THE ENVIRONMENT THAT MOULDED MOHAMMED
A true son of the desert, it is impossible to understand the powerful
and complex personality of Mohammed, unless we can appreciate the
peculiar character and genius of the desert. More so in some ways even
than the seaman, the dweller or sojourner in the desert is distinct and
unique in himself. Possessing the courage of the Fatalist, and as free
as the roving winds of heaven, he is all the same of a shrinking and
timorous nature, confronted as he often is by certain aspects and
phenomena that imperil his life and strike down to the very roots of his
moral consciousness.
In the desert there is, comparatively speaking, little life. Unlike the
forest region, it is naked and almost destitute. There, as at sea, man
is face to face not only with the great elements, but with the greater
Infinite and Invisible. He is nearer to God and the immensity of Nature.
There is nothing--or little at least--to distract his attention--nothing
between him and the ever watchful Inscrutable. There is no shade from
the sun by day, no protection from the moon and stars at night. They
look down on him as from the pinnacle of the sublimest elevation. The
fiercer glory of the sun by day burns into his very soul, consumes his
very marrow. The milder effulgence of the moon by night throws its
silvery glamour over all his senses. The lesser and more distant
splendour of the stars--those watch-fires of angelic spirits--in their
countless myriads awe and bewilder him. In the choking breath of the
simoom he feels the potentialities of God, and his own helpless
impotence. Struck all of a heap by its stifling blast, he is filled with
fear and trembling in the presence of a Power invisible yet tangible and
deadly. Whether he wills or not, the fear of God--of the Inexorable and
Inevitable--enters into his heart and takes possession of his inmost
soul. Call it the fear of God or not, it is practically one and the same
feature--the mere human label makes no difference to this awful and
unseen reality--the same fear of the Unknown, the Unexpected and the
Inevitable: the Inevitable that is always with us, the agnostic and the
sophist no less than with the theologian, yet unseen, incomprehensible
and omnipotent. But more than anything, it is the awful and impenetrable
silence that impresses and appals the silent and dignified nomad of the
desert.
To those who have never been outside the confines of civilization, it is
not logically possible even to guess at the extraordinary influence--a
fascination amounting to witchery--that the silence and solitude of the
desert exercises over one. Yet if I were asked to define the essence and
subtlety of this influence, I could but answer that it is indefinable;
all the same a glamour that, like the force of gravity, is irresistible.
Free and open like the sea (but fresh only at night), it is not the
witchery of the soft blue sky, for the sky of the desert is hard and
steely; it is not the fierce white heat of the fervid sun that melts
into the very marrow of one’s bones; but rather is it the soothing magic
of the moon at night, under the brilliant canopy of the heavens, when
the earth, cooling rapidly, is lulled into eternal silence, that one
falls under the magic spell of its wondrous influence. But even the
glamour of the moon is out-glamoured by the darkness of the night under
whose funereal pall even the great suns and planets hide their
diminished heads. There is in the darkness and the silence of the night
a mystery and a profundity that arouses the sluggish, even the stagnant
consciousness of the dullard--that much more so attracts the quickening
soul of the mystic and visionary, which springs to it with the same
eager avidity that a lean and hungry trout leaps at the first fly which
he sees after a long and enforced abstinence. It is in this darkness and
silence of the night, rather than in the fierce glare of the midday sun,
that the fear of the great Infinite comes to man. For if we but think of
it, what a spectre-teeming spectacle is night. We hear strange, weird
sounds. We know not whence they come or whither they go. Or it may be
that all around us is as the silence of the grave--of eternal death. We
see the evening star looming large like a great world on fire. The blue
of the sky looms black. The stars seem to speak to us; the whole scene
is impressive--a sight for the gods. In the desert, however, and to the
earnest thinker whose centre of gravity is God, night is something more
than a mere spectacle--a something greater, grander and more terrifying
than a simple impression--a feeling deeper and sublimer even than a
conviction: a revelation of the Unseen Unknown which is all the time
behind that which he sees and knows.
