave his adherence to no religious
sect. Agnosticism, not faith, is the keynote of his works." [1114]
Among the sects he saw everywhere strife and hatred in which he could
have no part. His earlier English translators, reflecting the tone
of the first half of the last century, have thought fit to moralize
censoriously over his attitude to life; and the first, Prof. Cowell,
has austerely decided that Omar's gaiety is "but a risus sardonicus
of despair." [1115] Even the subtler Fitzgerald, who has so admirably
rendered some of the audacities which Cowell thought "better left in
the original Persian," has the air of apologizing for them when he
partly concurs in the same estimate. But despair is not the name for
the humorous melancholy which Omar, like Abu' l-Ala, weaves around
his thoughts on the riddle of the universe. Like Abu' l-Ala, again,
he talks at times of God, but with small signs of faith. In epigrams
which have seldom been surpassed for their echoing depth, he disposes
of the theistic solution and the lure of immortality; whereafter,
instead of offering another shibboleth, he sings of wine and roses,
of the joys of life and of their speedy passage; not forgetting
to add a stipulation for beneficence. [1116] It was his way of
turning into music the undertone of all mortality; and that it is
now preferable, for any refined intelligence, to the affectation of
zest for a "hereafter" on which no one wants to enter, would seem to
be proved by the remarkable vogue he has secured in modern England,
chiefly through the incomparable version of Fitzgerald. Much of the
attraction, certainly, is due to the canorous cadence and felicitous
phrasing of those singularly fortunate stanzas; and a similar handling
might have won as high a repute among us for Abu' l-Ala, whom, as we
have seen, some of our Orientalists set higher, and whose verse as
recently rendered into English has an indubitable charm. Fitzgerald,
on the other hand, has added much to Omar. But the thoughts of Omar
remain the kernels of Fitzgerald's verses; and whereas the counsel,
"Gather ye roses while ye may," is common enough, it must be the
weightier bearing of his deeper and more daring ideas that gives
the quatrains their main hold to-day. In the more exact rendering of
those translators who closely reproduce the original he remains beyond
question a freethinker, [1117] placing ethic above creed, though much
given to the praise of wine. Never popular in the Moslem world, [1118]
he has had in ours an unparalleled welcome; and it must be because
from his scientific vantage ground in the East, in the period of the
Norman Conquest, he had attained in some degree the vision and chimed
with the mood of a later and larger age.
That Omar in his day and place was not alone in his mood lies on
the face of his verse. Many quatrains ascribed to him, indeed,
are admittedly assignable to other Persian poets; and one of his
English editors notes that "the poetry of rebellion and revolt from
orthodox opinion, which is supposed to be peculiar to him, may be
traced in the works of his predecessor Avicenna, as well as in those
of Afdal-i-Káshí, and others of his successors." [1119] The allusions
to the tavern, a thing suspect and illicit for Islam, show that he
was in a society more Persian than Arab, one in which was to be found
nearly all of the free intellectual life possible in the Moslem East;
[1120] and doubtless Persian thought, always leaning to heresy, and
charged with germs of scientific speculation from immemorial antiquity,
prepared his rationalism; though his monism excludes alike dualism
and theism. "One for two I never did misread" is his summing up of
his philosophy. [1121]
But the same formula might serve for the philosophy of the sect of
Sufis, [1122] who in all ages seem to have included unbelievers as
well as devoutly mystical pantheists. Founded, it is said, by a woman,
Rabia, in the first century of the Hej'ra, [1123] the sect really
carries on a pre-Mohammedan mysticism, and may as well derive from
Greece [1124] as from Asia. Its original doctrine of divine love, as a
reaction against Moslem austerity, gave it a fixed hold in Persia, and
became the starting point of innumerable heterodox doctrines. [1125]
Under the Khalif Moktader, a Persian Sufi is recorded to have been
tortured and executed for teaching that every man is God. [1126] In
later ages, Sufiism became loosely associated with every species of
independent thinking; and there is reason to suspect that the later
poets Sadi (fl. thirteenth century) and Hafiz [1127] (fl. fourteenth
century), as well as hundreds of lesser status, held under the name of
