CHAPTER XIV
THE ETHICS OF ISLAM: A MARTIAL IDEAL
I. Religious Basis of the Moral System
The great revolution which in the seventh century of the Christian era agitated all Arabia and gave a new trend to vast currents of world history was essentially a moral revolution. It was the moral degradation of the Arab tribes, still clinging to an outgrown, idolatrous worship incapable longer of giving moral guidance to its followers, that stirred the soul and inspired the message of Mohammed. The Prophet’s real appeal was to the conscience of the Arab race. The chief aim and purpose of his preaching was to effect a moral reform. He gave the Arabs, it is true, a new religion, but the religion was to give impulse and sanction to the new morality. The transformation which the new faith wrought in the moral consciousness of the Arabian nation was probably not less profound than that effected by Christianity in the moral consciousness of the European peoples. It is this which makes the rise of Islam a matter as important in the moral as in the religious history of mankind.
Islam may, with strict historical accuracy, be said to be essentially a republication of Judaism. Its morality, like the old Hebrew morality, is largely derived from its conception of deity. It teaches that God is one, and that he is all-powerful, compassionate, forgiving, and righteous. Allah is great and merciful and just, is the burden of the Prophet’s message respecting deity. This ethical monotheism has been a governing force in the moral life of the Mohammedan world, just as a like ethical monotheism has been a molding influence in the moral life of the Jews and of all those nations that have received their religion from them.
Another religious doctrine which has contributed largely to shape the morality of Islam is that of salvation by belief. Only the true believer can be saved. The tendency, indeed the logical and inevitable consequence of this doctrine, has been to make Islam one of the most intolerant of the great religions. It has tended to restrict the moral sympathies of Moslems to coreligionists and to make propagandism by violence seem a virtue.
Islam claims to be a divine revelation to man. This doctrine of the supernatural origin of the religion makes the moral code, which is bound up with it, a rigid, unchangeable law, for it is only a human code that can be changed without irreverence and sacrilege. The blighting effects upon Mohammedan morality of this dogma of a moral law supernaturally given for all time will be noted a little later, when we come to speak of the actual moral life in Mohammedan lands.
II. The Moral Code
Like all the other ethical systems of Asia, save those of genuine Christianity and Buddhism, the Islamic system lays special emphasis upon the performance of particular prescribed acts. It is by no means silent respecting the necessity of right states and dispositions of mind. But instead of relying upon general principles for the guidance of the moral life, it lays its emphasis upon specific outer observances, such as almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimages, and stated prayers.659 The tendency of such a code of precise rules and commands, as was pointed out in connection with Chinese morality and again in connection with the postexilic morality of the Jews, is to externalize morality and render the moral life conventional and mechanical.
In correspondence with the dogma of salvation through belief, the paramount duty and virtue in the ethical-religious code of Islam is unquestioning belief in Allah as the only true God and in Mohammed as his prophet. Without this virtue of correct belief there can be, according to the teachings of Islam, no salvation.
One effect of thus making right belief an indispensable virtue was to make intolerance practically a virtuous disposition of mind, and the conquest of infidels a paramount duty. It is here that we find one of the fundamental differences between the ethical teachings of Christ and those of Mohammed. The Founder of Christianity, through his teaching of nonresistance, condemned war. He commanded his followers to put up the sword. The founder of Islam, on the other hand, frankly and without scruple adopted the war system of his time and consecrated it to a religious end and purpose. His followers were commanded to fight for the extension of the religion of Allah.660 Those who fell in battle for the faith were promised immediate entrance into the joys of Paradise.661
Never was there a more fateful provision given a place in a code of morals. It determined in large measure the character of Islam and foreshadowed its history. It made it a martial religion. This martial religion, through reaction upon Christianity, helped to make it like unto itself. Thus was prepared the way for the Holy Wars.
