■•^-I'^HISTOn/l
k.,^
MOHAMMED
AND
MOHAMMEDANISM,
MOHAMMED
AND
MOHAMMEDAN^ISM.
By E. BOSWORTH SMITH, M.A.
ASSISTANT-MASTER IN HARROW SCHOOL
LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED
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3 3
S . 3 ) i
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1889.
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HAS, QUALESCUNQUE SUNT, PRIMITIAS
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260965
PREFACE
TO
THE SECOND EDITION.
While preparing a Second Edition of these Lectures for the
press, I have had the advantage of reading many notices of the
First, the great majority of them incisive yet kind, just yet
scrupulously appreciative. This has been a great advantage, but
it involves a corresponding responsibility. Next to the respon-
sibility and pleasure of writing what it is hoped may serve, in
however humble a measure, the cause of truth, charity, and
justice, there is no greater pleasure or responsibility than that
of reading a keen yet sympathetic criticism on it by one who is
evidently a master of his subject, and who is aiming at the
same goal, even though his standpoint be different, or he be
travelling by a different road. The knowledge of the critic, as
in more than one instance has been notably the case, may be
deeper, his experience wider, his judgment more profound ; he
may find out with unerring certainty all the weak points in
one's armour, but none the less is he eager to discover ' generosity
in the motives,' and conscientiousness in the work done, to
recognise the identity of the end in view, and such advance as
may have been made towards it. In a Preface to a new edition
I may, indeed I must, refer to such criticisms, because, on the
one hand, I am bound to express my gratitude for the service
they have done me, and to indicate how far they have modified
viii PREFACE TO
my views ; and, on the other, because I am quite conscious that
I owe them far more to the intrinsic interest and importance of
the subject than to any merits of my own.
It is unnecessary to reply here to objections in detail, but
there is one general criticism which perlwps had better be
noticed fully now rather than referred to repeatedly by way of
controversy in the book itself. It has been said by more than
one critic, who is entitled at once to my respectful consideration
and my gratitude, that my account of Islam and its founder,
though true on the whole, is somewhat too favourable. The
objection is natural, and, from more than one point of view, is just.
But it seems to me that some at least of those who have dwelt
on this point, have not taken sufficiently into account my pur-
pose in venturing to approach the subject, nor yet its vastness
and complexity. So many Christian writers, as it seemed to
me, had approached Islam only to vilify and misrepresent it,
that it appeared desirable that one who was at least profoundly
impressed with the dignity and importance of the subject,
should, in default of better qualified persons, make an attempt
to treat it, not merely with a cold and distant impartiality, but
even with something akin to sympathy and friendliness. The
defects of Islam are well known ; its merits are almost ignored,
at all events by the great majority of Englishmen. It is not
likely that a Christian and a European will err on the side of
over-appreciation of another, and that an Eastern creed : the
balance, therefore, if perchance it has been held for a moment
unconsciously to myself, with uneven hand, will soon right
itself.
Again, Islam in its various ramifications is a subject so vast
and so complex, and is so full of apparent contradictions, that
independent enquirers may honestly arrive at the most opposite
results. It ought, for this reason, to be approached from as
many and as different points of view as possible ; and assuredly
the precise point of view from which I have approached it,
whether it be the best per se or not, is the one from which
hitherto there has been hardly any attempt to approach it at alL
This, then, is the raiaon d'etre of my book ; to this, in the main,
is doubtless due such favourable reception as it has met with at
the handH of both Musalmans and Christians ; and it is to a
THE SECOND EDITION. ix
want of perception of what this involves that I think I can
trace many criticisms on it. In the treatment of a religious
revolution, which from its mere extent, from what it has achieved,
as well as from what it has failed to achieve, must afford an
ample field alike for exaggerated panegyric and depreciation, he
who endeavours to avoid both extremes must expect to find
fewer thorough-going partisans, and must be willing, or even
anxious, to be criticised by both sides alike.
To say that subsequent study, or that the remarks of my
critics, have only confirmed me in all my views, would of course
be equivalent to saying with Pontius Pilate, that ' what I have
written I have written ; ' a comfortable but a sorry conclusion
to come to, for one who is bound to begin by asking himself
with Pontius Pilate, 'What is truth?' and, unlike him, must
feel himself bound by the most sacred of obligations to keep
his ears always open for the reception of such fragments of the
answer as he may be able from time to time to catch. Some of
my views on matters of detail have been modified ; but, apart
from errors of detail, apart from errors of commission and
omission, apart from short-comings incidental to ignorance at
first hand of Oriental languages and of Musalman countries, I
more and more cherish the earnest hope that the spirit and the
purpose with which I have, at least, tried to approach my sub-
ject is the right spirit, and the right purpose with which to
approach the study of a creed different from one's own.
To dwell on what is good rather than on what is evil ; to search
for points of resemblance rather than of difference ; to use a
relative and an historical judgment in all things ; to point out
what is the out-come of mere human weakness as distinguished
from the flaws in the primal documents of the religion, or in
the life of its founder ; to discriminate between the accidental
and the essential, the transitory and the eternal ; above all,
constantly to turn the mirror in upon oneself, and to try to
make sure that one is complying with that great principle of
Christianity of judging and of treating others as we should
wish ourselves to be judged and treated ; this, I am convinced,
is the only way in which the better spirits of rival creeds can
ever be brought to understand one another, or to sink all their
differences in the consciousness of a likeness which is more
PREFACE TO
fundamental than any difference, and which, if it is not felt
before, will at least be felt hereafter, in
Tliat one far-oflf Divine event
To which the wliole creation moves.
These are the aims I have kept, and will continue to keep,
steadily in view, however imperfectly I have been able or may
yet be able to carry them out.
If the alterations or additions, therefore, I have made to the
text of my Lectures seem less than those high authorities who
have done me the honour of criticising my book have a right
to expect, I would assure them that it is not from any want of
respect to their judgment, or because I have not carefully
weighed their criticisms. The dropping of an epithet, the
addition of a word here or there, the omission of a note, or
the turn of a sentence, will often indicate the silent homage
that I have paid, wherever I could do so, to their superior right
to speak upon the subject. There may be little to show for it,
otherwise than by way of expansion and addition, in the general
aspect and arrangement of the book ; but there is more than
appears at first sight : and, assuredly, the amount of apparent
change hearts no proportion at all to the time and care I have
taken in making it.
And if I have forborne to enlarge my work by dwelling at
length, as I have been asked by some critics to do, upon the
darker side of the picture, the reason is not because I am igno-
rant of that darker side, still less because I am indifferent to it,
but because it would be wholly inconsistent with the end I have
in view. To denounce fundamental conditions of Oriental
society ; to ignore the law of dissolution to which Eastern no
less than Western dynasties are subject ; to confuse the
decadence of a race with that of a creed ; to be blind to the
distinction between progressive and unprogressive, between
civilised and uncivilised peoples ; to judge of a religion mainly
or exclusively by the lives of its professors, often of its most un-
worthy professors ; to forget what of good there has been in the
past, and to refuse to hope for something better in the future, in
despair or in indignation for what is — all this may occasionally be
excusable, or possibly even necessary ; but it cannot be done by
me so long as I think it neither excusable nor nccesHary.
THE SECOND EDITION. xi
The object of these Lectures, therefore, in their revised as
well as in their original shape, is not so much to dwell upon the
degradation of the female sex, for instance, in most Musalman
countries — ^f or that is admitted on all hands — as to show what
Mohammed did, even in his time, to raise the position of women,
and to point out how his consistent and more enlightened fol-
lowers may best follow him now ; not so much to dwell upon
the horrors of the Slave Trade — ^for these, too, are universally
recognised — as to show those Musalmans who still indulge in it
that it forms no part of their creed, that it is opposed alike to
the practice and precept of their Prophet, and that, therefore,
if they are less to blame, they are only less to blame than those
Christians who, in spite of a higher civilisation, and an infinitely
higher example, indulged in it till so late a period. My object
is not so much to dilate on the evils of the appeal to the sword,
still less to excuse it, as to point out that there were moments,
and those late in the life of the warrior Prophet, when even he
could say, ' Unto every one have we given a law and a way ; '
and again, ' Let there be no violence in religion.' My object
is, lastly, not so much to dwell on the fables, and the dis-
crepancies, and the repetitions, and the anachronisms which
form the husk of the Koran, as to show how they sink into
insignificance before the vis viva which is its soul — not so much
to define or to limit inspiration as to indicate by my use of the
word that it cannot, as I think, be limited or defined at all ; to
imply, in fact, that inspiration, in the broadest sense of the
word, is to be found in all the greatest thoughts of man ; for
the workings of God are everywhere, and the spirits of men and
nations are moulded by Him to bring about His purposes of
love, and to give them, in a sense that shall be sufficient for
thorn, a knowledge of Himself. Jn a word, my object is — with
all reverence be it said — not to localise God exclusively in this
or that creed, but to trace Him everywhere in measure ; not
merely to trust Him for what shall be, but to find Him in
what is.
Harrow: ^«/7Msi, 1875.
zu
PREFACE TO
Among the books which, in accordance with the plan pursued
in the First Edition of my work, I would wish to mention here
as having, apart from the special acknowledgments which I have
made in the notes, afforded me assistance in the preparation of
the Second Edition, are the following : —
* Sirat-6r-Racoal ' of Ibn Hishaiu :
Gennan translation, by G. Weil, Stutt-
gart, 11S64; the earliest and most autlien-
tic history of the Prophet, and founded
on a still earlier one, that of Ibn Ishak.
' Hishkat-ul-M asabih ' = ' niche
for lamps :' n collection of the most
authentic traditions re^anling the
actions and sayings of Mohammed,
translated by Captain A. N. Mathews,
Calcutta, 1809. This valuable book is
extremely scarce ; but there is a pros-
pect, if a sufficient immber of subscrib-
ers can be obtained, of a new edition
being brought out by Messrs. Allen
and Co., under the e<litorship of the
Rev. T. P. Huglies, Missionary at
Peshawur.
'History of Mohammedan Dy-
nasties,' by ^Lijor Price, Loudon,
1812 : a voluminous and somewhat
dreary account of the wars and crimes
of Musalman princes, but throwing very
little light on the social ami religious
life of their subjects.
' Histoire des Mnsalmans d'£s-
pagne jusqu'a la Conquete de
I'Andalousie par les Almoravides,
A.D. 711-1110,' by 11. Dozy, Leyden,
1861 ; a work of first-rate historical
importance. The author is equally at
liomi3 in the Arabic literature relating
to Sjiain, and the Spanish literature
relating to the Arabs, and he has cor-
rectetl many of the mistJikes of Condt^.
'Ueber das Verhaltniss des
Islam znm Evangelium,' by Dr. j.
A. -Mohler (183(i), Author of 'The
Sjnjbolik," a most sujrgestive and
thoughtful essay. I am happy to find
that it ha.s Rnticipate<l some of the
conclusions, with regiird to both the
Prophet and the Faith, which I had
set forth in my First Pxlltion, in entire
independence of it.
'Mohammed's Religion nach
ihrer inneren Entwickelnng. and
Uirem Einfltisse, eine historische
Betrachtung,' by Dr. Dolliuger, Ra-
tisbon, 18.38. The dlstinguislie<l author
lias brougiit togetlier the statements of
a large mmiber of travellers, &c., and
has weighe«l them with much ability,
and witli every wish to be impartial or
even generous towards Islam. He seems,
however, at the time when he wrote,
to have been more unable than he would
probably be now, to divest himself of
his eccla^iastical prepossessions, and
condemns, lor instance, Islam for the
alisence of \isible symbols, sacraments,
a priesthoo<l, and even a Pope ; forget-
ting that these things, however essen-
tial to his own creed, may have been,
not sources of strength, but of weak-
ness, to another.
* Essays on the Life of Moham-
med and Subjects subsidiary
thereto,' by Syed Ahmed Khan Balia-
dor, 1870.
' A Critical Examination of the
Life and Teachings of Moham-
med,' by Syod Ameer AH Moulla
(1873). It is satisfactory to find tliat
the hojH; I ventured to express in the
Preface to my First Edition, as to the
sj-mpethy of views and the conciliator}*
spirit of these two learncil Musalman
reformers, has been amply justifie«i by
a study of their works ; and it is difH-
cult not to believe that books like these
point, at however remotes period, to a
better understanding between the best
followers of the two cn»e<l«.
'L'Islamisme d'apres le Coran,
I'Enseignement doctrinal et la
Pratique,' byM.Gan.indeTa«y, l^ris
Tiiinl PIdition, 1874 ; the work of an ao-
complishe«l Orientalist; the most instrno-
tlve and original |iart of the wh.ik' Iteing,
perhaps, the essay on the nuMliflouiions
which Islam has undergone in India.
*La Lanffue et U Litteratore
Hindustaniet,* by M. Q«rvln de Tuny*
a colUx'tion of Leetares delivered
))etwocn the ymrs 18M-187ft ; eiuih
Leotare betng the oommenoement of
THE SECOND EDITION.
Xlll
a course upon Hindustani Literature,
and containing a valuable Review of
the Events that have taken place in
India in the preceding year, with Notices
of the Literal y and Religious Life of
the Natives, which are not to be found
elsewhere.
^ * L' Islam et son Fondateur,
Etude Morale,' by Jules Charles
SchoU, Neuchatel, 1874 ; an able and
candid enquiry, wliicli, though written
from a different point of view to mine,
often arrives at somewhat similar con-
clusions.
* Necessary Reforms of Mussal-
man States,' by General Kheredine,
Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign
Affairs at Tunis ; Athens, 1874 ; interest-
ing in itself, and doulaly interesting
owing to the quarter from which it
comes, as showing that India is not the
only Musalman country where the ' Mo-
hammedan social and political reformer '
is at work.
' Notes on Mohammedanism,' by
the Rev. T. P. Hughes, Missionary at
Peshawur, 1875. A valuable compen-
dium of facts. The author has studied
Islam both theoretically and practically ;
and though lie uses the stock phrases
'imposture,' 'would-be Propliet,' &c.,
with ominous frequency, he does more
justice than most of those, whose duty
it is to argue with Mohammedans, to the
character of tlie Prophet.
In Periodical Literature : —
' Mahometanism,' an able, thought-
ful, and generous article in the ' Chris-
tian Remembrancer ' for January, 1855,
which has been reprinted in a separate
form by its author, Dr. Cazenove.
Among Books of Travel, Essays, &c., throwing light on dif-
ferent periods or different parts of the Mohammedan World : —
'Travels of Marco Polo,' trans- 'Travels in Central Asia,' by
lated and Eilited by Col. Yule, with
copious illustrations, Second Edition,
1871.
'Travels of Ibn Batuta,' trans-
lated by Rev. S. Lee, 1829.
'Travels in the Interior Dis-
tricts of Africa,' by Mungo Park,
1810.
'Turkey, Greece, and Malta,'
by Adolphus Slade, R.N., 1837.
'The Spirit of the East,' byD.
Urquhart, 18.38.
' Christianity in Ceylon,' by sir
J. Emerson Tenneiit., 1850.
' Nestorians and their Rituals,'
by Rev. G-. P. Badger, 1852.
'Nineveh and Babylon,' by A.
H. Layard, 1853.
'The Ansayrii, or Assassins,'
by Hon. F. Walpole, 1854.
' Memoires de I'Histoire Orien-
tale,' by M. C. Defremery, 1854.
' Nouvelles Recherches sur les
Ismaeliens dc Syrie,' by if. c.
Defremery, 1855.
'Travels in Central Asia,
Arminius Vambery, 1861.
' Monasteries of the Levant,' by
Hon. R. Curzon, Fifth Edition, 1865.
' East and West, Essays by dif-
ferent hands,' 18G5.
'History of India,' by Joim Clark
Marshman, 1867.
'Sketches of Central Asia,' by
Arminius Vambery, 1868.
' The People of Africa— Essays,'
New York, 1871.
' Journey to the Source of the
OZUS,' by Lieutenant Wood, New Edi-
tion, 1872.
'African Sketch-Book,' by Win-
wood Reade, 1873.
' History of India,' by J. Taiboys
Wheeler, Vol. III., 1874.
' Women of the Arabs,' by Rev.
H. Jessup, 1874.
' Literary Bemains of Emanuel
Deutsch,' 1874.
xiv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Notf:. — In the absence, as yet, of any thorough consensus
among Oriental scholars as to the details of transliteration, I
have thought it desirable to retain the ordinary spelling in such
words as Mohammed, Koran, Sura, Mecca, Medina, rather than
adopt the more accurate Muhammad, Kuran, Surah, Makkah,
Madyna. With words less universally known, such as Koreishites,
Hegira, Mussulman, Sheeah, Sonna, &c., though I have not
thought it necessary to use accents, I have adopted the more
correct forms of Kuraish, Hijrah, Musalman, Shiah, Sunni,
&c.
PEEFACE
/id
TO
THE FIRST EDITION.
The substance of these Lectures was written early in 1872 :
they were originally intended only for a select audience of
friends at Harrow, but, on the suggestion of some of those who
heard them, they were afterwards considerably enlarged, and
were delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain
in the months of February and March 1874,
They are an attempt, however imperfect, within a narrow
compass, but, it is hoped, from a somewhat comprehensive and
independent point of view, to render justice to what was great
in Mohammed's character, and to what has been good in
Mohammed's influence on the world. To original Oriental
research they lay no claim, nor indeed to much originality at
all ; perhaps the subject hardly now admits of it ; but, thanks
to the numerous translations of the Koran into European
languages, and to the great works of Oriental scholars,
such as Caussin de Perceval, Sprenger, Muir, and Deutsch,
the materials for forming an impartial judgment of the
Prophet of Arabia are within the reach of any earnest
student of the Science of Religion, and of all who care, as
those who have ever studied Mohammed's character must care,
for the deeper problems of the human soul.
The value of the estimate formed of the influence of Moham-
medanism on the world at large must, of course, depend upon
a2
xvi PREFACE TO
such a modicum of general historical knowledge, and such
Catholic sjTnpathies, as the writer has been able, amidst other
pressing duties, to bring to his work. The only qualification he
would venture to claim for himself in the matter is that of a
sympathetic interest in his subject, and of a conscientious desire
first to divest himself of all preconceived ideas, and then by a
careful study of the Koran itself, and afterwards of its best
expounders, tt arrive as nearly as may be at the truth. How
vast is the interval between his wishes and his performance the
author knows full well, and any one who has ever been fairly
fascinated with a great subject will know also ; for he will have
felt that to have the will is not always to have the power, and
that the framing of an ideal implies the consciousness of failure
to attain to it.
A Christian who retains that paramount allegiance to Chris-
tianity which is his birthright, and yet attempts, without favour
and without prejudice, to portray another religion, is inevitably
exposed to misconstruction. In the study of his subject he will
have been struck sometimes by the extraordinary resemblance
between his own creed and another, sometimes by the sharpness of
the contrast ; and, in order to avoid those misrepresentations, which
are, unfortunately, never so common as where they ought to be
unknown, in the discussion of religious questions, — he will be
tempted, in filling in the portrait, to project his own personal
predilections on the canvas, and to bring the differences into full
relief, while he leaves the resemblances in shadow. And yet a
comparison between two systems, if it is to have any fruitful
results, if its object is to unite rather than divide, if, in short,
it is to be of the spirit of the Founder of Christianity, must,
in matters of religion above all, be based on what is common to
both. There is, in the human race, in spite of their manifold
diversities, a good deal of human nature ; enough, at all events,
to entitle us to assume that the Founders of any two religious
systems which have had a great and continued hold upon a
large part of mankind must have had many points of contact.
Accordingly, in comparing, as he has done to some extent, the
founder of Islam with the Founder of Christianity — a compa-
rison which, if it were not expressed, would always be implied
— the author of these Lectures has thought it right mainly to
THE FIRST EDITION. xvii
dwell on that aspect of the character of Christ, which, being
admitted by Musalmans as well as Christians, by foes as well
as friends, may possibly serve as a basis, if not for an ultimate
agreement, at all events for an agreement to differ from one
another upon terms of greater sympathy and forbearance, of
understanding and of respect.
That Islam will ever give way to Christianity in the East,
however much we may desire it, and whatever good would
result to the world, it is difficult to believe ; but it is certain
that Mohammedans may learn much from Christians and yet
remain Mohammedans, and that Christians have something at
least to learn from Mohammedans, which will make them not less
but more Christian than they were before. If we would conquer
Nature, we must first obey her ; and the Fourth Lecture is an
attempt to show, from a full recognition of the facts of Nature
underlying both religions — of the points of difference as well
as of resembance — that Mohammedanism, if it can never
become actually one with Christianity, may yet, by a process of
mutual approximation and mutual understanding, prove its best
ally. In other words, the author believes that there is a unity
above and beyond that unity of Christendom which, properly
understood, all earnest Christians so much desire ; a unity
which rests upon the belief that 'the children of one Father
may worship Him under different names ; ' that they may be
influenced by one spirit, even though they know it not ; that
they may all have one hope, even if they have not one faith.
Harrow : April 15, 1873.
I have to return my best thanks to my friend Mr. Arthur
Watson, for a careful revision of my manuscript, and for
several valuable suggestions.
It may be serviceable to English readers to mention the more
accessible works upon the subject, to the writers of which I
desire here to express my general obligations, over and above
the acknowledgment, in the text, wherever I am conscious of
them, of special debts. I am the more anxious to do this fully
xvm
PREFACE TO
here, as, while I am quite aware that I could not have written
on this subject at all without making their labours the basis of
mine, I have yet in the exercise of my own judgment been
often obliged to criticise their reasonings and their conclusions.
I can only hope that even where I have ventured to express a
somewhat vehement dissent from my authorities, they will
kindly credit me with something at least of the verecunde
dissentio, which becomes a learner, and of the zeal for truth,
or for his idea of it, which becomes a writer, however diffident
of himself, on a great subject.
* The Koran,' translated by Sale,
with an elaborate Introduction and full
Notes drawn from the Arabic Commen-
tators (1734).
' The Koran,' translated by Savarj-
(1782), also with instructive explanatory
Notes.
'The Koran,' translated by Rod-
well (1861) : the Suras arranged, as far
as possible, chronologically, with an
excellent Introduction and concise Notes.
Oagnier's Vie de Uahomet'
(1732) ; drawn chiefly from Abul Fe<ia
and tlie Sonna.
Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of
the Eoman Empire ; ' Chapters l.,
LI., LII. (1788). A most masterly and
complete picture.
Weil's ' Mohamed der Prophet '
(1845), Able and to the point.
Caussin de Perceval's 'Essai
snr I'Histoire des Arabes,' &c.
(1847) gives particularly full informa-
tion upon the obscure subject of early
Arabian bistory and literature, and is
written from an absohitely neutral point
of view.
Sprenger's 'Life of Mohammed,'
Alliiliubad, 1851 ; and liis Krcjitcr work,
'Das Leben nnd die Lehre des
Mohamad' (1851-1861), the most ex-
haustive, original, and learned of all,
but by no means tlie most imi^rtlal ;
he is often, as I shall point out, on one
or two occasions, in the notes, flagrantly
unfair to Mohammed.
Sir William Muir's ' Life of
Mahomet' (1858-1861). Leametl and
comprehensive, able and fair ; though
its scientific value is somewhat impaired
by theological assumptions as to the
nature of inspiration, and by the intro-
duction of a jKjrsonal Aliriman, which,
while it is self-contradictory in its sup-
posed operation, seems to me only to
create new difficulties, instead of solving
old ones.
' The Talmud,' «» article in the
'Quarterly Review' (October, 1867);
' Islam,' a" article in the 'Quarterly
Review ' (Octo»)er, 1869); two most bril-
liant essays. Had the lanientt>d autlior
lived to finisli the work he shadowed
forth in the last of tl ose, he would
prolMibly have dniwn a more vivid pic-
ture of Islam as a wliole tlinn has ever
yet bwn given to tlio worhl.
THE FIRST EDITION.
XIX
For less elaborate works : —
Ockley's 'History of the Sara-
cens from 632-706.' Picturesque;
dealing largely in romance (1708-1718).
Hallam's 'Middle Ages,' Chap-
ter VI. (1818); Milman's 'Latin
Christianity,' Book IV., Chapters I.
and II. (1857) ; both good samples of
the high merits of each as an historian.
Carlyle's ' Hero as Prophet '
(1846). Most stimulating.
Washington Irving' s ' Life of
Mahomet' (1849). The work of a
novelist, but strangely divested of all
romance.
- Lecture by Dean Stanley in his
' Eastern Church ' (1862). Has the
peculiar charm of all the author's
writings. Catholic in its sympathies,
and suggestive, as well from his treat-
ment of the subject as from the place
the author assigns to it on the borders
of, if not within, the Eastern Church
itself.
Barthelemy St.-Hilaire's 'Ma-
homet et le Koran' (1865), a com-
prehensive and very useful review of
most of what has been written on the
subject.
On the general subject of Comparative Eeligion : —
'Religions of the World,' byF.
D. Maurice (1846). Perhaps of all his
writings the one whicli best shows us
the character and mind of the man.
' Etudes d'Histoire Eeligieuse,'
by Renan (1858). Ingenious and fasci-
nating, but not always, nor indeed often,
convincing.
'Les Religions et les Philoso-
phies dans I'Asie Centrale,' by
Gobineau (1866), gives the best account
extent of B,ibyism in Persia.
Chips from a German Work-
shop' (1868), and 'Introduction to
the Science of Religion ' (1873), by
Max MilUer. Unfortunately the author
says very little about Mohammedanism,
but from him I have derived some very
valuable suggestions as to the general
treatment of the subject. Perhaps it is
well that the learning and genius of
Professor Max Miiller should be given
mainly to subjects which are less within
the reach of ordinary European students
than is Islam, but it is impossible not to
wish that he may some day give the
world a ' Chip ' or two on the Religion
of Mohammed.
For books which throw light on the specialities of Moham-
medanism in different countries : —
Al-Makkari's 'History of the
Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain '
(Eng. Trans,).
Sir John Malcolm's ' History of
Persia,' 1815.
Conde's 'History of the Domi-
nion of the Arabs in Spain '
(1820-21).
Crawfurd's ' Indian Archipel-
ago' (1820).
Colonel Briggs'
Mohammedan Po'
Rise of the
*ower in India,'
translated from the Persian of Perishta
(1829).
Sir Stamford Raffles' 'History
of Java ' (2nd edition), (1830).
• Burckhardt's 'Travels in Ara-
bia ' (1829).
Caille's 'Travels through Cen-
tral Africa to Timbuctoo ' (1830).
PREFACE TO
Burckhardt's ' Notes on the
Bedouins and Wah-Habees' (1831).
Lane's ' Modern Egyptians '
(1836).
Burton's ' Pilgrimage to Mecca
and Medina' (i856).
Barth's 'Travels in Central
Africa' (1857).
Waitz's ' Anthropologie der
Naturvblker ' (Leipsig, i860).
Lane's 'Notes to his Transla-
tion of the Thousand and One
Nights ' ( new edition, edited by B. S.
Poole, 1865).
Elphinstone's ' History of India *
(3rd edition), (1866;.
Palgrave's 'Arabia' (Ihot).
Hunter's ' Indian Mussulmans *
(1871).
Shaw's ' High Tartary, Yar-
kand, and Kashgar' (1871).
Burton's 'Zanzibar' (1872).
Palgrave's 'Essays on Eastern
Subjects' (1872).
' Keport of the General Mis-
sionary Conference at Allahabad '
(1873).
Three articles in Periodical Literature, besides ' Islam ' men-
tioned above, are of very high merit, and have furnished me,
in enlarging my work, with some matter for reflection or criti-
cism : —
' Mahomet,' ' National Review' (July 1858).
* The Great Arabian,' 'National Review ' (October 1861).
' Mahomet)' ' British Quarterly Review ' (January 1872).
Among other works which I regret I have not been able to
consult may be mentioned : —
Gerock's 'Versuch einer Dar-
stellung der Christologie des
Koran ' (Homburg, 1839).
Freeman's 'Lectures on the
History and Conquests of the
Saracens' (1856).
Geiger's ' Was hat Mohammed
aus dem Judenthume aufgenom-
menV
Noldeke's ' Geschichte des
Qorans.'
' Essays on the Life of Moham-
med and subjects subsidiary
thereto,' by Syod Ahmeil Khan Baha-
dor, 1870.
' A Critical Examination of the
Life and Teachings of Moham-
med,' by Syed Ameer Ali Moulla
(1873).
The last two books I had not heard of when I wrote the
substance of these Lectures ; and, in enlarging my work, I have
purposely abstained from consulting them, as I have been given
THE FIRST EDITION.
to understand that from a Mohammedan point of view they
advocate something of the spirit, and arrive at some of the
results, which it had been my object to urge from the Christian
stand-point. I would not, of course, venture to compare my
own imperfect work, derived as it is in the main from the study
of books in the European languages, and from reflection upon
the materials they supply, with works drawn, as I presume,
directly from the fountain-head. But if the starting-points be
different, and the routes entirely independent of each other,
and yet there turns out to be a similarity in the results arrived
at, possibly each may feel greater confidence that there is some-
thing of value in his conclusions.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I.
Introductory.
Comparative Religion. — Historical Keligions of the world moral in
their origin, rather than theological. — Judaism — Buddhism —
Christianity. — Religion in Greece — Question of originality of Mo-
hammedanism. — Two views of Religion. — Obscurity of all origins,
above all of Religion — 'Dim knowledge of Founders of other
Religions — Full knowledge of Mohammed. — Bible and K OTan man-
trasted. — Difficult in other creeds to distinguish the foundation from
the superstructure ; possible in Islam.r— Problems connected with
Mohammed's character. — Survey of the Saracen Conquests, and of
what Mohammedanism overthrew. — Its position now — is it losing
or gaining ground ? — China — East Indian Archipelago — America —
Africa — Extraordinary success of its missionaries there now. — Its
progress in the African continent traced historically. — Spreads even
into European settlements. — Wliat it^has done for Africa, intel-
lectually and morally ; and what Christians have done. — Testimony
of Mungo Park, Barth, Blyden. — Islam a comparative benefit.— Its
probable future in Africa — Armenia and Kurdistan, Revival there. —
India ; few, if any, converts to Christianity. — Supreme importance
of the subject to England, yet ignorance or indifEerencfe. — Causes
ordinarily suggested for its success reviewed. — National and Re-
xxiv CONTENTS.
ligious prejudices stand in way of a fair judgment. — Principles
which must guide investigation. — Do Keligions differ in kind ? —
Sacred Books and their influence. — Missionary work ; its limits
and legitimate objects. — Can the world be Christianised ? PAGE 1 ,
LECTURE II.
Mohammed.
History of Opinion about Mohammed : — the Troubadours — the Middle
Ages — Marco Polo — The Reformers — the Catholics — Biblical Com-
mentators — Alexander Ross — Englishmen generally. — Reaction —
Gagnier — Sale — Gibbon — Carlyle — other modern writers. —
Arabia before M ohammed — its social condition — Immobility. —
Characteristics, of Desert.— Virtues of the Arabs — contentment —
Liberty, national and individual — Tribal attachment — Poverty —
Hixpitiilit y — A[>i)Ctitc for pluiKkM' — Way — Kiiiglitly chivalryand
courtes y — -Poetry — Vices ui" the Arabs — llevenge — Drunkenness-
Gambling — Infanticide — Degradation of Women — unlimited Poly-
gamy a^TTC^^e — no ri;j^hts of pi'opcrty — Arab proverbs — Reli-
gions of Arabia — Judaisui — Cliristianity — ilow far living faiths? —
Sabaeanism — Magianism — Fcii-h-\\Miship — The Kaabaand its con-
tents — Human sacrifice — Divination — Superstitions — Could Mo-
hammedanism have been predicted ? — Was it the voice of the spirit
of the time, or of individual Religious Genius ? — Moral and National
upheaval — pre-Mohammedans. — Youth of Mohammed — A shepherd
— A Camel-driver — his call to be Prophet, and its phenomena —
marriage to Khadijah — religious temperament — theory of imposture
— his long struggles. — Speech of exiles to the Nagashy of Abyssinia,
and its importance — the Hijrah — Cliange in conditions of life
henceforward — would it have been well if he had died on Mount
Thor, for himself? — ^for the world?— Sincerity of Mohammed ex-
amined — his personal characteristics — the prophetic office — Mo-
hammed's life at Medina — his faults — his marriages, their possible
explanations — his supposed moral declension examined — ^was he
CONTENTS.
voluptuous ? — cruel ? — consistent ? — Privileges of a Prophet among
the Jews — Did he use the Koran for his private purposes? — Illus-
trations — the exact nature and limits of his mission — Illustrations
—his death PAGE 63
LECTURE III.
I
Mohammedanism.
Essence of Mohammedanism — Unity of God — Submission to God's
will — claims to be universal — how far borrowed from Jews — Juda-
ism and Christianity as known to Arabs — Mohammedanism a
misnomer — ilission of Mohammed — Compared with that of
' Moses — Other articles of Faith — Practical duties enjoined — Prayer
— Almsgiving — Fasting — Pilgrimage, its use and abuse — How far
alien in reality to Mohammedanism and to Christianity — History
of the Kaaba — the Hajj — Dictum of Dr. Deutsch, — The Talmud
and its influence.— Mohammed's concessiojis to the Jews, and his
efforts to gain them over. — Why he failed. — Supposed prophecies
about Mohammed in the Bible. — The Koran — its characteristics —
its history — influence — variety — poetry — theology — morality — the
Prophet's fits of inspiration. —Relation of Mohammed to Miracles,
compared with that of Christ. — The Miraculous generally. —
Religion. — Fatalism. — What the Koran says. — What has been
drawn from it. — Opposite effects of the same doctrine — Moham-
med's views of Prayer, Predestination, and Free Will.— Wars of
Islam — an essential part of the system or not ] — how accounted for.
— Connection of the Spiritual and Temporal Power — in Eastern
Christendom — in Western Christendom — and in Islam. — Character
of early Mohammedan Wars— Religious enthusiasm — the Crusades.
—Character and gloomy results of later Mohammedan conquests. —
The Ottoman Turks— their national character — vices and virtues —
What Europeans have done for them — what allowance is to be
made for them and for their misgovernment — not essential to Islam
now, whatever they were once— results of early Mohammedan
xxvi CONTENTS.
conquests — Literature — Science — and Civilisation— the Prophet's
own view of learning, and that of his followers — Attitude of
Christianity and Christians towards Religious wars — Morality of
war. — What wars are Christian . _ - . page 132
LECTUBE IV.
Mohammedanism and Cheistianity.
The Future Life of Mohammedanism — of other Religions. — Use Mo-
hammed made of Heaven and Hell — their legitimate use. — Does
Mohammedanism encourage self-indulgence ? — Morality of Moham-
medanism. — Mohammed's attitude towards existing institutions
compared with that of other Founders— Solon — Moses— Christ. —
How Islam dealt with Polygamy — Divorce — Women generally —
Slavery — Caste, as illustrated by Arabia, India— Africa. — How it
dealt with Orphans— the poor — the insane— origin of lunatic
asylums — the lower animals — moral offences, drunkenness and
gambling. — How then ought Christianity to reganl Moliammedan-
ism ? — How does it ? — Three Monotheistic creeds — Heroes common
to all — Spirituality of each.— Mohammed and Moses compared. —
Iconoclasm. — Absence of priestcraft and ritual, yet great success
in proselytising — reverence for Christ, and sympathy for Christians
— three reasons suggested for Mohammed's rejection of Christianity.
— Mohammed's views of Christ— of the Virgin Mary— of the
Trinity— of the Crucifixion^-of God. — Lessons to be learnt from
them. — Has Mohammedanism kept back the East by hindering the
spread of Christianity ? — Is it a curse or blessing to the world at
large ?— Limits of Mohammedanism and of Christianity. — A8i)ect8
of Mohammedanism in different countries — Africa — Spain — Sicily
— Turkey — Persia— India — Contrast between Christianity and Mo-
hammedanism and their founders. — Is the East progressive or not 1
— Corruptions of Moliammedanism — Evils more or less rife in
Musalman countries, e.g. Religious feuds, Fatnlinm, disregaixl of
human life, and of humanity in punishments— degradation of
CONTENTS.
women. — Judicial corruption — misgovernment and consequent
stagnation or decay — unbridled despotism — conquests of Christian
Powers — do these evils imply that the religion is dead ? — Illus-
trations from history of Christendom — the other side of the question
— inhabitants of Asia Minor — ^Wonderful power of Islam — Neces-
sity of Eevival in all religions — Wahhabis in Arabia and India —
revival in Eastern Anatolia — Maintenance of Ottoman supremacy
in Europe not necessary to Islam — Russian conquests in Asia not
fatal to it — Russian conquests do not spread a living Christianity —
Eastern Christians, their strength and weakness — ^Limits to the
influence of the West on the East — Despotism — Polygamy —
slavery — the slave-trade — condemned by Islam and by all religions
— mistakes of travellers and missionaries on this head — Is Moham-
medanism reconcilable with Civilisation 1 — With Christianity 1 —
Modifications possible or necessary. — Mohammed's place in His-
tory PAGE 188
Appendix to Lectuee I. - - • - - » 293
Appendix to Lectuee III. „ 301
Index ,,305
LECTURES
DELIVERED AT THE
ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN
FEBKTJAKY and MAKCH 1874.
MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
LECTURE I.
Delivered at the Koyal Institution.
February 14, 1874.
INTRODUCTORY.
Sua cuique genti religio est, nostra nobis. — CiCERO.
*A\\' kv TTavTi iOvei 6 tpojioviisvoQ avrbv, xal epyai:i6fi£vog SiKaioffvvrjv,
dsKTOQ avT^ e(TTi, — St. Peter.
The Science of Comparative Religion is still in its
infancy ; and if there is one danger more than
another against which it should be on its guard, it is
that of hasty and ill-considered generalisation. Hasty
generalisation is the besetting temptation of all young
Sciences ; may I not say of Science in general ?
They are in too great a hurry to justify their exist-
ence by arriving at results which may be generally
intelligible, instead of waiting patiently till the result
shapes itself from the premises ; as if, in the pursuit
of truth, the chase was not always worth more than
the game and the process itself more than the result !
Theory has, it is true, its advantages, even in a young
A
2 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Science, in the way of suggesting a definite line which
enquiry may take. A brilliant hypothesis formed;
not by random guesswork, but by the trained
imagination of the man of Science, or by the true
divination of genius, enlarges the horizon of the
student whom the limits of the human faculties them-
selves drive to be a specialist, but who is apt to
become too much so. It throws a flood of light upon
a field of knowledge which was before, perhaps, half
in shadow, bringing out each object in its relative
place, and in its true proportions ; finally, it gathers
scattered facts into one focus, and explaining them
provisionally by a single law, it makes an appeal to
the fancy, which must react on the other mental
powers, and be a most powerful stimulus to further
research. In truth, much that is now demonstrated
fact was once hypothesis, and would never have been
demonstrated unless it had been first assumed. But
since there are few Keplers in the world — men ready
to sacrifice, without hesitation, a hypothesis that had
seemed to explain the universe, and become, as it
were, a part of themselves, the moment that the facts
seem to require it — great circumspection will always
be needed lest the facts may be made to bend to the
theory, instead of its being modified to meet them.
Bearing this- caution in mind, we may, perhaps,
think that the Science of Comparative Religion,
young as it is, has yet been in existence long enough
to enable us to lay it down, at all events provisionally,
as a general law, that all the great religions of the
world, the commencement of which has not been
immemorial, coeval that is -with the human mind it-
self, have been in the first instance moral rather than
ORIGIN OF RELIGION, MORAL.
theological ; they have been called into existence to
meet social and national needs ; they have raised
man gradually towards God, rather than brought
down God at once to man.
Judaism, for instance, sprang into existence at the
moment when the Israelites passed, and because they
passed, from the Patriarchal to the Political life,
when from slavery they emerged into freedom, when
they ceased to be a family, and became a nation. ' I
am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the
land of Egypt, and out of the house of bondage.'
The Moral Law which followed, the Theocracy itself,
was the outcome of this fundamental fact. The
nation that God has chosen, nay, that He has called
into existence, is to keep His laws and to be His
people. Consequently, all law to the ancient Hebrew
was alike Divine, whether written, as he believed, by
the finger of God on two tables, or whether applied
by the civil magistrate to the special cases brought
before him. Moral and political offences are thus
offences against God, and the ideas of crime and sin
are identical alike in fact and in thought.
Again, take a glance at the religion of Buddha.
We speak of Buddhism, and are apt to think of it
chiefly as a body of doctrine, drawn up over two
thousand years ago, and at this day professed by four
hundred and fifty millions of human beings ; and we
wonder, as well we may, how a suminu7n bonum of
mere painlessness in this world, and practically, and
to the ordinary mind, of total extinction when this
world is over, can have satisfied the spiritual cravings
of Buddha's contemporaries ; and, in its various forms,
can now be the life-guidance of a third of the human
4 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
race.* But we forget that, in its origin at least,
Buddhism was more of a social than of a religious
reformation. It was an attack upon that web of
priestcraft which Brahmanism had woven round the
whole frame-work of Indian society.* It was the
levelling of caste distinctions, the sight of a ' man
bom to be a king' throwing off his royal dignity,
sweeping away the sacerdotal mummeries which he
had himself tested, and found unfruitful, preferring
poverty to riches, and Sudras to Brahmans. It was
Buddha's overpowering sense of the miseries of sin,
his dim yearnings after a better life, his moral system
of which the sum is Love, which wrought upon the
hearts of his hearers.' * He founded, it is true, a new
religion, but he began by attacking an old.' He
* To Boddha himBelf and to his immediate disciples, it is now
nearly certain that Nirvftna meant, not the cessation of being, but
its perfection. Many of his followers in all afpcs hare, no doubt,
developed one side of his teaching) only on this subject ; but there
arc not a few who know, as a friendly critic, the Rev. John Hoare,
on the hijfh authority of Mr. Beal, has i)oiiite«l out to me, that on
the last night which their master siwnt on earth he is said to have
held high oonyene with his disciples, much after the manner of
Socrates in the Phaxlo, on the future life ; and that a Sfitra stil
remaiuH in which the four characterintics of Nirv&na arc said to be
personality, purity, happiness, and etcniity.
* See Max MUller*s •Chips from a German Workshop.' vol. I.,
210-226, especially p. 220; ami S|}encc Hanly's 'Legends and
Theories of the Buddhists,* Introduction, p. 13-20. CI also Beal's
*Bnddhist IMlgrima,* Introduction, p. 49, scq.
* See in ' Travels of Maroo Polo,* translated by Colonel Yule (II.
SOO.seq.)* the remarkable story of the ilcvotion of Sakya Muni t<i an
Moetic life, as a preliminary to all that followed. 'Had he been a
Christian,' says the good Venetian, ' he would have been a great saint
of oar \jnx\\ Jesus (*hrist, to good and purt; w*as the life he led.* See
also Colonel Yule's notes im lor., and Mr. Talboys H'heeler's ' History
of IiMlia,' vol. 1 1 1., chap. Hi.
JUDAISM AND BUDDHISM.
reconstructed society first, and it was his social reform
that led to his religion, rather than his religion which
involved his social reconstruction. The half we
may, perhaps, think would have been more than the
whole —
' Quiiesivit coelo lucem ingemuitque reperti.'
Nor is it much otherwise with Christianity itself.
Christ was before all things the Founder of a new
Society ; not, it is true, of a political Society : had it
been so, more of His countrymen would have seen in
His person the Messiah that was to come, and in His
kingdom the golden age of their own poets and
prophets. The political frame-work, indeed, of the
world Christ came neither to destroy, nor to recon-
struct, except indirectly and remotely. He recognised
the logic of facts ; above all, the tremendous logic of
the Roman Empire. Tribute was to be paid to
Caesar, even though that Caesar was a Tiberius. The
new Society was potentially a world-wide one, a vast
democracy in which Jew and Roman, slave and free-
man, rich and poor were on a footing of absolute
equality. Enthusiastic love to Christ Himself, evi-
denced by purity of heart, by forgetfulness of self, and
by enthusiastic love to all mankind, was the one
condition and the one test of membership. He who
would serve God should first serve his fellow-creatures,
and he who with singleness of mind should serve
them best should be the least unworthy member of
the new brotherhood.
It is true, that to this new Creation of His, Christ
gives a name, which we are accustomed to look upon
as conveying mainly theological ideas ; He calls it
6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
* the Kingdom of Heaven,' but how does he explain
the temi Himself? His great precursor, John the
Baptist, had predicted its immediate advent. Christ
says, It is here already, it is withiii you. At the
very opening of His work. He speaks of it as already
existing ; the outline was there, even if the details
were not filled in. Now if the Kingdom of Heaven
existed before it had dawned, even upon the most
favoured of His followers, that he was more than
' that Prophet,' it would seem to follow that the
essence of His Kingdom was, not the doctrine which
they did not and could not as yet accept, but the
higher life they saw Christ leading, the life of the
soul ; and which, seeing, they reverenced, and reve-
rencing, as far as might be, wished to imitate. The
Sermon on the Mount, so far as that which is inde-
scribable can be described at all, and that which is
the fountain head of goodness in infinitely varied
types can be judged by one or two of the rills which
issue from it, is little else than Christ's own life trans-
lated into words ; and those who, least imperfectly,
re-translated His words back into their own lives,
were the very *salt of the earth.' They were
members of the Kingdom of Heaven, even though
they did not believe, as some did not even to the end,
that He who ^ spake as never man spake ' was some-
thing more than man.
If we go back to the ipsissima verba, so far as we
can now get at them, of Christ Himself, how much
of the doctrine that we are apt to attribute to Christ,
we shall find to be Pauline — how much more Patristic,'
Scholastic, Puritan ! How little dogma, and how mucl\
morality, there is in the Founder of our religion ; how
CHUr^TIANJTY.
few words, and how many works ; how little about
consequences, how much about motives ; in a word,
how little theology, and how much religion ! I do not
of course mean to deny that Moses, Buddha, Christ
Himself were founders of a theology as well as of a
life ; I only say that the life came first, since it was
that which was most called for by the time, and it w^as
their new views of life which prepared their followers
to receive and develope their new views of God. ' If
any man will do His will, he shall know of the doc-
trine whether it be of God.' ' He that loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God
whom he hath not seen .' ' ^ Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God.'
I am aware that distinguished German philoso-
phers. Professor Max Miiller among them,' have laid
it down that men cannot form themselves into a people
till they have come to an agreement about their reli-
gion, and that community of faith is a bond of union
more fundamental than any other bond at all. But
I do not think that if the distinction which I have drawn
between the primeval and the historical Religions of
the world be kept in sight, there is much necessary
antagonism between their view and mine ; that a new
religion is, in order of time, the outcome and not the
cause of a general movement towards a higher life,
whether moral or national. Religion is, no doubt,
practically all that they say it is, a tie so strong that
it can give an ideal unity, as it did in Greece, to tribes
dilFering from one another in degrees of civilisation,
in interests and in dialect ; but it does not follow that
it was historically ever the original moving power in
' ' Introduction to the Science of Keligiou/ Lecture [11., 144-153.
8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
the aggregation of scattered tribes, or that a new
religion was at first a revelation of God rather than
a revelation of morality. There must have been
a previous community of race and language for the
religion to work upon; there must also have been
a strong, though very possibly an ill-directed and a
desultory upheaval of society. The fragments still
existing of the primeval creed are no doubt a factor
in that upheaval, and feel its force ; but the new
religion is the result and not the cause of the general
movement. It is not till later that it pays the debt
it owes to what gave it birth, by lending a higher
sanction to each institution of the new society, and so
does in truth become, what philosophers say it is, the
most important bond in a national life. First the as-
pirations, then that which satisfies them ! First a new
conception of the relation of men to one another,
then that conception sanctioned, vivified, lit up by the
newly perceived relation of all alike to God !
I would also remark that Greece itself, though
Professor Max Miiller appeals to it in favour of his
own conclusions, seems to supply an argument in
favour of my view. For even in the Persian wars the
common danger and the common hatred of the ' Bar-
barian ' failed to bring about more than a very tran-
sitory coalition between two or three of the leading
states. The ideal unity of the Greek races was only
an ideal, and Panhellenism never went so far as
to unite the different states into a homogeneous
people. If there had been a real and spontaneous
movement among the autonomous cities of Greece
towards centralisation, a great reformer might have
taken advantage of it, and working upon the * dim
RELIGION IN GREECE.
recollection of the common allegiance they owed
from time immemorial to the great Father of Gods
and men, the old Zeus of Dodona, the Panhellenic
Zeus/ ' have welded the fragments into a nation.
The One would not merely have been dimly discerned
behind the Many by the highest minds, but the per-
ception would have been converted into a practical
reality. The intellectual mission of Socrates might
have taken something of the shape, and realised
something of the results of the mission of Mohammed.
But there was no such national movement in Greece,
and therefore no opportunity either for the birth of a
new religion or a revival of the old one. In Greek
Polytheism we see historically nothing but decay.
Mythology thus early had overgrown Religion, and
the gross stories of Homer and of Hesiod which so
scandalised Socrates and Plato, had, even in their
time, concealed from all but the highest minds the
vague primitive belief, common probably to the
whole Indo-Germanic race, in one Father who is in
Heaven.
To what extent the principle I have laid down as
to the origin of the three great historical religions, is
also true of that of Mohammed, will develope itself
gradually in the sequel.
It has been remarked, indeed, by writer after
writer, that Islam is less interesting than other reli-
gions, inasmuch as it is less original. And this is one
of the favourite charges brought against it by Chris-
tian apologists. In the first place, I am inclined to
think that the charge of want of originality, though it
cannot be denied, has been overdone by recent writers ;
' * Science of Religion,' p. 148.
10 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
most conspicuously so by M. Renan, who, ingenious
and beautiful as his Essay is, seems disposed to ex-
plain the whole fabric of Islam by the ideas that
existed before Mohammed ; and the political direction
given to it by his successors, most notably by Omar ;
in fact, it seems to me that the only element left out,
or not accounted for, in his analysis of Mohammeda-
nism, is Mohammed himself. His Mohammedanism
resembles a Hamlet with not only the Prince of Den-
mark, but with Shakespeare himself cut out. The
disjointed members and some few elements of the
fabric remain ; about as much as we should have of
the Hamlet of Shakespeare in the Amlettus of Saxo-
Grammaticus ; but the informing, animating, inspiring
soul is wanting.
It is undeniable that a vague and hearsay acquaint-
ance with the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the
New Testament, and the undefined religious cravings
of a few of his immediate predecessors, or contempo-
raries, influenced Mohammed much, and traces of
them at second hand may be found in every other
page of the Koran ; but then, in the second place, it
may be asked whether want of originality is any
reproach to a religion ; for what is religion ?
It is that something, which, whether it is a collec-
tion of shadows projected by the mind itself upon the
mirror of the external world, explaining the Macro-
cosm by the Microcosm, and invested with a reality
which belongs only to the mind that casts them, if
indeed even to that, or whether it is indeed an insight
of the soul into realities which exist independently of
it, and which underlie alike the world of sense and
the world of reason ; — it is something, at all events,
IS ISLAM ORIGINAL? 11
which satisfies the spiritual wants of man. Man's
spiritual wants, whatever their origin, are his truest
wants ; and the something which satisfies those wants
is the most real of all realities to him.
The founder, therefore, of a religion which is to
last must read the spiritual needs of a nation correctly,
or, at all events, must be capable of seeing the direc-
tion in which they lead, and the development they
will one day take. If he read them correctly, he need
not care about any originality beyond that which such
insight implies ; he will rather do well to avoid it.
The religious world was startled a few years ago by
the revelations of an Oriental scholar that much sup-
posed to be exclusively the doctrine of the New Tes-
tament is to be found in the Talmud, as though some
reflection was thereby cast upon the Founder of our
religion ! Positivists, again, have laid gi'eat stress on
the fact that some of the moral precepts supposed to
be exclusively Christian are to be found in the sacred
writings of Confucius and the Buddhists. But what
then ? Is a religion less true because it recognises it-
self in other garbs, because it incorporates in itself all
that is best in the system which it expands or sup-
plants ? What if we found the whole Sermon on the
Mount dispersed about the writings of the Jewish
Rabbis, as we unquestionably find some part of it ?
Christ Himself was always the first to assert that He
came, not to destroy, but to fulfil. But it is strange
that the avowed relation of Christianity to Judaism
has not protected Islam from the assaults of Christian
apologists, grounded on its no less explicitly avowed
relation to the two together !
But what of interest I am ready to admit that the
12 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
religion of Mohammed loses on the score of origina-
lity, it gains in the greater fulness of our knowledge
of its origin. It is the latest and most historical of
the great religions of the world.
Renan has remarked that the origin of nearly all
the leading phenomena of life and history is obscure.
What, for instance, can Max M tiller tell us of the
origin of language? What well-authenticated facts
can political philosophers like Hobbes or Locke, or
even scientific antiquaries like Sir Charles Lyell or Sir
John Lubbock, tell us of the origin of society ? What
can Darwin tell us of the origin of life ? Trace the
genealogy of all existing languages into the three great
groups of Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian ; find, if you
can, the parent language from w^hich even these three
families have originally diverged ; are we any nearer
an explanation of what language really is ? Our hopes,
indeed, are aroused by hints dropped throughout Pro-
fessor Max Miiller's fascinating book that he has a
secret to divulge to those who have gone through an
adequate process of initiation. But to our disappoint-
ment we find that the explanation of * Phonetic
Types ' is only a roundabout way of saying what, no
doubt, is true, that language is instinctive, and that
we know nothing whatever of its origin. That sound
expresses thought we knew before ; but how does it
express it ? That is the question. Trace elaborately
through Geological Periods, if you can, the steps by
which the Monad has been developed into Man, and
show that there is no link wanting, and that Nature,
so far as we can trace, never makes a leap. Perhaps
not ; but there is a leap somewhere, and who can say
how vast the leap before the Protoplasm can have
WHAT IS RELIGION? 13
received the something which is not Protoplasm but
Life, and which has all the dignity of life, even though
it be a Monad's ?
So, too, if the Science of Religion lasts long enough,
we may one day be able to trace a continuity of
growth from the very dawn of man's belief till, as in
history, so in religion,
* We doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.'
We shall find, however, that, even in the dimmest
dawn of history, the essence of religion was already
there, not forming, but already formed ; a feeling of
mystery which, as it is the beginning of philosophy,
so, perhaps, it is the very first beginning of religion ;
the distinction between right and wrong ; the idea of
a Power which is neither Man's nor external Nature's,
though it is evidenced by them both ; the sense that
there is something in this world amiss ; and the fear,
or, possibly, the hope, that it may be unriddled by-
and-bye.i Where did those ideas come from ^ And
do we knov/ anything more of the origin of religion
itself by having traced it to some of its elements ?
And, what is true of religion generally, is also
* I do not mean to touch here upon the disputed question whether
there are races without any definite religious ideas at all. Sir John
Lubbock (' Origin of Civilisation,' cap. iv.) has brought together the
testimony of many missionaries and travellers as to a great variety of
tribes, which seem to be, at all events, without anything beyond the
elements I have named ; but I much doubt whether these elements,
or some of them, do not exist in all tribes, even in the lowest. It is
certain that a longer acquaintance and minuter observation among
savage tribes, especially the African, have often led to the reversal of
an opinion naturally but hastily formed in the first instance. See
Waitz, ' Anthropologic der Naturvolker,' ii. 4.
U MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
true, unfortunately, of those three rehgions which I
have called, for want of a better name, historical —
and of their founders. We know all too little of the
first and earliest labourers ; too much, perhaps, of
those who have entered into their labours. We know
less of Zoroaster and Confucius than we do of Solon
and Socrates ; less of Moses and of Buddha than we
do of Ambrose and Augustine. We know indeed
some fragments of a fraginent of Christ's life ; but
who can lift the veil of the thirty years that prepared
the way for the three ? What we do know indeed
has renovated a third of the world, and may yet
renovate much more ; an ideal of life at once remote
and near ; possible and impossible ; but how much
we do not know ! What do we know of His mother,
of His home life, of His early friends, and His relation
to them, of the gradual dawning, or, it may be, the
sudden revelation, of His divine mission ? How many
questions about Him occur to each of us which must
always remain questions !
But in Mohammedanism ever^lhing is different ;
here, instead of the shadowy and the mysterious we
have history.' We know as much of Mohammed as
we do even of Luther and Milton. The mythical,
the legendary, the supernatural is almost wanting in
the original Arab authorities, or at all events can
easily be distinguished from what is historical .'' No-
' Cf. Rcnau, ' Etudes d'Histoire Religrieuse." pp. 220 and 230.
" The belief in Ujinn, beings created of smokeless tire 2,000 years
before Adam, as a part of the original Arab mythology, was not
discarded by Mohammed (Komn, Sura i. 7-8 ; xlvi. 28, 29 ; Ivii. 17-18,
Ixxii. 1, &c.), but, in other respects, the miraculous ami mythological
element in Mohammedanism comes almost exclusively from Persian
sources. I'ersia has revenge<l the destruction of her national faith
FULL KNOWLEDGE OF ISLAM. 15
body here is the dupe of himself or of others ; there
is the full light of day upon all that that light can
ever reach at all. ^ The abysmal depths of person-
ality ' indeed are, and must always remain, beyond
the reach of any line and plummet of ours. But we
know everything of the external history of Moham-
med — his youth, his appearance, his relations, his
habits ; the first idea and the gradual growth, inter-
mittent though it was, of his great revelation ; while
for his internal history, after his mission had been
proclaimed, we have a book absolutely unique in its
origin, it its preservation, and in the chaos of its
contents, but on the substantial authenticity of which
no one has ever been able to cast a serious doubt.
There, if in any book, we have a mirror of one of the
master-spirits of the world ; often inartistic, inco-
herent, self-contradictory, dull, but impregnated with
a few grand ideas which stand out from the whole •
a mind seething with the inspiration pent within it,
' intoxicated with God,' but full of human weaknesses,
from which he never pretended — and it is his lasting
glory that he never pretended — to be free.^
Upon the striking resemblances between the
Koran and the Bible — the book with which it is most
by corrupting in many i)articulars the simplicity of the creed of her
conquerors. For an exhaustive account of Arab ideas on the Djinn,
their creation, their influence on human affairs, and their abode, see
Note 21 to the Introduction of Mr. Lane's edition of ' The Thousand
and One Nights.' The legends illustrating the power of Solomon
over the Grenii are well known. The notes to Mr. Lane's edition of
the ' Arabian Nights ' form a storehouse of accurate information
upon Arab manners and customs.
' It was a proverbial saying in very early times among Musalmans
that ' Mohammed's character was the Koran.'
16 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
naturally compared — and the still more striking dif-
ferences, I need not now dwell at length, especially
as the latter have been admirably drawn out by Dean
Stanley.^
To compress, as best I may, into a few sentences
what he has said so well, making only a few amend-
ments or additions where, from my point of view, they
seem to be called for. — The Koran lays claim to a
verbal, literal, and mechanical inspiration in every part
alike, and is regarded as such by almost all Mohamme-
dans. The Bible makes no such claim, except possibly
in one or two controverted passages ; and there are few
Christians who do not now admit at least a human
element in every part of it. The text of the Koran is
stereotyped ; in the Bible there is an immense variety
of readings. The Koran has hitherto proved to be
incapable of harmonious translation into other lan-
guages, and good Musalmans have always on that
account consistently discouraged the attempt ; the
Bible loses little or nothing in the process, and those
Christians who value it most have been most anxious
to translate it into all the known languages of the
world. The Bible is the work of a large number of
poets, prophets, statesmen, and lawgivers, extending
over a vast period of time, and incorporates with
itself other and earlier, and often conflicting docu-
ments ; the Koran comes straight from the brain, some-
times from the ravings, of an unlettered enthusiast,
who yet in this proved himself to be poet and pro-
phet, statesman and lawgiver in one. Finally, the*
strength of the Koran lies in its uniformity, in its)
intolerance, in its narrowness ; the strength of the
' ' Lectures on the EaBtern Church,' viii, p. 266-273.
KORAN AND BIBLE COMPARED. 17
Bible in its variety, its toleration, its universality. In
all these points, as in the more important one of the
morality of its highest revelations, the supremacy of
our sacred books over the one sacred book of the
Mohammedans is indisputable.
Dean Stanley asks somewhat triumphantly, but
on the whole rightly enough, whether there is a
single passage in the Koran that can be named, as a
proof of inspiration, with St. Paul's description o^
Charity. But" it is worth remarking that sayings of
Mohammed's have been preserved, which, though
they are in no way equal to this, the sublimest pas-
sage of the greatest of the Apostles, yet show a real
insight into the nature and comprehensiveness of this
Christian grace ; and may at all events serve as a
comment on i Corinthians xiii. They are in the
form of an Apologue : ' When God made the earth, it
shook to and fro till He put mountains on it to keep
it firm.' — Then the angels asked, ^ O God, is there
anything in thy creation stronger than these moun-
tains V ' — And God replied, ^ Iron is stronger than the
mountains, for it breaks them.' — ^ And is there any-
thing in thy creation stronger than iron ? ' — ^ Yes, fire
is stronger than iron, for it melts it.' — ^ Is there any-
thing stronger than fire ? ' — ' Yes, water, for it
quenches fire.' — ^ Is there anything stronger than
water ? ' — ' Yes, wind, for it puts water in motion.' —
' O our Sustainer ! is there anything in thy creation
stronger than wind ? ' — ' Yes, a good man giving
alms ; if he give with his right hand and conceal it
from his left, he overcomes all things.' But Moham-
med did not end here, or restrict his notion of charity
to the somewhat narrow sense which, in common
A 2
18 MOHAMMED AND AWHAMMEDANISM.
language, it bears now, that of liberal and unostenta-
tious almsgiving ; he went on to give almost as wide
a definition of Charity as St. Paul himself. * Ever)-
good act is charity ; your smiling in your brother's
face ; your putting a wanderer in the right road ;
your giving water to the thirsty is charity ; exhorta-
tions to another to do right are charity. A man's
true wealth hereafter is the good he has done in this
world to his fellow-man. When he dies, people will
ask, what property has he left behind him ? But the
angels will ask, what good deeds has he sent before
him ? ' '
But from one point of view the Koran has, to the
comparative mythologist, and therefore to the student
of human nature, an interest quite unique, and not
the less absorbing that it springs out of the very
defects that I have pointed out. By studying the
Koran, together with the histor}^ of Mohammedanism,
we see with our own eyes, what we can only infer or
imagine in other cases, the precise steps by which a
religion naturally and necessarily developes into a
mythology.
In the Koran we have, beyond all reasonable
doubt, the exact words of Mohammed without sub-
traction and without addition. We see with our own
eyes the birth and adolescence of a religion. In the
' See * Mishkat-ul-Masabih,* translated by Captain Mattliews, I. vi.
445, 447, 4rjO. &c. The autliorities are Abu Hurairah, Abu Dliar and
Anas. A fiiendly American critic in 'The Nation' (New York).
May 20, 1875, points out that much of this view of charity is to be
found in the Talmud, I5aba r.athm, fol. x. a ; ani»ther pi-oof that
tra<litional Judaism is an important component ))art of Islam.
Mohannned did not chnin on'irinnlily for tlii-^. or for any other part
of his teaching.
GROWTH OF MYTHOLOGY. 19
history of Mohammedanism we descry the parasitical
growth that fastens on it, even in its founder's hfe-
time. We see the way in which a man who denied
that he could work miracles is believed to work them
even by his contemporaries, and how, in the next
generation, the extravagant vision of the nocturnal
flight to the seventh heaven, with all its gorgeous
imagery, and the revolutions of the moon round the
Kaaba, is taken for sober fact, and is propagated with
all the elaboration of details, which, if they came
from anybody, could have come only from Moham-
med himself ; and yet all of it with the most perfect
good faith. We see how a man, who, though he had
once in an outburst of anger uttered a prophecy
which turned out true, always denied that he could
predict the future, and was yet, in spite of himself,
credited with all the supernatural insight of a seer.
