end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have already spoken so often;
that external and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old; and
had seen that its name was righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely in
an absolutely righteous person; and moreover, that this person was no
careless self-contented epicurean deity; but that He was, as they loved
to call Him, the most merciful God; that He cared for men; that He
desired to make men righteous. Of that they could not doubt. The fact
was palpable, historic, present. To them the degraded Koreish of the
desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen
from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into the
lowest fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and
wretchedness—to them, while they were making idols of wood and stone;
eating dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of
chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in
trespasses and sins; hateful and hating one another—a man, one of their
own people had come, saying: “I have a message from the one righteous
God. His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself. He will have
you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham. Be
that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and
brutishness. Then you shall be able to trample under font the profligate
idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which they have been
oppressing for centuries, and to recover the East for its rightful heirs,
the children of Abraham.” Was this not, in every sense, a message from
God? I must deny the philosophy of Clement and Augustine, I must deny my
own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage my own moral sense, and
confess that I have no immutable standard of right, that I know no
eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been one; if I deny what
seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those wild Koreish had in
them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken to that message, and
perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless importance, and that they
did accept that message, and lived by it in proportion as they received
it fully, such lives as no men in those times, and few in after times,
have been able to live. If I feel, as I do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu
Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men than I am, I must throw away all that
Philo—all that a Higher authority—has taught me: or I must attribute
their lofty virtues to the one source of all in man which is not
selfishness, and fancy, and fury, and blindness as of the beasts which
perish.
Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete
failures upon earth, if the true test of a system’s success be the
gradual progress and amelioration of the human beings who are under its
influence? First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy. I do not judge
Mohammed for having allowed it. He found it one of the ancestral and
immemorial customs of his nation. He found it throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures. He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as
he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race. It seemed to
him that what was right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab. God
shall judge him, not I. Moreover, the Christians of the East, divided
into either monks or profligates; and with far lower and more brutal
notions of the married state than were to be found in Arab poetry and
legend, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal and
divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not only
proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated woman from her old
slavery to the stronger sex. And I believe, from his chivalrous
faithfulness to his good wife Kadijah, as long as she lived, that
Mohammed was a man who could have accepted that great truth in all its
fulness, had he but been taught it. He certainly felt the evil of
polyamy so strongly as to restrict it in every possible way, except the
only right way—namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of marriage.
But his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you will, was a deflection from the
right law, from the true constitution of man, and therefore it avenged
itself. That chivalrous respect for woman, which was so strong in the
early Mohammedans, died out. The women themselves—who, in the first few
years of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and became their helpmates,
counsellors, and fellow-warriors—degenerated rapidly into mere
playthings. I need not enter into the painful subject of woman’s present
position in the East, and the social consequences thereof. But I firmly
believe, not merely as a theory, but as a fact which may be proved by
abundant evidence, that to polygamy alone is owing nine-tenths of the
present decay and old age of every Mussulman nation; and that till it be
utterly abolished, all Western civilisation and capital, and all the
civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot toward their
revival. You must regenerate the family before you can regenerate the
nation, and the relation of husband and wife before the family; because,
as long as the root is corrupt, the fruit will be corrupt also.
But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more intimately
connected with those metaphysical questions which we have been hitherto
principally considering.
Among the first Mussulmans, as I have said, there was generally the most
intense belief in each man that he was personally under a divine guide
and teacher. But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that
belief in the minds of succeeding generations. They had destroyed the
good with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishing
wrath. In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the Syrian
Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which alone
can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships—if not outward and
material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more dangerous
idolatries of the intellect. For they had swept away the belief in the
Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, who was, in some
mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and wisdom. And
more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of the Logos,
which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one who can
enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human spirit. And,
therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends were dead, the belief
in a present divine teacher, on the whole, died with them; and the
Mussulmans began to put the Koran in the place of Him of whom the Koran
spoke. They began to worship the book—which after all is not a book, but
only an irregular collection of Mohammed’s meditations, and notes for
sermons—with the most slavish and ridiculous idolatry. They fell into a
cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for the mere letters and words
of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the old Rabbis was moderate and
rational. They surrounded it, and the history of Mohammed, with all
ridiculous myths, and prodigies, and lying wonders, whereof the book
itself contained not a word; and which Mohammed, during his existence,
had denied and repudiated, saying that he worked no miracles, and that
none were needed; because only reason was required to show a man the hand
of a good God in all human affairs. Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans
found the miracles necessary to confirm their faith: and why? Because
they had lost the sense of a present God, a God of order; and therefore
hankered, as men in such a mood always will, after prodigious and
unnatural proofs of His having been once present with their founder
Mohammed.
