extended catechism of the Creed (Dín), the ceremonial observances
(Mazhab) and the apostolic practices (Sunnat) of the Shafi’í school
which, with minor modifications, applies to the other three orthodox.
Europe has by this time clean forgotten some tricks of her former
bigotry, such as “Mawmet” (an idol!) and “Mahommerie” (mummery[315]), a
place of Moslem worship: educated men no longer speak with Ockley of the
“great impostor Mahomet,” nor believe with the learned and violent Dr.
Prideaux that he was foolish and wicked enough to dispossess “certain
poor orphans, the sons of an inferior artificer” (the Banú Najjár!). A
host of books has attempted, though hardly with success, to enlighten
popular ignorance upon a crucial point; namely, that the Founder of
Al-Islam, like the Founder of Christianity, never pretended to establish
a new religion. His claims, indeed, were limited to purging the “School
of Nazareth” of the dross of ages and of the manifold abuses with which
long use had infected its early constitution: hence to the unprejudiced
observer his reformation seems to have brought it nearer the primitive
and original doctrine than any subsequent attempts, especially the
Judaizing tendencies of the so-called “Protestant” churches. The Meccan
Apostle preached that the Hanafíyyah or orthodox belief, which he
subsequently named Al-Islam, was first taught by Allah, in all its
purity and perfection, to Adam and consigned to certain inspired volumes
now lost; and that this primal Holy Writ received additions in the days
of his descendants Shís (Seth) and Idris (Enoch?), the founder of the
Sabian (not “Sabæan”) faith. Here, therefore, Al-Islam at once avoided
the deplorable assumption of the Hebrews and the Christians,—an error
which has been so injurious to their science and their progress,—of
placing their “first man” in circa B.C. 4000 or somewhat subsequent to
the building of the Pyramids: the Pre-Adamite[316] races and dynasties
of the Moslems remove a great stumbling-block and square with the
anthropological views of the present day. In process of time, when the
Adamite religion demanded a restoration and a supplement, its pristine
virtue was revived, restored and further developed by the books
communicated to Abraham, whose dispensation thus takes the place of the
Hebrew Noah and his Noachidæ. In due time the Torah, or Pentateuch,
superseded and abrogated the Abrahamic dispensation; the “Zabúr” of
David (a book not confined to the Psalms) reformed the Torah; the Injíl
or Evangel reformed the Zabur and was itself purified, quickened and
perfected by the Koran which means κατ’ἐξοχήν the Reading or the
Recital. Hence Locke, with many others, held Moslems to be unorthodox,
that is anti-Trinitarian Christians who believe in the immaculate
Conception, in the Ascension and in the divine mission of Jesus; and
when Priestley affirmed that “Jesus was sent from God,” all Moslems do
the same. Thus they are, in the main point of doctrine connected with
the Deity, simply Arians as opposed to Athanasians. History proves that
the former was the earlier faith which, though formally condemned in
A.D. 325 by Constantine’s Council of Nice,[317] overspread the Orient
beginning with Eastern Europe, where Ulphilas converted the Goths; which
extended into Africa with the Vandals, claimed a victim or martyr as
late as in the sixteenth century[318] and has by no means died out in
this our day.