Sufiism views of life not far removed from those of Omar Khayyám; who,
however, had bantered the Sufis so unmercifully that they are said to
have dreaded and hated him. [1128] In any case, Sufiism has included
such divergent types as Al Gazzali, [1129] the skeptical defender of
the faith; devout pantheistic poets such as Jâmi; [1130] and singers
of love and wine such as Hafiz, whose extremely concrete imagery is
certainly not as often allegorical as serious Sufis assert, though no
doubt it is sometimes so. [1131] It even became nominally associated
with the destructive Ismaïlitism of the sect of the Assassins, whose
founder, Hassan, had been the schoolfellow of Omar Khayyám. [1132]
Of Sufiism as a whole it may be said that whether as inculcating
quietism, or as widening the narrow theism of Islam into pantheism,
or as sheltering an unaggressive rationalism, it has made for freedom
and humanity in the Mohammedan world, lessening the evils of ignorance
where it could not inspire progress. [1133] It long anticipated
the semi-rationalism of those Christians who declare heaven and
hell to be names for bodily or mental states in this life. [1134]
On its more philosophic side too it connects with the long movement
of speculation which, passing into European life through the Western
Saracens, revived Greek philosophic thought in Christendom after the
night of the Middle Ages, at the same time that Saracen science passed
on the more precious seeds of real knowledge to the new civilization.
§ 5
There is the less need to deal at any length in these pages with the
professed philosophy of the eastern Arabs, seeing that it was from
first to last but little associated with any direct or practical
repudiation of dogma and superstition. [1135] What freethought there
was had only an unwritten currency, and is to be traced, as so often
happens in later European history, through the protests of orthodox
apologists. Thus the Persian Al Gazzali, in the preface to his work,
The Destruction of the Philosophers, declares of the subjects of
his attack that "the source of all their errors is the trust they
have in the names of Sokrates, Hippokrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the
admiration they profess for their genius and subtlety; and the belief,
finally, that those great masters have been led by the profundity of
their faculty to reject all religion, and to regard its precepts as
the product of artifice and imposture." [1136] This implies an abundant
rationalism, [1137] but, as always, the unwritten unbelief lost ground,
its non-publication being the proof that orthodoxy prevailed against
it. Movements which were originally liberal, such as that of the
Motecallemîn, ran at length to mere dialectic defence of the faith
against the philosophers. Fighting the Aristotelian doctrine of the
eternity of matter, they sought to found a new theistic creationism
on the atoms of Demokritos, making God the creator of the atoms, and
negating the idea of natural law. [1138] Eastern Moslem philosophy
in general followed some such line of reaction and petrifaction. The
rationalistic Al Kindi (fl. 850) seems to have been led to philosophize
by the Motazilite problems; but his successors mostly set them
aside, developing an abstract logic and philosophy on Greek bases,
or studying science for its own sake, though as a rule professing a
devout acceptance of the Koran. [1139] Such was Avicenna (Ibn Sina:
d. 1037), who taught that men should revere the faith in which they
were educated; though in comparison with his predecessor Al Farabi,
who leant to Platonic mysticism, he is a rationalistic Aristotelian,
[1140] with a strong leaning to pantheism. Of him an Arabic historian
writes that in his old age he attached himself to the court of the
heretical Ala-ud-Dawla at Ispahan, in order that he might freely
write his own heretical works. [1141] After Al Gazzali (d. 1111),
who attacked both Avicenna [1142] and Al Farabi somewhat in the spirit
of Cicero's skeptical Cotta attacking the Stoics and the Epicureans,
[1143] there seems to have been a further development of skepticism,
the skeptical defence of the faith having the same unsettling tendency
in his as in later hands. Ibn Khaldun seems to denounce in the name
of faith his mixture of pietism and philosophy; and Makrisi speaks
of his doctrines as working great harm to religion [1144] among the
Moslems. But the socio-political conditions were too unpropitious
to permit of any continuous advance on rational lines. Ere long an
uncritical orthodoxy prevailed in the Eastern schools, and it is
in Moorish Spain that we are to look for the last efforts of Arab
philosophy.