Full as night is of phantoms, shades, sounds and silence, it is no
illusive mirage, no mere empty simulacrum. But in every way it is a
reality and a substance which is tangible, that touches one not only on
the spot, on the raw, but everywhere; that fills one with vague fears,
and brings even the proudest and the sternest to their knees before the
power of the great Omnipotence. The very stars which hang out in the
great firmament appear as God’s sign-posts--great all-seeing eyes that
are ever upon us--or like eternal watch-fires which contrast the
eternity of God with the momentary mortality of man; they enhance the
blackness of the blue. Peering as they do into the awesome watcher’s
inmost soul, they either drive him headlong into the blackness and
terrors of evil, or lead him by their kindly light into the glory of the
Almighty Presence. Unquestionably the night is either diabolical or
sacred. Not only this, she is the brooder and breeder of all primitive
doctrines, the conceiver and the mother of all human creeds. In her
immense womb there is a latent light, a smouldering volcano full of
ashes, cinders, and dead men’s bones; yet full also of fire-sparks that
are capable of flashing into luminosity, even of bursting into hissing,
leaping and devouring flames. It was thus that Christianity and Islam
came into being. It was thus out of the primeval sacrifices, the shadows
and silence of death and darkness, that all creeds have crept into and
out of the minds of men. Tortuous human ant-heaps bored and tunnelled
through and through by human ideas, human hopes, and human aspirations;
worlds in the low-lying limbo of the fœtus stage, fecundating in all
directions into beliefs, faiths, creeds, sects, denominations,
quackeries, dissimulations and charlatanism. Labyrinthine, subterranean,
and full of subtleties as all these creeds appear to be, they are easy
enough to comprehend. They have all sprung from the same simple seed if
we would but recognize it. If we but looked at this vista of the past as
through a mental telescope, if we but grasped the substance and not the
shadow, went straight to the simple root instead of to the theological
and metaphysical subtleties of it all, we would find it absolutely
simple. If we would but for a moment drop from our eyes the dense scales
of dogma, bigotry and prejudice, there would be no difficulty in tracing
back all these enigmatic ramifications and gloomy obscurities of
pristine darkness and chaos to the one central germ idea, the one
vitalizing spark that inspires and illumines them all.
It is obvious that Wordsworth, when he speaks of only “two voices,” the
one “of the sea,” the other “of the mountains”--“each a mighty voice,”
quite overlooked the bleakness and silence of the desert. This
overpowering blackness that pervades the very soul, creeps through every
vent into the bones and chills one to the very marrow. This sublime
silence, that speaks to one as the still small voice of God spoke to
Moses, and that fills the thinker with even greater awe and veneration
than the crashing and rolling thunder. This silence which is of
eternity, therefore golden, while speech is of to-day and only silvern,
for as Carlyle reminds us: “After speech has done its best, silence has
to include all that speech has forgotten or cannot express.”
Speaking for myself, who have passed many days of my existence at sea,
and many more still in the desert, there is that in the latter which
always reminds me of the former. To be sure, the ever restless sea with
its almost myriad moods--its calm, its motion, its rippling smiles, its
wavy undulations, its heights and depths, its fickleness and treachery,
its dazzling beauties, its fierce turbulence--is as unlike the desert,
with its grim stiff grandeur and appalling sameness as it well could be:
still--
“Tho’ inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us thither.”
There is no music in it by day or by night, only the dead still hush of
silence. Yet the desert has its aspects, if it has not its moods and
contrasts--as singular as they are striking. See, or rather feel it
under the fierce and scorching glare of the fiery sun, that almost
shrivels you into a mummy; see it also under the softer spell of the
silvery orb, when the air is balmy, if not fresh, and you will at once
imagine yourself to be in an altogether different and enchanted world.
Then again, lose yourself in the desert on a dark night when for once in
a way the stars are dim or obscured by clouds, and you will realize as
you never before have done, the awesome reality of the sense of
loneliness--a feeling which can only be compared to that felt by the
hunted criminal hiding in a city, and against whom every man’s hand is
raised.
