“_They seek to extinguish God’s light with their mouths; but God will
perfect His light, though the infidels be averse thereto. It is He
Who hath sent His Apostle with the direction, and the religion of
truth, that He may exalt the same above every religion, although the
idolators be averse thereto._”
There are two closely associated characteristics of Islam which impress
every student:—[Sidenote: Rigidity] the immovable _rigidity_ which
paralyzes individual action as well as social and religious progress
and for ever holds its professors arrested at the stage and within
the limit of Arab conditions as they were thirteen centuries ago;
[Sidenote: Solidarity] and the _solidarity_ of the world of Islam as it
exists to-day.
It is at this point that the contrast between the methods of
Jesus and of Muhammad is most sharply emphasized. The founder of
Christianity neither wrote, nor left instructions for the preservation
of His teachings; His method is best typified by His own favourite
illustration; His message is a seed, growing of its own living life,
mysteriously, silently, slowly, producing fruit after its kind indeed,
but each several fruit during each several season drawing its own
share of nourishment even as it drew its life directly from the root,
original and distinct from any other. Muhammad spoke, in the most
literal sense, the last word; the teaching has crystallized; principle
and detail are alike unyielding.
[Sidenote: Muhammad’s Vision]
Muhammad was a statesman as well as a poet; he had in view not only
the conversion of the world to God and to himself, but also a world
kingdom based upon the religious idea; and for the second end he worked
possibly even “better than he knew.”
[Sidenote: Symbols of Solidarity:]
The study of the symbols of this bond of uniformity—not of union—is
illuminating:—[Sidenote: 1. Creed] The _Creed_, binding to the God
of Islam through the Apostle of that God; [Sidenote: 2. Prayer] the
daily _Prayer Ritual:_ it has been truly said that “each Muslim is a
Church,” it is no less true that the Muslim world is a Church, bound
indissolubly by this uniform service of devotion; [Sidenote: 3. Quran]
the _Quran_ and [Sidenote: 4. Fast] _Ramadhán_, the Book, and the Fast
which commemorates the gift of the Book; and above all, [Sidenote: 5.
Pilgrimage] the _Pilgrimage to Mecca_, the local habitation of Islam,
sublime notwithstanding the apparent foolishness of the ceremonial.
“Thither the tribes go up,” from Turkey, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan,
India, China, Egypt and other North African lands, and Arabia herself.
National distinctions are forgotten; slave and master travel as
brother worshippers; Islam feels her solidarity through the far-seeing
provision of the centralization of her religious life, in the city
which is sacred to the memory of the Apostle.
The fact that Islam is broken up into as many sects as is Christianity,
does not affect this solidarity so greatly as might be supposed
from the experience of Christianity; in face of the Unbeliever the
Faithful stand a solid army, the separations touch none of these
symbols of unity. A solid army confronts the world. It has been
asserted by one who knew Islam well, that the conversion to another
Faith of an insignificant Muslim in an obscure village is known and
mourned (or resented) over the whole Muslim world. However that may
be, the solidarity of Islam is a grave and a suggestive fact; and
the Faith which hopes one day to win it, would do well to oppose the
statesmanship of Muhammad with a statesmanship and a wisdom equal with
his.