Nobody who has not lived in Turkey can realize how hopeless, almost
self-contradictory, it is to talk of "reforming" Turkey. It could
not be reformed and be Mohammedan Turkey; the lack of reform or power
of reform is just what makes it what it is. The root of the evil is
Mohammedanism itself; it is embodied social stagnation, corruption,
ultimate ruin. Neither the Sultan nor the Turks can improve the state
of the Empire, even if they wished. The usual "broad-minded" statements
about Mohammed and his religion are simply elaborations of ignorance,
made up out of men's own minds, and what they think must be true. It
is customary for writers to talk in this fashion:--"Mohammedanism is a
half-way house to Christianity; Mohammed converted the heathen Arabs
to a belief in the true God. Mohammed established a great religion
and a great Empire," etc., etc. There is no truth in this, for all its
plausible sound. Mohammedanism is not even on the road to Christianity;
and Arabia, Asia Minor, and Palestine were all much better off before
the Mohammedan conquest than after it. Buddhism and Brahmanism are
better religions than Mohammedanism. The Chinese, the Japanese, the
people of India are much better than the Turks. The Chinese Emperor and
the Japanese Mikado are far better men than the Mohammedan Sultan. The
heathen religions rear better men than Mohammedanism. The Mongols
are more humane and sympathetic than the Turks. Heathenism at its
worst, though a low form of religion, is really a form of religion;
but Mohammedanism is not a religion at all. Then what is it? It is a
system of imposture and false pretense, and of lives of human lust
and cruelty. Mohammed practiced all these, and his successors have
done the same, and taught the same ever since; and the system means
just that now, and nothing else. There is neither love nor sympathy,
manliness nor humanity in Mohammedanism. Can a system lacking all
these be considered a religion? This is the substance of Mohammed's
teachings:--"Love your fellow believers, hate and slay all who refuse
to accept your religion. Marry as many wives as you can afford; if you
can afford but one do not repine, for you shall have seven thousand
to enjoy in Paradise. If you conquer a country, show no mercy to the
people unless they embrace Islam; if they refuse, either kill them or
make slaves of them." What sort of reforms can you expect in Armenia,
or in Turkey, when the very religion that is to make people better,
inculcates such principles? If one does not know a language he cannot
speak it; if he has not a principle he will not practice it; how
can the Sultan, a vicious man to begin with, trained in a religion
calculated to make a cruel and licentious animal even out of a decent
man, reform anything? His very religion forbids it; he cares nothing
for the religion when it stands in his way, but he will follow its
injunctions to please the Mohammedans, especially when they gratify
and justify his worst passions.
I shall be asked if the Mohammedans do not believe in one God,
and the same God as the Christian; and if that does not make it
a religion, and very near that of Christians. Yes, they do; and
so do the devils. That is what Mohammedanism is, the religion of
devils. Most of the Turkish conversation consists of oaths and smut. I
do not mean among the common people--theirs is nothing else--but
of the educated upper classes, their scholars, teachers, governors,
and priests. I came in contact with them for years, and I hated to
listen to them, their talk was so full of cursing and filth. You
never see the fruits of the spirit in them; only the fruits of the
flesh. They do not understand what spiritual life is; with them all
is sense,--eating and drinking, finery and lust,--lust above all,
everywhere and always, like cattle. They seem never able to forget
sex and its uses. Some people think the climate makes the Turks lazy;
it is enough on that point to say that Constantinople is almost exactly
in the same latitude as New York, and Smyrna as St. Louis. The Turkish
climate is a temperate and salubrious one, with no greater extremes of
temperature than the United States; not tropical or enervating. Nor
is it their race that makes the Turks lazy; they were not so at the
outset. It is their religion and the habits it breeds. Their minds
and bodies are enervated by the unwholesome nervous excitation of
lust, their energies further sapped by a falsehood that leaves no
room for aspiration, their vanity as a military caste in not working
takes all the spirit of manly enterprise out of them. If the climate
enervates the Turks, why does it not the Christians? In the very same
cities you find the Christians rich, enterprising, full of energy; the
Turks poor, ignorant, unambitious, and lazy. The religion makes all
the difference. Christianity teaches purity, sympathy, and industry;
Mohammedanism teaches impurity, hate, and sloth. The pure life of the
Christian conserves all the energies; the hopes of Christianity give
vigor and endurance. The promise of each for the future gives the
clue to the history of each; the Christian heaven of unity with God,
the Mohammedan heaven of a lot of street dogs and sluts.
Here I must comment on the extraordinary statement of Alexander
Webb, at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Mr. Webb was an
American consul in the East, and became a convert to Mohammedanism,
or professes to have done so; it is not very hard to guess what
part of that so-called religion attracted him. He said the religion
of Mohammed teaches the Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of
Humanity. Now, as a fact, Mohammedans believe in neither one. As to
God, they believe he is a monarch, and that no one can approach him;
they have the same idea the Jews had. "Our Father who art in Heaven"
is a purely Christian aspiration, not that of any other religion
on earth; it is Christianity alone that teaches the Fatherhood of
God. And Mohammedans directly ridicule the idea of God the Father, or
of a Son of God. They say God is not married, and cannot be a father;
and that when they go to heaven they will not be in his presence,
nor wish to be, but will have a separate heaven, to enjoy their wives
in. They look at everything from a sexual or sensual standpoint. As
to brotherhood, there is no such thing in Mohammedanism; even sons
of the same mother are not brothers in feeling. A Mohammedan has not
confidence enough, even in his brother, to show his wives to him, and
even in heaven they will have to live in different places on account of
their wives. How can there be brotherhood without love or purity? And
we have seen and know what the "brotherhood" of Mohammedans to other
nations and religions is; there can be no relations whatever but of
master and slave, or murderer and corpse, or violator and victim. The
impudence of this talk of brotherhood is fathomless.