But there is besides in the desert the fateful mirage that, like the
ocean sirens, has lured so many to their doom. Finally there is the
oasis which stands out of the sea of shimmering sand, like an island
paradise that towers over the waste of seething waters which encircle
it. The desert too, like the sea, has its ships and its men. Ships that
pass by day as well as by night. Ships that stride across the great
sandy wastes, grunting and gawky, with unwearying patience, unyielding
tenacity, and unerring instinct. As are the ships, so are the men. But
in place of gawkiness and grunts, the golden virtue of silence, and the
conscious pride of natural dignity. Men who in their very port and
carriage are the very spirit and personification of the desert. Men who
represent not the genii, but the genius of the great dry sea of sand
and silence. Indeed, if ever men on this planet of ours were
patriarchal, if ever men bore themselves with the gait and the simple
dignity of free men, the Bedawins of Arabia and the North African
deserts do. With the lynx-like, yet enigmatic expression that calls to
mind a combination of eagle keenness and owl-like solemnity, there is
about them a freedom of manner and bearing, a dignity of carriage, an
independence of character, that are the peculiarly glorious and
distinctive heirlooms of the air, expanse and grandeur of these inland
seas. In every sense, moral and physical, they are the products of an
unrestricted environment that has made them what they are--wanderers on
the face of the earth. But wanderers from choice. Untrammelled even to
licence; giving an unbridled rein to their spirit of independence.
Regarding with supreme contempt the luxuries and even necessaries of
civilization. Yet with it all slaves to the spiritual fears that haunt
them. Relics of a primitive and old-world civilization, there is about
these Bedawins a flavour of antiquity, of a past that is hoary with the
hoariness of eternal age, so distant that we cannot conjecture about it,
even in the vaguest of terms. In addition to this everlasting antiquity
and conservatism, there is about these patriarchs a naturally dignified
reticence, and an air of calm, quiet assurance and authority, that are
peculiarly their own personal property. But there is even more than
this. There is that same universal concept--common to all primitive
people who have not outlived it--of belief in the fear of a supreme
power. That same awe and reverence for the patriarchal authority
connected with that of the ancestors which has preceded it; that calm
and philosophical acceptation of Karma or Fatalism; that same dread of
consequences; that identical terror of malignant demons; that same
shrinking from the inevitable, which is the heritage of all natural
people. Inherent instincts that even twelve centuries of Islam have
scarcely modified. When we get underneath the surface of human nature as
represented by the Arab, whether he came from the east, the west, the
south, or the centre, it is obvious that the underlying motive for most,
if not all, of his social customs is inspired by that personal or
religious instinct which is so closely allied to the primary instincts
of all. Out of such fundamental material did Mohammed emerge!
Nevertheless, with all its drawbacks, there is about the desert, only in
a different degree, the pleasure of the pathless woods, the rapture of
the lonely shore. Just as by the deep and rolling sea whose very roar is
music, there is a society where none intrudes, so with the desert.
Right in the very core and centre of its silence and solitude, the man
whose ears and eyes are open to receive impressions, finds himself in
the presence of that invisible but omniscient power of Nature. The power
that, while it causes the earnest thinker to pause and reflect, makes
the average human being yearn for the companionship of his own kind. But
it was not so with Mohammed. Mohammed was not as other men are. He was a
thought leader. Not a deep thinker by any means; but profoundly in
earnest. Few men in the world’s history--judging at least by
results--have been more in earnest than he was. In Hannibal there is the
same earnest fixity of purpose, only different in kind, the same
unquenchable ardour, and the same iron will that kept him faithful to
the sacred vow of undying vengeance against the Romans, that his father
exacted from him on the altar of their ancestral gods. In William the
Silent too, but also in another direction, we find the same relentless
purpose and the same inflexible sincerity to attain the independence and
autonomy of the United Provinces. Cromwell likewise gave his life and
his services--all that was best in him in fact--in the firm and sincere
conviction that he was God’s chosen instrument. But in none of these
men, not even in the great and heroic Ironside, was there the same
fervent godliness, i.e. the fear and veneration of God. It was Luther
most of all who approached Mohammed in the sincerity of his purpose,
i.e. of his religion. For although Luther was essentially a priest, and
did not found a new creed, his sincerity showed itself as a Protestant
and Reformer. In his whole life the fear and veneration of God as the
motive factor of his existence was manifest.
It is, of course, just possible, as Tennyson surmises, that:
“... Through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.”
