Chapter III: Part 3

We have now to see Moḥammad as king. Though he came as a fugitive, rejected as an impostor by his own citizens, yet it was not long before his word was supreme in his adopted city. He had to rule over a mixed and divided people, and this must have helped him to the supreme voice. There were four distinct parties at Medina. First, the ‘Refugees’ (Muḥájiroon), who had fled from Mekka; on these Moḥammad could always rely with implicit faith. But he attached equal importance to the early converts of Medina, who had invited him among them and given him a home when the future seemed very hopeless before him, and who were thenceforward known by the honourable title of the ‘Helpers’ (Anṣár). How devoted was the affection of these men is shown by the well-known scene at El-Ji´ráneh, when the Helpers were discontented with their share of the spoils, and Moḥammad answered, ‘Why are ye disturbed in mind because of the things of this life wherewith I have sought to incline the hearts of these men of Mekka into Islám, whereas ye are already steadfast in the faith? Are ye not satisfied that others should obtain the flocks and the camels, while ye carry back the Prophet of the Lord unto your homes? Nay, I will not leave you for ever. If all mankind went one way, and the men of Medina went another way, verily I would go the way of the men of Medina. The Lord be favourable unto them, and bless them, and their sons, and their sons’ sons, for ever!’ And the ‘Helpers’ wept upon their beards, and cried with one voice, ‘Yea, we are well satisfied, O Prophet, with our lot.’ To retain the allegiance of the Refugees and the Helpers was never a trouble to Moḥammad; the only difficulty was to rein in their zeal and hold them back from doing things of blood and vengeance on the enemies of Islám. To prevent the danger of jealousy between the Refugees and the Helpers, Moḥammad assigned each Refugee to one of the Anṣár to be his brother; and this tie of gossipry superseded all nearer ties, till Moḥammad saw the time was over when it was needed. The third party in Medina was that of the ‘Disaffected,’ or in the language of Islám the ‘Hypocrites’ (Munáfiḳoon). This was composed of the large body of men who gave in their nominal allegiance to Moḥammad and his religion when they saw they could not safely withstand his power, but who were always ready to turn about if they thought there was a chance of his overthrow. Moḥammad treated these men and their leader ´Abdallah ibn Ubayy (who himself aspired to the sovranty of Medina) with patient courtesy and friendliness, and, though they actually deserted him more than once at vitally critical moments, he never retaliated, even when he was strong enough to crush them, but rather sought to win them over heartily to his cause by treating them as though they were what he would have them be. The result was that this party gradually diminished and became absorbed in the general mass of earnest Muslims, and though up to its leader’s death it constantly called forth Moḥammad’s powers of conciliation, after that it vanished from the history of parties.

The fourth party was the real thorn in the Prophet’s side. It consisted of the Jews, of whom three tribes were settled in the suburbs of Medina. They had at first been well disposed to Moḥammad’s coming. He could not indeed be the Messiah, because he was not of the lineage of David; but he would do very well to pass off upon their neighbours, the pagan Arabs, as, if not the Messiah, at least a great prophet; and by his influence the Jews might regain their old supremacy in Medina. Moḥammad’s teaching was very nearly Jewish—they had taught him the fables of their Haggadah, and he believed in their prophets—why should he not be one of them and help them to the dominion? When Moḥammad came, they found out their mistake; instead of a tool they had a master. He told the people, indeed, the stories of the Midrash, and he professed to revive the religion of Abraham: but he added to this several damning articles; he taught that Jesus _was_ the Messiah, and that no other Messiah was to be looked for; and, moreover, whilst reverencing and inculcating the doctrine of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ, as he knew it, he yet insisted on his own mission as in nowise inferior to theirs—as, in fact, the seal of prophecy by which all that went before was confirmed or abrogated. The illusion was over; the Jews would have nothing to say to Islám: they set themselves instead to oppose it, ridicule it, and vex its Preacher in every way that their notorious ingenuity could devise.

The step was false: the Jews missed their game, and they had to pay for it. Whether it was possible to form a coalition,—whether the Jews might have induced Moḥammad to waive certain minor points if they recognised his prophetic mission,—it is difficult to say. It seems most probable that Moḥammad would not have yielded a jot to their demands, and would have accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender to his religion. And it is at least doubtful whether Islám would have gained anything by a further infusion of Judaism. It already contained all that it could assimilate of the Hebrew faith; the rest was too narrow for the universal scope of Islám. The religion of Moḥammad lost little, we may be sure, by the standing aloof of the Arabian Jews; but the Jews themselves lost much. Moḥammad, indeed, treated them kindly so long as kindness was possible. He made a treaty with them, whereby the rights of the Muslims and the Jews were defined. They were to practise their several religions unmolested; protection and security were promised to all the parties to the treaty, irrespective of creed; each was to help the other if attacked; no alliance was to be made with the Ḳureysh; war was to be made in common, and no war could be made without the consent of Moḥammad: crime alone could do away with the protection of this treaty.