And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipotent Being whom Mohammed,
arising out of his great darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish,
receded in the minds of their descendants to an unapproachable and
abysmal distance. For they had lost the sense of His present guidance,
His personal care. They had lost all which could connect Him with the
working of their own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with
the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and
human love; in plain English, that He was loving and merciful at all.
The change came very gradually, thank God; you may read of noble sayings
and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it came;
and then their belief in God’s omnipotence and absoluteness dwindled into
the most dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism. His unchangeableness
became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to teach, forgive, and
deliver men—as it seemed to Mohammed to have been—but a mere brute
necessity, an unchangeable purpose to have His own way, whatsoever that
way might be. That dark fatalism, also, has helped toward the decay of
the Mohammedan nations. It has made them careless of self-improvement;
faithless of the possibility of progress; and has kept, and will keep,
the Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual matters, whole ages behind
the Christian nations of the West.
How far the story of Omar’s commanding the baths of Alexandria to be
heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never
know. Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh
corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic
writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.
One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian
grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library, took
care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever strongly
Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the Koran
were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be destroyed,
the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very different. As
they settled in the various countries which they conquered, education
seems to have been considered by them an important object. We even find
some of them, in the same generation as Mohammed, obeying strictly the
Prophet’s command to send all captive children to school—a fact which
speaks as well for the Mussulmans’ good sense, as it speaks ill for the
state of education among the degraded descendants of the Greek conquerors
of the East. Gradually philosophic Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and
then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on
Aristotle’s Logic, and Ptolemy’s Megiste Syntaxis—which last acquired
from them the name of Almagest, by which it was so long known during the
Middle Ages.
But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or
mystic element in their commentaries. It seems as if Alexandria was
preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of
commentators, not of originators. It is worthy of remark, that
Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the
simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems
to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism. He
maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had entirely
misunderstood Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him with Plato,
or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism. Aristotle was henceforth
the text-book of Arab savants. It was natural enough. The Mussulman
mind was trained in habits of absolute obedience to the authority of
fixed dogmas. All those attempts to follow out metaphysic to its highest
object, theology, would be useless if not wrong in the eyes of a
Mussulman, who had already his simple and sharply-defined creed on all
matters relating to the unseen world. With him metaphysic was a study
altogether divorced from man’s higher life and aspirations. So also were
physics. What need had he of Cosmogonies? what need to trace the
relations between man and the universe, or the universe and its Maker?
He had his definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the only ultimate
relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an absolute fiat,
creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation between the
universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to speculate. The
idea which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic with man’s highest
inspirations and widest speculations—the Alexandria idea of the Logos, of
the Deity working in time and space by successive thoughts—he had not
heard of; for it was dead, as I have said, in Alexandria itself; and if
he had heard of it, he would have spurned it as detracting from the
absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom he so nobly yet so
partially bore witness. So it was to be; doubtless it was right that it
should be so. Man’s eye is too narrow to see a whole truth, his brain
too weak to carry a whole truth. Better for him, and better for the
world, is perhaps the method on which man has been educated in every age,
by which to each school, or party, or nation, is given some one great
truth, which they are to work out to its highest development, to
exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age—perhaps, alas! only
some future state—to reconcile that too favoured dogma with other truths
which lie beside it, and without which it is always incomplete, and
sometimes altogether barren.
But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, on the
mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality or vitality.
All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek philosophy, the
Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of physics, have had a deeper
motive for their search, a far higher object which they hope to discover.
