Chapter VIII: Islam's Failure

'As we conceive God, we conceive the Universe; a being incapable of loving is incapable of being loved.'--PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN.

[Sidenote: Another View of Baghdad.]

Before we set ourselves such questions as these, we should, perhaps, have peered a little more closely into the Caliph's palace. We might have gone round to the back door, and not to the front; we might (at the risk of our lives, though!) have watched him in his private life. We might have had an interview (if we could summon up the courage) with his ever-ready staff of state executioners, whose work was carried out at his caprice and not at the dictates of imperial justice, and have heard the tale of banquets where all the guests were murdered. We might have discovered in what fear he lived, how perilous a throne was his. Of the fifty-nine Caliphs of Baghdad, thirty-eight met violent deaths. We might have heard the confession of {117} Caliph Abdalrahman, who reigned for the record period of fifty years, perhaps the most splendid of all the line:

'I have now reigned above fifty years in victory and peace, beloved of my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honours, power and pleasure have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot; they amount to fourteen. O man! Place not thy confidence in this present world.'[1]

We might have discovered that the physicians, scientists, metaphysicians, and 'literati,' who, to their credit, the Caliphs drew around them, were not Moslems, but Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and even that the most enlightened of the Caliphs, heads of the religion of the Prophet, were not Mohammedans in heart, but infidels. There was much food for thought there.

However, without lingering any longer about the precincts of the Court of Baghdad, we will pursue our inquiry, asking, with all {118} seriousness, what, all down the centuries, have been the marks of Islam upon the countries it has conquered? What have been its fruits among the nations that adopted Islam as their faith? What are the fruits of Islam to-day?

We stand upon a pinnacle of 1200 years, looking out upon the world, and looking back upon the history of twelve centuries of Islam. Can we not find some features, so common that we may call them _characteristic features_, of Mohammedanism, which will help us in forming an estimate of the influence of Islam upon mankind?

[Sidenote: Fruits of Islam.]

Let us then try to bring Islam to the test, as we are able to examine its influence in this twentieth century. For after all the ultimate test of a religion must be its continuous fitness to elevate the faith and character of man.

Let us take, to begin with, the estimate not of a missionary enthusiast, but of a deliberately unbiassed writer in a secular magazine.[2] Discussing the situation in {119} those countries where 'Islam has had a free hand,' he says:

'For centuries it had had a fair field for developing its principles and exhibiting its spirit under the most favourable circumstances of climate, soil, natural resources, geographical position, together with a variety of races, unsurpassed in Christendom in all the qualities which go to the making of capable citizens.... And what is the result? Barbarism, oppression, lawlessness, corruption, cruelty, ignorance, decadence, have settled like an incurable blight on all the lands of Islam. There is no exception, not a single bright spot anywhere; no green oasis in all that wilderness of savage desolation. And those lands were once fertile, populous and flourishing homes of the arts, of science, and of literature! ... What became of these rich and civilized lands under Islam? Let the degraded, impoverished, and savage condition of Persia and the Khanites of Central Asia answer. Every vestige has disappeared of their flourishing condition before Islam invaded them. It exterminated all alien influences, gave free scope to its own spirit, and we see the result.'

As it is not possible to cover the whole field, let us take a closer look at the three Moslem empires of to-day, where Islam has for long years held undisputed sway.

First, then, let us see Islam in the {120} Turkish Empire, ruling from Constantinople, the successor of Baghdad. What is the story of the rule of the Moslem there? Again we will consult unprejudiced witnesses. Professor Freeman, the historian, says of him:

'His rule during all that time has been the rule of cruelty, faithlessness, and brutal lust: it has not been government, but organized brigandage.... While all other nations get better, the Turk gets worse and worse.'[3]

Or again, Mr. Bosworth Smith, most determined of apologists of Mohammed and Mohammedanism, is forced to admit that