Lastly, we mark how the formalities and the sacri-
fices and the idolatries which he spent his life in
overthrowing revived in another shape out of the
frequency of prayers and fasts that he enjoined, and
of the pilgrimages he permitted. The holy places
themselves became more holy, as having been the
scene of his preaching and of his death, and so, in
time, received more than human honours. We know
from history what the outgrowth and superstructure
have been, and we read in the Koran how narrow the
foundation was.
But from the Bible, by its very nature, and owing
to those peculiarities which constitute its special
strength, we fail to know, in the same sense, the
exact limits of the foundation of the Christendom
which has overspread the world. In the outward
20 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
shape in which it has come down to us, and in the
questions connected with the authorship of its dif-
ferent parts and the variety of its contents, the Bible
resembles not so much the Koran as the Sunnah^
which, in its authorised form of the *six correct
books,' is, of course, rejected by the Shiah half of
the Mohammedan races.' Even in the Gospels as
we have them, comment and inference and the indi-
viduality of the writer are mixed with verbal accuracy
and exact observation. We can detect conflicting
currents of feeling and of thought which it taxes the
ingenuity and honesty even of harmonists to harmo-
nise. The New Testament is not less but more
valuable because of these discrepancies. Its unde-
signed discrepancies have been as valuable in widen-
ing the base of our Christianity as its undesigned co-
incidences are in assuring it. Whether we may legiti-
mately apply the inferences to be drawn from our full
knowledge of the growth of Mohammedism to our
imperfect knowledge of the growth of other religions
is, of course, open to argument, but the interest and
importance of the enquiry can hardly be over-
estimated.
And over and above the interest attaching to the
one religion of the world which is strictly historical
in its origin, and which therefore may, rightly or
wrongly, be used to explain the origin of those of
which we know less, there is the fascination that
must always attach to those mixed characters of
vrhom we know so much, and yet so little ; who
' The Shiahs, however, have four books of their own which they
are «aid to look upon as only inferior in authority to the Koran itself.
(See Hughes's Notes, \k 3.">-39.)
HISTORY OF ISLAM. 21
have made the world what it is, and yet whom the
world cannot read.
' Hero, impostor, fanatic, priest, or sage : '
which element predominates in the man as a whole
we may perhaps discover, and most certainly we can
say now it was not the impostor ; but taking him at
different times and under different circumstances, the
more one reads, the more one distrusts one's own
conclusions, and, as Dean Milman remarks, answers
with the Arab ' Allah only knows.' ^
Nor does Mohammedanism lack other claims on
our attention. Glance for one moment at its marvel-
lous history. Think how one great truth working in
the brain of a shepherd of Mecca gradually produced
conviction in a select band of personal adherents ;
how, when the Prophet was exiled to Medina, the
faith gathered there fresh strength, brought him back
in triumph to his native place, and secured to him for
his hfetime the submission of all Arabia ; how, when
the master-mind was withdrawn, the whole structure
he had reared seemed, for the moment, to vanish
away like the baseless fabric of a vision, or hke the
mirage of the desert whence it had taken its rise ; how
the faith of Abu Bakr and the sword of Omar recalled
it once more to life and crushed the false prophets who
always follow in the wake of a true one, as the jackals
do the trail of a lion ; how it crumpled up the Roman
Empire on one side, and the Persian on the other,
driving Christianity before it on the west and north,
and Fire-Worship on the east and south ; how it
spread over two continents, and how it settled in a
* Latin Christianity, I. 555.
'22 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
third, and how, the tide of invasion carrying it head-
long onward through Spain into France, it, at one
time, almost overw^helmed the whole, till Charles the
Hammer turned it back upon itself in his five-days'
victory at Tours ; how, throughout these vast con-
quests, after a short time, to intolerance succeeded
toleration, to ignorance knowledge, to barbarism
civilisation ; how the indivisible empire, the represen-
tative on earth of the Theocracy in heaven, became
many empires, with rival Khali fs at Damascus and
Bagdad, at Cairo, Cairoan, and Cordova ; how horde
after horde of barbarians of the great Turkish or Tartar
stock were precipitated on the dominions of the faith-
ful, only to be conquered by the faith of those whose
arms they overthrew, and were compelled hence-
forward, by its inherent force, to destroy what they
had worshipped, to worship what they had destroyed ;
how, when the news came that the very birthplace
of the Christian faith had fallen into their hands, * a
nerve was touched,' as Gibbon says, *of exquisite
feeling, and the sensation vibrated to the heart of
Europe ; ' how Christendom itself thus became for two
hundred years half Mohammedanised, and tried to
meet fanaticism by counter-fanaticism — the sword, the
Bible, and the Cross, against the scymitar, the Koran,
and the Crescent ; how, lastly, when the tide of
aggression had been checked, it once more burst its
barriers, and seating itself on the throne of the Caesars
of the East, threatened more than once the very centre
of Christendom, till at length,
* The Moslem faith, though flickering like a torch
111 a night struggle on the slioi-es of Spain,
Glared, a broad column of advancing flame,
EXTENT OF ISLAM NOW. 23
Along the Danube and the Illyrian shore
Far into Italy, where eager monks
Who watch in dreams, and dream the while they watch^
Saw Christ grow paler in the baleful light,
Crying again the cry of the forsaken/
— all this is matter of history, at which I can only
glance.
And what is the position of Islam now ?
It numbers at this day more than one hundred
millions, probably one hundred and fifty millions, of
believers as sincere, as devout, as true to their creed
as are the believers in any creed whatever. It still
has its gi-ip on two continents, and a foothold, even if
a precarious foothold, in a third. It extends from
Morocco to the Malay Peninsula, from Zanzibar to
the Kirghis hoide. It embraces within its ample
circumference two extensive empires, one Sunni, the
other Shiah, the first of w^hich, though it has often
been pronounced sick unto death or even dead, is not
dead yet, and is even showing some signs of reviving
vitality. It still claims the allegiance of those widely-
scattered countries from which in the dimmest anti-
quity sprang the worship of Stars and of Fire, the
worship of Baal and of Moloch, of Al Lat and of Al
Uzza, of Ormuzd and of Ahriman, of Isis and of
Osiris. It still grasps Mount Sinai, the cradle of the
Jewish, and Bethlehem, the cradle of the Christian,
Faith. It is to be found beneath the shadow even of
those giant mountains of Nepal which gave birth to
Buddha. To the votaries, therefore, of Islam belong
the spots which, from their antiquit}'- or their associa-
tions, are most dear to the great religions of the world ;
and the countries which are the birthplace of them
all. Theirs is the Cave of Machpelah, theirs the
•24 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Church of the Nativity, theirs the Holy Sepulchre,
theirs Mount Elburz. To Islam belong El Azhar at
Cairo, the Taj at Agra, Saint Sophia at Constantinople,
the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, and the Kaaba
at Mecca. Africa, which had yielded so early to
Christianity, nay, which had given birth to Latin
Christianity itself, the Africa of Cyprian and Tertullian,
of Antony and of Augustine, yielded still more
readily to Mohammed ; and from the Straits of
Gibraltar to the Isthmus of Suez may still be heard
the cry which with them is no vain repetition of
' Allahu-Akbar, Allahu-Akbar,' — 'God is most great,
there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the
prophet of God.' ^
And if it be said, as it often is, that Mohammed-
anism has gained no territorial extension since the
first flame of religious enthusiasm, fanned, as it then
often was, by the lust of conquest, has died out, I
answer that this is far from the truth.
In the extreme East Mohammedanism has since
then won and maintained for centuries a moral
supremacy in the important Chinese province of
Yunnan, and has thus actually succeeded in thrusting
a wedge between the two great Buddhist empires of
• In the Adhan, or morning call to Prayer, which at once, by its
musical cadences, and its associations, proiluces so deep an impression
on all Eastern travellei-s, the words Allahu-Akbai- are repeated four
times at the beginning, and twice at the end. The translation of
the call is as follows : — • God is most great. I testify there is no God
but God. I testify that Mohammed is the messenger of God. Come
to prayer. Come to salvation. Pmyeris better than sleep. Gotl is
most great. There is no God but Gotl.' See Curzon's * Monasteries
of the Levant,' p. 56, kc. Walpole's * Ansayrii,' p. a.V.')*). Lane's
•Modern Egyptians,' L 9L
ISLAM IN CHINA. 25
Burmah and China. ^ Within our own memory,
indeed, after a fifteen years' war, and under the
leadership of Ta Wen Siu, one of those half-military,
half-religious geniuses, which Islam seems always
capable of producing, it succeeded in wresting from
the Celestial Empire a territorial supremacy in the
western half of this province. A few years ago an
embassy of intelligent and, it is worth adding, of
progressive and of tolerant Musalmans from Yun-nan,
headed by Prince Hassan, son of the chieftain who
had now become the Sultan Soliman, appeared in our
own country, and the future of the Panthays,^ as they
are called, began at length to attract attention, not so
much, I fear, from the extraordinary interest attach-
ing to their religious history — that interests few
Englishmen — as from the possible opening to our
Eastern trade, the only Gospel which most English-
men care now to preach, and one which we did
consistently for many years propagate by our com-
mercial wars in China and Japan, at the expense of
ever)' principle of religion and humanity. Unfoitu-
' Marco Polo ([f, '>2 -s"*/.) fouml Musalmans as well as Nestorian
Christians in the province of Carajan, i.e. Yun-nan, in the thirteenth
century ; and Colonel Yule in a note ad loc. cites a statement of
Bashichiddin, the Persian historian of the Mongols, that ' all the in-
habitants of Yachi, its capital town, were in his time Mohammedans ;'
an overstatement no doubt, but still substantially true. Ibn Batuta in
the following century (Ibn Batuta's ' Travels,' translated by Ptev. S.
Lee) says (page 208) that ' in every Chinese province there was a
town for the Mohammedans, with cells, villages, and mosques, and
that they were made much of by the Emperor of China ; ' * in each
town too there was a Sheikh el Islam who administered justice.'
^ A name given to them by their Burmese neighbours, from whom
the word has passed into the Western World. It is said to be a cor-
ruption of the Burmese * Putthee,' i.e., Mohammedan.
/
26 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
nately the interests of our trade were not suffi-
ciently bound up with the existence of the Panthays
to call for any representations on the part of a
nation which, in spite of its higher instincts and
aspirations, is still above all commercial, and Prince
Hassan was compelled to return to Asia without
any prospect of moral support from us or from
the Sultan of Turkey. On arriving at Rangoon
he was met by the news that the Musalmans had
at length been overpowered by the fearful odds
arrayed against them ; that Tali-Fu, the capital,
had fallen, and men, women, and children to the
number of some thirty thousand had been mas-
sacred by the victors. The fate of Momien, the
other stronghold, was, of course, only a question of
time ; but though the short-lived Mohammedan
sovereignty has been destroyed, and what was won
by the sword has since perished by the sword,
Mohammedanism itself has not been extinguished in
the Celestial Empire. Within the last eight years
that vast tract of country called Western Chinese
Tartary, or Eastern Turkestan, has thrown off the
yoke of China, and has added another to the list of
Musalman kingdoms.' Khoten and Yarkand and
Kashgar are united under the vigorous rule of the
• By so (loino:, it has only returno'l to the faith professecl by it in
the time of Marco Polo. • The people of Khoten,' says he, I. 19G,
* arc subject to the Great Khan, and are all worshippers [sic] of
Mohammed.' Ibn Batuta says (p. 8(5) of tlie inhalntants of Khavarism
=Khiva, that he ' never saw lx;tter-bRHl or more lilx;ml people, or those
who were more friendly to stranfjers.' He especially appnjveil of the
whip hunt? up in every mosque to chastise tlu»se who ab>eute<i tbem-
selvcs from prayers.
ISLAM IN CENTRAL ASIA. 27
Atalik Ghazee/ Yakub Beg. Whatever may be his
private character, the abohtion of the slave trade
throughout his dominions, his rigid administration of
justice, his readiness to establish commercial relations
with India, and the respect shown even by the
Meccan pilgrims among his subjects for Christianity,
are some indication of what Mohammedanism may
yet have in store for it in Central Asia under the
influence of a master mind, and wnth the modifications
that are possible or necessary to it. Throughout the
Chinese Empire, at Karachar for instance, there are
scattered Musalman communities who have higher
hopes than Buddhism or Confucianism, and a purer
morality than Taoism can supply. The Panthays
themselves, it is believed, still number a million and
a half, and the unity of God and the mission of God's
prophet are attested day by day by a continuous
line of worshippers from the Atlantic to the Pacific
Ocean.
Nay, even beyond, in the East Indian Archipelago,
beyond the Straits of Malacca, if J may venture just
now so to call them, in Java and Sumatra, in Borneo
and Celebes, Islam has raised many of the natives
above their former selves, and has long been the
dominant faith. It established itself in the Malay
Peninsula and Sumatra in the thirteenth and four-
teenth, and in Java and Celebes in the fifteenth
' The title was given him by the Amir of Bokhara. It means
' Guardian of the Champions of Religion.* For the abolition of the
slave trade, see the best authority on the subject, Shaw's ' High
Tartary,* p. 347 ; and for the view of Christians taken by some pil-
grims to Mecca fi-om Central Asia, p. 05. Tlie letters received from
Mr. Forsyth's Mission (see Tim'x, of March 17, 187-4) seem quite to
bear out the view T had formed of Yakub Beg's position.
28 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
century ; and it is interesting to note, as is remarked
by Crawfurd, that about the time it was being gradu-
ally expelled from Western Europe it made up for
its expulsion by extending itself to the East of Asia.
The Arab missionaries were just in time, for they
anticipated by only a few years the first advent of
grasping Portuguese and ambitious Spaniards. It
cannot, of course, be supposed that, among races so
low in the scale of humanity as are most of the Indian
islanders, Mohammedanism would be able to do what
it did originally for the Arabs or for the Turkish
hordes ; but it has done something even for them.
It expelled Hinduism from some islands, and a very
corrupt Buddhism from others. It was propagated
by missionaries who cared very much for the souls
they could win, and nothing for the plunder they
could carry off. They conciliated the natives, learned
their languages, .and intermarried with them ; and in
the larger islands their success was rapid, and, so far
as nature would allow, complete.' The Philippines
' Crawfurd's ' Indian Archipelago,' 11. 27.') and ;;i.'>.
Marco Polo (chap. IX.) says of Ferlcc, a king^dom in what he calls
Java the Less=Sumatra : * This kiii«jdom is so much frequented by
the Saracen merchants that they have converted the natives to the law
of Mohammed.' In the following century, the Moorish traveller, Ibn
Batuta, visited the island, and describes the king, Malik-al-Zhahir, as
being ' one of the most eminent and generous of princes :' the learned
were admitted to his society and had free converse with him, while he
proposed questions for their discussion. So humble withal was he
that he used to walk to the mosque divested of his royal robes, and
wearing those of a doctor of divinity. With the exception of the
Sultan of Fez, Ibn Batuta thought him * the most learned of all the
Musalman Sultans ;' and he had seen them all from Tangiei-s to China
(p. 226); he found that the inhabitants of Suimttm liad adopted
Islam to a distance of twenty-one days' journey onwaitl from the
capital, Samathrah.
ISLAM IN EAST INDIAN ISLANDS. 29
and the Moluccas, which were conquered by Spain
and Portugal respectively, did not become Moham-
medan, for they had to surrender at once their liberty
and their religion. It is no wonder that the religion
known to the natives chiefly through the unblushing
rapacity of the Portuguese, and the terrible cruelties
of the Dutch, has not extended itself beyond the reach
of their swords. Here, as elsewhere in the East, the
most fatal hindrance to the spread of Christianity has
been the lives of Christians.^ I will only add further
that the Musalmans of the East Indian Islands are
very lax in their obedience to many of the precepts
of their law, that they are tolerant of other religions,
and that the women enjoy a liberty, a position, and
an influence which contrasts favourably with that
allowed to them in any other Asiatic country.'^
' For the cruelties of the Portuguese, see Crawfurd, II. 403, and
for the Dutch, see especially II. 425 seq. and 411. The Portuguese in
the fifteenth century carried on a piratical crusade against every
Musalman ship they could find. Meeting with a vessel containing
two hundred and sixty pilgrims bound for Mecca, of whom fifty were
women and children, they saved and baptised twenty of the children j
the remainder were thrust down into the hold, and the ship scuttled
and set on fire. For some startling facts as to the comparative
morality of some native and Christian communities in India, see a
paper by the Rev. J. N. Thoburn, in the Report of the Allahabad
Missionary Conference, held in 1872-78, p. 467-470.
2 Crawfurd, II. 260 and 269-271 ; and Sir Stamford Raffles' * Java,'
1. p. 261 and II. 2-5. During the latter half of the seventeenth
century four Queens, all called * Sultans,' reigned in succession over
Achin. The Achinese Mohammedans are admitted to be more enter-
prising and sagacious than any of the Pagan tribes in Sumatra, and
they have given conspicuous proof of their valour in their recent
contest with the Dutch. I am informed that two works recently
published by Professor Veth, of Leiden, the one on Achin and its
relation to the Netherlands, and the other on Java, contain most inter-
esting particulars concerning the spread and influence of Islam in that
30 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
The New World, even, is not without some repre-
sentatives of the Musahiian faith. Islam has crossed
the Pacific with the Coolies, and the Atlantic wnth the
Negroes, and counts its adherents by thousands in
some of the West India Islands, in Trinidad, and in
Dutch Guiana.
In Africa, again, Mohammedanism is spreading
itself by giant strides almost year by year. Every-
one knows that, within half a century from the
Prophet's death, the richest states of Africa, and those
most accessible to Christianity and to European civili-
sation, w^ere torn away from both, by the armies of
the faithful, with hardly a struggle or a regret ; but
few except those who have studied the subject are
aware that, ever since then, Mohammedanism has
been gradually spreading over the northern half of the
Continent.
Let me now^ trace its progress through these vast
regions, as clearly and as briefly as I can.
When the conqueror Akbah had overrun the States
of Barbary from end to end, and, after passing through
wildernesses in which he himself or his successors were
one day to found the literar}- and commercial capitals
of Fez, Cairoan, and Morocco, had reached the point
where the Atlantic and the Great Desert meet, it was
his ^ career only, and not his zeal,' which was checked
by the prospect of the ocean. Spurring, so it is said,
his horse into its waves, and raising his eyes to heaven,
part of the world, ami are written in the most impartial spirit. It is
to Ixj hope<l that they may be translate*! from the Dntch into more
familiar European lan^naeos, as has Ijeen the case with the mlmirable
work by Professor Dozy, of I,( ideii. nn thr ' History of the Musiilnmns
of Spain.'
ISLAM IN AFRICA. 31
he exclaimed, ^ Oh Allah ! if my course were not
stopped by this sea, I would still go on to the unknown
kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy
holy name, and putting to the sword the rebellious
nations who worship other gods than Thee ! ' Before
many years had passed, the wish of this ^ Mohammedan
Alexander who sighed for more worlds to conquer ' ^
was gratified in a direction and to an extent which he
little expected. Muza crossed the Straits of Gibraltar
to carry Islam northward into Spain, while Musalman
missionaries, starting in the other direction, braved
even the terrors of the Sahara to carry their message
to the unknown kingdoms of the south. Leaping
from Oasis to Oasis of the Great Desert with almost
the speed of its nomad horsemen, and subduing to its
message, as it passed, even some of the wild and wan-
dering Touariks, we know that before the year loooit
had reached Timbuctoo, that mysterious city, a sea-
port, as it has been well described, in the heart of Africa,
situated on the remotest shore of the dry ocean, or
the sandy sea of the Sahara. It thence travelled to the
Jolofs between the Senegal and the Gambia, thence
to the wide-spread Mandingoes on the Niger,* thence
' Gribbon, cap. 51, 464-466,
^ See the * Travels ' of Ibn Batuta. who, about the year 1 357, found
Islam in full possession of some of the countries of the Niger, or, as he
calls it, the Nile (p. 237). At Zaga (Sego .')> the ' first city in these
parts to embrace Islam,' he found that the inhabitants were ' religious
and fond of learning.' At Mali there was an avaricious and worth-
less Sultan, but ' the people paid great regard to justice.' * A traveller
may proceed alone among them without the least fear of a thief or a
robber ; ' ' they are so regular in their attendance at the mosque, that
unless one makes haste he will find no place left to say his prayers '
(p. 246). Everyone knew the Koran by heart ; a father would keep
his son under restraint till he could say the whole perfectly. Negro
32 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
again to the Foulahs, and then, turning eastward
towards the land of its birth, it reached, by the thir-
teenth century. Lake Tchad, and the kingdoms be-
yond, where, finally, these Musalman missionaries of
the West were met by other Musalmans from the
East in the very centre of the Soudan.^ Of course enor-
mous tracts of heathenism were left, and are still left,
in various parts of this vast area, and it is mainly among
these that, at this day, Mohammedan missionaries are
meeting everywhere with a marked success which is
denied to our own. We hear of whole tribes laying
aside their devil-worship, or immemorial Fetish, and
springing at a bound, as it were, from the very lowest
to one of the highest forms of religious belief. Chris-
tian travellers, with every wish to think otherwise,
have remarked that the Negro who accepts Moham-
medanism acquires at once a sense of the dignity of
human nature not commonly found even among those
who have been brought to accept Christianity.
It is also pertinent to observe here, that such pro-
gress as any large part of the Negro race has hitherto
made is in exact proportion to the time that has
elapsed since their conversion, or to the degree of
fervour with which they originally embraced, or have
since clung to, Islam. The Mandingoes and the
Foulahs are salient instances of this ; their unques-
Musalniaus who had been the Pil^mage to Mecca were to be met
with every whei-e (p. 231), 241). The women were not veiletl, and
accompanied their husbands to prayers (p. 234). Among their bad
customs, that which seems to have offendeil Ibn Hututa most was
their want of clothinf^, and ' the contempt in which they held the
white people' (p. 234), <»f whom, doubtless, in comparison with the
ebony Negroes, he considered himself to W one.
• * Anthroi)ologie dcr Naturvolker,' by Dr. Theoilor Waits, p. 248.
SPREAD OF ISLAM IN AFRICA NOW. 33
tionable superiority to other Negro tribes is as un-
questionably owing to the early hold that Islam got
upon them, and to the comparative civilisation and
culture that it has always encouraged.
Nor can it be said that it is only among those
Negroes who have never heard anything of a purer
faith that Mohammedanism is making such rapid pro-
gress. The Government Blue Book of the year 1873
on our West African settlements, and the reports of
missionary societies themselves, are quite at one on
this head. The Governor of our West African colo-
nies, Mr. Pope Hennessy, remarks that the liberated
Africans are always handed over to Christian mission-
aries for instruction, and that their children are bap-
tised and brought up at the public expense in Chris-
tian schools, and are, therefore, in a sense, ready-made
converts. Missionary societies are not likely to err
on the side of defect in enumerating their converts ;
yet the total number of professing Christians in all
our African settlements put together, as computed
by the missionary societies themselves^ — very few
even of these, as the Governor says, and as we can
unfortunately well believe from our experience in
countries that are not African, being practical Chris-
tians — falls far short of the original number of Africans
liberated at Sierra Leone alone, and their descend-
ants.^ On the other hand, the Rev. James Johnson,
a native clergyman, and a man of remarkable energy
and intelligence as well as of very Catholic spirit,
deplores the fact that, of the total number of Moham-
• For further illustrations of this see Appendix to Lecture I. p. 351.
2 Papers relating to Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions. Part TL,
1873, 2nd division, p. 14.
34 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
medans to be found in Sierra Leone and its neigh-
bourhood, three-fourths were not bom Mohammedans,
but have become so by conversion, whether from a
nominal Christianity or from Paganism.*
And, what is still more to our purpose to remark
here, Mohammedanism, as it spreads now, is often
not attended by some of the drawbacks which ac-
companied its first introduction into the country.
It is spread in the main, not by the sword, but by
earnest and simple-minded Arab missionaries. It has
also lost, except in certain well-defined districts, much
of its intolerant and exclusive character. The two
leading doctrines of Mohammedanism, and the general
' Papers relating to Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions. Part II.,
1873, 2n(l division, p. 15. As Mr. Pope Hennesey's Report has been much
criticised, chiefly on the ground that he is a Roman Catholic (see a
letter to the Thm-s, of Oct. 21, 1873, signed ' Auili alteram partem'), and
as I have based some statements upon it, it may Ije worth while to
mention that I have had a conversation with Mr. Johnson, who is a
strong Protestant himself, and that he bore testimony to the bona
fides of the Report, aad to its accuracy even on some points which
have been most questioned. He told me that Mohammedanism was
introduced into Sierra Leone, not many years ago, by three zealous
missionaries who came from a great distance. It seems now not only
to be rapidly spreading in the colony it«elf, but in the countries to
the North of it to be gaining the ascendency, in spite of all the
European influences at work. It may perhaps be questioned, since
he does not dwell much upon it, whether Mr. Pope Hennessy, in his
remarks on the diminished numljer of Christians in Sierra Leone,
made allowance for the return of a ceilain number of true Christians,
such as Bishop Crowther, to their own countries. The object of
Mr. Johnson in dwelling on the sprea<l of Islam in Africa was no
doubt, as he has stated since, rather to stimulate the zeal of Christian
missionaries than to celebrate that of Musalmans ; but, whatever his
object, he sj)4)ke the simple truth, an»l the facts remain, and are
all the more striking, from the unexceptionable medium through
which they have come to us.
INTELLECTUAL BENEFITS IN AFRICA. 35
moral precepts of the Koran, are of course, incul-
cated everywhere. But, in other respects, the
Musalman missionaries exhibit a forbearance, a
sympathy, and a respect for native customs and
prejudices, and even for their more harmless beliefs,
which is, no doubt, one reason of their success,
and which our own missionaries and schoolmasters
would do well to imitate.
We are assured, on all hands, that the Musalman
population has an almost passionate desire for educa-
tion, and those in the neighbourhood of our colonies
would throng our schools, first if the practical educa-
tion given was more worth having, and, secondly, if
the teachers would refrain from needlessly attack-
ing their cherished and often harmless customs.
Wherever Mohammedans are numerous, they estab-
lish schools themselves ; and there are not a few who
travel extraordinary distances to secure the best
possible education. Mr. Pope Hennessy mentions
the case of one young Mohammedan Negro who is in
the habit of purchasing costly books from Triibner in
London, and who went to Futah, two hundred and
fifty miles away, to obtain an education better than
he could find in Sierra Leone itself.^ Nor is it an
uncommon thing for newly-converted Musalmans to
make their way right across the Desert from Bornu,
or from Lake Tchad, or down the Nile from Darfur
or Wadai, a journey of over one thousand miles, that
they may carry on their studies in El-Azhar, the
great collegiate Mosque at Cairo, and may thence
' Papers relating to Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions. Part II.
1873, 2nd division, p. 10.
36 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
bring back the results of their training to their native
country, and form so many centres of Mohammedan
teaching and example.^
Nor as to the effects of Islam when first embraced
by a Negro tribe, can there, when viewed as a whole,
be any reasonable doubt. Polytheism disappears
almost instantaneously ; sorcer}^ with its attendant
evils, gradually dies away ; human sacrifice becomes
a thing of the past. The general moial elevation is
most marked ; the natives begin for the first time in
their history to dress, and that neatly. Squalid filth
is replaced by some approach to personal cleanliness ;
hospitality becomes a religious duty ; drunkenness,
instead of the rule, becomes a comparatively rare
exception. Though polygamy is allowed by the
Koran, it is not common in practice, and, beyond the
limits laid down by the Prophet, incontinence is rare ;
chastity is looked upon as one of the highest, and
becomes, in fact, one of the commoner virtues. It is
idleness henceforward that degrades, and industry
that elevates, instead of the reverse. Offences are
henceforward measured by a written code instead of
the arbitrary caprice of a chieftain — a step, as every-
one will admit, of vast importance in the progress of
a tribe. The Mosque gives an idea of architecture at
all events higher than any the Negro has yet had.
A thirst for literature is created, and that for works
of science and philosophy as well as for commentaries
• Waitz, p. 251. He calculates the number of students returning
each year to be about fifty. To his book, and to the authorities
to whom ho refers, 1 owe many of the facts mentioned in the text
illustrative of the influence of Islam on the native mind and
character.
MORAL BENEFITS IN AFRICA. 37
on the Koran.i There are whole tribes, such as the
Jolofs on the river Gambia, and the Hausas, whose
manly qualities we have had occasion to test in
Ashantee, which have become to a man Mohamme-
dans, and have raised themselves infinitely in the
process ; and the very name of Salt-water Mohamme-
dans given to those tribes along the coast who, from
admixture with European settlers, have relaxed the
severity of the Prophet's laws, is a striking proof of
the extent to which the stricter form of the faith
prevails in the far interior.
But lest any one should think that in giving so
favourable an account of Islam in Africa, I am draw-
ing on my own imagination, or depending on the
testimony of untrustworthy travellers, I will select
from a large number of those whose works I have
read, and whose testimony all tends in the same
direction, the explicit statements of two or three, as
bearing on the points at issue.
Browne, an Englishman, who undertook extensive
travels in Central Africa in the years 1799 and 1806,^
remarks that, among the idolaters of Sheibon and of
other places, the only persons whom he saw wearing
decent clothes, or indeed clothing at all, were Mo-
hammedans ; that it was to the introduction of Islam
a century and a half before his time that Darfur
' Waitz, p. 252-25-i. Aristotle and Plato are known to not a
few Mohammedans in the interior — Barth, in his ' Travels in Central
Africa,' Vol. V. p. 63, mentions that Sidi Mohammed, of Tirabuctoo,
maintained that they were both Musalmans, that is to say, wor-
shippers of the true God. Cf. III., 373, for the case of a Pullo at
Massera, who had read Plato and Aristotle in Arabic, was well
acquainted with the history of Spain, and sympathised with the
Wahhabis.
'^ See Pinkerton's • Voyages,' Vols. XV. and XVI.
38 MO HA Am ED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
owed its settled government and the cultivation of
its soil ; and that the people of Bergoo were remark-
able for their zealous attachment to their religion,
and read the Koran dail}'. Here then we find the
use of decent clothing, and the arts of reading and
agriculture, attributed to Islam.
But Browne, perhaps, is not well known to those
who have not made a speciality of African travel.
Let us hear then what was the experience of a
traveller who is known to all the world, and who was the
first to explore a large district of the Western Soudan.
Mungo Park, educated as he was for the Scotch
church, and cruelly persecuted as he was throughout
his travels by Moorish banditti, would not be likely
to be a friend to Islam, and many of his remarks
show a strong bias against it : his testimony therefore
is all the more valuable. His travels lay almost
exclusively among Mohammedan or semi-Moham-
medan tribes, and he found that the Negroes were
everywhere summoned to prayer by blasts blown
through elephants' tusks. On reaching the Niger,
the main object of his wanderings, he found, to his
sui*prise, that Sego, the capital of BambaiTa, was a
walled town, containing some 30,000 inhabitants, that
the houses were square and ver}' often white- washed,
and that there were Moorish mosques in every
quarter. ^ The view of this extensive city,' he writes,
' the numerous canoes upon the river, the crowded
population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding
country, foniied altogether a prospect of civilisation
and magnificence which I little expected to find in
the bosom of Africa.' '
* See Mungo Park's * TraveU,' Cap. I. atl tin.
TICSTIAWNY OF MUNGO PARK. 39
The Mandingoes, a Mohammedan tribe through
whose territories he returned, he describes as being,
unlike the Moors, a very gentle race, cheerful in their
dispositions, hospitable, inquisitive, and credulous.
The propensity to pilfer, so common amongst bar-
barians, though he suffered himself by it, he thought
to be not greater than could be found among many
European nations. His impression of the women
was most fevourable. ' I do not recollect,' he says,
^a single instance of hard-heartedness towards me
among the women. In all my wanderings and
wretchedness I found them uniformly kind and com-
passionate.' One of the first lessons in which the
Mandingo women instructed their children was the
practice of truth. In the case of an unhappy mother
whose son had been murdered by the Moors, her
only consolation was, that in the whole of his blame-
less life he had never told a lie. On another point,
he remarks that the Negroes, whether Mohammedan
or Pagan, allowed a plurality of wives ; but that the
Mohammedans alone were by their religion confined
to four. Though in a position of inferiority com-
pared with more civilised nations, their wives were
not as a rule ill-treated, each wife taking her turn in
ruling the household. In a third and all-important
matter, that of sobriety, the advantage was entirely
on the side of the Mohammedans. ' The beverages,'
he says, ^ of the pagan Negroes are beer and mead, of
which they frequently drink to excess. ^ The Moham-
medan converts drink nothing but water.'
As to education, Mungo Park found schools and
active teachers everywhere ; not, of course, advanced
' Cap. VI 1.
40 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
schools nor highly educated teachers, but institutions
which, humble though they be, should not be scorned
as they often are by the representatives of Christian
missions, but treated with the respect and the sym-
pathy with which the Founder of Christian missions,
nay, of Christianity itself, would undoubtedly have
treated them. The master of one of these schools in
Kamalia, to whose care Mungo Park was himself for
some time committed, adhered strictly to the religion
of Mohammed, but was by no means intolerant
towards those who differed from him.^ His school
consisted of seventeen boys, most of whom were sons
of ' Kafirs,' i.e. unbelievers. He possessed the Koran,
some commentaries on it, and a considerable number
of Arabic manuscripts. Mungo Park witnessed the
examination held in presence of the assembled
^Bushreens' for the purpose of conferring the like
degree on a young student. No one was admitted
to the degree unless he had read through the Koran^
and could answer questions intelligently upon it.
Many of the Negroes were in possession of Arabic
versions of the Pentateuch, the Psalms of David, and
the Prophecies of Isaiah, and a considerable know-
ledge of the facts of Old Testament History was
diffused amongst them. As to the thirst for know-
ledge and the desire to get books, an Arabic copy
of the Pentateuch was often sold for the value of
a prime slave, while a Negro offered Park himself an
ass and sixteen bars of goods for an Arabic grammar I
It is strange to read these accounts of the spread
and influence of Islam in Africa, and to discover on
> Cap. XI.
TESTIMONY OF DR. BARTH. 41
a searching inquiry that — if allowance be made for
bias, or ignorance, or unreasoning indignation on
the part of a few travellers who have attributed to
Islam in Africa every crime it has not been able
to prevent, or which has been perpetrated by the
most unworthy of its professors — every one of Mungo
Park's statements may be strengthened and supported
by a continuous succession of dispassionate and phi-
lanthropic travellers ever since, and then to find it
gravely stated by the editor of a quasi-official mis-
sionary periodical that ' more Mohammedanism
means more slavery, more brutality, more polygamy,
and, we do not scruple to add ' (as if such a writer
would feel scrupulous in making any statement upon
any subject !), ^ more drunkenness for Africa,' and
' that in the waiting-room of Euston Squarp Station
all the Mohammedan Negroes in Africa who have
read the Koran, even once, could be most comfortably
accommodated.' ^
But lest it should be said as a last resource by
such opponents that, whatever was the case at the
time of Browne and Mungo Park, and other
travellers, such as Caillie, and Laing, and Winter-
bottom, and Richardson, and Galton, and Winwood
Reade, whose evidence, had I the time and space, I
might quote, that Islam has now suddenly become a
curse to Africa, I will adduce here the testimony of
two other very recent travellers, each of whom is the
eye-witness of what he records. The first is that of
Dr. Barth, whose travels in Northern and Central
Africa are probably more extensive than those of any
^ Church Missionary Intelligencer, August 1874, p. 2-17, and March
1875, p. 75.
42 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
other European traveller, and whose bias is certainly
not in favour of Islam. The second is that of the
Rev. Edward Blyden, which has reached me only
since the first publication of these Lectures, and which is
therefore the most recent evidence that I can obtain.
As to the rapid spread of Islam, Dr. Barth says
that ^ a great part of the Berbers of the Desert were
once Christians, and that they afterwards changed
their religion and adopted Islam ; ' and he describes
^that continual struggle which, always extending
further and further, seems destined to overpower the
nations at the very Equator if Christianity does not
presently step in to dispute the ground with it.' He
remarks in another place, that Mohammedans alone
seem able to maintain any sort of government in
Africa ; and, what is more important, that there * is a
vital principle in Islam which has only to be brought
out by a reformer to accomplish great things.^
On the other hand, the Rev. Edward Blyden, a
native African of the purest Negro blood, a Christian
missionary who has given the energies of his life to
extending education and founding schools in the in-
' Barth's 'Travels,' I. 1(54, 11>7, 310; II. liXi, cS:c. Mr. T. W.
Higginson, to whom I am indebted for some of these references, and
for several interesting publications on the subject of Comparative
Religion, in a suggestive address delivere<l by him at Boston in
America, on the ' Sympathy of Religions,* a«Uluce8 the testimony to
be found in favour of the effects of Islam in Africa in the following
works, which I have been unable to consult : — Wilson's ' Western
Africa;' Johnstone's 'Abyssinia;' Allen's 'Niger Expedition;'
Du Chaillu's ' Ashango Land;' Reade's 'Savage Africa;' but the
authorities I have myself read and have quoted or referre<l to in the
text seem to me to be ample to convince all who are open to convic-
tion, that Islam is, on the whole, a great forwanl movement for the
Negi'oes.
TESTIMONY OF MR, BLYDEN. 43
terior of Liberia, and who has learned by experience
to deal with Mohammedan prejudices against Chris-
tianity, wTites to me as follows. It may be worth
while to add that he is now Principal of the
Presbyterian High School in Monrovia, West Africa,
that he was quite unknown to me before, and is
known to me now only by his wTitings and his
reputation.
' It is curious,' he says, ' how at a distance from
the scene and only from ^^ the study of books in the
European languages, and from reflection upon the
materials they supply," you have arrived at precisely
the same conclusions with regard to the character
and influence of Mohammedanism in Africa which I
have reached after years of travel among, and inter-
course with, the people. Your remarks as to the
superiority of the Mohammedan Negro are quite in
accordance with my own observation and experience.
If those Christians who are so unmeasured in their
denunciations of Mohammedanism could travel, as I
have travelled, through those countries in the interior
of West Africa, and witness, as I have witnessed, the
vast contrast betw^een the Pagan and Mohammedan
communities — the habitual listlessness and continued
deterioration of the one, and the activity and growth,
physical and mental, of the other ; the capricious and
unsettled administration of law, or rather absence of
law, in the one, and the tendency to order and regu-
larity in the other ; the increasing prevalence of ardent
spirits in the one, and the rigid sobriety and con-
servative abstemiousness of the other — they w^ould
cease to regard the Musalman system as an unmiti-
gated evil in the interior of Africa.'
44 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
It is melancholy to contrast with the wide-spread
beneficial influences of Mohammedanism, on which I
have insisted, the little that has been done for Africa,
till very lately, by the Christian nations that have
settled in it, and the still narrower limits within
which it has been confined. Till a few years ago
the good effects produced beyond the immediate
territories occupied by them were absolutely nothing.
The achievement of Vasco da Gama, for which Te
Deums were sung in Europe, proved for centuries to
be nothing but the direst curse to Africa. If the
Oceanic slave trade has been, to the eternal credit of
England in particular, at last abolished by Christian
nations, it cannot be forgotten that Africa owes also
to them its origin, and on the West Coast, at all
events, its long continuance. The message that
European traders have carried for centuries to Africa
has been one of rapacity, of cruelty, of selfishness,
and of bad faith. It is a remark of Dr. Livingstone's^
that the only art that the natives of Africa have
acquired from their five hundred years' acquaintance
with the Portuguese, has been the art of distilling
spirits from a gun-barrel ; and that the only perma-
nent belief they owe to them is the belief that man
may sell his brother man ; for this, he says emphati-
cally, is not a native belief, but is only to be found in
the track of the Portuguese.
A century and a half before the time of Dr. Living-
stone, William Bosnian, a chief factor of the Dutch
at the castle of Elmina in 1705, and the author of a
valuable work on the Coast of Guinea, remarked on
the fatal results, which were even then apparent, of
' Liviugutouu'b ' Kx|>editiou tu the Zambesi/ page 240.
WHA T CHRISTIANS HA VE DONE FOR AFRICA. 45
the introduction of spirits among the Negroes ; ex-
cessive brandy drinking, he said, seemed to be the
favourite vice of the Negro, but that of the Gold
Coast exceeded all others whom he had ever met.
Islam, it should be remembered, had not then
approached the Gold Coast : if it had, his statement
as to the extent of the evil amongst the Negroes of
that part might have needed an important qualifica-
tion ; and when we reflect on the havoc wrought by
the ^ desolating flood of ardent spirits ' poured into
Africa ever since by European merchants, what
Christian should not rejoice that what a native
African well calls a ' Total Abstinence Association '
extends now, owing to the spread of Islam, right
across Central Africa from the Nile to Sierra Leone ?
The stopping of the Oceanic slave trade by
England on the other hand is an enormous benefit
to Africa. Like the suppression of slavery itself
throughout the British dependencies, it is directly due
to the noble exertions of genuine Christian philan-
thropists ; and it is one of the greatest triumphs
which Christianity has ever won over the self-seek-
ing and baser instincts of a great nation. It were
to be wished that one could discern any imme-
diate prospect of a wave of such philanthropy sweep-
ing spontaneously through Musalman countries.
Musalmans would, as I hope to show hereafter,^ only
be true to the spirit of their Faith in now at length
striking the fetter from the slave, and in once and
for ever branding the slave hunter and the slave
seller as the worst of men. But, if we except the
small number of converts made within the limits of
1 See Lecture IV. p. 328.
46 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
their settlements, the suppression of the foreign slave
trade has been the only benefit hitherto conferred by-
Europeans on Africa. The extension of African
commerce is of more than doubtful benefit at present.
The chief articles that we export from thence are the
produce of slave labour, and, what is worse, of a
vastly extended slave trade, in the inaccessible
interior.* Nor is it wholly without reason that in
spite of Krapf and Moffat, of Frere, and Livingstone,
and of a score of other single-hearted and energetic
philanthropists, the white man is still an object of
terror, and his professed creed an object of suspicion
and repugnance to the Negro race.
Here I must leave this, as I think, one of the
most interesting and important parts of my subject.
Do not let me be misunderstood. I contend here
only that Islam is a comparative benefit to Africa ;
that Christendom till very lately has failed to in-
fluence it in any direction extensively for good ; that
certain evils, such as drunkenness, always accompany
European progress there ; and that there is room
enough, and degradation enough, amidst its barbarous
races for any and for every elevating agency.
Making every deduction for possible exaggeration in
the accounts I have quoted ; granting freely, what I
have never denied, that there is a vast amount of
' For the introduction, or rather the invention, of the Slave Trade
hy the Portuguese in the year 1444, see Helps' * Spanish Conquest in
America,' 1. 35 sq. ; and the quotation there given from the Chronicle
of Azumra, relating the capture of 200 Africans by a Portuguese
company at Lagos, and their shipment to Portugal. A disastrous
precedent from that time down to the end of the last century, only
too fatally followed by all the Christian nations of Europe which
had the chance !
ISLA M A CO.\fPA RA TIVE BENEFIT TO AFRICA. 41
superstition, of impurity, of cruelty among African
Mohammedans, as there is in every other semi-civiHsed,
I might add among other highly civilised races, I
yet think that enough has been demonstrated to any
unbiassed mind to justify the view I have taken.
A religion which indisputably has made cannibal-
ism and human sacrifice impossible, which has in-
troduced reading and writing, and, what is more,
has given a love for them ; which has forbidden,
and, to a great extent, has abolished, immodest
dancing and gambling and drinking, which incul-
cates upon the whole a pure morality, and sets
forth a sublime, and at the same time a simple
theology, is surely deserving of other feelings than
the hatred and the contempt which some por-
tions of our religious press habitually pour
upon it.
Truly, if the question must be put, whether it is
Mohammedan or Christian nations that have as yet
done most for Africa, the answer must be that it is
not the Christian. And if it be asked, again, not
what religion is the purest in itself, and ideally the
best, for to this there could be but one answer ; but
which, under the peculiar circumstances, historical,
geographical, and ethnological, is the religion most
likely to get hold on a vast scale of the native mind,
and so in some measure to elevate the savage cha-
racter, the same answer must be returned. The
question is, indeed, already half answered by a glance
at the map of Africa. Mohammedanism has already
leavened almost the whole of Africa to within five
degrees of the Equator ; and, to the south of it,
Uganda, the most civilised state in that part of
48 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Central Africa, has just become Mohammedan. ^ A
few years ago, a Mosque was built on the shores of
the Victoria Nyanza itself, and the Nile, from its
source to its mouth, is now, with very few exceptions,
a Mohammedan river.
That Mohammedanism may, when mutual misun-
derstandings are removed, as I hope to show in a
future Lecture, be elevated, chastened, purified by
Christian influences and a Christian spirit, and that
evils such as the slave trade, which are really foreign
to its nature, can be put down by the heroic efforts
of Christian philanthropists, I do not doubt ; and I
can, therefore, look forward, if with something of anx-
iety, with still more of hope, to what seems the des-
tiny of Africa — that Paganism and Devil-worship will
die out, and that the main part of the continent, if it
cannot become Christian, will become, what is next
best to it, Mohammedan.
Anyhow, it is certain that the gains of Moham-
medanism, in Africa alone, counterbalance its ap-
parent losses from Russian conquests, and from
Proselytism everywhere else ; nor can I believe, not-
' See some interesting remarks by Mr. Francis Galton at a meeting
of the British Association at Ijceds, on Sept. 22, 1873. I have also
to thank him for V^ing me, in conversation, his experience of Mo-
hammedanism in Africa, and for directing me to the best authorities
on the subject. Along the coast-line Mohammedanism of a di graded
kind has, of coui-se, extended much further South, beyond Zanzibar
to Mozambique and the Portuguese colonies. There are Mohamme-
dans to be found even among the Kaffirs and in Madagascar. The
original Portuguese settlers found the Arabs established along the
coasts of Mozambique and in the interior. They exterminated the
former ; but as they failed to dispossess the latter, it is possible, or
rather it has lately l^en proved to be the case, that some of the
terra pai-um nujnita in the interior is still Moharame<lan.
ISLAM IN INDIA. 49
withstanding predictions inspired by the wish, that its
work is yet done, or nearly done, in any of the
countries, except, perhaps, those of Europe, that have
ever owned its sway.
I speak of the apparent losses from Russian con-
quest, for the onward march of the Russian Colossus
through Central Asia, so far from carrying any
form of Christianity with it, seems to intensify the
religious convictions of the half-conquered or threat-
ened races. What was dead in the religion before,
it revives ; to what was only half-alive, it gives fresh
vigour. Islam has now become with them a patriot-
ism as well as a creed ; and Mr. Gifford Palgrave, an
able and accurate observer, has lately described how
the distinctive precepts of the Mohammedan religion
— those enjoining the observance of the month of
Ramadhan, the reading of the Koran, the pilgrimage
of the Hajj, the abstinence from gaming, from to-
bacco, and from intoxicating drinks — are now much
more rigidly observed in the debateable territories ;
and, more than this, the Abkhasians with theii
immemorial antiquity, and the heroic Circassians
driven from their homes after a desperate struggle by
Muscovite oppression and bad faith, dropping such
traces of Christianity as they had, but carrying with
them a legacy of immortal hate to the creed and
country of their tyrants, have crossed the frontier of
the more liberal Turkish Empire, and coalescing with
Kurds, Turkomans, and Arabs, have settled down in
the uplands of Armenia, and are there forming, as
Mr. Palgrave believes, the nucleus of a new, and
vigorous, and unite i Mohammedan nation.^
^ Palgrave's ^ Es3 lys on Eastern Questions,' iv. and v.
B 2
60 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
In India, again, where the two rehgions are brought
face to face, and where, if anywhere, we may expect
the great drama to play itself out, Mohammedanism
gives no sign of yielding. Unlike Brahmanism, which
the thousand influences of Western civilisation are
sapping in every direction, Mohammedanism, on the
contrary, seems to concentrate the strength it already
has, and owing to the efforts of its zealous missionaries,
is giving symptoms at once of a Revival and of a
Reform that may, at any time, change the religious
destinies of the country. The Faithful are as cour-
ageous, as sincere, as ardently monotheistic as they
ever were ; witness it the Indian Mutiny, the Wah-
habee Revival, and the last terrible argument of
assassination. The heroism and self-devotion of our
missionaries seem to be wasted on them in vain, and,
except in individual cases, I see no sign that it will
ever be otherwise. Buddhism and Brahmanism may
be driven out of India, but Mohammedanism never,
except by the Mohammedan method of the sword.^
The most recent historian of India* remarks, that
' few impartial observers will deny the fact that, to all
appearance, the people of India are drifting, slowly
but surely, towards the religion of the Prophet of
Arabia rather than towards that Christianity which
is freely offered to them, but which they are not
prepared to accept.' And if this be true, or nearly
true, how profound the importance to England, even
from an Imperial point of view, of a sympathetic study
of the religion which, under her ver}^ rule, threatens
to become dominant ; and how far more profoundly
' See Appendix to this Lecture.
« Talboys Wheeler, in the Preface to his * History of India.'
CAUSES OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS. 51
important to the Christian and to the philanthropist
to understand and to influence, while yet he may, a
system which, long probably after the British Empire
in India shall have passed away, will be the chief
motive power — for in most Eastern countries religion
and national feeling are one and the same thing —
among its two hundred millions of inhabitants ! Yet,
probably, nowhere is there a more profound ignorance
of Islam and its founder, and a greater indifference to
what it is doing in the world, than in England.
Popular preachers and teachers still call the Prophet
of Arabia an impostor ; and military officers, and even
civil servants of the Crown, have gone out to India,
passed years there, and returned again, still fancying
that Musalmans are idolaters.
Such are the leading facts of Mohammedanism
viewed from the outside ; and now how are we to
account for them ?
One thing is certain, that the explanations so
readily offered by historians and Christian apologists
till within a very recent period will not suffice now.
People who think they have nothing to do with a
system except to attack it, are not those who can
best explain the causes of its vitality or its success.
One historian tells us that Mohammedanism tri-
umphed by the mere force of arms ; another, by the
use Mohammed made of the tendency so deeply
planted in man to fall victims in masses to any well-
conceived imposture ; a third traces his success to his
skilful plagiarisms from faiths purer than his own ;
and a fourth to the elevated morality, or to the
lax morality, inculcated in the Koran ; for both of
these are strangely enough urged almost in the
62 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
same breath by the same people : while, lastly, others
dwell on the inherent strength of the founder's cha-
racter and the enthusiasm that must accompany a
crusade against idolatry.^ We feel that most of
these have some truth in them ; some of them have
much ; and one or two of them are not only not true,
but they are the very reverse of the truth. But we
also feel that none of them singly, nor all of them
together, adequately account for the phenomena they
profess to explain.
In treating of Mohammedanism, as remarked by
M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire,'' we have to try in lifnine
to discard alike our national and our religious
prejudices. It was not till Mohammedanism had ex-
isted for eight hundred years that it was possible to
discard the one ; and not till very lately that it was
even attempted to discard the other. Since the con-
quest of Constantinople, or rather since the brilliant
naval victory of Don John of Austria at Lepanto, and
its final repulse by John Sobieski fron^ the walls of
Vienna two hundred and thirty years later, Moham-
medanism has ceased, in Europe at least, to be an
aggressive and conquering power ; and since then, it
has been possible Ibr the states of Christendom to
breathe more freely, and to forget the infidel in the
ally or the subject.
Religious prejudice is more difficult to overcome.
Men who are ardently attached to their own religion
find it difficult to judge another dispassionately, and
from a neutral point of view. The philosopher who,
' See some of these explanations admirably dealt with by F. D.
Maurice, ' Religions of the World,' Leoture 1.
* 'Mahomet et le Koi-an/ preface, p. tj.
COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION. 5S
according to Gibbon's famous aphorism, looked upon
all religions of the Roman Empire as equall}^ false,
and the magistrate who looked upon all as equally
useful, would be alike incapacitated for viewing the
Musalman creed from the Musalman stand-point.
Perhaps the populace who looked upon all religions
as equally true would have been the best judges of
the three ; but I doubt whether in this, as in most
epigrammatic sentences, something of truth has not
been sacrificed to the antithesis. Nature does not
arrange herself in antithetical groups for our conveni-
ence ; and I doubt whether the mass of any people,
at any time, have looked upon all religions as equally
true.
But the comparative study of religion is beginning
to teach, at all events, the more thoughtful of man-
kind, not indeed that all religions are equally true or
equally elevating, but that all contain some truth ;
that no religion is exclusively good, none exclusively
bad ; that any religion which has a real and con-
tinued hold on a large body of mankind must satisfy
a real spiritual need, and is so far good. God is in
all His works, and not the least so in the thoughts
and aspirations of His creatures towards Himself;
and what we have to do is to feel after Him in
each and all, assured that He is there, even if haply
in our ignorance we can find no trace of Him.
Truly, when we are dealing with religion at all,
even though it be Polytheism or Fetishism, we are
' treading upon holy ground ; ' and in order that we
may treat that creed, sublime in its simplicity, which
is our special subject, with that union of candour and
of reverence which alone befits it, it is necessary
54 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
before concluding this introductory Lecture that I
should lay down clearly one principle which must
guide us in our investigation.
It is this, that for the purposes of scientific investi-
gation, religions must be regarded as differing from
one another in degree rather than in kind. This is
the one postulate, itself the result of a careful induc-
tion, upon which alone the existence of any true
science of religion must depend. Without a clear
perception of this truth you enter upon the study of
the religions of the world, with a preconceived idea,
which will colour all your conclusions, and will invali-
date them the more gravely, the more favourable
those conclusions are to your own creed. The ordi-
nary distinctions of kind, therefore, drawn between
true and false, natural and supernatural, revealed and
unrevealed religions, are, for our present purpose, un-
real and misleading. The fact is, that from one point
of view all religions are more or less natural, from an-
other all are more or less supernatural ; and all alike
are to be treated from the same standpoint, and
investigated by the same methods. In the Science
of Religion, to quote an expression of Max Miiller's
used in this place, Christianity 'owns no prescriptive
rights, and claims no immunities.' It challenges the
freest inquiry ; and as it claims to come from God
Himself, so it fears not the honest use of any faculties
that God has given to man. Christianity is indeed a
revelation, and what it really reveals is true ; and, so
far, if the alternative must needs be put in this shape,
no Christian would have any doubt in which category
to place his own creed.
But does Christianity claim any such monopoly of
DO RELIGIONS DIFFER IN KIND ? 55
what is good and true as is implied in this crude
classification, or will any one say that there is no
real revelation of God in the noble lives of Confucius
or Buddha, and no fragments of Divine truth in the
pure morality of the systems which they founded ?
Truth, happily for man, is myriad-sided, and happy
he who can catch a far-off glance of the one side of it
presented to him ! Claim, if you like, for the Bible
what the Koran does claim for itself and the Bible
does not— a rigid or a verbal inspiration. Grant that
the truth revealed passed mechanically through the
mind of the sacred writer without contamination and
without alloy, yet who can say, — since the Verities
with which religion deals are all beyond the world of
sense, — that the precise meaning attached by him to
any one word in his creed is the same as that attached
to it by any other ? — qiwt ho7nines tot sententm.
The recipient subject colours every object of sensation
or of thought as it passes into it, and is conscious of
that object, not as it entered, but as it has been
instantaneously and unconsciously transfomied in the
alembic of the mind. In religion, as in external
nature, the human mind is, as Bacon says, an unequal
mirror to the rays of things, mixing its own nature
indissolubly with theirs. And this relative element
once admitted into religion at all, it follows that to
divide religions by an impassable barrier into true and
false, natural and revealed, is like dividing music into
sacred and secular, and history into sacred and pro-
fane. It is a division convenient enough for those—
the majority of the human race — who are content
with an artificial classification, and who care for no
religion but their own ; but, for scientific purposes, it
66 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
is a cross division, it begs the question at issue, and is
-as unphilosophical as it is misleading. *
Nor do Sacred Books, whatever be the theory of
inspiration on which they rest, lend to the religion to
which they belong any distinction of kind ; they fix
the phraseology of a religion, and we are apt to
believe that they also fix the thought. The}- do not
do so, however. The poetic and literary terms
'thrown out,' to use Mr. Matthew Arnold's happy
expression, by the highest minds at the highest
objects of thought, as faint approximations only to
the truth respecting them, become enshrined in the
Sacred Canon. They are misunderstood, or half
understood, even by those who hear them from the
Psalmist's or the Prophet's own lips, and in a few
years the misunderstanding grows till they become
fixed and rigid.- Poetic imagery is mistaken for
scientific exactness, and dim outlines for exhaustive
definitions. A virtue is attached to the words them-
selves, and the thought, which is the jewel, is hidden
by the letter, which is only the casket. If it be true
that man never knows how anthropomorphic he
himself is, still less do sacred writers know the
anthropomorphism and the materialism which will
eventually be drawn even from their highest and
most spiritual utterances. How little did the author
of the prayer at the dedication of the temple of
Solomon — the grandest assertion, perhaps, in the
' Kor a full iliseussioii of the ordinary methods of classifying
religion, see Max Midler's • Science of Keliifion,' pp. 123-143.
* For illustrations of this, see * Literatui-e and Dogma,' cap. II.
and V. p. 12.S. This part of Mr. Arnold's work, it may be pretty
confidently asserted, is done once for all ; and its influence will be
felt, avowedly or not, throughout the domain of Biblical criticism.
MISSION A EY WORK. 57
Old Testament of the infinite power and the infinite
goodness of God, His nearness to us and His dis-
tance from us — imagine that the time would ever
come when it would be held that in that temple
alone, and by Jews alone, the Father could be
worshipped !
Christians may and must rise from an impartial
study of the religions of the world with their belief
vastly deepened that their Sacred Books stand, as a
whole, on a far higher level than other Sacred Books,
and that the ideal life of Christianity, while it is
capable of including the highest ideals of other creeds,
cannot itself be attained by any one of them. But
the value of this belief will be exactly proportioned
to the extent to which they have been able, for the
purposes of scientific study, to divest themselves of
any arbitrary assumption in the matter ; and they
must also acknowledge that it is possible and natural
for sincere Mohammedans or Buddhists to arrive at
the same conclusions concerning their own faiths. It
is not easy to be thoroughly convinced of this, or to
act upon it ; for intolerance is the ^ natural weed of
the human bosom,' and there is no religion which
does not seem superstitious to those who do not
believe in it. ^
But this belief is far from necessitating in practical
life a religious indifference, nor, however it may seem
so at first sight, is it averse to all missionary efforts.
Missionaries will not cease to exist, nor will they lose
' See Grote, VI. p. 15G, sq., on the death of Socrates. The boast
of Cicero, ' Majores nostri superstitionem a religioue separaverunt'
(de Nat. Deorum, II. 28), is the natural belief of every one, even
of the Fetish-worshipper, concerning his own, and none but his own,
creed.
58 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMAEDANJSM.
their energy, their enthusiasm, and their self-sacrifice.
But they will go to work in a different way, will view
other religions in a different light, and will test their
success by a different standard. They will no doubt
be forced to acquiesce in what seems the will of
Providence, that a national religion is as much part of
a man's nature as is the genius of his language, or
the colour of his skin ; they will admit that the precise
form of a creed is a matter of prejudice and of cir-
cumstance with most of us, and that, in spite of the
rise of historical religions which have shattered other
faiths and risen upon their ruins, nine-tenths of the
whole human race have died, and will in all pro-
bability continue to die, in the profession of that
faith into which they were bom ; but this will no
longer seem to them, as it must seem now^, a mys-
terious and overwhelming victory of evil over good,
which appals the moral sense, and, if a man be not
better than the letter of his creed, must tend to shake
at once his belief in the Universal Fatherhood of God,
and the true brotherhood of humanity ; they will
rather, in proportion to the strength of their belief in
the goodness of God, believe that His creatures cannot
grope after Him, even in the dark, without getting
that light which is sufficient for them ; they will not
seek to eradicate wholly any existing national faith, if
only it be a living one ; nor, as the phrase is, will they
aim at ' bringing its adherents over to Christianity ;'
they will seek rather to bring Christianity to them, to
infuse a Christian spirit into what is, at worst, not an
anti-Christian, but merely a non-Christian, or, it may
be, a half-Christian faith.
The Apostles did not cease to be Jews because
EXAMPLE OF ST. PAUL. 59
they became Christians, nor did they look up to
Moses less because they reverenced Christ more.
And yet the difference between Judaism and Christi-
anity, between the forms and the ceremonies and the
exclusiveness of the one, and the spirituality and the
freedom and the universality of the other, is at least
as great as, I hope to show, is the difference between
a sincere believer in the teaching of the Prophet of
Arabia and a humble follower of the character of
Christ.
St. Paul, the one model given us in the New
Testament of what a missionary should be in dealing
with the faith of a cultivated people much dissimilar
to his own, a faith, most people would say now,
differing in kind as well as in degree from Chris-
tianity, never thought himself of drawing so broad a
distinction between the two. He might well have
been disposed to do so, for the Polytheism of Athens
had long ceased to be an adequate expression of the
highest religious life of the people. It was in its
decadence even when it had inspired the profoundest
utterances of ^schylus or Sophocles ; it could not
have inspired them then, even had there existed
genius like theirs to be inspired. Its oracles were
dumb ; and yet St. Paul dropped not a word of scorn
for the echoes that still lingered, and the flames that
were still flickering, on its shattered altars. He did
not talk of false gods or of devil-worship, of imposture
or of superstition. Those whom our translation
calls ' superstitious ' he calls * God-fearing.' He
quotes their great authors with sympathy and with
respect. He professes only to give articulate utter-
ance to their own thoughts, and to declare more fully
60 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM,
to them that God whom, unknowingly, they already
worshipped.
And so, again, in writing to the converts to be
found even in the metropolis of the world, and, it
must be added, the head-quarters of its vices, while
he lashes its moral iniquities and its religious
corruptions with an unsparing hand, yet, with a
toleration wholly alien to the Jewish race, and with
out forfeiting his supreme allegiance to his Master,
he strikes at the root of the impassable distinc-
tion between revealed and unrevealed religion,
by pointing out that those who, not having the law,
yet did by nature the things contained in the law,
were in truth a law unto themselves. He showed
that the Eternal could reveal Himself as well
by His unwritten as by His written law, and
that the voice of conscience is, in very truth, to
everyone who follows it, the voice of the living
God.
The missionaries of the future, therefore, will try
to penetrate to the common elements which, they
will have learned, underlie all religions alike, and
make the most of those. They will be able, with a
sympathy which is real because it is drawn from a
knowledge of the history of their own faith, to point
out the abuses which have crept, and always will
creep, into an originally spiritual creed. They will
inculcate in their teaching, and exhibit in their lives,
as they do now, something of that highest morality
which they have learned from their Master, and
which they will then have learned is the very essence
of their faith, and which, in its broad outhnes at
least, in the ' secret ' as well as in the ' method ' of
HOW MA Y CHRISTIANITY SPREAD ? 61
Jesus, ^ may adapt itself to the wants of every nation
and every creed.
They will never, therefore, think it necessary to
present Christianity to those of an alien creed as a
collection of defined yet mysterious doctrines w^hich
must be accepted whole or not at all, but wnll rather
be content to show them Christ Himself as He
appeared to His earliest disciples — before the mists of
metaphysics had gathered round His head, and the
w^atchw^ords of theology had half hidden Him from
the view^ — glorious in His moral beauty, sublime in
His self-surrender, Divine in His humanity and by
reason of it. And they may then leave it to the
moral sense of some, at least, in every section of the
race whose greatest glory and Ideal Representative
He is, to judge of Him aright, and to recognise in
His person the supreme and the final Revelation of
God. Here, in the ambition to set before the eyes
of all a higher Ideal, and a more perfect example
than any they have yet known ; in the proclamation
of the truth, wiiich Christ came to proclaim, of the
universal Fatherhood, and the perfect love of God —
here is ample w^ork for the enthusiasm of humanity ;
in this sense, Christ may live again upon the earth,
' ' Of the all-importance of righteousness there is a knowledge in
Mohammedanism, but of the method and secret of Jesus, by which
alone is righteousness possible, hardly any sense at all.' — ' Literature
and Dogma,' p. 843. There is substantial truth in this ; but few can
read Mr. Arnold's own account of what he conceives the secret and
method of Jesus to have been, without feeling that all the higher
religions of the world,— any religion, in fact, which controlling the
lower part of man's nature and stimulating the higher, makes him to
be at peace with himself, which gives hope in adversity, and calm-
ness in the prospect of death, must contain much both of the one and
of the other.
