Ten Great Religions by James Freeman Clarke

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No one could have foreseen the cruelty of which Mohammed, hitherto always
a kind-hearted and affectionate man, was capable toward those who resisted
his purpose. This first showed itself in his treatment of the Jews. He
hoped to form an alliance with them, against the idolaters. He had
admitted the divine authority of their religion, and appealed to their
Scriptures as evidence of the truth of his own mission. He conformed to
their ritual and customs, and made Jerusalem his Kibla, toward which he
turned in prayer five times a day. In return for this he expected them to
receive him as a prophet; but this they refused to do. So he departed by
degrees from their customs, changed his Kibla to Mecca, and at last
denounced the Jews as stiff-necked unbelievers. The old quarrel between
Esau and Jacob could not be appeased, nor an alliance formed between them.

M. Saint-Hilaire[396] does not think that the character of Mohammed
changed when he became the founder of a state and head of a conquering
party. He thinks "that he only yielded to the political necessities of his
position." Granted; but yielding to those necessities was the cause of
this gradual change in his character. The man who lies and murders from
the necessity of his political position can hardly remain a saint.
Plunder, cold-blooded execution of prisoners, self-indulgence, became the
habit of the prophet henceforth, as we shall presently see.

The first battle against the Koreish, that of Badr, took place in January,
A.D. 624. When Mohammed had drawn up his army, he prayed earnestly for
the victory. After a desperate struggle, the Koreish fled. Mohammed
claimed, by a special revelation, the fifth part of the booty. As the
bodies of his old opponents were cast into a pit, he spoke to them
bitterly. When the prisoners were brought before him he looked fiercely at
one of them. "There is death in that glance," said the unhappy man, and
presently the prophet ordered him to be beheaded. Two days after, another
was ordered for execution. "Who will take care of my little girl?" said
he. "Hell-fire," replied Mohammed, and ordered him to be cut down. Shortly
after the battle, a Jewess who had written verses against Mohammed, was
assassinated by one of his followers; and the prophet praised him for the
deed in the public mosque. Another aged Jew, for the same offence, was
murdered by his express command. A quarrel between some Jews and Moslems
brought on an attack by Mohammed upon the Jewish tribe. They surrendered
after a siege of fifteen days, and Mohammed ordered all the prisoners to
be killed; but at last, at the urgent request of a powerful chief in
Medina, allowed them to go into exile, cursing them and their intercessor.
Mr. Muir mentions other cases of assassination of the Jews by the command
of the prophet. All these facts are derived from contemporaneous Moslem
historians, who glorify their prophet for this conduct. The worst action
perhaps of this kind was the deliberate execution of seven or eight
hundred Jewish prisoners, who had surrendered at discretion, and the sale
of their wives and children into slavery. Mohammed selected from among
these women one more beautiful than the rest, for his concubine. Whether
M. Saint-Hilaire considers all this as "yielding to the political
necessities of his position," we do not know. But this man, who could
stand by and see hundreds of captives slaughtered in cold blood, and then
retire to solace himself with the widow of one of his victims, seems to us
to have retained little of his early purity of soul.

About this time Mohammed began to multiply wives, and to receive
revelations allowing him to do so beyond the usual limit of his law. He
added one after another to his harem, until he had ten wives, besides his
slaves. His views on such subjects are illustrated by his presenting three
beautiful female slaves, taken in war, one to his father-in-law, and the
others to his two sons-in-law.

So, in a series of battles, with the Jewish tribes, the Koreish, the
Syrians, passed the stormy and triumphant years of the Pontiff King. Mecca
was conquered, and the Koreish submitted in A.D. 630. The tribes
throughout Arabia acquiesced, one by one, in the prophet's authority. All
paid tribute, or accepted Islam. His enemies were all under his feet; his
doctrines accepted; the rival prophets, Aswad and Museilama, overcome.
Then, in the sixty-third year of his age, death drew near. On the last day
of his life, he went into the mosque to attend morning prayer, then back
to the room of his favorite wife, Ayesha, and died in her arms. Wild with
grief, Omar declared he was not dead, but in a trance. The grave Abu Bakr
composed the excited multitude, and was chosen caliph, or successor to the
prophet. Mohammed died on June 8, A.D. 632, and was buried the next day,
amid the grief of his followers. Abu Bakr and Omar offered the prayer:
"Peace be unto thee, O prophet of God; and the mercy of the Lord, and his
blessing! We bear testimony that the prophet of God hath delivered the
message revealed to him; hath fought in the ways of the Lord until God
crowned his religion with victory; hath fulfilled his words commanding
that he alone is to be worshipped in unity; hath drawn us to himself, and
been kind and tender-hearted to believers; hath sought no recompense for
delivering to us the faith, neither hath sold it for a price at any time."
And all the people said, "Amen! Amen!"