'the system of government, never an enlightened one, has, at all events since the so-called reforms of the Sultan Mahmoud, been rotten at the core. Stamboul has become an asylum for the rascality of East and West alike; the finest peasantry in the world, the inhabitants of Asia Minor, are dying by starvation, partly, no doubt, owing to bad harvests, but still more owing to the neglect of the most ordinary precautions and duties of Government. Roads unmade, bridges broken down, mines unworked, unprincipled and exorbitant provincial Pashas, wastefulness and disorder and excessive {121} centralization--such is the picture which travellers give us of these fair regions of the earth, and, unfortunately, we know it to be a true picture.'[4]

It was this same Sultan Mahmoud who issued in 1827 a protest against the interference of the Christian Powers in the administration of the Turkish Empire, 'the affairs of which,' as he truly said, 'are conducted upon the principles of sacred legislation, and all the regulations of which are strictly connected with the principles of religion.' The unending record of massacres, and of even more vile atrocities perpetrated upon Armenian Christians within that Empire are but another witness to its degradation, and are hardly past history yet. The war has brought us terrible reminders that the Moslem is no less a Moslem for his German alliance.

[Sidenote: Persia.]

Or if we turn to Persia, we find no relief from the gloom into which a survey of the history and condition of Moslem lands has plunged us. An observant traveller, after a journey across Persia, thus describes its condition:

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Like a wreck, a ruin, a memory of far distant greatness, the Persian nation lies in evidence of the paralysis of Islam. There are no schools, save here and there chattering groups around a village priest, or worse than medieval groups around a mesjid and a mujtahid. The few schools of the Government in Tabriz and Teheran are chiefly opportunities for officials to eat up public revenues. Charitable institutions are practically unknown. Prisons are mere places of torture until the demanded money fine is paid. Houses of permanent detention or reformation for evil-doers do not exist. Death or payment or torture are the end of the law. The courts, half civil, half ecclesiastical, are irregular, with no written codes, no jury system, no pleading, no testimony, save the eloquence and evidence of bribes. The sects of Shiahism[5] riot when they please in internecine strife, plunder and murder. The attempts to imitate some of the external ways of civilization have ended in bathos. The postal system is a despair, the couriers lounging idly along the road, taking often a week to go 200 miles, while postmasters take letters from the mail when they please, and are the tools of the Government. The telegraph system is yet more of a farce. Whole sentences were omitted from our messages. The posts lie on the ground with the wires under the feet of the caravans. Telegrams are often as long on the road as letters, and the senders frequently arrive before their messages. The roads are mere {123} trails. One or two were built once, but they are falling into ruin.... The army, with wages of two cents a day, and pay a year in arrears, tattered and sickly, is too sad a sight to be ludicrous.... The land lies smitten and in despair.... Saddest of all is the decadence of religious perception, the want of moral stamina, the prevalence of deceit, falsehood, rottenness of life, of all of which there is no stronger evidence than the throngs of dervishes, the holy men of Islam, who wander up and down the land, loathsome beyond words.'[6]

[Sidenote: Morocco.]

Of the third Mohammedan empire, Morocco, let Hall Caine the novelist, who on occasion can go great lengths as the friend and flatterer of Islam, speak:

'Within sight of an English port and within hail of English ships, as they pass on to our Empire in the East, there is a land where the ways of life are the same to-day as they were a thousand years ago, a land wherein government is oppression, wherein law is tyranny, wherein justice is bought and sold, wherein it is a terror to be rich and a danger to be poor, wherein man may still be the slave of man, and woman is no more than a creature of lust--a reproach to Europe, a disgrace to the century, an outrage on humanity, a blight on religion! That land is Morocco.'[7]

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Or, again, Joseph Thomson, the African explorer, who confessed that he thought favourably of Mohammedanism before he visited that country:

'It was difficult to grasp the fact which has been gradually boring its way into our minds, that absolutely the most religious nation on the face of the earth was also the most grossly immoral.... Among no people are prayers so commonly heard or religious duties more rigidly attended to. Yet, side by side with it all, rapine and murder, mendacity of the most advanced type, and brutish and nameless vices exist to an extraordinary degree. From the Sultan down to the loathsome beggar, from the most learned to the most illiterate, from the man who enjoys his reputation of utmost sanctity to his openly infamous opposite, all are alike morally rotten.'