The Talmud had been completed a full century before Mohammed’s time and
the Evangel had been translated into Arabic; moreover travel and
converse with his Jewish and Christian friends and companions must have
convinced the Meccan apostle that Christianity was calling as loudly for
reform as Judaism had done.[319] An exaggerated Trinitarianism or rather
Tritheism, a “Fourth Person” and Saint-worship had virtually dethroned
the Deity; whilst Mariolatry had made the faith a religio muliebris, and
superstition had drawn from its horrid fecundity an incredible number of
heresies and monstrous absurdities. Even ecclesiastic writers draw the
gloomiest pictures of the Christian Church in the fourth and seventh
centuries, and one declares that the “Kingdom of Heaven had become a
Hell.” Egypt, distracted by the blood-thirsty religious wars of Copt and
Greek, had been covered with hermitages by a gens æterna of
semi-maniacal superstition. Syria, ever “feracious of heresies,” had
allowed many of her finest tracts to be monopolised by monkeries and
nunneries.[320] After many a tentative measure Mohammed seems to have
built his edifice upon two bases, the unity of the Godhead and the
priesthood of the paterfamilias. He abolished for ever the “sacerdos
alter Christus” whose existence, as some one acutely said, is the best
proof of Christianity, and whom all know to be its weakest point. The
Moslem family, however humble, was to be the model in miniature of the
State, and every father in Al-Islam was made priest and pontiff in his
own house, able unaided to marry himself, to circumcise (to baptise as
it were) his children, to instruct them in the law and canonically to
bury himself (vol. viii. 22). Ritual, properly so called, there was
none; congregational prayers were merely those of the individual en
masse and the only admitted approach to a sacerdotal order were the
Olema or scholars learned in the legistic and the Mullah or
schoolmaster. By thus abolishing the priesthood Mohammed reconciled
ancient with modern wisdom. “Scito dominum,” said Cato, “pro totâ
familiâ rem divinam facere”: “No priest at a birth, no priest at a
marriage, no priest at a death,” is the aspiration of the present
Rationalistic School.
The Meccan apostle wisely retained the compulsory sacrament of
circumcision and the ceremonial ablutions of the Mosaic law; and the
five daily prayers not only diverted man’s thoughts from the world but
tended to keep his body pure. These two institutions had been practised
throughout life by the Founder of Christianity; but the followers who
had never even seen him, abolished them for purposes evidently political
and propagandist. By ignoring the truth that cleanliness is next to
godliness they paved the way for such saints as Simon Stylites and Sabba
who, like the lowest Hindu orders of ascetics, made filth a concominant
and an evidence of piety: even now English Catholic girls are at times
forbidden by Italian priests a frequent use of the bath as a signpost to
the sin of “luxury.” Mohammed would have accepted the morals contained
in the Sermon on the Mount much more readily than did the Jews from whom
its matter was borrowed.[321] He did something to abolish the use of
wine, which in the East means only its abuse; and he denounced games of
chance, well knowing that the excitable races of sub-tropical climates
cannot play with patience, fairness or moderation. He set aside certain
sums for charity to be paid by every Believer and he was the first to
establish a poor-rate (Zakát): thus he avoided the shame and scandal of
mendicancy which, beginning in the Catholic countries of Southern
Europe, extends to Syria and as far East as Christianity is found. By
these and other measures of the same import he made the ideal Moslem’s
life physically clean, moderate and temperate.
But Mohammed the “master mind of the age,” had, we must own, a “genuine
prophetic power, a sinking of self in the Divine, not distinguishable in
kind from the inspiration of the Hebrew prophets,” especially in that
puritanical and pharisaic narrowness which, with characteristic
simplicity, can see no good outside its own petty pale. He had insight
as well as outsight, and the two taught him that personal and external
reformation were mean matters compared with elevating the inner man. In
the “purer Faith,” which he was commissioned to abrogate and to quicken,
he found two vital defects equally fatal to its energy and to its
longevity. These were (and are) its egoism and its degradation of
humanity. Thus it cannot be a “pleroma”: it needs a Higher Law.[322] As
Judaism promised the good Jew all manner of temporal blessings, issue,
riches, wealth, honour, power, length of days, so Christianity offered
the good Christian, as a bribe to lead a godly life, personal salvation
and a future state of happiness, in fact, the Kingdom of Heaven, with an
alternative threat of Hell. It never rose to the height of the Hindu
Brahmans and Lao-Tse (the “Ancient Teacher”); of Zeno the Stoic and his
disciples the noble Pharisees[323] who believed and preached that Virtue
is its own reward. It never dared to say, “Do good for Good’s
sake[324];” even now it does not declare with Cicero, “The sum of all is
that what is right, should be sought for its own sake, because it is
right, and not because it is enacted.” It does not even now venture to
say with Philo Judæus, “The good man seeks the day for the sake of the
day, and the light for the light’s sake; and he labours to acquire what
is good for the sake of the good itself, and not of anything else.” So
far for the egotism, naïve and unconscious, of Christianity, whose
burden is, “Do good to escape Hell and gain Heaven.”
