AN OUTLINE OF MOHAMMED’S TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTERISTICS
One of the first thoughts that a very careful perusal of the Koran
brings home to me, is the intense humanity of Mohammed and his work. The
more one studies the various motives that led to his so-called
revelations, the more one is struck by the strong associations that
connect these divine messages and ordinances with the actions and
movements that were going on all round him, as well as in his own
mind--owing in a great measure to his own preaching.
In estimating the moral value of either Christianity or Islam, it is
necessary to take into consideration, also to make allowance for, the
times in which their founders lived. To attempt to judge one or other of
them from the scientific standpoint of modern culture and civilization
would be not only uneven but impossible. To gauge the standard of their
mental and moral attainments, the student must investigate their work,
and compare, then contrast, it with the general intellectual level of
their own age. When this has been done, he should try and, if possible,
realize what effect the advent and the doctrines advocated by them (in
the one case some 1,900 years, and in the other 1,300 years ago) would
now produce. In this way only is it feasible to arrive at a true and
legitimate conclusion. But in doing so, the inquirer must divest,
certainly dissociate himself, from all existing ideas on the subject,
and deal with it as it is, and not what he thinks it ought to be.
The more one studies the Koran, the more obvious does it become that
Mohammed had a powerfully receptive mind, and a specially retentive
memory. Notwithstanding that he was illiterate, unable even to read and
write, it is clear that he was well versed in all the tenets and
traditions of his own people and of the Jews; and that in addition he
had made himself acquainted with some of the doctrines and dogmas of the
Christian Gospels. It is above all certain that for a great number of
years Mohammed concentrated his mind thereon with the force and
intensity of a sincere and ardent nature. But first and foremost the one
great idea of the being, unity and providence of God predominated all
his thoughts. Acting on a temperament that was highly emotional, and
perceptibly neurotic or melancholic, the revelations embodied in the
Koran were the natural result of so long and continuous a
concentration. Still it is equally obvious that combining with this
emotionalism and neurasthenia was a strong vein of commercialism and
common sense, also marked political and administrative ability. It is
further evident that in Mohammed’s character there commingled a very
curious and conflicting number of elements and tendencies. Dominating
all of these, however, was an intense zeal, an insatiable ambition, an
overpowering individuality and egotism, and an inflexible doggedness and
determination to attain his own ends. To convert, that is, the weakness
and disintegration of the various tribes that composed the Arab nation
into the union of one consolidated whole, with himself and family at its
head, as a human representation of the unity and supremacy of the one
and only God. This latter, as we know, was in no way original. It is
clear all throughout that he had profited from his knowledge of Jewish
tradition and experience, and that he based his theory on the dogmas of
Moses and Abraham. He had long since realized that it was the worship of
their own tribal and communal gods by the members of the various Arab
tribes and communities that accentuated the differences and divisions
between them. He determined, therefore, as the Jewish leaders long
before him had attempted, to consolidate and weld them into a single
nation, through the worship of the one supreme and indivisible God. It
was on and through this divine indivisibility that he decided to base
and construct the unity and nationalization of the people.
Unquestionably Mohammed’s movement was as much political as it was
religious, as much material as it was spiritual. But being of a
profoundly reflective, at the same time of a practical, turn of mind, he
chose religion as the only possible and thoroughly reliable means of
achieving his great and noble ends; not only possible and thorough,
however, but the most potential. Mohammed, in fact, judged the capacity
and characteristics of his countrymen to a nicety. Unconsciously--for
legislation to him was a natural heritage--he followed the example of
the most famous legislators, and instituted such laws as at the time
were the best that the people were capable of receiving. Tactful and
diplomatic to a degree, it was policy on his part to retain a certain
number of the old beliefs and customs in order to satisfy the people. He
knew, none better, the fierce and turbulent temper of his countrymen,
and how it was most politic to deal with them. In making this concession
he showed his political wisdom, if not a certain breadth and greatness
of statecraft. After all it was, from an independent standpoint, but a
small concession as compared to the prize that he got in return for it.
It was a compromise in other words. Yet this and his own evidence in the
Koran is important as showing that Mohammed was not so much in a strict
sense the originator of a new creed as he was a reformer and the
renovator of an old one. It was the impress of his great personality,
distinguished as this was by the intense sincerity and earnestness of
his nature, that has left its mark on human history.
