Without applauding or deprecating this Koreishite behavior, we may
at any rate impartially consider its origin. The hitherto mentally
and emotionally normal trader, husband and father had found himself
suddenly swept off his feet and carried irresistibly away on a
mighty tide: the perverse, inexplicable desire to write poetry--a
fantasy that could not fail to make him the laughing-stock of all
right-minded Meccans. How curious, how odd, that he, a well-to-do
merchant who had looked forward to nothing more exciting than a
peaceful and prosperous future, should be summarily wrenched from
his moorings and cast adrift upon such a strange, tempest-tossed
sea! Surely, surely, there was some marvelous meaning in the
business--if he could but find it. And so, stabbed by agonizing
doubts or transported with rapturous ecstasies, he plunged blindly
on, seeking relief from his vague imaginings in intermittent bursts
of formless, rhapsodical verse. His perturbed spirit now soared
to the heights of Heaven and now plunged into the chasms of Hell;
moments of ethereal bliss would be followed by periods of the
profoundest melancholy. In short, he was passing through the throes
of an experience closely akin to religious conversion--an experience
that can end in but one of three ways: in a relapse into sin, in
suicide, or in a more or less enduring catharsis of the spirit.
Though Mohammed was too strong a man to return to the fleshpots of
Arabia--if, indeed, he had ever tasted them--it is almost certain,
as the earliest fragments of the Koran hint, that he meditated
self-destruction for a time; but Allah, the All-Compelling, the
Mighty One, had other plans.
It is related that the angel Gabriel, who thus far had labored only
in the field of Christian employment, was chosen by Allah as bearer
of the divine revelation to Mohammed. One day, while the trader-poet
was wrestling with his doubts among the foothills of Mount Hira,
he saw a wondrous apparition floating downward on celestial wing.
Coming within a distance of two bowshots--for the Arabs are very
accurate about such things--the divine envoy exposed a tablet covered
with heavenly hieroglyphs before Mohammed’s astonished eyes and
exclaimed, “Read!” “I cannot read,” replied Mohammed; but again
the unearthly voice uttered the word, “Read!” And then, impelled
by an irresistible power, Mohammed fixed his entranced eyes upon
the document and began to chant thus:
“Recite in the name of the Lord who created--
Created Man from nought but congealed blood;--
Recite! For thy Lord is beneficent....”
and so on, until the end. “Thou art God’s Prophet, and I am Gabriel,”
announced the awe-inspiring guest before he departed to receive the
blessing of Allah for having so successfully executed the heavenly
command. Gabriel, in truth, was a very valuable ambassador, for,
through the to and fro journeyings of this indefatigable messenger,
Allah was able to remain at ease in Heaven, thus keeping up that
appearance of intangible, majestic remoteness so necessary for
dignified gods.
And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment he looked upon
himself as Allah’s vicegerent, through whom Allah’s incontestable
decrees were to be given to man--although Gabriel, or the Holy
Ghost (for Mohammed’s slipshod knowledge of Christian theogony led
him into the regrettable error of perpetually confusing those two
eminent divinities), continued in his capacity as interpreter of
the intermittently revealed series of tablets. And so careful was
Allah to eliminate the possibility of merely human invention that
He prefaced every Sura, or individual revelation, with the express
or implied injunction “SAY” or “SPEAK”--the irrefutable proof of
divine authorship. Mohammed’s every doubt had now vanished, his soul
was completely at ease; and from his lips there burst the wildly
exultant chant: “_La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah!_”
Such, we may believe if we so desire, was the origin of the Koran, of
Mohammed the Prophet, and of Islam itself--those three interacting
and inseparable forces (a sort of Pagan Trinity, in fact) which,
emerging when Rome was dying and Christianity was barely out of its
cradle, convulsed the civilized and uncivilized world for centuries
to come. Inasmuch, however, as Mohammed himself, not to mention
his commentators, has added certain clarifying details that were
touched with an earthiness foreign to the pretty picture, it may
not be wholly presumptuous or irreverent to glance briefly at the
other side of the canvas.