A no less defect in the “School of Galilee” is its low view of human
nature. Adopting as sober and authentic history an Osirian-Hebrew myth
which Philo and a host of Rabbis explain away, each after his own
fashion, Christianity dwells, lovingly as it were, upon the “Fall” of
man[325] and seems to revel in the contemptible condition to which
“original sin” condemned him; thus grovelling before God ad majorem Dei
gloriam. To such a point was and is this carried that the Synod of Dort
declared, Infantes infidelium morientes in infantiâ reprobatos esse
statuimus; nay, many of the orthodox still hold a Christian babe dying
unbaptised to be unfit for a higher existence, and some have even
created a “limbo” expressly to domicile the innocents “of whom is the
kingdom of Heaven.” Here, if any where, the cloven foot shows itself and
teaches us that the only solid stratum underlying priestcraft is one
composed of £ s. d.
And I never can now believe it, my Lord! (Bishop) we come to this earth
Ready damned, with the seeds of evil sown quite so thick at our birth,
sings Edwin Arnold.[326] We ask, can infatuation or hypocrisy—for it
must be the one or the other—go farther? But the Adamical myth is
opposed to all our modern studies. The deeper we dig into the Earth’s
“crust,” the lower are the specimens of human remains which occur; and
hitherto not a single “find” has come to revive the faded glories of
Adam the goodliest man of men since born (!)
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.
Thus Christianity, admitting, like Judaism, its own saints and santons,
utterly ignores the progress of humanity, perhaps the only belief in
which the wise man can take unmingled satisfaction. Both have proposed
an originally perfect being with hyacinthine locks, from whose type all
the subsequent humans are degradations physical and moral. We on the
other hand hold, from the evidence of our senses, that early man was a
savage very little superior to the brute; that during man’s millions of
years upon earth there has been a gradual advance towards perfection, at
times irregular and even retrograde, but in the main progressive; and
that a comparison of man in the xixth century with the caveman[327]
affords us the means of measuring past progress and of calculating the
future of humanity.
Mahommed was far from rising to the moral heights of the ancient sages:
he did nothing to abate the egotism of Christianity; he even exaggerated
the pleasures of its Heaven and the horrors of its Hell. On the other
hand he did much to exalt human nature. He passed over the “Fall” with a
light hand; he made man superior to the angels: he encouraged his
fellow-creatures to be great and good by dwelling upon their nobler not
their meaner side; he acknowledged, even in this world, the
perfectability of mankind, including womankind, and in proposing the
loftiest ideal he acted unconsciously upon the grand dictum of
chivalry—Honneur oblige.[328] His prophets were mostly faultless men;
and, if the “Pure of Allah” sinned, he “sinned against himself.” Lastly,
he made Allah predetermine the career and fortunes, not only of empires,
but of every created being; thus inculcating sympathy and tolerance of
others, which is true humanity, and a proud resignation to evil as to
good fortune. This is the doctrine which teaches the vulgar Moslem a
dignity observed even by the “blind traveller,” and which enables him to
display a moderation, a fortitude, and a self-command rare enough
amongst the followers of the “purer creed.”