Mohammed was a thinker and a worker not only for his own, but for all
time. He recognized that man was equally a political and religious
product of God’s creation. He understood that as a counterpoise to man’s
materialism and to the destructive in his nature, is that indefinable
essence which we call the spiritual and the constructive. The more one
looks into and understands the Koran, the more obvious is it that
Mohammed concentrated all the active and vigorous energies of his vivid
and powerful imagination, also his virile mentality, on the
accomplishment of his great design. For design it certainly was. The
wish undoubtedly was father to the thought. Not, however, in an
invidious sense, but in the firm conviction that design and not accident
or chance is one of the controlling principles of God and His creation,
and that, consistent with this principle, he, Mohammed, had been chosen
as the divine agent. Personal ambition and aggrandizement never for a
moment entered his head, or formed part of it. The national good, to be
attained only by a national or universal God--the one and only God of
the universe--was the one great ambition that inspired and impelled him.
Because although every one for himself and God for us all is presumably
a natural law, Mohammed managed to evade it. But in evading it, he was
not revolutionary. On the contrary, in this way he rose one step upward
above the lower human level towards that higher humanity which
approaches the divine.
This design, as I have just said, originated from the doctrine of divine
unity attributed to Moses and Abraham. Indeed, as one reads the Koran
carefully and steadily through from beginning to end, it is manifested
in every surah--almost, in fact, on every page. The whole work, in fact,
is saturated with the one idea, inspired by the one thought. Everywhere
there is evidence of the final object in view, the unconquerable will,
the inflexible resolve, the fixed purpose, the indomitable perseverance,
the unyielding persistency, the infinite and interminable patience, the
calm endurance, the irresistible courage, and the grim tenacity of the
ego. So much so is this evident, that when I compare this determinism
with the neurotic element in Mohammed’s character, I am obliged to
admit that the balance remains with the former. Yet--and this I think is
the strangest feature about this strange but commanding
personality--there is no getting away from the fact that he was much
under the influence of the latter.
It is, of course, possible that Mohammed was what in Arabia is called a
“Saudawi,” or person of melancholy temperament--what nowadays would be
called a hypochondriacal dyspeptic. Melancholia is a complaint that the
Arabs are subject to, students, philosophers and literary men more
especially. A distaste for society, a longing for solitude, an unsettled
habit of mind, and a neglect of worldly affairs are always attributed to
it. It is very probably--to some extent at least--as Burton suggests,
the effect of overworking the brain in a hot, dry atmosphere; also due
in some measure to the highly nervous and bilious temperament
constitutional to the Arabs: a temperament that in Mohammed’s case was
aggravated by excessive emotionalism.
It is clear that once Mohammed got hold of, or was obsessed by, the idea
that he was God’s chosen messenger, and that his sayings were inspired
by God (a very old and primitive belief remember): or rather as soon as
ever Khadija and others of his household were imbued with the idea, then
he never relaxed his hold of it for a moment. The confidence of those
about him, his faithful spouse more especially, gave him confidence in
himself. Confidence engendered conviction, and conviction led to the
Koran and the ultimate triumph of his cause. That he was sincere in all
this, there is not the slightest doubt, but in taking the measure of his
sincerity we must be guided entirely by the fact that he was essentially
a man who had long before made up his mind to bring about the unity of
his country. Indeed the whole history of Khadija’s association with the
matter shows this. To be a prophet in his own country or household, a
man must inspire respect, or the still greater feeling of veneration. No
man, unless he is earnest and devout, could possibly impress the members
of his family. They are bound to find him out. This applies all the more
forcibly to an eastern household in which polygamy prevails, and that is
made up of so many opposing elements and conflicting interests, the
atmosphere of which is only too often one necessarily of envies,
jealousies, rivalries, suspicions, intrigues, and even conspiracies. If
Mohammed had been insincere, if instead of convictions, his belief had
been a mere profession or a sham; if it had not been one of austere,
rigid practice and self-denial, then those about him would neither have
been impressed, nor would they have espoused his cause as warmly and
valiantly as they did. Not only were they impressed, however, but
convinced, and it was their convictions that strengthened and confirmed
his own faith. But once he had gained their confidence, his mission was
assured. There was no doubt whatever then in his own mind that he was
God’s chosen apostle, to whom God had revealed His word--the words of
truth and life. From this out, his own vigour, his own extraordinary