Concerning the character of Mohammed, enough has been already said. He was
a great man, one of the greatest ever sent upon earth. He was a man of the
deepest convictions, and for many years of the purest purposes, and was
only drawn down at last by using low means for a good end. Of his visions
and revelations, the same explanation is to be given as of those received
by Joan of Arc, and other seers of that order. How far they had an
objective basis in reality, and how far they were the result of some
abnormal activity of the imagination, it is difficult with our present
knowledge to decide. But that these visionaries fully believed in their
own inspiration, there can be little doubt.

Sec. 5. Religious Doctrines and Practices among the Mohammedans.

As to the religion of Mohammed, and its effects on the world, it is easier
to come to an opinion than concerning his own character. Its essential
doctrine, as before indicated, is the absolute unity and supremacy of God,
as opposed to the old Arab Polytheism on the one hand and the Christian
Trinity on the other. It however admits of angels and genii. Gabriel and
Michael are the angels of power; Azriel, angel of death; Israfeel, angel
of the resurrection. Eblis, or Satan, plays an important part in this
mythology. The Koran also teaches the doctrine of Eternal Decrees, or
absolute Predestination; of prophets before Mohammed, of whom he is the
successor,--as Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus; of sacred books, of which all
that remain are the Pentateuch, Psalms, Gospels, and Koran; of an
intermediate state after death; of the resurrection and judgment. All
non-believers in Islam go into eternal fire. There are separate hells for
Christians, Jews, Sabians, Magians, idolaters, and the hypocrites of all
religions. The Moslem is judged by his actions. A balance is held by
Gabriel, one scale hanging over heaven and another over hell, and his good
deeds are placed in one and his bad ones in the other. According as his
scale inclines, he goes to heaven or hell. If he goes to heaven, he finds
there seventy-two Houris, more beautiful than angels, awaiting him, with
gardens, groves, marble palaces, and music. If women are true believers
and righteous, they will also go to heaven, but nothing is said about
husbands being provided for them. Stress is laid on prayer, ablution,
fasting, almsgiving, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Wine and gaming are
forbidden. There is no recognition, in the Koran, of human brotherhood. It
is a prime duty to hate infidels and make war on them. Mohammed made it a
duty for Moslems to betray and kill their own brothers when they were
infidels; and he was obeyed in more cases than one. The Moslem sects are
as numerous as those of Christians. The Dabistan mentions seventy-three.
The two main divisions are into Sunnites and Shyites. The Persians are
mostly Shyites, and refuse to receive the Sunnite traditions. They accept
Ali, and denounce Omar. Terrible wars and cruelties have taken place
between these sects. Only a few of the Sunnite doctors acknowledge the
Shyites to be Moslems. They have a saying, "to destroy a Shyite is more
acceptable than to kill seventy other infidels of whatever sort."

The Turks are the most zealous of the Moslems. On Friday, which is the
Sabbath of Islam, all business is suspended. Prayers are read and sermons
preached in the mosques. No one is allowed to be absent. The Ramadan fast
is universally kept. Any one who breaks it twice is considered worthy of
death. The fast lasts from sunrise to sunset. But the rich feast in the
night, and sleep during the day. The Turks have no desire to make
proselytes, but have an intolerant hatred for all outside of Islam. The
Kalif is the Chief Pontiff. The Oulema, or Parliament, is composed of the
Imans, or religious teachers, the Muftis, or doctors of law, and Kadis, or
ministers of justice. The priests in Turkey are subordinate to the civil
magistrate, who is their diocesan, and can remove them at pleasure. The
priests in daily life are like the laity, engage in the same business, and
are no more austere than they.

Mr. Forster says, in regard to their devotion: "When I contrast the
silence of a Turkish mosque, at the hour of public prayer, with the noise
and tumult so frequent in Christian temples, I stand astonished at the
strange inversion, in the two religions, of the order of things which
might naturally be expected." "I have seen," says another, "a congregation
of at least two thousand souls assembled in the mosque of St. Sophia, with
silence so profound, that until I entered the body of the building I was
unaware that it contained a single worshipper."