And then he said he was proud to be a convert to Islam, because
that meant believing in purity! This is more outrageously impudent
still. His ideal of purity must be a curious one if he finds more
in Mohammedanism than in Christianity; in a religion with a heaven
stuffed with concubines than in one where even earth is sprinkled with
nuns; in one that makes Titanic lust its crowning reward, as if men
were so feeble in sexual desires that they needed to be stimulated,
than in one which makes chastity its key-note, and pronounces the
very coveting of more than one wife a spiritual adultery; in one
that prescribes polygamy (that is, keeping erotic turbulence stirred
up much oftener and longer than it naturally would be), than in one
that allows but one wife, and smiles on getting along without that;
in one whose devotees are ashamed of foul language, and even of foul
thoughts, than in one whose devotees are rank and rotten with lustful
ideas and talk to correspond.
The whole Mohammedan system is designed to make the gratification of
lust as easy and plentiful as possible short of a promiscuity that
would lead to civil anarchy. A Mohammedan can divorce his wife any time
he pleases by paying back her dower, and marry another and do likewise;
every week, or day if he sees fit, and he can remarry and redivorce
the first one as often as he pleases. It is like trading horses;
as little sentiment or morality in one as the other; the slightest
possible regulation of sheer animal desire. There is, however, one
form or divorce which is complete, and does not allow of remarriage
until another marriage has intervened; that is called the achden
docuza (three to nine) divorce, from the terms the husband uses in
doing it, "I divorce you three to nine." Nobody knows what it means or
meant. After this, if he wants his wife back, he must get somebody else
to marry and divorce her regularly; and as this is perilous, because
the second husband after marrying her may take a notion to keep her,
or anyway keep her much longer than the first one relishes, or demand
a large sum of money, the usual plan is to fix on a very poor man,
or a blind beggar (preferably blind, so that he cannot see the wife,
and be so charmed by her beauties that he will wish to keep her),
get him to become the woman's husband for a few days, and then pay
him something to divorce her. Then the first can marry her again if
he chooses.
There are many more specimens of Mohammedan "purity" too shameful
to write, and too shameful to read; I cannot soil the paper with
them. Doubtless they are part of Mr. Webb's pride in being a
Mohammedan. But I must mention one more engine of corruption which
lies at the very root of Mohammedanism itself: the pilgrimage
to Mecca, to the birthplace of Mohammed in Arabia. Once a year
Mohammedan pilgrims from every quarter of the world go to Mecca to
pay homage to their beloved prophet; averaging a million a year. It
is their duty to sacrifice animals there, and about a million are
so sacrificed. This is done on the hills which surround the great
temple, the greatest mosque in the world. It is a square building,
which covers several acres of land. Just in the cluster is the Holy
Well, called Zemzem. Mohammedans believe that if they drink of that
water, hell-fire cannot burn them, and every pilgrim does so; then
they begin to die from cholera to the tune of fifty thousand a year
or so, for the well is a mere cesspool. You see, after cutting the
throats of the animals, they leave the filth and blood just as they
are, for the Mohammedan religion does not allow the sacrifice to be
touched. The sandy soil absorbs this putrid filth, which leaches into
the well. But it is a great merit to die on the spot where Mohammed
was born; one goes straight to heaven if he does. That is not the
worst, however; they fill bottles with that water, and carry it to
their families, and friends throughout the Turkish Empire, Persia,
and India, from which cholera is spread abroad over the world.
The pilgrims do not take their wives as far as the birthplace
of Mohammed, but leave them half-way, and on reaching Mecca they
marry temporarily. About 20,000 prostitutes there make a business of
being short-term wives of the pilgrims, getting $5 to $25 from each,
and being his wife for anywhere from a day to a fortnight, so that
each woman marries from fifty to a hundred pilgrims a year. This is
not prostitution; it is religion--and Mohammedan "purity." Mecca is
considered the most holy spot on earth by Mohammedans; but it is the
most corrupt spot. It is a hell. And the Mohammedan Paradise is worse
than Mecca.
In one word, Mohammedans have no right to exist, politically,
socially, or religiously. In the first they have wrought nothing but
ruin; in the second nothing but corruption; in the third nothing
but devilishness. They are working nothing else now in either
of the three. They have never built up anything; they are pure
destroyers. Anything which is built in any Mohammedan country is built
both by Christian money and by Christian architects; Mohammedans
have neither the money, the architects, nor the sense. The day one
becomes a Mohammedan he loses his intellect, his skill, and his common
sense. Mohammedanism is a poison fatal to any good gifts or graces;
it cultivates in him falsehood, cruelty, and lust. It was sent by
God for a curse to the Christians; as a punishment, just as the
Philistines were sent to the people of Israel.