individuality and inflexibility carried him through from beginning to
end. Once others believed in and relied on him, his own latent
self-reliance grew into a living and active factor that carried all
before it. But as he looked at it, all his strength was from God. God
was at his elbow and in his heart, therefore he could not fail. Nothing,
in fact, shows better than this aspect of the matter how very wise and
all-knowing (his constant refrain about God in the Koran) Mohammed
himself was. How tactful and diplomatic, but above all, how deep his
knowledge of human nature. Had Khadija and his household not believed in
him, it is safe to assume that then there would have been no Prophet and
no Islam. As Novalis says: “My conviction gains infinitely the moment
another soul will believe in it.” So it was with Mohammed. So it is with
us all. So Carlyle pithily observes: “A false man found a religion? Why
a false man cannot build a brick house!” I have already shown that
Mohammed was not false. But neither did he found a religion. Apart from
the fact that he was a reality, and as true as any of the world’s great
prophets, Mohammed was unable to perform the impossible. Religion as a
natural product was beyond his comprehension and potentialities. Islam
like Christianity was a creed--a human or artificial development--the
healthy and vigorous offspring of a noble and sublime, yet in no sense
original conception. But there was no demerit in this want of
originality. Because as Carlyle says: “The merit of originality is not
novelty; it is sincerity”: and with regard to Mohammed, this has been
more than once acknowledged.
Launched upon the world of Arabia in no false and unreal spirit, but
with the spirit of grim sincerity and earnestness, Islam has proved its
stability spiritually and materially, the present result of which speaks
for itself. It is enough to say that a creed whose followers now number
over 250,000,000, or some 15 per cent. of the human race (an under-
rather than an over-estimate), could have sprung from a healthy and
vigorous seed only--a seed that has been nourished and kept alive by the
vital spark of human sympathies, hopes and aspirations.
What appears to me as so remarkable and so significant, so truly
characteristic of the man, is the way in which he never lets go his grip
of the central idea and purpose, but follows it up step by step. And as
he follows, he makes every point that he can, seizes every opportunity,
takes every advantage of every ordinary event and occurrence that is
going on around him, makes the best of every reverse, turns even his
set-backs and reverses into moral victories; and accepts it all as
inevitable with the calmness of a philosophy that emanated from his own
wondrous egoism and that inexhaustible fund of patience and reserve of
courage which so distinguishes his character. In this respect alone
Mohammed truly was a remarkable man--a man infinitely above, not only
his surroundings, but his age. With Mohammed, not only was the great
fact of his own existence great to him, but in almost every page of the
Koran it is obvious that God’s omnipresence and omnipotence had made a
profound and lasting impression on him. Everywhere and in everything--in
natural objects more especially--he saw and felt the hand and the power
of God. And to him it was a power so overwhelmingly terrific and
transcendent in all its aspects, that it defied description and
demonstrated the insignificance and impotence of man. In more senses
than one he was a pantheist. To him, either God was Nature and Nature
God, or God was in Nature and Nature was in God. At bottom of him the
old primitive belief was there, but in unity and concentration he saw
strength. In his mind there was no room, no place, for lesser deities.
The power and the splendour of the one creative God--who lived and moved
and had His being throughout the universe, overshadowed, or, rather, had
absorbed, them all. In the grim silence of the desert, in the vastness
of the heavens, in the great infinity of space, in the scintillation of
the stars, in every fibre of his own consciousness, God was with him. To
Mohammed God was not a personal being but the God and Maker of the
universe and all mankind. With him the entire theme and volume of his
stream of thought was God and his religion. Coming from the core and
centre of him as it did, even through the long vista of thirteen
centuries, one can picture this overmastering element in every line of
his stern-set and yet gentle face: a face reflective and speaking, that
not only had a history stamped upon every feature, but a great, a
strenuous, and a commanding history. _In vino veritas_ is as true to-day
as when first it was uttered. So too the saw, that “mastership like wine
unmasks the man.” But Mohammed needed no unmasking. God and the
truth--the truth about God as it dominated him--was the rich, strong
wine which coursed through every vein and fibre of his mental organism,
stimulating and spurring him onwards to a sustained and continuous
effort that ended only in death. A sincere and earnest man, a natural,
therefore a deeply religious man, to him God was also a Dayyan (one of
the ninety-nine epithets of God), i.e. “A weigher of good and evil”; One
who computed and settled accounts; the holder of the even balance and
scales of justice, the Judge and Arbiter of all mankind.