Bishop Southgate, long a missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church of the
United States, says: "I have often met with Mussulmans who seem to possess
deep religious feeling, and with whom I could exercise something of a
religious communion. I have sometimes had my own mind quickened and
benefited by the reverence with which they spoke of the Deity, and have
sometimes mingled in harmonious converse with them on holy things. I have
heard them insist with much earnestness on the duty of prayer, when they
appeared to have some spiritual sense of its nature and importance. I have
sometimes found them entertaining elevated views of moral duty, and
looking with contempt on the pleasures of this world. These are indeed
rare characters, but I should do injustice to my own conviction if I did
not confess that I had found them. In these instances I have been
uniformly struck with a strong resemblance to patriarchal piety." He
continues: "When we sat down to eat, the old Turkish Bey implored a
blessing with great solemnity, and rendered his thanks when we arose.
Before he left us he spread his carpet, and offered his evening devotions
with apparent meekness and humility; and I could not but feel how
impressive are the Oriental forms of worship when I saw his aged head
bowed to the earth in religious homage."

Bishop Southgate adds further: "I have never known a Mussulman, sincere in
his faith and devout and punctilious in his religious duties, in whom
moral rectitude did not seem an active quality and a living principle."

In seasons of plague "the Turks appear perfectly fearless. They do not
avoid customary intercourse and contact with friends. They remain with and
minister to the sick, with unshrinking assiduity.... In truth, there is
something imposing in the unaffected calmness of the Turks at such times.
It is a spirit of resignation which becomes truly noble when exercised
upon calamities which have already befallen them. The fidelity with which
they remain by the bedside of a friend is at least as commendable as the
almost universal readiness among the Franks to forsake it."

Five times a day the Mezzuin proclaims the hour of prayer from the
minaret in these words: "There is no God but God. Mohammed is his prophet.
Come to prayer." In the morning call he adds, "Prayer is better than
sleep." Immediately every Mussulman leaves his occupation, and prostrates
himself on the floor or ground, wherever he may he. It is very
disreputable to omit this.

An interesting account is given of the domestic life of Moslem women in
Syria, by Miss Rogers, in her little book called "Domestic Life in
Palestine," published in 1862.

Miss Rogers travelled in Palestine with her brother, who was British
consul at Damascus. The following passage illustrates the character of the
women (Miss Rogers was obliged to sleep in the same room with the wives of
the governor of Arrabeh, near Naplous):--

"When I began to undress the women watched me with curiosity; and when I
put on my night-gown they were exceedingly astonished, and exclaimed,
'Where are you going? Why is your dress white?' They made no change for
sleeping, and there they were, in their bright-colored clothes, ready for
bed in a minute. But they stood round me till I said 'Good night,' and
then all kissed me, wishing me good dreams. Then I knelt down, and
presently, without speaking to them again, got into bed, and turned my
face to the wall, thinking over the strange day I had spent. I tried to
compose myself to sleep, though I heard the women whispering together.
When my head had rested about five minutes on the soft red silk pillow, I
felt a hand stroking my forehead, and heard a voice saying, very gently,
'Ya Habibi,' i.e. 'O beloved.' But I would not answer directly, as I did
not wish to be roused unnecessarily. I waited a little while, and my face
was touched again. I felt a kiss on my forehead, and a voice said,
'Miriam, speak to us; speak, Miriam, darling.' I could not resist any
longer; so I turned round and saw Helweh, Saleh Bek's prettiest wife,
leaning over me. I said, 'What is it, sweetness, what can I do for you?'
She answered, 'What did you do just now, when you knelt down and covered
your face with your hands?' I sat up, and said very solemnly, 'I spoke to
God, Helweh.' 'What did you say to him?' said Helweh. I replied, 'I wish
to sleep. God never sleeps. I have asked him to watch over me, and that I
may fall asleep, remembering that he never sleeps, and wake up remembering
his presence. I am very weak. God is all-powerful. I have asked him to
strengthen me with his strength.' By this time all the ladies were sitting
round me on the bed, and the slaves came and stood near. I told them I did
not know their language well enough to explain to them all I thought and
said. But as I had learned the Lord's Prayer, by heart, in Arabic, I
repeated it to them, sentence by sentence, slowly. When I began, 'Our
Father who art in heaven,' Helweh directly said, 'You told me your father
was in London.' I replied, 'I have two fathers, Helweh; one in London, who
does not know that I am here, and cannot know till I write and tell him;
and a Heavenly Father, who is here now, who is with me always, and sees
and hears us. He is your Father also. He teaches us to know good from
evil, if we listen to him and obey him.'