[Sidenote: Arabia.]

Arabia, the home of the Prophet, cradle of Islam, presents a sadder picture still. 'The torch burns lowest nearest to the stump,' says the Arab proverb by way of excuse. Palgrave, who has penetrated to its heart, and returned to tell the tale, sickened by the memory of sights he saw around its sacred places, burst forth in indignation:

'When the Korân and Mecca shall have disappeared from Arabia, then, and then only, can we {125} seriously expect to see the Arab assume that place in the ranks of civilization from which Mohammed and his book have, more than any other individual cause, held him back.'[8]

[Sidenote: Reaction of Moslem Degradation on other Lands.]

It is facts such as these which give to the problem of Islam its urgent and insistent importance. One-seventh of the world is in its grip. Humanity, after all, is one great whole, and it is impossible for some races to be in this decadent condition and for all the others not to feel it. Circulation goes on fast in this modern world, with its railways, telegraphs, and telephones, its greyhound 'liners' and its aeroplanes; and the interaction of one country on another is more quickly and deeply felt. What is happening in the streets of Stamboul, and Teheran, and Morocco, must inevitably affect us, however unconsciously, in the streets of London and Edinburgh.[9] Therefore, if {126} only for selfish reasons, it is a problem which concerns us. Moreover, among the subject races of the Empire over which we rule, there are ninety and a half million Moslems,[10] and we have a duty to them which we can never pay until we understand them and have tried to face the problem.

How is it, then, that a religion that began with such earnestness, that was propagated with such success, that so quickly {127} reached such magnificent proportions, has been as a blight upon the nations upon which it fell?

We shall not satisfy ourselves unless we carry our investigation back to the source, to Mohammed and his teaching, not this time, as in our last chapter, to discover the cause of its success, but the secret of its failure.

With this in mind we ask again, 'What was the essence of Mohammed's teaching?'

[Sidenote: Mohammed's teaching. 1. God.]

I. _His teaching about God_.--There are two qualities or attributes of Allah that we have heard, in fancy, from a myriad minarets all down thirteen long centuries, proclaiming the Allah whom the Moslem worships--'God is One,' and 'God is Great.' Those are the thoughts that call the Moslem daily to worship, that make for him his idea of God. They tower above, and almost overshadow, all else that he knows of Him; they fill his mind until God becomes to him but little more than an unlovable and loveless despot. He is a God above him, but not with him, still less with him and in him. True, Moslem {128} tradition teaches ninety-nine names of God, but not one brings Him near, not one calls Him Father. 'The Merciful' is again and again used of Him in the Korân, but as we listen more closely it is the mercy of a despot, not of a loving Father, which it proclaims, and there is _all_ the difference.

Moreover, the Moslem's Allah is absolute _Will_, neither bound nor directed by any law of right or wrong, and in His dealings with the world there is, there can be, nothing moral. 'God,' we are told, 'misleadeth whom He willeth, and guideth aright whom He willeth,'[11] and, 'As for man, we have firmly fixed his fate about his neck.'[12] Therefore, to the Moslem there can be no true sense of sin, for what his conscience condemns may be the will of Allah,[13] and the only sin he can conceive is to transgress an arbitrary degree of Allah's pleasure, or deny his Prophet.

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Therefore, because Allah to the Moslem is not a Father, because He is not Love, He does not yearn for the love of men.

Because He is not holy, He does not yearn for men to be Godlike, holy as Himself.

So because He is not Love and Holiness, He does not seek to redeem men from sin, to draw them to Himself.