But apart from these functions, the power and sublimity of the Supreme
Being, as he saw it expressed in the silent grandeur of the desert, the
death-like stillness of the sandy sea, the frowning ruggedness and
majesty of the mountains, the immense universality of Nature, was always
before his eyes and in all his thoughts. Full of this feeling, of the
awe and veneration innate in man and co-existent with the eternal ages,
he bursts out in the second surah: “God! there is no God but He; the
living, the self-subsisting: neither slumber nor sleep seizeth Him; to
Him _belongeth_ whatsoever is in heaven, and on earth. Who is he that
can intercede with Him, but through His good pleasure? He knoweth that
which is past, and that which is to come unto them, and they shall not
comprehend anything of His knowledge, but so far as He pleaseth. His
throne is extended over heaven and earth, and the preservation of both
is no burden unto Him. He is the high and mighty.”
As a natural outburst of emotions and convictions that had been pent up
within his own inner consciousness, that were the offspring of some
twenty years of journeyings to and fro across the deserts where “Amin”
the faithful one was in direct and constant contact with Nature, and
often in silent communion with the Infinite, these few words are truly
magnificent and sublime; magnificent not only for the boldness and
sublimity of their imagery and conception, but magnificent also with the
intensity and profundity of true sincerity. Few, but all the more pithy
for that, these words are from the heart and soul of the man--a man who
speaks not unadvisedly with his lips, but who feels with every nerve and
fibre of his intensely emotional being. They are (as he himself feels)
the outpouring of an insignificant and impotent atom, yet of a sincere
and earnest man approaching in all humility and veneration, and with the
loyalty and allegiance of a true believer and servant, the great,
invisible He, who holds him and all creatures in the hollow of His
mighty hand.
In a conversation that Luther had one day with some friends at table, he
spoke of the world as a vast and magnificent pack of cards composed of
emperors, kings, princes and so forth. For several ages these had been
vanquished by the Pope. Then God had come upon the scene, and chosen the
“ace,” the very smallest card in the pack--himself, in a word--and
overthrown this conqueror of worldly powers and principalities.
Mohammed, as much as Luther, was one of “God’s Aces.” Seldom, indeed, in
the history of the world, has so great a human river flowed from a
source so puny. Never did the divine manifest itself in a single pip, so
seemingly small and insignificant as a cause, yet so pre-eminently and
consistently great as an effect!
“Men,” says Dumas in one of his historico-romantic masterpieces, “are
visible, palpable, moral. You can meet, attack, subdue them; and when
they are subdued you can subject them to trial and hang them. But ideas
you cannot oppose in that way. They glide unseen; they penetrate; they
hide themselves especially from the sight of those who would destroy
them. Hidden in the depths of the soul, they there throw out deep roots.
The more you cut off the branches which imprudently appear, the more
powerful and inextirpable become the roots below.
“An idea is a young giant which must be watched night and day; for the
idea which yesterday crawled at your feet, to-morrow will dispose of
your head. An idea is a spark falling upon straw.” ... “For the mind of
man is no inert receptacle of knowledge, but absorbs and incorporates
into its own constitution the ideas which it receives.” Thus it was with
Mohammed. God was the spark, the vital spark of spiritual flame, and
this humble but honest Arab trader was the straw, that after twenty
years of silent but tenacious smouldering God had set a light to.
The better, however, to understand his character and purpose, we must
divide his life into two sections. The first when, as trader from the
age of thirteen up to forty, first for his uncle and then for Khadija,
he was the man of business. Yet synchronous with this the man of ideas
and ideals that he kept to himself however; that he divulged to no one.