The course of culture-evolution there broadly corresponds with that
of the Saracen civilization in the East. In Spain the Moors came into
contact with the Roman imperial polity, and at the same time with the
different culture elements of Judaism and Christianity. To both of
these faiths they gave complete toleration, thus strengthening their
own in a way that no other policy could have availed to do. Whatever
was left of Græco-Roman art, handicraft, and science, saving the
arts of portraiture, they encouraged; and whatever of agricultural
science remained from Carthaginian times they zealously adopted and
improved. Like their fellow-Moslems in the East, they further learned
all the science that the preserved literature of Greece could give
them. The result was that under energetic and enlightened khalifs
the Moorish civilization became the centre of light and knowledge
as well as of material prosperity for medieval Europe. Whatever of
science the world possessed was to be found in their schools; and
thither in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries flocked students
from the Christian States of western and northern Europe. It was in
whole or in part from Saracen hands that the modern world received
astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, botany, jurisprudence,
and philosophy. They were, in fact, the revivers of civilization after
the age of barbarian Christianity. [1145] And while the preservation
of Greek science, lost from the hands of Christendom, would have been
a notable service enough, the Arabs did much more. Alhazen (d. 1038)
is said to have done the most original work in optics before Newton,
[1146] and in the same century Arab medicine and chemistry made
original advances. [1147]
While the progressive period lasted, there was of course an abundance
of practical freethought. But after a marvellously rapid rise, the
Moorish civilization was arrested and paralysed by the internal and the
external forces of anti-civilization--religious fanaticism within and
Christian hostility without. Everywhere we have seen culture-progress
depending more or less clearly on the failure to find solutions for
political problems. The most fatal defect of all Arab civilization--a
defect involved in its first departure by way of conquest, and in
its fixedly hostile relation to the Christian States, which kept it
constantly on a military basis--was the total failure to substitute any
measure of constitutional rule for despotism. It was thus politically
unprogressive, even while advancing in other respects. But in other
respects also it soon reached the limits set by the conditions.
Whereas in Persia the Arabs overran an ancient civilization,
containing many elements of rationalism which acted upon their own
creed, the Moors in Spain found a population only slightly civilized,
and predisposed by its recent culture, as well as by its natural
conditions, [1148] to fanatical piety. Thus when, under their tolerant
rule, Jews and Christians in large numbers embraced Islam, the new
converts became the most fanatical of all. [1149] All rationalism
existed in their despite, and, abounding as they did, they tended to
gain power whenever the Khalif was weak, and to rebel furiously when
he was hostile. When, accordingly, the growing pressure of the feudal
Christian power in Northern Spain at length became a menacing danger
to the Moorish States, weakened by endless intestine strife, the one
resource was to call in a new force of Moslem fanaticism in the shape
of the Almoravide [1150] Berbers, who, to the utmost of their power,
put down everything scientific and rationalistic, and established
a rigid Koranolatry. After a time they in turn, growing degenerate
while remaining orthodox, were overrun by a new influx of conquering
fanatics from Africa, the Almohades, who, failing to add political
science to their faith, went down in the thirteenth century before
the Christians in Spain, in a great battle in which their prince sat
in their sight with the Koran in his hand. [1151] Here there could
be no pretence that "unbelief" wrought the downfall. The Jonah of
freethought, so to speak, had been thrown overboard; and the ship
went down with the flag of faith flying at every masthead. [1152]
It was in the last centuries of Moorish rule that there lived the
philosophers whose names connect it with the history of European
thought, retaining thus a somewhat factitious distinction as compared
with the men of science, many of them nameless, who developed and
transmitted the sciences. The pantheistic Avempace (Ibn Badja:
d. 1138), who defended the reason against the theistic skepticism
of Al Gazzali, [1153] was physician, astronomer, and mathematician,
as well as metaphysician; as was Abubacer (Abu Bekr, also known as