There is no bridge needed, no bridge possible, no sacrifice, no 'wall of partition' to be broken down, no Atonement, no Calvary, no thought of God sharing our life, that we may share His in holiness and love through all eternity, no Incarnation.

It is as though the Allah of the Moslem says, 'I have called you slaves'; not the words of infinite love and infinite glory, 'I have called you friends.' Islam denies, in fact, those eternal truths in which man's only hope of a redeemed life can lie--the divine life of our Lord on earth and His path through the Sacrifice of Himself, to the glory of His resurrection.

[Sidenote: 2. Man and Woman. (a) Man.]

II. _His teaching about Man_.--Because the Moslem's view of God is out of focus, discoloured, distorted, and false, therefore {130} his view of man is false and out of focus too.

If God is not our Father, then we are not His children, and cannot be. If He is but an Almighty Despot, we can only be His subjects, His slaves at best. And the Korân gives man no better place than that of the highest of the living beings inhabiting the earth. No breath of God is in him, no spark that is divine. And so it came about that during his life Mohammed never taught men to think; he gave not principles, but precepts, and religion became a thing of ritual and not a religion of the heart. We have seen how Islam in its propagation sought to win men's allegiance and asked no questions as to motives. Its very religious observances are not concerned with righteousness of life. For instance, in its teaching about prayer the Korân contains the most explicit instructions about the manner of prayer, about the previous washing, about the direction, the posture, the language, the form, but there is hardly a word about its meaning or its spirit. 'In the 10,000 verses of the Korân there are not as many petitions as there are in the Lord's Prayer.' {131} So completely do spirituality and righteousness seem to have got divorced in the Moslem mind, that there seems nothing incongruous, at least to many Moslems, in lying, cheating, swearing, and praying almost in the same breath.[14]

[Sidenote: (b) Woman.]

It is not hard to understand that such a God as Mohammed preached might be conceived to make a distinction between man and woman. And the blackest of all the blots which besmirch the name and memory of Mohammed was his teaching about Woman and his relations with her. True, his teaching may have been in advance of what was commonly accepted by the Arabs of his day, but he left her still the chattel and not the companion 'meet' for man. Women were to him an inferior grade of beings, whose sole destiny was to serve their husbands and be the mothers of children. Woman's honour, he said, was not to be trusted. He instituted the veil (which women in Moslem lands wear to this day to cover their faces whenever they are in the presence of men) and consigned her to the harem. He gave 'divine' {132} sanction to a Mohammedan to have four wives and as many concubines as he could afford, to beat them when they displeased him, and divorce them if he wished.

We do not need to follow the horrible details of Mohammed's own life, and the story of how, breaking his own law after Khadîjah's death, he had not four wives but nine. Instinctively we turn to a wholly different picture, to the story of the Life that gave Woman for ever her charter of emancipation and her place of honour. We see Him sitting weary on the side of Jacob's well, listening to and telling the sad story of a woman's sins; or accepting the offering of an alabaster box of ointment, very precious, which a woman broke upon His feet; we see Him comforting the sisters of Lazarus in the home at Bethany; and Himself comforted upon the cross by women braver than His Apostles. Were not women, too, the first to approach the tomb in the early dawn of Easter morning? Yes, something greater than the most beautiful of sentiments is written there. It has proved itself in history the secret of national greatness. For, as Dr. Fairbairn says, 'A religion that does not purify the {133} home cannot regenerate the race; one that depraves the home is certain to deprave humanity. Motherhood is to be sacred if manhood is to be honourable. Spoil the wife of sanctity, and for the man the sanctities of life have perished. And so it has been with Islam.'

[Sidenote: 3. Paradise.]

III. _Teaching about Paradise_.--Every religion has a Heaven--a goal of some sort towards which the faithful slowly wend their way across the earthly span of human life. Each has its own 'joy set before' man, to nerve, inspire, and direct him in his earthly course, a Heaven for which he is being fitted, where he shall reach the perfection of his life. What, then, was the Heaven that Mohammed painted, towards which the Moslem sets his face?