But the Jews would not content themselves with standing aloof; they must needs act on the offensive. They began by asking Moḥammad hard questions out of their law, and his answers they easily refuted from their books. They denied all knowledge of the Jewish stories in the Ḳur-án—though they knew that they came from their own Haggadah, which was ever in their mouths in their own quarter,—and they showed him their Bible, where, of course, the Haggadistic legends were not to be found. Moḥammad had but one course open to him—to say they had suppressed or changed their books; and he denounced them accordingly, and said that his was the true account of the patriarchs and prophets, revealed from heaven. Not satisfied with tormenting Moḥammad with questions on that Tórah which they were always wrangling about themselves, they took hold of the every day formulas of Islám, the daily prayers and ejaculations, and, ‘twisting their tongues,’ mispronounced them so that they meant something absurd or blasphemous. When asked which they preferred, Islám or idolatry, they frankly avowed that they preferred idolatry. To lie about their own religion and to ridicule another religion that was doing a great and good work around them was not enough for these Jews; they must set their poets to work to lampoon the women of the believers in obscene verse, and such outrages upon common decency, not to say upon the code of Arab honour and chivalry, became a favourite occupation among the poets of the Jewish clans.

These were offences against the religion and the persons of the Muslims. They also conspired against the state. Moḥammad was not only the preacher of Islám, he was also the king of Medina, and was responsible for the safety and peace of the city. As a prophet, he could afford to ignore the jibes of the Jews, though they maddened him to fury; but as the chief of the city, the general in a time of almost continual warfare, when Medina was kept in a state of military defence and under a sort of military discipline, he could not overlook treachery. He was bound by his duty to his subjects to suppress a party that might (and nearly did) lead to the sack of the city by investing armies. The measures he took for this object have furnished his European biographers with a handle for attack. It is, I believe, solely on the ground of his treatment of the Jews that Moḥammad has been called ‘a bloodthirsty tyrant:’ it would certainly be difficult to support the epithet on other grounds.

The bloodthirstiness consists in this: some half-dozen Jews, who had distinguished themselves by their virulence against the Muslims, or by their custom of carrying information to the common enemy of Medina, were executed; two of the three Jewish clans were sent into exile, just as they had previously come into exile, and the third was exterminated—the men killed, and the women and children made slaves. The execution of the half-dozen marked Jews is generally called assassination, because a Muslim was sent secretly to kill each of the criminals. The reason is almost too obvious to need explanation. There were no police or law-courts or even courts-martial at Medina; some one of the followers of Moḥammad must therefore be the executor of the sentence of death, and it was better it should be done quietly, as the executing of a man openly before his clan would have caused a brawl and more bloodshed and retaliation, till the whole city had become mixed up in the quarrel. If secret assassination is the word for such deeds, secret assassination was a necessary part of the internal government of Medina. The men must be killed, and best in that way. In saying this I assume that Moḥammad was cognisant of the deed, and that it was not merely a case of private vengeance; but in several instances the evidence that traces these executions to Moḥammad’s order is either entirely wanting or is too doubtful to claim our credence.

Of the sentences upon the three whole clans, that of exile, passed upon two of them, was clement enough. They were a turbulent set, always setting the people of Medina by the ears; and finally a brawl followed by an insurrection resulted in the expulsion of one tribe; and insubordination, alliance with enemies, and a suspicion of conspiracy against the Prophet’s life, ended similarly for the second. Both tribes had violated the original treaty, and had endeavoured in every way to bring Moḥammad and his religion to ridicule and destruction. The only question is whether their punishment was not too light. Of the third clan a fearful example was made, not by Moḥammad, but by an arbiter appointed by themselves. When the Ḳureysh and their allies were besieging Medina, and had well-nigh stormed the defences, this Jewish tribe entered into negotiations with the enemy, which were only circumvented by the diplomacy of the Prophet. When the besiegers had retired, Moḥammad naturally demanded an explanation of the Jews. They resisted in their dogged way, and were themselves besieged and compelled to surrender at discretion. Moḥammad, however, consented to the appointing of a chief of a tribe allied to the Jews as the judge who should pronounce sentence upon them. The man in question was a fierce soldier, who had been wounded in the attack on the Jews, and indeed died from his wound the same day. This chief gave sentence that the men, in number some six hundred, should be killed, and the women and children enslaved; and the sentence was carried out. It was a harsh, bloody sentence, worthy of the episcopal generals of the army against the Albigenses, or of the deeds of the Augustan age of Puritanism; but it must be remembered that the crime of these men was high treason against the State, during time of siege; and those who have read how Wellington’s march could be traced by the bodies of deserters and pillagers hanging from the trees, need not be surprized at the summary execution of a traitorous clan.