The conception of a flexible revelation--of one that could be
indefinitely extended, amended, expurgated, or even abrogated in
part--was excellent in many ways. Christianity and Mormonism, to cite
only two counter cases, have both suffered somewhat, perhaps, from
the inexorable nature of their scriptures. Woe unto him who alters
a jot or tittle of their contents! At the same time, the precise
meaning of the Christian creed, in particular, is very indefinite; it
permits a latitude of interpretation, even in fundamental matters,
that has brought about those lamentable schisms into major, minor
and microscopic sects with which everyone is familiar. But, however
much civil strife Islam may have endured from political factionalism
or antagonism over inconsequential tenets in the Koran, it has
remained indissolubly firm in its adherence to its supereminent
divinities: Allah and Mohammed. And the credit for this, it is
to be suspected, is due principally to the one whom all orthodox
Moslems believe--or profess they believe--to be the lesser.
Poetry and oratory--the only forms of literature known to the
Arabs--were both oracular and rudely rhythmical; and Mohammed, who
from his childhood had been familiar with the yearly contests of
poets and orators at the fairs, naturally adopted a cognate medium
of expression. His thoughts, whether conceived in a white heat of
frenzy or with deliberate coolness and sly calculation for the main
chance, were probably not written down in any definite way during
his life. It is not certain, in fact, that he could either read or
write. He delighted in the appellation “the illiterate Prophet,”
possibly on account of his humility, and possibly because he knew
that inspired ignorance had been the indisputable prerogative of
all successful prophets in the past. Indeed, the very fact that
he was unlearned was rightly supposed to increase the miraculous
nature of his revelations. As he tossed the divine emanations
from his lips, they were sometimes recorded by hired or willing
scribes upon palm leaves, leather, stones, the shoulder-blades or
ribs of camels and goats, or were even tattooed upon the breasts
of men. But often they were not immediately written down at all;
the Prophet would go around spouting them forth to his followers
who, trained from infancy to memorize verses and songs of every
sort with infallible precision, would piously commit them to
memory. As a result of this divinely haphazard procedure, the time
of composition of the different Suras has never been definitely
fixed. Two facts, however, are well established: the revelations,
at first very short, steadily increased in length; and, doubtless
for that reason, the interminable later Suras do not even contain
ashes--for ashes prove that flame was once present--whereas the
earlier songs are occasionally touched with fire.
Occasionally ... but only so. The indefeasible privilege of all
Holy Writ to be dull--a privilege only too generously exercised--is
abused in the Koran with an enthusiasm matched only by the third
part of the Pentateuch. The spasmodic structure of the Koran--its
absence of cohesion between chapters and even between sentences, its
dithyrambic convulsions, its hodge-podge of inchoate and irrelevant
ideas, its pervasive lack of charm--may be due, it has been hazarded,
to Mohammed’s neurotic idiosyncrasy; yet epileptic men of genius in
many branches of mental activity have been by no means uncommon,
and it seems simpler to assume that he was not born to be a poet.
In any case, it is certain that his predilection for non-didactic
poetry showed itself only at rare intervals: perhaps because, as
the Koran puts it, “We have not taught him poetry, nor is it meet
for him,” perhaps because he had had no genuine love-affair in his
youth, and perhaps because he believed that his commission was too
serious to allow any protracted indulgence in such a frivolous
thing as verse. Like the Hebrew prophets, he was at his best when
raining heavenly maledictions on his enemies; like them, too, he
was at his worst when he used repetition as a substitute for ideas.
But they at least had good stories, taken from a long and rich
racial history, to redecorate as they saw fit, whereas Arabia had
almost no history worth the telling; and so Mohammed was compelled
to fall back on Hebrew literature to help him out. He did fall
back--again and again, and yet again. Even if he could not read,
it was easy to get the necessary material from friendly Jews in
Mecca; but an unfortunate, though apparently disregarded, difficulty
attended this procedure: different Jews would tell the same story
in different ways. So it came about that, when the Prophet was
hard pressed for material, he would use one version; again, when
his clock of inspiration had run down or been left unwound, he
would use another garbled rendition of the same narrative. While
the story of Joseph was his favorite, his collection of trophies
pillaged from Biblical folklore included the activities of Noah,
Abraham, Moses, David and less important notables; at the same
time, he was quite innocent of the common Christian complaint that
he had plagiarized the Bible, inasmuch as he had never read it.