Ibn Tophail: d. 1185), who regarded religious systems as "only a
necessary means of discipline for the multitude," [1154] and as being
merely symbols of the higher truth reached by the philosopher. Both
men, however, tended rather to mysticism than to exact thought;
and Abubacer's treatise, The Self-taught Philosopher, which has
been translated into Latin (by Pococke in 1671), English, Dutch,
and German, has had the singular fortune of being adopted by the
Quakers as a work of edification. [1155]
Very different was the part played by Averroës (Ibn Roshd), the
most famous of all Moslem thinkers, because the most far-reaching
in his influence on European thought. For the Middle Ages he was
pre-eminently the expounder of Aristotle, and it is as setting forth,
in that capacity, the pantheistic doctrine which affirms the eternity
of the material universe and makes the individual soul emanate from
and return to the soul of all, that he becomes important alike in
Moslem and Christian thought. Diverging from the asceticism and
mysticism of Avempace and Abubacer, and strenuously opposing the
anti-rationalism of Al Gazzali, against whose chief treatise he penned
his own Destruction of the Destruction of the Philosophers, Averroës is
the least mystical and the most rational of the Arab thinkers. [1156]
At nearly all vital points he oppugns the religious view of things,
denying bodily resurrection, which he treats (here following all his
predecessors in heretical Arab philosophy) as a vulgar fable; [1157]
and making some approach to a scientific treatment of the problem of
"Freewill" as against, on the one hand, the ethic-destroying doctrine
of the Motecallemîn, who made God's will the sole standard of right,
and affirmed predestination (Jabarism); and against, on the other hand,
the anti-determinism of the Kadarites. [1158] Even in his politics
he was original; and in his paraphrase of Plato's Republic he has
said a notable word for women, pointing out how small an opening is
offered for their faculties in Moslem society. [1159] Of all tyrannies,
he boldly declared, the worst is that of priests.
In time, however, a consciousness of the vital hostility of his
doctrine to current creeds, and of the danger he consequently ran,
made him, like so many of his later disciples, anxious to preserve
priestly favour. As regards religion he was more complaisant than
Abubacer, pronouncing Mohammedanism the most perfect of all popular
systems, [1160] and preaching a patriotic conformity on that score
to philosophic students.
From him derives the formula of a two-fold truth--one truth for
science or philosophy, and another for religion--which played so
large a part in the academic life of Christendom for centuries. [1161]
In two of his treatises, On the harmony of religion with philosophy
and On the demonstration of religious dogmas, he even takes up a
conservative attitude, proclaiming that the wise man never utters a
word against the established creed, and going so far as to say that
the freethinker who attacks it, inasmuch as he undermines popular
virtue, deserves death. [1162] Even in rebutting, as entirely absurd,
the doctrine of the creation of the world, and ascribing its currency
to the stupefying power of habit, he takes occasion to remark piously
that those whose religion has no better basis than faith are frequently
seen, on taking up scientific studies, to become utter zendeks. [1163]
But he lived in an age of declining culture and reviving fanaticism;
and all his conformities could not save him from proscription, at
the hands of a Khalif who had long favoured him, for the offence
of cultivating Greek antiquity to the prejudice of Islam. All study
of Greek philosophy was proscribed at the same time, and all books
found on the subject were destroyed. [1164] Disgraced and banished
from court, Averroës died at Morocco in 1198; other philosophers were
similarly persecuted; [1165] and soon afterwards the Moorish rule in
Spain came to an end in the odour of sanctity. [1166]
So complete was now the defeat of the intellectual life in Western
Islam that the ablest writer produced by the Arab race in the period
of the Renaissance, Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332-1406), writes as a
bigoted believer in revelation, though his writings on the science of
history were the most philosophic since the classic period, being out
of all comparison superior to those of the Christian chroniclers of
his age. [1167] So rationalistic, indeed, is his method, relatively
to his time, that it is permissible to suspect him of seeking to
propitiate the bigots. [1168] But neither they nor his race in general
could learn the sociological lessons he had it in him to teach. Their
development was arrested for that period.