Whilst Moḥammad’s supremacy was being established and maintained among the mixed population of Mekka, a vigorous warfare was being carried on outside with his old persecutors, the Ḳureysh. On the history of this war, consisting as it did mainly of small raids and attacks upon caravans, I need not dwell; its leading features were the two battles of Bedr and Oḥud, in the first of which three hundred Muslims, though outnumbered at the odds of three to one, were completely victorious (A.D. 624, A.H. 2); whilst at Oḥud, being outnumbered in the like proportion and deserted by the ‘Disaffected’ party, they were almost as decisively defeated (A.H. 3). Two years later the Ḳureysh, gathering together their allies, advanced upon Medina and besieged it for fifteen days; but the foresight of Moḥammad in digging a trench, and the enthusiasm of the Muslims in defending it, resisted all assaults, and the coming of the heavy storms for which the climate of Medina is noted drove the enemy back to Mekka. The next year (A.H. 6) a ten years’ truce was concluded with the Ḳureysh, in pursuance of which a strange scene took place in the following spring. It was agreed that Moḥammad and his people should perform the Lesser Pilgrimage, and that the Ḳureysh should for that purpose vacate Mekka for three days. Accordingly, in March 629, about two thousand Muslims, with Moḥammad at their head on his famous camel El-Ḳaṣwá—the same on which he had fled from Mekka—trooped down the valley and performed the rites which every Muslim to this day observes.

‘It was surely a strange sight which at this time presented itself in the vale of Mekka,—a sight unique in the history of the world. The ancient city is for three days evacuated by all its inhabitants, high and low, every house deserted; and, as they retire, the exiled converts, many years banished from their birthplace, approach in a great body, accompanied by their allies, revisit the empty homes of their childhood, and within the short allotted space fulfil the rites of pilgrimage. The ousted inhabitants, climbing the heights around, take refuge under tents or other shelter among the hills and glens; and, clustering on the overhanging peak of Aboo-Ḳubeys, thence watch the movements of the visitors beneath, as with the Prophet at their head they make the circuit of the Kaạbeh and the rapid procession between Eṣ-Ṣafá and Marwah; and anxiously scan every figure if perchance they may recognise among the worshippers some long-lost friend or relative. It was a scene rendered possible only by the throes which gave birth to Islám.’[15]

When the three days were over, Moḥammad and his party peaceably returned to Medina; and the Mekkans re-entered their homes. But this pilgrimage, and the self-restraint of the Muslims therein, advanced the cause of Islám among its enemies. Converts increased daily, and some leading men of the Ḳureysh now went over to Moḥammad. The clans around were sending in their deputations of homage. But the final keystone was set in the eighth year of the flight (A.D. 630), when a body of Ḳureysh broke the truce by attacking an ally of the Muslims; and Moḥammad forthwith marched upon Mekka with ten thousand men, and the city, defence being hopeless, surrendered. Now was the time for the Prophet to show his bloodthirsty nature. His old persecutors are at his feet. Will he not trample on them, torture them, revenge himself after his own cruel manner? Now the man will come forward in his true colours: we may prepare our horror, and cry shame beforehand.

But what is this? Is there no blood in the streets? Where are the bodies of the thousands that have been butchered? Facts are hard things; and it is a fact that the day of Moḥammad’s greatest triumph over his enemies was also the day of his grandest victory over himself. He freely forgave the Ḳureysh all the years of sorrow and cruel scorn they had inflicted on him: he gave an amnesty to the whole population of Mekka. Four criminals, whom justice condemned, made up Moḥammad’s proscription list when he entered as a conqueror the city of his bitterest enemies. The army followed his example, and entered quietly and peaceably; no house was robbed, no woman insulted. One thing alone suffered destruction. Going to the Kaạbeh, Moḥammad stood before each of the three hundred and sixty idols and pointed to it with his staff, saying, ‘Truth is come and lying is undone,’ and at these words his attendants hewed it down; and all the idols and household gods of Mekka and round about were destroyed.

It was thus that Moḥammad entered again his native city. Through all the annals of conquest, there is no triumphant entry like unto this one.

The taking of Mekka was soon followed by the adhesion of all Arabia. Every reader knows the story of the spread of Islám. The tribes of every part of the peninsula sent embassies to do homage to the Prophet. Arabia was not enough: the Prophet had written in his bold uncompromising way to the great kings of the East, to the Persian Khusru, and the Greek Emperor; and these little knew how soon his invitation to the faith would be repeated, and how quickly Islám would be knocking at their doors with no faltering hand.

The Prophet’s career was near its end. In the tenth year of the Flight, twenty years after he had first felt the Spirit move him to preach to his people, he resolved once more to leave his adopted city and go to Mekka to perform a farewell pilgrimage. And when the rites were done in the valley of Miná, the Prophet spoke unto the multitude—the forty thousand pilgrims—with solemn last words.[16]

‘YE PEOPLE! Hearken to my words; for I know not whether after this year I shall ever be amongst you here again.

‘Your Lives and your Property are sacred and inviolable amongst one another until the end of time.

‘The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his inheritance: a Testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs.

‘The child belongeth to the Parent; and the violator of Wedlock shall be stoned.

‘Ye people! Ye have rights demandable of your Wives, and they have rights demandable of you. Treat your women well.

‘And your Slaves, see that you feed them with such food as ye eat yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a fault which ye are not willing to forgive, then sell them, for they are the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented.

‘Ye people! Hearken unto my speech and comprehend it. Know that every Muslim is the brother of every other Muslim. All of you are on the same equality: ye are one Brotherhood.’

Then, looking up to heaven, he cried, ‘O Lord! I have delivered my message and fulfilled my mission.’ And all the multitude answered, ‘Yea, verily hast thou’!—‘O Lord! I beseech Thee, bear Thou witness to it’! and, like Moses, he lifted up his hands and blessed the people.