62 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
and in this sense, and only in this, is it likely that
Christianity will overspread the world. I have pre-
mised this much, even at the risk of anticipating some
of the conclusions to which we shall, I believe,
ultimately come, because I think it necessary to pre-
vent any misunderstanding as to my point of view.
€$ oiu)v Otoe ; how far the way was prepared for
Mohammed by circumstances, and what part he him-
self bore in the great revolution that goes by his name ;
what we are to say on the nature of his mission, on
the much-disputed question of his sincerity, of the
inconsistencies in his career and the blots upon it,
this will form the subject of mv next Lecture.
MEDIEVAL VJEW OF MOHAMMED. 63
LECTURE II.
February 21. 1874.
MOHAMMED.
McyaXwv kavrbv d^Lol a^io? utv. — ARISTOTLE.
There goeth the soft of Abdallah, who hath his conversation in the
heavens.— The Kuraish.
A COMPLETE history of the opinions that have been
held by Christians about Mohammed and Moham-
medanism would not be an* uninstructive chapter,
however melancholy, in the history of the human
mind. To glance for a moment at a few of them.
During the first few centuries of Mohammedanism,
Christendom could not afford to criticise or explain ;
it could only tremble and obey. But when the
Saracens had received their first check in the heart of
France, the nations which had been flying before them
faced round, as a herd of cows will sometimes do when
the single dog that has put them to flight is called
off ; and though they did not yet venture to fight,
they could at least calumniate their retreating foe.
Drances-like, they could manufacture calumnies and
victories at pleasure : —
'Quae tuto tibi magna volant ; dum distinct hostemi
Ag'ijer murorum, nee inundant sanguine fossae.'
04 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
The disastrous retreat of Charles the Great through
Roncesvalles, and the slaughter of his rear-guard by
the Gascons, is turned by Romance-mongers and
Troubadours into a signal victory of his over the
Saracens ; Charles, who never went beyond Pannonia,
is credited, in the following century, with a successful
Crusade to the Holy Sepulchre, and even with the sack
of Babylon ! The age of Christian chivalry had not
yet come, and was not to come for two hundred years.
In the romance of ' Turpin,' quoted by Renan,
Mohammed, the fanatical destroyer of all idolatry, is
turned himself into an idol of gold, and, under the
name of Mawmet, is reported to be the object of wor-
ship at Cadiz ; and this not even Charles the Great,
Charles the Iconoclast, the destroyer of the Irmansul,
in his own native Germany, would venture to attack
from fear of the legion of demons which guarded it.
In the song of Roland, the national Epic of France,
referring to the same events, Mohammed appears with
the chief of the Pagan Gods on the one side of him
and the chief of the Devils on the other ; a curious
anticipation, perhaps, of the view of Satanic inspira-
tion taken by Sir William Muir. Marsilles, Khalif of
Cordova, is supposed to worship him as a god, and
his favourite form of adjuration is made to be * By
Jupiter, by Mohammed, and by Apollyon,' — strange
metamorphosis and strange collocation ! Human
sacrifices are offered to him, if nowhere else indeed,
in the imagination and assertions of Christian writers
of the tenth and eleventh centuries, under the various
names of Bafum, or Maphomet, or Mawmet ; and in
the same spirit Malaterra, in his ' History of Sicily,'
describes that island as being, when under Saracenic
MISCONCEPTIONS SHOWN BY LANGUAGE. 65
rule, ^ a land wholly given to idolatry/ ^ and the expe-
dition of the Norman Roger Guiscard is characterised
as a crusade against idol worship. Which people
were the greater idolaters, any candid reader of the
Italian annalists of this time, collected by Muratori,
can say. Even Marco Polo, the most charming and,
where his religious prejudices or his partiality for the
' Great Khan ' do not come in, the most trustworthy
of travellers, yet speaks of the Musalmans whom he
met everywhere in Central Asia and in China as
* worshippers of Mahommet.' '^ It is not a little curious
that both the English and French languages still bear
witness to the popular misapprehension ; the French
by the word ' Mahomerie ' ; the English by the word
* B. IT. 1. ' Terrain idolis deditam.'
2 Marco Polo, II. 196, 200, 266. Colonel Yule, in his gorgeous
and exhaustive edition of the Venetian traveller, quotes, in illus-
tration of the misconception, from iBaudouin de Sebourg, where a
Christian lady who is renouncing her faith before Saladin is made to
say
' Mahom voel aourer, apportez le moi cha.'
= I wish to worship Mahommed ; bring him to me here. Where-
upon Saladin commanded
' Qu'on aportast Mahom ; et celle I'aoura.'
He also remarks that even Don Quixote, who ought to have known
better, celebrates the feat of Einaldo, who carried off, in spite of forty
Moors, a golden image of Mohammed ! In keeping with Marco Polo's
calling Musalmans ' Worshippers of Mahommet ' are his other remarks
on the subject (I. 70, 74, ifec.) : * Marvel not that the Saracens hate
the Christians ; for the accursed law that Mahommet gave them
commands them to do all the mischief in their power to all other
descriptions of people, and especially to Christians. See then what
an evil law and what naughty commandments they have I But in
such fashion the Saracens act throughout the world.' Perhaps the
best commentary on this, is, that Marco Polo himself passed un-
guarded through almost all Musalman countries, and came out un-
harmed in person and in property.
C
66 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
V mummery,' still used for absurd or superstitious rites J
Nor has a Mohammedan nothing to complain of in
the etymolog>^ and history, little known or forgotten,
of the words * Mammetry ' and ' Paynim,' * terma-
gant ' and * miscreant ' ; '^ but to these I can only refer
in passing.
In the twelfth century * the god Mawmet passes
into the heresiarch Mahomet,' '* and, as such, of course
he occupies a conspicuous place in the ' Inferno.'
Dante places him in his ninth circle among the
sowers of religious discord ; his companions being
Fra Dolcino, a communist of the fourteenth century,
a^d Bertrand de Born, a fighting Troubadour : his flesh
i? torn piecemeal from his limbs by demons who re-
peat their round in time to re-open the half-healed
wounds. The romances of Baphomet, so common in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, attribute any
and every crime to him, just as the Athanasians did
to Arius. * He is a debauchee, a camel stealer, a
Cardinal, who having failed to obtain the object of
' Renan, 'fitudes d'Histoire Reli^euse,' p. 223, note.
'^ Mammetry, a contraction of Maliometry, used in early English
for any false religion, especially for a worship of idols, insomuch that
Mammet or Mawmet came to mean an idol. In Shakespeare the
name is extended to mean a doll : Juliet, for instance, is called by
her father 'a whining mammet.' See Trench 'On Wonls,' p. 112.
Paynim = I'agan or Heathen. Termagant, a term applied now only
to a brawling woman, was originally one of the names given to the
suppose<l idol of the Mohammedans. Miscreant, originally 'a man
who believes otherwise,' acquircnl its moral significance from the
hatred of the Saracens which accompanie«l the Crusades. The story
of Blue Beard, the associations connected with the name ' Mahound,'
and the dislike of European chivalry in Medieval times for the Mare
— the favourite animal of the Arabs— are t)ther in«lications of the
same thing.
* Benan, loc. eit.
LANGUAGE OB' PROTESTANTS AND CATHOLICS. 67
every Cardinal's ambition, invents a new religion to
revenge himself on his brethren !' ^
With the leaders of the Reformation, Mohammed,
the greatest of all Reformers, meets with little sym-
pathy, and their hatred of him, as perhaps was
natural, seems to vary inversely as their knowledge.
Luther doubts w^hether he is not worse than Leo ;
Melancthon believes him to be either Gog or Magog,
and probably both.^ The Reformers did not see that
the Papal party, fastening on the hatred of priestcraft
and formalism which was common doubtless to Islam
and to Protestantism, would impute to both a common
hatred of Christianity, even as the Popes had accused
the iconoclastic Emperors of Constantinople eight
centuries before.
The language of the Catholic Church, with the
accumulated wisdom and responsibilities of fifteen
centuries, was not more refined, nor its knowledge of
* Renan, p. 224. According to Bayle (Dictionary, Art. ' Mo
hammed,') Benvenuti of Imola started this idea.
> ^ See ' Quarterly Review,' Art. Islam, by Deutsch, No. 254, p. 296.
Cf . Shakespeare's view of him,
' The prince of darkness is a gentleman :
Modo he's call'd, and Mahu ' ; Le. Mahound.
and
' five fiends have been in poor Tom at once : of _lust, as Obidicut ;
Hobbididance, prince of dumbness ; Mahu, of stealing ; Modo, of
murder.' — King Lear, Act III. Scene IV. ; and Act IV. Scene I.
As a sample of the controversial works of the theologians of the
Reformed Church on this subject, take the following modest title-
page of a ponderous work written in 1666: — * Anti-christus Maho-
metes: ubi non solum per Sanctam Scripturam, ac Reformatorum
testimonia, verum etiam per omnes alios probandi modos et genera,
plene, fuse, invictc solideque demonstratur MAHOMETEM esse
unum ilium verum, magnum, de quo in Sacris fit mentio, ANTI-
CHRISTUM.'
68 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Islam more profound, than was that of the Protes-
tants of yesterday. Genebrard, for instance, a famous
Cathohc controversialist, reproaches Mohammed with
having written his Koran in Arabic, and not in Hebrew,
Greek, or Latin, ^ the only civilised languages.' Why
did he do so ? asks he. ^ Because,' he replies to his
own question, * Mohammed was a beast, and only
knew a language that was suited to his bestial condi-
tion 1 ' Nor are some of his other arguments more
convincing, however seriously they were meant.
Now, too, arose the invention, the maliciousness of
which was only equalled by its stupidity, but believed
by all who wished to believe it — of the dove trained
to gather peas placed in the ear of Mohammed,^
that people might believe that he was inspired by the
Holy Ghost — inspired, it would seem, by the very
Being whose separate existence it was the first article
of his creed to deny ! In the imagination of Biblical
commentators later on, and down to this very day,
he divides with the Pope the credit or discredit of
being the subject of special prophecy in the books of
Daniel and Revelation, that magnificent series of
tableaux, a part of which, on the principle that ' a
prophecy may mean whatever comes after it,' has
been tortured into agreement with each successive
act of the drama of history ; while from another part,
lovers of the mysterious have attempted to cast, and,
in spite of disappointment, will always continue to
cast, the horoscope of the future. He is Antichrist,
the Man of Sin, the Little Horn, and I know not
' A similar st^^ry is told of the great Shamil ; only in this case it is
Mohammed himself who takes the form of a dove, and imparts his
commands to the Hero.
SUPPOSED SUBJECT OF PROPHECY. 69
what besides ; nor do I think that a single writer,
with the one strange exception of the Jew Maimonides,
till towards the middle of the eighteenth century,
treats of him as otherwise than a rank impostor and
false prophet.
Things did not much improve even when it was
thought advisable, before passing judgment, or for the
purpose of registering one already passed, to ascend
as nearly as possible to the fountain-head. The
Koran was translated into French by Andre du Ryer
in 1649, and by the Abbe Maracci in 1698. Maracci,
the confessor of a Pope, of course dealt with the
Koran chiefly from a Romanist point of view : indeed
he accompanies his translation with what he calls a
^ Refutatio Alcorani,' and a very voluminous and
calumnious one it is ; and when a certain Englishman,
named Alexander Ross, ventured to translate the
French version of du Ryer into English, he thought
it necessary to preface his work by what he calls ^ a
needful caveat or admonition,' which runs thus :
' Good reader, the great Arabian impostor, now at
last, after a thousand years, is, by the way of France,
arrived in England, and his Alcoran, or Gallimaufry
of Errors, (a Brat as deformed as the Parent, and
as full of Heresies as his scald head was of scurf,)
hath learned to speak Enghsh.' And one who has
probably as much right to speak upon the subject as
any living Englishman,' after quoting this refined
description of the Koran and its author, remarks that,
' though the education of two centuries has chastened
the style of our national literature and added much to
* Dr. G. P. Badger, in the ' Contemporary Review ' for June 1875;
Art. Mohamme-i and Mohammedanism.
70 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
our knowledge of the East, there is good ground for
supposing that the views of Alexander Ross are in
accordance substantially with the views still held by
the great majority of Englishmen.' That he is not
far wTong, I would adduce as evidence from amongst
Churchmen the tone habitually taken by a large part
of the religious press when dealing with any subject
connected with Islam ; and from among Noncon-
formists the following hymn written by Charles
Wesley for ' believers interceding ' for Mohammedans,
and still, as I am informed, used by some of them at
their religious sei-vices : —
' The smoke of the infernal cjive
Which half the Christian world o'erspread,
Disperse, thou heavenly li^^ht. and save
The souls by that impostor led —
That Arab thief, as Satan bold.
Who quite destroyed thy Asian fold.
' Oh may thy blood once sprinkled cry
For those who spurn thy sprinkled blood !
Assert thy glorious Deity.
Stretch out thine arm, thou triune God I
The Unitarian fiend expel.
And chase his doctrine back to hell."
France and England may, however, in spite of
the ^ needful caveat or admonition ' of Alexander
Ross, and the popular misconceptions which are
still afloat upon the subject, divide the credit of
having been the first to take a different view, and
to have begun that critical study of Arabian history
or literature which, in the hands of Gibbon and of
Muir, of Caussin de Perceval and of St. Hilaire,
of Weil and of Sprenger, has at length placed the
materials for a fair and unbiassed judgment within
POPULAR VIEW OF MOHAMMED STFLL. 71
the reach of everyone. Most other writers of the
eighteenth century, such as Dean Prideaux and
d'Herbelot, Boulainvilhers and Voltaire, and some
subsequent Bampton lecturers and Arabic profes-
sors, have approached the subject only to prove a
thesis. Mohammed was to be either a hero or an
impostor ; they have held a brief either for the
prosecution or the defence ; and from them, there-
fore, we learn much that has been said about Mo-
hammed, but comparatively little of Mohammed him-
self.
It is not unnatural that in some cases extravagant
detraction should have given rise to equally extrava-
gant eulogy, and that the Prophet of Arabia should
have been, more than once, held up to admiration as
almost the ideal of humanity. But this is a length to
which it is quite unnecessary for me to go, and which
is inconsistent alike with what Mohammed claimed
for himself and with recorded facts. These facts are
now all or nearly all before us ; and what is most
needed now is, as has been well remarked by an able
writer in the ^ Academy,' the mind that can see their
true meaning, ^ that can grasp the complex character
of the great man whose life they mark out, like a
grand but intricate mosaic'
The founder of the reaction was Gagnier, a French-
man by birth, but an Englishman by adoption.
Educated in Navarre, where he had early shown a
mastery of more than one Semitic language, he be-
came Canon of St. Genevieve at Paris ; on a sudden
he turned Protestant, came to England, and attacked
Catholicism with all the zeal of a recent convert.
Having been appointed to the Chair of Arabic at
72 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Oxford, he proceeded to write a history of
Mohammed, founded on the work of Abulfeda, the
earliest and most authentic of Arabic historians then
known.
The translations of the Koran into two different
European languages by Sale and Savary soon followed ;
and from these works, combined with the vast
number of facts contained in Sale's Introductory Dis-
course, Gibbon, who was not an Arabic scholar him-
self, drew the materials for his splendid chapter, the
most masterly of his ' three master-pieces of bio-
graphy,' Athanasius, Julian, and Mohammed. ' He
has descended on the subject in the fulness of his
strength,' has been inspired by it, and has produced
a sketch which, in spite of occasional uncalled-for
sarcasms and characteristic innuendoes, must be the
delight and the despair even of those who have access,
as we now have, thanks especially to Sprenger and
Muir, to vast stores of information denied to him.
But Gibbon's unfair and unphilosophic treatment of
Christianity has, perhaps, prevented the world from
doing justice to his generally fair and philosophic
treatment of Mohammedanism ; and, as a conse-
quence of this, most Englishmen, who do not con-
demn the Arabian prophet unheard, derive what
favourable notions of him they have, not from
Gibbon, but from Carlyle. Make as large deductions
as we will on the score of Carlyle's peculiar views on
' Heroes and Hero-worship,' how many of us can
recall the shock of surprise, the epoch in our intel-
lectual and religious life, when we found that he
chose for his * Hero as prophet,' not Moses, or Elijah,
or Isaiah, but the so-called impostor Mohammed I
X
\PARTIAL REACTION IN HIS FAVOUR. 73
And now, before we go further, let us leap back
in imagination to the times preceding the birth of
Mohammed, and enquire what the country was like
from which he sprung, what were the aptitudes of the
Arabs, their tastes, their organisation, their religions ;
we shall then, perchance, be better able to approach
the proper subject of this and the succeeding Lectures,
the character of the Prophet himself and of the creed
which he founded ; and to apply that historical and
relative judgment to the matter which is essential to
it. ^ Man is the creature of circumstances,' says the
English aphorism : if we know what the antecedents
of Mohammed were, we shall be better able to judge
how far the proverb is true or adequate — how far,
that is, Mohammed was formed by circumstances, and
how far he moulded them b}^ his mighty will and his
keen insight.
The most distinctive feature of the countless tribes
who have, from time immemorial, wandered over the
vast and arid plains of Arabia, and the one most
difficult for us to realise, is their immobility.^ Some
few there were among them who, like the inhabitants
of Mecca, lived, in the main, by legitimate commerce ;
some few also, like the inhabitants of Medina, who
lived by the cultivation of the soil ; but the vast
majority were shepherds of the desert. This was the
air in which alone they could breathe freely, here
they could wander at will. Nowhere in the world,
says Sprenger in a charming passage, is a man happier
than in the desert : the sky is always clear ; the air,
^ For an admirable account, to which T am miach indebted, of the
characteristics of the Arabs, see the first two chapters of Dozy's
* Histoire des Musalmans d'Espagne.'
74 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
even in hot weather, is strengthening and refreshing ;
every breath we draw makes us thank God for hfe.
A native of the Alps himself, though he would often
amidst the burning sands of Arabia dream of glaciers,
and long for the echoes of the Jiidel, he confesses
that neither the air of his own Alps nor that of the
Himalayas was so strengthening or so vivifying as
that of the desert. Such a climate, he goes on to
remark, had a powerful influence, physical and intel-
lectual, on its inhabitants. They were elastic and
quick ; their horses were swifter than any other
horses, and very healthy. No king of Hira, so their
historians say, ever died of ill-health brought on by
natural causes ! and Ibn Chaldun seriously attributes
the forty years' wanderings of the Israelites in the
desert to the natural feebleness of a race bom else-
where. It required a new generation bom in the
desert and endowed with the strength which the
desert alone can give to conquer Canaan !'
The Camel, it has been said, is tlie Arab's ship of
the desert ; the caravan is his fleet. Agriculture the
Arabs looked down upon as tethering the cultivator,
like a slave, to the soil on which he laboured. Com-
merce was in better repute with them, but only
because it gave more material for plunder : the fool-
ish merchants toiled, and the wise and wandering
Bedouins entered into their toils. What the Arabs
were in the time of Abraham, that they were in the
time of Mohammed ; and that, be it remembered, the
bulk of those who cling to their native deserts are, in
' Sprenger, III., Preface, viii. : uiul chap. xvii. 8. C'uiupare alno
the testimony of Mr. LayanI in his popiUar condensjition of his
works on Nineveh,
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ARABS. 75
Spite of the vast impulse given by him to the Arab
nation, to this very day ; that also, it is not too much
to add, they will be hundreds of years hence. They
feed on the same food, wield the same weapons of
war, water their cattle at the same springs as the
Patriarchs themselves. The accounts of Niebuhr and
of Burckhardt, of Burton and of Layard, are thus the
best commentaries on much of the Koran, on much
also of the Book of Genesis. The Bedouins of the
desert call themselves Musalmans, but they value
freedom too much to trouble themselves about obey-
ing the Musalman laws. ' They pray, many of them,'
says Burckhardt, ^ not five times a day, but never.'
The Bedouin, though not the noblest, is yet a noble
type of humanity. A stranger to the idea of progress,
he despises the hurry and the flurry, the breathless
race for wealth, the luxuries and the appliances, and
the accumulated knowledge of facts, that go to make
up what we call our civilisation. , It is surely a relief
to turn, if only for a moment, to the supreme content-
ment of an Arab with his lot, to his carelessness of the
future, to his ineffable dignity of repose, from the
feverish activity, the constant straining after an
ideal which can never be satisfied, the ^ life at high
pressure,' which is the characteristic of the more
active, but hardly the more highly gifted, races of
the West.
It is not that the Arab lacks the intelligence or
the power vto change his condition — he does not wish,
or rather he wishes not, to do so. He looks upon
himself as the highest type of creation, V upon his
language as the most perfect language ; and in this, if
' Dozy, Vol. I. p. 4.
76 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Arabic scholars are to be believed, and if the music ]
of the Koran is what they say it is, he is not so far
wrong. Upon him, and upon him alone, as he
proudly asserts, God has bestowed four privileges —
that their turbans should be their diadems, their tents
their homes, their swords their entrenchments, and
their poems their laws. Passionately fond of liberty,
the Arab may well boast that, whatever the cause,
his country has never been conquered by foreign foes.
Alexander dreamed, but only dreamed of conquering
Arabia. Trajan struck medals to commemorate his
conquests of it ; but what he conquered was not
Arabia at all, but only an outlying province of it, and
that he did not attempt to hold.
Nor are the individual and the social liberty of
the Arabs less than their national. Split up into
innumerable tribes, constantly at war with each other,
each tribe has a Sheik of its own, but that Sheik is
elected by the members of his tribe, not for his birth
or for his wealth, but for his individual merits. When
elected, he has duties only, not rights ; influence, not
power. His tent is pitched on that side of an encamp-
ment on which an enemy is most likely to attack it, or
a friend to visit it. To be the first to resist an enemy,
or to do honour to a guest, this is at once his duty and
his privilege. He can neither issue an order nor inflict
a punishment of his own free will. He must summon
the heads of all the families of the tribe, and, sitting
in council with them, he is only primus inter pares.
The tie most sacred in the eyes of the Arab is that
which binds him to his tribe : he calls his fellow
tribesmen his brothers, he will share his last morsel
or kill his last sheep to relieve any one of them who
THE BEDOUINS. 11
is in distress.^ He will avenge any insult or injury
offered to him as if it were his own.
A true Bedouin despises wealth, for his only
property consists of flocks and herds. The descent
of a band of plunderers may hurry it all away, and
the despoiled owner must wait patiently till his turn
comes for reprisals. Amongst such a people hospi-
tality and open-heartedness would be not only one of
the higher, but also one of the easier and commoner
virtues. ^ Let the torrent of your liberality escape
from your hand,' says the Arab proverb, ^ without the
sound of it reaching your ear.' A man who had
ruined himself by his open-handed generosity was
held in high honour, while he who had amassed
riches was despised and hated. ' From the hand of
the greedy falls not even a grain of mustard seed,'
says one Arab proverb. ^ The miser puts a bridle
even on the rats of his house,' says a second, meaning
that he tries to guard even what cannot be guarded.
* The miser is like a glow-worm's spark, which gives
neither light nor heat that is good for anything,' says
a third.^
Next to the passion for liberty, the affection for
their tribe, and the duty of hospitality, came, in the
breast of a true-bom Bedouin, the appetite for
plunder, the respect for valour, the love of poetry and
eloquence. The scanty sustenance which an arid soil
yielded they were fain to eke out by plundering
those who conducted caravans along the coast of
Hedjaz to exchange the spices and precious stones
' Dozy, p. 10.
=* Quoted by M. Scholl, ' L'Islam et son Fondateur,' p. 12, 13, from
Meidani's collection of ancient Arabic Proverbs.
78 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
of India, of Hadramaut, or of Yemen, with the manu-
factures of Bozra and Damascus ; their hand was
against every man, and every man's hand was against
them ; yet even in their phmdering excursions
there was a contempt of danger and a sensibiHty of
honour which lends a charm to all we hear of their
loves and their wars, their greed and their hospitality,
their rapine and their revenge. The Bedouin has
been the same in these respects in all ages. ' Be
good enough to take off that garment of yours,' says
the Bedouin robber politely to his victim ; * it is
wanted by my wife ; ' and the victim submits with as
good a grace as he can muster to the somewhat un-
reasonable demands of a hypothetical lady. When a
woman is the victim, no Bedouin brigand, however
rude, will be ill-mannered enough to lay hands upon
her. He begs her to take off the garment on which
he has set his heart, and he then retires to a distance
and stands with eyes averted, lest he should do vio-
lence to her modesty.^
El Mutanabi, a poet, prophet, and warrior, three
hundred years after the Hijrah, but who, no doubt, had
his prototypes before it, was journeying with his son
through a country infested by robbers, and proposed
to seek a place of refuge for the night : * Art thou
then that Mutanabi,' exclaimed his slave, ' who wrote
these lines, —
' 1 am known to the night, and the wild and the stee*!,
To the gue^t and the sword, to the paper and the reed I '
' See an exquisite story illustrating the true knightly courtesy of
Othman, son of Zalha, to 0mm Salama, who afterwards became a
wife of the Prophet. (Sprenger, II. 535-538.)
ARAB LOVE OF POETRY. 79
The poet-warrior felt the stain hke a wound, and
throwing himself down to sleep where he then was,
met his death at the hands of the robbers.' The
passion indeed for indiscriminate plunder had, before
the time of Mohammed, so far given way to the
growing love of commerce that a kind of Treuga Dei,
or Truce of God, was observed, in theory at least,
during four months of the year. But what the law
forbade then, ex hypothesi it allowed at other times,
and it is likely that the enforced abstention gave, at
once, the zest of novelty and a clear conscience to
the purveyors of the trade when the four months
were over.
Nor were the Arabs as uncivilised in other
respects as has often been supposed. They were
as passionately fond of poetry as they were of war
and plunder. What the Olympic Games did for
Greece in keeping up the national feeling, as
distinct from tribal independence, in giving a brief
cessation from hostilities, and acting as a literary
centre, that the annual fairs at Okatz and Mujanna
were to Arabia. Here tribes made up their dissen-
sions, exchanged prisoners of war, and, most important
of all, competed with one another in extempore poetic
contests. Even in the ^ times of ignorance,' each
tribe produced its own poet-laureate ; and the most
ready and the best saw his poem transcribed in letters
of gold,* or suspended on the wall of the entrance of
' Burton's * Pilgrimage to Mecca,' III. p. 60, where he tells this
story and translates the Arabic lines. See the whole of chap. XXIV.
for a graphic account drawn from personal observation of Bedouin
knight errantry, and poetry, and generosity.
'■* Called Moallacat. Sprenger and Deutsch agree that this word
means not ' suspended,' but ' strung loosely together,' and question
80 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
the Kaaba, where it would be seen by every pilgrim
who might visit the most sacred place in the country.
But the Arab poetry, rich as it was in sparkling
gems, in melody, and in all the graces of style, and
passionately fond as the Arab was of it, never rose
to the dignity of the epic. It was lyrical and descrip-
tive only : their amours and their love feuds, the
joys of the dice-box and the wine-cup, the heroic deeds
of their ancestors, the birth of a son or of a foal of
generous breed — these were the themes of their
greatest poets, and these the wild tribes of the
desert flocked to hear. ' The Kings of the Arabs/
said the Khalif Omar, ^ are their orators and poets,
those who practise and who celebrate all the virtues
of a Bedouin.' '
What those virtues were, the foregoing sketch may
indicate ; perchance we may think some among them
to be vices ; but there is a yet darker side to the
picture, which called aloud for the hand of a reformer,
if such could ever be found in so unchangeable a
people.
To forgive an injury was with the Arabs the sign
of a craven spirit ; revenge was a religious duty ;
blood feuds were handed down from father to son as
the most sacred of obligations ; the crime, or it might
be the misfortune, of an individual involved a whole
tribe in its consequences ; and the claim was some-
times not considered to be satisfied till the whole
tribe had been swept away. Arab writers celebrate
the truth of the story of the suspension in the ' Kaaba.' Some of these
poems, as, for Instance, that of the \x)et Labyd, still survive, and are
a standing proof of the untaught poetic genius of the Arabs.
* Quoted by Do/.y, p. 8.
DISPOSAL OF FEMALE CHILDREN. 81
with patriotic pride this national characteristic, and
attribute it to the flesh of the camel, that most surly
and unforgiv-ng of creatures, which forms the main
animal food of the Bedouin/ Drunkenness was, as
many poems which have been preserved to us indi-
cate, very common, and very fatal in its effects. The
passion for gambling was so reckless that a man
would often stake all his possessions, and after losing
them at a throw, would next stake his freedom, and,
losing that also, become a slave.^
But the most barbarous practice of these ^ times
of ignorance,' for so the Arabs after the time of Mo-
hammed call with proud humility the times before
him, was the burying alive of female children as soon
as they were born ; or, worse still, as sometimes-
happened, after they had attained the age of six
years. The father was generally himself the murderer.
' Perfume and adorn,' he would say to the mother,
' your daughter, that I may convey her to her mothers.'
This done, he led her to a pit dug for the purpose,
bade her look down into it, and then, as he stood be-
hind her, pushed her headlong in, and then filling up
the pit himself levelled it with the rest of the ground !.
It is said that the only occasion on which a certain
Othman ever shed a tear was when his little daughter
whom he was burying alive wiped the dust of the
grave earth from his beard. This inhuman practice
may have originated from motives of domestic eco-
nomy, or from fear of dishonour to the tribe if a
woman should be taken captive by the enemy, or,
' Sale, ' Preliminary Discourse,' I. 22.
^ See ' Christian Remembrancer ' for January 1855, by Dr. Cazenove
p. 68.
C 2
82 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
what is more likely, from the general disregard of
female life and rights. Anyhow it had once been
very common, and in Mohammed's time it was still
not rare, even among the Kuraish.'
Some women there were who, like the Arabian
poetess El Khunsa, by sheer force of character or of
genius managed to assert themselves even in 'the
times of ignorance.' But the majority were in the most
degraded position, worse even than thatin which they ^
were under the laws of Manu in Hindustan, or than
they are in Musalman states now. A woman had
no rights ; she could not inherit property ; her person
formed part of the inheritance which came to the heir
of her husband, and he was entitled to marry her
against her will. Hence spnmg the impious mar-
riages of sons with their step-mothers and others of an
even worse character which Mohammed so perempto-
rily forbade. Polygamy was universal and quite
unrestricted ; equally so was divorce, at least as far
as the man was concerned. We read of a certain
woman Omm-Charijeh, who had distinguished herself,
even amongst the Arabs, by having forty husbands.
A husband could dismiss his wife on the merest whim,
and then, if he so pleased, might recall her again
under the influence of a similar whim. A few ancient
Arab proverbs collected by an American Missionary
in Syria, Dr. Jessup,'"* will perhaps illustrate, more
forcibly than any statements of my own, the degrada-
tion of woman in the times preceding Mohammed.
Here are some of them : —
Sale, * Pielimiimry DiMtuux-,' V. in\
' 'Women of the Aral)8,' cap. I.
FORMER DEGRADATION OF WOMAN. 83
' To send women before to the other world is a benefit.'
' The best son-in-law is the grave.'
' Obedience to women will have to be repented of.'
' A man can bear anything but the mention of his wives.'
* The heart of woman is given to folly.'
* Leave not a girl nor a green pasture unguarded.'
* Women are the whips of Satan.'
' Our mother forbids us to err, and herself runs into eripr.'
* My father does the fighting, and my mother the talking about it.'
Such then were the leading social characteristics of
the nation from which Mohammed sprang. It is im-
portant for us to bear carefully in mind the difficulties
that were in the Prophet's way, that we may be
better able hereafter to appreciate the manner in
which he dealt with them, and the extent to which
he was able to overcome them.
Let us now turn to the religious systems and ideas
which prevailed in Arabia before Mohammed's time,
and which he, like every other reformer whose work
is to last, would have to take into account.
The two highest religions of the world, Judaism
and Christianity, were not unknown in Arabia. The
destruction of Jerusalem by Titus had caused a very
general migration of Jews from Palestine, southwards
and eastwards, beyond the limits of the Roman
Empire ; and from that time onwards the northern
part of Arabia was dotted over by Jewish colonies.
In the third century a whole Arabian tribe, even in
the south of the peninsula, had adopted the Jewish
faith, and the history of Mohammed proves that the
neighbourhood of Yathrib^ contained many Jewish
tribes, which, though they maintained in the land
' Not called Medina, i.e. Medinat-an-Nabi, ' the City of the Prophet,'
till after the Hijrah. The Arab capital of Malta (now Civita Vecchia)
bore for several centuries the same name, Medina.
84 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
of their exile that proud rehgious isolation which was
their national birthright, were not without their influ-
ence on Arab politics.
Christianity may have been introduced into Arabia
by St. Paul himself. ' Neither went I up into Jerusa-
lem to them which were apostles before me/ he says
to his Galatian converts, ' but I went into Arabia.'
Anyhow, the persecutions which sprang up in the
Eastern Church in the third century drove large
numbers of Christians, chiefly those of the Jacobite
persuasion, into this land of liberty and free tolera-
tion. ^ I reign,' said Marthan, a king of Yemen in the
fourth century, ^over men's bodies, not over their
minds. I require of my subjects that they should
obey my government : of their opinions God alone
will judge.' Noble words, but mistimed by above
eleven centuries, and how imperfectly carried out even
now ! Accordingly, we hear of several tribes of
Yemen becoming to some extent Christianised. We
hear of churches, and even of bishops, at Djafar and
at Nadjran. But Christianity seems to have taken
even less hold than Judaism of the Arab character.
Controversies on the minutest points of Christian
doctrine absorbed all the energies of those who never
thought of leading a Christian life ; and the Khalif
Ali was not far wrong when he said of a tribe in
which Christianity seemed more than elsewhere to
be the dominant religion, 'The Taglibites are not
Christians : they owe nothing to Christianity except
the custom of drinking wine.'*
Thus neither Christianity nor Judaism ever struck
' Dozy, p. 20.
OBJECTS OF BEDOUIN WORSHIP. 85
deep root in the Arabian soil. The people were not
suited to them, or they were not suited to the people.
They lived on, on sufferance only, till a faith, which
to the Arabs should be the more living one, should
sweep them away.
I have admitted in my first Lecture that the re
ligion of Mohammed was in its essence not original.
Mohammed never said it was : he called it a revival
of the old one, a return to the primitive creed of
Abraham ; and there is reason to believe that both
the great religions of the Eastern world existing in
his time, Sabaeanism, that is, and Magianism, had
been, in their origin at least, vaguely monotheistic.
They had passed through the inevitable stages of
spirituality, misunderstanding, decline, and, lastly,
intentional corruption, till the God whom Abraham,
according to the well-known Musalman legend, had
been the first to worship, because, while He had
made the stars and sun to rise and set. He never rose
nor set Himself, had withdrawn behind them alto-
gether ; the heavenly bodies, from being symbols,
had become the thing symbolised ; temples were
erected in their honour, and idols filled the temples.
And, as with Sabseanism, so with Magianism ;
Ormuzd and Ahriman were no longer the principles
brought into existence, or existing, by the permission
of the one true God, who, as Zoroaster had taught,
would tolerate neither temples, nor altars, nor sym-
bols ; worshipped only on the hill-tops with the eye
of faith, quickened though it might be by the glory
of the rising or setting sun presented to the bodily
eye. Fire had itself become the Divinity ; and what
offering could be more acceptable to such a God
86 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
than the human victim, overw^helmed by the myste-
rious flame, whose divine power he denied ?
And, combined with these two rehgions which
had been spiritual in their origin, and, probably, more
prominent and popular than either, was the grossest
Fetishism. The idea indeed of one God was not
altogether lost ; but a number of inferior divinities
were worshipped as mediators with Him, or, as the
Koran indignantly expresses it, as ' companions ' to
Him. Stocks, stones, trees, shapeless masses of
dough — such were some of the objects of the Bedouins'
worship. Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manah were wor-
shipped as angels under female names, and were
called the daughters of God. ' They attribute,' says
Mohammed, in a noble Sura of the Koran, ^ they
attribute daughters to God ; yet they wish not
daughters for themselves. When a female child is
announced to one of them, his face grows dark, and
he is as though he would choke.' ^ Al-Uzza was
worshipped under the form of a tree, Manah of a
large stone, Yaghuth of a lion, Sawa of a woman,
Ya'uk of a horse, Nasr of an eagle. Here was
material enough for the withering scorn of the
Prophet.
But the most famous and the most ancient sanc-
tuary in the country was the Kaaba, called Beit-
Allah, or House of God, built in the shape of a cube,
and forming a veritable Pantheon of all Arabia.
Here was the grim array of the three hundred and
sixty idols, one for every day in the year. Here was
the famous Hobal, the figure of a man carved in red
* Siinv XVI. .*»9, with Rodwell's note ad loc,
SUPERSTITIONS OF THE ARABS. 87
agate and holding seven wingless arrows in his hand,
like those used in divination. Here, strange to say,
was a statue of Abraham ; and, stranger still, a statue
of the Madonna. Here was Zemzem, the sacred
spring which bubbled forth, as the Bedouins believed,
from the sandy soil to save the life of Ishmael, their
great progenitor, when perishing of thirst. Here
was the white stone which was supposed to form
his sepulchre ; and here, above all, was the black
stone, that stone which had fallen from heaven
in the time of Adam, once of dazzling whiteness,
but long since turned black by the kisses of sinful
mortals.
The religious ideas or superstitions of the Arabs
varied as much as did the objects of their worship.
A father not unfrequently sacrificed his own child to
appease an angry God ; a practice which, common
amongst other branches of the Semitic races, the
Phoenicians, the Moabites, the Carthaginians, and not
unknown even amongst the Jews, need not occasion
surprise when found amongst the Arabs. Divination
by arrows was a favourite method of finding out the
will of God. Seven of these pointless and featherless
arrows were kept in the Kaaba, but the number most
commonly employed was three : one of them marked
with the words, ' My Lord hath commanded thee ; '
a second, ' My Lord hath forbidden thee ; ' the third
being left blank. The Arab was always ready to
consult these arrows, but not always so ready to
abide by their decision. A certain prince was anxious
to avenge the murder of his father. He consulted an
idol of much repute by drawing from three arrows in
his presence. On one of them was inscribed the word
88 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
/ command/ on the second ' prohibition,' on the third
' delay.' He drew out ' prohibition : ' dissatisfied, he
shuffled the arrows a second time, and the second
time drew out the same. Twice again he shuffled
them, and each time with the same result. In his
anger he broke the arrows into pieces, and threw
them at the idol's head, exclaiming : ^ Wretch ! if it
were thy father who had been killed, thou wouldst
not have forbidden his being avenged.' ^
The fact is, that though there were many religions
and many superstitions amongst the Arabs, they
were, as a whole, in temperament, neither religious
nor superstitious. They were careless, sceptical, mate-
rialistic. ^ Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,'
is the Epicurean tone of the majority of the poems
that have come down to us. What a contrast they
were in this respect to Mohammed, and what a
Herculean difficulty did this temperament of theirs
place in the way of the religious reformer ! Many of
the Arabs believed that death was extinction : some
few believed in a future life and a future judgment.
By these last a camel was tethered to a dead man's
grave, and was left to die of hunger, that the corpse
might have an animal to carry it at the day of resur-
rection. There was a weird superstition too among
them, that the soul of the dead hovered over his
grave in the form of an owl, and that if the person
had been murdered it might be heard crying ' Oscuni,
Oscuni,' that is, ^ Give me drink, give me drink ; ' nor
would it cease doing so till the blood of the murderer
had been shed.*
* Caussiu de Perceval, II. 810, quoted by Cazenove, p. 6t».
• Sale. * Preliminary Discourse,' p. 15.
COULD ISLAM HAVE BEEN PREDICTEDV 89
Such then, ver}^ briefly, was the condition of the
Arabs, social and religious, when, to use an expres-
sion of Voltaire, quoted by Barthelemy St. Hilaire,
' The turn of Arabia ' came ; ^ when the hour had
already struck for the most complete, the most
sudden, and the most extraordinary revolution that
has ever come over any nation upon earth.
One of the most philosophical of historians has
remarked that of all the revolutions which have had a
permanent influence upon the civil history of man-
kind, none could so little be anticipated by human
prudence as that effected by the religion of x\rabia.
And at first sight it must be confessed that the
Science of History, if indeed there be such a science,
is at a loss to find that sequence of cause and effect
which it is the object and the test of all history, which
is worthy of the name, to trace out.
The Emperor Justinian, not the least shrewd of
the Byzantine Emperors, who, some forty years be-
fore, had thought it necessary to protect his empire
from every possible and from many impossible
dangers, had neglected to erect a line of fortresses
on the side of his empire which, in defiance of nature,
really was the most vulnerable.^ ^By a precaution
which inspired the cowardice it foresaw,' he had
erected a fortress, even at Thermopylae, where the re-
ligio loci would rather have called for a Spartan ram-
part of three hundred men, if only they had been
forthcoming. He had kept the Sclavonians out of
Constantinople by one long wall, and the Russians
1 p. 211. See Cap. II., generally, for a description of Pre-Moham-
medan Arabia.
2 Cf. Gibbon, Vol. V. 102-111.
90 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
out of the Crimea by another ; he had fortified Amida
and Edessa against the fire-worshippers ; had built
St. Catherine's half-monaster}^ and half-fortress in
the wilderness of Mount Sinai ; and had even taken
precautions against the savages of ^Ethiopia : but he
had trusted to the six hundred miles of desert which
Nature had interposed between him and a set
of robber tribes, intent onl}^ on molesting one an-
other. What hostile force could pass such an
obstacle ?
But we can see now, and Mohammed himself per-
haps saw, that the ground was in many respects pre-
pared for a great social and religious revolution. * It
detracts nothing from the fame of a great man to
show, so far as we can, how his success was possible.'^
It is only another proof, if proof were wanting, that
genius is little else than insight joined to sustained
effort ; the eye sees what it brings with it the power
of seeing ; and the great man differs from his contem-
poraries chiefly in this, that he can read the dark
riddle of his time with an eye a few degrees less
obscured than those around him. He is the greatest
product of his age, but he is still its product, and he
is only the father of the age that is to succeed in so
far as he owns his parentage. He marches indeed in
front of his age ; but his influence will be permanent
or fleeting precisely so far as he discerns the direc-
tion in which it would advance at a slower pace
without him.*^ When he tries to go beyond this, and
' M. Barthi'leray St. Hilaire, ' Mahomet et le Koran,' p. ."»!.
' Cf . Guizot's * Lectures on History,' Vol. III. Lect. XX.; and
Mill's Review «if them in * Dissertations an<l Discussions,' II. 249,
250.
GREAT MEN AND THEIR INFLUENCE. 91
to force the world out of its groove, to adopt hobbies
of his own, then begins the region of the remote, the
selfish, the personal ; in this the great man fails ; and
hence the commonplaces on the failure of greatness,
and the greatness of failure, with which we are all
familiar. ^ Perish my name,' said Danton, ' but let
the cause triumph ;'^ and personal failure of this kind
is to the great man no failure at all — it is only another
word for success. The truth is that greatness, so far
as it is the truest greatness, rarely fails altogether of
its object ; and that failure is great, only when the end
proposed is good, and the human means, though in-
adequate to its attainment, are yet a real advance
towards it.
It must be remembered therefore as regards what
seems the sudden birth of the Arabian nation, fully
armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, that the
annual resort to Mecca for purposes of trade, poetry,
and religion, had pointed to the Holy City as to a
possible metropolis ; and to the Kuraish, the heredi-
tary guardians of the Kaaba, as the potential rulers
of a future people ; while as regards the new religion,
there was thQ groundwork of Monotheism underlying
all the abuses and corruption of Magianism and Sabae-
anism. There was also a class of people, called
Hanyfs, who prided themselves on preserving the
original creed of Abraham, and even his sacred
books ; while Ibn Ishak,^ the earliest known historian
' A similar saying is attributed to Cavour : ' Perish my name and
memory, so that Italy be made a nation ! '
2 See Sirat-er-raQoiil. Weil's Translation, 1. 107-1(J8. Ibn Ishak
died A.H. 151. His work has been preserved for us in the Sirat-er-
ra^oul of Ibn-Hisham, who died in the year of the Hijrah 213. The
92 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
of Islam, records a meeting of four or five among the
Kuraish at which it was resolved to open a crusade
against idolatry, and to seek for the original and only
true faith ; and they straightway abandoned their
homes and spread over the world in quest of this
Holy Grail. ^
Mohammedanism therefore is no real exception
to the principle I provisionally laid down in my first
Lecture as to the origin of the Historical Religions of
the world, though, at first sight, it may appear to be
so. To Mohammed's own mind it is quite true that
the theological element was the predominant and in-
spiring one, but Mohammed's mind itself was the out-
fuUest and mo8t trustworthy historian, in the judgment of Muir and
Sprenger, whose writings have come down to us, is the Katib al
Wakidi, or secretary of the historian Wakidi : died 207 A.H. The MS.
was discovered by Sprenger at Cawnpore. Among other discoveries
of Sprenger may be mentioned a portion of the biography of Moham-
med by Tabari, who died A.H. 310, and a complete biographical
dictionary, termed I^aba, of the Companions of Mohammed, compiled
by Ibn-Hidjr, in the fifth century, from writers, whose names he
gives, of earlier and incontestable authority. It contains the
biographies of some 8,000 people. And it may be hope<i that the
Government of India, which numbers among its subjects more than
fifty million Musalmans, may recognise, if they have not already
done so, the imperial importance of publishing the three remaining
folios of the work. Sprenger brought out one volume, but an order
of the Court of Directors suspended the publication of the rest. See
Sprenger, Preface, p. 12, where it may be observed how modestly he
passes over his own gi*cat discoveries, and does not even allude to the
slight shown it by the Directoi-s. Learned and criticjil Mohammedans,
it would seem, do not think so highly of Wakidi and his secretaiy as
Muir and Sprenger do : they prefer Ibn-Hisham. — See Muir, 1. 77-10'),
and B. St. Hilaire, p. 19-25. Syed Ahmefl's ' Life of Mohammed,*
Preface, p. 14, 18, etc. Syed Ameer Ali, Preface, p. 7.
•sprenger, p. 81. These four * enquirers ' wei-e Wanika, Othniau,
Abayd, and Zeid.
PRE- MO HA MMEDANS. 93
come, at least as much as it was the cause, of the
great revolution which goes by his name. There was
a general social and religious upheaving at the head
of which the Prophet placed himself, and which partly-
carried him on with it, partly he himself carried it on :
the train was already laid, and the spark from heaven
was all that was needed to set the Arab world ablaze.
In this sense it is perhaps true, as Renan has remarked
and the Koran itself declares, that Mohammedanism
was preached before the time of Mohammed ; but
there were Mohammedans before Mohammed, only
in the sense in which there were Zoroastrians before
Zoroaster, Lutherans before Luther, and Christians
before Christ. Renan has himself remarked else-
where, though he seems to have forgotten it in dealing
with Mohamm_edanism, that the glory of a religion
belongs to its founder, and not to his predecessors
or to his successors.^ It is easy, he says himself, to
' It seems to me, though I would speak with the utmost diffidence
in venturing to dissent from the greatest European authority on the
subject, that Sprenger errs in the same direction as Kenan, when he
says in his volume, published at Allahabad (p. 171), that Abu Bakr
did more for the success of Islam than the Prophet himself ; and again
(p, 174), after enumerating all those who, merely from their vague
Monotheism, he calls the predecessors of Mohammed, he says that even
after Mohammed was acknowledged as the messenger of God, Omar
had more influence on the development of the Islam than Mohammed
himself. ' The Islam is not the work of Mohammed ; it is not the
doctrine of the impostor .... it is the offspring of the spirit of the
time, and the voice of the Arabic nation .... There is, however, no
doubt that the impostor has defiled it by his immorality and perverse-
ness of mind.' It is fair to say that this tone seems somewhat
moderated, or even altered, in the author's subsequent and greater
work. Cf., however, Vol. I. 209, and II. 83-88. One is inclined to
ask, if Islam was merely the spirit of the time, who proved himself
best able to read that spirit ? Was it Abu Bakr and Omar, or was it
94 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
try to awake faith, and it is easy to be possessed
by it when once it has been awakened ; but it is not
easy to inspire it. It is the grandest gift, a very gift
of God.
But though, as I have said, the hour had come, the
youth of Mohammed gave few signs that he was the
man. The portents which ushered in his birth, and
that attended his early youth, are the offspring of
another country and of a later age. The celestial
light that beamed in the sky and from his newly-
opened eyes ; the Tigris overflowing its banks ; the
palace of Chosroes toppling over to the ground ; the
sacred fire of Zoroaster, which had burned for one
thousand years, suddenly extinguished ; the mules
that talked, and the sheep that bowed to him, were
unknown to the contemporaries of Mohammed, and
Mohammed himself says nothing of them ! * He be-
longed to the family of Haschim, not the least dis-
tinguished family of the Kuraish, who were then the
leading tribe at Mecca. He was bom on April 20,
575 A.D. His father Abd' Allah died before his
birth ; his mother Aminah was weak and sickly, and
was obliged to put him out to nurse with the wife of
a shepherd : thus the first few years of the Prophet's
life were spent in the tent of a nomad family. His
mother died when he was only six years old, and
his share of his father's property consisted of but five
camels, of a few sheep, and of a female slave. His
grandfather Abd'al Muttalib took charge of the orphan,
Mt)hainme<l that pioducctl the Komn ? And isitthuir i>ei>oimlity, or
liiH, wliich has staiupetl itself with ineffaceable clcanieti» for all time
ji|)<>n the Eastern world?
' They aiUHJftr, however, in tlie Sinit-fr-ravoul alnjiU A.H.2<0. See
1.77-81.
MOHAMMED'S MARRIED LIFE. 95
and on his death-bed committed him to the care of
his uncle Abu Taleb ; a charge which, though he never
beheved in his nephew's mission, he observed to the
day of his death, with all the fidelity of an Arab to
a member of his family. Abu Taleb himself, however,
was very poor ; the boy's small patrimony was soon
spent ; and then, as he loved to recall in after years, in
order to support life he was obliged to tend sheep in
the wilderness, a calling much despised among the aris-
tocratic Meccans, who got their wealth by merchandise,
but one which encouraged his fondness for solitude,
and supplied him with the vivid descriptions of the
scenery of the desert which we find in the Koran.
^ God had never chosen anyone to be a prophet,' he
used to say in his later days, * who had not, like Moses,
like David, or like himself, tended sheep in the wilder-
ness.'^ But Mohammed was not always to remain a
shepherd. Hitherto a man of few words, and with
few friends, he was yet notable within his own small
circle for his truthfulness and good faith. Men called
him ' Al-Amin, or the trusty.' A rich widow, named
Khadijah, employed him to go on some trading] ourneys
for her to Syria. The shepherd became a camel-driver,
and the trust committed to him he discharged with
such fidelity and prudence, that Khadijah offered him
her hand in marriage. She was some fifteen years
older than he ; old enough, that is, in that Eastern
climate to be his mother; yet the marriage was
one of real affection and respect, and from that time
to the day of her death, a period of twenty-four years,
Mohammed remained faithful to her, and took no
* Sprenger, I. 148
96 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
second wife, though the universal custom of his coun-
trymen would have countenanced him in so doing.
Mohammed's married life was still, what men would
call, an uneventful one. The birth of four daughters^
and of two sons, both of whom, to the great grief of
their father, died in childhood ; his famous vow to
succour the oppressed ; and the skill with which he
managed to reconcile conflicting claims in placing the
Black Stone in the renovated Kaaba — these are the
only noteworthy external incidents in the next few
years of his life. Up to the age of forty, there is
nothing to show that any serious scruple had occurred
to him individually as to the worship of idols in
general, and in particular of the Black Stone, of
which his family were the hereditary guardians.
Of a nervous, excitable, imaginative temperament,
Mohammed was susceptible to influences too subtle
for robuster natures to feel. What a contrast in all
respects to those who lived around him, and what a
contradiction to Sprenger's theory that the Prophet
was only the type of his time and nation, and that
Islam was only an impersonation of its tendencies ! He
was liable, too, to fits,^ which, whether epileptic or not,
' Sprenger (Vol. F. 207) has described these fits most minutely, and
with a great deal of curious learning. He thinks Mohammed suf-
fered from hysteria, followed by witalepsy, mther than epilepsy ; for
the Prophet does not seem to have lost all consciousness. It is
worth remarking that Sprenger's medical knowledge is not very
favourable in its result to Mohammed. He starts by sivying, p. 210,
that all hysterical people have a tendency to lying and deceit. This
is his major premise. His minor is that Mohammed was hysteriail,
and the inference is obvious. Acconlingly, we are not surprised to
find him (Vol, I. cap. IV. p. 30(5, note) si^aking of the 'r/x/Vw' of
the flight to Jerusalem as ojie ' lie,' an«l that to the seventh
heaven as another lie.
CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE. 97
involved strange physical phenomena, which at that
time and place — like the so-called ^sacred disease'
among the Greeks, or ' the possession of the devil ' of
the Jews — would suggest both to himself and to his
friends influences that were not physical. The month
of Ramadhan, like other religious Arabs, he observed
with punctilious devotion ; and he would often retire
to the caverns of Mount Hira for purposes of medita-
tion and prayer. As time passed on, solitude became
a passion with him— that solitude which is ^ the school
of genius,' and in the silence of his own heart he held
high converse with the unseen God of the universe.
The sin of worshipping idols of wood and stone, which
could neither hear nor regard, began to flash at times
across him ; the crimes, too, of his countrymen weighed
upon his spirit ; when he walked forth from his cave,
he heard, or fancied that he heard, the rocks and
the shrubs of the desert calling him the Apostle of
God.i
It is possible that his interviews with Nestorian
monks, with Zeid, or with his wife's cousin Waraka,
may have turned his thoughts into the precise direc-
tion they took. Dejection alternated with excite-
ment ; these gave place to ecstasy or dreams ; and in
a dream, or trance, or fit, he saw an angel in human
form, but flooded with celestial light, and displaying
a silver roll. ' Read ! ' said the angel. ^ I cannot
read,' said Mohammed. The injunction and the
answer were twice repeated.^ ' Read,' at last said
the angel, ^ in the name of thy Lord, who created all
^ ' Sirat-er-raQoul,' I. 153.
^ Cf. Sura XCVI. Deutsch (Islam, p. 306) renders the word
usually translated ' Read ' by ' Cry,' comparing Isaiah xi. 6.
98 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
besides Himself; who created man out of a clot of
blood ; read, in the name of the Most High, who
taught with the pen ; who taught man that which he
never knew.' Upon this Mohammed felt the heavenly
inspiration, and read, as he believed, the decrees of
God, which he afterwards promulgated in the Koran.
Then came the announcement, ^ O Mohammed, of a
truth thou art the Prophet of God, and I am his
angel Gabriel.' ^
This was the crisis of Mohammed's life. It was
his call to renounce idolatry, and to take the office of
Prophet. Like Isaiah, he could not at first believe
that so unworthy an instrument could be chosen for
such a purpose. ^ Woe is me, for I am undone, be-
cause I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the
midst of a people of unclean lips ; ' but the live coal
was not immediately taken from the altar and laid
' strangely enough, Sir William Muir, Vol. II. p. 89-96, selects
this period, above all others in Mohammed's life, as the one in
which to suggest his peculiar view, that the Prophet's belief in his
inspiration was Satanic in its origin ; and he supports his view by a
somewhat elaborate parallel with the temptations which presented
themselves to Christ at the beginning of His work. Whether such
a jDeus ex machina is required to untie the knot is hardly within my
province to inquire, since the whole matter is alike incapable of
proof and disproof ; but it seems pertinent to remark, first, that the
developed and quasi-scientific conception of such a being as Sir
William Muir pictures is Persian rather than Jewish in its origin,
and is found in Palestine only after the Captivity ; and, secondly,
that if the spirit of evil did suggest the idea to Mohammetl, he never
8o completely outwitted himself, since friend and foe must alike
admit that it was Mohammed's firm belief in supernatural guidance
that lay at the root of all he achieved. Without this we should
never have heanl of him except as one of a thousand short-lived
Arabian sectaries ; with it he created a nation, and revivified a third
of the then known world.
OPPOSITION TO THE PROPHET. 99
upon his, as upon Isaiah's hps. Trembhng and agi-
tated, Mohammed tottered to Khadijah and told her
his vision and his agony of mind. He had always
hated and despised soothsayers, and now, in the irony
of destiny, it would appear that he was to become a
soothsayer himself. ' Fear not, for joyful tidings dost
thou bring,' exclaimed Khadijah. ' I will henceforth
regard thee as the prophet of our nation. Rejoice,'
she added, seeing him still cast down ; ^ Allah will
not suffer thee to fall to shame. Hast thou not been
loving to thy kinsfolk, kind to thy neighbours, charit-
able to the poor, faithful to thy word, and ever a
defender of the truth ? ' First the life, and then the
theology, in the individual, as in the tribe and the
nation.
But the assurances of the good Khadijah, and the
conversions of Zeid and Waraka, did not bring the
live coal from the altar. A long period of hesitation,
doubt, preparation followed. At one time Moham-
med even contemplated suicide, and he was only
restrained by an unseen hand, as he might well call
the bright vision of the future, pictured in one of the
earliest Suras of the Koran, ^ when the help of God
should come and victory, when he * should see the
people crowding into the one true Faith, and he, the
Prophet, should celebrate the praise of his Lord, and
ask pardon of Him, for He is forgiving.' Three years,
the period of the Fatrah, saw only fourteen proselytes
attach themselves to him. His teaching seemed to
make no way beyond the very limited circle of his
earliest followers. His rising hopes were crushed.
' Sura ex.
100 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
People pointed the finger of scorn at him as he passed
by : ' There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his
converse with the heavens I ' They called him a
driveller, a star-gazer, a maniac-poet. Thorns were
strewn in his path, and stones thrown at him. His
uncles sneered, and the main body of the citizens
treated him with that contemptuous indifference,
which must have been harder to him to bear than
active persecution. Well might he, to take an illus-
tration suggested by Sir William Muir himself,^ like
Elijah of old, go a day's journey into the wilderness,
and request for himself that he might die, and say,
' It is enough, O Lord ; now take away my life, for I
am not better than my fathers : ' or, again, ' I have
been very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts, because
the people have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down
Thine altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword ;
and I, even I, only am left, and they seek my life
to take it away.' At times his distress was insupport-
able :
' And had not his poor heart
Spoken with That, which being everywhere
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude.'
And, as the Kuraish said in their bitter scorn, the son
of Abdallah did indeed ' have his converse with the
heavens ;' for out of weakness came forth strength at
last ; out of doubt, certainty ; out of humiliation,
victory. Another vision, in which he was commanded
to preach publicly, followed ; and now he called the
Kuraish of the line of Haschim together, those who
' Muir, Vol. II., 228.
COURAGE OF THE PROPHET. 101
had most to lose and least to gain by his reform, and
boldly announced his mission.
Content no longer with preaching in the abstract
the one true God, he now ventured to denounce those
who, as with righteous indignation he expressed it,
' gave companions ' to Him. The Kuraish, the guard-
ians of the Kaaba, perceived, like the silversmiths at
Ephesus, that, if this went on, their position would
be endangered, and their gains gone. Finding that
bribes, and threats, and entreaties were alike power-
less to deter him, they expostulated with Abu Taleb,
his guardian. Abu Taleb, in his turn, expostulated
kindly with his nephew. ' Should they array against
me the sun on my right hand, and the moon on
my left,' said Mohammed, ^ yet while God should
command me, I would not renounce my purpose.'
These are not the words, nor this the course, of
an impostor.
^Were there as many devils in Worms,' said
Luther, ' as there are tiles on the houses, yet would
I go there, putting my trust in God.' Luther
knew something of the Koran, and knew it only to
malign it : had he known how exactly his own noble
answer had been anticipated by the Prophet of
Arabia, would he not have recognised a singleness
and a sincerity of purpose in Mohammed which
would have made him honour him as a man, even if
he could not have welcomed him as a brother ?
Like the Hebrew prophets, like St. Anthony and
St. Benedict, like Joan of Arc and St. Theresa, like
Swedenborg,! like Luther himself, Mohammed had his
^ I have to thank a friendly critic, Mr. I. de Maine Browne, for
directing my attention to the analogy to be traced between the
102 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
visions. Luther's visions, as every one knows, were
material enough, for he threw an inkstand at the devil
which appeared to him at the Castle of Wartburg.
But if an imposture theory is not needed to explain
the visions of the one, why is it needed to explain
the visions of the other ? What Mohammed said he
saw, he did see, even if they were only the 'sub-
jective creations of his own brain ; ' and if results are
any test of truth, Mohammed's vision must have been
in some sense a true one, for it gave him strength for
his great work.
Ten more years passed away : his doctrine fought
its way amidst the greatest discouragements and
dangers by purely moral means, by its own inherent
strength. But with the number of his disciples, in-
creased also the persecutions they had to endure.
Mohammed, unwilling to expose their newly
awakened faith to too sore a trial, advised them to
take refuge in Abyssinia. They did so to the number
of fifteen, while Mohammed remained at his post.
That they took his advice is not to be regretted ; for
first it is a convincing proof, if proof be needed, how
throughout this period Mohammed's real strength lay
in what the world would call his weakness ; and
secondly, because to this, the first Hijrah, as it is
called, we owe the noblest summar}^ of the Prophet's
early teaching that we now possess.
The Kuraish sent to the Nagashy of Abyssinia
demanding that the exiles should be given up for
death ; but one of their number, Djafar, came
' visions ' of Mohammcil and those of Sweilenbor^, as well as to one
or two fine passages in the writings of tlie remarkable Swede on the
founder of Islam.
THE FIRST HIJRAH. 103
forward, and in the presence of the Christian bishops of
the country, who had been specially convened for the
purpose, and had ^ brought their Bibles with them/
explained the change in their religion as follows :
* O King ! we were in ignorance and barbarism,
we prayed to idols, we eat animals that had died of
themselves, we committed hateful things, we wounded
the love of our own relations, and violated the laws
of hospitality ; the strong consumed the weak, till
God sent a messenger among us, of whose birth,
faithfulness, and purity we wxre aware ; he exhorted
us to worship God alone, and to turn ourselves from
stones and other gods, which we and our fathers had
associated with Him. He commanded us to speak
the truth, to be faithful to our trusts, to love our
relations, and to protect our guests ; not to consume
the property of the orphan, or to slander virtuous
women ; he bade us pray, give alms, and keep the
fast. We have obeyed Mohammed and have believed
in his message. Hence our people have maltreated
us, and have sought to bring us back to idolatry and
their other abominations ; we have come to thee for
help ; wilt thou not protect us ? '
The Nagashy asked for a sample of the message
which had wrought such w^onders. Djafar read him a
Sura from the Koran, not to our ideas one of the most
remarkable ; but the effect was such that all present
burst into tears, and the Nagashy exclaimed, his tears
gushing down over his beard, and those of all the Bishops
upon their books, ^ I will never deliver you up ; ' and the
Kuraish messengers returned to Mecca discomfited.^
' Sirat-er-ra90ul, p. 219, 220.
104 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Warned afterwards in his solitude by these same
Kuraish that 'they would not cease to oppose his
preaching till either they or he had perished,
Mohammed answered them only by fearlessly fre-
quenting the approaches to the Kaaba, the stronghold
of his enemies, and by delivering his message to the
wild Arabs of the desert who resorted to the national
fair or the pilgrims' festival there J But a greater
disaster than any Mohammed had yet experienced
was at hand. Khadijah, his faithful wife, died ; Abu
Taleb, his uncle and protector, died also. The
Prophet was now alone amongst his enemies, like
Elijah amongst the prophets of Baal ; and, persecuted
in his own city even to the death, he determined to
fly to another. He had already preached to pilgrims
from Medina, and had received from them an offer of
an asylum in case of need. Accompanied by Abu
Bakr he fled from the assassin's knife and took refuge
on Mount Thor, a league from Mecca : for three days
he lay concealed in a cavern there ; the Kuraish
pursuers scoured the country, thirsting for his blood.