Christian historians explain variously the portentous rise of Al-Islam
and its marvellous spread over vast regions, not only of pagans and
idolators but of Christians. Prideaux disingenuously suggests that it
“seems to have been purposely raised up by God, to be a scourge to the
Christian church for not living in accordance with their most holy
religion.” The popular excuse is by the free use of the sword; this,
however, is mere ignorance: in Mohammed’s day and early Al-Islam only
actual fighters were slain[329]: the rest were allowed to pay the
Jizyah, or capitation-tax, and to become tributaries, enjoying almost
all the privileges of Moslems. But even had forcible conversion been
most systematically practised, it would have afforded an insufficient
explanation of the phenomenal rise of an empire which covered more
ground in eighty years than Rome had gained in eight hundred. During so
short a time the grand revival of Monotheism had consolidated into a
mighty nation, despite their eternal blood-feuds, the scattered Arab
tribes; a six-years’ campaign had conquered Syria, and a lustre or two
utterly overthrew Persia, humbled the Græco-Roman, subdued Egypt and
extended the Faith along northern Africa as far as the Atlantic. Within
three generations the Copts of Nile-land had formally cast out
Christianity, and the same was the case with Syria, the cradle of the
Nazarene, and Mesopotamia, one of his strongholds, although both were
backed by all the remaining power of the Byzantine empire. Northwestern
Africa, which had rejected the idolatro-philosophic system of pagan and
imperial Rome, and had accepted, after lukewarm fashion, the Arian
Christianity imported by the Vandals, and the “Nicene mystery of the
Trinity,” hailed with enthusiasm the doctrines of the Koran and has
never ceased to be most zealous in its Islam. And while Mohammedanism
speedily reduced the limits of Christendom by one-third, while
throughout the Arabian, Saracenic and Turkish invasions whole Christian
peoples embraced the monotheistic faith, there are hardly any instances
of defection from the new creed and, with the exception of Spain and
Sicily, it has never been suppressed in any land where once it took
root. Even now, when Mohammedanism no longer wields the sword, it is
spreading over wide regions in China, in the Indian Archipelago, and
especially in Western and Central Africa, propagated only by
self-educated individuals, trading travellers, while Christianity makes
no progress and cannot exist on the Dark Continent without strong
support from Government. Nor can we explain this honourable reception by
the “licentiousness” ignorantly attributed to Al-Islam, one of the most
severely moral of institutions; or by the allurements of polygamy and
concubinage, slavery,[330] and a “wholly sensual Paradise” devoted to
eating, drinking[331] and the pleasures of the sixth sense. The true and
simple explanation is that this grand Reformation of Christianity was
urgently wanted when it appeared, that it suited the people better than
the creed which it superseded and that it has not ceased to be
sufficient for their requirements, social, sexual and vital. As the
practical Orientalist, Dr. Leitner, well observes from his own
experience, “The Mohammedan religion can adapt itself better than any
other and has adapted itself to circumstances and to the needs of the
various races which profess it, in accordance with the spirit of the
age.”[332] Hence, I add, its wide diffusion and its impregnable
position. “The dead hand, stiff and motionless” is a forcible simile for
the present condition of Al-Islam; but it results from limited and
imperfect observation and it fails in the sine quâ non of similes and
metaphors, a foundation of fact.
I cannot quit this subject without a passing reference to an admirably
written passage in Mr. Palgrave’s travels[333] which is essentially
unfair to Al-Islam. The author has had ample opportunities of comparing
creeds: of Jewish blood and born a Protestant, he became a Catholic and
a Jesuit (Père Michel Cohen)[334] in a Syrian convent; he crossed Arabia
as a good Moslem and he finally returned to his premier amour,
Anglicanism. But his picturesque depreciation of Mohammedanism, which
has found due appreciation in more than one popular volume,[335] is a
notable specimen of special pleading, of the ad captandum in its modern
and least honest form. The writer begins by assuming the arid and barren
Wahhabi-ism, which he had personally studied, as a fair expression of
the Saving Faith. What should we say to a Moslem traveller who would
make the Calvinism of the sourest Covenanter, model, genuine and ancient
Christianity? What would sensible Moslems say to these propositions of
Professor Maccovius and the Synod of Dort:—Good works are an obstacle to
salvation. God does by no means will the salvation of all men: he does
will sin and he destines men to sin, as sin? What would they think of
the Inadmissible Grace, the Perseverance of the Elect, the
Supralapsarian and the Sublapsarian and, finally, of a Deity the author
of man’s existence, temptation and fall, who deliberately pre-ordains
sin and ruin? “Father Cohen” carries out into the regions of the extreme
his strictures on the one grand vitalising idea of Al-Islam, “There is
no god but God”;[336] and his deduction concerning the Pantheism of
Force sounds unreal and unsound, compared with the sensible remarks upon
the same subject by Dr. Badger[337] who sees the abstruseness of the
doctrine and does not care to include it in hard and fast lines or to
subject it to mere logical analysis. Upon the subject of
“predestination” Mr. Palgrave quotes, not from the Koran, but from the
Ahádís or Traditional Sayings of the Apostle; but what importance
attaches to a legend in the Mischnah, or Oral Law, of the Hebrews
utterly ignored by the Written Law? He joins the many in complaining
that even the mention of “the love of God” is absent from Mohammed’s
theology, burking the fact that it never occurs in the Jewish scriptures
and that the genius of Arabic, like Hebrew, does not admit the
expression: worse still, he keeps from his reader such Koranic passages
as, to quote no other, “Allah loveth you and will forgive your sins”
(iii. 29). He pities Allah for having “no son, companion or counsellor”
and, of course, he must equally commiserate Jehovah. Finally his views
of the lifelessness of Al-Islam are directly opposed to the opinions of
Dr. Leitner and the experience of all who have lived in Moslem lands.