Three months more and Moḥammad was dead.

A.H. 11. June, 632.

It is a hard thing to form a calm estimate of the Dreamer of the Desert. There is something so tender and womanly, and withal so heroic, about the man, that one is in peril of finding the judgment unconsciously blinded by the feeling of reverence and well-nigh love that such a nature inspires. He who, standing alone, braved for years the hatred of his people, is the same who was never the first to withdraw his hand from another’s clasp, the beloved of children, who never passed a group of little ones without a smile from his wonderful eyes and a kind word for them, sounding all the kinder in that sweet-toned voice. The frank friendship, the noble generosity, the dauntless courage and hope of the man, all tend to melt criticism in admiration.

In telling in brief outline the story of Moḥammad’s life I have endeavoured to avoid controversial points. I have tried to convey in the simplest manner the view of that life which a study of the authorities must force upon every unbiassed mind. Many of the events of Moḥammad’s life have been distorted and credited with ignoble motives by European biographers; but on the facts they mainly agree, and these I have narrated, without encumbering them with the ingenious adumbrations of their learned recorders. But there are some things in the Prophet’s life which have given rise to charges too weighty to be dismissed without discussion. He has been accused of cruelty, sensuality, and insincerity; he has been called a ‘bloodthirsty tyrant,’ a voluptuary, and an impostor.

The charge of cruelty scarcely deserves consideration. I have already spoken of the punishment of the Jews, which forms the ground of the accusation. One has but to refer to Moḥammad’s conduct to the prisoners after the battle of Bedr, to his patient tolerance towards his enemies at Medina, his gentleness to his people, his love of children and the dumb creatures, and above all, his bloodless entry into Mekka, and the complete amnesty he gave to those who had been his bitter enemies during eighteen years of insult and persecution and finally open war, to show that cruelty was no part of Moḥammad’s nature.

To say that Moḥammad, or any other Arab, was sensual in a higher degree than an ordinary European is simply to enounce a well-worn axiom: the passions of the men of the sunland are not as those of the chill north. But to say that Moḥammad was a voluptuary is false. The simple austerity of his daily life, to the very last, his hard mat for sleeping on, his plain food, his self-imposed menial work, point him out as an ascetic rather than a voluptuary in most senses of the word. Two things he loved, perfumes and women; the first was harmless enough, and the special case of his wives has its special answer. A great deal too much has been said about these wives. It is a melancholy spectacle to see professedly Christian biographers gloating over the stories and fables of Moḥammad’s domestic relations like the writers and readers of ‘society’ journals. It is, of course, a fact that whilst the Prophet allowed his followers only four wives he took more than a dozen himself; but be it remembered that, with his unlimited power, he need not have restricted himself to a number insignificant compared with the ḥareems of some of his successors, that he never divorced one of his wives, that all of them save one were widows, and that one of these widows was endowed with so terrific a temper that Aboo-Bekr and ´Othmán had already politely declined the honour of her alliance before the Prophet married her: the gratification of living with a vixen cannot surely be excessive. Several of these marriages must have been entered into from the feeling that those women whose husbands had fallen in battle for the faith, and who had thus been left unprotected, had a claim upon the generosity of him who prompted the fight. Other marriages were contracted from motives of policy, in order to conciliate the heads of rival factions. It was not a high motive, but one does not look for very romantic ideas about love-matches from a man who regarded women as ‘crooked ribs,’ and whose system certainly does its best to make marriage from love impossible; yet, on the other hand, it was not a sensual motive. Perhaps the strongest reason—one of which it is impossible to over-estimate the force—that impelled Moḥammad to take wife after wife was his desire for male offspring. It was a natural wish that he should have a son who should follow in his steps and carry on his work; but the wish was never gratified, Moḥammad’s sons died young. After all, the overwhelming argument is his fidelity to his first wife. When he was little more than a boy he married Khadeejeh, who was fifteen years older than himself, with all the added age that women gain so quickly in the East. For five-and-twenty years Moḥammad remained faithful to his elderly wife, and when she was sixty-five, and they might have celebrated their ‘silver wedding,’ he was as devoted to her as when first he married her. During all those years there was never a breath of scandal. Thus far Moḥammad’s life will bear microscopic scrutiny. Then Khadeejeh died; and though he married many women afterwards, some of them rich in youth and beauty, he never forgot his old wife, and loved her best to the end: ‘when I was poor she enriched me, when they called me a liar she alone believed in me, when all the world was against me she alone remained true.’ This loving, tender memory of an old wife laid in the grave belongs only to a noble nature; it is not to be looked for in a voluptuary.[17]