They approached the cavern. *We are only two,'
said his trembling companion. ' There is a third,' said
Mohammed; 'it is God Himself.' The Kuraish
> Sp^enger {\l. XVI.) thinks that vei-ses 82, 83, cVc, of Sura XVI.
were delivered especially for the edification of these wandering
tribes ; ' Allah has given you tents for dwellings and animal skina
for coverings ; and ye tin^ them light to remove and easy to pitch
a^ain ; and He hath given you furniture uuule of their wool and
fur ; — these pleasures last for a time ; and Allah hath given you
places of shade and retreats in the mountains ; clothing also to
protect you from the heat, and to cover you in the day of battle.
He has mmlc His beuefits thus complete to you that ye may become
Muslims.'
THE HIJRAH. 105
reached the cave : a spider, we are told, had woven
its web across the mouth, and a pigeon was sitting on
its nest in seemingly undisturbed repose. The Kuraish
retreated, for it was evident the solitude of the place
was unviolated ; and by a sound instinct, one of the
sublimest stories in all history has been made the era
of Mohammedan Chronology.
It is unnecessary to follow connectedly and in
detail any other incidents in Mohammed's hfe. The
above may be found, with some variety in the details,
in any History of Mohammed ; but I have thought it
essential to dwell upon them, however familiar they
may be to some of us, as they seem to me, apart
from their own intrinsic beauty, to supply the key to
almost everything else in Mohammed's career.
With the flight to Medina the scene changes. The
Prophet and his creed now take their place for good
or evil on the theatre of the world. Was it for evil
or for good ?
On the one hand, it may be as fairly,^ as it has
been often, said that it might have been well for the
Prophet's memory if he had died a simple Prophet, as
he gave utterance to those grand words, ^ There is a
third with us, it is God Himself.' The utterance itself
would have been not less true, and the speaker would
have died, not indeed a great hero, a great lawgiver,
or a great ruler, but he would have died as he had
lived, and as so many men who were greater than
their generation, and of whom the world was not
worthy, have lived and died before and since. But
had he died then, his name would never have been
* Cf. ' Academy ' for June 6, 1874.
106 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
known beyond the neighbourhood of Mecca. His
small band of followers would have melted away like
the other thousand sects that Arabia has produced,
leaving not a trace behind them, and Islam itself
might have been strangled in its cradle.
And what would this have meant for the Eastern
world, and for something too of the world which is
not Eastern ?
The practices that Mohammed forbade, and not
forbade only, but abolished, human sacrifices and the
murder of female infants, and blood feuds, and
unlimited polygamy, and wanton cruelty to slaves,
and drunkenness, and gambling, would have gone on
unchecked in Arabia and the adjoining countries.
The Mongols, the Tartars, and the Turks would have
devastated, as they did devastate, the fairest regions of
the earth without gaining that which, in some degree,
softened their national character, and alone prevented
their conquests from being an unmitigated evil.* In
' The Mogul invasion of Hindustan, for instance, gave the peninsula
for nearly two hundred years, 1520-1707, a succession of princes who,
in spite of their passion for war, were the ablest, the most enlightened,
and the best whom, till within a very recent period, it has ever known.
Baber, the conqueror of Delhi and the founder of the dynasty, is
almost as famed for his poems and for his public works as for his
military adventures. The administration of Akbar, one of the great-
est monarchs of all time, need not shrink from comparison in any
respect with that of his great contemporary Elizabeth of England.
He introduced not only religious toleration, but entire religious
equality among his subjects. Shah Jehan was a great oi-ganiser ; and
Aurungzebe, with his energy and with his magniticence, tilled a large
place in the horizon of Europeans themselves. Even the less dis-
tinguished members of the dynasty may compare not unfavourably
with most of their Christian contem|)oraries. The architecture of the
Mogul emiKjrors, like that of their co-religionists, the Moors of Spain,
is the admiration anil the despair of the whole world.
PRACTICES FORBIDDEN BY MOHAMMED. 107
Northern and Central Africa there would have been,
not the semi-civilisation of the Moors or of the Man-
dingoes, but the brutal barbarism of the Fans and the
Ashantees. The dark ages of Europe would have
been doubly, nay trebly dark ; for the Arabs who
alone by their arts and sciences, by their agriculture,
their philosophy, and their virtues, shone out amidst
the universal gloom of ignorance and crime, who gave
to Spain and to Europe an Averroes and an Avicenna,
the Alhambra and the Al-Kazar, would have been
wandering over their native deserts. As to religion
a Christianity which, in the East, had long become a
corrupt superstition, would have become yet more
corrupt, and would have sunk to the condition in
which it is in Abyssinia now. Over a seventh part of
the earth's service the Star-worshipper might have
been worshipping stars, and the Fetish-worshipper
Fetishes, to this very day. The answer therefore to
the question whether it would have been well for the
Prophet and well for the world, if he had died by
the sword of the Kuraish before a wider field, with
its greater dangers and temptations, opened before
him, is not a simple one ; and in the remainder of
this and the subsequent Lectures I hope to give, not
indeed a full answer to it — for that would be as much
beyond my powers as beyond my limits — but at least
to indicate the direction in which, as I think, the
answer lies.
The question of the sincerity of Mohammed has
been much debated, but to me, I must confess, that
to question his sincerity at starting, and to admit the
above indisputable facts relating to his early life, is
very like a contradiction in terms. Nor could anyone
108 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
have done what Mohammed did without the most
profound faith in the reaHty and goodness of his
cause. Fairly considered, there is no single trait in
his character up to the time of the Hijrah which
calumny itself could couple wnth imposture : on the
contrary, there is everything to prove the real enthu-
siast arriving slowly and painfully at what he believed
to be the truth.
It has been remarked by Gibbon that no incipient
prophet ever passed through so severe an ordeal as
Mohammed, since he first presented himself as a
prophet to those who were most conversant with his
infirmities as a man. Those who knew him best, his
wife, his eccentric slave, his cousin, his earliest friend
— he who, as Mohammed said, alone of his converts,
' turned not back, neither was perplexed ' — were the
first to recognise his mission. The ordinary lot of a
prophet was in his case reversed ; he was not without
honour save among those who did not know him
well. Strange that Voltaire, who himself wrote on
Mohammed, and even made him the subject of a
drama, should, with Mohammed's example before
him, have ventured on his immoral paradox that
' No man is a hero to his valet ! ' Explained in
one sense, that a small mind cannot fully under-
stand or appreciate a great one, it is a feeble
truism ; explained in another, which was the sense
Voltaire meant, that the hero is only a hero to
those who see him at a distance, and that there
is no such thing as true greatness, it is an auda-
cious falsehood. It is almost equally strange that
Gibbon, who has done such full justice to Mohammed
in the general result, should say at starting, * Moham-
MOHAMMEUS FAITH IN HIS CAUSE. 109
med's religion consists of an eternal truth, and a
necessary fiction — There is one God, and Moham-
med is His prophet.' It was, as I have endea-
voured to show, no fiction to Mohammed himself
or to his followers ; had it been so, Mohammedanism
could never have risen as it did, nor be what it is
now.
But before we go on to consider those points in
Mohammed's career which are really open to ques-
tion, it may be well to recall a few prominent charac-
teristics of the man who has stamped his impress so
deeply on the Oriental world. Minute accounts of his
appearance and of his daily life have been preserved
to us ; they may be found in most of the biographies,
and Sir William Muir in particular has given us
copious extracts from the writings of the secretary of
Wakidi. '
Mohammed was of middle height and of a strongly
built frame ; his head was large, and across his ample
forehead, and above finely arching eyebrows, ran a
strongly marked vein, which, when he was angry,
would turn black and throb visibly. His e3^es were
coal black, and piercing in their brightness ; his hair
curled slightly ; and a long beard, which, like other
Orientals, he would stroke when in deep thought,
added to the general impressiveness of his appear-
ance. His step was quick and firm, ' like that of one
descending a hill.' Between his shoulders was the
famous mark, the size of a pigeon's Qgg, which his
disciples persisted in believing to be the sign of his
prophetic office ; while the light which kindled in his
' Muir, Vol. IV., Supplement to Chap. XXXVII. ; cf. also
Deutsch's ' Islam,' pp. 302-304.
110 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
eye, like that which flashed from the precious stones
in the breast-plate of the High Priest, they called the
light of prophecy.
In his intercourse with others, he would sit silent
among his companions for a long time together, but
truly his silence was more eloquent than other men's
speech, for the moment speech was called for, it was
forthcorning in the shape of some weighty apothegm
or proverb, such as the Arabs love to hear. When
he laughed, he laughed heartily, shaking his sides,
and showing his teeth, which * looked as if they were
hailstones.' He was easy of approach to all who
wished to see him, even as * the river bank to him
that draweth water therefrom.' He was fond of
animals, and they, as is often the case, under such
circumstances, were fond of him. He seldom passed
a group of children playing together without a few
kind words to them ; and he was never the first to
withdraw his hand from the grasp of one who offered
him his. If the warmth of his attachment may be
measured, as in fact it may, by the depth of his friends'
devotion to him, no truer friend than Mohammed
ever lived. Around him, in quite early days, gathered
what was best and noblest in Mecca ; and in no
single instance, through all the vicissitudes of his
chequered life, was the friendship then formed ever
broken. He wept like a child over the death of his
faithful servant Zeid. He visited his mother's tomb
some fifty years after her death, and he wept there
because he believed that God had forbidden him to
pray for her. He was naturally shy and retiring ; ' as
bashful,' said Ayishah, ' as a veiled virgin.' He was
kind and forgiving to all. 'I served him from the
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROPHET. Ill
time I was eight years old/ said his servant Anas,
'and he never scolded me for anything, though I
spoiled much.' The most noteworthy of his external
characteristics were a sweet gravity and a quiet
dignity, which drew involuntary respect, and which
was the best, and often the only, protection he en-
joyed from insult.
His ordinary dress was plain, even to coarseness ;
yet he was fastidious in arranging it to the best
advantage. He was fond of ablutions, and fonder still
of perfumes ; and he prided himself on the neatness
of his hair, and the pearly whiteness of his teeth.
His life was simple in all its details. He lived with
his wives in a row of humble cottages, separated from
one another by palm branches, cemented together
with mud. He would kindle the fire, sweep the
floor, and milk the -goats himself. Ayishah tells us
that he slept upon a leathern mat, and that he
mended his clothes, and even clouted his shoes, with
his own hand. For months together, Ayishah is also
our authority for saying that he did not get a sufficient
meal. The little food that he had was always shared
with those who dropped in to partake of it. Indeed,
outside the Prophet's house w^as a bench or gallery,
on which were always to be found a number of the
poor who lived entirely on his generosity, and were
hence called the ' people of the bench.' His ordinary
food was dates and water, or barley bread ; milk and
honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which
he rarely allowed himself. The fare of the desert
seemed most congenial to him, even when he was
sovereign of Arabia. One day some people passed by
him with a basket of berries from one of the desert
112 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
shrubs. ' Pick me out/ he said to his companion,
' the blackest of those berries, for they are sweet —
even such as I was wont to gather when I fed the
flocks of Mecca at Adgad.'
Such were some of the characteristics of the man
whom the Arabs were now called upon to recognise
as the prophet of their countr}% and as a messenger
direct from God.
Monotheism, pure and simple, if it is to be a life
as well as a creed, almost postulates the prophetic
office. The Creator is at too great a distance from
His creatures to allow of a sufficiently direct com-
munication with them. The power, the knowledge,
the infinity of God overshadow His providence. His
sympathy, and His love. Renan has remarked that
in only two ways can such a gap be bridged over :
first, if, as in the Indian Avatar, from time to time,
or, as in Christianity, once for all, there is an actual
manifestation of the Godhead upon earth ; or, se-
condly, if, as in Judaism or in Buddhism, the Deity
chooses a favoured mortal, who may give to his
brother men a fuller knowledge of the Divine mind
and will/ The latter would seem the form most
congenial to the Semitic mind, if one may be allowed
to use that convenient, but since the bold generalisa-
tions in which Renan has indulged respecting them,
somewhat misleading word. The Arabs themselves
looked up to Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses as
prophets ; Mohammed did the same, and added Christ
to their number. He held that each successive
revelation had been higher than the preceding one,
though each was complete in itself, as being adequate
* Renan, p. 278.
PROPHETIC OFFICE AMONG SEMITIC RACES. Il3
to the circumstances of the time. Was there,
Mohammed might ask, any reason to suppose that
Christ had been the last of the prophets, and that
His revelation was absolutely as well as relatively
final ; and were there not evils enough in Arabia and
in the world to call for a further communication from
heaven ? To say that Arabia needed renovation was
to say in other words that the time for a new prophet
had come, and why might not that prophet be Mo-
hammed himself? Sprenger, the most recent and
exhaustive writer on the subject, has shown that for
some hundred years before Mohammed the advent of
another prophet had been expected and even pre-
dicted. So strong was the general conviction on the
subject that the Arab tribes were guided by it even
in their politics.^
But, if we admit the sincerity of Mohammed and
the naturalness of his belief up to the time of the
Hijrah, what are we to say of him during his first
years of exile at Medina, and again of his subsequent
successes ?
It is unquestionably true that a change does seem
to come over him. The revelations of the Koran are
more and more suited to the particular circumstances,
and caprices of the moment. They are often of the
nature of political bulletins, or of personal apologies
rather than of messages direct from God. Now ap-
pears for the first time the convenient but dangerous
' Sprenger, I., p. 24."3, quotes a saying of the Arabs that the
children of Shem are prophets, of Japhet kings, of Ham slaves. We
are told that the Arab women were at this time in the habit of
praying for male children, in the hope that of them the long-expected
prophet might be born.
D 2
114 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
doctrine of abrogation, by which a subsequent revela-
tion might supersede a previous one.^
The Hmitation to the unbounded hcense of Orien-
tal polygamy which he had himself imposed, he
relaxes in his own behalf;^ it is a blot, and, in the
Christian view, an indelible blot, upon his memor}^ ;
but it is ^ ossible, on the one hand, that he may have
justified himself to his own mind b)- the Ethiopian
marriage not condemned in the case of Moses,^
whom he always regarded as, in a peculiar sense, his
predecessor, and it is certain on the other, that if, in
accordance with Eastern notions, he claimed for him-
self as Prophet exceptional pri^^leges in this one
direction, he imposed upon himself exceptional pri-
vations, in the way of prayers, fasting, and poverty, in
QYQxy other. He was certainly, therefore, not a
sensualist or a voluptuary in the ordinary meaning of
that term. His marriage with Maria, a Christian, an
Eg}^ptian, and a slave, caused an uproar among his
lawful wives ; but it does not seem to have been any
violation of the Harem law, and it was certainly not
condemned by the Arabs themselves. His marriage
with Zeinab, the wife of Zeid, his freedman and
adopted son, after her divorce from him, bears on the
face of it a worse complexion ; but I am satisfied,
after a close examination of the circumstances of the
case, that it does not bear the interpretation usually
placed upon it by Christians. It raised an outer}'
among the Arabs of the Ignorance, not because they
suspected an intrigue on the Prophet's part to secure
a divorce ; but because they looked upon an adopted
• Sura XVI. 108, II. 100. • Sum XXXIII. 49, and LXVI. I.
» See Lecture IV. p. 262.
APPARENT CHANGE IN MOHAMMED. 115
as though he were a real son, and considered, there-
fore, that the marriage fell within the prohibited
degrees. This restriction, which Mohammed, for what-
ever causes, considered to be an arbitrary one, he
abolished by his marriage, not for his own benefit
only, but for that of the Arabs at large. In the view
indeed usually taken of the whole transaction, there is
a strange compound of fact and fiction ; and much that
was comparatively innocent has been made to wear
the appearance of deep guilt ; but it must be admitted
with sorrow that in the matter of his marriages Mo-
hammed laid himself open to much misconception and
to much blame even on the part of the most temperate
and most truth-loving of his opponents.^
* It should be remembered, however, that most of Mohammed's
marriages may be explained, at least, as much by his pity for the
foriorn condition of the persons concerned, as by other motives.
They were almost all of them with widows who were not remarkable
either for their beauty or their wealth, but quite the reverse. May
not this fact, and his undoubted faithfulness to Khadijah till her
dying day, and till he himself was fifty years of age, give us addi-
tional ground to hope that calumny or misconception has been at
work in the story of Zeinab ? There are some indications on the face
of it, besides those mentioned in the text, that this is the case. For
example, Zeinab was the Prophet's cousin, and there was nothing to
prevent his having married her himself when both he and she were
younger, instead of giving her in marriage to his f reedman. An able
and a friendly Muslim critic, Mir Aulad Ali, Professor of Oriental
Languages at Trinity College, Dublin, suggests to me that the
marriage of Zeinab; one of the Kuraish and first cousin to the
Prophet, with a f reedman, was distasteful to her ; and that it was an
unhappy one for the husband as well as for the wife, as is shown by
Zeid's continuing to demand a divorce, when the Prophet advised
him against it. Mohammed by his subsequent marriage with her
removed, he goes on to suggest, a restriction which he thought
unnecessary ; and showed that he at all events saw nothing degrading
in a marriage connection with a f reedman. Anyhow it is certain
lie MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Whether, indeed, the various explanations of the
Prophet's conduct that have been suggested by the
piety or the admiration of his followers are quite
consistent with the facts or not, matters now com-
paratively little : but it matters very much, and
should be a subject of rejoicing to every Christian,
that pious Musalmans, instead of justifying an act
which, if it was in reality what it has often been
represented to have been, they, no less than we, know
to be wrong, are able to explain it to themselves in a
way which does not impute a crime to the founder of
their creed, nor involve them in condoning it.
The free toleration of the purer among the creeds
around him, which the Prophet had at first enjoined,
gradually changes into intolerance. Persecuted no
longer, Mohammed becomes a persecutor himself;
with the Koran in one hand, the scymitar in the other,
he goes forth to offer to the nations the threefold
alternative of conversion, tribute, death. He is once
or twice untrue to the kind and forgiving disposition
of his best nature ; and is once or twice unrelenting in
the punishment of his personal enemies, especially of
the Jews, who had disappointed his expectation that
they would join him, and of such as had stung him by
their lampoons or libels. He is even guilty more than
once of conniving at the assassination of inveterate
opponents ; and the massacre of the Bani Koraitza,
though they had deserted him almost on the field of
that Zeiil, if he had su8i)ectetl, as Christians have done, anjthiDg: in
the nature of an intri^ie on the Prophet's part to alienate his wife's
affection fmm him, couhl not have served him as he did even to the
<lay (tf his ilenth with all the loyalty and devotion of a zealous
disciple.
HOW EXPLAINED. 117
battle, and their lives were forfeit by all the laws of
war, moved the misgivings of others than the dis-
affected. He might, no doubt, believing, as he did,
in his own inspiration, have found an ample precedent
for the act in the slaughter of the Midianites by-
Moses or the Canaanites by Joshua two thousand
years before, or even in the wars of Saul and David
with neighbouring tribes ; but, judged by any but an
Oriental standard of morality, and by his own con-
spicuous magnanimity on other occasions, his act, in
all its accessories, was one of cold-blooded revenge.
Can we explain away or extenuate these blots on
his memory, or, if we cannot, are they inconsistent
with substantial sincerity and singlemindedness ?
Here is a problem of surpassing interest to the
psychologist, and I have only time to touch lightly
upon it.
In the first place, the change in his character and
aims is not to be separated from the general condi-
tions of his life. At first he was a religious and moral
reformer only, and could not, even if he would, have
met the evils of his time by any other than by moral
means. If he was without the advantages, he was
also free from the dangers, of success. A religion
militant is, as all ecclesiastical history shows, very
different from a religion triumphant. The Prophet in
spite of himself became, by the force of circumstances,
more than a prophet. Not, indeed, that with him
height ever begot high thoughts. He preserved to
the end of his career that modesty and simplicity of
life which is the crowning beauty of his character ;
but he became a temporal ruler, and, where the Koran
did not make its way unaided, the civil magistrate
118 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
naturally used temporal means. Under such circum-
stances, and when his followers pressed upon him
their belief in the nature of his mission, who can
draw the line where enthusiasm ends, and self-decep-
tion or even imposture begins ? No one who knows
human nature will deny that the two are often per-
fectly consistent with each other. Once persuaded
fully of his divine mission as a whole, a man uncon-
sciously begins to invest his personal fancies and
desires with a like sanction : it is not that he tampers
with his conscience ; he rather subjects conscience
and reason, appetite and affection, to the one domi-
nating influence ; and so, as time goes on, with
perfect good faith gets to confound what comes from
below with what comes from above. What is the
meaning of the term ^ pious frauds,' except that such
acts are frauds in the eyes of others, acts of piety
in the eyes of the doer ? The more fully convinced
a man is of the goodness of his cause, the more likely
is he to forget the means in the end ; he need not
consciously assert that the end justifies the means,
but his eyes are so fixed upon the end that they over-
look the interval between the idea and its realisation.
He has to maintain a hold over the motley mass of
followers that his mission has gathered round him.
Must he not become all things to all to meet their
several wants ? Perhaps he does become so, and, in
the process, what he gains in the bulk of his influence
he loses in its quality. Its intensity is in inverse
proportion to its extension. No man — I quote here,
with only such slight alteration as adapts them to my
subject, the noble words of George Eliot : * No man,
whether prophet, statesman, or popular preacher.
MORAL VALUE OF CONSISTENCY. 119
ever yet kept a prolonged hold over a mixed multi-
tude without being in some measure degraded thereby.,
His teaching or his life must be accommodated to the
average wants of his hearers, and not to his own
finest insight. But, after all, we should regard the
life of every great man as a drama, in which there
must be important inward modifications accompany-
ing the outward changes.' ^ Rigid consistency in
itself is no great merit, rather the reverse : what one
has a right to demand in a great man is that the
intensity of the central truth he has to deliver should
become, not less, but more intense ; that that flame
shall burn so clear as to throw into the shade other
objects which shine with a less brilliant light ; that
the essence shall be pure even if some of the
surroundings be alloyed ; and this, I think, if not
more than this, with all his faults, we may affirm of
Mohammed.
On the whole the wonder is to me not how much,
but how little, under different circumstance, Mo-
hammed differed from himself. In the shepherd of
the desert, in the Syrian trader, in the solitary of
Mount Hira, in the reformer in the minority of one,
in the exile of Medina, in the acknowledged con-
queror, in the equal of the Persian Chosroes and the
Greek Heraclius, we can still trace a substantial
unity. I doubt whether any other man, whose
external conditions changed so much, ever himself
changed less to meet them : the accidents are
changed, the essence seems to me to be the same
in all.
• Romola, Vol. II., Chap. V. p. 5.
120 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Power, as the saying is, no doubt put the man to
the test. It brought new temptations and therefore
new failures, from which the shepherd of the desert
might have remained free. But happy is the man
who, hving
* In the fierce light that beats upon a throne,
And blackens even' blot,'
can stand the test as well as did Mohammed. A
Christian poet has well asked : —
* What keep-; a spirit wholly true
To that ideal which he beare !
What record ? not the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.'
But it is a current misconception, and, subject to
the above explanation, a very great one, that a
gradual, but continuous and accelerating moral de-
clension is to be traced from the time when the
fugitive unexpectedly entered Medina in triumph.
^ Truth is come — let falsehood disappear,' he said,
when, after his long exile, and after the temptations
of Medina had done their worst for him, he re-entered
the Kaaba, and its three hundred and sixty idols, the
famous Hobal amongst them, vanished before him ;
and in his treatment of the unbelieving city he was
marvellously true to his programme. There was now
nothing left in Mecca that could thwart his pleasure.
If ever he had worn a mask at all, he would now
at all events have thrown it off; if lower aims had
gradually sapped the higher, or his moderation had
been directed, as Gibbon supposes, by his selfish
interests, we should now have seen the eflfect ; now
would have been the moment to gratify his ambition,
NO CONTINUOUS DECLENSION 121
to satiate his lust, to glut his revenge. Is there any-
thing of the kind? Read the account of the entry of
Mohammed into Mecca, side by side with that of
Marius or Sulla into Rome. Compare all the at-
tendant circumstances, the outrages that preceded,
and the use made by each of his recovered power,
and we shall then be in a position better to appreciate
the magnanimity and moderation of the Prophet of
Arabia. There were no proscription lists, no plunder,
no wanton revenge.
The chief blots in his fame are not after his un-
disputed victory, but during his years of chequered
warfare at Medina, and, such as they are, are dis-
tributed very evenly over the whole of that time. In
other words, he did very occasionally give way to a
strong temptation ; but there was no gradual sapping
of moral principles, and no deadening of conscience
— a very important distinction. One or two acts of
summary and uncompromising punishment ; possibly,
one or two acts of cunning, and, after Khadijah was
dead, the violation of one law which he had from
veneration for her imposed on others, and had always
hitherto kept himself, form no very long bill of in-
dictment against one who always admitted he was a
man of like passions with ourselves, who was ignorant
of the Christian moral law, and who attained to
power after difficulties, and dangers, and misconcep-
tions which might have turned the best of men into a
suspicious and sanguinary tyrant.^
• Yet Sprenger (1. p. 359), on no more grounds than those here
mentioned, can say of Mohammed, that when he attained to power
in Medina, ' er wurde zum wolliistigen Theokraten und blutdiirstig
Tyrannen, Pabst und Konig.' What Christian Pope or King — to say
122 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
As regards the relaxation of the marriage law in
his own favour it must be remembered that, accord-
ing to the notions of the Jewish Rabbis, a prophet
who was properly commissioned might supersede any
law ; ^ when Christ broke through the Sabbatarian
restrictions of the Pharisees, it was his mission only,
and not his right, if he was so commissioned, which
they called in question. The answer ^ He is a Pro-
phet' was a sufficient one to all who could receive it
as true. The Arab notions seem to have been sub-
stantially similar, and this must be carefully borne in
mind in estimating the blame we attribute to the
Prophet of Arabia.
It is no doubt true that some of the revelations of
the Koran, particularly the later ones, bear the ap-
pearance of having been given consciously for per-
sonal and temporary purposes, and these have led,
with some show of reason, even such impartial writers
as Sir William Muir to accuse Mohammed of ' the
high blasphemy of forging the name of God. ' But it
nothing of Oriental rulers, with whom alone is it fair to comi>are
him — had ns great temptations and succumbed to them as little as
did Mohammal ?
' See Farrar's ' Life of Christ,' I. >^3, .tcq. Mir Aulad Ali, whom I
have quoted above, writes to me on this subject as follows : — ' We
Muslims are not bound to follow or accept as law any of the dee<lK of
any of the Prophets ; we are only bound to accept what they give us
as law. Mohamme<l has not enjoined polygamy, he has only allowed
it under certain conditions. This permission has often been abused ;
but whatever its abuses, it has lessened the immorality, the illegiti-
mate births, and the child-murder which are rife in monogjimous
countries. One Prophet may be right acconling to us Muslims in
practising polygamy, while another may be right in remaining celi-
bate, but it may not be right in others to follow the example of
either ; still less is it right to make their example binding.'
DID HE FORGE THE NAME OF GOD'? 123
would be strange indeed if, viewed in the light of
what I have said above as to Mohammed's unfaltering
belief in his own inspiration, he had not occasionally,
or even often, revealed in the Koran the mental pro-
cesses by which he justified to himself acts about,
which he may have, at first, felt scruples, or which
his contemporaries may have called in question.^ Is
not this the true explanation of what is commonly
considered to be the deepest stain upon Mohammed's
memory, the production of a Sura*'* in which he
legalises in God's name his marriage with Zeinab, a
divorced wife of his adopted son? The production
of this Sura, whatever else it proves about Moham-
med, seems to me to prove not his conscious insin-
cerity, but the reverse ; he had already attained his
end, why then blazon his shame if shame he felt it to
be ? why ^ forge the name of God ? ' Why lay him-
self open to the crushing retort which his enemies
would at once bring against him? Surely a single
act of conscious imposture in the matter of the Koran
would have sapped all his strength ; it would have
been like
* The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all,'
It would have made such a speech as that wherein,
at the very close of his life, Samuel-like, he boldly
challenged all Musalmans to mention aught that they
had against him, impossible : moreover, such an act,
if successful, would have been repeated again and
' Cf. the view of Mohler in his treatise ' on the Relation of Islam
to the Gospel.' p. 20-22.
» Sura XXXIII. 37.
124 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
again ; the path would have been too slippery and
the descent have seemed too easy and inviting for
him to recall his footsteps. It seems pertinent also
to ask, by way of rebutting the charge, whether he
was not at least equally ready, when occasion re-
quired, to blame himself for what he had said or done,
and to call the whole Musalman world to be wit-
nesses of his self-condemnation ? '
But what are the facts ? Take two samples.
On one occasion, in a moment of despondency, he
made a partial concession to idolatry. He thought to
win over the recalcitrant Kuraish to his views by
allowing that their gods might make intercession with
the supreme God.
*■ What think ye of Al-Lat, and Al-Uzza, and Manah, the third be-
sides ]
They are the exalted Females, and their intercession with God may
be hoped for.'
The Kuraish, overjoyed, signified their adhesion to
Mohammed, and it seemed that they would bring
over all Mecca with them. His friends would have
passed the matter over as quietly as possible. So
great was the scandal among the Faithful that some
of his earliest historians omit it altogether. But the
Prophet's conscience was too tender for that. In an
hour of weakness Mohammed had mistaken expe-
diency for duty, and having discovered his mistake, he
would recall the concession, at all hazards, as pub-
licly as he had made it, even at the risk of the impu-
' Cf Sura XLVIII. 2, 'that Qoil may foi'ijive thee thy preceding
and thy subsequent sin.'
DID HE FORGE THE NAME OF GOD? 125
tation of weakness and of imposture. The amended
version of the Sura ran thus :
' What think ye of Al-Lat, and Al-Uzza, and Manah, the third be-
sides ?
They are nought but empty names which ye and your fathers have
invented.' *
I will give one more instance. It is a memorable
one. Mohammed was engaged in earnest conversa-
tion with Wallid, a powerful Kuraish, whose conver-
sion he much desired. A blind man in very humble
circumstances, Abdallah by name, happened to come
up, and, not knowing that Mohammed was otherwise
engaged, exclaimed, ^ Oh, Apostle of God, teach me
some part of what God has taught thee.' Mohammed,
vexed at the interruption, frowned and turned away
from him. But his conscience soon smote him for
having postponed the poor and humble to the rich
and powerful, and the next day's Sura showed that
this ^ forger of God's name ' was at least as ready to
forge it for his own condemnation as in his defence.
The Sura is known by the significant title * He
frowned,' and runs thus :
' The Prophet frowned, and turned aside,
Because the blind man came unto him.
And how knowest thou whether he might not have been cleansed
from his sins,
Or whether he might have been admonished, and profited thereby ?
As for the man that is rich,
Him thou receivest graciously ;
And thou carest not that he is not cleansed.
But as for him that cometh unto thee earnestly seeking his salvation,
And trembling anxiously, him dost thou neglect.
By no means shouidst thou act thus.'
» Sura LIII. ; cf. also XVII. 75, and XXII. ol ; see Muir, II.
p. 149-158, and Sprenger, II. 17, where there is a curious dissertation
on the word Gharanyk, used for Females — 'swans which mount
higher and higher towards God.'
126 ^ MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
And, ever after this, we are told that, when the
Prophet saw the poor bHnd man, he went out of his
way to do him honour, saying 'The man is thrice
welcome on whose account my Lord hath repri-
manded me,' and he made him twice Governor of
Medina.'
Mohammed never wavered in his belief in his own
mission, nor, what is more extraordinary, in his belief
as to its precise nature and well-defined limits. He
was a prophet charged with a mission from God ; no-
thing less, but nothing more. He might make mis-
takes, lose battles, do wrong acts, but none the less
did he believe that the words he spoke were the very
words of God. To every Sura of the Koran he
prefixed the words ' In the name of God, the Com-
passionate, the Merciful,' even as the Hebrew prophet
would open his message with his ^Thus saith the
Lord ; ' and before every sentence and every word of
the Sacred Book is to be read, between the lines, the
word ^ say,' indicating that Mohammed believed, what
Moses and Isaiah only believed on special occasions,
that in his utterances he was the mere mouthpiece,
and therefore the unerring mouthpiece, of the Infinite
and the Eternal. He might win his way against
superhuman difficulties, preserve a charmed life, do
deeds which seemed miracles to others, gain the
' Sura LXXX., with Sale's note ad loc. ; and Muir, II. p. 128.
Sir William Muir tells the story much as 1 have related it, but
seems quite unable to see its grandeur, for he only remarks upon it,
* This incident illustrates at once the anxiety of Mohammed to gain
over the principal men of the Kumish, and when he was rejected, the
readiness with which he turned to the \yoov and uninfluential.' Wais
ever moral sublimity so marred, or heroism so vulgarisetl ? How
Mohammed towers above even his best histonans I
NATURE AND LIMITS OF HIS MISSION. 127
homage of all Arabia, and present in his own person
an ideal of morality never before pictured by an Arab ;
and yet he never forgot himself, or claimed to be more
than a weak and fallible mortal.
As his view of his own mission is an all-important
point in estimating his character, let us deal, in con-
cluding this Lecture, with facts alone, and watch
his conduct at a few critical epochs which I
have purposely selected, as throwing light upon
the matter, in its different aspects, away from their
chronological order and from very different periods
of his life.
When the Persian monarch Chosroes was contem-
plating with pride, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, the
great Artemita that he had built and all its fabulous
treasures, he received a letter from an obscure citizen
of Mecca, bidding him acknowledge Mohammed as
the Prophet of God. Chosroes tore the letter into
pieces. ^ It is thus,' exclaimed the Arabian Prophet
when he heard of it, ' that God will tear his kingdom
and reject his supplications.' No prediction could
have seemed at the time less likely to be accomplished,
since Persia was at its height, and Constantinople at
its lowest. But Mohammed lived to see its fulfilment,
and yet never claimed in consequence, as others might
have done, the power of prophecy.
While he had as yet only half established his posi-
tion, a powerful Christian tribe tendered their submis-
sion, if only he would leave their chief some remnant
of his power. ^ Not one unripe date,' replied Moham-
med.' We remember how the French rhetorician the
' Muir, Vol. TV. p. r>9. , .
128 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
otlier day, knowing that his nation, if they are slaves
to nothing else, are always slaves to an epigram, pro-
longed resistance to the bitter end by his famous
declaration that not ^ an inch of their territory nor a
stone of their fortresses ' would the French surrender.
And we may imagine the effect produced upon the
handful of Mohammed's Meccan followers who were
still in exile at Medina by such an answer, coming
from one who was certainly no vapid rhetorician, who
preferred silence to speech, and who never said a thing
he did not really mean.
Moseilama, the most formidable of the rival pro-
phets whom Mohammed's success stirred up, thinking
that Mohammed's game was a merely selfish one, and
that two might play at it, sent to Mohammed to offer
to go shares with him in the good things of the world,
which united they might easily divide. The letter
was of Spartan brevity : ' Moseilama the apostle of
God to Mohammed the apostle of God. — Now let
the earth be half mine and half thine.' Moham-
med's reply was hardly less laconic : ' Mohammed
the apostle of God to Moseilama the liar. — The earth
is God's, He giveth it to such of His servants as He
pleaseth, and they who fear Him shall prosper.'
Again mark his conduct under failure or rebuff.
He had lost, within three days of each other, Abu
Taleb his one protector, and his venerable wife
Khadijah, that toothless old woman, as Ayishah
long afterwards in the bloom of her beauty called
her; the wife who, as Mohammed indignantly re-
plied, 'when he was poor had enriched him, when
he was called a liar had alone believed in him, when
he was opposed by all the world had alone remained
MOSEILAMA THE LIAR. 129
true to him.' ^ What was he to do ? Silence and
the desert seemed the one chance of safety, but what
did he do? Followed only by Zeid, his faithful
freedman, he went to Tayif, the town after Mecca
most wholly given to idolatry ; and, like Elijah in
Samaria, he boldly challenged the protection and
obedience of the inhabitants. They stoned him out
of the city. He returned to Mecca defeated, but not
disheartened ; cast down, but not destroyed ; quietly
saying to himself, ' If thou, O Lord, art not angry, I
am safe ; I seek refuge in the light of thy countenance
alone.' ^
After the tide had turned in his favour, and the
battle of Bedr had, as it seemed, put the seal to his
military success, he was signally defeated and
wounded almost to the death at Mount Ohud.
People began to desert him ; but a Sura, Moham-
med's ^ order of the day,' appeared : ^ Mohammed is
no more than a prophet. What if he had been
killed, needs ye go back ? He that turneth back
injure th not God in the least, but himself.' ^ The
spell of his untaught eloquence recalled them to
' Sprenger characteristically remarks (I, 151) that Mohammed's
faithfulness to Khadijah to her dying day was due probably not to his
inclination, but to his dependence on her. Why, then, the interval
before Mohammed married again ? And why, long afterwards, his
noble burst of gratitude to her memory when Ayishah contrasted her
own youth and beauty with Khadijah's age and infirmities, and asked,
* Am not I much better than she 1 ' ' No, by Allah,' replied Moham-
med ; ' no, by Allah ; when I was poor she enriched me,' &c. Was
Mohammed dependent upon the dead ? For cynical remarks of a
similar kind see, amongst many other instances, Sprenger, II.
19, 23, 86.
2 See the story in full in Muir, Vol. II. p. 198-203.
■■^ Sura III. 138.
E
130 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
themselves, and we are assured that his defeat at
Ohud advanced his cause as much as did his victory
at Bedr.
Here is a story which illustrates the nature of the
revenge which the Prophet lived to take. He was
one day sleeping under a tree, alone, and at a distance
from his camp, when he awoke and beheld Durthur,
his deadly foe, standing over him with a drawn swords
' Oh Mohammed,' cried he, ' w^ho is there now to save
thee ? ' ^ God,' said the Prophet. Struck with awe,
Durthur dropped his sword ; Mohammed seized it,
and exclaimed in his turn, ' Oh Durthur, who is there
now to save thee?' ' No one,' replied Durthur. 'Then
learn from me to be merciful ; ' and with these words
he gave him back his sword, and made him his
firmest friend.
Ayishah, his favourite wife, one day asked of him^
'O Prophet of God, do none enter Paradise but
through God's mercy ? ' ' None, none, none,' replied
he. ' But will not even you enter by your own
merits?' Mohammed put his hand upon his head
and thrice replied, 'Neither shall I enter Paradise
unless God cover me with His mercy.' ^ There was
no ' false certitude of the Divine intentions,' the be-
setting temptation of spiritual ambition; no facile
dogmatising upon what he had only to hint to be
believed — his own preeminent position in the unseen
world. It would have been safe to do so : k a<pav\Q
rov fivBov aveveUag ovk t)(ii tXtyxov *. * and how few
could have resisted a like temptation I
And at the last grand scene of all, when the Pro-
» Mishkat-ul-Masibeli, I. Book IV. 280. " Hdt. II. 23.
DEATH OF THE PROPHET. 131
phet had met his death, as he had always told his
doubting followers he must, and Omar, the Simon
Peter of Islam, in the agony of his grief drew his
scymitar and wildly rushing in among the weeping
Musalmans swore that he would strike off the head
of any one who dared to say that the Prophet was
dead — the Prophet could not be dead — it was by a
gentle reminder of what the Prophet himself had
always taught, that the venerable Abu Bakr, the
earliest of the Prophet's friends, and his successor in
the Khalifate, calmed his excitement : ^ Is it then
Mohammed, or the God of Mohammed, that we have
learned to worship i '
\
132 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
LECTURE III.
FebeuARY 28, 1874.
MOHAMMEDANISM.
Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one God. . , . Now there-
fore go and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt
say. — The Hebrew Bible,
Allahu Akbar — God is most great — there is no God but God. and
Mohammed is His messenger. — The Creed op Islam.
In the concluding part of my last Lecture I discussed
at length the question of the character of Mohammed,
and we arrived, I think, at the conclusion that, on the
one hand, he had grave moral faults which may be
accounted for, but not excused, by the circumstances
of the time, by the exigencies of his situation, and by
the weaknesses of human nature. And, on the other,
we saw reason to believe that he was not only pas-
sionately impressed with the reality of his divine
mission in early life, but that the common view of a
great moral declension to be traced in his latter years
is not borne out by the evidence, and that to the end
of his career, amidst failures and successes, in life and
in preparation for death, he was true to the one prin-
ciple with which he started. He became indeed, by
TRUE CHARACTER OF MOHAMMED. 133
the force of circumstances, general and ruler, law-
giver and judge of all Arabia ; but above all and
before all, he was still a simple prophet delivering
God's message in singleness of heart, obeying, as far
as he could, God's will, but never claiming to be more
than God's weak and erring servant.
And now, perhaps, it is time to ask what was the
essence of Mohammed's belief, that which made him
what he was, which has given his religion its inex-
haustible vitality ? How did it resemble, and how
did it differ from, the religions which it overthrew,
and one of which at least we are accustomed to look
upon, and shall, in its pure form as it came from
Christ's own lips, and can still be read in Christ's own
acts, and eve n to some extent in the character of His
servants, always continue to look upon, as immeasur-
ably superior to Mohammedanism ?
<^The essence of Mohammedanism is not merely
the sublime belief in the unity of God, though it is
difficult to us to realise the tumult of the feelings, and
the intensity of the life, which must be awakened in a
Polytheistic people, who are also imaginative and
energetic, when, on a sudden, they recognise the One
in and behind the Many. Mohammed started indeed
with the dogmatic assertion that there was but one
God, the Creator of all things in heaven and earth, all
powerful, knowing all things, everywhere present.
He reiterates this in a thousand shapes as the fore-
front of his message; ^ and sublimely confident that
' See especially Suras I. and CXI I., the beginning and end of the
Koran in the orthodox arrangement ; also Sura XXXV. 41-44. Cf.
also Sura II. 19-20, 109 ; VI. 1-6 ; XIII. 10, 11 ; XVI. 12-17 ; LIII*
and XCVI.
134 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
it need only be stated to ensure ultimate acceptance,
he deigns not to offer proof of that which, in his judg-
ment, must prove itself
But it was more than the unity of God, and the
attributes which flow from that conception, which
Mohammed asserted. A theoretic assent to this
might have had but little influence on practice.
What is by its nature immeasurably above man, may
also be immeasurably removed from him ; and ac-
cordingly Mohammed reasserted that which had been
the life of the old Hebrew nation, and the burden of
the song of every Hebrew prophet — that God not
only lives, but that He is a righteous and a merciful
ruler ; and that to His will it is the duty and the
privilege of all living men to bow.' Nor was the
sublimity of this doctrine marred in its application by
the old Hebrew exclusiveness. The Arabian nation
was first called indeed ; but as in Christianity, and as
it was not in Judaism, the obligations of the Arabs
were to be measured by their privileges, and the call
was to be extended through them to the world at
large. /The Jew surrendered his birthright if he im-
parteoliis faith to other peoples. The Arab sur-
rendered his if he did not spread his faith wherever
and however he could. ^
* See this well drawn out in Maurice's ' Reli^ons of the World,' p.
21-24. The passage is a most sug^stive one. I owe much to it, and
it seems to me that here, and in many other passages of his writings,
Mr. Maurice did far more, and penetrated far (leei)er, than is allowed
in a very brilliant passage of a recent work (see * Literature and
Dogma,' p. 34o). When the unacknowledged debts of the nineteenth
century to its great writers come to be added up, I am convinceil
that it will Ix; fully recognised that the mental iwjwera of Mr.
Maurice rank as high as did the purity and nobility of his life ; and
more can hardly be 8ai<l.
ESSENCE OF MOHAMMEDANISM. 135
But Mohammed's assertion of the unity of God
and of His rule over every detail of man's life, was no
mere plagiarism from an older faith. The Jewish
people at large had, even in their best days, rushed
wildly after the worship of alien gods ; at last, indeed,
the iron of the Captivity had entered into their souls ;
they learned much during their sojourn in the East,
but they unlearned more; they unlearned there, once
and for ever, the sin of idolatry. But though they
never henceforward worshipped other gods, the higher
teaching of their prophets they still too much ig-
nored, and the period which might have been the
culmination of their glory ended in that tragedy of
tragedies which was the immediate precursor of their
fall. The sceptre departed from Judah, but the
Jewish exiles in Arabia still clung desperately to the
phantom of those proud religious privileges when all
which had given some claim to them had disappeared.
Christians too, such Christians as Mohammed had
ever met, had forgotten at once the faith of the Jews,
and that higher revelation of God given to them by
Christ which the Jews rejected. Homoousians and
Homoiousians, Monothelites and Monophysites, Jaco-
bites and Eutychians, making hard dogmas of things
wherein the sacred writers themselves had made no
dogma, disputing fiercely whether what was mathe-
matically false could be metaphysically true, and
nicely discriminating the shades of truth and false-
hood in the views suggested to bridge over the abys-
mal gulf between them ; turning figures into facts,
rhetoric into logic, and poetry into prose, had for-
gotten the unity of God, while they were disputing
about it most loudly with their lips. They busied
136 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
themselves with ever^^ question about Christ except
those which might have led them to imitate Christ's
life. Now Mohammed came to make a clean sweep
of such unrealities. Images: what are they? 'Bits
of black wood, pretending to be God ; ' ' philosophical
theories, and theological cobwebs. Away with
them all ! God is great, and there is nothing else
great. This is the Musalman Creed. * Islam,' that
is, man must resign his will to God's, and find his
highest happiness in so doing. This is the Musalman
life. J
Was there anything in these two principles, an
objector may ask, that was either original or new?
There was nothing ; they were as old as the time of
Moses, as old, in reality, even as Abraham ; again
and again Mohammed asseverates that he has been
sent to bring the Arabs nothing new ; he has come
only to republish the creed of Abraham which had
always existed, however it had been forgotten or neg-
lectedT] Amongst sullen and isolated Jews, amongst
wrangling tritheistic Christians, amongst Fetish-
worshippers of every grade, came a camel driver, not
to teach them what was new, but to remind them of
what was old. On Arabian soil more than two
thousand years before, there had come to one who
was tending his father's flock in the desert, the simple
but the startling message, ' I am that I am. Hear, O
Israel : the Lord our God is one God ; now therefore
go and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what
thou shalt say; ' * and, at the words, from Africa the
chosen people had passed into Asia, slaves had
' Carlyle, * Heroes,' p. 226.
« Exodus IF I. 14, IV. 12 ; Deut. VI. 4.
HOW FAR WAS MOHAMMEDANISM NEW? 137
become freemen, and a family a nation. On that
same Arabian soil now came the same voice to
another shepherd of the desert, and that with effects
not less striking, and hardly less fraught with benefit
to the world at large : ' Allahu Akbar, God is most
great, there is no God but God, and thou, Moham.med,
art the Prophet of God.' The mission was accepted
and the message proclaimed, and within a century
its echoes were heard, and its truth recognised,
from Aden to Antioch, and from Seville to Samar-
kand.
And I would remark here, and would particularly
beg those who are doing me the honour to attend
these Lectures to bear in mind, that though I have,
in compliance with European custom, often spoken of
Mohammedanism and Mohammedans, the name was
never used by Mohammed himself, or by his earlier
disciples, and, in spite of the reverence paid to their
Prophet, it has always been rejected by his followers
themselves as a rightful appellation. To quote once
more the noble words of Abu Bakr, it was not Mo-
hammed, but the God of Mohamnr^ei that the Prophet
taught his followers to worship/The creed is ' Islam,'
a verbal noun, derived from a root meaning ' submis-
sion to ' and * faith in God,' and the believers who so
submit themselves are called Muslims, a participle of
the same root, both being connected with the words
'Salam,' or 'peace,' and 'Salym,' or 'health;^^^
There was nothing, therefore, theoretically new in
what I have described as the central truth of Islam,
for it was this belief that lay at the root of the great-
' Sprenger. Vol. 1. p. 09.
138 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
ness of the Jewish nation, and their separation from
all other nationsTj Certain forms of Christianity have
asserted it as strongly as did Mohammed. It is this
principle which has been the strength of Calvinism
and of Puritanism, and in this direction perhaps lies
the explanation of the fact that those forms of reli-
gion which have been theoretically most fatalistic
have by their acts given the strongest practical asser-
tion of free-will. This was the spark from heaven
which lit the train. In his assertion of this, lay the
religious genius of MohammedTl This gave the Arabs
' unity as a nation, discipline and enthusiasm as an
army.' ' This sent them forth in their wild crusade
against the world ; and, armed with this, they swept
away before them ever}^ creed, or memory of a
creed, which did not then contain any principle so
inspiring.
Such then were the two leading principles of the
new creed ) the existence of one God, whose will was
to be the rule of life, and the mission of Mohammed
to proclaim what that will was. The one doctrine as
old, if not older than the time when the father of the
faithful left his Chaldean home in obedience to the
Divine will ; the other sanctioned indeed, in its
general assertion of the prophetic office, by the
traditionary belief of both Jews and Arabs ; but
startling enough in the time at which the revelation
came, in the instrument selected, and in the way in
which he proclaimed it. In this consists the originality,
such as it is, of Mohammedanism. The other articles
of faith, added to the two I have already discussed —
* Maurice, loc. cit.
PRACTICAL DUTIES OF ISLAM. 139
— Ihe written revelation of God's will, tltl responsibility
of man, me existence of angels and of Djinn, the
future life, the resurrection, and the final judgment
— are to be found, either developed or in germ, in the
systems, either of Jews, or Zoroastrians, or Christians.
Even in the times of ignorance, the camel tethered
to a dead man's grave was an indication that the
grave was, even to the wild Arab, not the end of all
things.^
Nor was there anything much more original in the
four practical duties of Islam — in pr^er and alms-
giving, in fasting and in pilgrimage.fl- Prayer is the
aspiration of the human soul towards God, common
to every religion, from the rudest Fetishism to the
most sublime Monotheism. But it occupies in Islam
a more prominent place both theoretically and practi-
cally than it does in any other religion. Some of the
characteristics of Musalman prayer are almost peculiar
to it, and render it sometimes, perhaps, more pro-
foundly devotional, and sometimes more purely
mechanical, than is to be found amongst the followers
of.any other creed.
^Almsgiving is the most easy and obvious method
of evidencing that love to man which leads up to, and
' Sprenger says (I. 4, 801) that the reason why Mohammed refers
so often, e.g., in the very first Sura in chronological order, to the
* clot of blood ' from which man was created, is because he looked
upon it much as Christians have done to the emerging of the
butterfly from the chrysalis, as a proof or illustration of the resur-
rection. In Sura LI 1 1, Mohammed says he took not the doctrine
merely, but the illustration also, from 'the roll of Abraham.' Cf.
Sura LXXV., entitled ' The Resurrection,' ad Jin. : ' Is not the God
who foi-med man from a mere embryo powerful enough to quicken
the dead ? '
14U MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
is, in its turn, the result of love to Godv2/Fasting is
an assertion, though a superficial one, of the great
truth that self-denial is a step towards God ; but
it is peculiarly liable to abuse as fostering the belief,
so common among the ruder of the Semitic nations,
and still commoner among ascetics in modem times,
that God is to be feared rather than loved, and that
there is something pleasing to Him in pain as such ;
pain, that is, apart fro»rks effect upon the will, and
so upon the character.vfypilgrimage is a concession to
human feelings, not to say to human weakness,
common again, in practice, to all the religions of the
world. But this last calls, perhaps, for some special
remark here, since its actual influence has been so
great, while in theory and in reality it is alien alike
to Mohammedanism and to Christianity.'
' A high authority, Ur. Badger, has remarked with reference to
this i)assage, that he is at a loss to undei'stand how the Hajj can be
spoken of as in any way alien to islam, seeing that it is enjoined in
the Koran : he has a much greater right to si>eak on the subject than 1
have, but I still tliiuk that a careful examination of the twenty-second
Sura of the Koran, entitled the Pilgrimage, compared with other
passages, will justify me in the way in which I have sjx>ken here of
it as alien in reality to so spiritual a religion as Islam, even though
it is enjoined in the Koran ; as a concession, and an inconsistent
concession, to natural weakness rather than as a part of the inner
belief of the Prophet, who so erai)hatically said, ' There is no piety in
turning your faces towards the East or West, but he is pious who
believeth in Gotl.' The gist of the Sum seems to me to be this (cf.
Bprenger, 11., xvi. oSl) : the chief ceremony of the faithful is the
pilgrimage, which it is well to observe with all its peculiarities
as an historical commemoration (v. 2**)). Every people has religious
rites and ceremonies of its own, and their use will dejiend on the
spirit in whicii they are jKjrformed. * By no means can the flesh of
camels which ye sjicrifice reach unto Gotl, neither their blootl ; but
piety on your part reachetli Him' (v. 3S). But ceremonies are ex-
HOLY PLACES. 141
' The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this
mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.'
'God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit and in truth.' But from the
time the words were spoken, even to this day, a con-
tinuous living stream has poured towards the Holy
Land. For nineteen centuries Christian Pilgrims
have been seen to leave their homes and kindred,
facing, now privations, now dangers, and now ridicule,
that they might enjoy the sacred luxury, the ineffable
religious rapture, of beholding the city over which the
Saviour wept, of standing on the spot which gave
Him birth, of gazing on the lake whereon He taught,
and of worshipping in the shrine which covers the
rock wherein His body lay. And far be it from me to
say, spite of the invention of the true Cross, spite of
St. Andrew's lance and the relics of the Apostles,
spite of the Crusades themselves, spite of the keys of
the Holy Sepulchre, and even of the imposture of the
Holy Fire, that the evils belonging to- this reverence
for places have altogether predominated over the
good. A scientific and unimaginative age laughs at
the weaknesses and the follies involved, but it forgets
the dauntless faith and the heroic endurance, the
sacrifice of self, and the romance of danger ; it forgets
that it is the office of religion to deal with these very
human weaknesses and follies, and make the best of
such materials as it has to work upon.
Christ swept away some of the abuses of the
temple worship, and looked forward to its ultimate
ternals (v. 66) ; the essence of the matter consists in prayer, in giving
alms to the poor, in ' cleaving fast to Gro.l, to Him who is your liege
Lord, a goodly Lord and a great helper ' (v. 77).
142 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
abolition ; but He did not sweep away the temple
itself. He rather paid it its customary honours.
Mohammed saw^ the dangers of the Kaaba worship,
and, once and again, proposed to destroy it altogether ;
but he had to deal with an historical faith, and with
a shrine of immemorial antiquity, one which Diodorus
Siculus, a hundred years before the Christian era,
tells us, was even then 'most ancient, and was
exceedingly revered by the whole Arab race.' The
traditions of the Kaaba ran back to Ishmael and
Abraham, nay even to Seth and Adam ; ^ and, as its
very name, ' Beit Allah,' shows, it might, in its first
rude shape, have been erected by some such ancient
patriarch as he who raised a pillar of rough stone
w^here in his sleep he had seen the angels ascending
and descending, and called it ' Bethel or Beit Allah :
this is the house of God, and this the gate of
heaven.' Arab poets went further back still, and
assigned to the holy city a date to be reckoned rather
by astronomical or geological time than historical :
even ' before Sirius was created,' so says a patriotic
poem w^hich commemorates the miraculous repulse of
Abrahah, the Christian King of Abyssinia, from the
Kaaba, ' even before Sirius was created, was Mecca a
holy place : therefore should even the mightiest
among men yield it homage. Ask the Nagashy of
' Cf. Sura III. UO. 'The tirst temple that was founded for man-
kind was that in Becca (place of resort, i.c.^ Mecca) — Hlessctl, and a
{guidance to human beings. In it are evident sijfnsjcven the stan«ling-
place of Abraham, and he who entereth it is safe. And the pili^rim-
aj?e to the temple is a service due to God from those who ai-e able to
journey thither.' This sentence is still woven into the eovorintr of the
Kaaba, sent annually by the Sultan.
PILGRIMAGE— ITS USE AND ABUSE. 143
Abyssinia about it : sixty thousand of them returned
not again to their homes ; they quitted hfe : God
sent a mighty wind which scattered them hke a flock
of sheep.' ^ Now Mohammed cherished all the family
associations of a Haschimite,^ as well as all the local
affections of a Meccan patriot ; and the family, and
the place, and the country, the historical lore, and
the religious imagination, combined to save the sacred
shrink Mohammed swept away the idols of the
Kaaba ; he abolished the nude processions ^ and the
other abuses of its worship ; but he retained the
Kaaba itself ; and tlie quaint rites, which were old in
Mohammed's time, are still religiously observed by
the whole Mohammedan world. Seven times the
pilgrim walks around the sacred mosque, seven times
he kisses the Black Stone ; he drinks the brackish
water of the sacred well Zemzem, buries the parings
of his nails, and the hair he has at length shaved, in
the consecrated ground ; he ascends Mount Arafat
and showers stones on the three mysterious pillars.*
Nor is the Kaaba present to the mind at those times
only when the prescribed pilgrimage is near at hand,
* Sirat-er-racoul, I. 29.
^ See a curious conversation between Mohammed and Ayishah on
the Kaaba, illustrating the strong family feelings of the Prophet.
Sprenger, I. iv. 315.
3 Sura VII. 27 sq.- Cf. XXII. 27-40, and Mishkat-ul-Masibeh, I.
Book XI. 619.
■* A plan of the Kaaba, as taken by Ali Bey, and a full description
of the Pilgrim ceremonies, which he himself went through, may
be seen in Burton's ' Pilgrimage,' III. 61. Burckhardt and Burton
have both described the Black Stone minutely from personal
observation ; and a picture of it, the size of the original, is given in
Muir, II. 18.
144 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
in prospect or in retrospect. The first architectural
requisite of every Musahnan house of prayer is the
niche or arch which points with mathematical pre-
cision to the sacred pile ; and, guided by this, every
devout Musalman turns five times a day towards the
Kiblah of the world, in earnest prayer to Goci\
* That man,' says Dr. Johnson, ^ has little to be envied
whose patriotism would not gain force on the plains
of Marathon, or whose pietv would not grow warm
among the ruins of lona.V^ The ceremonies of the
Kaaba may perhaps seem to us ridiculous, but the
shrine is one which kindled the feelings of the Arab
patriot, and roused the hopes of the Bedouin of the
desert, ages before Miltiades fought, and tens of ages
before Columba preached. It has been consecrated
in its later history by its connection with the grandest
forward movement that the Eastern world has ever
known ; and, in spite of the mummeries and the
abuses which have grown round the pilgrimage of the
Hajj in the course of ages, I should be slow indeed
to assert that the feelings which still draw, year after
year, Musalmans by myriads from the burning sands
of Africa, from the snows of Siberia, and the coral
reefs of the Malays, towards a barren valle)' in
Arabia, do not, on the whole, elevate rather than
depress them in the scale of humanity. In their own
rough and imperfect way, they raise the mind of the
nomad and the shepherd from the animal life of the
present to the memories of the distant past, and the
hopes of the far future. They are a living testimony
to the unity of God, and a homage paid by the un-
progressive nations of the world to that Prophet who
softened the savage breast, and elevated the savage
INFLUENCE OF THE TALMUD ON THE KORAN. 145
mind, and taught them what, but for him, they had
never learned at all. "7
It will be appareni/, from what I have already said,
that of the previous faiths existing in the world, the
one that influenced Mohammed most was, be3^ond
all question, Judaism. Insomuch, that one whose loss
all who take interest in Eastern questions are now
deploring, the late Emanuel Deutsch, summed up
the connection between them in the celebrated dictum,
that ' when the Talmud was gathered in, the Koran
began — post hoc ergo propter hoc' And he went on
to endorse and to develope what Dean Milman had
hinted before him, that Islam was little else than-
a republicanism of Judaism, with such modifications
as suited it to Arabian soil, plus the important
addition of the prophetic mission of Mohammed,
The gifted author was, perhaps, from the very extent
of his knowledge of Talmudical literature, prone to
trace its influence everywhere ; and the proposition
is, perhaps, stated a little too nakedly, and, as he,
no doubt, would have been the first to admit, needs
some important qualifications ; ^ but nobody would
deny that it is substantially true. Indeed, the
general connection between race and creed has been
proved by the Science of Comparative Religion to be
so intimate, that it could hardly in any case have
' It must be remembered also that in the new form of the faith the
ceremonialism which marked Judaism for the time almost entirely
disappeared; and its exclusive spirit permanently and completely.
The propagandist and missionary spirit of Islam is a point in which
it compares most favourably with Judaism. For a full account of
the influence of the Essenic communities and their doctrines on the
rise of Islam, see Sprenger, I. 17-21, and 30-3o ; and for that of the
Ebionites or Judaising Christians to the East of the Jordan, p, 21 -2S.
E 2
140 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
been otherwise. It seems a cruel destiny that allows
a man of great original genius to accumulate such
vast stores of recondite learning, and then snatches
him away before he has had time to do more than
leave the world dimly and sadly conscious of what it
has lost in losing him !
Anyhow, the Koran teems with ideas, allusions,
and even phraseology, drawn not so much from the
written as from the oral Jewish law, from the tradi-
tions that grew round it, and the commentaries on it.
The Talmud, in its two divisions of Halacha and
Haggada, sums up the intellectual and social and
religious life of the Jews during a period of nearly
a thousand years. It is the meeting point of the
three Monotheistic creeds of the world ; and, even
with the imperfect information that Eastern scholars
have yet given respecting it, it has done much to
throw light upon them all. Mohammed was never
backw^ard to acknowledge the intimate connection
between his faith and that of the Jews. And in
more than one passage of the Koran he refers with
equal respect to their oral and to their written law.
Nor did Christ really draw so broad a distinction
between these two as might be imagined from the
sweeping way in which He sometimes denounces
the Scribes and Pharisees. * Whatsoever they that
sit in Moses' seat bid 3'ou observe, that obser^'e and
do.' ' And it is incontestable that the Pharisees,
as a body, contained some of the best and noblest —
Hillel and Shammai, Gamaliel and St. Paul — as it
' St. Matt. XX 111. 2 and 8. Sec this well argued in an article on
the Talmud, Edinhurgh Jfrricv for July 1873.
EXCLUSIVENESS OF JUDAISM. 147
contained some of the worst and meanest, of their
nation.
And, accordingly, Mohammed, during the early
years of the Hijrah, struggled hard, and, as it might
have seemed to him, with every prospect of success,
to secure the adhesion of the Jewish tribes who dwelt
round Medina. He appealed to their Scriptures,
which, he said, he came not to destroy, but to fulfil,
and which, as he argued, for those who had eyes to
see, pointed to him. * A prophet shall the Lord your
God raise up unto you of your brethren like unto me ;
to him shall ye hearken.' Was he not like unto
Moses ? he asked again and again ; and did he not
spring from their brethren, the children of Ishmael?
^ In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed : '
were Abraham's descendants by Ishmael, he asked,
to be altogether excluded from this blessing, and had
they not now their part of the prophecy to fulfil, as
Abraham's descendants by Isaac had already fulfilled
theirs? ^ The Lord came from Sinai, He rose up
from Mount Seir unto them. He shined forth from
Mount Paran.' ' From Sinai had come the law of
Moses, so argued others for Mohammed, if he did not
argue for himself, from Mount Seir the Gospel ; and
now from Paran, the hills round Mecca, had come the
Koran.^ He adapted the fasts and the feasts of the
1 Deut. III. 2.
* Other passages of Scripture taken by Mohammed himself, or by
Musalman doctors, to refer to Islam, are Gen. XVII. 20 ; Isa. XXI. 7,
XLII. LXIII. 1-6 ; Habakkuk III. 3 ; John I. 21, ' art thou that
Prophet ? ' John XIV. 16 ; Rev. VI. 4. The treatment of the passage
in Isa. XXI. 7 is interesting : the watchman, according to the right
translation of the Hebrew original, ' saw a chariot with a couple of
riders, the one a rider on an ass, the other on a camel : ' if, as
148 MOTIA?fMED AND MOHA.VMEDANrSM.
new religion to the Jewish model. He took from
them the law of usury and the law of inheritance.