Carlyle was certainly not a tepid admirer of Mohammed, but, when he
read the Koran, even his Berserker rage for great men suffered a
serious shock--a shock that might justly be criticized for the very
thing it criticizes. “I must say,” he confessed, “it is as toilsome
reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome, confused jumble, crude,
incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most
crude, incondite;--insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but
a sense of duty would carry any European through the Koran.” And
indeed, so far as that volume is concerned, the European sense of
duty has been very small.
But with Mohammed’s acolytes the case has been wholly different.
For from the beginning they believed in the Koran with an
appallingly artless simplicity, at once noble and absurd. Through
its instrumentality, Allah the Wise, the Only Wise, revealed his
immutable decrees: to the good, the rewards of a Paradise that
utterly beggared the Christian Heaven, and to the bad the punishments
of a Hell that contained an infinity of such refined tortures of
heat, and even of cold, as neither the most imaginatively gifted Jew
nor Christian had yet conceived--for Dante was undreamed of. Mohammed
of course properly approved of Allah’s decisions and judgments, as
an employee should rightly behave toward his employer; and he was
especially fond of his superior’s delight in describing Hell--“I
swear,” he gravely announced one day, “that it is one of the most
serious things.”
The earlier part of the Koran, or “Recitation,” is mostly concerned
with these elemental and primitive things; only at a later day did
Allah--or Mohammed?--deal separately with the many matters touching
the growth of a definite code of religious, social and governmental
precepts. When scoffers poked ridicule at the rather sloppy grammar
and metre of the Koran, Mohammed did two things: in the first place,
after brandishing the doom of an eternity of roaring flames over
their heads, he challenged them to produce better verses than his--or
Allah’s?--own; and, in the second place, he incautiously prepared
a loophole of escape by revealing, in Sura 69, the fact that the
Koran was “not the word of a poet,” but “a revelation from the
Lord of the Worlds.” This lofty gesture temporarily squelched his
defamers, who promptly dug off with their tails between their legs;
but its effect did not last long when they reflected how damaging
an admission he had made. It may of course be readily granted that
precepts concerned with daily washing, food, taxes, and so on,
were not especially well adapted to rhythmical prose; but, after
all, that was Allah’s and Mohammed’s lookout. Perhaps, indeed, the
confession of non-poetical power was scarcely necessary; for the
inexplicable man who, in the pristine freshness of poetic glow,
could indite this terse stanza, instinct with brooding doom:
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,
The King of men,
The God of men,
From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking devil,
Who whispers into the hearts of men,
From among the Jinn and the men,”
and who conceived the charming fantasy that the lengthened shadows
of morning and evening are elongated in obeisance to Allah, was
also capable many years later of concocting an effusion designed
expressly to make his wives behave themselves.
[Illustration: IV]
“A PROPHET IS NOT WITHOUT HONOR”
I
Islam, the doctrine of “resignation to God,” was now started on its
way; but mystery hovers over every stage of the journey. The various
explanations that have been devised to account for its marvelously
rapid development have commonly just enough plausibility to make
them romantically misleading; for the charm of a half-truth lies in
its Lethean amalgamation of realism and fancy: it displays neither
the dulness of unadorned fact nor the superficiality of exotic
fabrication. In recent times Mohammed and his era have inevitably
been subjected to treatment according to principles derived from
the “scientific method.” Now, while it is unquestionably true that
a large amount of invaluable information has been accumulated thus,
it is also true that the excessive use of this method has given rise
to some definite dangers--dangers that are all the more alluring
and deceptive because they bear the stamp of contemporary approval.