"For a moment there was perfect silence. They all looked startled, and as
if they felt that they were in the presence of some unseen power. Then
Helweh said, 'What more did you say?' I continued the Lord's Prayer, and
when I came to the words, 'Give us day by day our daily bread,' they said,
'Cannot you make bread yourself?' The passage, 'Forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,' is particularly forcible in
the Arabic language; and one of the elder women, who was particularly
severe and relentless-looking, said, 'Are you obliged to say that every
day?' as if she thought that sometimes it would be difficult to do so.
They said, 'Are you a Moslem?' I said, 'I am not called a Moslem. But I am
your sister, made by the same God, who is the one only God, the God of
all, my Father and your Father.' They asked me if I knew the Koran, and
were surprised to hear that I had read it. They handed a rosary to me,
saying, 'Do you know that?' I repeated a few of the most striking and
comprehensive attributes very carefully and slowly. Then they cried
out, 'Mashallah, the English girl is a true believer'; and the
impressionable, sensitive-looking Abyssinian slave-girls said, with one
accord, 'She is indeed an angel.'

"Moslems, men and women, have the name of Allah constantly on their lips,
but it seems to have become a mere form. This may explain why they were so
startled when I said, 'I was speaking to God.'" She adds that if she had
only said, "I was saying my prayers," or, "I was at my devotions," it
would not have impressed them."

Next morning, on awaking, Miss Rogers found the women from the
neighborhood had come in "to hear the English girl speak to God," and
Helweh said, "Now, Miriam, darling, will you speak to God?" At the
conclusion she asked them if they could say Amen, and after a moment of
hesitation they cried out, "Amen, amen!" Then one said, "Speak again, my
daughter, speak about _the bread_." So she repeated the Lord's Prayer with
explanations. When she left, they crowded around affectionately, saying,
"Return again, O Miriam, beloved!"

After this pleasant little picture, we may hear something on the other
side. Two recent travellers, Mr. Palgrave and Mr. Vambery, have described
the present state of Mohammedanism in Central Arabia and Turkistan, or
Central Asia. Barth has described it as existing among the negroes in
North Africa. Count Gobineau has told us of Islam as it is in Persia at
the present day[397]. Mr. MacFarlane, in his book "Kismet, or the Doom of
Turkey," has pointed out the gradual decay of that power, and the utter
corruption of its administration. After reading such works as these,--and
among them let us not forget Mr. Lane's "Modern Egyptians,"--the
conclusion we must inevitably come to is, that the worst Christian
government, be it that of the Pope or the Czar, is very much better than
the best Mohammedan government. Everywhere we find arbitrary will taking
the place of law. In most places the people have no protection for life
or property, and know the government only through its tax-gatherers. And
all this is necessarily and logically derived from the fundamental
principle of Mohammedan theology. God is pure will, not justice, not
reason, not love. Christianity says, "God is love"; Mohammedanism says,
"God is will." Christianity says, "Trust in God"; Mohammedanism says,
"Submit to God." Hence the hardness, coldness, and cruelty of the system;
hence its utter inability to establish any good government. According to
Mr. MacFarlane, it would be a blessing to mankind to have the Turks driven
out of Europe and Asia Minor, and to have Constantinople become the
capital of Russia. The religion of Islam is an outward form, a hard shell
of authority, hollow at heart. It constantly tends to the two antagonistic
but related vices of luxury and cruelty. Under the profession of Islam,
polytheism and idolatry have always prevailed in Arabia. In Turkistan,
where slavery is an extremely cruel system, they make slaves of Moslems,
in defiance of the Koran. One chief being appealed to by Vambery (who
travelled as a Dervish), replied, "We buy and sell the Koran itself, which
is the holiest thing of all; why not buy and sell Mussulmans, who are less
holy?"

Sec. 6. The Criticism of Mr. Palgrave on Mohammedan Theology.

Mr. Palgrave, who has given the latest and best account of the condition
of Central and Southern Arabia,[398] under the great Wahhabee revival,
sums up all Mohammedan theology as teaching a Divine unity of pure will.
God is the only force in the universe. Man is wholly passive and impotent.
He calls the system, "A pantheism of force." God has no rule but arbitrary
will. He is a tremendous unsympathizing autocrat, but is yet jealous of
his creatures, lest they should attribute to themselves something which
belongs to him. He delights in making all creatures feel that they are his
slaves. This, Mr. Palgrave asserts, is the main idea of Mohammedanism,
and of the Koran, and this was what lay in the mind of Mohammed. "Of
this," says he, "we have many authentic samples: the Saheeh, the
Commentaries of Beydawee, the Mishkat-el-Mesabeeh, and fifty similar
works, afford ample testimony on this point. But for the benefit of my
readers in general, all of whom may not have drunk equally deep at the
fountain-heads of Islamitic dogma, I will subjoin a specimen, known
perhaps to many Orientalists, yet too characteristic to be here omitted, a
repetition of which I have endured times out of number from admiring and
approving Wahhabees in Nejed.