He owes to them some of his regulations respecting
ablutions and unclean animals. He even, till he
could hope no longer, made Jerusalem the Kiblah of
the world for the five daily prayers.
It must have surprised Mohammed, with his half
knowledge of their history, that the Jews should be
unable to enter into his views of a great Catholic
creed, or Religion of Humanity — the creed of
Abraham — embracing Jews, Arabs, and Christians
in one body. But it can surprise no one who has
ever in any degree entered into the religious genius
of the Jewish race, or who has reflected on the
almost insuperable difficulties which lay in the way
of the Jews accepting that higher creed, the Author
of which it is their eternal honour to have produced,
and their tragic destiny to have rejected. And the
Bani Kainucaa, and the Bani Xadhir, the Bani
Kuraitza, and the Jews of Kheibar, bitterly expe-
rienced in Mohammed's subsequent treatment of
them the truth of the now-all-too-familiar maxim in
ecclesiastical history, that they who differ least in
religious matters hate the most.
It is impossible to gain for oneself, and almost
equally so to give to others within a short space of
time, anything like an adequate idea either of the
form or of the contents of the book of which Moham-
med, whatever the general influences brought to bear
upon his mind, was the undisputed author, and which
ChriBtiaii controversijilists nmintainetl, the Trophet of Nazareth was
one. is not, so argue tlie Musalman doctors, the Prophet of Mecca
the other .>
HISTORY OF THE KORAN. 149
still underlies the life of the vast fabric of the
Mohammedan world. In my First Lecture I com-
pared and contrasted the Koran with the Bible ; but
it is necessary, perhaps, to say something more of its
leading characteristics, or the want of th^m. The
Koran defies analysis, for that presupposes something
like method in the thing to be analysed. It can
hardly be characterised by any one epithet, for there
is not a single Sura of any length which sustains a
uniform character throughout. It has often been re-
marked that there is no more striking proof of the
discrepancies of national taste than the diametrically
opposite opinions held by the cultivated classes of
East and West on the literary merits of the Koran.
Having performed repeatedly, for the purpose of
these Lectures, a task w^hich Bunsen and Sprenger and
Renan all pronounce to be almost impossible — that of
reading the Koran continuously from beginning to
end, both in the orthodox and chronological order
— I have acquired a better right, perhaps, than most
people to endorse the superficial opinion that dulness
is, to a European who is ignorant of Arabic, the pre-
vailing characteristic of the book as a whole, until
he begins to make a minute study of it. The
importance of the subjects it handles, the unique
interest attaching to the speaker, and the unaffected
reverence with which every utterance is still regarded
by so large a portion of the world, are insufBcient to
redeem it from this general reproach.
Endless assertions as to what the Koran is, and
what it is not, warnings drawn from previous
Arabian history, especially the lost tribes of Ad and
Thamud ; Jewish or Arab legends of the heroes
160 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
of the Old Testament, stories told, and, it must b e
added, often spoiled in the telling of them ; laws^
ceremonial and moral, civil and sumptuar>^; personal
apologies ; curses showered upon Abu Lahab or the
whole community of the Jews ; all this alternates
with sublime revelations of the attributes of the
Godhead, with bursts of admiration for Christ Him-
self, though not for the views held of Him by His
so-called followers, with flights of poetry, with scath-
ing rebukes of the hypocrite, the ungrateful, the un-
merciful.
That the book as a whole is a medley, however it
may be arranged, will seem only natural when we
remember the way in which it was composed, pre-
served, edited, and stereotyped. Dictated from time
to time by Mohammed to his disciples, it was by
them partly treasured in their memories, partly written
down on shoulder-bones of mutton or oyster-shells,
on bits of wood or tablets of stone, which, being
thrown pell-mell into boxes, and jumbled up together,
like the leaves of the Cumean Sibyl after a gust of
wind, were not put into any shape at all till after the
Prophet's death by order of Abu Bakr. The work of
the editor consisted simply in arranging the Suras in
the order of their respective lengths, the longest first,
the shortest last ; and, though the book once after-
wards passed through the editor's hands, this is sub-
stantially the shape in which the Koran has come
down to us. Various readings, which would seem,
however, to have been of very slight importance,
having crept into the different copies, a revising com-
mittee was appointed by order of the Khalif Othman,
and, an authorized edition having been thus prepared
HISTORY OF THE KORAN. I5t
^ to prevent the texts differing, like those of the Jews
and Christians/ all previous copies were collected
and burnt !
Nor is it to be wondered at that the principle of
arrangement, combined with the impossibility of
keeping the rhyme or ryhthm in any translation,
have prevented European critics, as a body, from
endorsing the judgment, not merely of Mohammed
himself, for that, if it had stood alone, might be
looked upon as partial, but also of the whole Eastern
world.
^ If ye be in doubt as to our revelation to our
servant, then produce a Sura like unto it, and
summon your witnesses, God and all, if ye be men
of truth; '
And again, ' If men and genii were assembled
together that they might produce a book like the
Koran, they must fail.' '^
It is to be remarked that Mohammed and
Mohammed's enemies are quite at one as to the
merits of the book. The Arabs said that the Koran
could not be Mohammed's work because it was too
good. Mohammed replied to the effect that they
were both right and wrong. They were right, for it
was too good for Mohammed uninspired ; they were
wrong, for it was too good to have come originally
from anyone but the All-Merciful. ^
Of course, by the existing arrangement, even such
psychological development as there was in the Koran
has been obscured ; for, as a rule, what the editor put
1 Sura II. 21.
^ Sura XVIl. 90.
^ Sura XVI. 105, compared with XXV. 5, etc.
152 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
last comes really first. These are the burning utter-
ances of the Prophet who knows no influence but the
inspiration pent within him ; in these are the pith
and poetry of the whole ; while the elaborate and
laboured arguments, the apologice pro vita sua, are
the product of the mind which the force of circum-
stances and the love of spiritual power, that most
exquisite and most dangerous of fascinations, had
driven to become conscious of itself. The very titles
of the earlier Suras, the imprecations with which they
abound, the imagery they employ, suggest the shep-
herd of the desert, the despised visionary, the poet
and the prophet. ' The folding up,' ' the cleaving in
sunder,' ^ the celestial signs,' ^ the unity,' ^ the over-
whelming,' ^ the striking,' ' the inevitable,' * the earth-
quake,' ' the war-horses,' tell their own story. There
are passages in these, though it must be admitted they
are rare, which may be compared in grandeur even
with some of the sublimest passages of Job, of David,
or of Isaiah.
Take, for instance, the vision of the last day with
which the eighty-first Sura, ' The folding up,' begins ;
' When the sun shall be folded uj).
And when the stars shall fall,
And when the mountains shall l>e set in motion,
And when the she-camels with youn^ shall te neglected.
And when the wild beasts shall V)e luiddlcd toyrether,
And when the seas shall lx)il,
And when souls shall Ihj joined a .rain to their Ixnlies,
rnd when the female child that had been buried alive .shall ask for '\
what crime she was put to death, 1
And when the leaves of the B(X)k shall be unrollc<l.
And 'when the Heavens shall be stripped away like a skin,
And when Hell shall Ikj made to blaze,
And when I'aiadise shall l)e brouifht neai,
Every k)uI shall know what it has done.'
CHARACTERISTICS OF KORAN. 153
Allusions to the monotony of the desert ; the sun
in its rising brightness ; the moon in its splendour ;
are varied in the Koran by much more vivid mental
visions of the great day when men shall be like moths
scattered abroad, and the mountains shall become like
carded wool of various colours, driven by the wind.
No wonder that Labyd, the greatest poet of his time,
forbore to enter the poetic lists with Mohammed
when he recited to him the description of the infidel
in the second Sura.
^ They are like one who kindleth a fire, and when
it hath thrown its light on all around him, God taketh
away the light and leaveth him in darkness, and they
cannot see.'
^ Deaf, dumb, blind, therefore they shall not retrace
their steps.'
'They are like those who, when there cometh a
storm-cloud out of heaven big with darkness, thunder
and lightning, thrust their fingers into their ears be-
cause of the thunder-clap for fear of death. God is
round about the infidels.'
' The lightning almost snatcheth away their eyes :
so oft as it gleameth on them, they walk on in it ;
but when darkness closeth upon them, they stop ;
and if God pleased, of their ears and of their
eyes would He surely deprive them ; verily God is
almighty.'
And at the end of the same Sura, which, it is to be
remembered, appeared quite late in the Prophet's life,
at a period when it might have been expected that
the cares of government would dim the brightness of
the Prophet's visions, we find the sublime description
of Him whom it had been the mission of his life to
154 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM,
proclaim, and which is still engraved on precious
stones, and worn by devout Musalmans.
' God ! there is no God but He, the Living, the
Eternal. Slumber doth not overtake Him, neither
sleep ; to Him belongeth all that is in heaven and in
earth. Who is he that can intercede with Him but
by His own permission ? He knoweth that which is
past and that which is to come unto them, and they
shall not comprehend anything of His knowledge
but so far as He pleaseth. His throne is extended
over heaven and earth, and the upholding of both
is no burden unto Him. He is the Lofty and the
Great.'
Such is the theology of the Koran ; and here, in
the same grand Sura, is perhaps the best summary of
its morality : —
^ There is no piety in turning your faces towards
the East or the West, but he is pious who belie veth
in God, and the Last Day, and the Angels,
and the Scriptures and the Prophets ; who for
the love of God disburseth his wealth to his
kindred, and to the orphans, and the needy, and
the wa}'farer, and those who ask, and for ransom-
ing ; who observeth prayer, and payeth the legal
alms, and who is of those who are faithful to their
engagements when they have engaged in them, and
patient under ills and hardships and in time of
trouble ; these are they who are just, and those who
fear the Lord.'
Almost equally well too, as a proof of his poetic
inspiration, might have Mohammed quoted that other
description of Infidelity also produced late in his
life, and pronounced by Sir William Muir and by
POETRY OF KORAN. , 165
Emanuel Deutsch to be one of the grandest in the
whole Koran.
' As to the Infidels, their works are like the Serab
on the plain/ which the thirsty traveller thinketh to
be water, and then when he cometh thereto, he findeth
it to be nothing ; but he findeth God about him, and
He will fully pay him his account ; for swift in taking
an account is God ;
^ Or as the darkness over a deep sea, billows riding
upon billows below, and clouds above ; one darkness
on another darkness : when a man stretcheth forth
his hand he is far from seeing it ; he to whom God
doth not grant light, no light at all hath he.' ^^
Strange and graphic accounts have been preserved
to us by Ayishah of the physical phenomena attending
the Prophet's fits of inspiration. He heard as it were
the ringing of a bell ; he fell down as one dead ; he
sobbed like a camel ; he felt as though he were being
rent in pieces, and when he came to himself he felt as
though words had been ^ written on his heart.' And
when Abu Bakr, ' he who would have sacrificed father
and mother for Mohammed,' burst into tears at the
sight of the Prophet's whitening hair, ^ Yes,' said
Mohammed, ^ Hud and its sisters, the Terrific Suras,
have turned it white before its time.' '^
But in order to make the general outline of Mo-
hammed's system, which I am attempting to draw, as
little imperfect as it is possible for me to make it
* i.e. the Mirage of the Desert.
* Sura XXIV. 39, 40. See Muir, III. 308 ; and Deutsch, ' Islam,'
in ' Quarterly Review,' No. 254, p. 346.
3 Suras XI., Hud ; LVI., ' The Inevitable ; ' CI., ' The Striking.'
See Muir, II. 88.
156 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
within the limits I have prescribed myself, it is neces-
sary to touch upon three difficult questions, which
have acquired different degrees of prominence at
successive periods in the history of Mohammedanism
— questions which have been much misunderstood,
and sometimes intentionall}' misrepresented, and
which call more loudly even than other matters which
we have been considering for a laborious investigation
and a candid judgment. They need also above all
things the historical sense, which does not apply the
standard of the nineteenth century to the seventh, of
Europeans to Asiatics, or of a high civilisation to
semi-barbarism ; and which is content to balance the
evil against the good, without requiring a verdict
either for an absolute acquittal or an uncompromising
condemnation. The three questions I refer to are the
relation of Mohammedanism to Miracles, to Fatalism,
and to wars for the sake of Religion. I propose in
the remainder of this Lecture to deal with these in
succession ; not I hope consciously shirking any
difficulty, or glossing over what is unquestionably bad,
but, of course, not professing in any degree to exhaust
the subject.
First, then. Miracles. Mohammedanism is a system
in many respects unique, but in none more so than in
this, that alone of the great religions of the world
it does not, in its authoritative documents, rest its
claims to reception upon miracles ; and yet the
attitude of Mohammed towards the miraculous has
been made the ground by different people of very
conflicting accusations. Superficial obser\'ers up to
the middle of the last century, and Christian mission-
aries of later times, whose zeal has not always been
ATTITUDE OF MOHAMMED TO MIRACLES. 157
tempered by accurate knowledge of their subject,
fastening on the fantastic character of the few miracles
attributed to Mohammed by the pious credulity of
his followers or the ^ successors/ have triumphantly
torn the mask from the ^ impostor/ and have gone
on to contrast, as well they might from their point
of view, the purposeless character and impossibility
of his supposed miracles, with the sober nature and
the moral purpose which underlie the miracles of
the New Testament, however supernatural they may
be. Other writers — White in his ' Bampton Lectures,'
and Paley in his ^ Evidences of Christianity,' and
Butler in his ' Analogy ' — preferring to appeal to what
Mohammed said of himself, rather than to what was
said of him by others, have driven home the con-
trast between Mohammedanism and Christianity by
pointing out that Christianity is attested by super-
natural manifestations, and is therefore Divine, while
Mohammedanism is neither the one nor the other.
Let us enquire what the Koran itself, the only trust-
worthy authority on the subject, says, and then make
one or two remarks on the general question.
In the thirteenth Sura we read, —
'The unbehevers say, Unless a sign be sent down
with him from his Lord, we will not believe. But
thou art a preacher only, O Mohammed ! '
Mohammed replies that God alone can work
miracles; and, after specifying some of them, he
says : —
' God alone knoweth that which is hidden, and
that which is revealed. He is the great and the
Most High.'
In the seventh Sura the Infidels ask why Mo-
158 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
hammed had not been sent with miracles, hke
previous prophets? Because, rephed Mohammed,
miracles had proved inadequate to convince. Noah
had been sent with signs, and with what effect ?
Where was the lost tribe of Thamud? They had
refused to receive the preaching of the prophet Sahleh
unless he showed them a sign, and caused the rock to
bring forth a living camel. He did what they asked.
In scorn they had cut off the camel's feet, and then,
daring the Prophet to fulfil his threats of judgment,
were found dead in their beds next morning, stricken
by the angel of the Lord. There are some seven-
teen places in the Koran in which Mohammed is
challenged to work a sign, and he answers them all
to the same effect.
There are in the whole of the sacred book only
two supposed exceptions to the attitude thus assumed
by him ; and those who know how large a part
the Miraj, or miraculous journey on the Borak,^ bears
in popular conceptions of Mohammedanism, will learn
with surprise, if they have not gone much into the
matter, that there is only one passage in the Koran
which can be tortured into an allusion to the journey
to heaven.
' Praise be to Him who transferred His servant by
night from the sacred temple to one that is more
remote.' *
To make this refer at all to the Miraj, we have to
insert the word * Mecca ' in one place, and Jerusalem
or * seventh heaven ' in another, and this, though in
' Homk, after all, means only Lightning ; the Barak of the Jews ;
the Barca of the Carthajdnians.
• Sura XVII. 1.
THE MIRACULOUS. 159
the sixtieth verse of the same Sura Mohammed tells
lis he was not sent with miracles, because people
would not believe them ; and in the sixty-second
verse express mention is made of a vision he had
had, beyond doubt, of this very journey ! So, too, in
the verse : ' The hour hath approached and the mpon
hath been split in sunder; '^ people were so anxious
to see an allusion to their own extravagant invention
of the moon's descending on the Kaaba, and entering
Mohammed's sleeve, that they forgot that ' the hour '
means ' the hour of judgment,' and that the tense
used is the prophetic preterite. To the eye of the
Semitic ^ nabi,' whether Jewish or Arab, the future is
as the past.^
Without discussing the question of miracles at
length, I would make three remarks on the general
subject : — First, that in a new religion the real cause
for wonder is, not that it claims to be founded on
miracles, but that it should ever be able to profess to
do without them. In certain stages of the human
mind there is no natural phenomenon which will not
bear a supernatural interpretation. In fact, the super-
natural is then the rule ; the natural, the exception.
Gibbon, I think, has somewhere asked whether there
exists a single instance in ecclesiastical history of a
Father of the Church claiming for himself the power
of working miracles, and I am not aware that the
question has ever been answered in the affirmative.
And yet we know that during many centuries there
» Sura LIV. 1.
2 Cf. the past tense used in Sura XCVIIL, called < The Victory'—
' Verily, we have won for thee an undoubted victory,' believed to
point to the conquest of Mecca two years later.
160 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
was hardly a Father of the Church who did not have
miracles attributed to him by other men of equal, or
even greater, reputed sanctity. Among many others
I need only mention the names of St. Benedict and
St. Martin of Tours, of St. Bernard and St. Francis of
Assisi. They attribute even to inanimate remains,
and to relics, which were often fictitious, powers which
they would never dream of claiming for themselves.
St. Augustine, whose honesty is above suspicion, tells
us gravely that he had ascertained, on certain evi-
dence, that some small fragments of the disinterred
relics of St. Stephen had, in his own diocese, within
two years, performed no less than seventy miracles,
and three of them raisings from the dead ! St. Ber-
nard was believed by his admirers to have excommu-
nicated some flies which teased him, and * they
straightway fell down in heaps.' And if such be the
mental atmosphere of a Church in its adolescence,
a fortiori will an age which is capable of producing
or receiving a new religion throw a mystic halo of
supernatural! sm round the supreme objects of its
reverence. Even if the founder himself disclaims the
power of working miracles, they will be thrust upon
him in the most perfect good faith by the warm
imagination of his disciples.
Secondly, and what would seem to follow from
my first remark : in proportion as exact knowledge
advances, the sphere of the supernatural is narrowed ;
and therefore a proof which is fitted for an imaginative
and creative age is not best suited for a critical and
scientific one. Many minds, no doubt, will always
crave the supernatural, and they will always find
plenty of it ; but to many, also, in an age like this.
RELIGIOUS INSTINCT AN ULTIMATE FACT. 161
miracles have been a stumbling-block, and have seemed
a reason for rejecting the religion which is made to
rest mainly on them. Where there is a choice, it is at
least wise to select the strongest ground we have ; nor
is there any fear that Science will ever explain too
much. Behind what she explains, there will always
remain the unexplained and the unexplainable. Let
her classify and explain the phenomena of Mind and
Matter as she will, but will she ever be able to tell
us what Mind and Matter are themselves ? Let her
analyse the springs of human action, and dissect the
complex anatomy of the human conscience ; but the
religious instinct will still remain, as an ultimate fact
of human nature ; and that instinct will find without,
or supply from its own resources, the verities with
which it deals, the verities which supplement and
explain to it the facts of Nature, and are not explained
by them ; which assure us that this life is not the only
life, nor death extinction; and that love, the main
source of human happiness, is not given us to make
all real happiness impossible ; which, in a word, supply
the soul with the supreme objects for its worship and
its aspirations.
Thirdly, I would remark that the answers given by
Mohammed himself to those who demanded miracles,
that God gave the power of working miracles to whom
He pleased ; that other prophets had wrought mira-
cles, and had not been believed ; that he who could
not know even himself adequately, could not know
what God had hidden ; that there were greater mira-
cles in nature than any which could be wrought out-
side of it ; that the Koran itself was a miracle, find at
least one line of thought in a greater than Moham-
F
162 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
med, which is not opposed to, but identical with them.
People have raised questions about the authenticity
and meaning of much that is in the Gospels, but by
the rules of all critical interpretation, what they can
least question is the genuineness and accuracy of those
passages which the Disciples have, in their undoubted
honesty, recorded, as it were, in spite of themselves,
and which appear to run counter to other and loftier
conceptions of that majestic character on whose par-
tially-preserved utterances all Christendom still hangs.
He who said he could of His own self do nothing ;
it was the spirit which quickened, the flesh profiteth
nothing ; the words that He spake unto them, they
were spirit and they were life ; He who, when His
Disciples wondered at the withered fig tree, told them
that the trust in God which underlay His act would
enable even them to do greater things ; who, we are
told, cotcld not, in certain places, work m'racles because
of their unbelief ; and when people declined to accept
His teaching on higher grounds, told them, with a
touch of scorn, that they might do so if they liked on
the lower ground, for ^ His very works' sake ; ' and
lastly, who said it was an evil and adulterous genera-
tion which sought after a sign, and that no sign should
be given it ; and that if a man believed not Moses
and the Prophets, not even would he repent though
one rose from the dead ; in one aspect, at all events,
of His teaching agreed with the Arabian Prophet
whom Christians have so much discredited. He, at
all events, treated the miraculous as subordinate to
the moral evidences of His mission, and struck upon
a vein of thought and touched a chord of feeling
which, it seems to me, is reconcilable at once with
FATALISM. 163
the onward march of Science, and all the admitted
weaknesses of human nature.
11. Fatalism. I have spoken above of the extra-
ordinary impulse given to the earlier followers of
Mohammed by their vivid sense of God's personal
presence with them. Inspiring, indeed, this principle
then was ; for it must never be forgotten, as I hope
now to prove, that the belief in an absolute predesti-
nation, which turns men into mere puppets, and all
human life into a grim game of chess, wherein men
are the pieces, moved by the invisible Hand of but a
single Player, and which is now so general in Moham-
medan countries, was, all appearances to the contrar)',
no part of the creed of the Prophet himself or of his
immediate successors ; ^ and I venture, therefore, to
think that Gibbon is wrong in tracing the desperate
valour of the primitive Musulmans mainly to the
notion that since there was no chance, there need be
no fear : the germ, indeed, of fatalism was there, but
its effects were as yet anything but fatalistic.
It is of course true that there are many passages
in the Koran which assert in the strongest way the
foreknowledge of God. For instance, ^The fate of
every man have we bound about his neck ; ' and the
relations of the slain at the battle of Ohud are com-
forted by the assurance that every one must die at
his appointed time, whether it be in his own bed or
on the field of battle. Nor is it possible to any reli-
gion to reconcile the conflicting dogmas of the fore-
knowledge of God and of the free will of man. The
New Testament does not try to do so. St. Paul's
1 Cf . ' National Review ' for July, 1858, p. 154.
164 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
simile of the potter, for instance, in the Romans is as
fatalistic as is any passage in the Koran. It asserts
an absolute predestination as strongly as many other
passages in his Epistles assert free will. It is not
likely that Fathers of the Church or controversialists
will succeed in doing what an Apostle found it neces-
sary to leave undone, and the maxim of John of
Damascus, ^ ilhid scire oportet, Detim omnia prcBscire
sed 11071 omnia proefinire,' does not get over the
difficulty, though he appears to have imagined that it
did. Most assuredly our own Articles of Religion,
however successful they may be in finding a com-
promise between opposing views on other things, fail
to effect a compromise here. Press to its logical
result either the omnipotence or the omniscience of
God, and w^hat becomes of man's free wnll ? But logic
is not the only criterion of truth, nor is it the only
rule of life ; and consequently there is hardly a re-
ligion which does not, in words at all events, assert as
strongly as possible God's foreknowledge ; in acts, at
all events, man's freedom. Sometimes one will be
the more prominent, sometimes the other.
The Prophet of Arabia naturally dwelt most on
those attributes of God which, throwing the widest
gulf between the Creator and His creatures, would,
once and for all, rescue the Arabs from worshipping
what their owni hands had made.' He inculcates
hope in adversity, and humility in success, on the
ground that there is a supreme Ruler who never leaves
the helm ; who knows what is really best for man
when man himself does not ; and whose supreme will
• Cf. Qobineau, ' Les Religrions et les Philosophies dans I'Asie
Centrale.' See the whole passage on this subject, p. 72, 73.
MOHAMMED NOT A FATALIST. 165
and power, where He asserts them, cannot be crossed
by the efforts of the creatures of His hand. But this
is not the only side to his teaching. He asserts that
man is a free agent ; free to refuse or to accept the
Divine message, responsible for his acts, and therefore
deserving, now of punishment, now of reward. The
future, in fact, is in his own hands, and Mohammed
incessantly urges him to use his opportunities. Ali,
the most saintly, I would almost sa}^ the most Chris-
tian, of all Musalmans, pronounces those who say the
will is not free to be heretics.^ There are at least
four sects among Mohammedans that differ from one
another on the one point of predestination and free
will. One of them, the Mutazalites, almost assert
what philosophers have called the ^ liberty of indif-
ference ; ' and there is little doubt that Mohammed
himself, if the alternative had been clearly presented
to him, would have had more in common with Pela-
gius than with Augustine, with Arminius than with
Calvin.
It is difficult to believe that, if Mohammed had
been the consistent fatalist he is often represented to
have been, he would have made prayer one of the
four practical duties enjoined upon the faithful, and
that, on an equal or even a higher footing than alms-
giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. He is said to have
called it the Pillar of Religion and the Key of Para-
dise. He told a tribe which, after its conversion,
begged for a remission of some of the daily prayers
enjoined upon them, that there could be no good in
a religion in which there was no prayer ; and, ac-
cording to one of his successors, prayer of itself lifts
' Quoted by Gobinean. loc. cit.
166 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
men half way to heaven.' Now, if all events are
absolutely fixed by the Divine will, and foreseen by the
Divine mind, then there is no possibility, I do not
say of altering the fixed laws of nature, for that is a
power which few would claim for prayer, but even of
a man's improving in the smallest degree, by any
acts or petitions of his, his own spiritual condition.
Prayer would thus be a superfluity and delusion if
explained in any other way than as an aspiration of
the heart towards God, which, being an end in itself,
necessarily brings its own answer with it. Now,
whether this last is a true view of prayer or not, it
was certainly not Mohammed's view. In neither case
would he have been quite a consistent fatalist ; but it
is not likely that he could have overlooked the
glaring inconsistencies involved between an absolute
predestination on the one hand, and material answers
1 As to the reality of Prayer amongst Mohammedans, see the testi-
mony of Lieutenant WocmI, the intrepid explorer of the Oxus, who
gave a signal proof of his high Christian chamcter by resigning his
post under the Indian Government, on finding that it had employed
him to make promises of friendship to the Afghans which it was not
prepared to keep. He says ( ' Journey to the Source of the Oxus,'
p. 93), after mentioning a remarkable proof of the importance which
liis Mohammedan guides attached to prayer, ' Often since that time
have I observed that the Mohammedans, both old and young, how-
ever worn out by fatigue or suffering from hunger and thii-st, have
postponed all thought of self-indulgence to their duty to their God.
It is not with them the mere force of habit ; it is the strong impres-
sion on their minds that the duty of prayer is so important that no
circumstances can excuse its omission.' Nor did their dependence on
God make them less ready to help themselves. As they nearetl the
dangerous whirlpools of the Indus below Attock (p. 77). * the crew
went to prayers : then, steering the oars, they fixed their eyes upon
the steersman, watching for his signal when they were to exert
themselves.' (Cf . Wali^le's * Ansayrii,' I. r>6-r»9. Curzon's * Mon-
asteries,' p. 5G, &c.)
MOHAMMED'S VIEW OF PRAYER. 167
to prayer on the other. The prayers that he enjoined
five times a day ^ are still offered with full confidence
in their efficacy by all devout Musalmans, and the
cry of the Muezzin, before daybreak, from a myriad
mosques and minarets — ^ Prayer is better than sleep,
prayer is better than sleep ' — is a living witness,
wherever the influence of the Prophet of Arabia has
extended, more vivid than the letter of the Koran
itself, overpowering even the lethargy and quietism of
the East, to Mohammed's belief in God's providen-
tial government of the world, and in the freedom of
man's will.
Mohammed, on one occasion, complains of the Jews
that ' if good fortune betide them, they say it is from
God ; if evil betide them, they say it is from Moham-
med : ' say rather, he suggests, all is from God. But
what, he asks in the very next verse, has come to
these people that they are not near to understanding
what is told them ?
^y,yJ^i 'Whatever good betideth thee is from God, and \f^^^'^^^^^
ivhatever betideth thee of evil is from thyself.' ^ aw^l^
There are the two contradictories brought face to
face, and left fronting one another for all time ; and
can any religion do more, and, perhaps, I may add,
less, than this ?
It is not difficult to see how one and the same
doctrine of God's foreknowledge on the one hand,
and of His actual intervention in human affairs on
^ It is worth noticing, in passing, that the five daily prayers, like
the rite of circumcision, though universally observed by Musalmans,
are not enjoined in the Koran itself. Circumcision is not even men-
tioned in the Koran : it is one of the many Pre-Islamitic practices
which Mohammed tacitly sanctioned.
2 SuralV. 80, 81.
168 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
the other, may have diametrically opposite effects in
different natures, or in even the same natures under
different circumstances.
• There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune ;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.'
The early Musalmans, in the new burst of life
breathed into them by Mohammed, it inspired with
double energy and double enthusiasm, as in their best
days it inspired the Puritans, the Covenanters, the
Pilgrim Fathers. But to their descendants in their
more normal state — the dreamy Sufi, the brooding
Sepoy, the insensate Turk ; I would add, to those
religious people who refuse to prevent the miseries
and the diseases which Nature, they think, has
attached to guilt — it furnishes with a new excuse for
that life of inactivity to which they are already too
much disposed, since they believe that they are ac-
quiescing, as in duty bound, in the immutable decrees
ofGod.^
III. One more question remains to be discussed
to-day — the wars of Islam and the relation they bear
to Mohammed's religion. It is true that it was not
till the Prophet found himself, to his surprise, in a
position of power at Medina, that we hear even a
whisper of the sword as an instrument of conversion.
It is then, and not till then, that we are told that
other prophets have been sent by God to attest His
different attributes in their own person and by their
' Sec an eloquent passage on tbin subject in an article of the
•National Review' for October, 1861, entitletl the Great Arabian,
p. 312.
USE OF THE SWORD. 169
miraculous acts ; but that men had closed their eyes
to the character, and denied the miracles, even of
Moses and of Christ. What remained to the last of
the prophets except that he should try the last argu-
ment of the sword ? Was the sword then an after-
thought and an accidental appendage merely to Mo-
hammed's religion, or was it an essential part ? I am
inclined to think that the nature of the case itself
and the verdict of subsequent experience will tend to
show that, however absent it was from Mohammed's
thoughts at first, and however alien to his gentle and
forgiving nature, it came in the progress of events to
some extent in his own life, and still more so in the
lives of his successors, to be the latter. How this
came about requires careful explanation.
Mohammed's notion of God had never been that of
a great moral Being who designs that the creatures
He has created should, from love and gratitude to
Him, become one with Him, or even assimilated to
Him. Mohammed believed in God, feared, reverenced,
and obeyed Him after his light, as few Jews or
Christians ever did ; but he could hardly be said in
the Christian, or even the Jewish sense of the word,
to love God. It is possible that repeated acts of
obedience to a God whom he always represents as
compassionate and merciful might imply or result in
love ; but at all events with him love was not, as it
is in Christianity, the fulfilling of the law, the inspiring
motive to action, the sum of its theology as of its
morality. Had it been so, Mohammed would have
seen more reason to doubt whether the sword could
ever be its best ally ; but though he must in any case
have seen that it was impossible to force men to love
170 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
God, it may have crossed his mind that it was possible
to force men to abstain from idolatry, to acknowledge
one God with their lips, to fear and to obey Him, at
all events in their outward acts.
Had Mohammed remained master of himself —
had he remained, that is to say, the simple Prophet
throughout his career — it is possible, on the one hand,
that his message would never have spread in his life-
time beyond the walls of Mecca and Medina ; and it
is more than probable, on the other, that his character
■ might now be held up to the world as that which we
feel the Founder of a religion ought to be ; that which
Confucius and Buddha were, and that which Moham-
med himself, throughout his life at Mecca, unques-
tionably was — a perfect model of the saintly virtues.
There is one glory of the founder of a religion, another
of the founder of a nation, another of the founder of
an empire. They are better kept distinct ; and the
limits of the human faculties are an adequate security
against their being often found united in one person.
It is the uncongenial mixture of earthly needs and
heavenly aspirations which has made Mohammed at
once a smaller and a greater man — at once more and
less commanding than he would otherwise have been.
I What he gains as a ruler of men, he loses as a guide
and as an example ; and people are, naturally enough,
led to condemn the prophet for the drastic energy of
the leader, and the leader for the shortcomings of the
prophet. It is, perhaps, inevitable that Christians
should do so ; for the image of Him whose kingdom
was not of this world, who did not strive nor cry,
whose servants were never to draw the sword in
His defence, forces itself upon the mind, in silent
MOHAMMED SOLDIER AS WELL AS PROPHET. 171
and reproachful antithesis to the mixed and sulhed
character of the Prophet-soldier Mohammed. The
trumpet-call is not the still small voice ; it is im-
measurably below it : but there has been room for
both in the development of humanity.
Now, on a sudden, Mohammed found himself in a
position he had not courted, which was forced on him
l)y his enemies ; and the exigencies of his exiled
followers — the need of sustenance, the appetite for
plunder, the desire of revenge, and the longing for
their homes, no less than the impending attack of the
Kuraish — drove the Prophet for the first time to
place himself at their head ; and, for temporal pur-
poses only, to unsheath the sword. Mohammed thus
became a general by accident ; and the extraordinary
success of his first ventures deepened the impression,
already half natural to an Arab, that the sword might
be a legitimate instrument of spiritual warfare, and
that God had put into his power a new means, where
all other means, as in the case of previous prophets,
had failed. At all events the sword, originally drawn
for temporal purposes only, was found to have, half-
unexpectedly, answered another end as well. It was
found that the religion, once started by the sword, was
soon able to throw the sword away. The march of
the Faith anticipated the march of the army of the
Faithful, and the all but uniform success of the armies,
when they had to fight, seemed to stamp the means
used with the Divine approbation : and so it was
that Mohammed felt less and less scruple as to the
use of the sw^ord where it seemed to him to be
wanted ; and at the close of his life, in one of the last
Suras of the Koran we are hardly surprised to find
172 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
the stern command and the 'magnificent presenti-
ment : '
' Fight on, therefore, till there be no temptation to
idolatry, and the religion becomes God's alone.' ^
The early Khalifs obeyed the precepts and imi-
tated the example of the warrior-Prophet, and went
forth on their enterprise in all the plenitude of auto-
cratic power ; there was no rivalry between Church
and State to tie their hands, for the Khalif was the
head of both in one ; the State, so far as it had any
separate existence at all, being simply a creature of
the Church. And let us here turn aside for a moment
to examine the relation then subsisting between the
spiritual and temporal power, first in the Western,
and then in the Eastern Empire, and to contrast it
with the extraordinary concentration of all the ener-
gies of a new-born enthusiasm, placed in the hands of
the Khalif. We shall then see, on the one hand,
from what a vantage-ground the Arabs, at that precise
moment, entered the lists to contend with Christen-
dom ; but, on the other, we shall note how few are
the men who, even under the most exceptional cir-
cumstances, can, in the exercise of power, afford to
dispense with those checks which are a condition of
its permanence, and which alone can prevent it from
developing into unbridled tyranny, or dying of inani-
tion.
The Christianity of the West then had, centuries
before this, organized an imperium in imperio which
afforded a substantial check to the tyranny of the
Emperors, and, by its moral majesty, could restrain a
' Sura VIII. 40. Cf. also XXII. 40. atul IX. pa^m : perhaps the
last Sura Mohammed <'om|X)so(l.
SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL POWER. 173
savage barbarian even in the full career of conquest.
Ambrose had sternly rebuked Theodosius ; Innocent
had mitigated the horrors of the sack of Rome by
Alaric ; Leo had turned back Attila, and half-dis-
armed Genseric. The transference of the seat of
Empire to Constantinople forced the Bishops of Rome
into a political prominence which would not otherwise
have belonged to them ; and, in process of time,
the spiritual power thus fortified began to contend,
on something like equal terms, with the temporal.
Gregory the Great, whose pontificate ended shortly
before the ' call ' of the Prophet of Arabia, was the
virtual sovereign of Rome, able to protect it alike
from the ferocity of the Lombards, and from the pre-
tentious weakness of the Exarchs. Before long the
sacerdotal monarchs who reigned on the Tiber were
to be seen deposing by right Divine one Prankish
dynasty which ruled upon the Rhine ; setting up an-
other of their own creation ; and, finally, in the person
of Charles the Great, -giving new body to the phantom
of the ancient Roman Empire which had never ceased
to flit before the mind of Europe, and fancying, in
their superb audacity, that a breath might overthrow
what a breath had made. And, by the time that
the Eternal City itself heard the dreaded Tecbir
at their gates, it was to a Pope, and not a Caesar —
a Pope, too, elected in hot haste, without even the
formal sanction of the Caesar — that Rome owed her
safety ! ^
But the religion of the Eastern Empire, to quote
Gibbon's epigram, could teach men only ' to suffer and
» Leo IV.
174 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
to yield.' The Patriarch of Constantinople, unlike the
Patriarch of Rome, was the puppet of the Emperor,
endorsed his worst deeds, or was swept away if he
objected to them.^ And the Saracens who besieged
the ' ceremonious ' Emperor of the East in his own
capital must have enjoyed, if they could read, the
form of service, prescribed by Church and State
together, for the day on which the Emperor should
trample on the necks of the captive Musalmans, while
the singers were to chant, ' Thou hast made mine
enemies my footstool,' and the people were to shout
forty times the ^ Kyrie Eleeson.' '^ The crusading
spirit which might have been evoked by a proposition
of the great Emperors, Nicephorus and Zimisces, to
give a martyr's crown to those who fell in battle with
the infidels, was checkmated by a counter-proposition
of the Patriarch to exclude from the highest rites of
the Church all those who took up arms even in self-
defence.^ Had it been otherwise, the period of the
Crusades might have been anticipated by more than
a hundred years ! We see, therefore, that in the West,
by the time that the tide of Arab conquest had spread
from Mecca to Gibraltar, the spiritual power was in-
dependent of the temporal, and was often able to
• See the history of the Iconoclastic Emperors generally, A.D.
717-841, and their dealings with the Patriarchs of Constantinople.
Read esj^ecially, on the one hand, the account of the dastanlly sub-
mission of the Patriarch Anastasius to Leo, and, on the other, the
horrible cruelties inflicted on the Patriarch Constantine by Coprony-
mus. Milman, II. Chap. VII.
' See the • De Ceremoniis Aulas et Ecclesias Byxantinse ' of Con-
stantine Porphyrogenitus, II. 19 ; quoted by Gibbon, Chap. LII 1. 116,
and Dote.
» See Gibbon, loc. cit
KHALIFS, SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL RULERS, 175
control or neutralise its action, even in temporal
affairs ; while in the East, on which the storm was
first to burst, it was almost non-existent ; and if ever
it did cause its voice to be heard, the cry it uttered
was that of Phocion, not of Demosthenes — of Jere-
miah, not of Isaiah ; that of submission to the inevi-
table, not of resistance to the bitter end.
But with the Saracens the case was different. The
God of Mohammed, hke the God of the wanderers of
the wilderness, and unlike the God of Christendom,
was pre-eminently the God of Battles. The early
Musalmans shed tears when held back within their
leashes from the battle, and the Emperor Leo, who
condemned the Mohammedan idea of God, must have
secretly envied the vigour that it brought. Military
zeal under a tried leader is a strong passion, so is
religious enthusiasm ; and never probably in the
history of the world have these two passions burned
with so consuming a flame as they did in the breasts
of the early followers of Mohammed. The civil, the
religious, and the military were as indissolubly blended
together in his system as they were in mediaeval
chivalry. It was not so much religion that became
warlike, as w^ar, the normal condition of the Arabs on
a small scale, now itself became religious, with the
whole world for its battle ground. Probably in no
army in the world, not even among the Scotch
Covenanters, nor among Cromwell's Ironsides, did
religious exercises so form part of the military dis-
cipline, and religious enthusiasm so infuse an esprit
de corps.
The early battles of Islam, Bedr and Ohud, Kade-
sia and Nehavend, the Yermuk and Aiznadin ; its
176 MO HA ^f MED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
early sieges, Bozra and Damascus, Jerusalem and
Aleppo, Memphis and Alexandria, are more than
Homeric in the reckless valour and the chivalrous
devotion that they exhibit. And it is to be re-
membered that they are, in the main, historical.
Khaled is the Achilles of the siege of Damascus, Amru
of that of Memphis, Dames of Aleppo. At Bedr,
Omeir, a mere stripling, who, fearing that he might
be rejected on account of his youth, had managed to
join the small army of the Faithful unknown to Mo-
hammed, flung away the dates he was eating, with
the vow that he would eat the next in the presence
of God. ' Paradise is before you, the devil and hell-
fire in your rear,' was the exhortation of the generals
at the battle of Yermuk. The Faithful courted death
with the ecstasy of martyrs, and received a martyr's
reward. At Aiznadin, Derar maintained a flying
fight single handed against thirty infidels, and killed
seventeen of their number. To Khaled, after he had
been fighting long, he cried, * Repose yourself : you
are tired of fighting with this dog.' ' He that labours
to-day,' replied Khaled, 'shall rest in the world to
come.' ' God is victorious,' said Ali, four hundred
times in a conflict, and each time he laid low an
unbeliever. At the siege of Damascus, a Saracen
heroine, who had followed her husband, Aban, to the
holy war, saw him killed by her side, stopped to bury
him, and then fought on in the post of danger till she
slew the famous archer who had killed her husband.
Nor is there any period in the histor}^ of Mohamme-
danism, late or early, in which the intensity of the
crusading spirit does not on occasion manifest itself.
It is God's battle that each Muslim is fighting ; and
RELIGIOUS AND MILITARY ENTHUSIASM. IIT
as God may will, he is ready for either event, for
victory or defeat, for life or death. In the Crusades
themselves, when Christendom seemed to be seized
with a double portion of the Mohammedan spirit, by
the confession of the Christians, the generosity, the
reckless valour, the self-sacrifice, and the chivalry
were not all on one side. Richard of England and
Frederick Barbarossa found their match in Saladin ;
and even the history of our own Empire in India
teems with proofs that the vital spark of fanaticism
is latent only, not extinct.
Whenever hitherto, in the history of Mohamme-
danism, the belief has grown feeble that the Faithful
hold a commission from on high to put down evil,
wherever it shows itself, with a strong hand, it must
be admitted that the religion itself has proportion-
ately failed to do its proper work, both as a com-
pelling and as a restraining power. In the Middle
Ages the vitality and energy of Mohammedanism
evidenced itself most clearly, not in Arabia, or
Persia, or Northern Africa, where its success was
most complete, but in the Christian border lands, in
Spain, in Palestine, in Asia Minor, where the crusad-
ing spirit was most evoked. Where there was no
outlet for an active, and even a material warfare,
against what was believed to be evil, there corruption
crept in, and stealthily paralysed all the energies of
Musalman society. ^ Corruptio optimi Jit pessima."
Ommiade, and Abbasside, and Fatimite Khalifs ;
Ghaznevide, and Seljukian, and Ottoman Sultans
passed through the same dreary stages of luxury and
decay ; and the government that now represents, or
misrepresents, the Khalifate, and is by most people
F 2
178 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
foolishly supposed to be the main support of Islam,
originally in the hands of men like Abu Bakr, or
Omar, the best, the simplest, and the most re-
publican of all absolute governments, has, in the
hands of the Ottoman Turks, ever since their faith
ceased to be militant, become the most hopeless
of despotisms, since the abject submission to the
ruler remains, while all reason for submission has
vanished.^
In the eyes of many, the admission I have frankly
made that the propagation of religion by the sword
has been an essential part of Mohammedanism will
serve to condemn it at once, and so, in the abstract
and from the highest point of view, it ought. The
sword is a rough surgical instrument in any case ; but
the doctrine that religion can ever be propagated by
it, paradoxical as it sounds now, has seemed a truism
in more ages than one ; and though the Arabs were
semi-barbarians, the conquered nations were con-
strained to admit that in their conquests they were
not barbarous. Their wars were not mere wars of
devastation like those of Genseric or Attila in eariier
times, or of Chenghis Khan or Tamerlane in later.
It was the savage boast of Attila, the genius of
destruction, the ^ scourge of God,' that the grass
never grew where his horse had once trodden ; and
the proverb has, in later times, been applied by their
enemies to the conquests of the Turks, to those rich
provinces whose resources, from whatever causes,
have been so long wasted, and whose inhabitants
' See this line of thought developed by Maurice, ' Religions of the
World,' p. 29 sq. I have done little more in this paragraph than
condense and illustrate his argument.
TURKISH MISGOVERNMENT. 179
have been so misgoverned under the sway of the
Othmanhs.
The saying that the grass never grows in the foot-
prints of a Turk is, it must be admitted, not without
some truth. The system of government, never an
enhghtened one, has at all events since the so-called
^ reforms ' of the Sultan Mahmoud been rotten at the
core. Stambul has become an asylum for the rascality
of West and East 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, un-
principled and exorbitant provincial Pashas, waste-
fulness and disorder and excessive centralisation ;
such is the picture which travellers give us of those
fair regions of the earth, ^ and unfortunately we know
it to be a true picture. But it is easy, for all this, to
be too hard upon the Turk — to forget how much
there is that is fine in his character, to forget that
many of the vices of which we complain are not
Turkish, but European in their origin — to forget that
those governments which are loudest in their com-
plaints are the very governments which by the
injurious privileges they have claimed in the ' Capi-
tulations, ' ^ for the most worthless of their subjects
» See Admiral Blade's ' Turkey, Greece, and Malta,' Vol. I. 295-
353, &c. Layard's 'Nineveh and Babylon,' I. i. p. 5, 11-13, &c.
* Quarterly Review,' Oct. 1874, Art. Provincial Turkey.
2 See Walpole's ' Ansayrii,' I. ii. 23, 24 ; * East and West,' Essays
I. and II. ; and compare Curzon's ' Monasteries of the Levant,' p. 69,
for the like deleterious effects produced by Western influences on
Cairo. See also the dignified protest of General Kheredine, Prime
Minister of Tunis, ' Reforms of Musalman States,' p. 34 seq.
' 180 MOHA MM ED A ND MO HA MMEDA NISM.
resident at Stambul ; by their usurious loans, and by
their incessant interventions ; by the funeral orations
they have so frequently pronounced upon the sick
man, and by their ill-disguised eagerness to divide
his effects even before his death, have done most to
render anything like good government impossible.
The genuine Othmanli has many noble social and
national characteristics : he is, or was, till the ex-
ample and the precept of the Western money-makers
influenced him, eminently a man of his word ; his
word was his bond, and a bond which was a first-rate
security. He is still sober, temperate, dignified, and
courageous. Terribly cruel as he is when his passions
are aroused, he is at other times gentle, hospitable,
and humane. Nowhere in Christendom, with the one
exception perhaps of Norway, are beasts of burden and
domestic animals treated with such unvarying kind-
ness and consideration as they are in Turkey, and
nowhere probably, in spite of all the depressing in-
fluences of polygamy and the degradation of women
generally, does the mother retain more hold on her
children, or do children regard their mother with such
constant and indissoluble veneration. It was not a
Musalman, but a Christian Missionar}% and he a
zealous and successful one, who in rebuking some
younger missionaries at Stambul who were speaking
contemptuously of the Turks, remarked, ^ You will
see practised here the virtues we talk of in Christen-
dom ; ' * an over-statement, no doubt, but still with
some truth in it, and truth which we should do well
to bear in mind as a makeweight against the official
' Dr. GooiWall, an American, * East an4 West,' p. 141.
CHARACTER OF WARS OF ISLAM. 181
corruption and the misgovernment and the vices with
which the Turks may be justly charged, and which
those who most admire what is fine in their national
character have the best right to deplore. With all
their vices, the Turkish Sultans, as a whole, compare
favourably with many of the Christian Caesars who
preceded them ; nor is it certain that, taking differences
of time and circumstances into account, they compare
unfavourably with the Pontiffs of more than one
century of the Papacy.
But whatever may be said or thought of the con-
quests of the Ottoman Turks and of their rule now^
of the early Saracen conquests it would rather be
true to say that after the first wave of invasion had
swept by, two blades of grass were found growing
where one had grown before ; like the thunderstorm,
they fertilised while they destroyed ; and from one
end of the then known world to the other, with their
religion they sowed seeds of literature, of commerce,
and of civilisation. And as these disappeared, in the
lapse of years, in one part of the Musalman world,
they reappeared in another. When they died out,
with the dying of the Abbasside Khalifate, along the
banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, they revived again
on the Guadalquivir and Guadiana. To the splendours
and civilisation of Damascus succeeded Bagdad ; to
Bagdad, Cairo ; to Cairo, Cordova.
Mohammedanism has been accused of hostility to
the growth of the human intellect. It may have been
so in its earliest days, when Omar, as the story goes,
condemned the Alexandrian Library to the flames by
his famous dilemma : ^ If these books agree with the
Book of God, they are useless ; if they disagree, they are
182 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
pernicious ; and in either case they must be destroyed/
It may be so whenever there is a passing outburst of
fanaticism ; but it is not so in its essential nature,,
nor has it been so historically not even in its wars.
The Prophet himself, it has been objected, was not a
learned man ; he was scarcely able to read or write ;
but even if the story be true, what does it prove ?
Theodoric the Great, the patron of art and science and
philosophy, was only able to sign his own name by
drawing a pen round the first four letters of it, which
having been carved in brass were placed on the paper
which was to receive the signature ; Charles the Great
strove laboriously in his later years to acquire the
simple arts, which, by the foundation of schools and
colleges throughout his vast empire, he took care that
his subjects should, as far as possible, acquire in their
youth. Nor was Mohammed less eager than the
Ostrogothic King or the Prankish Emperor to promote
the studies of which he felt that he had all too little.
* Seek for science, even though it be in China,' is one
of the sayings attributed to him. *A learned man is
as superior to a worshipper as the full moon to stars/
is another. ^ One learned man is harder on the de\il
than a thousand ignorant believers,' is a third. To
impart knowledge to others was in Mohammed's
view as imperative a duty as to acquire it. * He who
concealeth his knowledge shall be reined with a bridle
of fire at the day of resurrection.' * The wise are more
exalted than those who pray. The latter hope to
attain by prayer their own desires, the former learn
themselves, that they may instruct the ignorant.'*
' For these sayings aiul others of a like tendency, see Mishkat-ul*
Hasibeh, Book II. Cap. II. and III.
HIS ENCOURAGEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE. 183
The story of Balaustion, romantic as it is in itself,
and sung as it has been by a great poet, is known to
all the world ; but no poet has sung, and few have
ever heard of a story less romantic perhaps, but
certainly not less suggestive or less beautiful, of the
great Arabian. The Greeks, who, to gratify their
artistic tastes, allowed a shipwrecked maiden to
purchase the lives of her companions in misfortune
by reciting a tragedy of Euripides, did well ; but the
illiterate Prophet, who, when in exile at Medina,
allowed the Meccan prisoners who could write Arabic
to go free so soon as they should have taught twelve
lads of Medina the art of which he and they were
ignorant, did better/
Nor have the best portion of Mohammed's followers
been unworthy of him. The religion which has
declared that ' the ink of the learned is as precious as
the blood of the martyrs ; ' ^ and which declares that
at the Day of Decision a special account will be given
of the use made of the intellect, cannot fairly be
accused of obscurantism. It was not so when, during
the darkest period of European history, the Arabs for
» Sprenger, XVIII. 131.
'•* Quoted by Gobineau, p. 26. So, too, Abulpharages, in his
' Dynasties,' says that Almamun, Khalif of Bagdad, invited learned
men to his court because they were the elect of God, whose lives were
devoted to the development of the mind. (See Gibbon, VII. 34.)
Against the destruction of the Alexandrian Library by Omar may
fairly be set the destruction by the Crusaders of an immense library
at Tripoli, in Palestine. The General, finding that the first room of
the library contained the Koran only, ordered the whole library to be
burnt. So, too. Cardinal Ximenes, on entering the Moorish capital,
showed that a crass fanaticism is not the prerogative of one religion
only, by his order to destroy the vast collection of Arabic MSS. there,
with the exception of 300 medical works, which he reserved for his
own university.
184 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMED ANISiM.
five hundred years held up the torch of learning to
humanity. It was the Arabs who then * called the
Muses from their ancient seats ; ' who collected and
translated the writings of the great Greek masters ;
who understood the geometr}' of Apollonius, and
wielded the weapons found in the logical armour}^ of
Aristotle. It was the Arabs who developed the
sciences of Agriculture and Astronomy, and created
those of Algebra and Chemistr)' ; who adorned their
cities with colleges and libraries, as well as with
mosques and palaces ; who supplied Europe with a
school of philosophers from Cordova, and a school of
physicians from Salerno. When we condemn the
Mohammedan wars, let us at least remember what of
good they brought with them.
Nor is Mohammedanism the only religion which
has tried to propagate itself by the sword. It is true,
of course, that a holy war waged by Christians is in
direct contravention of the spirit of their Founder,
while one waged by Mohammedans is in accordance
with both the practice and the precept of the Pro-
phet, and, so far, there is no parallel at all between the
two religions. The means authorised by Christ for
the spread of His religion were moral and spiritual
only. The means authorised by Mohammed were
persuasion and example first ; but, failing these, the
sword.
Yet, historically speaking, the contrast between
the practice of Christians and Mohammedans has not
been so sharp as is often supposed. The Saxon wars
of Charles the Great were avowedly religious wars,
and differed chiefly from the Syrian wars of Omar and
of All, from the Afiican wars of Amru and Akbah,
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 185
and the Spanish wars of Mussa and of Tarik, in that
they were much more protracted and vastly less suc-
cessful. Otto the Great, the best of Charles's succes-
sors, used the sword with vigour to extend the exter-
nal profession of Christianity among the Sclavonian
tribes who dwelt along the shores of the Baltic. The
Mediaeval Papacy, whatever its other services to pro-
gress, was never backward to unfurl the standard of a
religious war, whether against the common enemy of
Christendom, or, as more often happened, against a
sect of heretics, the Albigenses, or the Waldenses,
nearer home. Nor, in point of ferocity, is it clear
that religious wars waged by Christians will compare
favourably with those of Mohammedans. The Mo-
hammedan wars were never internecine. Even on
the field of battle, the conquering Musalman allowed
his conquered foe the two other alternatives of con-
version or of tribute. When Abu Bakr first invaded
Syria, he charged his troops not to mutilate the dead,
not to slay old men, women, and children, not to cut
down fruit-trees, nor to kill cattle unless they were
needed for food ; and these humane precepts served
like a code of laws of war during the career of Moham-
medan conquest. And this, be it remembered, among
Orientals, who had always been remarkable for their
disregard of human life. When we remember, on the
other hand, the massacre of 4,500 Pagan Saxons in
cold blood by Charles the Great — when we remember
the famous answer by which the Papal Legate, in the
Albigensian war, quieted the scruples of a too con-
scientious general, ' Kill all, God will know His own '
— when we recall the Spanish Inquisition, the Con-
quest of Mexico and Peru, the Massacre of St. Bar-
186 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
tholomew, and the sack of Magdeburg by Tilly, we
shall be disposed never, indeed, to justify religious
wars, but to point out that, of the religious wars
which the world has seen, the Mohammedan are cer-
tainly not the worst — in their object, in their methods,
or in their results.
Nor is the extermination of moral evil in all cases
an unworthy object of war. There are occasions even
in our modern civilisation, and in an era of non-inter-
vention, when one longs to feel that the sword a
nation wields may be, in their eyes at all events, the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon. An unselfish war
to put down the slave trade or the opium traffic, to
counteract some * Holy Alliance ' of Emperors against
the rights of peoples, to prevent a giant iniquity like
the partition of Poland, is perhaps the only kind of
war, except those of self-defence, to which the spirit
of Christianity is not opposed. Christianity /5 opposed
to wars of aggression, to dynastic wars, and, above
all, to religious wars ; for a religious war rests upon
the irreligious assumption that one fallible man holds
a fiat from Omnipotence to step between another
human soul and God ; and to enforce his partial views
of truth upon a fellow-mortal, who, for aught he knows,
may have as wide a prospect, and as deep an insight,
as he has himself. ^ Deorum hijurice Deis curce,' The
sword may silence ; it cannot convince : it may
enforce hypocrisy ; it can never force belief. But
this has not always seemed so self-evident ; and I say
it deliberately and with all the force of conviction,
compared with the war of the Confederate States in
the nineteenth century for the perpetuation of
slavery, compared with our own Japanese wars for the
RELIGIOUS WARS OF CHRISTIANS. 187
extension of our trade, our Chinese wars for the sale
of our opium, and our miserable African wars waged
for the possession of a territory which we bought,
and had no moral right to buy, from those who sold
what they had no moral right to sell,^ the Mohamme-
dan wars for the propagation of a comparatively pure
religion and a higher morality were, in their time and
according to their light, inasmuch as they were not
purely selfish, I do not say excusable, but they were
at least intelligible and natural.
Here I must close for to-day. What of good and
what of evil the world owes to Mohammed ; what is
the condition and what the prospects of Mohamme-
danism now ; what, as a matter of fact, is the histori-
cal connection between Mohammedanism and Chris-
tianity — its points of difference as well as of resem-
blance ; finally, and most important of all, how that
connection ought to be regarded by Christians, and
under what conditions or modifications the two great
creeds may work together, or, if needs be, apart, for
their common object, the general good of humanity — ■
these are some of the points I hope to be able to
discuss in my fourth and concluding Lecture.
' See Appendix to Lecture III.
188 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
LECTURE IV.
March 7, 1874.
MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY.
Say unto the Christians, their Gocl and my God is one.—
The Koban.
"O ^f 'IrjaovQ diTf, M>) KioXveTt ahrov og yap oi'ik tort KaO' i)nC!iv, vnkp
rindtv iariv. — ST. MARK.
It may have been observed that in attempting, in
my last Lecture, to deal with some of the questions
connected with Mohammedanism, such as miracles,
fatalism, religious wars, which have much perplexed
the Christian mind, I omitted to say anything on a
point which, more even than any of these, has scan-
dalised those who view Mohammedanism from a
distance : I mean the notions Mohammedans have
fonned of a future state. The omission was not
altogether accidental, for I am inclined to think that
too much stress has been laid upon these notions, no
less by Mohammed's apologists than by his critics ;
more stress than the Koran itself, and more even than
the current Mohammedan belief, will wan-ant. But,
remembering a remark of Sprenger's,' that, although
• Sprenger, Vol. II. Chap. XI. p. 18.
THE FUTURE LIFE OF ISLAM. 189
Islam has been described in many books, yet educated
people have not got much further in the knowledge
of it than that the Turks are Mohammedans, and
allow polygamy, I think it will be well to add a few
words to counteract the common notion, which I
should be disposed to place on a par with this, that
the Paradise of the Mohammedans is nothing more
than the enjoyment of polygamy, with its earthly
drawbacks and limitations removed.
So much has been said and written about the gross
nature of Mohammed's Paradise, the black-eyed
Houris, the perfumes and the spices, the cushions
and the carpets, with which his imagination furnished
it, that ordinary people may be excused for believing
that it was mainly, if not wholly, sensual. But this is
not, in the main, a true, and still less is it an adequate
account of the matter. The passages are few in
number in which Mohammed dwells much on these
aspects of the future, and, even in these, much of
what is said is explained by orthodox Mohammedans
to be merely Oriental imagery, while some of it is
especially suitable — the bubbling fountains and the
shady gardens above all — to the inhabitants of a dry
and thirsty land, such as Arabia is.'
Few people now put a literal interpretation upon
the gorgeous imagery and the glowing colours used
in the Book of Revelation to describe the Celestial
City ; and every one will admit that in all religions,
even the most spiritual, the circumstances of this life
must necessarily, to some extent, lend both form and
colour to the views of the life to come. The Red
" See Sale's ' Intrwluction,' p. 78 ; and Lane's ' Modern Eeyp-
tians,' I. Chap. ITT. 84.
190 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Indian dreams of a heaven behind the cloud-topped
hills, enbosomed in woods, wherein his faithful dog
will bear him company. The fierce Norseman hoped
to be admitted after death to the Hall of Odin, and
there, reclining on a couch, to drink ale for ever from
the skulls of his enemies whom he had slain in battle.
The earnest Methodist pictures to himself a place
* Where congregations ne'er break up,
And Sabbaths never end,'
for the simple reason that he finds his highest
spiritual happiness in these things on earth. A
polygamous people could hardly have pictured to
themselves a heaven without polygamy. It would
never even have occurred to them that such a thing
was possible, since few of them had ever known a
society on earth which w^as without it ; nor do I sup-
pose that any individual Christian who has ever
known the luxury of home affection, has been able to
accept in any literal sense the doctrine that, in the
future world, there are to be no exclusive attach-
ments,* for the simple reason, again, that without
individual love no human heart can conceive of the
possibility of any happiness as complete or real.
Again, it is to be remembered that much that is
material, or even gross, in the Mohammedan concep-
tion of a future life is due, not to Mohammed, but to
Mohammed's successors ; and it is not the least of
the enigmas that attach to the extraordinar}^ and
unique character of the Prophet, that his views of a
future state are never more spiritual than at the time
when, according to the common theory, he had most
' St. Matt. XXII. 80.
THE FUTURE LIFE OF OTHER RELIGIONS. 191
entirely, and, in fact, he had to some extent, fallen
away from his austerely moral life. Contrast the tone
of the Suras, referring to this subject, which were writ-
ten at Mecca early in his life,^ with the third, for in-
stance, which was written at Medina many years
later.
^ Fair,' says he, ^ in the sight of men are the plea-
sures of women and children ; fair are the treasured
treasures of gold and silver ; and fine horses ; and
flocks ; and corn-fields ! Such is the enjoyment of
this world's life. But God ! goodly is the home with
Him!
^ Shall I tell you of better things than these, pre-
pared for those who fear God in His presence ? Theirs
shall be gardens beneath which the rivers flow, and
in which they shall abide for aye, and wives of stain-
less purity, and acceptance with God, for God regard-
eth His servants.
^They who say, O our Lord, we have indeed be-
lieved, pardon our sins, and keep us from the torment
of the fire.
' The patient are they, and the truthful, the lowly,
and the charitable, and they who ask for pardon as
each day breaks.' '^
Surely here, as elsewhere, and increasingly so as
the Prophet drew near his end, it is the presence of
God, the knowledge of Him, the eternal Salaam or
Peace with which they shall salute one another, the
purity of love, and not its sensuality, which are the
most prominent ideas.
Heaven and Hell, indeed, were realities to the
' Sura LV. 44-58 ; LVI. 17-36 ; LXXVI. 12-22.
a Sura XIII. 12-15.
192 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Mohammedan mind in a sense in which they have
hardly ever been to any other nation. With a more
than Dantesque realism, Mohammed saw the tortures
of the lost no less than the bliss of the faithful.
* They shall dwell/ he says, * amidst burning winds
and in scalding water, under the shade of a black
smoke which is no shade, neither cool nor grateful,
and they shall surely eat of the fruit
of the tree Ez-Zakkoum, and shall fill their bellies
therewith, and they shall drink thereon boiling water,
even as a thirsty camel drinketh.' '
And again he says :
' They shall have garments of fire fitted unto them,
their bowels shall be dissolved thereby, and also their
skins, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron.' ^
And once more, in one of his very early Suras,
which, if it is memorable for nothing else, is memor-
able for its superb audacity, when we recollect that
as yet Mohammed's prophetic claims were treated
only with contemptuous indifference, and he himself
was a mere outcast :
' Woe be,' he says * on that day to those who
accused the prophets of imposture !
