Chapter XLVI: Section 2: The Religion of Mahomet

The false faith of which Mahomet was at once the prophet and the founder, seems to have taken for its basis the traditionary religion then prevalent amongst the Arab tribes. These traditions were probably compounded of dim remnants of the Truth which had been revealed to Abraham and handed down through his son Ishmael, and of a very corrupt form of Sabaeanism, which included the worship of the heavenly bodies, as well as of idols, and which had been the religion of Terah and his fellow-countrymen. [Sidenote: Mixture of truth and error in Mahometanism.] Upon this foundation was engrafted a mixture of Persian philosophy, and of such perversions of Christianity and of Scriptural doctrine as Mahomet could gather from a Persian Jew and a Nestorian monk. [Sidenote: Opposition of the Koran to Christianity.] The Koran, which Mahomet pretended to have received from heaven by the mouth of the archangel Gabriel, makes mention of our Blessed Lord and of many of the facts of Old Testament History, but its teaching is essentially {91} anti-Christian and blasphemous, inasmuch as it denies the Divinity of Christ, and represents Him as a Teacher and Prophet far inferior to Mahomet himself. An intended contradiction of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is also conveyed in its opening sentence, which is the Mahometan confession of faith,--"There is but one God, and Mahomet is His prophet."

[Sidenote: Mahomet's Iconoclastic tendencies.]

Mahomet's energetic opposition to idolatry was, no doubt, a good feature in his religious system, though, like that of the Iconoclasts[2], it was carried to an extravagant extent, and this agreement, with their undue fears and prejudices on this head, seems to have been a sufficient inducement to many unstable Christians to deny the Lord, for Whose Honour they professed such deep concern, and to give themselves up to an impostor who was perhaps the nearest approach to Anti-Christ which the world has yet seen.

Christian people are found even in these days who do not hesitate to speak with some degree of favour of the great apostasy of which Mahomet was the founder, because of its opposition to idolatry, its recognition of our Blessed Lord as a Prophet, the certain admixture of truth contained in its grievous error, and the alleged moral teaching and beauty of language of particular passages in the Koran. [Sidenote: Moral effects of Mahometanism.] Any such favour or tenderness is, however, altogether out of place in professed worshippers of Him Whom Mahomet so grievously blasphemed, whilst the grossly sensual and immoral lives led by the false prophet and the large proportion of his followers down to {92} the present time, serve to show us that wrong belief and wrong practice go hand in hand, and that whatever show of morality there may be in some few of the precepts of the Koran, it has no influence on the conduct of those who profess to be guided by it.