For not until the time was ripe and the hour had come, not until he felt
the call--felt, that is, that he was ready and able to begin--did he
confide even in Khadija. The second section when, as the apostle of God,
he worked with all the fiery fervour yet steady zeal of a true prophet,
to put his ideas into practice. But there was this difference with
regard to Mohammed as a theorist. He was not a man of many ideas. In
reality one central idea alone inspired him. But great and magnificent
as that was, it was equal to a multitude. It was a growing and a
spreading giant which, like the prolific banyan tree, threw out branch
and root with such extravagant luxuriance, that it completely
overshadowed and predominated the entire expanse of his mental area. We
know what this idea was. We know that round and out of the central stem
of God’s overmastering unity Mohammed had determined to construct an
Arabian nation--possibly something even greater. We know, too, that the
one was but the offspring of the other. Or it may be that they were the
twin offspring of all this profound and concentrated contemplation. But
we do not know how this great idea first took root. Let us, however, try
and trace it to its source as nearly as we can.
With still greater emphasis than Chrysostom, who asserted that “the true
Shekinah is man,” Carlyle says: “the essence of our being, the mystery
in us that calls itself ‘I,’ is a breath of heaven; the highest Being
reveals Himself in man.” An idea such as this would never have occurred
to Mohammed. The fatherhood of God in its accepted human sense was
repugnant to him. The mere thought was sacrilege!
His conception of God was much too exalted, much too divine for this.
God and humanity could have no possible connexion. God was the
Creator--the Potter, who out of the clay or matter in chaos had made
the world and all therein. Humanity was but a small part only of His
creation. Men were but as clay in His hands--mere creatures of His.
Beyond this hard and fast line there could be no relationship between
God and man. Association was as impossible as comparison was
objectionable. God, as supreme Creator and Director of the universe, was
a Being altogether distinct and apart from His own creation. Yet as such
He was the soul or spirit of it, the breath of life to all that lived,
and of death to all that died. Man was as evil, as puny, and as weak as
God was great and good and strong. God was too exalted and glorious for
words. Incomprehensible and inscrutable, He was beyond the power of
language, outside the narrow limitations of thought to imagine. Just as
the heavens were divided from the earth by boundless space, so far apart
was God from man. The endless immensity of everything was insufficient
to express His omnipotence--fell far short of the unthinkable reality.
Even the heavens and earth as His handiwork did not convey as completely
as it might appear to do the capacity of the power that belonged to Him.
To Mohammed, in every vibrating star an all-seeing eye and glory of the
great Creator, God, was visible; in every tiny blade of grass, in every
spring of water, He was manifest and tangible. So some eleven centuries
after Mohammed was laid to rest, a poor, struggling, but undaunted
artist-poet, looking from his mean London garret with the eyes of a
dreamer-mystic into the great invisible above and beyond him (just as
Amin the faithful one had done), yearned:
“To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold Infinity in the palm of “his” hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
And in the middle of the late departed century--which rushed across the
great void of Time like a hissing meteor--thus Tennyson:
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.”
While to Wordsworth, with a faith in Nature and Nature’s God as deep as
Mohammed, the meanest flower that blows, gave thoughts that often lay
too deep for words.
Society is only too apt to judge or condemn facts and men; also to
ridicule the age and its spirit. This drastic method saves the trouble
of comprehending them. The society of keen Arab traders and wily
Bedouins which environed Mohammed did not comprehend him. To them he
was not so much like a fish out of water, as a land quadruped at sea,
altogether out of his element as well as out of his depth--a flotsam
struggling to get to dry land as a jetsam.
Immeasurably above and beyond his social contemporaries either morally
or spiritually, to them Mohammed was an enigma and a mystery. “Scenting
a mystery is like the first bite at a piece of scandal, and holy souls
do not detest it. In the secret compartments of bigotry there is some
curiosity for scandal.” But among Mohammed’s opponents--the Koreish more
particularly--it was not merely scandal that moved them: it was
jealousy, envy, malice, and in the end sheer diabolical hatred. In
describing the state of a mind that is advancing, we must remember that
all progress is not made in one march or even series of marches.
Mohammed’s march was entirely uphill, dead against the collar, the whole
way and all the time, except, perhaps, just towards the end. Yet each
day’s march brought him nearer to the goal of his desires. Slowly but
surely he made progress, and with it reputation. The slowness of his
movement, his advance, made progress and reputation all the more not a
dead, but a living certainty. But there is always anarchy in reputation.
It was this reputation--this individuality that dared to insolently
assert itself in the overthrow of their ancestral gods--which explained
Koreish hostility.
