Chapter XVII

THE RISE OF MAHOMEDANISM.
(600‒650.)

=1. ‘The Koran or the Sword.’=――Another change was impending. Persians and Romans both were soon to be put on their defence against a common enemy. By the beginning of the seventh century it was clear that boundaries were again to be altered, and faiths to be again unsettled. A new and mysterious movement had begun, with Mahomed, half soldier and half prophet, at its head. The end Mahomed had in view was conversion; the means he employed was conquest. Across the deserts of Arabia came his cry of ‘the Koran or the sword.’ It sounded a fierce and fanatic cry enough, but at least there was a suggestion of choice about it, and that may have been part of the secret of its success. People by this time were so used to the threat of the ‘sword,’ that many were more than half willing to accept, without any inquiry, the ‘Koran,’ which was offered as an alternative. And those who did inquire were, for the most part, all the more ready to accept. For the Koran, or sacred book of Mahomed, was a simple book. The unity of God was its one dogma. It promised much in the way of reward, and demanded little in the way of belief. Its acceptance was the main point, and to the ‘faithful,’ things were to be made pleasant in both worlds. The Koran was a formidable rival to the books of Zoroaster, and to the Gospels of the Christian Church. The fire-worshippers in the East, beset by civilising influences, were ready for a new creed, and the Christ-worshippers in the West, possessed as they were by the persecuting spirit, and materialised as they had become by pagan influences, were making their religion dishonoured and unacceptable. So the victorious cry of ‘the Koran or the sword’ swept onward like a trumpet call, and the man who raised it, before he died――and he died in 632――found half the inhabited world ready to cry with him that ‘Allah was God, and Mahomed was His prophet.’

=2. What Mahomed learned from the Jews.=――From very early times there had been a settlement of Jews in Arabia. Tradition says that the Queen of Sheba travelled thence to pay her famous visit to King Solomon. But, however that may be, there are tolerably trustworthy records which tell of Jewish dwellers in Arabian valleys before the Christian era. At one time there undoubtedly existed an Arab-Jewish state. Its limits and dates are not very exactly defined, but over this Himyerite kingdom, as it was called, there was certainly a Jewish king ruling at the time of its downfall in the year 530. It was brought to an end by a Christian king of Abyssinia, who in his turn was defeated by Chosroes II. of Persia. There is also a story, seemingly legend, and yet historical, of a people called the Khozars, whose king, Bulan, became a convert to Judaism, and who founded a Jewish dynasty and ruled long and happily by the shores of the Caspian Sea. But however much or however little of truth there may be in these traditions which treat of kings and dynasties, certain it is that, divided by the desert from the pursuit of persecutors all round, Arabian Jews did live, century after century, in their fertile valleys, secure in the possession of perfect freedom of faith. In the northern parts of Arabia these Jews were wandering herdsmen like their Ishmaelitish brethren, but in the south and east they carried on a considerable trade with India and Persia and the Byzantine Empire. They were much more civilised than the native Arabs among whom they dwelt. The Jews were people with a past, which is in itself impressive. They could tell tales without end, of heroic ancestry, or could speak of the higher life with the authority befitting descendants of seers and prophets. They were the direct heirs of Abraham; these other Arabians, fulfilling the destiny of Ishmael, whose ‘hand was to be against every man, and every man’s hand against his,’ had the blood of Hagar the bondwoman in their veins. The Arabian Jews came naturally to have that influence over the native tribes which the higher always exercises on the lower. And thus it came to pass that the new faith, which Mahomed came from Arabia to preach, showed many signs of the Jewish surroundings in which its founder had been born and brought up.

=3. Islam.=――The very name which was given to Mahomedanism has a certain Jewish suggestiveness about it. Arabic and Hebrew belong to the same group of languages, the Semitic. The Arabic ‘Islam’ and the Hebrew שָׁלוֹם are derived from a like radical term, which denotes soundness, or a perfect and unimpaired condition. Peace is another rendering of the word, and expresses a very similar meaning, since ‘peace’ would naturally ensue from a sound and healthy state of things.

=4. Likenesses between Islam and Judaism.=――There was a kinship of religious thought, as well as of language and of race, between the Arab and the Jew. The Unity of God is the first principle of Islam as it is of Judaism. Abraham and Moses are the heroes of the Koran as of the Pentateuch, and the covenant of Abraham and the dietary laws of Moses are enjoined by Mahomed on his followers.

=5. Differences between Islam and Judaism.=――But there were differences too, and these of a very vital sort. ‘Allah was God.’ That doctrine of the new faith, the Jews, worshippers of One, might agree with. That ‘Mahomed was His prophet’ was debatable. Moses, even, was not always unquestioningly obeyed. There was small hope for Mahomed. And much of the teaching of the new prophet soon showed that the deserts of Arabia, and not the heights of Sinai, inspired it. Judaism, for all its minute bodily observance, is essentially a spiritual religion. Future rewards are not mapped out after any human pattern, and such Hereafter as is hinted at is of a purely spiritual kind. ‘In My presence there is fulness of joy,’ is the nearest glimpse God vouchsafes of His heaven. ‘Allah’s’ promised paradise was of a quite different sort. Creature comforts, and very earthly delights, were to be the portion of believers in him, and in Mahomed his prophet. It was a programme likely to appeal to a lower class of mind, and the Jews remained unaffected by it. Mahomed was never able to count the Jews among his converts. From among the Jews of Arabia he met, indeed, at first with contempt and opposition. They would not grasp the hand that held the Koran, and so the other, the sword-arm, was lifted against them. There was some fighting, and much bad feeling, at first between the Jews and the followers of Mahomed. During the lifetime of the Prophet some Jews were oppressed and some were exiled, and some were forced to serve under the banner of Islam. But after his death, and as the tide of Mahomedan conquest swept on, the Jews found cause to rejoice in the more tolerant treatment which they experienced from the rulers who adopted the faith of Islam.