This, however, is vague and brings us no nearer to an exact
comprehension of the matter. The better to understand this feeling of
fear that so dominated men of the Numa, Buddha, Luther, John Knox,
Cromwell and Mohammed type, it is essential that the student grasps and
measures the actual measure of difference that divides religion from
creed. It is but meet that we should accept the rational axiom, that
religion is natural, and creed the egotistical and personal
interpretation placed upon religion by human beings. As Draper says:
“When natural causes suffice, it is needless to look for supernatural.”
So Bacon, looking with the insight of true genius into the Book of
Nature, up to Nature’s God, said in that immortal aphorism which opens
the _Novum Organum_, “Homo Naturæ minister et interpres”--man is the
servant and interpreter of Nature. This will make it easier to get at
the root of this dual feeling of fear and veneration. But to do so it is
necessary for the student to look as far back into the past as he can.
In every ancient cult that has ever existed, in the Chaldæan, the
Egyptian, the Aryan, the various (so-called Pagan) African, for example,
the same overmastering element predominates. In Grecian annals and
literature--in the _Iliad_, the _Odyssey_, Hesiod’s _Theogony_, in the
great tragedies of Æschylus, in Plutarch and other writers--Fear is not
merely reverenced as “_Holy_,” but in Greece, as elsewhere, altars were
erected and worship offered to her as a goddess.
It is in its definition and conception of religion that humanity has
gone astray. By general acceptation religion and creed have always been
confounded. Natural religion is spoken of as a something different and
widely apart from Christianity, as a religion revealed. This is not so.
There is no difference between them. Christianity is but the development
of natural religion on the lines and ideas of certain individuals. There
is no such thing as revelation. Religion is an evolution. It is natural.
It comes to us from Nature, i.e. from the God out of which Nature has
evolved. Hence its constructive and destructive dualism. It is a living
and vital force that is innate in man as being one with Nature.
Obviously this veneration, this fear of the Unseen, the Unexpected and
the Inevitable (which I have spoken of), is one of the root instincts
out of which it unfolds itself. Most unquestionably it is the outward
and visible expression of the inner consciousness or spirit that moves
man to the adoration of veneration in the constructive direction, and of
fear in the destructive. This varies in the individual. Thus on the one
hand we have a Mohammed; on the other a Napoleon. From the very
beginning of human existence right down until now this fear of God has
predominated. It still exists. It will go on existing. Religion is as
much a part of the human constitution as the primal instincts. Creed is
acquired. It is environment and education that makes or forms creed. The
child becomes what his teacher makes him, as he can neither distinguish,
discriminate nor judge for himself. But to make him Jew, Gentile or
Christian, the religion must be in him. Creed, in a word, is but the
view that is taken of natural religion by the ego. But a matter so
important as this, however, cannot here be entered into.
As it has been with all the great religious leaders of history, so too
it was with Mohammed. Fearing, yet venerating, the might, the majesty
and the goodness of God, the companionship that he most wanted was not
human but divine. Communion with Him, through his own thought and
through the great Infinity around him, was what his heart most desired.
A town Arab by birth and breeding, a Bedawin by feeling and instinct, he
was something more than a mere native of Arabia. Rather a son of men, an
apostle chosen out specially from among men, that he might bear to them
the message and truth of God.
“Men,” says Victor Hugo, “talk to themselves, speak to themselves, but
the external silence is not interrupted. There is a grand tumult;
everything speaks within us, excepting the mouth. The realities of the
soul, for all they are not visible and palpable, are not the less
realities.” The great reality, as I have shown, that obsessed Mohammed
was God. Though invisible in person or even in spirit, God was none the
less visible and palpable to him as much in the finest speck of sand as
in the consuming glory of the sun. In the mocking spectres of the night,
as well as in the shifting shadows of the morning, the might and majesty
of Allah was supreme. In the dead silence of human solitude, the grand
tumult within him was only grand and tumultuous because God talked to
him and he to God in the suppressed sibilance of hushed and awesome
whisperings. “Diamonds are only found in the darkness of the earth;
truths are only found in the depths of the thought.” As it seemed to
Father Madeline, the ex-convict Jean Valjean, so it appeared to
Mohammed, “that after descending into these depths, after groping for
some time in the densest of this darkness, he had found one of these
diamonds, one of these truths, which he held in his hand, and which
dazzled his eyes when he looked at it.” The brilliant which Mohammed
searched for was the truth--the greatest brilliant of all! The truth
that he found as it appeared to him was God. Thus he immolated his whole
being to the will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone.