For one thing, its adherents often lack the ability to apply the
principle to their own mental processes: they sometimes manifest a
bias as essentially unscientific as the fervent prayer of the most
benighted Moslem. For another thing, its devotees frequently dispute
among themselves over the validity of its countless ramifications
with an enthusiasm unexcelled by political fanatics; and, for still
another thing, the method itself is as much a product of conditions
peculiar to the so-called Modern World as Islamism was a logical
excrescence of the deplorable Dark Ages.
Although Mohammed’s parents died so early as to deprive the
Freudians of the opportunity to dissect him in a manner compatible
with the most cherished articles of their faith, other not wholly
dissimilar schools of thought have not failed to wield their
scalpels--oftentimes with very considerable effect. For example,
those who look upon him as a largely self-conscious medium who was
extraordinarily skillful and successful in employing the cabalistic
devices used by mediums as a class, have much to warrant their
belief. The evidence extant in support of this view, in fact,
merits respect if not complete acceptance. For the whole business
of Allah, and Gabriel, and the magical tablets--whose precious
contents none but Mohammed might gaze upon, and he only at infrequent
intervals--is, to say the least, very intriguing. The problem that
fronts all mediums is this: how to produce their messages without
arousing the suspicion that they themselves are the authors;
and innumerable devices are used to attain this end. It has been
suggested that the Prophet himself may have solved the problem by a
subtly clever device--his known susceptibility to epileptic fits.
Before giving vent to one of Allah’s inditements, he would snore,
cover himself with a blanket, and remain thus until, drenched with
sweat, he emerged and gave his message. One traditional account runs
thus: “He fell to the ground like an inebriate, or one overcome by
sleep; and in the coldest day his forehead would be bedewed with
large drops of perspiration. Even his she-camel, if he chanced
to become inspired while mounted on her, would be affected by a
wild excitement, sitting down and rising up, now planting her legs
rigidly, then throwing them about as if they would be parted from
her.” In the earlier Koran, he is characterized as the “man in the
blanket,” or the “man who is wrapped up.” For he fully appreciated
the necessity of keeping his followers in a state of protracted
mystification, and to that end he made use of many theatrical
tricks. He would drum up a crowd with his ludicrous snortings and
puffings until the resounding cry, “Inspiration hath descended on
the Prophet!” assured him that he had a sufficiently large audience
to warrant the ebullition of a new Sura. While in a room that was
obviously empty, he declared that all the seats were occupied by
angels; he cultivated a suave and benign expression; he flattered
and astounded his adherents by telling them intimately personal
facts about themselves which he had presumably acquired through
private information; he took the most painstaking care of his
person--painted his eyes and perfumed his entire body every day,
wore his hair long and probably dyed it when it became gray, and
there is reason to believe that he always wore a veil. Eventually,
he so perfected his technique that he could throw a cataleptic fit
and produce a message without any previous preparation. In the midst
of a meal he would contort himself, disgorge a new injunction, and
then calmly finish his dinner.
Nor does the case for the prosecution end here. The manner in which
his early disciples were won and organized suggests that like
principles were employed. In the beginning, Islam was a profoundly
secret society, whose leader frowned upon publicity but encouraged
furtive proselytizing on a great scale--a policy of action that
turned out to be perfectly suited to the situation. For this privacy
doubtless saved the cause from early obliteration, while at the
same time it offered the romantic attraction of a Jekyll-and-Hyde
existence to those who accepted Islam--a circumstance decidedly
favorable to the growth of any surreptitious conclave; and, in
addition, it gave Mohammed time to pick and choose his lieutenants
with care, as well as to school himself in the lessons needed for
ruling heterogeneous masses of men. While all this was going on, he
himself remained aloof in august, inaccessible grandeur, for none
could see him who was not already rabid with desire to prostrate
himself at the Prophet’s feet. Thus, in those clandestine gatherings
held in the house of the convert Al-Arkam--a house afterward
appropriately immortalized by the title “The House of Islam”--and
in the febrile activity of Mohammed’s plastic pupils, headed by
the efficient Abu Bekr, is to be found the germ whence all Islam
sprang.
This reasoning sounds very plausible until one reflects: after
all, could it have been as simple as this? And then an inscrutable
image looms in the mind--the grotesque, grand, preposterous and
prodigious figure of Mohammed.