Mohammed was a calm, yet by no means an unprogressive agent of
Providence. Brains that are absorbed either in mania or wisdom, or, as
often happens, in both at once, are permeated very very slowly by the
things of this world. But even admitting that there was melancholia,
there was no mania about Mohammed. If ever a man was sane and healthy,
he was. “You grant a devout man, you grant a wise man: no man has a
seeing eye without first having had a seeing heart.” This fits his case
to a nicety. A more devout man than Mohammed never lived. He was as
pre-eminently wise as he was devout. He utilized his wisdom to the
fullest extent of his capacity, and he proved his devoutness by putting
his beliefs to the infallible test of stern and rigid practice. A trader
to his finger tips, a clear-sighted man of business, and a statesman
with prophetic instincts, who profited by the past, utilized the
present, and prepared for the future, in this sense he was a
contradiction. The being absorbed in wisdom did not prevent him from
carrying on his worldly duties in the most conscientious and thorough
manner. _Per contra_, his worldly duties did not prevent him from
philosophical absorption. The one was his duty, the other the breath of
life to him. His veneration of God gradually crystallized the religion
in him into a creed. This is generally the result of concentration. His
absorption of God ended in God’s absorption of him. It was a long and
gradual process which occupied twenty years. During this period of
embryonic development he withdrew, as it were, into himself. Then when
the crisis arrived, it came out of him, as a river flows out of a
spring, and was called Islam. “Our chimeras,” says Victor Hugo, “are the
things which most resemble ourselves, and each man dreams of the
unknown, and the impossible according to his nature.” Mohammed’s
chimera, as we know, was God and Arabian unity. But there was nothing
chimerical about the former, and with this invincible lever, the latter
too was a distinct probability. For although he was doubtless
superstitious--that is natural--and wrestled with shadows and visions,
Mohammed dealt in realities. To him God was the most real thing, the
sternest reality of all in the universe. God, in fact, was the Universe.
These, which to another would have been the unknown and the impossible,
were to him the possible and the inevitable. The nature that was in him
was the nature of God and the universe. There is a point where
profundity is oblivion, when light becomes extinguished. Though from a
literary aspect Mohammed was not profound, in a religious sense his
profundity, centring as it did in God, burst forth into the Cimmerian
darkness which enveloped his country with the brilliancy of a meteor
that illumines the blackest night.
There is too a way of encountering error by going all the way to meet
the truth, also by a sort of violent good faith which accepts everything
unconditionally. There was nothing violent (certainly not for a long
period), but there was everything that stands for goodness and stability
in Mohammed’s faith. It was thus--in the spirit of a hero and the valour
of a Paladin--he encountered the error and opposition of his enemies by
first of all going out of his way to meet the truth; then, in spite of
themselves and their hostility, by enforcing it upon those who would not
be persuaded. According to Fontenelle, “there is only truth that
persuades, and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It
makes its way so naturally into the mind, that when it is heard for the
first time, it seems as if one were only remembering.” This was very
much the case with Mohammed. This was why he tried at first to lead and
not to drive his countrymen to the truth. To him who saw the truth of
God’s existence, His mercy written as plainly in the falling raindrop as
His power of retribution is in the lightning that flashes across the sky
as if it would rend it, their stubbornness in rejecting God was utterly
incomprehensible. His mind had two attitudes. The one was turned to God,
the other to man. In contemplating God, he but studied man’s interests
and his own. But contemplation with Mohammed did not end by becoming a
form of indolence. Imaginative--visionary, in fact--as he was, he did
not allow his imagination to play tricks with him. He did not fancy that
he wanted for nothing. Even when married to Khadija, and in tolerable
affluence, there was obviously a great void in his life. This want of
course was spiritual. Exact and punctilious as he was in his temporal
duties, his whole bent and inclination was towards the former. As a
younger and poorer man, he had looked so much at the humanity around him
that he saw right down into its very soul. With the same fervent
intensity he had looked into nature until he saw or rather felt the
creator and controller thereof. “There are times when the unknown
reveals itself in a mysterious way to the spirit of man. A sudden rent
in the veil of darkness will make manifest things hitherto unseen, and
then close again upon the mysteries within. Such visions have
occasionally the power to effect a transfiguration in those whom they
visit. They convert a poor camel-driver into a Mahomet; a peasant girl
tending her goats into a Joan of Arc.” A conscientious and faithful
worker, Mohammed was at the same time a dreamer. But his dreams were but
the reflex of his work and of his ideas. These came to him like
mountainous waves, or the swell of an angry surf as it thunders on the
beach with a threatening roar, a mass of water that would submerge the
very earth. His ideas did not, however, submerge him. Nor did they
destroy or bury him. Out of their unknown and bosky depths Mohammed
invariably rose to the surface with the buoyancy of a life-belt, calm
and unmoved, for his spiritual centre of gravity always held him up. He
dreamt of man, but chiefly of God--of God’s goodness and greatness, of
man’s impotence and frailty. He looked at the solid earth on which he
stood, with its stones and its sand, its wheat and its tares, its joys
and sorrows, but particularly its suffering children and helpless women.