' It shall be said unto them. Go ye into that which
ye denied as a falsehood.
^ Go ye into the shadow of the smoke of hell, which,
though it ascend in three columns,
* Shall not shade you from the heat, neither shall it
be of service against the flames ;
' But it shall aist forth sparks as big as towers,
* And their colour shall be like unto that of red
camels.
' Sura LVI. 41-66. ■* Sum XXII. 2) 21.
REALITY OF FUTURE LIFE TO 310 HA MMED. 193
' Woe be on that day unto those who accuse the
prophets of imposture ! '^
'What shall be our reward/ asked his earliest
followers of Mohammed, ' if we fall in battle ? '
'Paradise/ said the Prophet, without the slightest
hesitation. In the war of Tabuk his men demurred to
marching because it was harvest time. ' Your harvest
it lasts for a day/ said Mohammed ; ' what will come
of your harvest through all eternity ? ' They com-
plained of the burning sun. ' Hell is hotter/ said the
Prophet, and on they went.^
That it was desirable to dwell with so much per-
sistence upon the enormous issues involved as re-
gards the future life, in every act and thought of this,
I am far from asserting ; since self-interest, how-
ever enlightened, and however refined, however even
spiritualised it may be, is self-interest still. But at all
events it was stern reality to Mohammed and to his
followers. The future was all as real and as instant
to him as it was to the Apostles when, expecting, as
they did, from the interpretation they put upon
Christ's words, to see Him in their own lifetime
coming in the clouds of heaven, they drove home their
warnings by bidding men flee from ' the wrath to come.'
In every successive crisis of the Christian Church, it
has been the belief of Christians that the darkest hour
is that before the dawn, and it has been used, however
mistakenly, yet with effect and with sincerity, to com-
' Sura L XXV 1 1. 29 to end. The ' Woe be,' &c. is a refrain which
recurs ten times in the Sura.
* Carlyle's ' Heroes,' p. 239 ; and Sura IX. 82, &;c. In this expedi-
tion water was so scarce that the fainting troops were obliged to kill
the camels and drink the water out of their stomachs.
G
194 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
fort the depressed, to awaken the sleeping, and to
arouse the dead. ' Fi7iem simm mu?idus jam 7io?i
nunciat solu7n, sed osteiidity says St. Gregory amidst
the devastations of the Lombards. ^ Appropinquante
jam mundi terminol is the heading of even legal
documents amidst the deeper depression of the tenth
century caused by the ravages of the Hungarians by
land and the Norsemen by sea. This is the burden
of St. Bernard's hymns, of Savonarola's preachings,
of Bunyan's allegories. Truly, if Mohammed sinned
at all in this respect, he sinned in good company.
But the future world, ever present though it was
to the minds of the early Mohammedans, did not
supply the motive by which they were really inspired.
Not such the motive which, at the present day, impels
the Wahhabi missionary to brave social and religious
ostracism in India, or the Negro Musalman to face
the Great Desert, or the terrors of cannibalism and of
human sacrifice, with the hope of winning new con-
verts to their faith ; still less is it a sufficient, or, as I
think, even a partial explanation of their astonishing
success. A selfish hope of Heaven, and a slavish fear
of Hell, may act as a ' negative stimulus ' — may possi-
bly teach passive resistance to temptation — but it does
not nerv^e the arm to strike, or quicken the eye to see.
Perhaps, indeed, the highest heroism of all, that
which consists in absolute conscious self-sacrifice or
self-annihilation for the good of others — the heroism
of the ideal just man in the second book of Plato's
Republic; the heroism of Moses when he prayed to
be blotted out of the Book that God had written ; the
heroism of a greater than Moses when He died upon
the cross — is impossible to those who believe firmly
LEGITIMA TE INFL UENCE OF A FUTURE LIFE. 195
in a future life, the happiness or misery of which is to
be exactly detemiined by the life here. But there
may be true heroism even short of the truest ; and
all true heroism, even if it cannot deny or forget its
reward, is stimulated not so much by the reward as
by the difficulty of obtaining it. The reward, to use
an Aristotelian phrase, is an iTnyiyvo^^vov tl reXog^
something thrown in, an after-thought and accessory
merely ; and this is what a future life was to the
primitive warriors of the Crescent.
Nor is it true, in any sense of the word, if we
appeal to its primal documents and not to the lives
of its more unworthy professors, that Mohammed's is
an easy or sensual religion. With its frequent fasts,
its five prayers a day, its solitudes, its almsgivings, its
pilgrimages, even in the tortures of Indian fakirs and
the bowlings of Mecca dervishes, which are the abuse,
and not the use, of the religion — it certainly does not
appeal much to the laziness, or the sensuality, or the
selfishness of mankind.
In his capacity even of temporal ruler, Mohammed
rarely gave material rewards to his followers. Abu
Bakr, Ali, Omar, Hamza, when in his early days they
ranged themselves as friends round the then friendless
enthusiast, sacrificed, as it must have appeared to
them, all their worldly hopes ; they little thought that
they were enrolling themselves in that most select
band of heroes who may be said to have made
History. On one occasion, late in his life, Moham-
med did give some material rewards to recent and
perhaps half-hearted converts ; but the exception only
proved the rule, and that in the most memorable
manner. The Helpers of Medina were naturally dis-
196 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
satisfied, but Mohammed recalled them to their alle-
giance by words which went straight from his heart
to theirs : that he had given things of the world to
those who cared for such things, but to them he had
given himself. Others returned home with sheep
and camels, the Helpers with the Prophet of God.
Verily, if all the men of the earth went one way, and
the Helpers of Medina another, he would go the way
of the Helpers of Medina.^ The Helpers burst into
tears, and exclaimed that they were more than
satisfied with what he had given them. And, just
before his death, Mohammed commended these same
Helpers of Medina to the protection of the exiles who
had accompanied him from Mecca. ' Hold in honour,'
said he,/ the Helpers of Medina : the number of be-
lievers may increase, but that of the Helpers never
can.^ They were my family, and with them I found
a home ; do good to those who do good to them, and
break friendship with those who are hostile to them.'
^ Perhaps there is no remark one has heard more
often about Mohammedanism than that it was so suc-
cessful because it was so sensual ; but there is none
more destitute of truth, as if any religion could owe its
permanent success to its bad morality ! I do not say
that its morality is perfect, or equal to the Christian
morality. Mohammed did not make the manners of
Arabia, and he was too wise to think that he could
'Alluded to in Sura LIX. H and 1», and VIII. 42. See Muir, IV.
151-154.
"^ Cf. Heixxlotus iii. I 111. it fiaaiKtv, avi)f> fc«v /<ot hv aWoQ yivotro,
(1 Saifiitv kOtXoi, Kai r'sKva aWa, ti ravra airo^aXoifii' narpoQ Si Kai
fitirpbg ovK ht fiiv swovrw*' dt^tX^tof &v dWoQ ovStvi rpon-y ytvoiro.
Cf. also Hoph. Anfhjo,ir, im)-'.)\)i.
A TTITUDE TOWARDS EXISTING INSTITUTIONS. 197
either unmake or remake them all at once. Solon re-
marked of his own legislation that his laws were not the
best that he could devise ; but that they were the best
the Athenians could receive ; and his defence has gene-
rally been accepted as a sound one. Moses took the
institutions of a primitive society as he found them — •
the patriarchal power, internecine war, blood feuds,
the right of asylum, polygamy and slavery — and did
not abolish any one of them ; he only mitigated their
worst evils, and so unconsciously prepared the way,
in some cases, for their greater permanence, in others,
for their eventual extinction.
In like manner the religion of Christ did not sweep
into oblivion any national or political institutions.
He contented Himself with planting principles in the
hearts of His followers which would, when the time
was ripe for it, work out their abolition. Willing to
sow if others could reap, to labour if others could
enter into His labours. He cast into the ground the grain
of mustard seed, and was content, with the eye of
faith alone, to see it grow into the mighty tree whose
branches should overspread the world, and whose
leaves should be for the healing of the nations. With
sublime self-restraint and self-sacrifice, governed by
His thought for the boundless possibilities of the
future of His Church, rather than by the impulse of
the moment. He forbore to denounce in so many words
the inveterate evils of the Roman Empire, which
must have gone to His soul's soul — foreign conquest,
tyranny, the amphitheatre, slavery. He even used
words which have been wrongly construed to mean
that at all times passive obedience is a duty, and that the
people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey
198 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
them. Nor has the Christian Church — sections of which
have for strange and various, but inteUigible, reasons,
canonised a Constantine and a Vladimir, a Cyril and a
Charles the Great, a Dunstan and a Becket — ever
attached the name of Saint to some who, in the ful-
ness of time, have carried out far more fully and in
spirit Christ's work, albeit in seeming contradiction to
the letter of the law which inculcated submission to
existing powders and institutions — to a Telemachus or
a Theodoric, to an Alfred or a Wilberforce. And yet
no Christian will deny that the monk Telemachus,
who threw himself between the swords of the
gladiators, and, braving the fury of the spectators
athirst for blood, accomplished by his death what his
life could never have won, did a deed which all the
'Acta Sanctorum' could be searched to parallel.
Now Mohammed was a legislator and a statesman,
as well as the founder of a religion ; and why is the
defence w^hich we allow to Solon, and the praise we
bestow upon the limited scope of the Mosaic legisla-
tion, denied to Islam ?
Polygamy is, indeed, next to caste, the most
blighting institution to which a nation, which has
passed through the early stages of its growth, can
remain a prey. It tends to degrade love into an
animal passion, and so to unspiritualise all the relations
between the sexes. It pollutes society at the fountain-
head, for the family is the source of all political and
of all social virtues. Mohammed would have more
than doubled the debt of gratitude the Eastern world
ow^es to him had he swept it away, but I cannot think
that he could have done so, even if he had fully seen
its evils.
TREATMENT OF WOMEN. 199
Polygamy is an institution which springs from
causes far too deep down among the roots of society
for any reformer, however great, to abohsh it by the
word of his mouth or the stroke of his pen. In abo-
hshing idolatry, Mohammed found among the Arabs,
as I have shown in my last Lecture, an historical
groundwork of belief in the unity of the Godhead,
and even an existing religious sentiment in his favour,
and he was not backward to avail himself of its help.
But in forbidding polygamy he would have found no
audi extraneous support : there does not seem among
the higher spirits of Arabia to have been even so
much as a floating sentiment in favour of monogamy,
and the women themselves appear to have been as
contented with this part of their condition as were
their masters.
As a true Arab, Mohammed recognised polygamy
as an existing institution ; as a reforming legislator,
he made many regulations for lessening its evils ; but
it is hardly more fair on these grounds to say that
Mohammedanism is responsible for polygamy, than it
is to say that Christianity is responsible for slavery.
The New Testament contains, it is true, no direct con-
demnation of slavery ; on the contrary, it recognises
it as an existing institution ; and St. Paul is at
least as precise upon the duties of servants — whom,
by the way, he calls by the downright name of slaves,
a term hardly used in the Koran — to their masters,
as he is upon the duties of masters to them ; but no
Christian will grant, on this score, that his religion
has either sanctioned slavery, or is responsible for it,
for he will have no difficulty in showing that the
humanity everywhere inculcated in it is inconsistent
200 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
with the prolonged maintenance of slavery, and would
of itself suffice, first in the case of individual Christians^
and afterwards of -Christian nations, to secure, as now,
at last, it has secured, its abolition. Slavery, there-
fore, has simply co-existed with Christianity without
being mixed with it, even as the muddy Arve and the
clear Rhone keep their currents distinct long after
they have been united in one river-bed. Perhaps it
is strange that they ever could have co-existed, even
for a day ; but we have to deal with facts as they are ;
and it is a fact that slavery has co-existed with
Christianity, nay, has professed to justify itself by
Christianity, even till this nineteenth century. As a
code, indeed, of law and morals, it is of course fairer to
compare Islam with Judaism than, as I have just been
doing, with Christianity ; for in manners and in civili-
sation, as in race, the Arabs of Mohammed's time
resembled the Israelites far more nearly than they
did any of those nations upon whom Christianity was
destined to take real hold. Now the Mosaic law, so
far from prohibiting polygamy, did not even put any
limitation on it. The Patriarchs indulged in poly-
gamy ; so did the Judges ; so did the Kings ; and not
least so the more elevated and the more spiritually-
minded amongst them. The man after God's own
heart, and the king whose wisdom and magnificence
still form the folk-lore of so many Eastern countries,
can hardly be surpassed in this particular even by
those Musalman princes who break the laws of the
Koran, and strain the traditions almost to bursting,
that they may gi'atify their love of display, or their
brutal appetites.
Mohammed could not have made a tabula rasa of
POLYGAMY. 201
Eastern society, but what he could do he did. He at
least put some limitations on the unbounded license
of Eastern polygamy,^ and the absolute recklessness
of Eastern divorce."^ If the two social touchstones
of a religion are the way in which, relatively to the
time, it deals with the weaker sex, and the way in
which it regards the poor and the oppressed, Mo-
hammed's religion can stand the test.^ The laws of
the Prophet in these particulars, as in others, were
greatly ahead of the pagan, and in some respects also
of the Hebrew practice.
The Arabs of the Ignorance, for instance, allowed
any number of wives ; the Koran limits the number
of lawful wives to four.* Among the Arabs of the
Ignorance divorce was a matter of the merest caprice,
and the divorced wife lost her dowry as well as all
conjugal rights. The Koran orders the dowry in all
' Sura IV. 3, &c.
2 Sura IV. 89 and 127, XXXIIT. 48, 52, &c.
•' Among many other illustrations of this see («) the oath taken
early in his life Avith other Kuraish, ' to defend the oppressed so long
as a dro}) of water remained in the ocean,' an act the remembrance
of which Mohammed said ' he would rrot exchange for the choicest
camel in Arabia ;' (/-») the account given by Djafar to the Nagashy of
Abyssinia of the change wrought by Mohammed among his followers ;
perhaps the noblest and truest summary we have of the moral
teaching of the Prophet ; (^) the pledge of Acaba, a.d. 621, taken by
his first converts from Medina ; (rZ) Sura II. 172: ' There is no piety
in turning your faces towards the Bast or the West, but he is pious
who believeth in God .... who for the love of Grod distributeth
his wealth to his kindred, and to the orphans, and the needy, and the
wayfarer.'
* It was a remark of Napoleon's that Mohammed was the only
Eastern legislator who ever attempted to impose any restraint on
polygamy : a fact which should be borne in mind. See Lane's
' Modern Egyptians,' I. 121-128 for an analysis of the laws of Islam
relating to women and slaves.
202 MORA MMED A ND MO HA MM ED A NISM.
cases to be given back ; and to ensure deliberation, or
to prevent mere caprice, in carrying out or in recall-
ing what, unlike his countrymen, the Prophet con-
sidered so momentous and so objectionable a resolve,
he ordained that a man who had once pronounced
the formula of divorce should not be at liberty to
take his wife back till he had done some penance for
his thoughtless cruelty by setting a slave free.'
The Arabs of the Ignorance allowed a woman no
part of her husband's or father's property, on the
ground that none should inherit property who could
not bear arms. The Koran says women are entitled
to a share of the inheritance : a daughter, for instance,
should have half as much as a son.'^ The Arabs of
the Ignorance treated the wife of a deceased husband
as part of the inheritance of his heir-at-law, who
would often be her own step-son. Mohammed con-
demned all such marriages, which were not uncom-
mon before his time, as infamous. The Arabs of the
Ignorance buried alive their female children ; for as
the Arab proverb expressed it, ' To send women
/before to the other world is a benefit. The best son-
(jn-law is the grave ; ' and the wish offered to newly-
married couples, ' With concord and pennanence, with
sons and no daughters,' implied similar ideas.^ Mo-
' See Sale's ' rreliminary Discourse,' VI. 95. If a mau had pro-
nounce<l the forrauUi twice at different times, he was not to liave the
right to chvim her a^ain at all, until she had fulfilled the condition
which, to the pride and jcjvlousy of an Arab, Mohammed knew would
be in»upportable, of being married previously to another person. A
third divorce was to Ix; absolutely irrevocjible.
'Sura IV. 12; and Sale's Preliminary Discom-se, VI. U8.
* * Women of the Arabfl,' by the Rev. flenry Jessup, AmcricaQ
Missioiiarj in Syria, p. 2. The first two chapters give a forcible
deecription of the degradation of women In the East now, among both
DIVORCE. 203
hammed sternly forbade the cruel practice, and said
that at the last great day the girl who had been
buried alive would demand for what crime she had
been slain. The Arabs of the Ignorance who believed
in any form of future life denied all share in it to
woman, and Mohammed has been thought by many
to have done the same ; but the Koran says, ^ Whoso
doeth good works and is a true believer, whether
male or female, shall be admitted into Paradise.' An
old woman once came to the Prophet begging him to
intercede with God that she might be admitted into
Paradise. ^No old woman finds admittance there,'
replied Mohammed. She burst into tears, when
Mohammed smiled, and with the kindly humour
which was characteristic of him, said, ^ No old
woman, for all will there be young again.' *
It has been said that 4iusbands love your wives'
is a precept of the Bible, and not of the Koran.^
Hear, however, the farewell address of Mohammed
to the pilgrims assembled on Mount Arafat in the
year before his death. ^ Ye people, ye have rights
over your wives, and your wives have rights over you.
Treat your wives with kindness : verily ye have taken
them on the security of God, and have made them
lawful unto you by the words of God.'
The Prophet's personal view of the prevalent
practice of divorce is well expressed in the beautiful
saying attributed to him in the Traditions, ' God has
Musalmans and Christians ; but in a summary, to which I am much
indebted, do full justice to the improvement in their condition
effected, or at least aimed at, by Mohammed.
' Sale, ' Preliminary Discourse,' p. 73.
* By Dr. Jessup, loc. cit.
204 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
created nothing which He likes better than the eman-
cipation of slaves, and nothing which He hates more
than divorce/ and it must be admitted that his ex-
ample, in this respect at all events, was as good as his
preceptyX^ It is difficult in this or in any other of his
sayings^ to find aught to justify the epithet used by
the most recent writer on the Life of Christ when he
speaks of the ' cynical sanction ' given by Mohammed
to polygamy or despotism ; '^ and it is to be regretted
that in his treatment of the religion of One who said
that ^ those who were not against Him were for Him,'
there is not a single passage which refers to the great
kindred creed of Islam, which does justice either to its
founder or to his reforms. Nor do the provisions I
have mentioned above constitute the whole of what
Mohammed did for the female sex, for besides imposing
restrictions on polygamy, by his severe laws at first^
and by the strong moral sentiment aroused by these
laws afterwards, he has succeeded, down to this very
day, and to a greater extent than has ever been the
case elsewhere, in freeing Mohammedan countries
from those professional outcasts who live by their
own misery, and, by their existence as a recognised
class, are a standing reproach to every member of the
society of which they fonn a part.
I do not forget, on the other hand, that Mohammed
' c;f. Sum IV. 12«i-12S. 17.') ; ami LXV., ontitletl * Divorce,'
throughout.
■"' Kan-jir'H 'Life of Christ,' I. 2(il>. The pivssiivfo in Sum IV. 32,
' G(hI desireth to make your bunlen light, for man hath l)ecn createil
weak,' is, «urely, not ' cynical,' but the ivverse, and nuiy be CM)mpared
with the * hanhies8 of their hearts ' alloweil as a sutticient rcation for
divorce under the Afosaic law by Christ himself. .Matt. XIX. 8.
SLAVERY. 205
authorised the corporal punishment of the wife by
the husband in extreme cases, provided it was done
with moderation ; that he allowed or enjoined the
seclusion of women ; that he relaxed in his own behalf
the restriction with regard to polygamy which he
imposed on others, and that he allowed concubinage
with captives taken in war ; ^ and I fully admit that
his followers have been far more ready to imitate and
to obey him in these, the defective parts of his teach-
ing and example, than in the more elevated ones ;
but I say confidently that compared with Paganism,
and even with Judaism, Mohammed gave women a
great advance on their previous position, and so has
deserved well of them. It must be remembered also,
what we are apt to forget, that it required not the
sublime moral precepts of Christianity alone, but the
influence of codes of Roman law, and the innate
respect felt by Teutonic nations for the female sex
and centuries of civilisation also, to raise woman to
her proper position in European countries ; and can
we be surprised that the unprogressive East is some
centuries behind us in this as in other respects ? I
think also that consistent and enlightened followers
of the Prophet, such as are Syed Ahmed and Syed
Ameer Ali in India, and Mir Aulad Ali, Professor
' Sale maintains, and he is supported by many Muslim doctors,
and, to all appearance, by the words of the Koran (Sura IV. 3), that
under no circumstances is a man allowed to take his slaves as con-
cubines if he have the maximum number of four wives allowed him
by the law. Mr. Lane maintains the contrary, and supports his
argument by the authority of other Muslim doctors, and by the
practice of some of the Companions of the Prophet ; but it is surelj^
dangerous to lay stress on this. No Musalman will contend that the
Companions are examples to be followed.
206 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
of Oriental Languages at Trinity College, Dublin,
have a right to say that Musalmans now would be
best canning out the spirit of the Prophet, as shadowed
forth in many precepts of the Koran, in pronouncing
polygamy to be out of date, and therefore unlawful.
And how was it with Slavery? Here, too, the
advance is incontestable, and much more decisive
than in his legislation for women. Mohammed did
not abolish slaver}^ altogether, for in that condition of
society it would have been neither possible nor de-
sirable to do so ; but he encouraged the emancipation
of slaves ; he laid down the principle that the captive
who embraced Islam should be ipso facto free, and,
what is more important, he took care that no stigma
should attach to the emancipated slave in consequence
of his honest and honourable life of labour. As to
those who continued slaves, he prescribed kindness
and consideration in dealing with them.' 'See,' he
said, in his parting address at Mina, the year before
his death, ' see that ye feed them with such food as
ye eat yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye
yourselves wear ; for they are the serv^ants of the
Lord, and are not to be tormented.'
A slave thus protected by the law and by the
highest sanctions of religion was hardly a slave in the
modern sense of the word at all. It is significant,
as I have remarked above, that the word itself seldom
occurs in the Koran. The phrase that is used, ' those
whom your right hand possesses,' means only those
who have been taken prisoners in lawful warfare, and
have lost their freedom. Such captives, if they bec<ime
' Sura XXIV. 34, 57.
SLAVERY. 207
Musalmans, were set free ; if they retained their own
faith, they were, as Mohammed told his followers,
none the less their brethren. The master who treated
them kindly would be acceptable to God ; he who
abused his power would be shut out of Paradise.
' How many times,' asked a follower of Mohammed,
' ought I to forgive a slave who displeases me ? '
^ Seventy times a day,' replied the Prophet.
Concubinage, indeed, with his female captives,
Mohammed, like the chiefs of every other semi-civilised
state that has ever existed, allowed to their captor,
but she who bore her master a child was never to be
severed from it. She could never again be sold, and
at her master's death she received her freedom.
These humane provisions are, as might be expected,
in the same plane as those of the Mosaic law, but
they are an advance, in many respects, upon it ; and
they are such as no European or American slave-
trading power ever enrolled in its code of laws till the
wave of total abolition swept over Christendom. For
example, when the Hebrew who had become a slave
had served his time, he might go free ; but the wife
his master had given him, and the children she had
borne to him, were to be severed from him and to
remain slaves.^ The Musalman master who chas-
tised his slave without cause was bound to set him
free ; the Hebrew, on the other hand, who chastised
his slave so severely as to cause his death at once,
was liable to a certain penalty, but if he survived for
a day or two, he got off scot-free ; for, as the English,
version of the Bible expresses it with terrible blunt-
ness, ^ he is his money.' ^ In the Slave States of
' Exodus XXT. 4. ^ Exodus XXI. 21.
208 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
America, again, a slave had no legal rights : if a
master treated his females slaves well, it was because
he happened to be humane, not because, as in Islam
in its best days, the courts were open to compel him
to be so. The equality of all men before God was
a principle which Mohammed everywhere maintained,
and which, taking, as it did, all caste feeling from
slavery, took awa}^ also its chief sting. To Moham-
med's mind labour could never be degrading ; and the
domestic slavery of the Arabs, under which, thanks
to him, parents were never to be separated from their
children, nor indeed relations from each other at all,
though always to be condemned in the abstract, be-
came, under the Prophet's hands, a bond closer and
more lasting, and hardly more liable to abuse, than
domestic service elsewhere.
Mohammedanism, in fact, preaches equality al-
most as explicitly as does Christianity. * No more
pride in ancestry,' said Mohammed to the assembled
Musalmans, the haughty Kuraish themselves among
them : ' ye Musalmans are all brothers, all equal ; '
and it must be admitted that Mohammedans have,
from whatever causes, acted up to their creed in
this respect more fully than have Christians.' In
' See Wood's ' Oxus,' p. 194. ' Nowhere is the difference between
European and Mohammedan society more stronjfly marked than in
the lower walks of life. The broad line that separates the rich and
|MK)r in civilised society is as yet but faintly drawn in Central Asia.
Here unreserved intercourse with their superiors has jMilishetl the
manners of the lower classes, and instead of this familiarity breetling
(Contempt, it begets self-respect in the dciwndent. . . . indeed all the
inferior classes |x)ssess an innate self-respect and a natural gravity
<»f deportment which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hin-
dustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown.'
MOHAMMEDAN CONVERTS. 209
India, for instance, Mohammedans make converts by
hundreds from among the Hindus, while Christians
with difficulty make ten, and this partly at least
because the)^ receive their converts on terms of entire
social equality, while Europeans, in spite of all the
efforts of missionaries to the contrary, seem either
unwilling or unable to treat their converts as other
than inferiors. The Hindu who becomes a Christian
loses, therefore, his own cherished caste without being
admitted into that of his rulers. The Hindu who
turns Mohammedan loses his narrow caste, but he
becomes a member of the wide brotherhood of Islam.
In Africa there is, happily, no caste system analogous
to that of India, but like causes have, even there, pro-
duced like effects or like contrasts. The ^ Negro ' con-
vert to Islam is received at once as an equal by the
Arab, or the Moorish, or the Mandingo missionary
who has brought him his message ; he is enrolled in
a fraternity which has influenced half the world, and
in which Negroes themselves have played no incon-
siderable part. A literature and a language are
thrown open to him which, if they are not his own,
are yet a classical literature and language, and one
which he may wxll claim as, in some sense, his, in
view of what they have already done for his race.
He thus acquires a sense of independence, of dignity,
and of brotherhood, to which he was before a stranger.
The Christian Negro, on the other hand, with few
exceptions, still feels at an immeasurable distance
from those Europeans to whom, indeed, he owes the
message of love that he has received, but who, as a
race, for centuries past, have enslaved and sold him,
and, alien as they are to him in all respects, still
G 2
210 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
debar him from the possession of his own coasts that
they may enrich themselves with his merchandise,
or flood his country with those ardent spirits which
are the curse of their own. He sets to work to
imitate, as best he may, the dress and the habits, the
virtues and the vices, of those who have so little in
common with him ; and the result is that with which
we are all familiar/ Christianity is not to blame for
this, but Christian nations are. As to his religion,
while nothing can quite deprive him of the sense of
equality before God, and of the bright hopes beyond
the grave which the self-sacrificing missionar}^ preaches
to him, in spite of all the caste prejudices and that
most fatal of obstacles to missionary work, the ex-
ample of the Europeans themselves, he naturally takes
hold of that side of Christianity which any religion
that is of such universal applicability must certainly
contain ; the side, I mean, which dwells upon the
helplessness of man to help himself, his dependence
upon merits not his own, the sense that even his best
efforts and aspirations have something in them of the
nature of sin. These notions have much truth in
them, but they are only one side of the truth, and
they require to be balanced and held in check by
that other side of Christianity which inculcates self-
reliance and self-respect, the active and the heroic,
as well as the passive and the saintly virtues. Races
which are more energetic, more fortunate, or more
' See on this subject a very remarkable article in Fmser's Magazine
for November 1875, by a Negro, the Rev. EdwanI Blyden, headed
* MohammeilaniHm and the Negro Race.' The author speaks in great
measure from his own experience, and treats the subject with ori-
ginality, with eaniestness, and with deep pathos.
CHRISTIANITY. 211
highly-gifted, are, in some imperfect sense, better able
to lay hold of this other side of Christianity, and the
result, such as it is, is seen in the progressive nations
of the West. Christianity has done much for Europe,
but Europe has done much also for Christians. Down-
trodden and unfortunate nations like the African,
which have been brought into contact with more
powerful races only to be oppressed by them, and
have, by their mere geographical peculiarities, been
unduly weighted throughout their history in the
struggle for existence, naturally lay hold, with few
exceptions, of that side of Christianity which comes
most home to them, and which appeals most to their
depressed condition. The same general causes which,
with or without reason, make the Turk despise the
Armenian, the Druse despise the Maronite, and the
Copt the Abyssinian, are at work in Central Africa
also ; and, in spite of the ineffable superiority of
Christianity in its purity, serve to point the contrast
between the dependence and the servility of the
average Christian, and the dignity and the self-reliance
of the average Musalman, Negro.
^ La carriere ouverte aux talens ' has thus been
throughout the history of Islam something of a reality.
No considerations of birth, or race, or colour, or
money, have prevented a man rising to the post for
which it had been recognised that he was best fitted.
Zeid, the Prophet's freedman, led his armies in war.
Bilal, a blind Negro, became the first Muezzin ; and,
as Deutsch remarks, even Alexander the Great is at
this day an unknown personage in Asia compared to
him. A dynasty of Circassian slaves ruled Egypt
for a century before its conquest by the Ottoman
212 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM,
Turks, and it is said that Christians from the Caucasus
were glad to be carried off as slaves to Eg}^pt because
each one felt that he might rise to be sultan.^ In
Islam the emancipated slave is actually, as well as
potentially, equal to a free-bom citizen, and through-
out the Turkish Empire at all periods of its history^
slaves have risen repeatedly to the highest offices, and
have never been ashamed of their origin.^
The orphan was not less than the slave the object
of the Prophet's peculiar care, for he had been an
orphan himself; and what God had done for him, he
was anxious, as far as might be, to do for others.*
The poor were always present with him, and their
condition never absent from his mind. In one of his
early Suras, ' the steep,' as he calls it — that is to say,
the strait and narrow way, is said to be to release
the captive, to give food to the poor that lieth in the
dust, and to stir up one another to steadfastness and
compassion.* And in another Sura Jews and Arabs
are alike warned in their exclusive pride in their
common progenitor, Abraham, that verily the nearest
of kin to Abraham are they who follow him in his
works.^
' * Mohammed's Religion,' by J. J. Dbllinper, p. 32.
" Captain Burton mentions (* Pilgiimage,' 1. p. 89) that the pachs
of the Syrian camvan with which he ti*avelled to Damascus had
Ixjen the slave of a slave. JScbuktegin, the fatlier of the magnificent
Mahmud, and founder of the Ghaznevide dynjisty, was a slave ; so
was Kutl)-ud-din, the conqueror and first king of Delhi, and the true
founder, therefore, of the Mohammedan Empirc in India. (Sec
Elphinstone's 'India,' p. .H20, and 3G3, and 370.) The dynasty of
the Egyptian Mamelukes derived their name from an Ambic word
meaning slave.
' Sum VIII. 42, and XPIII. f. to end.
< Sure XC. 12, IT), and poMini. * Sura III. 61.
THE ORPHAN AND THE POOR. 213
And how, as a matter of history, has Islam dealt
with these classes of society, which more even than
the ordinary poor, need the help of those who are
richer, stronger, more fortunate than they ? It is the
glory of Christianity to have created that enthusiasm
of humanity which, from the earliest times, has made
the care of the sick and the relief of the distressed to
be not only the first of duties, but of happinesses.
The Emperor Julian, an unwilling and therefore a
trustworthy witness, remarked with reference to the
' splendid outpouring,' even in his own day, of charity
among the Christians whom he despised, that it was
a scandal that the Galileans should support the
destitute not only of their own religion, but of his.
Following Christ's example, and believing what He
taught, that in finding out the afflicted and in tending
the leper and the outcast, Christ Himself may in
some sense be found and tended. Christians have
everywhere erected orphanages for the bereaved,
refuges for the aged, penitentiaries for the fallen,
hospitals for the sick, and asylums for the insane.
These institutions are the result not of any positive
external law among Christian nations, but of that
glowing impulse of love which Christ has breathed
into His true disciples, and which, under their influ-
ence, has become a second nature to numbers who do
not acknowledge either its origin or its sanction. They
have grown with the growth of Christianity, and
in their number, in their size, and their efficiency,
those of the present day throw into the shade the
efforts of all other religions and of all previous ages.
But no Christian need be sorry to learn, or be
backward to acknowledge, that, contrary to what is
214 MOHAMMED AND 2I0HAMMEDANISM.
usually supposed/ two of those noble institutions which
flourish now most in Christian countries, and are
assuredly most characteristic of Christianity, owe their
origin and their early spread not to his own religion,
but to the great heart of humanity which beats in two
other of the grandest religions of the world. Hos-
pitals are the direct outcome of Buddhism, and from
the time of the charitable edicts of King Asoka for
the establishment of medical dispensaries both for
men and animals, three hundred years before Christ,
began to overspread the Buddhist East.^ To Moham-
medanism, it would seem, Christendom is indebted
for the foundation of lunatic asylums, and for the
comparatively humane treatment of the insane. The
lunatic asylum at Cairo was founded in a.d. 1304,
and it was not till more than a century afterwards
that we hear of any institutions of the kind in Europe,
and then only in that part of it which was most open
to Mohammedan influences — I mean in Spain. It was
• ' Amid all the boasted civilisation of antiquity there existetl no
hospitals, no penitentiaries, no asylums.' Farrar's ' Life of Christ,*
I. 334.
' For the Buddhist origin of hospitals see some facts collected by
the Rev. J. Hoare, of Killiskey, Dublin, in an interesting and able
sermon on hospitals ; and for the origin of lunatic asylums, and some
of the facts here mentioned, see Mr. Lecky's * History of European
Morals,' II. 04. Mr. T. Wheeler in his 'History of India' (III. 2:)7)
quotes from Fa-hian, a Buddhist pilgrim from Chin i to India about
A.D. 40(), a vivid description of the hospitals at Patali-putra or Patua,
the former capital of King Asoka, which were oj)en gratuit^iusly to
the poor and the diseased of all countries. A hospital for tlie relief
of animal suffering (m an extensive scale existed at Surat »lown to
the beginning of this century. It doubtless owed its origin to
Buddhist influences, flourished throughout the periinl of the Musal-
man rule under the special guardianship of the Jains, ami has only
fallen into decay in very recent times.
HOSPITALS. 215-
from Spain that they gradually spread over Europe ;
and it was to the Spaniards, strange to say, that Rome
itself, the capital of Christendom, owed in the year
1548 the foundation of its earliest asylum. In the
fifteenth century Leo Africanus found that portions
of several hospitals at Fez, in the interior of Morocco,
were dedicated to the care of the insane ; and the
Mosque itself, so far from being exclusively dedicated,
as Europeans commonly suppose, to those services
which alone we are apt to call religious, is in most
Musalman countries immediately connected with
schools for the young or hospitals for the sick and
the insane ; and its guardians, in the belief that
those serve God best who most benefit their fellow-
creatures, have generally devoted a part of the funds
of the foundation to these most truly sacred purposes.
Instead of the harsh treatment which, till lately in the
West, has been thought to be the only possible one,
lunatics have in the Mohammedan East been treated
generally not only with humanity, but with respect.
They are regarded in Egypt now, Mr. Lane tells us,
as men who, their minds being in heaven, are not
responsible for what their bodies do on earth : their
souls being absorbed in devotion, it is thought only
natural that their passions should be without con-
trol.i
Nor does Mohammed omit to lay stress on what I
venture to think is as crucial a test of a moral code,
and even of a religion, as is the treatment of the poor
and the weak^ — I mean the duties we owe to what we
call the lower animals. There is no religion which
Lane's ' Modern Egyptians,' p. 288.
216 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
has taken a higher view in its authoritative documents
of animal Hfe, and none wherein the precept has
been so much honoured by its practical observance.
^ There is no beast on earth/ says the Koran/ ^ nor
bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a
people like unto you — unto the Lord shall they
return ; ' and it is the current belief that animals will
share with men the general resurrection, and be judged
according to their works. At the slaughter of an
animal, the Prophet ordered that the name of God
should always be named, but the words ^ the Compas-
sionate, the Merciful,' were to be omitted ; for on the
one hand such an expression seemed a mockery to
the sufferer, and, on the other, he could not bring
himself to believe that the destruction of any life,
however necessary, could be altogether pleasing to the
All Merciful. ^ In the name of God,' says a pious
Musalman before he strikes the fatal blow ; ' God is
most great ; God give thee patience to endure the
affliction which He hath allotted thee ! "^ In the East
there has been no moralist like Bentham to insist in
noble words on the extension of the sphere of morality
to all sentient beings, and to be ridiculed for it by
people who call themselves religious ; there has been
no naturalist like Darwin, to demonstrate by his mar-
vellous powers of observation hov; large a part of the
mental and moral faculties which we usually claim
for ourselves alone we share with other beings ; there
has been no Oriental * Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals ; ' but one reason of this is not far
to seek. What the legislation of the last few years has
' Suiji VI. 3S, and Sale's note ad lor.
" Lane's ' M<»dern KjfA-ptians,' I. IIU.
TREATMENT OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 'Ill
at length attempted to do, and, from the mere fact that
it is legislation, must do ineffectually, has been long
effected in the East by the moral and religious senti-
ment which, like almost everything that is good in that
part of the world, can be traced back, in part at least,
to the great Prophet of Arabia/ In the East, so far
as it has not been hardened by the West, there is a
real sympathy between man and the domestic ani-
mals ; they understand one another, and the cruelties
which the most humane of our countrymen uncon-
sciously inflict in the habitual use, for instance, of the
muzzle or the bearing-rein on the most docile, the
most patient, the most faithful, and the most intelli-
gent of their companions, are impossible in the East.
An Arab cannot ill-treat his horse ; and Mr. Lane
bears emphatic testimony to the fact that in his long
residence in Egypt he never saw an ass or a dog (though
the latter is there looked upon as an unclean animal)
treated with cruelty, except in those cities which were
overrun by Europeans. "^
' The sympathy of the Prophet for his domestic animals is well
known. There is a great variety of traditions respecting his horses,
his mules, his milch and riding camels, and his goats. It would be
easy to write a complete biography of his favourite she-camel, Al
Kaswa. Her eccentricities and perversities exercised an influence
on some critical occasions in the Prophet's life — e. g. on his entrance
to Medina, and at Kodeiba. Among the phenomena attending Mo-
.hammed's fits, it is recorded that if one came on him while riding,
his camel itself became first wildly excited, and then fixed and rigid !
And I have little doubt that the story arose from the almost electric
sympathy that exists between an intelligent animal that is kindly
treated and its master.
2 Lane, I. 359-361. Many mosques in Egypt and in other parts
of the Mohammedan East have funds belonging to them which arc
specially appropriated to the relief or support of animals.
218 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Mohammed was not slow to forbid the practices
nearest to the Arab heart if he saw them clearly to be
wrong ; a strong reason surely for putting the most
charitable interpretation possible upon his retention of
polygamy. All hostilities and plundering excursions
between neighbouring tribes that had become Musul-
man he forbade on pain of death ; and this among
those who had hitherto lived by plunder or by war,
and who he knew might be deterred by such pro-
hibition from joining him. ^ Let us make one more
expedition against the Temim/ said a tribe that was
almost, but not altogether, persuaded to embrace the
faith, ' and then we will become Musalmans.' ^ Usury
and divination, drunkenness and gaming, were, as I
have shown in my Second Lecture, among the darling
practices of the Arabs : how did the Prophet deal
with them ? ' O true believers, surely wine, and lots,
and images, and divining arrows are an abomination
of the work of Satan : therefore avoid them, that ye
may prosper. Satan seeketh to sow dissension and
hatred among you, by means of wine and lots, and to
divert you from remembering God and from prayer :
will ye not therefore abstain from them ? ' '^
By thus absolutely prohibiting gambling and in-
toxicating liquors, Mohammed did much to abolish,
once and for all, over the vast regions that own his
sway, two of the worst and most irremediable evils of
European society ; evils to the intensity of which the
Christian Governments of the nineteenth century are
hardly yet beginning to awake.
' Quote<l by Dr. Cazenove. * Christian Remembrancer,' January
1855, p. 71, from Caussin de Perceval.
« Sura V. 92.
HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS REGARD ISLAM? 219
Can anyone then who recollects what the Arabian
Prophet did for woman, and the slave and the orphan,
for the poor and the sick, and the lower animals, and
who knows also how much he has done to restrain
throughout the East certain vices which are still ram-
pant in Christendom, deny what I have already
hinted above, that, looking at him merely as a moral
reformer, and apart from his great religious revolution,
Mohammed was really doing Christ's work, even if he
had reverenced Christ less than in fact he did ?
And this brings me to the most important question
that I shall touch upon at present ; and one, but for
which, in its various bearings, I do not know that I
should have written these Lectures : I mean the at-
titude that Christianity ought to bear to Mohammed-
anism now. To say that in spite of the theoretic
intolerance of Mohammedanism, it ought, unless its
theory is put into practice, itself to be tolerated, is
happily now a mere truism. But it ought not to be
treated with a merely contemptuous or distant re-
cognition, or to be inserted tanquam i7if amice causa —
^ Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics ' — in a collect,
once a year, upon that day of all others upon which
the universality of Christ's self-sacrifice is brought be-
fore us. When the draft of a treaty was brought to
the General of the armies of revolutionary France, the
first clause of which contained a formal recognition by
the Emperor Francis of Austria — the representative of
legitimacy, absolutism, and divine right — of the exist-
ence of the French Republic, ^ Strike that clause out,'
said Napoleon ; ^ the French Republic needs no re-
cognition from him — it is as clear as the sun at noon-
day.' Mohammedanism needs no formal recognition
220 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
of its existence by a faith with which it has so much
in common. The immemorial quarrel between Mo-
hammedanism and Christianity is, after all, a quarrel
between near relations ; and, like most immemorial
quarrels, is based chiefly on mutual misunderstandings.
Without any appearance of extraordinary condescen-
sion, we should recognise the fact which Mohamme-
dans themselves might at present certainly be inclined
to deny, that Islam is the nearest approach to
Christianity, I would almost call it, remembering
Mohammed's intense reverence for Christ, the
only form of Christianit)^, which has proved itself
suited to the nations of the East. John Cantacuzene,
the Greek Emperor of Constantinople, who calls him-
self in the title of his book ^ the most pious and Christ-
loving ' king, and who was often compelled to sharpen
his sword, as well as his pen, against the Turkish foes
who were then closing in around his capital, yet treats
them throughout as sectaries only, and not pagans.*
Dante himself placed Mohammed in the ' Inferno/
not as a heathen, but as a heretic ; and is there any
reason why our notion of Christianity should be less
comprehensive that that of the patriot Greek Em-
peror or of the Christian poet ?
Mohammedanism is the one religion in the world,
besides our own and the Jewish, which is strictly and
avowedly Monotheistic. ' Dispute not,' said Moham-
med to his followers, ' against those who have received
' The title of the lK)ok is sujfirestive : roit ihotfitCTdrov Kai <fn\o'
\piOTov fiaffiXfwQ 'liodvvoi' tov KavraKov 0)vov .... Kara r^c
'i^apaxiiviov (iipKriiti unoXoyiai A. He nuinietl his djiu^hter to h
Turk. See Ibn Batiitii's TniveN. p. 71»-S.'). fur :n» intore-^tiiiir accouut
of H Himilftr occuri-eiiee.
THREE MONOTHEISTIC CREEDS. 221
the Scriptures, that is Jews and Christians, except
with gentleness ; but say unto them we beheve in the
revelation which hath been sent down to us, and also
in that which hath been sent down to you ; and our
God and your God is one.' ^ And again he says in
another place, ^ Verily the Believers, and those who
are Jews, those who are Christians and Sabeans, who-
ever believeth in God, and the last day, and doeth
that which is right, they shall have their reward with
their Lord, there shall come no fear upon them,
neither shall they be grieved.' '^ And in a still more
striking passage we find it written : ^ Unto every one
have we given a law and a way. Now if God had
pleased. He w^ould surely have made you one people,
but He hath made you to differ that He might try
you in that which He hath given to each, therefore
strive to excel each other in good w^orks. Unto God
shall ye all return, and He will tell you that concerning
which ye have disagreed.' ^
The three Creeds are branches from the same
parent stock, not different stocks ; and they all alike
look back to the majestic character of Abraham as
the first teacher of the unity of God. Mohammed
says, again and again, that the belief he inculcates is
no new belief — it is the original creed of Khalil Allah,
the Friend of God. The heroes of the Old Testament
history, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and Joshua, David
' Sura V. 73.
2 Sura II. 59.
* Sura V. 52, 53. Cf . Acts x. 35. These are passages on which the
comparative mythologist, the Musalman reformer, and the Christian
missionary would alike do well to dwell. It is noteworthy also that
the fifth Sura, from which two of them come, is placed by Rodwell
and others last in the chronological order.
222 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
and Solomon, are heroes of the Mohammedan religion
as well as of the Jewish and Christian.
I remarked in my Second Lecture that Mohammed
may have thought himself justified in breaking the
moral law he himself imposed, because a somewhat
similar concession had been made to Moses. This is
not a mere conjecture on my part, for it is certain that
Mohammed had, for one who was so careless of facts,
acquired somehow a full and fairly accurate knowledge
of the history of the great Lawgiver. He relates it
at length,' and recurs to it with a passionate fondness
from an early period in his career, evidently dwelling
mentally on the striking parallels between himself and
Moses, the shepherd life, the call to the Prophet's
office, the rejection by their own countrymen, no less
than — be it always remembered to Mohammed's
credit that he does not disguise it — the main point of
difference, the prodigality of miracles performed by
the one, and the inability to work them in the other.
One most sacred spot actually connects the two
Prophets together. There is a tradition, to some ex-
tent authenticated, that Mohammed drove the camels
of Khadijah to the very place where Moses had tended
the flocks of Jethro. Moses and Mohammed may
have reposed on the same rock, watered their cattle
at the same springs, looked upon the same weird
mountains.* And it is a redeeming point, perhaps
the only redeeming point, in the melancholy history
of St. Catherine's Monastery, that from age to age
within the convent walls, Mosque and Church have
stood side by side, and Muslims and Christians have
• See especially Sums VII. XVIII. XXVII. XXVIII. LV.
• Surall. 67, VII. 1(50.
SPIRITUALITY OF ISLAM. 223
knelt together worshipping the same God ; and there,
if only there in the world, venerating with a kindred,
if not with an equal reverence, the same prophets,
Moses and Mohammed, and One who is infinitely
greater than them both.^
Again, Mohammedanism is in a true sense of the
word a spiritual religion. As instituted by Mohammed
it had ^ no priest and no sacrifice ;' ^ in other words,
no caste of sacrificing priests were ever to be allowed
to come between the human soul and God : forbid-
ding the representation of all living things alike,
whether as objects of use or of admiration, of venera-
tion or of worship, Mohammedanism is more opposed
to idolatry even than we are ourselves. Mohammed
hated images more sternly even than the Iconoclasts
of Constantinople or the soldiers of Cromwell. Every
mosque in the world of Islam bears witness to this.
Statuary and pictures being forbidden, variegated
marbles, and festoons of lamps, and geometric shapes
and tortuous inscriptions from the Koran, have to
* See the account of St. Catherine's and its degradation in ' The
Desert of the Exodus,' by E. H. Palmer ; and in Stanley's * Sinai and
Palestine,' p. 53-54. Dean Stanley draws my attention to the fact
that there is a large mosque in the principal street of St. Petersburg ;
and it is said that at Nijni Novgorod the same phenomenon, mosque
and church as near and not unfriendly neighbours, may be observed ;
but there no doubt it is commerce rather than religious sympathy
which we have to thank for it.
* The Sacrifice at the Annual Pilgrimage is a mere relic of the
Pagan practice ; it has little religious significance, and does not
imply priestcraft ; it indicates only the belief that sin deserves
death. At the feast of Beiram a victim is offered, but only in com-
memoration of the ram accepted by God in the place of Isaac, or
rather, as the Musalmans represent it, in the place of Ishmael.
Each worshipper, moreover, offers the victim for himself, without
the intervention of any official.
224 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
supply their place as best they can, and form that
pecuhar species of ornamentation, strictly confined to
the inanimate world, which we call Arabesque, and
which is still to be traced in the architecture of so
many churches and so many mosques along the
frontier line of four thousand miles which divides the
realm of the Crescent from that of the Cross.*
This hatred of idolatry has been found even
among the most uncivilised followers of the Prophet.
The gorgeous ritual, the gaudy pictures, and the pious
frauds which play so large a part in the conversion of
the Sclavonian nations to Christianity seem only to
have alienated these semi-barbarians. Mahmud the
Ghaznevide, the son of a slave and the conqueror of
Hindustan, was offered a sum of ten millions sterling
if only he would spare the famous idol in the pagoda
of Somnat. Avarice is said to have been his beset-
ting fault, but he replied in the memorable words,
^ Never shall Mahmud be a merchant of idols;' and
broke it into pieces.*
In this horror of all objective symbols, in the
simplicity of its liturgical forms,' in the Nai^sence of a
priestly caste, and therefore of all beflref in such
' Cf. Stanley's 'Lectures on the Eastern Church,' p. 273. Without
discussing the general question at length, I may remark here that
Gothic architecture, though it is not very ready to acknowledge the
debt, owes much to Moorish architecture — in particular the Horse-
shoe or Crescent Arch. The pointed arch itself is to be found in
many early mosques, and some of the most famous Venetian build-
ings, St. Mark's among them, owe much to Saracenic architecture.
' Ferishta's ' History of Mohammedan Power in India' (Brig^'s
translation), I. p. 72 ; and Elphinstone's * History of India,' p. 336.
» See the forms of pniyer, «S:c., given by Garvin de Tassy,
* L'Islamisme,' p. 207-2S.". Most of them are of course an after-
jfrowth.
HA TRED OF IDOL A TR Y. 225
doctrines as those of apostolical succession, inherent
sanctity, indissoluble vows, the duty of confession or
powers of absolution, Islam stands alone among the
religions of the world. Yet without compromising
seriously this its essential character, it was able
originally, and it is able still, in Africa and in
Hindustan, in Central Asia and the East Indian
islands, to win over, and that often by pure conviction,
Pagans from the most debasing and materialistic
forms of idolatry, and this to an extent which is
quite unequalled in modern times by any form of
Christianity, or by any other proselytising creed. In a
Protestant country in which the missionary spirit is
still strong, but in some portions of which a florid
ritual and an exotic Bestheticism seem to be the order
of the day, it is well to draw pointed attention to
what another creed can do without any such accom-
paniments, and to the stumbling-block which these
would inevitably place in the way of a Musalman
who might otherwise be disposed to listen to the
Christian message.^
Finally, Mohammedanism, in spite of centuries
of wars and misunderstandings, looks back upon the
Founder of our religion with reverence only less than
that with which the most devout Christians regard
Him.
So far from its being true, as is commonly sup-
posed, that Mohammedans regard Christ as Christians
' One of the forms of idolatry which Mohammed found among the
Pagans of Arabia, and which he overthrew, was the worship of bread.
A tribe called the Hanifa used to pay Divine honours to a shapeless
lump of dough ; which, however, with characteristic levity, they were
not unwilling to eat when pressed by want of food.
H
226 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
have too often regarded Mohammed, with hatred
and with contempt ; Sir Wilh'am Muir remarks
that devout Musalmans never mention the name of
Seyyedna Eesa, or Our Lord Jesus, without adding the
words ^on whom be peace.' The highest honour that
a Musalman can conceive is given to Christ in the
grave reserved for Him by the side of the Prophet
himself in the great Mosque at Medina. Moham-
medans expect that He will one day return to earth,
and having slain Antichrist, will establish perfect peace
among men. And Dr. Hunter ^ tells us that the
Indian Shiahs avowedly look forward to his reap-
pearance simultaneously with that of the last of their
twelve Imams, and to an amalgamation of the two
creeds ; of Islam as the followers of Ali hold it, and
of Christianity, not as it is, but as they believe it was
taught by Christ Himself.* A Christian indeed is
not received by Mohammedans with quite the open
arms of hospitality with which they welcome a brother
Mohammedan ; but a traveller who was the first to
explore the source of the Oxus, and the adjacent
countries in Central Asia, tells us, as the result of his
own wide experience, that a Christian may count
upon a courteous, if not upon a cordial, reception
from them, and that he is always treated with kind-
ness and respect.^ A Mohammedan, he goes on to
say, looks upon Christians in the light indeed of
benighted and misguided men, but yet, as the Prophet
himself so often called them, as 'people of the Book/
' • 'Our Indian MnBsulmanp,' p. 120, by W. W. Hunter.
« For a curious (HscuRsion on the return of the Messiah to earth
held at Tirabuctu, see Barth's ' Travels in Central Africa,' V., p. 4.
• Wood's * Oxus,' p. 9.S, 94.
REVERENCE FOR CHRIST. 227
who, though not heirs to the high destinies of Moham-
med's followers, are nevertheless, from the sacred
character of Seyyedna Eesa, entitled to the commi-
seration and sympathy of the faithful. The fact is
that though, since the first spread of Islam, compara-
tively few Christians have ever become Musalmans,
a Musalman is still disposed to look upon a Christian
as, potentially at least, a brother Musalman. It was
a saying of the Prophet himself, that 'everyone is
bom a Musalman :' Abraham was one, so was Jesus,
in that he was resigned to God's will and had un-
bounded faith in Him. The two systems of belief,
therefore, were, in the Prophet's view, in no way con-
tradictory to each other. Islam was, as he taught
at one stage of his life, a religion co-ordinate with
Christianity ; at another a development, but not more
than a development of it. To revile Jesus has there-
fore always been looked upon by the Prophet's con-
sistent followers as no less an offence than to revile
Mohammed. In the time of Mohammed IV. a
convert to Islam at Constantinople, in order to prove,
as he thought, the sincerity of his conversion, or
to ingratiate himself with those who were now
his co-religionists, began to blaspheme Christ. He
was dragged off by the Musalmans who heard him
to the Divan, and was ordered out for instant exe-
cution.
If it be asked, why then did Mohammed not
accept Christianity, I apprehend that the reasons are
threefold ; and that it appears from the chronological
order lately assigned to the Suras of the Koran, that
at one period, that of the Fatrah, Mohammed did
consider whether first Judaism, and secondly Chris-
228 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
tianity, as he knew it, contained the message he had
to give.
I. The first explanation I would suggest is, that
the Christ known to him was the Christ, not of the
Bible, but of tradition ; the Christ, not of the
Canonical, but of the Apocr^^phal Gospels, and even
these only from general tradition. The wonder is,
Mohammed's information being confined to the in-
coherent rhapsodies and the miraculous inanities of
the Gospels of the Infancy, the Acta Pilati and the
' Descensus ad Inferos,' not that he reverenced Christ
so little, but so much. In the whole of the Koran
there are only three passages which look like any
direct acquaintance with the Evangelists ; and one of
these, the well-known passage about the Paraclete, he
misunderstands himself, and accuses Christians of
intentionally perverting from its proper meaning, a
prediction of the coming of the Periclyte, the Greek
form of Mohammed, the Illustrious, or the Praised.'
II. Secondly, the worship of saints and images,
and the shape which certain floating ideas had taken
when they were stereotyped in the formulas of the
Christian Church, seemed to Mohammed to conflict
with his fundamental doctrine of the unity of God.
The mysteries of the Trinity were to be appraised and
handled by every one who called himself a Christian,
not merely as a test, but as the test of his Christianity.
Mohammed accuses even the Jews of having lost
sight of their primary truth, which was also his, in
calling Ezra the Son of God,* and what wonder if he
rejected a religion the essence of which he understood,
' Sura KXI. «5. « Hum IX. 30.
WHY DID MOHA MMED REJECT CHRISTIANITY? 229
and too many Christians of his time understood to
be, not a holy life, but, as it is still represented in the
Athanasian Creed, an elaborate and unthinkable
mode of thinking of the Trinity ? It is doubtful
indeed whether a people that has once become mono-
theistic in any other form than the Christian, can ever
be brought to accept, I do not say Christianity
altogether, but the doctrines that are often supposed
to be of its very essence. Among such a people the
missionary invariably finds that the doctrine of the
Trinity, however explained, involves Tritheism, and
their ears are at once closed to his teaching. To a
Pagan who accepts Christianity the change no doubt
is one from Polytheism to Monotheism, but to the
Jew or Mohammedan, except in very rare instances,
it is the opposite.
Let us hear on these points, however, Mohammed
himself, remembering all the while how slight was
his knowledge of the doctrine which he travestied,
and how dim the outline of the majestic character
which yet filled his imagination : —
^ They surely are infidels who say God is the third
of three, for there is no God but one God.' ^
^ Say not three ; forbear, it will be better for thee ;
God is only one God.' '^
Christ was with Mohammed the greatest of Pro-
phets.-^ He had the power of working miracles ; He
spoke in his cradle ; He made a bird out of clay.'*
He could give sight to the blind, and even raise the
» Sura V. 77. ^ Sura IV. 6. ' Sura II. 254.
* Incidents drawn from the Grospels of the Infancy or of St.
Thomas.
230 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
dead to life.^ He is the Word proceeding from God ;
His name is the Messiah. Illustrious in this world
and in the next, and one of those who have near
access to God.'^ ' He is strengthened by the Holy
Spirit/ for so Mohammed, in more than one passage,
calls the Angel Gabriel.^ Mohammed all but believes
in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin,* and
certainly in the miraculous nature of the birth of
Christ, to which he recurs repeatedly.* But that
Jesus ever claimed, as is affirmed by the writers of
the New Testament, and as we know He did, to be
the Son of God, still less that He ever claimed to be
equal with God, Mohammed could not bring himself
to believe.
^ It becometh not a man that God should give him
the Scriptures, and the Wisdom, and the spirit of
Prophecy, and that then he should say to his
followers Be ye worshippers of me as well as of God,
but rather Be ye perfect in things pertaining to God,
since ye know the Scriptures, and have studied
them.' ^
And again, ' For the Messiah himself said. Oh
children of Israel, worship God, my Lord and
yours.' ^
And once more, ' Those who say that Jesus, the
Son of Mary, is the Son of God, are infidels, for who
could stop the arm of God if He were to destroy the
> Sura III. 41-43. « Sura III. 40. » Sura II. 81.
* Sura III. 30. There was a well-known sect of Christians calleil
CoUyridians 'in Arabia who paid the Virgin divine honours, and
offered her a twisted cake {k6\\v(>iq). Thence, no doubt, came Mo-
hammed's idea that the Virgin was one of the Persons of the Trinity.
• Sura XIX. 20. • Sura IIL 78. » Sura V. 76.
MOHAMMED'S VIEWS OF THE TRINITY. 231
Messiah and His mother, and all who are in the earth
together ? ' ^
Neither can Mohammed ever believe that Jesus
could have been crucified. ' It is so long ago, let us
hope that it is not true/ said an old Cheshire woman
when she heard for the first time in her life the story
of the Crucifixion. ^ If I and my brave Franks had
been there, we would have avenged His injuries,'
was the exclamation of the fierce barbarian Clovis
when he received his first lesson in the Christian life.
The Dreamer of the Desert sympathised rather with
the first of these. As Stesichorus '^ believed that
the Greeks and Trojans fought for the phantom of
Helen, and not for Helen herself; as the Docetists
held that the phantom of Jesus and not Jesus Himself
had been crucified ; so Mohammed rebels at the
thought that God can ever have allowed such a
tragedy to take place. Some one else, he curiously
supposes, who deserved such a death — perhaps it
was Judas himself — may have been substituted for
Christ ; and Christ being taken up to heaven,
must have felt that the deception thus practised
on the Jews was a kind of punishment to Himself
for not having taken greater pains to prevent men
calling Him the Son of God.^ And at the resurrec-
tion Jesus will Himself testify against both Jews
and Christians ; the Jews for not having received
Him as a prophet, the Christians for having received
Him as God.
There is a short chapter in the Koran which Mus-
Sura V. 19. » Plato, 'Republic,' IX. hd.
» Sura 111. 49, IV. 156.
232 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANIISM,
lims look upon as equal to a third of the whole in
value :
' Say there is one God alone —
God the Eternal ;
He begetteth not, and He is not Vjegotten,
And there is none like unto Him.' *
And once more, ' They say the Merciful hath
gotten offspring. Now have ye done a monstrous
thing ; almost might the very heavens rend thereat,
and the earth rend asunder, and the mountains fall
down in fragments, that they ascribe a son to the
Merciful, when it becometh not the Merciful to beget
a son. Verily there is nobody in the heavens nor in
the earth that shall approach the Merciful but as a
servant.' *
It is certain that the notions conveyed to Moham-
med's mind by the words he so often uses, ' begetting
and begotten,' and which called forth this torrent of
indignant invective, were such as might well do so ;
and such also as he might, under the circumstances,
not unnaturally attribute to Christians. A learned
critic to whom I am much indebted, Dr. G. P. Badger,
points out that the word * Walada ' used by Moham-
med throughout the Sura quoted just now, does neces-
sarily involve notions of sex and of physical pater-
nity ; and it was doubtless against these that Moham-
med hurled his anathemas. On the other hand, Dr.
Badger remarks that the equivalent of this word is
never used in the New Testament to express the
Christian doctrine of the Divine Sonship ; and that
the term * Word of God ' is applied to Christ as much
• Sum ex 11. » Sum XIX. Ul-y4.
MOHAMMED'S VIEWS OF CHRIST. 233
by Mohammed and the Koran as by St. John in his
Gospel. If this can be made evident to Musalmans,
it is clear that one great cause of misconception will
be lessened or removed ; and, even if it cannot, it is
still fair to remember that for centuries the battle of
Ecclesiastical warfare in the East had been raging
round the words which should be used to express the
idea of a relationship which, it is admitted, human
language cannot adequately convey nor human
thought conceive. The followers of the party which
had triumphed at the councils of Ephesus and Chalce-
don, which had made the word Theotokos, for the
time, to be the watchword of mitres and of thrones ; and
had driven the Nestorians, with their rival watchword,
Christotokos, into exile in the remote East, were not
likely to steer clear of the physical questions which
might be involved in the controversy ; and no impar-
tial enquirer will be surprised to hear that in Arabia the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity was believed to be a
Trinity of a Father, a Mother, and a Son ; or that the
Almighty is represented in the Koran as enquiring of
Jesus, the son of Mary, ^ hast thou indeed said unto
men, Take me and my mother for two Gods besides
God ? ' The honours indeed paid to the ^ Mother of
God ' by the party which had triumphed, were little
less than divine ; and Mohammed may therefore be
excused for believing that in rejecting Christianity as
he knew it, he was rejecting Saint- worship and Poly-
theism, as well as the adoration of pictures and of
images.
I have dwelt thus at length upon Mohammed's
views of Christ, partly because of the intrinsic in-
terest and importance attaching to the views held by
234 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
one so great of One so infinitely greater ; partly
because they show how little Mohammed, and in-
deed how little Christians themselves, understood
the real nature of Christianity ; partly also because
the strictures of Mohammed, however exaggerated
and however mistaken, seem to me to suggest a
caution necessary for us all. Christ came to reveal
God, not to hide Him ; to bring Him down to earth,
not to shroud Him in an immeasurable distance ; to
tell us that God is not primarily Justice, or Truth,
or Power, but Love. Do Christians always remem-
ber this ? Are our views of Justification, of Origi-
nal Sin, of a Future Life, when drawn out in the
forensic and almost legal language in which some
Churches foolishly delight to clothe them, always
consistent with it? Do our prayers always pre-
suppose a God who, in His own intrinsic nature, is
anxious to receive them ? Are we not apt to forget
the unity of God, while we doginatise on the Trinity?
