Part 2 (1/2)
Powerless against the scepticism of his hearers, after twelve years of preaching followed only by a few dozen, most of them outcasts like himself, he hoped now and then that Allah would strike the recalcitrant mult.i.tude with an earthly doom, as he knew from revelations had happened before. This hope was also unfulfilled. As other messengers of G.o.d had done in similar circ.u.mstances, he sought for a more fruitful field than that of his birthplace; he set out on the Hijrah, _i.e._, emigration to Medina. Here circ.u.mstances were more favourable to him: in a short time he became the head of a considerable community.
Allah, who had given him power, soon allowed him to use it for the protection of the interests of the Faithful against the unbelievers.
Once become militant, Mohammed turned from the purely defensive to the aggressive att.i.tude, with such success that a great part of the Arab tribes were compelled to accept Islam, ”obedience to Allah and His Messenger.” The rule formerly insisted upon: ”No compulsion in religion,” was sacrificed, since experience taught him, that the truth was more easily forced upon men by violence than by threats which would be fulfilled only after the resurrection. Naturally, the religious value of the conversions sank in proportion as their number increased. The Prophet of world renouncement in Mecca wished to win souls for his faith; the Prophet-Prince in Medina needed subjects and fighters for his army. Yet he was still the same Mohammed.
Parallel with his altered position towards the heathen Arabs went a readjustment of his point of view towards the followers of Scripture.
Mohammed never pretended to preach a new religion; he demanded in the name of Allah the same Islam (submission) that Moses, Jesus, and former prophets had demanded of their nations. In his earlier revelations he always points out the ident.i.ty of his ”Qorans” with the contents of the sacred books of Jews and Christians, in the sure conviction that these will confirm his a.s.sertion if asked. In Medina he was disillusioned by finding neither Jews nor Christians prepared to acknowledge an Arabian prophet, not even for the Arabs only; so he was led to distinguish between the _true_ contents of the Bible and that which had been made of it by the falsification of later Jews and Christians. He preferred now to connect his own revelations more immediately with those of Abraham, no books of whom could be cited against him, and who was acknowledged by Jews and Christians without being himself either a Jew or a Christian.
This turn, this particular connection of Islam with Abraham, made it possible for him, by means of an adaptation of the biblical legends concerning Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael, to include in his religion a set of religious customs of the Meccans, especially the hajj.[1] Thus Islam became more Arabian, and at the same time more independent of the other revealed religions, whose degeneracy was demonstrated by their refusal to acknowledge Mohammed.
[Footnote 1: A complete explanation of the gradual development of the Abraham legend in the Qoran can be found in my book _Het Mekkaansche Feest_ (The Feast of Mecca), Leiden, 1880.]
All this is to be explained without the supposition of conscious trickery or dishonesty on the part of Mohammed. There was no other way for the unlettered Prophet, whose belief in his mission was unshaken, to overcome the difficulties entailed by his closer acquaintance with the tenets of other religions.
How, then, are we to explain the starting-point of it all--Mohammed's sense of vocation? Was it a disease of the spirit, a kind of madness? At all events, the data are insufficient upon which to form a serious diagnosis.
Some have called it epilepsy. Sprenger, with an exaggerated display of certainty based upon his former medical studies, gave Mohammed's disorder the name of hysteria. Others try to find a connection between Mohammed's extraordinary interest in the fair s.e.x and his prophetic consciousness.
But, after all, is it explaining the spiritual life of a man, who was certainly unique, if we put a label upon him, and thus cla.s.s him with others, who at the most shared with him certain abnormalities? A normal man Mohammed certainly was not. But as soon as we try to give a positive name to this negative quality, then we do the same as the heathens of Mecca, who were violently awakened by his thundering prophecies: ”He is nothing but one possessed, a poet, a soothsayer, a sorcerer,” they said. Whether we say with the old European biographers ”impostor,” or with the modern ones put ”epileptic,” or ”hysteric” in its place, makes little difference. The Meccans ended by submitting to him, and conquering a world under the banner of his faith. We, with the diffidence which true science implies, feel obliged merely to call him Mohammed, and to seek in the Qoran, and with great cautiousness in the Tradition, a few princ.i.p.al points of his life and work, in order to see how in his mind the intense feeling of discontent during the misery of his youth, together with a great self-reliance, a feeling of spiritual superiority to his surroundings, developed into a call, the form of which was largely decided by Jewish and Christian influence.