§ 6
Of later freethought under Islam there is little to record as regards
literary output, but the phenomenon has never disappeared. Buckle,
in his haste, declared that he could write the history of Turkish
civilization on the back of his hand; [1169] but even in Turkey,
at a time of minimum friendly contact with other European life,
there have been traces of a spirit of freethinking nearly as active
as that astir in Christendom at the same period. Thus at the end of
the seventeenth century we have circumstantial testimony to the vogue
of a doctrine of atheistic Naturalism at Constantinople. The holders
of this doctrine were called Muserin, a term said to mean "The true
secret is with us." They affirmed a creative and all-sustaining
Nature, in which Man has his place like the plants and like the
planets; and they were said to form a very large number, including
Cadis and other learned as well as some renegade persons. [1170] But
Turkish culture-conditions in the eighteenth century were not such as
to permit of intellectual progress on native lines; and to this day
rationalism in that as in other Moslem countries is mainly a matter of
reflex action set up by the impact of European scientific knowledge,
or social contact. There is no modern rationalistic literature.
Motazilism, so-called, is still heard of in Arabia itself. [1171]
In the Ottoman Empire, indeed, it is little in evidence, standing
now as it does for a species of broad-church liberalism, analogous
to Christian Unitarianism; [1172] but in Persia the ancient leaning
to rationalism is still common. The old-world pantheism which we
have seen conserved in Omar Khayyám gave rise in later centuries to
similar developments among the Parsees both in Persia and in India;
and from the sixteenth century onwards there are clear traces among
them of a number of rationalizing heresies, varying from pantheism
and simple deism to atheism and materialism. [1173] In Persia to-day
there are many thinkers of these casts of thought. [1174] About 1830 a
British traveller estimated that, assuming there were between 200,000
and 300,000 Sufis in the country, those figures probably fell greatly
short of the number "secretly inclined to infidelity." [1175] Whatever
be the value of the figures, the statement is substantially confirmed
by later observers; [1176] missionaries reporting independently that
in Persia "most of the higher class, of the nobility, and of the
learned professions ... are at heart infidels or sceptics." [1177]
Persian freethought is of course, in large part, the freethought of
ignorance, and seems to co-exist with astrological superstition;
[1178] but there is obviously needed only science, culture, and
material development to produce, on such a basis, a renascence as
remarkable as that of modern Japan.
The verdict of Vambéry is noteworthy: "In all Asia, with the exception
of China, there is no land and no people wherein there is so little
of religious enthusiasm as in Persia; where freethinkers are so
little persecuted, and can express their opinions with so little
disturbance; and where, finally, as a natural consequence, the old
religious structure can be so easily shattered by the outbreak of new
enthusiasts. Whoever has read Khayyám's blasphemies against God and
the prophet, his jesting verses against the holiest ceremonies and
commandments of Islam; and whoever knows the vogue of this book and
other works directed against the current religion, will not wonder
that Bâb with the weapon of the Word won so many hearts in so short
a time." [1179]
The view that Bâbism affiliates to rationalism is to be understood in
the sense that the atmosphere of the latter made possible the growth of
the former, its adherents being apparently drawn rather from the former
orthodox. [1180] The young founder of the sect, Mirza-Ali-Mohammed,
declared himself "The Bâb," i.e. "the Gate" (to the knowledge of God),
as against the orthodox Moslem teachers who taught that "since the
twelve Imâms, the Gate of Knowledge is closed." Hence the name of
the sect. Mirza-Ali, who showed a strong tendency to intolerance,
quickly created an aggressive movement, which was for a time put down
by the killing of himself and many of his followers.
Since his execution the sect has greatly multiplied and its doctrines
have much widened. For a time the founder's intolerant teachings
were upheld by Ezél, the founder of one of the two divisions into
which the party speedily fell; while his rival Béha, who gave himself
out as the true Prophet, of whom the Bâb was merely the precursor,
developed a notably cosmopolitan and equalitarian doctrine, including a
vague belief in immortality, without heaven, hell, or purgatory. Ezél
eventually abandoned his claims, and his followers now number less
than two thousand; while the Béhaïtes number nearly three millions
out of the seven millions of the Persian population, and some two
millions in the adjacent countries. The son of Béha, Abbas Effendi,
who bears the title of "The Great Branch," now rules the cult, which
promises to be the future religion of Persia. [1181] One of the most
notable phenomena of the earlier movement was the entrance of a young
woman, daughter of a leading ulema, who for the first time in Moslem
history threw off the regulation veil and preached the equality of
the sexes. [1182] She was one of those first executed. Persecution,
however, has long ceased, and as a result of her lead the position
of woman in the cult is exceptionally good. Thus the last century
has witnessed within the sphere of Islam, so commonly supposed to
be impervious to change, one of the most rapid and radical religious
changes recorded in history. There is therefore no ground for holding
that in other Moslem countries progress is at an end.