Like Pascal, Mohammed believed that “one can be quite sure that there is
a God without knowing what He is.” Or in the words of Hobbes: “Forasmuch
as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no
conception or image of the Deity, except only this, that _there is a
God_.” This in sense if not in word was Mohammed’s idea of God as he
tried to conceive Him. For him it was sufficient that God was the only
God--the Creator and the Controller of the universe! “There are touching
illusions which are perhaps sublime realities.” But to Mohammed, God was
not even “the Great Illusion,” but a stern as well as a sublime reality!
To him the desert and lone places were God’s dwelling-place--as far
away from the busy hum and haunts of men as He could get. But only
because of the delightful charm of golden silence and solitude--only
because in the midst thereof, as in the heavenly paradise, God dwelt
there. The one fair spirit that he dwelt and communed with--not in close
proximity however, but with a great gulf fixed between--was the one and
only God, who had at last constituted him His minister and apostle,
because of his great love and devotion to Him. It was for this that
Mohammed sought the desert. It was there under the stars--the flashing
forget-me-nots of God’s great power--that alone with Nature and his own
thoughts, he sought God. Who is there of us can say that he did or did
not find Him? Can we, or can we not, by searching find God? Whether we
can or no, however, is not the question--is not for us to decide! But
one fact is certain--one fact is obvious. It was in the core and centre
of the eternal silence and solitude of mountain fastnesses and desert
expanses that the spirit of Islam had its origin. It was there, as it
were under the myriad eyes of the great and infinite God, under the
fiery blaze of the burning sun, under the cooler and more clinging
glamour of the mellow moon, under the dimmer gloom and mystery of
darkness, there with his face to the red-hot furnace blasts and
suffocation of the simoom, that the message came to him. Alone with his
thoughts:
“Alone, alone, all all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!”
No mere saint, but God Himself, “took pity on” his “soul in agony.” He
was not alone, for God was with him. This self-communion of Mohammed
with his thoughts, was to him none other than communion with God,
because his thoughts were concentrated on Him with all the soul and
strength he was humanly capable of.
The power of persuasion does not always lie in the flow and eloquence of
speech. The strongest are often the most silent. God never speaks but in
the still small voice of consciousness, that comes to every man in the
dark watches of the night, when the hum and movement of life is hushed
into the silence of sleep!
Solitude, too, that twin-sister of Silence, “though,” as De Quincey
says, “it may be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of
agencies; for solitude is essential to man.” But if essential to the
ordinary man, it is as the breath of life to men of God and prophets.
Solitude, in fact, sinks deep into a pure and simple nature, and changes
him in a great measure. Unconsciously it intensifies him to a
superlative degree, and inspires him with an awe of itself that becomes
sacred to him. Within himself the recluse feels weak, unstable and
inconsistent. Without he is strong in the consciousness of the
omnipotence and supremacy of the Infinite. “Solitude generates a certain
amount of sublime exaltation. It is like the smoke arising from the
burning bush. A mysterious lucidity of mind results, which converts the
student into the seer, and the poet into a prophet.” In a word, there is
an enthusiasm, an influence, and a power in solitude that the civilized
man, or the man who has never been subjected to it, cannot form the
slightest or faintest conception of. For the silence of solitude and the
solitude of silence is a state (common to all primitive people) in which
the being believes himself to be not only “πλήρης θεοῦ,” i.e.
full of God, but that the God predominates. Hence the enthusiasm, the
rapture, and the power to divine and speak in divers tongues.
Surely, if ever man was in deadly earnest, this faithful son of Arabia
was. If ever man opened his heart and soul to the Father and Mother of
all things, this Mohammed, the merchant, did. Truly if ever the great
Author of our being responded to a soul in silent agony, i.e. in
conflict, in a struggle for victory, it was to this great descendant of
the bond-woman Hagar! For in Islam, and the soul of Islam, such as he
inculcated, the victory was greater than any Marathon or Thermopylæ.