When, however, all has been said, when it has been shown that Moḥammad was not the rapacious voluptuary some have taken him for, and that his violation of his own marriage-law may be due to motives reasonable and just from his point of view rather than to common sensuality, there remains the fact that some of the soorahs of the Ḳur-án bear unmistakable marks of self-accommodation and personal convenience; that Moḥammad justified his domestic excesses by words which he gave as from God. And hence the third and gravest charge, the charge of imposture. We must clearly understand what is meant by this accusation. It is meant that the Prophet _consciously_ fabricated speeches, and palmed them off upon the people as the very word of God. The question, it will at once be perceived, has nothing whatever to do with the truth or untruth of the revelations. Many an earnest enthusiast has uttered prophecies and exhortations which he firmly believed to be the promptings of the Spirit, and no man can charge such an one with imposture. He thoroughly believes what he says, and the fault is in the judgment, not the conscience. The question is clearly narrowed to this: Did Moḥammad believe he was speaking the words of God equally when he declared that permission was given him to take unto him more wives, as when he proclaimed ‘There is no god but God’? It is a question that concerns the conscience of man; and each must answer it for himself. How far a man may be deluded into believing everything he says is inspired it is impossible to define. There are men to-day who would seem to claim infallibility; and in Moḥammad’s time it was so much easier to believe in one’s self. Now, one never wants a friend to remind him of his weakness; then, there were hundreds who would fain have made the man think himself God. It is wonderful, with his temptations, how great a humility was ever his, how little he assumed of all the god-like attributes men forced upon him. His whole life is one long argument for his loyalty to truth. He had but one answer for his worshippers, ‘I am no more than a man, I am only human.’ ‘Do none enter Paradise save by the mercy of God?’ asked ´Áïsheh. ‘None, none, none,’ he answered. ‘Not even thou by thy own merits?’ ‘Neither shall I enter Paradise unless God cover me with His mercy.’ He was a man like unto his brethren in all things save one, and that one difference served only to increase his humbleness, and render him the more sensitive to his shortcomings. He was sublimely confident of this single attribute, that he was the messenger of the Lord of the Daybreak, and that the words he spake came verily from Him. He was fully persuaded—and no man dare dispute his right to the belief—that God had sent him to do a great work among his people in Arabia. Nervous to the verge of madness, subject to hysteria, given to wild dreamings in solitary places, his was a temperament that easily leads itself to religious enthusiasm. He felt a subtle influence within him which he believed to be the movings of the Spirit: he thought he heard a voice; it became real and audible to him, awed and terrified him, so that he fell into frantic fits. Then he would arise and utter some noble saying; and what wonder if he thought it came straight from highest heaven? It was not without a sore struggle that he convinced himself of his own inspiration; but once admitted, the conviction grew with his years and his widening influence for good, and nothing then could shake his belief that he was the literal mouthpiece of the All-Merciful. When a man has come to this point, he cannot be expected to discriminate between this saying and that. As the instrument of God he has lost his individuality; he believes God is ever speaking through his lips; he dare not question the inspiration of the speech lest he should seem to doubt the Giver.

Yet there must surely be a limit to this delusion. There are some passages in the Ḳur-án which it is difficult to think Moḥammad truly believed to be the voice of the Lord of the Worlds. Moḥammad’s was a sensitive conscience in the early years of his teaching, and it is hard to think that it could have been so obscured in later times that he could really believe in the inspired source of some of his revelations. He may have thought the commands they conveyed necessary, but he could hardly have deemed them divine. In some cases he could scarcely fail to be aware that the object of the ‘revelation’ was his own comfort or pleasure or reputation, and not the _major Dei gloria_, nor the good of the people.

The truth would seem to be that in the latter part of his life Moḥammad was forced to enlarge the limits of his revelations as the sphere of his influence increased. From a private citizen of Mekka he had become the Emeer, the chief of the Arabs, the ruler of a factious, jealous, turbulent people; and the change must have had its effect upon his character. The man who from addressing a few devout followers in a tent in the desert finds himself the head of a nation of many tribes, king of a country twice the size of France, will find many things difficult that before seemed easy. As a statesman Moḥammad was as great as he was as a preacher of righteousness; but as his field of work enlarged, his mind had to accommodate itself to the needs of commoner minds. He learnt to see the expedient where before he knew only the right. His revelations now deal with the things of earth, when before they looked only towards the things of heaven; and petty social rules, ‘general orders,’ selfish permissions, are promulgated with the same authority and as from the same divine source as the command to worship one God alone. He governed the nation as a prophet and not as a king, and as a prophet his ordinances must be endorsed with the divine afflatus. He found he must regulate the meanest details of the people’s life, and he believed he could only do this by using God’s name for his decrees. He doubtless argued himself into the belief that even these petty, and to us sometimes immoral, regulations, being for the good of the people, as he conceived the good, were really God’s ordinances; but even thus he had lowered the standard of his teaching, and alloyed with base metal the pure gold of his early ideal. It was a temptation that few men have withstood, but it was, nevertheless, a falling-off from the Moḥammad we loved at Mekka, the simple truth-loving bearer of good tidings to the Arabs.

Yet behind this engrafted character, formed by the difficulties of his position, by the invincible jealousy and treachery of the tribes he governed, the old nature still lived, and ever and anon broke forth in fervid words of faith and hope in the cause and the promises that had been the light and support of his early years of trial. In the late chapters of the Ḳur-án, among complicated directions for the Muslim’s guidance in all the circumstances of life, we suddenly hear an echo of the old fiery eloquence and the expression of the strong faith which never deserted him.