It was little different from a glorified Arabia--a land where men still keep the lower natures which were their bondage here, where their cravings and baser appetites and passions are satisfied. That is the Heaven where the Moslem would be; no note of triumph for a hard-won victory over self, no robes washed white of all {134} defilement, no joyful service, for which this life was but the probation, in the presence of the King.

[Sidenote: Revelation without Redemption.]

It is enough. The causes of Islam's failure lie not far below the surface. To lift the eyes of Arabia above its poor idols was indeed something: it is something to believe and bear that witness to one God in an unbelieving world to-day. But it is not all, or nearly all. 'Dost thou believe in the one God?' 'The devils also believe,' and are devils still, although they 'tremble.' A 'revelation' without a redemption must for ever mock man. It calls him to aspire, but 'whither?' It teaches him he has a duty, but what? As one of our great administrators of a Moslem land has said: 'Islam may mean progress, but certainly it is progress up a blind alley.' Man can only raise his ladder on this earth, and though he climb a little, it will not reach to Heaven.

QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER VIII

1. What has been the past effect of Mohammedan rule in the Turkish Empire? What is the present position?

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2. What was the condition of Persia in 1895?

3. Account for the fact that degradation in Moslem lands reacts upon Britain. Illustrate from Morocco.

4. What does Mohammed teach about GOD?

5. What position does Mohammed assign to man, and what to woman?

6. Contrast the Moslem idea of Paradise with that of the Christian.

7. What seem to you the most striking points of contrast between Islam and Christianity?

[1] Gibbon, vi. 29. (Frowde.)

[2] _Quarterly Review_, July 1895.

[3] Freeman's _The Turk in Europe_.

[4] Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and Mohammedanism._

[5] The Moslem sects which include the great majority of the Mohammedans of Persia.

[6] _Missions and Politics in Asia_, R. E. Speer, pp. 49-50. For recent developments in Persia also see _infra_, chap. xii.

[7] Hall Caine in _The Scapegoat_.

[8] Palgrave, _Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia_, vol. i. p. 175.

[9] Whatever may be the rearrangement of the map of Europe and Western Asia to which the Great War will lead, it is clear already that the problem of Islam will have assumed a new importance and a new urgency. For Moslem Turkey has been courted and won in alliance by great European powers, and armed and organized for their support. It has already been terribly proved that Germany feels herself unable to curb the passions she has roused--witness the wholesale massacre of Armenian Christian populations in the Turkish Empire, of which Lord Bryce, speaking in the House of Lords (on 6th October, 1915), said: 'It would seem that three-fourths or four-fifths of the whole nation has been wiped out. There is no case in history, certainly not since the time of Tamerlane, in which any crime so hideous and upon so large a scale has been recorded.'

It is clear enough that for Germany, or for us, or for any other nation, there is only one means ultimately of making the Turk a healthy influence in the world and a worthy member of the commonwealth of nations, and that is to change his heart--which indeed is the programme of the Christian Gospel.

[10] See Appendix D. King George V. has at least twenty million more Moslem than Christian subjects. Great Britain holds the highways and gateways of the Moslem world, and every great Moslem metropolis, save Constantinople, is under her power.

[11] Sura LXXIV.

[12] Sura XVII.

[13] One of the Moslem commentators on the Korân (Ibn Khaldun) says: 'Dieu a implanté le bien et le mal dans la nature humaine, ainsi qu'il l'a dit lui-même dans le Korân: la perversité et la vertu arrivent à l'âme humaine par l'inspiration de Dieu.'--French translation from the Arabic in _Notices et Extraits de la Bibliothèque Impériale de France_, vol. xix. p. 268.

[14] Dr. Porter, _Five Years in Damascus_, vol. i. p. 141.

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