Then he looked at the vast void above, with its star-spangled sky, its
sun and moon, and the God that made all and was in all. This led him to
think of the void that was in himself, and to compare the one with the
other. Then he pondered and compared. The greatness of it all passed
into him and he dreamt again. There was no void above, for God filled
it. So too his own emptiness gave place to the Supreme. All at once a
great feeling of tenderness was aroused within him. From the egotism of
the _genus vir_, he passed to the contemplation of the _genus homo_, the
man who contemplates and feels. God had touched his heart. In
forgetfulness of self was born a great compassion for all. For years and
years Mohammed lived with his neck in a noose of obstacles composed of
human thorns and millstones. He was, so to speak, an outcast, thrown on
the dung heap, and into the brambles; at times even in the mud. Yet no
mud clung to him, not even to his feet. His head at all events was
always in the light, his hand always resting on the omnipotence of the
Almighty. Invariably gentle, attentive, serious, benevolent, easily
satisfied, he remained serene and peaceful. It was only in the last
extremity, when all his persuasive earnestness failed him, that his
enemies stirred him to wrath. But it was a just and dispassionate wrath;
it was the wrath of God. For whether they liked or no, Mohammed in his
dual capacity as God’s agent and Arabian patriot had made up his mind
that they should have God. On this point he was inexorable. Feeling that
there is an eternity in justice, he felt that in justice to God, and to
themselves, and in spite of themselves, it was his duty to proclaim the
truth. Many a less tenaciously sincere man, many a real hero, would have
shrunk from and have succumbed before an ordeal so terrific, a contest
so supremely Titanic. But Mohammed was made of sterner stuff, of the
spirit that gods are made of. Failure was a word that he did not
recognize. With God at his back, success was an absolute certainty--a
foregone conclusion.
Whatever might be his desire to remain where he was and cling to it, he
was impelled to advance, to continue, to go on further and still
further. Yet to think and to ask himself where it was all going to lead
him to? But although he thought, he never hesitated, never turned back.
His hand was to the plough--the plough God. God was the goal, the end,
the summit of human existence and ambition. Humanity was the soil, and
to get there he must furrow his way through its enmities and affections.
Firm and exceptional natures are thus moulded out of miseries,
misfortunes and afflictions. As a result of his work history shows us
more and more that Mohammed was firm and exceptional to the very highest
degree. Yet there was nothing of that hypocrisy which Victor Hugo calls
supreme cynicism about him. He was too human, too much in earnest, to be
anything but Amin the Faithful. There is, after all, more in a name than
meets the eye. In some names there is history and the tragedy of
history. In others there is the might and majesty of a commanding
magnetism, which recognizes the sublimity of truth. In Mohammed’s case,
even to this day over two hundred and fifty million human beings bow the
knee through him to God. Yes, there is much--a world of meaning--that is
inexpressible in a name--a magic and a _je ne sais quoi_ which under the
label of Napoleon led men to the Kingdom Come of glory--in other words,
to destruction and the devil--but that with Mohammed was the open sesame
to the glory and power of God. A rose by any other name may smell as
sweet. But Islam without the halo of time-honoured sanctity that
attaches to the name of Mohammed, would sound as but a hollow brass or a
tinkling cymbal. Just, in fact, as the man himself was sincere and
faithful, there is, and there will continue to be, a magic in his
name--more so even than that of Christ has for the Christian--drawing
men to God, as he in person drew them not alone by sheer force of will
and character, but by a force which was even stronger, the force of
sincerity and truth.