Surely the character of Moḥammad has been misjudged. He was not the ambitious schemer some would have him, still less the hypocrite and sham prophet others have imagined. He was an enthusiast in that noblest sense when enthusiasm becomes the salt of the earth, the one thing that keeps men from rotting whilst they live. Enthusiasm is often used despitefully, because it is joined to an unworthy cause, or falls upon barren ground and bears no fruit. So was it not with Moḥammad. He was an enthusiast when enthusiasm was the one thing needed to set the world aflame, and his enthusiasm was noble for a noble cause. He was one of those happy few who have attained the supreme joy of making one great truth their very life-spring. He was the messenger of the One God, and never to his life’s end did he forget who he was, or the message which was the marrow of his being. He brought his tidings to his people with a grand dignity, sprung from the consciousness of his high office, together with a most sweet humility, whose roots lay in the knowledge of his own weakness. Well did Carlyle choose him for his prophet-hero! There have been purer lives and higher aspirations than Moḥammad’s; but no man was ever more thoroughly filled with the sense of his mission or carried out that mission more heroically.

III.—ISLAM.

‘Your turning your faces in prayer towards the east and the
west is not piety; but the pious is he who believeth in God
and the Last Day, and in the Angels, and the Scripture, and
who giveth money, notwithstanding his love thereof, to
relations and orphans, and to the needy and the son of the
road, and to the askers, and for the freeing of slaves, and
who performeth prayer and giveth the appointed alms; and those
who perform their covenant when they covenant, and the patient
in adversity and affliction and in the time of violence. These
are they who have been true: and these are they who fear
God.’—_Ḳur-án_, ii. 172.

When it was noised abroad that the Prophet was dead, ´Omar, the fiery-hearted, the Simon Peter of Islám, rushed among the people, and fiercely told them they lied, it could not be true, Moḥammad was not dead. And Aboo-Bekr came and said, ‘Ye people! he that hath worshipped Moḥammad, let him know that Moḥammad is dead; but he that hath worshipped God,—that the Lord liveth, and doth not die.’

Many have sought to answer the questions—Why was the triumph of Islám so speedy and so complete? Why have so many millions embraced the religion of Moḥammad, and scarcely a hundred ever recanted? Why do a thousand Christians become Muslims to one Muslim who adopts Christianity? Why do a hundred and fifty millions of human beings still cling to the faith of Islám? Some have attempted to explain the first overwhelming success of the Moḥammadan religion by the argument of the sword. They forget Carlyle’s laconic reply, ‘First get your sword.’ You must win men’s hearts before you can induce them to peril their lives for you, and the first conquerors of Islám must have been made Muslims before they were made ‘fighters on the path of God.’ Others allege the low morality of the religion and the sensual paradise it promises as a sufficient cause for the zeal of its followers; but even were these admitted to the full, to say that such reasons could win the hearts of millions of men who have the same hopes and longings after the right and the noble as we, is to libel mankind. No religion has ever gained a lasting hold upon the souls of men by the force of its sensual permissions and fleshly promises. It is urged, again, that Islám met no fair foe, that the worn-out forms of Christianity and Judaism it encountered were no test of its power as a quickening faith, and that it prevailed simply because there was nothing to prevent it; and this was undoubtedly a help to the progress of the new creed, but it could not have been the cause of its victory.

In all these reasons the religion itself is left out of the question. Decidedly Islám itself was the main cause of its triumph. By some strange intuition Moḥammad succeeded in finding the one form of Monotheism that has ever commended itself to any wide section of the Eastern world. It was only a remnant of the Jews that learned to worship the one God of the prophets after the hard lessons of the Captivity. Christianity has never gained a hold upon the East. Islám not only was at once accepted (partly in earnest, partly in name, but accepted) by Arabia, Syria, Persia, Egypt, Northern Africa, and Southern Spain at its first outburst, but, with the exception of Spain, it has never lost its vantage-ground; it has seen no country that has once embraced its doctrine turn to another faith; it has added great multitudes in India and China and Turkestan to its subjects; and in quite recent times it has been spreading in wide and swiftly—following waves over Africa, and has left but a small part of that vast continent unconverted to its creed. Admitting the mixed causes that contributed to the rapidity of the first torrent of Moḥammadan conquest, they do not account for the duration of Islám. There must be something in the religion itself to explain its persistence and increase, and to account for its present hold over so large a proportion of the dwellers on the earth.

Men trained in European ideas of religion have always found a difficulty in understanding the fascination which the Muslim faith has for so many minds in the East. ‘There is no god but God, and Moḥammad is His Prophet.’ There is nothing in this, they say, to move the heart. Yet this creed has stirred an enthusiasm that has never been surpassed. Islám has had its martyrs, its self-tormentors, its recluses, who have renounced all that life offered and have accepted death with a smile for the sake of the faith that was in them. It is idle to say the eternity of happiness will explain this. The truest martyrs of Islám, as well as of Christianity, did not die to gain paradise. And if they did, the belief in the promises of the creed must follow the hearty belief in the creed. Islám must have possessed a power of seizing men’s belief before it could have inspired them with such a love of its paradise.