Do we not sometimes place Christ as it were in front
of God, thinking so much of the Son who sacrificed
Himself, that we ignore the Father who ^ spared Him
not ; ' forgetting the Giver in the very magnitude of
the gift ?
HL And the third reason, and perhaps the
most important of all, for Mohammed's rejection of
Christianity is the fact that Christianity as he knew
it had been tried and had failed. It had been known
for three hundred years in Arabia, and had not been
able to overthrow, or even weaken, the idolatry of
the inhabitants.
It is strange, with this fact and the whole course
of history before him, with which evidently few are
MOHAMMED'S REJECTION OF CHRISTIANITY. 235
more familiar, that a great writer can conclude a
review of Mohammedanism, which is otherwise fair
and able, by endorsing the charge made against it,
that it has kept back the East by hindering the spread
of Christianity. The charge has been often made
before,^ but it rests on so slender a basis that I should
not have thought it necessary to discuss it here, had
I not found at the last moment that one who is
apparently so high an authority has lent the weight
of his name to it. That I may do him no injustice, I
quote his own words : —
' Mohammed in his own age and country was the
greatest of reformers — a reformer alike religious,
moral, and political But when his
system passed the borders of the land in which it was
so great a reform, it became the greatest of curses to
mankind. The main cause which has made the reli-
gion of Mohammed exercise so blighting an influence
on every land where it has been preached, is because
it is an imperfect system standing in the way of one
more perfect. Islam has in it just enough of good to
hinder the reception of greater good
Because Islam comes nearer to Christianity than any
other false system, because it comes nearer than any
other to satisfying the wants of man's spiritual nature,
for that very reason it is, above all other false systems,
pre-eminently anti-Christian. It is, as it were, the
personal enemy and rival of the Faith, disputing on
equal terms for the same prize ! ' ^
This indictment is so well drawn, at first sight it
so carries conviction with it, and yet, if true, it is so
* As, for instance, by Sir W. Muir, IV. 321.
2 Britiith Quarterly Review, Jan. 1872, p. 132-134.
236 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
fatal to any favourable or any fair judgment of
Mohammedanism, that I am compelled, while I gladly
acknowledge the author's fair and sympathetic treat-
ment of the subject in every page that precedes and
follows those I have quoted, to contest, from my
point of view, as strongly as I can, upon this ques-
tion, alike his facts and his inferences.
Upon what single fact then, either before or after
Mohammed's time, does the writer ground this charge ?
If the purest Christianity of all, preached by Christ
and His Apostles, did not make way in the Eastern
world ; if the few Christian Churches which did exist
among the half Roman or Hellenic inhabitants of
Syria and of Africa had sunk to the condition in which
we know they were when Mohammedanism swept
them away, what reason have we, either a priori or dt
posteriori^ for supposing that the Christianity of any
later time w^ould have been more successful ? Have
Christian nations been so energetic or so successful in
converting any of those African or Asiatic nations
which Mohammedanism has never reached, as to
entitle us to turn round upon the religion which has
re-moulded so large a portion of the human race, and
tell it that it is a curse to humanity because, forsooth,
while we admit it was in its time a grand forward
movement and has been a higher life to untold millions
since, we wish that Fetish worship should have lasted
on perhaps till now, that Christianity may now have
the chance of doing the work somewhat better ? If
this is Christianity, I only say most certainly it is not of
Christ. It is not of the Spirit of Him who said that
those who were not against Him were with Him ; and
rejoiced that good was done by others, even if it seemed
CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF THE WEST. 237
an infringement of His own Divine commission. Christ
was not like the Prsetorian prefect of Tacitus, ^ Co7isiliiy
quamvis egregiiy quod non ipse ajferret inimicusl
though some Christians would have it that He was.
The only monopoly of good that Christianity, if it is
of the spirit of its Founder, may claim, is the monopoly
not of doing good, but of rejoicing at it whenever it
is done, and whoever does it ; of showing, if it carries
out its Founder's intentions, that it is wide enough to
recognise as its own and to embrace within its ample
bosom all honest ' seekers after God,' and all true
benefactors of humanity. The most ^anti-Christian'
religion is not that which comes nearest to Christianity,
but that which is furthest removed from it ; and the
religion which after Christianity comes nearest to
'satisfying the wants of man's spiritual nature' is
really not its most deadly enemy, but its best ally.
To say otherwise, liberal and tolerant as the author
unquestionably is, is to encourage weaker men under
the shadow of his name,* not merely to indulge in the
odium theologicum, but to assert that the odium
theologicum itself is Christian.
' NoQ tali auxilio nee defensoribus istis
Tempus eget,'
Can it be forgotten that the churches planted by
the great Apostle were, without exception, to the west
of Palestine — that star- worship and fire-worship were
unaffected by Christianity then, even as Brahminism
* This has actually been the case, for the passage I have quoted
was the only one in an otherwise most temperate essay upon which
religious periodicals pounced, and, by quoting apart from its context,
fanned the flame of misconception and prejudice which, even when
read with everything which tends the other way, it would, in my
judgment, be likely to kindle.
238 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
and Buddhism, if we regard them broadly, are un-
affected by it now ? Can we point to a single
Oriental nation which has been able to accept and
to retain Christianity in its pure form, or to a single
religion to be named with Mohammedanism in
point of purity and sublimity, which has ever been
able to overthrow any national Oriental faith ? And,
if we cannot, what right have we to say that it is
Islam, and not Nature, that has hitherto stood in the
way of Christianity in Arabia and Persia, in Africa
and India ? The triumphs of the Cross have indeed
been far purer, far wider, far sublimer than those of
the Crescent ; but they have been hitherto confined to
the higher races of the world. Uncivilised nations of
the higher stock, Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals
and Lombards, Franks and Northmen, the Celt, the
Teuton, and the Sclavonian, invaded Christianity only
to be conquered by it. But upon the Oriental bar-
barians of a lower race who invaded Europe, with
the one exception of the Magyars, whose case is
special,* Huns and Avars, Turks and Tartars, it has
' The Magyars, whatever their original home — and it seems that
they were of the Finnish stock — are probably the most mixed race on
the Continent of Europe, and were so even before they settled within
the limits of the present Hungary. In their march towards Europe
they were joined by hosts of Chazars, Bulgarians, and Sclavonians.
During their ravages, which lasted for some fifty years, and spread
from the Oural Mountains to the Pyrenees, they transported women
and children wholesale from the countries they overran to their head-
quarters on the Danulx; ; and it is probable that at the time of their
avowetl conversion by Adalbert, about a.d. lOOU, they luul almost
as much German and Italian as they had Tartar bl«K^ in their veins.
8t. Piligrinus (quoted by Giblmn, VII. 172), the fii>«t raiasionary
who entered Hungary, says that he found the ' majority of the
population to be Christians,' qui rue omni parte mundi illuc tracti
sunt eaptivi.
ISLAM THE RELIGION OF PASTORAL RACES. 239
had no influence. Shall Christians, then, complain
of Mohammedans for having succeeded in some
measure in doing for the East what they have failed
to do ; or would Christ have rejected what good
service Mohammed did because his credentials were
not precisely those of the Apostles ? What super-
ficial appearance of truth there is in the charge is this
— that no Mohammedan nation has hitherto accepted
Christianity, while some nations that were nominally
Christians have accepted Mohammedanism. But to
establish the charge, it would, of course, be necessary
to show that the East, if it had not accepted Moham-
medanism, would have accepted a real Christianity, or
any religion so much like Christianity as Mohamme-
danism unquestionably is ; and to do this we must
read history backwards.
Now Mohammed offered to the Arabs an idea of
God less sympathetic and less loveable, indeed, but
as sublime as the Christian, and perhaps still more
intense, and one, as it turned out, which they could
receive. Christianity was compelled to leave its birth-
place — the inhabitants and subsequent history of
which it has scarcely affected, except indirectly — to
find its proper home in the Western world, among
the inhabitants and progressive civilisation of Greece
and Rome. The lot of Mohammedanism has been
different ; ^ it is the religion of the shepherd and
the nomad, of the burning desert and the boundless
steppe.' So admirably suited was it to the region
in which it was bom, that it needed no foreign air or
change of circumstances to develope it.*
* Compare throughout this paragraph, M. Barth. St. Hilaire,
p. 230 seq. Sir Emerson Tennent, in his ' Christianity in Ceylon,'
240 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
In its simple grandeur it has been able, without
tampering with that which is its Alpha and Omega —
the belief in one God, who reveals Himself by His
prophets — to leave the most essential elements of
national life to the various nations which made up the
Arabian empire ; and to adapt itself to ever^' pecu-
liarity, mental and moral, of the inhabitants of Central
and Western Asia. The rapid intuition and the wild
flights of imagination ; the vivid mental play around
the Antinomies of the reason, and the craving for
the supernatural in the utmost particularity of detail ;
the fervid asceticism of the Dervish, and the mystic
Pantheism of the Sufi, have each found in Islam some-
thing to meet their wants.
But, on the other hand, Mohammedanism has
never passed into countries of a wholly different
nature, and held them permanently. Spain is not a
case in point, though it was never so well governed as
under the Mohammedans ; for the Spaniards them-
selves never to any great extent became Moham-
medan, and the Moorish settlement there was only
lifter pointing out (p. 272, 273) that education must precede direct
missionary efforts, remarks that ' neither history nor more recent
experience can furnish any example of the long retention of pure
Christianity by a people themselves rude and unenlightened. In all
the nations of Europe Christianity has taken the hue and complexion
of the social state with which it was incorporated, presenting itself
unsullied, contaminated, or corrupted in sympathy with the enlighten-
ment, or ignorance, or debasement of those by whom it has been
originally embraced. The rapid and universal degeneracy of the
early Asiatic Churches is associated Avith the decline of education,
and the intellectual decay of the communities among whom they
were eatablished.' Apply these remarks, mutatis mvtandh, to Islam,
and how many of the charges made against it fall at once to the
ground, or fail to hit their mark !
ISLAM IN AFRICA AND SPAIN. 241
like a Greek lirLTuxiaiia or a Roman colonia — an out-
post in the heart of the enemy's country. Much the
same may be said of Turkey, where the majority of
the subject population has always remained Christian.
I cannot, therefore, 'pace tanti nommisl follow Gibbon
in his picture of the probable consequences to Euro-
pean civilisation had Charles Martel been conquered
at Tours ; of Musalman preachers demonstrating to a
circumcised audience, in the mosques of Paris and of
Oxford, the truth of the religion of Mohammed 1
The wave of conquest might have spread over Europe ;
but it would have been but a wave, and few traces
would have been left when it had swept on. In
Africa the case was different ; the Greek colonists
and Roman conquerors — the higher races, in fact —
were driven out by the Saracens, and, ' in their climate
and habits, the wandering Moors who remained behind
already resembled the Bedouins of the Desert.' ^
Mohammedanism is the only form in which the know-
ledge of the true God has ever made way with the
native races of Africa ; and the form of Christianity
which it supplanted in the North — the Christianity
of the Donatists and of the Nitrian monks ; of Cyril,
strangely called a saint ; and of the infamous George
of Cappadocia, still more strangely transformed into
St. George of England, the patron of chivalry and of
the Garter — was infinitely inferior to Mohammedanism
itself.
I fully admit that Mohammedanism, if indeed it
had succeeded in conquering the most civilised races
of the world and the Christianity of the West,
' Gibbon, VI. LI. p. 473.
H 2
242 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
as it succeeded in conquering the Eastern nations
and their various fomis of belief, would have con-
quered something that was potentially better than
itself, and then it would have been what Christian
writers are so fond of calling it — a curse to the world
rather than a blessing. It would have stepped
beyond what I conceive to have been its proper
mission ; but I maintain that it stopped short of this,
and that it destroyed nothing that was not far inferior
to itself.
I should hesitate to say that even its conquest of
Spain was not, while it lasted, a blessing to Spain
itself, and through Spain to the whole of Europe. Has
Spain exhibited more order, more toleration, more
industry, better faith, more material prosperity, under
her most Christian Kings, or under her Ommiade
Khalifs ? The names of the three Abdul Rahmans,
and of Almamun, suggest all that is most glorious in
Spanish history, and much that has conferred benefit
on the rest of Europe in the darkest period of her
annals — religious zeal without religious intolerance,
philosophy and literature, science and art, hospitals,
and libraries, and universities.
Nearly three centuries have elapsed since the
fatuous decree of Philip III. banished from Spain and
from Europe the most enlightened and industrious
portion of his subjects ; yet even now the traveller in
Spain feels as he approaches Andalusia that he is
breathing a clearer atmosphere, that he is brought
into contact with a finer literature, and is contem-
plating a far nobler architecture, than any which the
more northern parts of the Peninsula can boast.
Moorish, not Catholic, is ever}'thing that appeals to
THE MOORS IN SPAIN. 243
his imagination and to his finer feehngs ; Moorish are
the legends and the ballads of the country ; Moorish
are the Alcazar and the Giralda of Seville ; Moorish
everything that is not discordant in the once matchless
Mosque, now the interpolated Cathedral of Cordova ; '
Moorish all the glories of the Alhambra. And
as the traveller passes the hill which is still called,
with such deep pathos, ^the last sigh of the Moor/ he
feels that the day which saw the fall of Granada is a
day over which every Spaniard may well sigh for
what it cost Spain, and every European for what it
cost humanity at large.
Sicily again was conquered by the Arabs and held
by them for two hundred years ; and it was their rule
that gave to the island the only period of prosperity
and good government which it has enjoyed from the
time of the first Punic war till now ; and when at last
the rule of the Fatimite Khalifs was overthrown by
the crusading chieftains of the house of Tancred of
Hauteville, the comparative prosperity which still
smiled on Sicily was due to those Norman princes
who adopted the customs and the manners of the
people they had overthrown ; and some of whom,
like William the Good, are said to have been at least
as much Musalman as Christian.*
In spite, however, of what I maintain it has done
under exceptional circumstances even for European
' When Charles V. saw the havoc that had been wrought by those
who had converted the Mosque into a cathedral, he reproached the
bishop and chapter, saying, • You have built here what you might
have built anywhere else, but you have destroyed what was unique
in the world.'
^ See Deutsch, ' Literary Eemains,' p, 457-160.
244 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
countries, it follows from what I have equally freely
admitted above that Mohammedanism is not a world-
wide rehgion. The sphere of its influence is vast,
but not boundless ; in catholicity of application it is
as much below the purest Christianity as the Semitic
and Turanian nations which have embraced it are
below the Western Indo-Germanic. I say the
Western Indo-Germanic races, for among the Eastern
branches of that great family, the inhabitants of
Persia and of Hindustan, Mohammedanism did estab-
lish itself.
The Persians are of a race and genius widely dif-
ferent from the Arabs ; but the surroundings and the
general mode of life are the same in each, and the
exception, so far as it is an exception, to the rule I
have laid down, tends rather, in its results, to prove
its general truth, for the hold of Mohammedanism on
them has been much modified by the difference of
race. The religion which proclaimed the absolute
supremacy of God was no doubt an infinite advance
upon the ^chilhng equipoise' of good and evil to which
the creed of Zoroaster had at that time sunk.' Nor
was the national existence of Persia stamped out, as
has been often said, by the Khalifs ; for the Persian
province of Khorasan was itself strong enough to
place the Abbasside Khalifs on the throne of Bag-
dad ; the Persian dynasties of the Samanides and
Dilemites gave to the nation a new lease of life, and a
wholly new national literature ; and it is to a Moham-
medan Sultan of the Turkish race that Persia owes
her greatest literary glory, her national epic, the
• Sec Elpliinstonc's * India,' V. I. 818.
ISLAM IN PERSIA AND INDIA. 245
'Shahnameh' of Firdausi. Still it cannot be said that
the religion proved itself altogether suited to the
people. In other countries the scymitar had no sooner
been drawn from its scabbard than it was sheathed
again. But in Persia the scymitar had not only to
clear the way, but for some time afterwards to main-
tain the new religion.^ The Persians corrupted its
simplicity with fables and with miracles ; they actually
imported into it something of saint-worship, and
something of sacerdotalism ; and, consequently, in no
nation in the Mohammedan world has the religion
less hold on the people as a restraining power. The
most stringent principles of the Koran are set at
nought ; beng and opium are common ; . the Ketman,
or religious equivocation, is held to be as allowable
as it has been by the Casuists or the Jesuits ; and the
nation which Herodotus tells us devoted a third of
its whole educational curriculum to learning to speak
the truth, now contains hardly an individual who will
speak the truth unless he has something to gain
by it.
In Hindustan, amidst the other branch of the great
Aryan race which did not move westward, Moham-
medanism has obtained finally a very strong footing ;
but it was slow in winning its way.; and the forty
millions of Musalmans over whom we rule — and a
tremendous and but half-recognised responsibility it
is^ — devout as they are, have become so by long
1 See Sir John Malcolm's ' History of Persia,' I. VIII. ]>. 277, &c.
* Since this was written, the grievances of Mohammedans in India,
so ably and temperately stated by Mr. Hunter, have been in part
alleviated by the adoption of some of the remedies he suggests, at
least as far as regards education.
246 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
lapse of time, by social influences, and by intermixture
with conquering Arabs, Gheznevides, and Afghans,
rather than by the sudden fervour of religious enthu-
siasm.^ The reverence paid to saints and their tombs,
which has, in defiance of the letter of the Koran and
the traditions, crept into so many parts of the Musal-
man world, is, as was to be expected, more noticeable in
Persia and in India than elsewhere. The festival of the
Moharram, commemorating the martyrdom of Hassan
and Hosein, sons of Ali, and observed in Persia with
such passionate indications of grief, is celebrated with
hardly less solemnity in India also, and resembles in
many particulars the Mysteries and the Miracle-Plays
of the Middle Ages. Islam has in the course of
centuries and by long contact with Hindu idolatry
naturally made many compromises with it. Some of
the Musalman saints are reverenced by the Hindus
as well as by the Musalmans ; and these last have in
their turn accommodated the accessories of their
Pilgrimages, of their Fasts, and their Feasts, to the
tastes of the Hindus ; to a religion, that is, which
speaks more to the senses than to the reason, to the
imagination than to the soul.*
' Elphinstone, V. I. 314, and Cap. III. on the Reign of the Sultan
Mahmud.
* See the interesting memoir appended by M. Gargin de Tassy to
his • Islamisme,' on the peculiarities of the Musalman religion in India,
p. 289-408, especially p. 290. I am indebtwl to the courtesy of the
Rev. T. P. Hughes, missionary at Peshawur, for some valuable 'Notes
on Mohamme<lanism,' in which he describes the ceremonies and the
formalities which unhappily now form so large a part of the religion
in India and elsewlicre, ami throws some light on the nature of the
Wahhabi revival— an obscure subject, on which he has Ixicn able to
obtain information from very original sources. It is worth remarking
COMPROMISES OF ISLAM AND HINDUISM. 247
Those who have followed me thus far will perceive
that my main object in writing these Lectures has
been, if possible, to render some measure of that
justice to Mohammed and to his religion which has
been all too long, and is still all too generally, denied
to them. I have naturally, therefore, been led to dwell
rather on the points in which Mohammedanism
resembles Christianity than on the points in which it
differs, and 1 have been led, also, to some extent, to
compare the persons of their respective Founders. It
is not possible to avoid this. Of the Founder of
Christianity I have necessarily spoken only under
that aspect of His character which Muslim as well
as Christian, friend as well as foe, will perforce allow
Him ; and in which alone, by the nature of the case.
He can be compared with any other Founder at all.
In like manner, in comparing the two Creeds, I have
insisted mainly on the points in which they approxi-
mate to each other ; and to do this is more necessary,
more just, and, I venture to think, more Christian,
than to do the opposite.
But if, in order to prevent misconception, the two
Creeds must necessarily be contrasted rather than
compared, nothing that I have said, or am going to
say, will prevent my admitting fully — what, indeed,
is apparent upon the face of it — that the contrasts are
at least as striking as the resemblances.
The religion of Christ contains whole fields of
morality and whole realms of thought which are all
but outside the religion of Mohammed. It opens
that in India the schism between Sunuis and Shiahs is not nearly so
marked as in other parts of the Mohammedan world. They both
join, for instance, in the Moharram.
248 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
iiumility, purity of heart, forgiveness of injuries, sacri-
fice of self to man's moral nature ; it gives scope for
toleration, development, boundless progress to his
mind ; its motive power is stronger, even as a friend
is better than a king, and love higher than obedience.
Its realised ideals in the various paths of human
greatness have been more commanding, more many-
sided, more holy, as Averroes is below Newton,
Harun below Alfred, and Ali below St. Paul. Finally,
the ideal life of all is far more elevating, far more
majestic, far more inspiring, even as the life of the
founder of Mohammedanism is below the life of the
Founder of Christianity.
And when I speak of the ideal life of Moham-
medanism I must not be misunderstood. There is in
Mohammedanism no ideal life in the true sense of
the word, for Mohammed's character was admitted
by himself to be a weak and erring one. It was
disfigured by at least one huge moral blemish ; and
exactly in so far as his life has, in spite of his earnest
and reiterated protestations, been made an example
to be followed, has that vice been perpetuated. But
in Christianity the case is different. The words,
* Which of you convinceth me of sin ? ' forced from
the mouth of Him who was meek and lowly of
heart, by the wickedness of those who, priding them-
selves on being Abraham's children, never did the
works of Abraham, are a definite challenge to the
world. That challenge has been for nineteen cen-
turies before the eyes of unfriendly, as well as of
believing, readers, and it has never yet been fairly
met ; and at this moment, by the confession of friend
and foe alike, the character of Jesus of Nazareth
CONTRAST BETWEEN MOHAMMED AND CHRIST. 249
stands alone in its spotless purity and its unapproach-
able majesty. We have each of us probably at some
period of our lives tried hard to penetrate to the
inmost meaning of some one of Christ's short and
weighty utterances —
' Those jewels, five words long,
Which on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever.'
But is there one of us who can say there is no more
behind ? Is there one thoughtful person among us
who has ever studied the character of Christ, and has
not, in spite of ever-recurring difficulties and doubts,
once and again, burst into the centurion's exclama-
tion, ^ Truly this was the Son of God ' ?
Nor are the methods of drawing near to God the
same in the two religions. The Musalman gains a
knowledge of God — he can hardly be said to approach
Him — by listening to the lofty message of God's
Prophet. The Christian believes that he approaches
God by a process which, however difficult it may be
to define, yet has had a real meaning to Christ's ser-
vants, and has embodied itself in countless types of
Christian character — that mysterious something which
St. Paul calls a ^ union with Christ.' ^ Ye are dead,
and your life is hid with Christ in God.'
But this unmistakeable superiority does not shake
my position that Mohammedanism is, after all, an
approach to Christianity, and perhaps the nearest
approach to it which the unprogressive part of
humanity can ever attain in masses; and yet how
large a part of the whole human race are unpro-
gressive ! Whatever we may wish, and however
current conversation and literature may assert the
250 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
contrary, progress is the exception, and not the rule,
with mankind. The whole Eastern world, with very-
few exceptions, has been hitherto, and is still, sta-
tionary, not progressive. What Oriental society is now,
it was in the time of Solomon — I might say, in the
time of Abraham. Even those nations which, like
the Chinese, have considerable powers of invention
and mechanical skill, reach a certain height rapidly,
and then stop short.^
Accepting, then, the non-progressiveness of a large
part of the human race, when left to themselves, as a
fact, cannot we estimate other religions, not by our
conception of what we want, but by their bearing on
the life of those whom they affect, ennobling them
so far as the other conditions of their existence may
render possible ?
We are apt to forget that there are two factors to
be considered in testing the value of a religion in any
given case, the Creed itself and the people who
receive it. There are of course good and bad men,
and these of every degree of goodness and badness,
to be found professing every Creed, but the average
morality of the followers of an imperfect Creed may,
in this very imperfect world, be better than the
average morality of those who profess a higher one,
' 1 specify China ; for I ainnot accept the chants relietl upon by
Dr. Hritlges, in his very able essay on China, in * International
Policy,' as being evidence of continuous and progressive change,
which is the real point at issue. Of coui-se this in no way affects the
more im|)ortant que-«tions treated of in the essay, the moral elevation
of which seems to me almost unequalled in the writings even of
those who, like the contributors to the volume referred to, and the
followers of Auguste Comte generally, have laboured most earnestly
to treat all political questions from a moral standpoint.
RELATIVE STANDARD THE ONLY TRUE ONE. 251
and of course vice versa. TrdvTojv fiirpov avOpojirog,
Judged, then, by this relative standard — which is, as
I conceive, the only true one — Mohammedanism has
nothing to lose, and much to gain, by the keenest
criticism.^ I grant to the full everything that can be
said by travellers such as Burckhardt, and Burton,
and Palgrave, upon the degradation of the mass of
the Bedouins and the Turks, and the want of all
vital rehgion, sometimes of the very elements of
religion, among them. And no one will deny there
is much indeed in the present state of the whole
Mohammedan world to make every thoughtful person,
Musalman as well as Christian, ask himself with the
^ Abyssinia is a case in point for those who think that a religion,
because it is better and purer in itself, is necessarily better than all
other religions, wherever and whenever and in whatever degree of
purity it may be found. Abyssinia has been nominally Christian
since very early times, and yet it would puzzle the greatest enemy of
Islam to name a single particular in which the inhabitants are
superior to their Musalman neighbours. In the matter, for instance,
of marriage and divorce see the following quotation from Bruce 's
' Abyssinia.' IV. p. 487 : — ' There is no such thing as marriage in
Abyssinia, unless that is to be called so which is contracted by
mutual consent without other form, and subsists only till dissolved
by the dissent of one or other, to be renewed, however, or repeated
as often as it is agreeable to both parties ; for when they please, they
live together again as man and wife, after having been divorced, had
children by others, or whether they have had children by others or
not. I remember once to have been at Koscam in presence of the
Itighe (or Queen), when in the circle there was a woman of gi'eat
quality, and seven men, who had all been her husbands, but none of
whom was the happy spouse at that time.' See also a vigorous
description of the barbarism and superstitions of the Abyssinian
Church in Dean Stanley's 'Eastern Church,' p. 10-12. Spain may
suggest thoughts similar to those suggested by Abyssinia, and equally
applicable to the question in hand, which is indeed one of the main
questions of my Lectures.
252 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
prophet of old, whether what seem to be dry bones
can live.
As regards the faith itself, schisms more numerous
even than the seventy-three which the Prophet him-
self predicted, have sprung up from a very early
period in Islam ; and, while they have doubtless con-
tributed to keep up a spirit of free enquiry and of
intellectual energy, which the simplicity of a creed
that ' can be written on a finger-nail ' has often been
supposed to suppress, they have turned chiefly upon
questions which have been still more unintelligible or
devoid of practical results, and have been fought out
with passions even fiercer than those which have pre-
vailed in Christendom. Questions as to the proper
successor of the Prophet, resulting first in the great
Shiah schism, and afterwards in the belief among
many Persian sects in the incarnation of God in Ali,
and the Imams ; questions as to the precise nature of
the Divine attributes, the upshot of which has now
been something resembling the dualism of the ancient
fire-worshippers, now the mystic pantheism of the
Sufis, and now again the strange amalgam of doctrines
which is to be found among the Druses, the Rosheinias
or the Yezidis. The predestinarian expressions of
Mohammed, harmonising, as they did, better than
his equally strong assertion of free-will, with the
natural quietism of the East, have degenerated into
a fatalism which tends to sap the springs of human
energ}^ in those countries where energ}' is now most
required, and have made men look upon a famine,
a pestilence, or a tyrant, as an inevitable dispensation
of destiny, to be patiently submitted to, not to be
grappled with and overcome.
STAINS ON THE PROPHETS CHARACTER. 253
The few stains which, making every allowance for
his manifold temptations and for the times in which
he lived, a Christian must yet always consider to be
stains on the grand character of the Prophet, have
been fatally improved on by the Eastern dynasties
which own his sway. The assassinations at which the
Prophet once or twice connived, and the indulgence
which he claimed in the observance of the Harem
laws which he had himself made, have been prominent
features in the history of those who have called them-
selves his successors in the Khalifate, and of less
conspicuous Musalman rulers. The murder of the
nearest relations by a sovereign on his accession to
the throne, as the best means of securing his title to
it, has been a common occurrence ; and, though the
Ottoman Sultans might justly have retorted upon
Lord Bacon, who points one of his most brilliant
apophthegms by an allusion to it, that they were only
imitating the example of many of the Christian Caesars
who had preceded them, there is no doubt that the
horrible practice has been raised by them in times
past almost to the dignity of a maxim of Imperial
policy. The human body and human life itself have
rarely in the East been invested with that sanctity
with which Christianity alone of Eastern-bom reli-
gions regards them. With the example before them
of One who was solicitous for the happiness and the
lives of all around Him, and prodigal only of His own
— with the belief, too, that the human body is not the
prison but the temple of the soul, and of something
holier even than the soul, shame indeed would it be
to Christians if the respect for human life were not
greater, the average standard of personal purity far
254 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
higher, and the enthusiasm of humanity more deep
and lasting, than in the average of the followers of
other Creeds. Unfortunately it has not been always
so; and the dealings of the Holy Father and the
Holy Office with suspected heretics, of the Spaniards
with the Indians of America, of the Portuguese and
the Dutch with the East Indian islanders, of the
French with the Arabs of Algeria, of the English,
under the rule of the East India Company, with the
Hindus, and of all the Christian nations, who in
bygone times have had the chance, with the down-
trodden Negroes of Africa, will hold their own in the
hideous race of cruelty and oppression with the worst
deeds of Orientals ; but in the absolute recklessness
of human life which has marked Eastern wars, and
in the barbarous nature of the punishments inflicted
by Eastern rulers, it cannot be said that Musal-
man nations have fallen far behind the Tartars
or the Chinese.' Again, the death-bed commands
of Musalman princes have rarely breathed forgiveness
of their enemies ; they have resembled the last in-
junctions of the aged David to his son Solomon —
surely one of the darkest pages in his history — or the
reckless revenge of the younger Marius when he saw
that his fate was sealed, rather than the ' Father, for-
' VamWry ('Central Asia/ p. 139), after describinj^ a horrible
execution of prisoners by the Khan of Khiva, remarks, ' Such treat-
ment is indeed horrible, but it is not to be regaitied as an exceptional
case. In Khiva, as well as in the whole of Central Asia, wanton
cruelty is unknown ; the whole proceetling is regartlcd a.s perfectly
natural, and usaf^, law, and religion, all acconl in sanctioning it.'
The wortl * religion ' can only be undeixtcxxi here in a sense which
excludes the Koran and the Tra<litions— all the documents, in fact,
on which the Religion rests.
CHRISTIANS AND MUSALAIANS CONTRASTED. 255
give them/ of the Founder of Christianity ; that
prayer which has done something to temper the
violence and sheath the swords of so many semi-
Christian conquerors or rulers, and has filled the souls
of so many Christian saints and martyrs.
Women, again, in spite of the beneficent legislation
of the Prophet — the nature of which it has been one
of my objects as clearly as possible to bring out —
have rarely exercised in the East the humanising, the
elevating, the spiritualising influence on husbands,
fathers, or sons, which it is their glory to have exer-
cised again and again in Christendom, and that even
through its darkest ages. The life of the Harem, so
far as its influence has extended, is not a life in which
any of the finer qualities of the human soul, still less
love itself in any sense of the word which entitles it
to be so called, naturally thrive. Triviality, selfish-
ness, heart-burnings, deadly hatreds, if nothing worse,
are the weeds which must, in the nature of things, as
soon as society has passed beyond its earlier stages,
find in it a congenial soil.
The professed teachers of the people, again,
whether theologians or legists — Muftis and Mullas,
Kadis and Imams — have sometimes, on the one hand,
claimed powers which Islam itself never gave them ;
and on the other, have all too often been without those
fundamental qualities of zeal for learning, of justice,
and of humanity, which should alone entitle them to
the offices they hold.^ As to the practical religion of
the masses in the towns — more especially those towns
which have received a whitewash of European civili-
' Cf. the anticipation of the Prophet himself, quoted below,
p. 314.
256 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
sation — it is not so much what its Founder intended it
to be, a brotherly affection, at all events, within the
ranks of the faithful, the relief of the orphan and the
oppressed, the practice of sobriety, truthfulness, and
liospitality, but, as has so often been the case in the
histor}^ of Christendom, a frigid round of traditional
observances, fastings for fasting's sake, and prayers
consisting of a mechanical enumeration of the Divine
attributes many times repeated, and accompanied by
a childish ceremonial.' An Arab will often say the
Bismillah when he is meditating an atrocious crime ;
just as * the Most Christian king ' would be most par-
ticular in his religious observances when he was per-
petrating his worst deeds ; the whole resulting, very
often, in as complete a separation between religion
and morality as was the case in Christendom, for
instance, in the age of Leo X. at Rome, of Charles II.
in England, or of Louis XV. in France.
^ Nor, at first sight, is the prospect more bright
politically than it is in its social and its strictly re-
ligious aspects. ^ When the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the kings bear rule by their means,' what wonder
that the Khalifate of the faithful Abu Bekr, the in-
trepid Omar, the saintly Ali, has degenerated into
the self-seeking and short-sighted rule of the Sultan
or the Shah ? It has been said, not without exagge-
ration, but still not without some truth, that most of
the countries ruled by Musalman princes are deserts,
or tend to become so. Towns have dwindled into
villages, and whole villages have often disappeared.
Fields lying un tilled and mines un worked, justice
' See Hughes, Notes, p. 63-75.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PROSPECTS. 25?
polluted at its source, excessive taxation and arbitrary
punishments — such are some of the features which
belong to the decadence of a once Imperial race, and
which we are apt to attribute to the decadence of
a religion. Meanwhile Christian nations, propelled
partly by ambition, partly by a blundering philan-
thropy, partly by the mere pressure of events, are
threatening to absorb large portions of the Musalman
world, and are putting the bit and bridle for the first
time in their history on the wildest and most fanatical
•of the followers of the Prophet who have roamed for
ages over the barren steppes of Central Asia, Kirghis
and Khivese, Uzbeks and Turkomans. The Caucasus,
again, has since the lamentable Circassian Exodus,
ceased to be Mohammedan, and become Christian,
if, indeed, a solitude can ever be so called. Algiers
belongs, by military occupation at least, to France ;
and Cairo under the rule of the Khedive is rapidly
becoming, for good or evil, a second Paris, and is
taking kindly to all the vices of the West.
How, then, it may be asked again, can these dry
bones live ? why busy ourselves about a dead creed,
or trouble about that against which, as it may seem,
has already gone forth the sentence of God and of
the big battalions ?
But look once more a little closer and see if this
is really so ; or if all the facts correspond to the super-
ficial appearances. I alluded in my First Lecture to
the claims which the marvellous history of Islam, its
achievements in centuries and on continents other
than ours, the intimate relations in which we must
stand to it now, the proselytising enthusiasm it still
exhibits, and the unmeasured influence it may yet
I
258 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
exert on the virgin soil of Africa ^ or among the teem-
ing millions of India, have at once upon our attention,
our sympathy, and our respect ; but it may be well —
now that I have, in order to prevent misconstruction,
set forth, in spite of myself, the worst that can be
said with any approach to fairness of Musalman coun-
tries at the present day — to call renewed attention to
those claims, and thereby at once to appraise the
evils mentioned at their proper value, and to point
out the grounds of hope for the future.
And, first, it should be remembered that to say
that a religion is stationary, and presents an obstacle
to the progress and the innovations and the restless
struggles which are the life of the West, is no reproach
at all in the eyes of a people that is itself stationary
and unprogressive. It is precisely this that has
enabled it to take such deep hold of all the nations
that have accepted it, and to intertwine itself with all
their thoughts and feelings. 'A Musalman first and
a Turk, an Afghan or an Arab afterwards,' is no mere
formula or figure of speech with that vast assemblage
of peoples and of tongues to whom the Prophet of
Arabia, by teaching them to worship the one true
God, has given a bond of union stronger than any tie
of blood or nation ; and that, by means which were
nobler and with objects that were higher than those
with which Papal Rome is striving, in these latter days,
to implant a similar feeling in the Catholic. Sublime
and Eternal and Unchangeable as its God, Islam
appears to its votaries a religion worthy at once of
* ♦ In Cairo and Constantinople Islam may api)ear to be decaying,
hut in the heart of Africa it is young, vigorous, victorious as in the
early days.' — Winwooil Readers • African Sketch-book,' p. 315.
ISLAM SUITED TO STATIONARY RACES. 259
the worshipper and of the B^ing that he worships ;
and is it for us to say that it is not so ?
Secondly, it must be borne in mind that Musal-
man countries and Musalmans themselves, whether
stationary or progressive, whether elevated or de-
graded, are not Islam itself, any mare than Christen-
dom and Christians are Christianity. The Faith is
something infinitely greater than even its greatest
and worthiest votaries ; else it would not be a living
Faith at all. The best cure for the evils of Christen-
dom is Christianity ; and the cure for many, at least,
of the evils in Musalman countries now, which, if not
ideally the best, is yet the most natural, the most
ready to hand, and the most likely to be efficacious,
is not, perhaps, Islam itself, yet something so nearly
akin to Islam that it can confidently appeal to its
most authoritative documents in its support.
Thirdly, as to the desolation of countries which
were once flourishing, the question has never, so far
as I know, been fairly raised how much of it is, even
at this distance of time, the direct consequence of the
wholesale havoc and destruction wrought by the
successive inroads of the Mongols and Tartars who
followed Chenghis, or Octai, or Kublai Khan.^ What-
^ For the devastations of Chenghis Khan see Ibn Batuta, p. 87
seq. : — 'He came with the Tartars into the countries of Islam, and
destroyed them.' ' He left the country quite desolate, destroying the
cities, and slaughtering the inhabitants.' * In Irak alone 24,000
learned men were put to the sword' (p. 89). Balkh still lay in ruins,
' not having been rebuilt since its destruction by the cursed Chenghis
Khan ' (p. 93). Cf . also the terrible illustrations collected by Col.
Yule, in his edition of Marco Polo, I. 256-257, Marshman (' History
of India,' I. 49) says: 'From the Caspian to the Indus, more than
1,000 miles in extent, the whole country was laid waste witli fire and
sword by the ruthless barbarians who followed Chenghis Khan. It
■260 MOHAMMED AND MOHAM M IIDAMSM.
ever the answer to such an enquiry might be, Asia
would not be the only part of the globe in which
devastations far less than theirs would seem in very
truth to have sown the land with salt and to have
rendered it incapable of revivification. Has Sicily,
in spite of all its changes of rulers, ands its incom-
parable advantages of air and soil, ever recovered
from the havoc wrought in it by the first Punic War ?
Fourth and lastly, the same travellers who give
us so gloomy a picture of the condition of the
Ottoman Empire are careful to point out that that
condition is, in great part, the result of the misgovern-
ment and the corruption of a clique ; of elements, in
fact, which in great measure have intruded into Islam
and are not of it, and is in no respect the result of the
religion.^ On the contrary, it is that religion which
was the greatest calamity which had befallen the human race since
the Deluge, and five centuiies have been barely sufficient to repair
that desolation.'
• See 'Quarterly Review' for October, 1874: Art. 'Provincial
Turkey ;' Admiral Slade's * Turkey, Greece, and Malta,' I. 298 seq.,
318 seq. ; Urquhart's * Spirit of the East;' and Palgrave's * Eastern
Essays,' j9a«*///i. Admiral Slade says : 'If people were only to take
the trouble to enquire into the state of the Mosque, their voices would
be hushed ; for they would see in the Mosque the healer of the sores
caused by the worst of governments ; they would find libraries, and
schools, and haspitals for the insane on the foundation of the Mosque ;
they would see well-cultivated estates belonging to it, and would learn
that through its agency a man may secure a provision for his wife or
daughter after his death. . . . Not one of the reasons ordinarily urged
against a Church establishment — tithe, ministere of religion chosen
from particular classes, monastic seclusion, celibacy — is applicable to
the Mosque.' So, too, Mouradgiad'Ohsou, a high authority, quoted in
* East and West,' p. 185, says : ' Tous les maux politiques qui affligent
les pcuplcH MuKsalraans devinrent de leurs pr^jugt^s, de leurs fausses
opinions, les vices dc gouvernement, mais non des vraies principcs de
In religion et de la loi.'
VITALITY OF MOHAMMEDANISM. 261
alone gives stability to the tottering fabric, and is the
one principle of life amidst all the jarring elements of
destruction. It is the religion which merges all
colours, ranks, and races in the consciousness of a
common brotherhood.^ It is the religion which
elevates the mind by drawing it from the Transitory
to the Eternal, and which gives to the half-starved
or ill-used peasant that courage in calamity, that calm
amidst confusion, and that ineffable dignity in distress,
which is found nowhere but in Islam. Without a
Khalif, without a hierarchy, without good schools or
teachers, the peasants of Asia Minor still cling to
their creed as firmly as ever, and what is more im-
portant, to the practical duties enjoined by it. No-
where in the world — so I heard it stated at a meeting
in London the other day for the relief of the Turkish
famine, by traveller after traveller who knew the
country well — is there more hospitality to strangers,
greater self-respect, more personal cleanliness, greater
temperance, freer toleration, than amongst them. The
one building well cared for everywhere, well built,
well white- washed, well swept, is the village Mosque.
The houses of the peasantry may be mere hovels
falling into decay for lack of the means to build
them up, but each Mosque possesses the niche which
' ' Among Mohammedans there is much kindly feeling ; their
religion knits them as it were into a general fraternity, in which every
member, rich or poor, is, though a stranger, affectionately received.
Much of this charitable disposition is no doubt to be traced to those
causes which make the inhabitants of thinly-peopled districts so
generally hospitable : more, however, is attributable to the precepts of
the Koran, nor are the followers of Mohammed exclusive in their
benevolence, for all strangers share their charities.' — Wood's ' Oxus,'
p. 93.
262 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
points towards the holy place, and five times a day-
does each peasant, at the summons of the village
Muezzin, pour forth his heart to God, not so much in
petitions for relief of his pressing temporal necessities
— for this, be it remembered, is not the characteristic
of Musalman prayer ^ — but rather in a meditation on
the power and the majesty, the wisdom and the mercy
of God.
Does all this look much like decadence in their
religion ? And even if every item of the accusation
detailed above be true, and no account be taken of
the considerations which, as I have endeavoured to
indicate in the enumeration itself, may be urged in
explanation or extenuation of many of them, I still
ask whether the state of the Mohammedan world, as
• The notion of the duty of submission to God's will, whatever it
may be, is perhaps stronger among Muslims than among Christians :
on the other hand, the idea of a filial relation on the part of the
worshipper to the Being whom he worships, which enables a man
to lay all his wants before God as before a father, is almo^t wanting
in Islam ; and hence the distinguishing characteristics of Musalman
and Christian prayer. The ordinary form of pmyer among the Muslims
is as follows: —
Holiness to Thee, God !
And praise be to Thee !
Gi-eat is Thy Name !
Great is Thy greatness !
There is no God but Thee !
Then comes the Fatihah, or first chapter of the Koi-an :
Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds !
The compassionate, the merciful,
King on tlie day of reckoning 1
Thee only do we worehip,and to Thee do we cry fi>r help.
Guide Thou us in the straight path :
The path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious ;
With whom Thou art not angrj',
And who go not astray. Amen.
CHRISTIANITY AND MOHAMMEDANISM 263
a whole, is worse, in proportion to its light, than has
been that of Christendom in many stages of its
history, and which it has yet passed safely through ?
Is it half as bad, for instance, as the age when Brune-
haut and Fredegonde ruled the Franks ; as the age
when Theodora and Marosia dispensed the patronage
of the Church from the Vatican ; or as the age when,
at length, the cup of iniquity of Papal Rome was full,
and a Luther was born ! To take an instance nearer
home, has religion less hold upon the Arabs than it
had upon the English throughout the last century, till
the evangelical revival of Wesley and Whitefield
roused it from its sleep ? Has it less hold even upon
the ' Frenchmen of the East,' eis the Persians have
been called — liars, drunkards, profligate though they
are — than it has at this moment upon the Frenchmen
of the West ? What account do travellers in Russia
give us of the state of religion among the masses
there ? And what judgment must pious Mohamme-
dans form of Christianity, if their knowledge of it is
confined to the average lives of Europeans who pro-
fess it ?
To say that gross abuses have crept into Moham-
medanism — that the lives of many, or even of the
majority, who profess it are a disgrace to their name —
is only to say that it is not exempt from the common
conditions of humanity.
Take one instance drawn from the history of the
Christian Church. Christianity was in its origin and
in its essence a creed entirely spiritual ; but Christians,
forming, as they did, a new human society, were
allowed by their Founder to symbolise this close
union, and to bring it home more vividly to them-
264 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
selves and to the world, by two external rites. The
mere fact that they were external, in a religion which
was otherw^ise a matter of the heart, ought to have
put men on their guard, lest they should assume in
time a too prominent place ; lest what was accidental,
and secondary, and relative, should dominate over
what was absolute, and primary, and eternal. Baptism
w^as of considerable importance in the infancy of the
Church, for it was a pledge of fidelity consciously and
voluntarily given by a new recruit, in the face of the
enemy, to a cause whose victories were yet in the
future. It was, as it were, the uniform assumed by
the small army which at its Master's bidding went
forth against the world. The Love-feast also was of
special importance among the earliest Christians, as
a constant reminder that those who had taken upon
themselves the commission of the Cross, that crown-
ing act of love, were bound to one another by the
same enthusiasm of love which bound them to their
common Master. Both did good service then, and in
the history of the Christian Church have done good
service since, in so far as they have acted upon the
heart, and thence upon the conduct, through the
medium of a very powerful appeal to the religious
imagination. But in so far as any mysterious or
supernatural efficacy has been attached to the form
of either, they have sapped the root of Christianity.
They have done for Christianity what of good, no
doubt, Mohammed thought, and, half rightly, half
"WTongly, thought, that pilgrimages to the holy places
might do for Mohammedanism. Both were so far
concessions to human weakness that they introduced
formal, or even material, conceptions into a spiritual
PERVERSIONS AND CORRUPTIONS. 265
religion ; both, in fact, were capable of being used to
advantage ; and experience has proved that they were
both alike liable to the same kind of abuse.
Every human institution, therefore — religion itself,
so far as man can affect it — is exposed to inevitable
decay ; and the purer the religion, the more inevitable
the degradation which contact with the world, which
is not of it, nmst bring. ^ Accordingly, a religion which
is not waiting for a revival is waiting only till it be
swept away.
But, on the other hand, we must not judge of a
religion by its perversions or corruptions ; and it is as
fair to take Turkish despots, and maniac dervishes,
and Persian libertines, as types of the Mohammedan
life, as it would be to take Anabaptists, or Pillar Saints,
or Shakers, as types of the Christian life. Most of
the well-known vices of our Mohammedan fellow-
subjects in India are Indian vices, and not Moham-
medan. Professor Max Miiller has remarked with
truth, that without constant reformation — that is to
say, without a constant retu rn to the fountain head —
every religion, however pure, must gradually degen-
erate. Christianity has always reformed itself, and
will to the end of time continue to reform itself, by
going back to the words and to the life of Christ. It
is a maxim of the Buddhists that Svhat has been
said by Buddha, that alone is well said;"^ and
it is currently believed that Mohammedanism is dying
out because it has no such power of revival. But the
very reverse of this is, rather, true. The Prophet him-
self must have foreseen the need there would be for a
' Max Miiller, • Chips,' Preface, p. 23.
^ Quoted by Max Miiller, loc. cit. p. 23.
266 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
reformer when he so sorrowfully remarked to Abu
Taleb, * The time is near in which nothing will remain
of Islam but its name, and of the Koran but its mere
appearance ; and the mosques of Musalmans will be
destitute of knowledge and worship, and the learned
men will be the worst people under the heavens, and
contentions and strife will issue from them, and it will
return upon themselves ;' but he also confidently hoped
that when the time was ripe for it, a reformer w^ould be
found. 'Certainly,' he said to Abu Hurairah, 'cer-
tainly, God will send my sect at the expiration of
ever)^ hundred years a person who will renew my
religion.' ' Probably no religion has produced, in the
various parts of its vast empire, a more continuous
succession of reformers whose aim has been to bring
it back, by fair means if possible, and, if not, by
force, to its original simplicity and purity.'^ Such
was one object, how^ever wildly they set about it, of
the Carmathians in the ninth century ; and, to select
one amongst many individual reformers, such was the
career of Abdul Wahhab, the son of a petty Arabian
sheik, a hundred and fifty years ago. The facts I
take almost verbatim from an interesting and able
essay on ' Our Indian Mussulmans,' by Dr. Hunter.*
Beginning with a moral attack upon the profligacy
of the Turkish pilgrims and the mummeries which
profaned the holy cities, Abdul Wahhab gradually
» * Mishkat-ul-Masabih; 11., III., 68, and II. II., iV2.
' Sec Dollinger, p. 42-49, for an enumemtion of attempted re-
formern throuj^hout the history of Islam. He hardly does justice to
some of them.
* See Hunter, p. r>.">-60 ; and for a further account of the Arab
movement, see Burckhardt's ' Notes on the Bedouins and Wahhabis.'
THE WAHHABIS. 267
elaborated a theological system which is substantially
identical with the original creed of Mohammed. He
taught, first, absolute reliance on one God, and the
rejection of all mediators between man and God,
whether saints or Mohammed himself; second, the
right of private interpretation of the Koran and of
the Traditions ; third, the prohibition of all forms and
ceremonies with which the pure faith has been over-
laid in the lapse of centuries ; finally — and this is the
only part to be regretted in the movement — he reas-
serted the obligation to wage war upon the infidel.
In 1803 Wahhab's successors took the holy cities, and
desecrated the sacred mosque at Mecca and the
Prophet's tomb at Medina, to save them from the
greater desecration, as it seemed to those Puritans of
the Desert, involved in the almost Divine honours
lavished on them by ignorant or profligate pilgrims.
Here was an act upon the significance of which
we may well dwell for a moment, and endeavour, by
comparing it with somewhat parallel and better-
known cases, to realise what it must have seemed like
then, and what it proves about Mohammedanism
now. Imagine the feelings of pious Jews when their
most religious king broke into pieces the relic of
relics, the memorial of the Divine deliverance and of
their desert life, and stigmatised it as a bit of brass !
Imagine, if you can, the feelings of the Apostles when
it dawned upon them that one of their number, even
then, was a traitor in his heart ! Imagine, to take a
parallel case suggested by Dr. Hunter,^ Mediaeval
Christendom, when the news spread that Bourbon's
cut-throats were installed in the Vatican, and that the
' Hunter, p. 59,
268 .VO HAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
head of the Christian Church had been taken captive
by a revolted subject of the Church's eldest son !
Imagine Luther, when in the fervour of youthful
enthusiasm he visited the Rome of the Martyrs and
of the Apostles, and found it to be the Rome of the
Papacy, the Rome of impostures and indulgences, of
the Borgias and the Medici ! And we can then
picture to ourselves the thrill of horror that must
have passed through the orthodox Musalman world
when they heard that a sect of reformers, whose one
idea of reform was a return to the life and doctrine
of the Prophet, had rifled the mosque whose imme-
morial sanctity the Prophet had himself increased
by making it the Kiblah of the world, and had
even violated the Prophet's tomb. Imagine, on the
other hand, what it must have cost the Wahhabis to
have, like Luther, the courage of their convictions,
to appear to stultify themselves, to dishonour their
Prophet, and all that they might make their religion
the spiritual religion that it had once been ! And
then say if you can, that Mohammedanism has
no power of self-reform, and is dying gradually of
inanition !
Beaten down at last by the strong arm of Mo-
hammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt in 1812, helped, I regret
to say, by Englishmen, the Wahhabis disappeared
temporarily from Arabia,* only to reappear in 1821
' For a i^mphic and not very favourable account of the Wahhab
Knipire as it exists now in Arabia, and its scat of Government at
Riail, sec Talprave's 'Arabia,' Chap. IX. XIII. There are one or
two passives in this account — c. g., Vol. I. 3r>5-.S78, 427-437 — in
which 1 cannot but think, with all my admiration for Mr. Palgrave's
varied powei-s, that he has not been, even on his own showinu: else-
where, alt(^ether fair to Islam as a system.
MOHAMMEDAN REVIVAL. 269
in India, under the leadership of the prophet Syed
Ahmed ; and the despised sect of Wahhabis are now,
perhaps, the real ruling spirit of Musalman politics
in India, and enjoy the singular honour of having, as
much, no doubt, by their gloomy fanaticism as by
their moral lives and their missionary zeal, attracted
to themselves considerable attention even from their
English rulers at home. Puritans of the Puritans of
Islam, they are despised and hated by the so-called
orthodox Musalmans, as the Lutherans were hated
by Leo, and the Covenanters by Claverhouse.
And it must be remembered that Wahhabiism,
while it denounces, as I have shown, all the existing
forms of Islam, and, in its turn, is denounced by them,
has yet done much outside of the sphere of its im-
mediate influence to purify the Faith, and to reform
abuses throughout the Musalman world. The Refor-
mation, it has often been observed, did as much good
for Europe by the reforms which it drove the nations
who rejected it, for very shame, to introduce for them-
selves, as by what it did directly for those German
peoples who threw off for ever the yoke of Rome.
Even so has Wahhabiism compelled many who are
anything but Wahhabis to reform the most crying
abuses, and so to make the discrepancy between
their practice and their creed less glaring than it was
before.
The extraordinary phenomena attending the great
religious movement called Babyism now going on in
Persia, the ecstatic martyrdoms and the prodigality
of tortures submitted to amidst songs of triumph by
women and children, the followers of the ' Bab,' are
well worth the study of all who are interested in the
270 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
history of religion; and, however we explain the
facts, much that I have said of Wahhabiism may,
mutatis mutandis^ be said of it; and at all events its
existence is a standing proof that Persian Moham-
medanism possesses so much of vitality as is necessary
to adapt an old creed to a new belief.'
When I first wrote the above paragraphs on the
power of revival which I conceive to be inherent in
Islam, I did not know^ that my words were at that
very time being illustrated in the most striking way,
not only in India and Persia and Arabia upon which
I then dwelt, but also throughout the Asiatic do-
minions of the Ottoman Sultans. Since then Mr.
Palgi'ave's most interesting ' Essays on Eastern Ques-
tions ' have come into my hands ; and I find in them
both evidence to show that there is such a revival,
and a graphic account of its leading symptoms.
Secular and denominational schools are everywhere
giving place to schools of the most strictly Musalman
type. Mosques which were deserted are now crowded
with worshippers ; mosques which were in ruins are
rebuilt. There is a general reaction, not perhaps to
be wondered at, against the employment in public
offices of the European and the Christian. Wine and
spirit shops are closed, for their trade is gone except
among the Levantine residents. Even opium and
tobacco are becoming luxuries which are not for-
bidden only, but forsaken.
Add to this, what Mr. Palgrave has also shown,
that a new nation is, as it were, growing up under our
eyes in Eastern Anatolia, rich with all the elements
• Sec Gobineau, ' Les Religions et les IMnlosophics dans I'Asie
Centralc; p. 141-215.
THE OTTOMAN SUPREMACY. 271
of a vigorous national and religious life ; and we shall
then have reason to believe that though the Ottoman
supremacy may pass away, as Khalifs and Sultans,
Attabeks and Khans, Padishahs and Moguls, have
passed away before them, yet Islam itself is a thing of
indestructible vitality, and may thrive the more when
rid of the magnificent corruptions and the illusory
prestige of the Stambul successors of the Prophet.
In truth, Islam has existed for centuries in spite of
Othmanli rule, and not because of it ; and this the
ambassadors lately sent to the Porte from the most
distant parts of the Musalman world — from Bokhara
and Khokand, from the Sultan of Achin and the
Sultan of the Panthays — must have learnt to their
cost, when the}^ found that the so-called Commander
of the Faithful was sufficiently employed nearer home,
and had neither the power nor the will to give them
the help or even the advice they asked.
Mohammedanism, therefore, can still renew its
youth, and it is possible that the present generation, in
face of the advance of semi-barbarous Russia, may see
a revival of the old Crusading spirit — an outburst of
stern fanaticism, which, armed with the courage of
despair, obliterating, as it did among the tribes of the
Caucasus in the Circassian war,^ even the immemorial
' See Baron Von Haxthausen's ' Tribes of the Caucasus ; ' especially
his interesting account of the rise of Muridism, and the heroic struggle
of Shamil, his personal influence, and his genius for military and
political organisation. Truly while Mohammedanism can throw oflE
geniuses like Shamil, it may well be able to dispense with such govern-
ments as that of the Turks. The Baron's prophecies of a general
collapse of Mohammedanism are being signally falsified. The union of
Sunnis and Shiahs was one principle of Muridism as taught by
Mulla Mohammed, and after him by Shamil. Elijah Mansur, the
272 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
schism of Sunni and Shiah, may hurl once more in
simple self-defence the united strength of the Crescent
upon the vanguard of advancing Christendom. It is a
prospect formidable to every Christian Power — for-
midable above all to those who for good or for evil
rule forty millions of Musalmans in India. Then if
anywhen, and there if anywhere, will be the Arma-
geddon of Islam.
It may be that nothing — not even a holy war
waged in self-defence — can arrest the onward march
of the Colossus which, gaunt and grim and inex-
orable, like one of the primeval forces of Nature,
is pressing, or is being pressed on, towards the East
and South ; and is, in the nineteenth centur}%
turning back, in some sense, itself upon itself, that
tide of Tartar agression which, in by-gone times,
carried now an Attila from the wall of China to the
Catalaunian fields, and now a Tamerlane from Kara-
korum to the Vistula or the Danube. Licking up
Khanates and kingdoms like the grass of the field in
its gradual but irresistible advance, it is threatening
at once the national existence of Turks and Persians,
and is exciting the uneasy apprehensions alike of
those who rule at Calcutta, and of those who rule at
Pekin. Doubtless it is well that something like
order should be introduced into the wildest and most
lawless people in the world, the nomade hordes of
Turkistan ; but it is at least open to question whether
great Circassian hert) towanls the cltmc of the last century, apiKjai-s to
have been far superior even to Shamil in ability. Like him, he united
the characters of warrior, priest, and pn)phet, and there is a belief
amouK: the natives that he is to reappear at the end of a hundred years
and drive buck the Muscovite from his native country.
PROGRESS OF RUSSIA IN THE EAST. 273
this could not be as well done by the religious en-
thusiasm of some new Comm.ander of the Faithful, of
some heroic Elijah Mansur or Shamil or Abdel Kader
on a vaster scale, as by the dull, heavy tread of mili-
tary despotism beneath the shadow of the Czars of
All the Russias. The rule of General Kaufmann is
not likely to do more for Central Asia^ than is already
in the way of being done for it by Yakub Beg ; and
surely those who imagine that the Russian arms of
precision are carrying any form of Christianity with
them which will get hold of the native mind and
character, are indulging in the wildest of chimseras.
Injustice has doubtless often been done by travellers
who know them but superficially to the sterling
qualities which are to be found on a closer investi-
gation in some of the scattered Christian communities
of the East. They have expected to find in them
energies which can only be the offspring of freedom ;
and one who knows them intimately avers that credit
has not been given to the Christians of the East for
the industry, the enterprise, and the social morality,
which are to be found amongst them in spite of all the
drawbacks of their political position. But Dr. Badger
himself would probably admit that the isolation of
these communities is too great, their superstitious
practices and their mutual misconceptions too nume-
rous, and the want of a missionary spirit amongst
them too marked, to enable them, under any circum-
stances, to do more than hold their own in the East ;
and as to the religion of the ' orthodox ' Greek Church,
' The attack on the Yomud Turkomans in the recent Khiva cam-
I)aign was as murderous, as purposeless, and as cruel as any of which
the wildest Asiatics were ever guilty.
I 2
274 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
which is the form of Christianity, if any, which will
accompany the Russian arms, who can find in its
history of a thousand years any germ of progress,
any spark of missionary enthusiasm, any sublimer
idea of God, or any nobler conception of man's duty
to Him and to his brother man, than is to be found in
the authentic documents of Islam ?
And here, perhaps, will be the place to make
a few remarks upon a subject which cannot have
failed to attract the attention of the more thoughtful
among us in recent years — I mean the attempt made
to introduce Western manners and customs into
Eastern countries.
We live in days when we hear of Khans and
Khedives, Shahs and Sultans, giving up their imme-
morial passivity and seclusion, and even coming to
Europe with the avowed intention of carrying back to
Asia or Africa what they can of Western science and
civilisation. I should be slow indeed to complain of
any steps taken by the Western Powers to do away
with any institutions which, like the Suttee, the festivals
of Juggernaut, the East African slave trade, or the
traffic in opium, are a curse to our common humanity,
or are not grounded on any fundamental peculiarity
of the Eastern world. But to attempt by force, or
even by influence brought to bear upon Eastern
rulers, to do away with any domestic or national
institutions, such as the form of government, or
patriarchal slavery, or even polygamy, can do no
good.
Eastern despotism is not what Western despotism
is, nor — as I have already pointed out — is Oriental
slavery like American. Nor is even polygamy in the
EASTERN DESPOTISM. 275
East SO intolerable an evil as it would be in the
social freedom of the West. For example, an Eastern
sovereign has all the power over his subjects that a
father had in the most primitive times, and had even
in Rome, over his children. His power is liable to
the same abuses ; but it has also some of its safe-
guards and redeeming points. To introduce into his
government, as the Shah has been supposed to wish,
a system of Boards and Parliaments, of checks and
counter-checks, such as works fairly well in this
country because it has grown with our growth and is
suitable to our instinct of compromise in everything,
would be to make many tyrants instead of one, and
to cripple the power and lessen the responsibility of
the only man in Persia whose interest it is, whether
he sees it or not, to let no one commit injustice but
himself. Asia, till its whole nature be changed, can
probably never be better governed than it was by the
early Khalifs ; and if an Abu Bakr or an Omar, or even
a Harun or a Mahmud, a Baber or an Akbar, do not
come twice in a century, it is probable that Nature
has endowed Asiatics with precisely those qualities of
patience, docility, and inertness which harmonise better
with the evils of such a government than with those
of any other.
Polygamy is a more difficult question, and it is
impossible, for obvious reasons, to discuss it adequately
here. It is a gigantic evil, worse even than slavery ;
for with its attendant mischiefs, so far as it extends,
it does away with all real sympathy and companion-
ship between man and woman ; it is unnatural, in
the fullest sense of the word, in a highly civilised
nation, for Nature, by making the number of men
276 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
and women equal, has declared decisively for mono-
gamy. But, in a barbarous people, polygamy has
this one redeeming point, that it is less likely that
any woman will be left without a natural protector ;
and, as a matter of fact, it is almost universal in
primitive stages of civilisation.^ In the East it is
the almost inevitable result of that fundamental in-
stitution of Eastern, as well as of Muslim society,
the absolute seclusion of women. There is an imper-
vious bar to all social intercourse between the sexes
before marriage. The husband's knowledge of his
future wife is at second hand only, and rests on the
report of a Khatibeh,* or professional match-maker.
Such a marriage is more than a lottery ; there can be
no affection to begin with, and, except on rare occa-
sions, it is not likely that it will turn out to be really
happy. If it be thoroughly uncongenial, a man tries
his luck once more in the same miserable lotter}^, and
for his own happiness, and probably also for that of
all concerned, annuls the previous bond. Hence poly-
gamy implies freedom of divorce, and both together
' In an uncivilised nation, split up, as Arabia was before Mohammetl,
into a number of hostile tribes, or overrun by its more powerful
neighbours, as was Palestine in the time of the Judges, the number
of births of men and women is, no doubt, as in more civilised nations,
about equal ; but the adult male population being reduced by war to
half its proper number, the preponderance of women in such a state
of society renders Polygamy possible, and the insecurity renders it
perhaps from that one point of view allowable. Sir Samuel Baker,
in his ' Albert Nyanza,' Introduction, p. 25, remarks that * In all
tropical countries Polygamy is the prevailing evil.' He might have
gone on to say much the same of slavery ; but then what would
become of the charge he so often makes against Islam — that it is
responsible for polygamy and slavery ?