"Accordingly, when God--so runs the tradition,--I had better said the
blasphemy--resolved to create the human race, he took into his hands a
mass of earth, the same whence all mankind were to be formed, and in which
they after a manner pre-existed; and, having then divided the clod into
two equal portions, he threw the one half into hell, saying, 'These to
eternal fire, and I care not'; and projected the other half into heaven,
adding, 'And these to paradise, and I care not.'

"Commentary would here be superfluous. But in this we have before us the
adequate idea of predestination, or, to give it a truer name,
pre-damnation, held and taught in the school of the Koran. Paradise and
hell are at once totally independent of love and hatred on the part of the
Deity, and of merits and demerits, of good or evil conduct, on the part of
the creature; and, in the corresponding theory, rightly so, since the very
actions which we call good or ill deserving, right or wrong, wicked or
virtuous, are in their essence all one and of one, and accordingly merit
neither praise nor blame, punishment nor recompense, except and simply
after the arbitrary value which the all-regulating will of the great
despot may choose to assign or impute to them. In a word, he burns one
individual through all eternity, amid red-hot chains and seas of molten
fire, and seats another in the plenary enjoyment of an everlasting
brothel, between forty celestial concubines, just and equally for his own
good pleasure, and because he wills it.

"Men are thus all on one common level, here and hereafter, in their
physical, social, and moral light,--the level of slaves to one sole
master, of tools to one universal agent. But the equalizing process does
not stop here: beasts, birds, fishes, insects, all participate of the same
honor or debasement; all are, like man, the slaves of God, the tools and
automata of his will; and hence Mahomet is simply logical and
self-consistent when in the Koran he informs his followers that birds,
beasts, and the rest are 'nations' like themselves, nor does any intrinsic
distinction exist between them and the human species, except what
accidental diversity the 'King,' the 'Proud One,' the 'Mighty,' the
'Giant,' etc., as he styles his God, may have been pleased to make, just
as he willed it, and so long as he may will it."

"The Wahhabee reformer," continues Mr. Palgrave, "formed the design of
putting back the hour-hand of Islam to its starting-point; and so far he
did well, for that hand was from the first meant to be fixed. Islam is in
its essence stationary, and was framed thus to remain. Sterile like its
God, lifeless like its First Principle and Supreme Original, in all that
constitutes true life,--for life is love, participation, and progress, and
of these the Koranic Deity has none,--it justly repudiates all change, all
advance, all development. To borrow the forcible words of Lord Houghton,
the 'written book' is the 'dead man's hand,' stiff and motionless;
whatever savors of vitality is by that alone convicted of heresy and
defection.

"But Christianity, with its living and loving God, begetter and begotten,
spirit and movement; nay more,--a Creator made creature, the Maker and the
made existing in one; a Divinity communicating itself by uninterrupted
gradation and degree, from the most intimate union far off to the faintest
irradiation, through all that it has made for love and governs in love;
one who calls his creatures not slaves, not servants, but friends,--nay
sons,--nay gods: to sum up, a religion in whose seal and secret 'God in
man is one with man in God,' must also be necessarily a religion of
vitality, of progress, of advancement. The contrast between it and Islam
is that of movement with fixedness, of participation with sterility, of
development with barrenness, of life with petrifaction. The first vital
principle and the animating spirit of its birth must, indeed, abide ever
the same, but the outer form must change with the changing days, and new
offshoots of fresh sap and greenness be continually thrown out as
witnesses to the vitality within; else were the vine withered and the
branches dead. I have no intention here--it would be extremely out of
place--of entering on the maze of controversy, or discussing whether any
dogmatic attempt to reproduce the religious phase of a former age is
likely to succeed. I only say that life supposes movement and growth, and
both imply change; that to censure a living thing for growing and changing
is absurd; and that to attempt to hinder it from so doing by pinning it
down on a written label, or nailing it to a Procrustean framework, is
tantamount to killing it altogether. Now Christianity is living, and,
because living, must grow, must advance, must change, and was meant to do
so: onwards and forwards is a condition of its very existence; and I
cannot but think that those who do not recognize this show themselves so
far ignorant of its true nature and essence. On the other hand, Islam is
lifeless, and, because lifeless, cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot
change, and was never intended so to do; stand-still is its motto and its
most essential condition; and therefore the son of Abd-el-Wahhab, in
doing his best to bring it back to its primal simplicity, and making its
goal of its starting-point, was so far in the right, and showed himself
well acquainted with the nature and first principles of his religion."