Moḥammad’s conception of God has, I think, been misunderstood, and its effect upon the people consequently under-estimated. The God of Islám is commonly represented as a pitiless tyrant, who plays with humanity as on a chessboard, and works out his game without regard to the sacrifice of the pieces; and there is a certain truth in the figure. There is more in Islám of the potter who shapes the clay than of the father pitying his children. Moḥammad conceived of God as the Semitic mind has always preferred to think of Him: his God is the All-Mighty, the All-Knowing, the All-Just. Irresistible Power is the first attribute he thinks of: the Lord of the Worlds, the Author of the Heavens and the Earth, who hath created Life and Death, in whose hand is Dominion, who maketh the Dawn to appear and causeth the Night to cover the Day, the Great, All-Powerful Lord of the glorious Throne; the Thunder proclaimeth His perfection, the whole earth is His handful, and the Heavens shall be folded together in His right hand. And with the Power He conceives the Knowledge that directs it to right ends. God is the Wise, the Just, the True, the Swift in reckoning, who knoweth every ant’s weight of good and of ill that each man hath done, and who suffereth not the reward of the faithful to perish.

‘God! There is no God but He, the Ever-Living, the
Ever-Subsisting. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him
belongeth whatsoever is in the Heavens and whatsoever is in
the Earth. Who is he that shall intercede with Him, save by
His permission? He knoweth the things that have gone before
and the things that follow after, and men shall not compass
aught of His knowledge, save what He willeth. His Throne
comprehendeth the Heavens and the Earth, and the care of them
burdeneth Him not. And He is the High, the Great.’—_Ḳur-án_,
ii. 256.

But with this Power there is also the gentleness that belongs only to great strength. God is the Guardian over His servants, the Shelterer of the orphan, the Guider of the erring, the Deliverer from every affliction; in His hand is Good, and He is the Generous Lord, the Gracious, the Hearer, the Near-at-Hand. Every soorah of the Ḳur-án begins with the words, ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and Moḥammad was never tired of telling the people how God was Very-Forgiving, that His love for man was more tender than the mother-bird for her young.

It is too often forgotten how much there is in the Ḳur-án of the loving-kindness of God, but it must be allowed that these are not the main thoughts in Moḥammad’s teaching. It is the doctrine of the Might of God that most held his imagination, and that has impressed itself most strongly upon Muslims of all ages. The fear rather than the love of God is the spur of Islám. There can be no question which is the higher incentive to good; but it is nearly certain that the love of God is an idea absolutely foreign to most of the races that have accepted Islám, and to preach such a doctrine would have been to mistake the leaning of the Semitic mind.

The leading doctrine of Moḥammad, then, is the belief in One All-Powerful God. Islám is the self-surrender of every man to the will of God. Its danger lies in the stress laid on the power of God, which has brought about the stifling effects of fatalism. Moḥammad taught the foreknowledge of God, but he did not lay down precisely the doctrine of Predestination. He found it, as all have found it, a stumbling-block in the way of man’s progress. It perplexed him, and he spoke of it, but often contradicted himself; and he would become angry if the subject were mooted in his presence: ‘Sit not with a disputer about fate,’ he said, ‘nor begin a conversation with him.’ Moḥammad vaguely recognised that little margin of Free Will which makes life not wholly mechanical.

This doctrine of one Supreme God, to whose will it is the duty of every man to surrender himself, is the kernel of Islám, the truth for which Moḥammad lived and suffered and triumphed. But it was no new teaching, as he himself was constantly saying. His was only the last of revelations. Many prophets—Abraham, Moses, and Christ—had taught the same faith before; but people had hearkened little to their words. So Moḥammad was sent, not different from them, only a messenger, yet the last and greatest of them, the ‘seal of prophecy,’ the ‘most excellent of the creation of God.’ This is the second dogma of Islám: Moḥammad is the apostle of God. It is well worthy of notice that it is not said, ‘Moḥammad is the only apostle of God.’ Islám is more tolerant in this matter than other religions. Its prophet is not the sole commissioner of the Most High, nor is his teaching the only true teaching the world has ever received. Many other messengers had been sent by God to guide men to the right, and these taught the same religion that was in the mouth of the preacher of Islám. Hence Muslims reverence Moses and Christ only next to Moḥammad. All they claim for their founder is that he was the last and best of the messengers of the one God.[18]

After the belief in God and his prophets and scriptures, the Muslim must believe in angels, good and evil genii, in the resurrection and the judgment, and in future rewards and punishments. What the teaching of the Ḳur-án is upon these points may be seen in the First Part of the ‘Selections.’ They form a very common weapon of attack on the ground of their superstition, their anthropomorphism, and their sensuality. Yet these minor beliefs have their place in all religions, and they are conceived in scarcely more absurdly realistic a manner in Islám than in any other creed. Every religion seems to need an improbable, almost a ludicrous, side, in order to provide material for the faith of the masses. Moḥammad himself was what is called a superstitious man, and the improbable side thus found its way easily into his creed. With all the fancies floating in Arabia in his time, it would have been strange if he had introduced nothing of the superstitious into Islám. The Jinn, the Afreets, and the other beings of the air and water, have not done much harm to the Mohammadan mind; and they have given so many a delightful fable to the West, that we must feel a certain grateful respect for them. The realistic pictures of paradise and hell have exercised a more serious influence. The minute details of these infernal and celestial pictures must move alternately the disgust and the contemptuous amusement of a Western reader; yet these same things were very real facts to Moḥammad, and have been of the utmost importance to generation after generation of Muslims. In the present day there are cultured men who receive these descriptions in the same allegorical sense as some Christians accept the Revelation of S. John—which, indeed, in some respects offers a close parallel to the pictorial parts of the Ḳur-án; but the vast majority of believers (like many Christians in the parallel case) take the descriptions literally, and there can be no doubt that the belief founded on such pictures, accepted literally, must work an ill effect on the professors of the faith of which these doctrines form a minor, but a too prominent, part; and it is the aim of rational Muslims to sweep away such cobwebs from their sky.