While being struck by various weaknesses which disfigured this great personality and which he himself freely confessed, we must admire the perseverance with which he retained his faith in his divine mission, not discouraged by twelve years of humiliation, nor by the repudiation of the ”People of Scripture,” upon whom he had relied as his princ.i.p.al witnesses, nor yet by numbers of temporary rebuffs during his struggle for the dominion of Allah and His Messenger, which he carried on through the whole of Arabia.
Was Mohammed conscious of the universality of his mission? In the beginning he certainly conceived his work as merely the Arabian part of a universal task, which, for other parts of the world, was laid upon other messengers.
In the Medina period he ever more decidedly chose the direction of ”forcing to comply.” He was content only when the heathens perceived that further resistance to Allah's hosts was useless; their understanding of his ”clear Arabic Qoran” was no longer the princ.i.p.al object of his striving. _Such_ an Islam could equally well be forced upon _non-Arabian_ heathens. And, as regards the ”People of Scripture,” since Mohammed's endeavour to be recognized by them had failed, he had taken up his position opposed to them, even above them. With the rise of his power he became hard and cruel to the Jews in North-Arabia, and from Jews and Christians alike in Arabia he demanded submission to his authority, since it had proved impossible to make them recognize his divine mission. This demand could quite logically be extended to all Christians; in the first place to those of the Byzantine Empire. But did Mohammed himself come to these conclusions in the last part of his life? Are the words in which Allah spoke to him: ”We have sent thee to men in general,”[1] and a few expressions of the same sort, to be taken in that sense, or does ”humanity” here, as in many other places in the Qoran, mean those with whom Mohammed had especially to do? Noldeke is strongly of opinion that the princ.i.p.al lines of the program of conquest carried out after Mohammed's death, had been drawn by the Prophet himself.
Lammens and others deny with equal vigour, that Mohammed ever looked upon the whole world as the field of his mission. This shows that the solution is not evident.[2]
[Footnote 1: _Qoran_, x.x.xiv., 27. The translation of this verse has always been a subject of great difference of opinion. At the time of its revelation--as fixed by Mohammedan as well as by western authorities--the universal conception of Mohammed's mission was quite out of question.]
[Footnote 2: Professor T.W. Arnold in the 2d edition (London, 1913) of his valuable work _The Preaching of Islam_ (especially pp. 28-31), warmly endeavours to prove that Mohammed from the beginning considered his mission as universal. He weakens his argument more than is necessary by placing the Tradition upon an almost equal footing with the Qoran as a source, and by ignoring the historical development which is obvious in the Qoran itself.
In this way he does not perceive the great importance of the history of the Abraham legend in Mohammed's conception. Moreover, the translation of the verses of the Qoran on p. 29 sometimes says more than the original.
_Lil-nas_ is not ”_to mankind_” but ”_to men_,” in the sense of ”_to everybody_.” _Qoran_, xvi., 86, does not say: ”One day we will raise up a witness out of every nation,” but: ”On the day (_i.e._, the day of resurrection) when we will raise up, etc.,” which would seem to refer to the theme so constantly repeated in the Qoran, that each nation will be confronted on the Day of Judgment with the prophet sent to it. When the Qoran is called an ”admonition to the world (_'alamin_)” and Mohammed's mission a ”mercy to the world (_'alamin_),” then we must remember that 'alamin is one of the most misused rhymewords in the Qoran (e.g., _Qoran_, xv., 70); and we should not therefore translate it emphatically as ”all created beings,” unless the universality of Mohammed's mission is firmly established by other proofs. And this is far from being the case.]