Such are the ingenious but not ingenuous distortions of fact, the fine
instances of the pathetic fallacy, and the noteworthy illustrations of
the falsehood of extremes, which have engendered “Mohammedanism a
Relapse: the worst form of Monotheism,”[338] and which have been eagerly
seized upon and further deformed by the authors of popular books, that
is, volumes written by those who know little for those who know less.
In Al-Rashid’s day a mighty change had passed over the primitive
simplicity of Al-Islam, the change to which faiths and creeds, like
races and empires and all things sublunary, are subject. The proximity
of Persia and the close intercourse with the Græco-Romans had polished
and greatly modified the physiognomy of the rugged old belief: all
manner of metaphysical subtleties had cropped up, with the usual
disintegrating effect, and some of these threatened even the unity of
the Godhead. Musaylimah and Karmat had left traces of their handiwork:
the Mutazilites (separatists or secessors) actively propagated their
doctrine of a created and temporal Koran. The Khárijí or Ibázi, who
rejects and reviles Abú Turáb (Caliph Ali), contended passionately with
the Shí’ah who reviles and rejects the other three “Successors;” and
these sectarians, favoured by the learned, and by the Abbasides in their
jealous hatred of the Ommiades, went to the extreme length of the
Ali-Iláhi—the God-makers of Ali—whilst the Dahrí and the Zindík, the
Mundanist and the Agnostic, proposed to sweep away the whole edifice.
The neo-Platonism and Gnosticism which had not essentially affected
Christendom,[339] found in Al-Islam a rich fallow and gained strength
and luxuriance by the solid materialism and conservatism of its basis.
Such were a few of the distracting and resolving influences which Time
had brought to bear upon the True Believer and which, after some half a
dozen generations, had separated the several schisms by a wider breach
than that which yawns between Orthodox, Romanist and Lutheran. Nor was
this scandal in Al-Islam abated until the Tartar sword applied to it the
sharpest remedy.
B.—WOMAN.
The next point I propose to consider is the position of womanhood in The
Nights, so curiously at variance with the stock ideas concerning the
Moslem home and domestic policy still prevalent, not only in England,
but throughout Europe. Many readers of these volumes have remarked to me
with much astonishment that they find the female characters more
remarkable for decision, action and manliness than the male; and are
wonderstruck by their masterful attitude and by the supreme influence
they exercise upon public and private life.
I have glanced at the subject of the sex in Al-Islam to such an extent
throughout my notes that little remains here to be added. Women, all the
world over, are what men make them; and the main charm of Amazonian
fiction is to see how they live and move and have their being without
any masculine guidance. But it is the old ever-new fable
“Who drew the Lion vanquished? ’Twas a man!”
The books of the Ancients, written in that stage of civilisation, when
the sexes are at civil war, make women even more than in real life the
creatures of their masters: hence from the dawn of literature to the
present day the sex has been the subject of disappointed abuse and
eulogy almost as unmerited. Ecclesiastes, perhaps the strangest specimen
of an “inspired volume” the world has yet produced, boldly declares “One
(upright) man among a thousand I have found; but a woman among all have
I not found” (vol. vii. 28), thus confirming the pessimism of
Petronius:—
Femina nulla bona est, et si bona contigit ulla
Nescio quo fato res mala facta bona est.