Islám lies more in doing than in believing. That ‘faith without works is dead’ is a doctrine which every day’s routine must bring home to the mind of the devout Muslim. The practical duties of the Mohammadan religion, beyond the actual profession of faith, are the performance of prayer, the giving of alms, the keeping of the fasts, and the accomplishing the pilgrimage. Mr. Lane has so minutely described the regular prayers used over all the Mohammadan East, that it is only necessary here to refer to his account of them in the ‘Modern Egyptians.’ There it will be seen that they form no light part of the religious duties of the Muslim, especially since they involve careful preparatory ablutions; for Moḥammad impressed upon his followers the salutary doctrine that cleanliness is an essential part of godliness, and the scrupulous cleanliness of the Mohammadan, which contrasts so favourably with the unsavoury state of Easterns of other creeds, is an excellent feature in the practical influence of Islám. The charge which missionaries and the like are fond of bringing against the Muslim prayers, that they are merely lifeless forms and vain repetitions, is an exaggeration. There is a vast deal of repetition in the Mohammadan ritual, just as the paternoster is repeated again and again in the principal Christian liturgies; but iteration does not necessarily kill devotion. There is plenty of real fervour in the prayers of the Mosque, and they are joined-in by the worshippers with an earnest attention which shames the listless sleepy bearing of most congregations in England. It is true the greater part of the prayers are laid down in prescribed forms; but there is an interval set apart for private supplication, and the original congregations in the mosques availed themselves of this permission more generally than is now the case, when the old fervour has become comparatively cool; and Moḥammad frequently enjoins private prayer at home, and specially praises him who ‘passeth his night worshipping God.’

Almsgiving was originally compulsory, and the tax was collected by the officers of the Khalif; but now the Muslim is merely expected to give voluntarily about a fortieth part of his income in charity each year. The great fast of Ramaḍán is too well known to need more than a passing mention here; but it is not so well known that Moḥammad, ascetic as he was himself in this as in many other matters, whilst he ordained the month of fasting for the chastening of his able-bodied followers, was a determined enemy to useless mortification of the flesh, and boldly affirmed that God took no pleasure in a man’s wantonly injuring himself; and so if one that was weakly and sick could not keep the fast without bodily detriment he was to omit it. And the same wise leniency was shown by the Arab prophet in respect of prayer,—which may be curtailed or omitted in certain cases,—and with regard to the pilgrimage, which no one was to perform to his hurt. This same pilgrimage is often urged as a sign of Moḥammad’s tendency to superstition and even idolatry. It is asked how the destroyer of idols could have reconciled his conscience to the circuits of the Kaạbeh and the veneration of the black stone covered with adoring kisses. The rites of the pilgrimage cannot certainly be defended against the charge of superstition; but it is easy to see why Moḥammad enjoined them. They were hallowed to him by the memories of his ancestors, who had been the guardians of the sacred temple, and by the traditional reverence of all his people; and besides this tie of association, which in itself was enough to make it impossible for him to do away with the rites, Moḥammad perceived that the worship in the Kaạbeh would prove of real value to his religion. He swept away the more idolatrous and immoral part of the ceremonies, but he retained the pilgrimage to Mekka and the old veneration of the temple for reasons of which it is impossible to dispute the wisdom. He well knew the consolidating effect of forming a centre to which his followers should gather; and hence he reasserted the sanctity of the black stone that ‘came down from Heaven;’ he ordained that everywhere throughout the world the Muslim should pray looking towards the Kaạbeh, and he enjoined him to make the pilgrimage thither. Mekka is to the Muslim what Jerusalem is to the Jew. It bears with it all the influence of centuries of associations. It carries the Muslim back to the cradle of his faith, the childhood of his prophet; it reminds him of the struggle between the old faith and the new, of the overthrow of the idols, and the establishment of the worship of the One God. And, most of all, it bids him remember that all his brother Muslims are worshipping towards the same sacred spot; that he is one of a great company of believers, united by one faith, filled with the same hopes, reverencing the same things, worshipping the same God. Moḥammad showed his knowledge of the religious emotions in man when he preserved the sanctity of the temple of Islám.

It would take too much space to look closely into the lesser duties of Islám, many of which suggest exceedingly wholesome lessons to Western civilisation. But we must not pass over one of these minor duties, for it reflects the highest credit upon the founder and the professors of Mohammadanism—I mean the humane treatment of animals.