■ Lane's ' Modern Egyptians,' I. 199.
POLYGAMY. 277
are the inevitable result of the seclusion of the female
sex. But to abolish by law the two former without
dealing with the far more fundamental institution
which is its root, would be to carry on a war with
symptoms only, and to introduce evils worse than
those it is wished to prevent. The only way of going
to the root of the matter would be, if it were pos-
sible, to allow a freer intercourse between the sexes at
all times ; and Sir William Muir admits that this could
not be done at all with the present freedom of divorce.*
It is a melancholy fact, but a fact still, that the strict
checks imposed by Mohammed on married women,
degrading though they are,'-^ are essential to prevent
what is still worse, and, be it remembered, what was
far worse, before the reforms and limitations which
Mohammed himself imposed. It is a complete dead-
lock ; and the greatest reformers, Moses no less than
Mohammed, have been unable to deal with the root
of the evil. It is to be remembered, on the other
hand, that both Moses and Mohammed did what they
could to restrain and modify its abuses ; and at pre-
sent neither polygamy nor divorce is so common as
is often supposed. The humanity of human nature
has asserted itself; and Lane, the most accurate of
observers, says that polygamy is in Egypt at all
events very rare among the higher classes, and not
common even among the lower.^
' Muir, III. 234, and note.
•■^ Sura XXXIII. 6 and 56. Also Sura XXIV. 32.
^ Lane, I. 231 ; ' Not more than one husband in twenty has two
wives at the same time.' But divorce is very common. If it were
not for Lane's proverbial accuracy, one would be inclined to suspect
that in the passage referred to in the text he had either accidentally
transposed the words higher and lower, or had for once made a mis-
278 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
Much the same may be said of slavery. The
slavery of the East is a patriarchal institution, coeval
with the very dawn of history. It is an institu-
tion allowed and modified by Moses, even as it was
allowed and modified by Mohammed, for people in
that stage of civilisation which required it. In neither
nation has it anything in common with slavery as it
was in America, or indeed with slavery at all as prac-
tised by civilised nations. It has been remarked with
truth that the cruel treatment of domesticated slaves is
the shameful and exclusive prerogative of civilisation.
To do away with domestic slavery by force, as has
been the case in Khiva, though we naturally rejoice
at it, will probably do little pemianent good. It
will revive in another, and probably a worse, shape.
Perhaps we have hit upon the one means of gradu-
ally getting rid of it in Arabia by making it as diffi-
cult as possible to recruit slavery from without by
means of the slave trade. Much will have to be done
henceforw^ard by free labour in Arabia, in Persia, and
in Egypt, which has hitherto been done by slaves ;
and we need not fear but that the result will be
so good, that even in a stolid Oriental people the
gradual movement will be one in the direction of
abolition.
The horrors of the Slave Trade in East Africa have
take on a matter of fact. It appeal's, however, that he is strictly
accurate : and tlie dropping of Polygamy in Kgypt by the higher
classes is a clear indication that its continuance there is only a ques-
tion of time. Certainly in other parts of the Mohammedan world
polygamy is, for obvious reasons, much more common among the rich
than among the poor. Hut the current of opinion, like the general
conditions of society, seems to be everywhere setting against it, espe-
cially in India
SLAVERY. 279
recently been most graphically described by Dr.
Livingstone, by Dr. Schweinfurth, and by Sir Samuel
Baker ; and all that they have written falls probably
far short of the terrible and overwhelming reality.
' May Heaven's rich blessing/ says Dr. Livingstone,
and in accents that are all the more touching, and it
is to be hoped may be all the more effectual, because
they come to us from his grave, ' may Heaven's rich
blessing descend on every one, American, English, or
Turk, who will help to heal the open sore of the world! '
Every true friend of humanity will echo his prayer,
and will rejoice to know that every one, whether he
be Jew or Christian, Hindu, Musalman, or Buddhist,
who joins in healing that open sore will be acting not
against but in accordance with the precepts and the
spirit of his religion. The Slave Trade, in fact, rests
for its support on no religion at all, but only on that
which is cruel and selfish and licentious in human
nature. It is a common mistake, but a mistake still,
to suppose that the Slave Trade ever received any
sanction either from Moses or from Mohammed.
Moses ordered the man-stealer and the man-seller to
be put to death. ^ Mohammed is reported by the
Sunna to have said, ' the worst of men is the seller of
men.' It is no more fair, then, to tax Islam itself, as
is often done, with the horrors of the East African
Slave Trade, than it would have been in the last cen-
tury to blame Christianity for the still greater horrors
of the West African traffic and its segue Ice in America.
It is well therefore, in furtherance of my object in
writing these Lectures, to remind once more those
who, like the great travellers I have mentioned, have
1 Exod. XXT. 6.
280 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
been led to condemn in the most sweeping terms
Islam itself, because it happens now that Arabs and
Egyptians are the chief slave traders, that the Slave
Trade is not Islam, but is opposed to it.^ It is con-
demned by the whole spirit of the Koran, condemned
by the Traditions, condemned by the doctors of the
Mohammedan law. If so-called Musalmans are now
the chief slave-traders, it is not long since so-called
Christians were the same ; and some of them, the
Portuguese for example, are not clean-handed even
yet. The spread of Islam over the African continent
from the North and West, so far from extending the
Slave-Trade, tends, in one important particular, to
suppress it, by limiting more and more the area from
which slaves are drawn ; for even the most degraded
Musalmans have that notion of brotherhood amongst
themselves which forbids them to enslave one another.
Dr. Schweinfurth himself admits in one passage, what
he unfortunatel)^ forgets in a score of others, that the
Arabs in Eastern and in part of Central Africa * have
suppressed the true doctrines of their Prophet which
would have enfranchised the very people whom they
oppress, and would have raised them to a condition of
brotherhood and equality.'* And if this be true, as it
' I should be as sorry to think that the (loing:s of the Arab slave-
hunters described in such forcible laujfuaofe by Sir Samuel Baker
were characteristic of Islam in its sacred book, and in its true spirit,
as I should be sorry to think that some of the doings of Sir Samuel,
as describetl by himself in 'Ismailia' (see es|>ecially his dealing;H
with the Baris), were in any way characteristic of Christianity.
* The Aral) slave-trader does not preach Islam in Eastern Africa
for two reasons : first, Ixjcause he cares not for his Crcal himself ;
and secondly, because to do so would lessen his huntinjf-pmund, and
cut off the supplies of his nefarious tmtflc.
THE SLAVE TRADE. 281
undoubtedly is, would it not be well for Christian
missionaries to attempt to carry their message of love
to African Musalmans by telling them that the Slave-
Trade is inhuman in itself, and should be doubly
hated by those whose Creed in its authentic docu-
ments condemns it, rather than by telling them that
their whole Creed is worthless and detestable because
many amongst them are untrue to it ? Which course
is likely to be the most successful, which is the truest,
which the most Christian ?
The question indeed is answered by being asked.
Yet authoritative Missionary periodicals,^ and there-
fore it is to be feared Missionaries themselves, have
all too often adopted the latter course. They have
treated Islam as the deadliest foe instead of a poten-
tial friend of Christianity, and then they wonder at
their want of success in dealing with it.
Western science, with its railways, its canals, and
its printing-presses, may, no doubt, do something for
the material prosperity of Eastern countries, but by
itself it will do little for their moral welfare ; and a
thin varnish of Western civilisation introduced by
rulers who have been forced to admire the material
power of the West, and have lost their own self-
' See 'Church Missionary Intelligencer' for July 1872, August
1874, March 1875, April 1875, &c., &c. In the number for August
1874, one excellent missionary, the Kev. H. Townsend, who, it is
said, has been a missionary in Africa for forty years, makes the
astounding assertion that ' even the religious creed of Muhammadans
is further removed from the truth than is that of the heathen ; '
in other words, Polytheism is better than Monotheism, and idolatry
than a sublime spiritualism. After this we need not be sur-
prised at being told by the same writer that the morality of Islam
* makes its Negro Proselyte twofold more a child of Hell than
before ! '
282 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
AVrespect in the process, is earnestly to be deprecated.
Those Orientals who have been most influenced by
the Franco-mania of Stambul are, beyond all com-
parison, the most degraded and profligate of their
race, and no earnest observer can wish to see im-
ported into other parts of the Mohammedan world
that indescribable combination of all that is con-
temptible in human nature conveyed by the word
Levantine.
The heroic and unselfish lives of a few such men as
Livingstone are the only legitimate means of intro-
ducing into semi-civilised countries such benefits as
we think we have to bestow. A life and character
like Livingstone's has done more to regenerate the
African races than any amount of direct preaching,
or any number of European settlements, with the
miserable and immoral wars that so often follow in
their train. Such men are the true pioneers of
civilisation and Christianity — of the only species of
civilisation and the only form of Christianity which
we have any reason to expect will be a real benefit
to the East.
But does it follow, from what I have said of the
immobility of the East, that it is impossible for Islam
to make any advance at all ; that it is impossible for
it to yield anything to the progressive civilisation of
Christianity and of the West ?
How Christianity and civilisation should deal with
Mohammedanism I have partly indicated already,
and shall have a very few more words to say upon
the subject presently. But, first, what can Islam do
on its part ? Where religion and law are indissolubly
bound up together, as they are in the Koran, each
REFORMERS AMONG INDIAN MUSALMANS. 283
loses, and each gains, something. What they gain in
stabihty, they more than lose in flexibility. And yet
it may be safely said that there is nothing more
extraordinary in the whole history of Islam than the
way in which the theory of the verbal inspiration of
the Koran, and the consequent stereotyped and un-
alterable nature of its precepts, have, by ingenuity,
by legal fictions, by the ' Sunna,' or traditional sayings
of Mohammed, and by responsa priidentu7n, been
accommodated to the changing circumstances and the
various degrees of civilisation of the nations which
profess it. When the Kadi fails to find in the law
laid down for the nomad Arabs a rule precisely appli-
cable to the more complex requirements of Smyrna
or of Delhi, he places the sacred volume upon his
head, and so renders homage to human reason and to
the law of progress. He does what Puritans and
Churchmen would alike do well to remember, when
each professes to find in the varying or convertible
expressions of the writers of the New Testament a
divinely ordered and unalterable model of Church
government. It is not, therefore, quite so true as is
commonly supposed, that Islam is reconcileable with
one narrow form of government or society only ; and
it is quite possible that where so much has been done
already, more may be done in future, and means may
be found for reconciling, for instance, the laws against
taking interest for money with the requirements of
modern society. Already within the ranks of Indian
Musalmans is to be found a party of social and reli-
gious reformers, who, without a suspicion of heresy,
so far as I know, having been breathed against them
by their co-religionists, can yet maintain that the
284 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM,
passages of the Koran which legaHse Polygamy and
Slavery have done their work, that they are out of
date, and that the spirit and purpose of the great
Arabian can now be best attained by abolishing them
altogether.^ In other Musalman countries the intole-
rant principles of the Koran have long since been
reconciled, except where there is a passing outburst of
fanaticism, with the utmost practical toleration ; and
the standard of the ' Jihad,' or holy war, will probably
never henceforward be raised on an extensive scale,
except in a war of self-defence, and unless the lives
and liberties of Mohammedans, as well as their reli-
gion, are at stake.
And, what is infinitely more important, it seems to
me that while Mohammedans cling as strongly as
ever to their rigid Monotheism, and to their unfalter-
ing belief in the Divine mission of their Prophet —
and what serious person could wish them to do
otherwise? — to give up those beliefs which have
made them what they are, which have given them
a glorious history, and which have influenced half a
world ; to give up —
' . . . Those first affectious. y
Those Hhaclowy recollections, y^
Which, be they what they may, X
Are yet the fountain-light of all their day,
Are yet a mastei'-light of all their seeing ;
Uphold them — cherish — and have jxiwer to make
Their noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence : truths tliat wake
To i>eri8h never ! ' —
' See on this subject some interesting details in M. Garyin do
Tassy's 'Annual Lectures on the Hindustani Language and Litera-
ture.'
CAN IT APPROXIMATE TO CHRISTIANITY'? 285
while they ding, I say, to these, as strongly, yes, more
strongly than ever, they may yet be brought to see that
there is a distinction between what Mohammed said
himself, and what others have said for him ; and that
there is a still broader distinction between what he said
as a legislator and a conqueror, and what he said as a
simple prophet. There are some among them who see
now, and there will be more who will soon see, that
there may be an appeal to the Mohammed of Mecca
from the Mohammed of Medina ; that there may be an
idolatry of a book, as well as of a picture, or a statue,
or a shapeless mass of stone ; and that the Prophet,
who always in other matters asserted his fallibility,
was never more fallible, though certainly never more
sincere, than when he claimed an equal infallibility for
the whole Koran alike. Finally, with the growth of
knowledge of the real character of our faith, Moham-
medans must recognise that the Christ of the Gospel
was something ineffably above the Christ of those
Christians from whom alone Mohammed drew his
notions of Him ; that He was a perfect mirror of that
one primary attribute of the Eternal of which Moham-
med could catch only a far-off glance, and which, had
it been shown to him as it really was, must needs have
taken possession of his soul.
All this may or may not be in our own time ; but
in a sympathetic study even of Mohammedanism as
it is. Christians have not a little to gain. There is the
protest against Polytheism in all its shapes ; there is
the absolute equality of man before God ; there is the
sense of the dignity of human nature ; there is the
simplicity of life, the vivid belief in God's providence,
the entire submission to His will ; and last, not least,
286 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
there is the courage of their convictions, the fearless
avowal before men of their belief in God, and their
pride in its possession as the one thing needful. There
is in the lives of average Mohammedans, from what-
ever causes, less of self-indulgence, less of the mad
race for wealth, less of servility, than is to be found
in the lives of average Christians. Truly we may
think that these things ought not so to be ; and if Chris-
tians generally were as ready to confess Christ, and to
be proud of being His servants, as Mohammedans are
of being followers of Mohammed, one chief obstacle to
the spread of Christianity would be removed. And
the two great religions which started from kindred
soil, the one from Mecca, the other from Jerusalem,
might work on in their respective spheres — the one the
religion of progress, the other of stability ; the one
of a complex, the other of a simple life ; the one
dwelling more upon the inherent weakness of human
nature, the other on its inherent dignity ; ' the one the
religion of the best parts of Asia and Africa, the
other of Europe and America — each rejoicing in the
success of the other, each supplying the other's
wants in a generous rivalr}' for the common good
of humanity.
A few words more about Mohammed himself, and
I have done. The world, in its wisdom or unwisdom,
has never thought proper to distinguish Mohammed
from the millions of Mohammeds named after him,
by calling him 'the Great.'* Perhaps he was too
great for such an external distinction. People call
the conqueror of Constantinople, eight centuries later,
' Perhaps the two views ai-e, nfter ull. only iliffeient asiH-'cts of the
same truth.
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS LEARN FROM ISLAM? 287
Mohammed the Second. But I do not think they
ever speak of the Prophet as Mohammed the First ;
and perhaps the unconscious homage thus rendered
to him by a world which ostensibly, and till very
lately, has done him such scant justice, is the
highest tribute that can be given to his greatness.
The Greeks paid the highest compliment they could
to the surpassing splendour of the King of Persia
when, consciously or unconsciously, they dropped the
article before his name, and so put him on a level,
grammatical and moral, with the sun, the moon, and
the earth, which could by no possibility need any
such distinguishing mark. Compare Mohammed with
the long roll of men whom the world by common
consent has called ^ Great ; ' while I admit that there
is no one point in his character in which he is not
surpassed by one or other, take him all in all, what he
was, and what he did, and what those inspired by him
have done, he seems to me to stand alone, above and
beyond them all. A distinguished writer on the Holy
Roman Empire has remarked of Charles the Great
that, ' like all the foremost men of our race, he was
all great things in one.' ^ But though Mr. Bryce
does not illustrate the truth of his remark by Moham-
med — nay, by not including him among the foremost
men of the world whom he goes on to enumerate, he
seems designedly to exclude him — I venture to think
thatof Jio one of them all is the remark more strictly
true.
Mohammed did not, indeed, himself conquer a
world like Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon. He
did not himself weld together into a homogeneous
' Bryce's ' Holy Koman Empire,' p. 7i).
288 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
whole a vast system of states like Charles the Great.
He was not a philosophic king like Marcus Aure-
lius ; nor a philosopher like Aristotle or like Bacon,
ruling by pure reason the world of thought for cen-
turies with a more than kingly power ; he was not
a legislator for all mankind, nor even the highest
part of it, like Justinian ; nor did he cheaply earn the
title of 'the Great' by being the first among rulers to
turn, like Constantine, from the setting to the rising
sun. He was not a universal philanthropist, like the
greatest of the Stoics,
• Non sibi seel toti genitum se credere miiiido ;'
nor was he the apostle of the highest form of religion
and civilisation combined, like Gregory or Boniface,
like Leo or Alfred the Great. He was less, indeed,
than most of these in one or two of the elements
that go to make up human greatness, but he was also
greater. Half Christian and half Pagan, half civilised
and half barbarian, it was given to him in a marvel-
lous degree to unite the peculiar excellences of the
one with the peculiar excellences of the other. ' I
have seen,' said the ambassador sent by the tri-
umphant Kuraish to the despised exile at Medina ;
' I have seen the Persian Chosroes and the Greek
Heraclius sitting upon their thrones, but never did I
see a man ruling his equals as does Mohammed.'
Head of the State as well as of the Church, he was
Caisar and Pope in one ; but he was Pope without the
Pope's pretensions, and Caesar without the legions of
Ca3sar. Without a standing anny, without a body-
guard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue, if
ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by a
CHARACTER OF MOHAMMED. 289
right Divine, it was Mohammed ; for he had all the
power without its instruments and without its supports.
He rose superior to the titles and ceremonies, the
solemn trifling, and the proud humility of court eti-
quette. To hereditary kings, to princes born in the
purple, these things are, naturally enough, as the breath
of life ; but those who ought to have known better,
even self-made rulers, and those the foremost in the
files of time — a Caesar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon —
have been unable to resist their tinsel attractions.
Mohammed was content with the reality, he cared
not for the dressings, of power.^ The simplicity of
his private life was in keeping with his public life.
' God,' says Al Bokhari, ' offered him the keys of the
treasures of the earth, but he would not accept them.'
Hagiology is not history ; but the contemporaries
of Mohammed, his enemies who rejected his mission,
with one voice extol his piety, his justice, his veracity,
his clemency, his humility, and that at a time before
any imaginary sanctity could have enveloped him.
A Christian even, as is remarked by a great writer
whom I have quoted above, with his more perfect
code of morality before him, must admit that Mo-
hammed, with very rare exceptions, practised all the
moral virtues but one ; and in that one, as I have
shown, he was in advance of his time and nation.
Assuredly, if Christian missionaries are ever to win
over Mohammedans to Christianity, they must alter
their tactics. It will not be by discrediting the great
Arabian Prophet, nor by throwing doubts upon his
mission, but by paying him that homage which is his
due; by pointing out, not how Mohammedanism
* See 'British Quarterly Review,' Jan. 1872, p. 128.
K
290 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM,
differs from Christianity, but how it resembles it ; by
dweUing less on the dogmas of Christianity, and more
on its morality ; by showing how perfectly that
Christ, whom Mohammed with his half-knowledge so
reverenced, came up to the ideal which prophets and
kings desired to see, and had not seen, and which
Mohammed himself, Prophet and King in one, could
only half realise. In this way, and in this alone, is it
likely that Christianity can ever act upon Moham-
medanism ; not by sweeping it into oblivion — for what
of truth there is in it, and there is ver}^ much truth,
can never die — but by gradually, and perhaps un-
consciously, breathing into its vast and still vigorous
frame a newer, a purer, and a diviner life.
By a fortune absolutely unique in history, Mo-
hammed is a threefold founder — ' of a nation, of an
empire, and of a religion.' Illiterate himself, scarcely
able to read or write, he was yet the author of a
book which is a poem, a code of laws, a Book of
Common Prayer, and a Bible in one, and is rever-
enced to this day by a sixth of the whole human
race as a miracle of purity of style, of wisdom, and of
truth. It was the one miracle claimed by Moham-
med — his * standing miracle ' he called it ; and a
miracle indeed it is. But looking at the circumstances
of the time, at the unbounded reverence of his fol-
lowers, and comparing him with the Fathers of the
Church or with mediaeval saints, to my mind the most
miraculous thing about Mohammed is, that he never
claimed the power of working miracles, ^^^latever
he had said he could do, his disciples would straight-
way have seen him do. They could not help attri-
buting to him miraculous acts which he never did,
MOHAMMED A TRUE PROPHET. 291
and which he always denied he could do. What more
crowning proof of his sincerity is needed ? Moham-
med to the end of his Hfe claimed for himself that
title only with which he had begun, and which the
highest philosophy and the truest Christianity will
one day, I venture to believe, agree in yielding to
him — that of a Prophet, a very Prophet of God.
The religion, indeed, that he taught is below the
purest form of our own as the central figure of the
Mohammedan religion is below the central figure of
the Christian — a difference vast and incommensurable ;
but, in my opinion, he comes next to Him in the
long roll of the great teachers and benefactors of the
human race ; next to him, lo7igo intervallo certainly,
but still next. He had faults, and great ones, which
he was always the first himself, according to his light,
to confess and to deplore ; and the best homage we
can render to the noble sincerity of his character is to
state them, as I hope I have tried to do, exactly as
they were. ^ It was the fashion of old,' to quote once
more the words of our greatest novelist and greatest
psychologist — and so to conclude this course of Lec-
tures, of the manifold imperfections and shortcomings
of which no one of those who have so kindly listened
to me week after week can be half so conscious as
myself—' It was the fashion of old, when an ox was
led out for sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark
spots, and give the offering a false show of un-
blemished whiteness. Let us fling away the chalk,
and boldly say — the victim is spotted, but it is not
therefore in vain that his mighty heart is laid on the
altar of men's highest hopes.'
( 293 )
APPENDICES.
APPENDIX TO LECTURE 1.
Sir Bartle Frere, in an interesting and able and catholic
essay in ' The Church and the Age ' on Indian Missions, takes a
hopeful view of the future of India, as influenced by Western
civilisation and Christianity, He begins (p. 318) by showing,
rightly enough, that almost everything we do in India tends
to break up old beliefs, and so to prepare the way for a new
one, and is, therefore, more or less Missionary work ; ' not only
railways and printing-presses, education, commerce, and the
electric telegraph ; our impartial codes and uniform system of
administration ; but our misfortunes and our mistakes, our wars,
our famines, and our mutinies.' He then gives (p. 334-337)
elaborate statistics of the Missionary agencies at work in 1865
in Western India ; they have enormously increased in the last
30 years, and he estimates the number of Missionaries at work
at about 105, and the number of converts at somewhere about
2,200 ; and this, multiplied by six or seven, would probably, he
thinks, give a general idea of the direct results of Missionary
work during that period throughout all India (I would remark
here that an official statement published in 1873 gives a much
more favourable account, estimating the number of communi-
cants at 78,494 ; but when Sir Bartle Frere comes to deal with
Mohammedanism (p. 354-356) he gives no statistics on the point
we most desiderate — the number of converts, if it be at all
appreciable, from Islam to Christianity ; the general remarks,
indeed, he does make, seem to go exactly contrary to the
294 APPENDICES.
conclusions he draws from them — e.g.^ Mohammedans study-
portions of the Bible more than they did formerly ; but these
portions unfortunately seem to be the prophetical writings, espe-
cially those of Daniel ; and they find therein the denunciations,
of Christianity which Christians find in it against other creeds ;
they are humiliated by the fact that Mohammedanism is no
longer the Imperial creed of India ; but the upshot of their
depression is not Christianity, but Wahhabiism, i.e., a return to
Islam in its simplest and sternest shape. Brahmoism, which
is really Brahmanism as modified by Christianity, Brah-
manism minus caste and minus idolatry of every kind,
seems to be in some respects the beginning of a national
movement, and, judging from the authoritative sermon
(p. 346-352) delivered in Calcutta on the 39th anniversary of
the Brahma Samaj, and entitled ' The Future Church,' seems to
me to give real hope for the future, and to be very suggestive
as to the way in which Missionaries should go to work. ' The
answer,' says the preacher, 'of Jesus the immortal Son of God,
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy mind, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength,
and thy neighbour as thyself, is the essence of true religion
simply and exhaustively expounded.' ' The composite faith of
the future Church is to combine in perfect harmony the pro-
found devotion of the Hindu and the heroic enthusiasm of the
Musalman ;' but, unfortunately, the simplicity and intelligibility
of the Mohammedan creed render it incapable at present of
actually coalescing with the eclectic spirit of Brahmoism. It
is strange at first sight that Mohammedanism, originally the
most eclectic of religions, should, in India at all events, prove
itself to be the least capable of settling down on terms of
equality with other creeds, or of combining with them. No
doubt the fact that Mohammedanism has been the Imperial
creed and is so no longer, and the proud memories of Mahmud
and Akbar, of Baber and of Aurungzebe, are a formidable,
though it is to bo hoped a passing, difficulty. If the Moham-
medan revival now going on in India under the influence of the
Wahhabis, the Firazeea, and the followers of Dudu Miyan, can
only be accompanied by a great moral reformation, such as
Sprenger himself does not seem to despair of (I., p. 459, ' the
APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 295
Arabs only want another Luther'), the result, partially at least,
of Christian influences, the simplicity of Islam will no doubt
in its turn give it a great advantage over the Brahma Samaj in
the struggle to fill the void created by the crumbling fabric of
Hinduism. It has another great advantage in being already to
some extent in possession of the ground. I observe that one of
the speakers at the recent Allahabad Missionary Conference says
that thirty milUons, the estimated number of Musalmans in India,
is much below the mark.
The unfavourable opinion expressed by Dr. Livingstone on
the effects of Mohammedanism in Africa (Expedition to the
Zambesi, p. 513-516, and 602-603) appears opposed to the
general view I have taken in the Lecture ; and of course, so far
as his personal experience goes, is unimpeachable and conclusive.
But it is clear that Dr. Livingstone drew his general conclusions
almost entirely from his acquaintance with the Arab slave
traders in the south and east of Africa, whom it was the main
purpose of his noble and heroic life to put down. In the
Lecture I have purposely not dwelt upon the extension of Islam
along the coast to the south of the Equator, for the simple
reason that the inhabitants are Mohammedans in nothing but
the name. The Arabs there are of the most degraded type,
and are engaged almost to a man in the brutalising slave trade,
which by itself is a complete obstacle to every species of civilisation
and religion. No doubt, as Dr. Livingstone remarks, the native
African there contrasts favourably with the Mohammedan — ^as
favourably, I would add, as he does even with the Portuguese ;
but that Dr. Livingstone judged of the whole of Mohammedan
Africa by his experience of its worst part, is clear from his
remark — opposed as it is to the unanimous testimony of travel-
lers in Northern and Central Africa — ' that the only foundation
for the statements respecting the spread of Islam in Africa is
the fact that in a remote corner of North- West Africa, the
Foulahs and Mandingoes, and some other tribes in Northern
Africa, have made conquests of territory ; but that even they
care so little for the extension of their faith, that after conquest
no pains whatever are taken to indoctrinate the adults of the
tribe' (p. 513). Captain Burton asserts that 'Mohammedans
alone make proselytes in Africa.' Dr. Livingstone says as
296 APPENDICES.
explicitly ' in Africa the followers of Christ alone are anxious to
propagate their faith.' Here is a direct contradiction ; and it is
obvious that in a country of such vast extent as Africa no such
sweeping statement can be absolutely true. Perhaps Sierra
Leone, to which Dr. Livingstone paid a visit for the purpose of
testing the results of missionary enterprise, and to which he
specially refers (p. 663), will furnish us with the best materials
for pointing out how far the two statements are reconcileable
with each other, and with substantial accuracy. In Sierra Leone
there is a large negro community, the members of which having
been brought for many years into contact not only with direct
Christian preaching, but, what is more important, with Christian
education, government, and example, are both excellent citizens
and sincere Christians, and, as one would expect, contrast
favourably in point of morality even with the best Mohamme-
dans. This is unquestionably true ; and of the self-denying
efforts of the missionaries, especially the native ones, within
certain limits, it is impossible to speak too highly. As to the
exact number of Christians in the colony at this moment it is
rather difficult to arrive at an accurate conclusion ; but to take
Dr. Livingstone's figures, he remarks (p. 605) that in the census
of 1861 the whole population of Sierra Leone itself was 41,000
souls, 27,000 of them being Christian, and 1 ,774 Mohammedan,
' not a very large proportion,' he observes, ' for the only sect in
Africa which makes proselytes.' It is not a large proportion,
but what is the number now ? Sierra Leone now affords the
most striking proof that can be given of the extent to which
on the one hand Islam is spreading in that part of Africa by the
efforts of unassisted missionaries, and on the other of the
absence of any such propagation of the Christian faith among the
tribes beyond the limits of the settlement. When Dr. Living-
stone visited Sierra Leone a few years ago, Islam was, as he
says, hardly known there ; since then Mohammedan mission-
aries have come thither from the Foulahs and from the far
interior, and with what result ? No one will say that it is the
sword to which they owe their success, for the peace of Sierra
Leone has been for years undisturbed. And now we have
(Government Report of West African Colonies, 1873) the
testimony of Mr. Johnson (p. 15), the able and excellent mis-
APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 297
sionary whom I have quoted in my Lecture, endorsed as it
would seem by the Bishop of the Diocese, that the Christian
community at Sierra Leone, however flourishing itself, has exer-
cised no influence on the large number of native Africans
resorting annually to the town for the purpose of trade, and
still less has it done anything to propagate itself by sending out
missionaries among adjoining tribes. On the other hand, a few
active and zealous Mohammedan missionaries have carried their
peaceful war into the enemies' country, and have produced
great results even among the Christian and native population of
Sierra Leone itself ; insomuch that the religion of a large
portion, the Governor says of the majority, of the Christians
within the settlement has been actually changed by their
preaching ! There may be, and it is to be hoped there is,
exaggeration as to the numbers ; but there can be no doubt,
looking to the consensu-'! of testimony, that Islam is propagated
in "Western, ISTorthern, and Central Africa ; that it is propagated
by simple preaching and with marked success even where a
Christian Government, and, what is better, Christianity itself,
is to a great extent in possession of the ground. One wishes
that Dr. Livingstone, the greatest and most single-minded of
all the friends of Africa, had himself come into contact with
a few of these simple and single-minded Mohammedan mis-
sionaries. They come so near in many respects to his own ideal
of what a Christian missionary ought to be, that one feels sure
he would have been led to modify his judgment as to the system
which produces them, and to the great teacher whom he rarely
mentions but as the ' false prophet.'
The remarks I have made in the Lecture as to the attitude
which it seems to me that Christian Missionaries should adopt,
wherever their efforts appear to have a chance of being success-
ful — and surely there is too much evil in the world that is
remediable, to allow of a great expenditure of labour or money
where there is no such prospect — have been suggested to me
mainly by way of contrast to what I have read in most books
devoted to the cause of Missions. Even so noble, and self-
sacrificing, and single-hearted a man as Henry Martyn appears
to have gone out as a Missionary to India, nay to have argued
with Mohammedans, without having first read a word of the
298 APPENDICES.
Koran, even in its English dress (Memoir of Rev. Henry
Martyn, by Rev. J. Sargent, p. 177 : cf. 225) ; and throughout
his career he treats it as an ' imposture ; ' ' the work of the
devil.' He is sent to fight the ' four-faced devil of India,' — e.e.,
Hindus, Mohammedans, Papists, and Infidels (p. 2r)9) ; and see
a summary of his written arguments against Mohammedans
(on p. 335), which are quite enough by themselves to account for
his ill-success. See also the account by another devoted mis-
sionary, the Rev. C. B. Leupolt, of his mission at Benares
('Recollections of an Indian Missionary'), who takes much the
same position. ' The so-called Prophet of the Mohammedans ; '
the ' Koran ' is an assemblage of facts and passages taken from
the Bible mixed with a great number of gross and cunningly
devised fables ; ' 'no Mohammedan who believes the whole
Koran can have the notion of the true God ; ' ' the Koran is
calculated to lead man daily further from God, and to unite him
closer to the Prince of darkness ; ' ' Satan holds them enthralled
by a false religion,' and so on. How not to deal with a dif-
ferent faith could hardly be better demonstrated than by the
writings of two such admirable and devoted men. Surely the
system has been to blame ! There is an anecdote related of
Aidan, first Bishop of Lindisfarne, which every one interested
in missions, and most of all those who themselves attempt to
bring over to their own faith the followers of another creed,
and that one so sublime and so nearly connected with their own
as is Islam, would do well to bear in mind. When a monk of
lona who had been sent at the request of King Oswald to
preach the Gospel to the heathens of his Northumbrian king-
dom, returned disheartened to his native country, and reported
that success was impossible among a people so stubborn and so
barbarous : ' Was it their stubbornness or your severity?' asked
another monk, who was sitting by ; 'did you forget God's word
to give them the milk first and then the meat ? ' The speaker
was Aidan. He was begged, by all present, himself to take in
hand the mission that had been abandoned. He settled as
Bishop in the isle of Lindisfarne, and, influenced by his spirit
and instinct with his charity and wisdom, missionaries went
forth from there, who, in a generation or two, evangelised all
the north of England.
APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 299
Happily, as is shown from the general tone of the Allahabad
Conference, and the explicit testimony of the Government of
India in 1873, there has been a great advance in the right
direction lately. Not to go beyond the limited circle of one's
own acquaintance, such men as Bishop Cotton and . the Rev. T.
P. Hughes, in India ; the Rev. George and the Rev. Arthur
Moule, in China ; and the Rev. James Johnson, native of
Sierra Leone — though I would not venture to say that they
would in any degree accept my point of view — yet in reality
would have much in common with it ; and all would certainly
admit the immense amount of good that is to be found in the
creeds, which it is their duty to controvert. Alas, that those
who knew Bishop Cotton well, and who therefore know what
his catholic spirit might have done for India, can only now,
when they think of him, repeat to themselves, consciously or
unconsciously, the touching lament,
' But oh for a touch of the vanished hand,
And a sound of the voice that is still ! '
( 301 )
APPENDIX TO LECTURE III.
That the assertions I have made in the Third Lecture, as to the
comparative ferocity of Christian and Musalman religious wars,
are within the mark, it would be easy to bring abundance of
proof, I will adduce here one illustration only, drawn from the
chief battle-ground of the contending forces, the Holy Land.
Jerusalem capitulated to Omar, the third Khalif , after a pro-
tracted blockade in the year 637. No property was destroyed
except in the inevitable operations of the siege, and not a drop
of blood was shed except on the field of battle. Omar entered
the city with the Patriarch, conversing amicably about its his-
tory ; at the hour of prayer he was invited by the Patriarch to
worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but he refused to
do so for fear that his descendants might claim a similar right,
and so the freedom of religious worship, which he wished to
secure to the inhabitants by the articles of capitulation, might
be endangered. In the year 1099 the Holy City fell before the
arms of the Crusaders after a much shorter siege. It was taken
by storm, and for three days there was an indiscriminate slaughter
of men, women, and children ; 70,000 Musalmans were put to
the sword, 10,000 of them in the mosque of Omar itself : ' in
eodem templo decern millia decollata sunt / pedites nostri usque ad
hasen cruore peremptorum tingebantur, nee feminis nee parvuUs
pepet'cerunW This comes not from an enemy but from the
monkish historian, an eyewitness and a partaker of what he re-
lates, Foulcher of Chartres. Raymond of Agiles and Daimbert,
Archbishop of Pisa, give similar details, and all with approval.
The city itself was pillaged ; but the turn of the Saracens came
once more in the year 1187. The breach was already forced,
302 APPENDICES.
when the great Saladin retracted a hasty vow he had made to
avenge the innocent blood that had been shed when the city had
been sacked by the Crusaders, and took not Godfrey de Bouillon
but Omar for his model. No blood was shed, and the captives
were allowed to ransom themselves, the Prankish Christians
leaving the city, the Eastern Christians continuing to reside
there in peace.
As to humanity in war in general, the progress made has not
been so great as is commonly supposed, even among those who
pride themselves, and who to some extent pride themselves with
reason, on being the pioneers of Christianity and civilisation.
Take the case of Africa. I am not aware that the Saracens in
the full career of conquest deliberately burnt a single city in the
whole of the North of Africa, whether as a precautionary mea-
sure, or to support their prestige, or to glut their revenge. Can
England say the same ? If we assume — a large assumption —
that the war on the Gold Coast in 1874 is wholly justifiable, if
we also assume that the burning of the enemy's capital was
indeed a necessity, it was a necessity for which a Christian
nation should go into mourning, and should contemplate not
with feelings of triumph, but with those of humiliation and
regret. Is there anything of the kind, or has one single ruler
either in Church or State — now that the elections are over, and
the moral iniquity of the war has been condoned by its success —
been heard to raise his voice in condemnation of it, Jis even
Omar or Saladin might have done ? It is difficult to see how
the English nation, which has abolished the slave trade in the
West of Africa, and is in its best portions profoundly philan-
thropic, can honestly believe that they are advancing the objects
they have at heart when, in support of such a treaty as I have
alluded to in the Lecture, they lead on a weaker bjirlxirous
nation, whom pro hac vice we designate as ' our allies,' against a
more powerful one, and deliberately burn out of their homes a
people who, barbarous and cruel as they were, have offended us
not by their cruelty, or by their human sacrifices, but by their
honest belief that we had come to Africa to bar them from
access to their own coast. It seems not to have occurred to
anyone that our ' prestige ' would have been sufficiently vindi-
cated, and our future security sufficiently provided for, if we
APPENDIX TO LECTURE III. 303
had burned down the palace of the king, the chief offender.
But our ' prestige ' serves as an ample excuse for committing
what we should condemn as crimes in any other nation. It is
an entity that has juggled us into the belief that to destroy what
we cannot retain and cannot use is the prerogative, not of bar-
barism, but of civilisation and of Christianity. Had the war
upon the Gold Coast been avowedly a war not for the spread of
our influence, or for the security of a territory acquired by
questionable means, but a moral crusade against human sacrifice,
or for any purely unselfish object, the case would have been
different. Truly this war will be a damnosa hereditas to posterity,
alike whether we accept or disclaim the fearful responsibilities
in which it has involved us.
There is an anecdote related of Mahmud the Ghaznevide, the
great Turkish conqueror of Central Asia, which seems to me to
be suggestive. Soon after the conquest of Persia, a caravan was
cut off by robbers in one of its deserts, and the mother of one
of the merchants who was killed went to Ghazni to complain.
Mahmud urged the impossibility of keeping order in so remote
a part of his territories, when the woman boldly answered :
' Why, then, do you take countries which you cannot govern,
and for the protection of which you must answer in the Day of
Judgment ? ' Mahmud was struck with the reproach : whether
it would have prevented all further conquests on his part we do
not know, for he died soon afterwards ; but he liberally rewarded
the woman, and took immediate and effectual steps for the pro-
tection of the caravans.
i
ft
INDEX.
305
INDEX.
A BAN, 176
^ Abd' Allah, father of Mo-
hammed, 94
Abd' Allah, the blind, 125
Abd' al Muttalib, 94
Abd'-al-kader, 273
Abd'-al-Rahman, 242
Abkhasians, 49
Abrahah, 142
Abraham, 85, 136, 148, 221
Abu Bakr, 21, 104, 131, 137,
150, 185
Abu Hurairah, 18, 266
Abu Lahab. 150
Abu Taleb, 95, 101, 104, 128, 266
Abulf eda, 72
Abyssinia, 102, seq., 251
Achin, 29, 271
Acta Sanctorum, 198
Ad, Bani, 148
Adalbert, 238
Adhan, 24
Africa, Islam in, early spread of,
30 seq.; spreading now, 33 seq.,
35 ; intellectual benefits of, 35,
209; moral benefits of, 37 seq.,
106, 209 ; testimony of travel-
lers to, 37-43; slavery and slave
trade in, 47, 278, 280; probable
destiny of , 48 seq. ; Christianity
in, 47, 48, 211 seq., 241
Africanus, Leo, 215
Aidan, 298
Aiznadin, battle of, 176
Akbah, the conqueror, 30
Akbar, 106, 294
Albigenses, 185, 186
Alexander, 76. 287
Alfred the Great, 198, 288
Alhambra, 107, 243
Ali, 84, 165, 176, 246
All, Bev, 143
Ali, Mohammed, 268
Allahabad Missionary Confe-
rence, 295, 299
Al-Kazar, 107, 243
Al-Lat and Al-Uzza, 86, 124
Alliance, Holy, 186
Almsgiving, 111, 139
America, Islam in, 30 ; slavery
in, 207, 278
Aminah, 94
Amru, 176, 184
Anatolia, 58, 261, 270
Animals, kindness of Turks to,
180 ; of Mohammed to, 215 ;
of Egyptians and Arabs to,
217; funds devoted to, 214,
217 ; future life of, 216
Anti-Christ, 68, 69
Apocryphal Gospels, 228, 229
Arabesques, 224
Arabs. See Bedouins.
Arafat, Mount, 203
Architecture, Moorish, 106, 224,
243 ; Mogul, 106
Armageddon, 272
Arnold, Mr. Matthew, 56, 61
Ashanti, 187, 302, 303
Asia, Central, Islam in, 27; Rus-
sian advance into, 257, 272, 273
Asoka, 214
Asylums, lunatic, 215
Attila, 173, 178, 272
Augustine, St., 160
Aurungzebe, 106, 294
Avatar, 112
Ayishah, 110, 111, 130, 143,
155
Azurairah, Chronicle of, 46
BABBR, 106, 275, 294
Babyism, 269
Bacon, Lord, 55, 253
I
306
INDEX.
BAD
GIB
Badger, Dr. G. P., xiii, 69,
140,
Cantacuzene, Emperor, John, 220
141, 273
Capitulations. 179
Baker, Sir Samuel, 276, 279
Cappadocia, George of, 241
Balaustion, 183
Carlyle, Mr. T., xix, 72, 193
Barth, Dr., 37, 41, 42, 226
Carmathians, 266
Bayle, 67
Caste, absence of, in Islam, 208;
Beal, Mr., 4
among Hindus, 209 ; amongst
Becket, Thomas \ 198
Christians, 209 ; effect on Ne-
Bedouins, immobility of, 72,
73;
groes, 209
passion for the desert,
74;
Cavour, Count, 91
heathenism, 75 ; never
con-
Cazenove. Dr., xiii, 81, 88, 218
quered, 76 ; tribal organisa-
Charity, St. Paul on, 17 ; Mo-
tion, 77 ; hospitality
and
hammed's apologue on, 18
plunder, 78 ; chivalry.
79;
Charles Martel, 22
)oetry,79; revenge and cruelty.
Charies V., 243
iJO, 81 ; treatment of women,
Charies the Great, 64, 182, 186,288
82 ; proverbs, 83 ; religions,
Chenghis Khan, 178, 259
83-86 ; . superstitions, 87
China, Islam in, 25; early civili-
Bedr, battle of, 129, 175
sation of, 250 ; Dr. J. Bridges
Beiram, feast of, 223
on, 250
Beit-Allah. See Kaaba.
Chosroes, 119, 127, 288
Bench, people of. Ill
Christ, His life and teaching, 6-7;
Bentham, 216
our imperfect knowledge of , 11 ;
Bernard, St., 160, 194
nature of His miracles, 161,162;
Bible compared with Koran
16-
nature of His kingilom, 169;
24 ; criticism of, 59 seq.
attitude towards existing insti-
Bilal, 211
tutions. 197; spirit of, 204;
Bismillah, 256
how he would have viewed
Blyden, Rev. E., 42, 43, 210
Mohamraai, 219, 236, 238;
Bokhara, 27
Mohammedan ideas of, 226 ;
Bokhari, Al, 289
Mohammed's ideas of, 227,
Boniface, St., 288
231 ; contrasted \vith Moham-
Borak, 158
med, 247-249
Bosman, William, 44
Christianitv, origin of, 5 seq.; in
Brahma Samaj, 294, 296
Africa, 4>>, 44; 210, 241 ; pre-
Brahmanism, 50, 209, 246,
294,
eminent, but not exclusive
295
claims of, 138-142; how it may
Bridges, Dr. J., 250
spread, 60, 62 : in Arabia, 84,
Browne, traveller, in Africa, 37
138 ; relation to Judaism, 59,
Browne, Mr. I. de Maine, 101
146; spread by peaceful means,
Bruce, traveller, in Abyssinia
,261
185 ; attitude to slavery, 204 ;
Brunehaut, 263
enthusiasm of humanity, 211 ;
Bryce, Mr. J., 287
relation to Islam, 219 seq. ;
Buddha, 4, 23, 170
rapid degeneracy in the East,
Buddhism, 3, 214
234-236 ; comprehensiveness
Burckhardt, 75, 143, 266
of, 237-244; contrasted with
Burton, Capt.,75,79, 143,251,295
Islam, 247
Bushreens, 40
Christotokos, 2S3
Cicero, 57
pAIRO, 35, 181, 214, 257
^ Cairoan, 30
Circassians, 212, 271
Circumcision, 167
INDEX.
307
CLA
Claverhouse, 269
Collyridians, 230
Comparative religion, 1-3, 53-56
Conception, Immaculate, 230
Concubinage, 207, 208
Confucius, 11, 14, 170
Constantine Porphyrogenitus,
174
Constantine the Great, 198, 288
Constantinople. 24, 173, 179,
180
Cordova, 22, 64, 184, 243
Cotton, Bishop, 299
Covenanters, the, 269
Crawfurd, 28, 29
Creed, Athanasian, 229
Crowther, Bishop, 34
Cruelties, of Christians, 254 ; of
Musalmans, 253, 254
Crusades, 177, 301-302
Curzon, R., 24, 166, 179
Cyril. St.. 198. 241
TVAIMBERT OF i>LSA, 301
^ Damascus, John of, 164
Damascus, siege of. 176
Dante, 68, 192, 220'
Dan ton, 91
Darwin, Mr. Charles, 216
Dervishes, 195, 240
Desert, characteristics of, 73, 74
Despotism, Eastern, 274
Deutsch, E., xiii,, 109, 145, 243
Divination by arrows, 87 ; for-
bidden, 218
Divorce, 201-203
Djafar, 102
Djinn, 14, 139, 151
Docetists, 231
D'Ohson, Mouradgia, 260
Dollinger, Dr., xii., 212, 266
' Dozy, Professor, xii., 30, 73, 75,
77,80
runk
218
Druses, 211, 252
Dudu Miyan, 294
Dunstan, St., 198
Durthur, 130
Dutch, 29, 44
GIB
l^AST AND WEST, 179, 181
-^ Ebionites, 145
Eesa, Seyyedna, 226 seq.
El Azhar, 24, 35
El Khunsa, 82
El Mutanabi, 78. 79
Elijah, 104, 129 '
Eliot, George, 118, 291
Blphinstone, Mount Stuart, 212,
224, 246
Epilepsy, 96, 155
Essenes, 145
F
A-HIAN, 214
Fairs, annual, in Arabia, 79,
104
Farrar, Dr. F. W., 122, 204, 214
Fatalism, not a dogma of Mo-
hammed, 163 ; nor of St. Paul,
164; common in East, 252
Fatihah, 262
Fatrah, 99, 227
Female children, burial alive of,
81 ; prohibited, 106, 203
Ferishta, 224
Fetishism, 53 ; Arabian, 86, 107
Fez, 30, 215
Firazees, 294
Firdausi, 245
Fire-worship, 23, 25, 85
Forsyth, Sir D., 27
Foulahs, 32, 295
Foulcher, of Chartres, 301
Fredegonde, 263
Frere, Sir Bartle, 46, 293, 294
Future life, Arab ideas of, 88,
138 ; of Islam, 188-192 ; of
other religions, 191 ; legitimate
influences of, 194 ; of animals,
216
AAGNIER, 71
^^ Galton, Mr. F., 48
Gambling prohibited, 218
Genebrard, 68
Genseric, 178
Gharanyk, 125
Ghaznevide, 177. See Mahmud.
Gibbon, xviii., 53, 72, 89, 108,
120, 159, 174
308
INDEX.
GOB
Gobineau, Count, xix., 164 seq.,
183, 270
Great men, influence of, 91 seq.
Greece, religion in, 7, 59
Greek Church, 173, 174, 273, 274
Gregory the Great, 173, 194, 288
Guiana, Dutch. 30
Guizot, 90
HAJJ, 140, 141, 144
Hallam, xix.. 89
Hanifa, tribe of, 225
Hamza, 195
Hanyfs, 91
Hardy, Mr. Spence, 4 •
Harun al Raschid, 248, 275
Hassan, Prince, 25, 26
Hassan and Hosein, 246
Hausas, 37
Haxthausen, Baron von, 271
Helpers of Medina, 195
Helps, Sir A., 46
Hennessy, Mr. Pope, 34, 35
Heraclius, 119, 288
Hijrah, the fii-st, 102
Hijrah, the, 104
Hilaire, Barth^lemy St., xix., 52,
89, 92, 239
Hillel, 146
Hinduism. See Brahmanism
Hira, Mount, 97.
Hoare, Rev. J., 4,214
Hobal, 86, 120
Hospitals, 214
Hughes, Rev. T. P., xiii., 246,
256, 299
Hunter, Dr. W. W., 226, 245,
266 seq.
TBN BATUTA, 25, 28, 31, 220,
■■■ 259
Ibn Chaldun, 75
Ibn Hisham, 91
Ibn Ishak, 91
I<jaba, 92
Iconoclasm, 174, 22S, 224
Idolatry, 85, 86,223,224
India, Islam in, 49, 50, 249, 246,
246 ; Mogul invasion of, 106
Isaiah, 98, 126
JUD
Ishmael, 87, 223
Islam, historic origin, 15 ; spreatl,
20-22 ; extent, 23, 24 ; in
China, 25 ; in Central Asia,
27 ; in East Indian Islands, 28,
29 ; in America, So ; in Africa,
31, 47 ; in Asiatic Turkey, 49 ;
in Hindustan, 49, 50, 209, 245.
246, 294, 295, 297, 299 ;
causes of success, 51 ; prepara-
tion for, 91, 93 ; essence of,
133 seq. ; meaning of, 137 ;
relation to Judaism, 136, 137 ;
practical duties, 139 ; relation
to the miraculous, 159 seq. ;
to fatalism, 163 seq. ; to use of
sword, 163 seq. ; to temporal
power, 173 seq. ; to future life,
189 seq. ; not sensual, 196, 198 ;
nature of its reforms, 200, 219 ;
relation to Christianity, 220,
234 ; not anti- Christian, 235,
238 ; religion of pastoral races,
239 ; in Spain, 242, 213 ; in
Sicily, 243; in Persia, 244,
245 ; schisms in, 252 ; corrup-
tions and' abuses, 253, 257 ;
potentiality of, 258 ; vitality,
260, 261 ; power of revival,
265, 271 ; can approximate to
Christianity, 285 ; lessons to
be learnt from Christians, 286
Itigh6, 251
TAINS, 214
" Jerusalem, 148, 176, 301, 302
Jessup, Dr., 89, 202, 203
Jews, Mohammed's eflPorts to gain,
148; later hostility, 116, 149,
150.
Jihad, 267, 284
Joan of Arc, 101
Johnson, Rev. J., 34, 299
Jolofs, 37
Judaism, its origin, 3 ; in Arabia,
82 ; exclusive spirit, 134-136,
148 ; relation to Christianity,
11 seq., 57, 146; relation to
Islam, 136, 137 ; slavery and
polygamy in, 200 seq., 207
INDEX.
309
JUG
MIR
Juggernaut, 274
Leupolt, Eev. C. B., 298
Julian, Emperor, 213
Levantine, 282
Justinian, 89, 288
Library, Alexandrian, 181 ; at
Tripoli, 183 ; at Cordova, 183
IZAABA, 24, 80, 91. 101, 120, '
■^ 142 seq.
Lindisfarne, 298
Literature and Science in Islam,
Kadis, 255, 283
181, 184. 244
Kafirs, 40
Livingstone, Dr., 44,279, 295-297
Karakorum, 272
Lubbock, Sir J., 12
Katherine's, St., Monastery. 90,
222
Kaufmann, General, 273
Luther, 67, 101, 102, 263, 268
MAGIANISM, 85
^^ Magyars, 238
Kepler, 2
Ketman, 245
Mahmud, the Ghaznevide, 212,
w^ Khadijah, 95 seq., 99, 104, 129,
224, 303
. 222
Mahu, 67
Khaled, 176
Maimonides, 69
Khalifate, 172, 177, 253, 256
Malaterra, 64
Khalifs-Abassides, 181 seq. ;
Malay Peninsula, Islam in, 27
Fatimite, 244
Malcolm, Sir John, 245
Khatibeh, 276
Mamelukes, 212
Kheredine, General, xiii., 179
Mammetry, &Q
Khiva, 26, 278
Mandingoes. 31, 32, 39, 40, 295
Khoten, 26
Mansur, Elijah, 271, 272
Kiblah, 148, 268
Manu, laws of, 82
Kirghis, 23, 257
Maracci, the Abbe, 69
Koraitza, Bani, 116 seq.
Marco Polo, 4, 25, 26, 28, 65
Koran, compared with Bible, 15-
Maria, 114
19 ; translations of, 72, 75 ;
Marshman, Mr., 259
characteristics, 146 ; history,
Marosia, 263
149 ; editions, 151 ; poetry,
Marriages, Mohammed's, 95, 96,
155, 157 : theology, 157 ; mo-
114
rality, 158 ; on miracles, 159
Marsilles, 64
seq. ; on predestination, 163 ;
Marthan, 84
on the sword. 170 ; on the fu-
Martyn, Kev. Henry, 297
ture life, 191, 193 ; on tolera-
Maurice, Rev. F., xix., 52, 134,
tion, 219 ; a miracle, 290, 291
178
Krapf, Dr., 46
Mawmet, 66
Kuraish, the, 94, 100, 103-105,
Max Muller, xviii., xix, 4, 7
124-126
seq., 54, 265
Kutb-ud-din, 212
Mecca, 73, 94 seq., 120, 142
Medina, 21, 83, 104, 128, 168
T ABYD, 80, 153
^ Lane, Mr., 14, 24, 215, 216,
Milman, Dean, xix., 21, 145, 174
Miracles, at Mohammed's birth.
217, 277, 278
94 ; attributed to the Church
Layard, Mr., 74, 75, 179
Fathers, 159 ; Mohammed's
Lecky, Mr., 214
attitude towards, 23, 156, 157 ;
Leo Africanus, 215
Christ's attitude towards, 163 ;
Leo the Great, 29
the Koran a miracle, 290
Leo X., 67, 256
Miraj, 19, 158
Lepanto, battle of, 52
Mir Aulad Ali, 115, 122, 205
310
INDEX.
^
Miscreant, 66
Mishkat-ul-Masabih, xii., 17, 130,
143, 182, 266
Missionaries, Musalman, in Afri-
ca, 33 ; St. Paul as a, 59, 60 ;
of the present and future. 6 1 ,62,
287, 288 : mistakes of, 297-298
Missionary Intelligencer, 41, 281
Missions, results of Christian,
in Africa, 33, 209, 287-
297 ; in India, 49, 293, 294 ;
legitimate objects of, 60
Modllacat, 79
Moffat, Dr., 46
Moguls, 106
JIohanMaed, full knowledge of,
15 ; opinions about, 63, 71 ;
youth, 94 ;_ marriage to Kha-
<iijah(^9§"; call to be prophet,
97 ; persecuted, 99 seq. ;
visions, 102 ; flight, 105 ;
life at Medinn, 106 ; sin-
cerity, 108, 123-125 ; cha-
racteristics, 109, 112 ; apparent
change in, 113, 1 17 ; mnrriagrps
.of^ll4-llA; consistency, 119
faults, 121 ; nature of mission
127 : anecdotes of, 128-131
feelings towards Jews, 146,
147 ; miracles, 157 seq.
soldier and conqueror, 171 seq.
encouragement of learning,
183 ; moral reformer and legis-
lator, 200 ; views of Christ and
Christianity, 226 seq. ; place
in history, 286 seq. ; true pro-
phet, 290, 291
Mohammed II., 287
Mohammed IV., 227
Mohammedanism. See Islam.
Mohler. xii., 123
Mohammed, Mulla, 271
Moharram, 246
Momiem, 26
Monotheism, 9, 112, 189 seq.,
220, 229, 282, 284
Moors, 107, 177, 184 seq., 242 seq.
Moseilama the liar, 128
Moses, 95, 117, 146, 222, 277-279
Mother among Turks, reverence
for, 180
PEE
Muezzin, 24. 167, 211
Muir, Sir W., xviii., 64, 92, 93,
109, 114. 226, 236, 277
Mullas, 255
Mungo Park, 38-41.
Muridism, 271
Muza, 31
Mythology, growth of, 19
NABI, 159. See Prophetic
Office
Nagashy, 102 seq., 142
Napoleon, 201, 219, 287
Negro, effects of Islam on, moral,
intellectual, and political, 32-
43 ; the Mohammedan Negro
compared with the Christian,
209
Nehavend, battle of, 175
Nestorians, 233
Nicephorus, 174
Niger, 31, 38
Nijni Novgorod, 223
Nirvana, 4
Nitria, 241
Norway, 180
DIN, 190
Ohud, battle of Mount, 129,
163
Okatz, fair of, 79
Omar, 21, 131, 181, 301
0mm Salama, 78
Opium traffic, 187, 274
Originality of Islam, 9, 91, 137-
139
Ormuzd, 23, 85
Orphans, treatment of, 218
Othman, 81, 150
Otto the Great, 185
PALEY, W., 157
Palgrave, Mr. GiflEord, 49,
251, 270, 271
Palmer, Prof. E. H., 228
Panhellenism, 8
Panthays, 25, 271
Papacy, 173, 174, 268
Paraclete, 228
Paul, St., 6, 17, 59, 60, 163
Perceval, Caussin de, xvii., 70, 84
INDEX.
311
PER
Persia, Islam in, 244
Philip III., 242
Pilgrimage, 140 seq.
Piligrinus, 238
/^^^j&iljtgamy, Authorised by Moham-
^^^"nied, 198 ; limited, 202 ; diffi-
culty of dealing with, 275-277
Poole, Mr. Stanley Lane, 72, 105
Portuguese, 29, 44, 48, 2'.^5
Prayer. Mohammed's views on
139, ' 166, 262, character of
Muslim, 166 seq., 262
Predestination. See Fatalism.
Pre-Mohammedans, 93
Price, Major, xii
Prideaux, Dean, 71
Prophecies, supposed, of Moham-
med, 69, 147 ; forced interpre-
tation^of, 68
Prophetic office, 112, 113, 122,
128, 138, 159.
Proverbs, Arab, 77, 82
Puritans, 269
BAFFLES, Sir Stamford, 29
^ Kamadhan, 97
Kaymond of Agiles, 301
Reade, Winwood, 42, 258
Religious instinct, 160 ; origin of,
3 ; nature of , 10 ; elements of,
13 ; relative element in all, 60
Renan, M., xix., 10, 66, 67,
112
Revival of Islam, in Armenia, &c.,
50, 270 ; in Arabia, 266, 269 ;
in Persia, 270 ; in India, 51, 294
Rodwell, Rev. J. M., xviii., 221
Ross, Alexander. 69, 70
Russia, progress of ,48,257, 272 seq.
Ryer, Andr6 du, 69
a AB^ANISM, 85, 108
^ Sacraments, their use and
abuse, 264, 265
Sacrifice, human, 86 ; no sacri-
fices in Islam. 223
Sahleh, 158
Saladin, 177
Sale. G., 72, 82, 83, 88, 202, 203,
205
Saltrao, 184
SYE
Samanides, 244
Savary, xviii, 72
Savonarola, 194
SchoU, M. J. C, xiii., 77
Schweinfurth, Dr., 279, 280
Science and literature, Moham-"
med's attitude to, 182 seq. ; in
Africa, 36, 37, 40 seq., 242 seq.
Sego, 31, 38
Sensuality of Islam, supposed, 195
Sermon on the Mount, 6, 11
Shah, the, 256, 275
Sicily, Islam in, 243, 260
Siculus, Diodorus, 142
Sierra Leone, 33, 296, 297
Sirat-er-ra90ul, xii., 94, 97, 103,
143
Shamil, 68, 271, 272
Shaw, R. B., 27
Sheik, privileges and duties of, 76
Shiah, 20, 226, 247. 252, 271
Slade, Admiral, 179, 260
Slave trade, 45, 46, 278, 281
Slavery, ameliorations in, 105,
205 ; Jewish, 207- ; American,
207 ; African, 281
Sobieski, John, 52
Solimaii, Sultan, 25
Solon, 198
Spain, Islam in, 240 seq.
Spirituality of Islam, 223
Sprenger, xviii, 73, 74, 92, 95.
96, 97, 98, 104, 113, 121, 125,
129, 137, 139, 143, 145, 183,
185, 188
Stanlev, Dean, xix., 16, 223,
224,251
Stephen, St., 160
Stesichorus, 231
Sumatra, 28
Sunna, 20, 279, 283
Sunni, 23, 271
Superstitions, 87
Sufi<, 168, 252
Suras, titles and variety of, 149 :
the terrific, 152. See Koran.
Surat, 214
Suttee, 274
Swedenborg, 101, 102
Syed Ahmed, xii., 205
Syed Ahmed,'Wahhabileader, 269
312
INDEX
SYK
ZOB
Syed Ameer Ali, xii, 205
Wakidi, Katib al, 92
Sword, use of. See War.
Walada, 232
VValpole, Hon. F., • Ansayrii,' 24
m ABUK, war of, 193
-*■ Talmud, influence of,
179
on
Waraka, 97-99
Koran, 146
Wars, Musalmau, 174-178 ;
Tamerlane, 178, 272
character of, 181. 301 ; Chris-
Taoism, 27
tian, 184 seq., 302, 303 ; what
Tassy, Garoin de, xii, 147,
224,
are Christian, 186
246, 284
Wartburg, 102
Tayif, 129
Weil, xviii., 91
Tecbir, 173.
Wesley, J., 263
Telemachus, the monk, 198
Wesley, Charles, 70
Temim, 218
West, influence of, on East, 255,
Tennent, Sir Emerson, 239
257, 282
Termagant, 66
Wheeler, Mr. Talboys, 4, 50, 51,
Thamud, Bani, 149, 158
214.
Theodora, 268
White, Professor, 71, 157
Theodoric, 182, 198
Whitefield, 263
Theotokos, 233
Wilberforce, 198
Thor, Mount, 104
Wiili^m the Good, 243
Toleration, 219, 220
V>'
Cffiamenr^former degradation of,
Trajan, 76
83 ; amelioration in their posi-
Trinity, Mohammed's views of
tion, 198-207; yet still inferior,
the, 229, 231
255
Tritheism, 136, 229
Wood, Lieutenant, 166, 208, 226,
Turks, conversion of Seljukian, 22
261
Turks, Ottoman, 24 ; vices
and
Worms, 109
virtues of, 180 seq., 270
Turpin, romance of, 64
^IMENES, Cardinal, 183
TTGANDA, 47
^ Drquhart, Mr. D.. 260
VAKUB, Beg, 27, 273
-•■ Yermuk, 175
Usury, prohibited, 218
Yezidis, 252
VAMBI:RY, Professor, 254
' Veth, Professor, 29
Yule, Colonel, 4, 25, ()5
Yunnan, 24
Visions of Mohammed, 97,
99 ;
their nature, 100, 101
7 ANZIBAR, 23, 48
^ Zeid, the enquirer, 92. 97
Voltaire, 89, 108
Vladimir, 198
Zeid, the Prophet's free<lnian,
97,99, 110,129,211
WAHHAB, Abdul, 266
" WahhabiH, 266-270, 294-
Zeinab, 114, 115,123
-295
Zemzem, 87, 143
Waitz, 13, 32, 36
Zoroaster, 93, 244
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