In our valuation of Mohammed's sayings we cannot lay too much stress upon his incapability of looking far ahead. The final aims which Mohammed set himself were considered by sane persons as unattainable. His firm belief in the realization of the vague picture of the future which he had conceived, nay, which Allah held before him, drove him to the uttermost exertion of his mental power in order to surmount the innumerable unexpected obstacles which he encountered. Hence the variability of the practical directions contained in the Qoran; they are constantly altered according to circ.u.mstances. Allah's words during the last part of Mohammed's life: ”This day have I perfected your religion for you, and have I filled up the measure of my favours towards you, and chosen Islam for you as your religion,” have in no way the meaning of the exclamation: ”It is finished,”
of the dying Christ. They are only a cry of jubilation over the degradation of the heathen Arabs by the triumph of Allah's weapons. At Mohammed's death everything was still unstable; and the vital questions for Islam were subjects of contention between the leaders even before the Prophet had been buried.
The expedient of new revelations completing, altering, or abrogating former ones had played an important part in the legislative work of Mohammed. Now, he had never considered that by his death the spring would be stopped, although completion was wanted in every respect. For, without doubt, Mohammed felt his weakness in systematizing and his absence of clearness of vision into the future, and therefore he postponed the promulgation of divine decrees as long as possible, and he solved only such questions of law as frequently recurred, when further hesitation would have been dangerous to his authority and to the peace of the community.
At Mohammed's death, all Arabs were not yet subdued to his authority.
The expeditions which he had undertaken or arranged beyond the northern boundaries of Arabia, were directed against Arabs, although they were likely to rouse conflict with the Byzantine and Persian empires. It would have been contrary to Mohammed's usual methods if this had led him to form a general definition of his att.i.tude towards the world outside Arabia.
As little as Mohammed, when he invoked the Meccans in wild poetic inspirations to array themselves behind him to seek the blessedness of future life, had dreamt of the possibility that twenty years later the whole of Arabia would acknowledge his authority in this world, as little, nay, much less, could he at the close of his life have had the faintest premonition of the fabulous development which his state would reach half a century later. The subjugation of the mighty Persia and of some of the richest provinces of the Byzantine Empire, only to mention these, was never a part of his program, although legend has it that he sent out written challenges to the six princes of the world best known to him. Yet we may say that Mohammed's successors in the guidance of his community, by continuing their expansion towards the north, after the suppression of the apostasy that followed his death, remained in Mohammed's line of action.
There is even more evident continuity in the development of the empire of the Omayyads out of the state of Mohammed, than in the series of events by which we see the dreaded Prince-Prophet of Medina grew out of the ”possessed one” of Mecca. But if Mohammed had been able to foresee how the unity of Arabia, which he nearly accomplished, was to bring into being a formidable international empire, we should expect some indubitable traces of this in the Qoran; not a few verses of dubious interpretation, but some certain sign that the Revelation, which had repeatedly, and with the greatest emphasis, called itself a ”plain Arabic Qoran” intended for those ”to whom no warner had yet been sent,” should in future be valid for the 'Ajam, the Barbarians, as well as for the Arabs.
Even if we ascribe to Mohammed something of the universal program, which the later tradition makes him to have drawn up, he certainly could not foresee the success of it. For this, in the first place, the economic and political factors to which some scholars of our day would attribute the entire explanation of the Islam movement, must be taken into consideration.
Mohammed did to some extent prepare the universality of his religion and make it possible. But that Islam, which came into the world as the Arabian form of the one, true religion, has actually become a universal religion, is due to circ.u.mstances which had little to do with its origin.[1] This extension of the domain to be subdued to its spiritual rule entailed upon Islam about three centuries of development and accommodation, of a different sort, to be sure, but not less drastic in character than that of the Christian Church.
[Footnote 1: Sir William Muir was not wrong when he said: ”From first to last the summons was to Arabs and to none other... The seed of a universal creed had indeed been sown; but that it ever germinated was due to circ.u.mstances rather than design.”]
II
THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF ISLaM