Everything depends, broadly speaking, on the possibilities of
culture-contact. The changes in Persia are traceable to the element
of heretical habit which has persisted from pre-Moslem times; future
and more scientific development will depend upon the assimilation
of European knowledge. In Egypt, before the period of European
intervention, freethinking was at a minimum; and though toleration
was well developed as regarded Christians and Jews, freethinking
Moslems dared not avow themselves. [1183] Latterly rationalism tends to
spread in Egypt as in other Moslem countries; even under Mohammed Ali
the ruling Turks had begun to exhibit a "remarkable indifference to
religion," and had "begun to undermine the foundations of El-Islam";
and so shrewd and dispassionate an observer as Lane expected that
the common people would "soon assist in the work," and that "the
overthrow of the whole fabric may reasonably be expected to ensue at
a period not very remote." [1184] To evolve such a change there will
be required a diffusion of culture which is not at all likely to be
rapid under any Government; but in any case the ground that is being
lost by Islam in Egypt is not being retaken by Christianity.
In the other British dominions, Mohammedans, though less ready than
educated Hindus to accept new ideas, cannot escape the rationalizing
influence of European culture. Nor was it left to the British to
introduce the rationalistic spirit in Moslem India. At the end of
the sixteenth century the eclectic Emperor Akbar, [1185] himself a
devout worshipper of the Sun, [1186] is found tolerantly comparing
all religions, [1187] depreciating Islam, [1188] and arriving at
such general views on the equivalence of all creeds, and on the
improbability of eternal punishment, [1189] as pass for liberal
among Christians in our own day. If such views could be generated
by a comparison of the creeds of pre-British India they must needs
be encouraged now. The Mohammedan mass is of course still deeply
fanatical, and habitually superstitious; but not any more immovably so
than the early Saracens. In the eighteenth century arose the fanatical
Wahabi sect, which aims at a puritanic restoration of primeval Islam,
freed from the accretions of later belief, such as saint-worship; but
the movement, though variously estimated, has had small success, and
seems destined to extinction. [1190] Of the traditional seventy-three
sects in Islam only four to-day count as orthodox. [1191]
It may be worth while, in conclusion, to note that the comparative
prosperity or progressiveness of Islam as a proselytizing and
civilizing force in Africa--a phenomenon regarded even by some
Christians with satisfaction, and by some with alarm [1192]--is not
strictly or purely a religious phenomenon. Moslem civilization suits
with negro life in Africa in virtue not of the teaching of the Koran,
but of the comparative nearness of the Arab to the barbaric life. He
interbreeds with the natives, fraternizes with them (when not engaged
in kidnapping them), and so stimulates their civilization; where
the European colonist, looking down on them as an inferior species,
isolates, depresses, and degrades them. It is thus conceivable that
there is a future for Islam at the level of a low culture-stage; but
the Arab and Turkish races out of Africa are rather the more likely
to concur in the rationalistic movement of the higher civilization.
Even in Africa, however, a systematic observer notes, and predicts the
extension of, "a strong tendency on the part of the Mohammedans towards
an easy-going rationalism, such as is fast making way in Algeria, where
the townspeople and the cultivators in the more settled districts,
constantly coming in contact with Europeans, are becoming indifferent
to the more inconvenient among their Mohammedan observances, and
are content to live with little more religion than an observance of
the laws, and a desire to get on well with their neighbours." [1193]
Thus at every culture-level we see the persistence of that force of
intellectual variation which is the subject of our inquiry.