But indeed, the Mussulmans did not so much wish to discover truth, as to
cultivate their own intellects. For that purpose a sharp and subtle
systematist, like Aristotle, was the very man whom they required; and
from the destruction of Alexandria may date the rise of the Aristotelian
philosophy. Translations of his works were made into Arabic, first, it
is said, from Persian and Syriac translations; the former of which had
been made during the sixth and seventh centuries, by the wreck of the
Neoplatonist party, during their visit to the philosophic Chozroos. A
century after, they filled Alexandria. After them Almansoor, Hairoun
Alraschid, and their successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians,
obtained from them translations of the philosophic, medical, and
astronomical Greek works; while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman,
had introduced the same literary taste into Spain, where, in the
thirteenth century, Averroës and Maimonides rivalled the fame of
Avicenna, who had flourished at Bagdad a century before.
But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to have invented nothing;
they only commented. And yet not only commented; for they preserved for
us those works of whose real value they were so little aware. Averroës,
in quality of commentator on Aristotle, became his rival in the minds of
the mediæval schoolmen; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on
Hippocrates and Galen, was for centuries the text-book of all European
physicians; while Albatani and Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, commented on
Ptolemy, not however without making a few important additions to his
knowledge; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third inequality of the moon’s
motion, in addition to the two mentioned by Ptolemy, which he did,
according to Professor Whewell, in a truly philosophic manner—an
apparently solitary instance, and one which, in its own day, had no
effect; for the fact was forgotten, and rediscovered centuries after by
Tycho Brahe. To Albatani, however, we owe two really valuable heirlooms.
The one is the use of the sine, or half-chord of the double arc, instead
of the chord of the arc itself, which had been employed by the Greek
astronomers; the other, of even more practical benefit, was the
introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead of the
troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the Greeks. These ten digits,
however, seem, says Professor Whewell, by the confession of the Arabians
themselves, to be of Indian origin, and thus form no exception to the
sterility of the Arabian genius in scientific inventions. Nevertheless
we are bound, in all fairness, to set against his condemnation of the
Arabs Professor De Morgan’s opinion of the Moslem, in his article on
Euclid: “Some writers speak slightingly of this progress, the results of
which they are too apt to compare with those of our own time. They ought
rather to place the Saracens by the side of their own Gothic ancestors;
and making some allowance for the more advantageous circumstances under
which the first started, they should view the second systematically
dispersing the remains of Greek civilisation, while the first were
concentrating the geometry of Alexandria, the arithmetic and algebra of
India, and the astronomy of both, to form a nucleus for the present state
of science.”
To this article of Professor De Morgan’s on Euclid, {127} and to
Professor Whewell’s excellent “History of the Inductive Sciences,” from
which I, being neither Arabic scholar nor astronomer, have drawn most of
my facts about physical science, I must refer those who wish to know more
of the early rise of physics, and of their preservation by the Arabs,
till a great and unexpected event brought them back again to the quarter
of the globe where they had their birth, and where alone they could be
regenerated into a new and practical life.
That great event was the Crusades. We have heard little of Alexandria
lately. Its intellectual glory had departed westward and eastward, to
Cordova and to Bagdad; its commercial greatness had left it for Cairo and
Damietta. But Egypt was still the centre of communication between the
two great stations of the Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. Lane has shown
in his most valuable translation of the “Arabian Nights,” possessed a
peculiar life and character of its own.
It was the rash object of the Crusaders to extinguish that life.
Palestine was their first point of attack: but the later Crusaders seem
to have found, like the rest of the world, that the destinies of
Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt; and to Damietta,
accordingly, was directed that last disastrous attempt of St. Louis,
which all may read so graphically described in the pages of Joinville.
The Crusaders failed utterly of the object at which they aimed. They
succeeded in an object of which they never dreamed; for in those Crusades
the Moslem and the Christian had met face to face, and found that both
were men, that they had a common humanity, a common eternal standard of
nobleness and virtue. So the Christian knights went home humbler and
wiser men, when they found in the Saracen emirs the same generosity,
truth, mercy, chivalrous self-sacrifice, which they had fancied their own
peculiar possession, and added to that, a civilisation and a learning
which they could only admire and imitate. And thus, from the era of the
Crusades, a kindlier feeling sprang up between the Crescent and the
Cross, till it was again broken by the fearful invasions of the Turks
throughout Eastern Europe. The learning of the Moslem, as well as their
commerce, began to pour rapidly into Christendom, both from Spain, Egypt,
and Syria; and thus the Crusaders were, indeed, rewarded according to
their deeds. They had fancied that they were bound to vindicate the
possession of the earth for Him to whom they believed the earth belonged.
He showed them—or rather He has shown us, their children—that He can
vindicate His own dominion better far than man can do it for Him; and
their cruel and unjust aim was utterly foiled. That was not the way to
make men know or obey Him. They took the sword, and perished by the
sword. But the truly noble element in them—the element which our hearts
and reasons recognise and love, in spite of all the loud words about the
folly and fanaticism of the Crusades, whensoever we read “The Talisman”
or “Ivanhoe”—the element of loyal faith and self-sacrifice—did not go
unrequited. They learnt wider, juster views of man and virtue, which I
cannot help believing must have had great effect in weakening in their
minds their old, exclusive, and bigoted notions, and in paving the way
for the great outburst of free thought, and the great assertion of the
dignity of humanity, which the fifteenth century beheld. They opened a
path for that influx of scientific knowledge which has produced, in after
centuries, the most enormous effects on the welfare of Europe, and made
life possible for millions who would otherwise have been pent within the
narrow bounds of Europe, to devour each other in the struggle for room
and bread.
But those Arabic translations of Greek authors were a fatal gift for
Egypt, and scarcely less fatal gift for Bagdad. In that Almagest of
Ptolemy, in that Organon of Aristotle, which the Crusaders are said to
have brought home, lay, rude and embryotic, the germs of that physical
science, that geographical knowledge which has opened to the European the
commerce and the colonisation of the globe. Within three hundred years
after his works reached Europe, Ptolemy had taught the Portuguese to sail
round Africa; and from that day the stream of eastern wealth flowed no
longer through the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf, on its way to the new
countries of the West; and not only Alexandria, but Damietta and Bagdad,
dwindled down to their present insignificance. And yet the whirligig of
time brings about its revenges. The stream of commerce is now rapidly
turning back to its old channel; and British science bids fair to make
Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations.
It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possibilities of
her future. Her own physical capacities, as the great mind of Napoleon
saw, are what they always have been, inexhaustible; and science has
learnt to set at naught the only defect of situation which has ever
injured her prosperity, namely, the short land passage from the Nile to
the Red Sea. The fate of Palestine is now more than ever bound up with
her fate; and a British or French colony might, holding the two
countries, develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from
Alexander’s handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the
nations of the West and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem destined
to spring up in the Australian ocean. Wide as the dream may appear,
steam has made it a far narrower one than the old actual fact, that for
centuries the Phoenician and the Arabian interchanged at Alexandria the
produce of Britain for that of Ceylon and Hindostan. And as for
intellectual development, though Alexandria wants, as she has always
wanted, that insular and exclusive position which seems almost necessary
to develop original thought and original national life, yet she may still
act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and polities, and the
young and buoyant vigour of the new-born nations may at once teach, and
learn from, the prudence, the experience, the traditional wisdom of the
ancient Europeans.
This vision, however possible, may be a far-off one: but the first step
towards it, at least, is being laid before our eyes—and that is, a fresh
reconciliation between the Crescent and the Cross. Apart from all
political considerations, which would be out of place here, I hail, as a
student of philosophy, the school which is now, both in Alexandria and in
Constantinople, teaching to Moslem and to Christians the same lesson
which the Crusaders learnt in Egypt five hundred years ago. A few years’
more perseverance in the valiant and righteous course which Britain has
now chosen, will reward itself by opening a vast field for capital and
enterprise, for the introduction of civil and religious liberty among the
down-trodden peasantry of Egypt; as the Giaour becomes an object of
respect, and trust, and gratitude to the Moslem; and as the feeling that
Moslem and Giaour own a common humanity, a common eternal standard of
justice and mercy, a common sacred obligation to perform our promises,
and to succour the oppressed, shall have taken place of the old brute
wonder at our careless audacity, and awkward assertion of power, which
now expresses itself in the somewhat left-handed Alexandrian
compliment—“There is one Satan, and there are many Satans: but there is
no Satan like a Frank in a round hat.”
* * * * *