Just as Mohammed adopted the war system he found in existence, so did he adopt that of slavery. But while accepting the system, he did much to improve the status of the bondsman. The legislation of the Koran in this department of ethics follows the humane regulations of the old Hebrew code. In its specific provisions favorable to the slave it goes beyond the requirements of the New Testament. It not only enjoins the kind treatment of slaves but provides that converts to Islam shall be set free, and in general encourages manumission.662
In no department of ethics is the contrast between Christian and Mohammedan morals sharper than in the sphere of domestic morality. Sex relations which the Christian Church condemns as sin, and which the Christian civil law makes a crime, are by the Mohammedan moral consciousness pronounced natural and right, or at least ethically indifferent. The New Testament absolutely prohibited polygamy, although from primitive times the moralists of the East had had in general no condemnation for the custom; but the Koran accepted the system without scruple. In doing so, however, it placed salutary restraints upon the unregulated license which had hitherto characterized the institution. It limited the number of wives of the faithful to four,663 and surrounded divorce with wholesome restrictions.
Family ethics were further lifted to a higher level by the positive prohibition of infanticide,664 a practice which constituted one of the worst evils of Arab society in pre-Islamic times. The positive enactments of the Koranic code in this department of morals accomplished what was effected indirectly in the same domain by Christianity through its teachings of the sanctity of human life.
Among the other prohibitions of the moral code of Islam are two worthy of special notice for the reason that, being made largely effective by the sanctions of religion, they have exercised an incalculable influence upon the Mohammedan world. These are the provisions of the Koran forbidding in the most positive terms gambling and the use of alcoholic drinks.665 These prohibitions have had a great and undeniable influence in preserving Mohammedan civilization, in the extended reach of lands over which it has spread, from those inveterate twin evils of gambling and drunkenness which constitute one of the deepest stains on Christian civilization.
It has been maintained that the place given duties to lower animals is a crucial test of a moral code.666 Tried by this standard, the code of Islam must be accorded a high place among the ethical systems of the world. In the department of animal ethics it is on a level with that of the old Hebrew Testament. Indeed, the tender solicitude of the code for dumb animals is one of its most admirable features. The whole animal creation is here brought within the pale of ethics. Thus at the outset Islam took up a position respecting man’s duty toward the animal world which Christianity is only just now tardily assuming.
Taken as a whole the ethical rules and commands of the Koran constitute an admirable code, one which has been an efficient force in the moral improvement and uplift of the peoples of vast regions of the earth. The morality inculcated has been succinctly characterized as a concrete and practical one. It is particularly well adapted to races in a low stage of culture. The very fact that, notwithstanding some serious defects and limitations, the code has been accepted by so large a part of the human race, and has, for over a thousand years, given moral guidance and inspiration to such vast multitudes, goes to prove that the great body of its rules and prescriptions of conduct are in general in line with the elemental laws of the moral world.
III. The Moral Life
In any comparison instituted between Christianity and Islam as moral regenerators of society there is need that the difference in the fields entered by these rival creeds be kept carefully in mind. Islam was placed at a disadvantage in that it went among the morally degenerate and dissolute peoples of the Orient, while Christianity had for its field the classical peoples and particularly the fresh German race. In those same Eastern lands and among those same Oriental or semi-Hellenized races Christianity had not only signally failed morally to reform and uplift society, but in that unfavorable environment had itself become lamentably degenerate and corrupt. In pointing out this disadvantage to which Islam has been subjected, a discerning Moslem writer says, “Like rivers flowing through varied tracts, both these creeds have produced results in accordance with the nature of the soil through which they have found their course.”667 There is here the necessary recognition of the influence which the historical environment exercises upon the moral standard. The prerequisite of a good harvest in the field of morals, as in the physical world, is not only good seed but also a good soil.
The whole history of Islam, as already remarked, has been molded by the fact that fighting for the extension of the true religion was made by Mohammed a chief duty of the faithful. Islam’s wonderful career of conquest during the first century after its rise was in large measure the result of the Prophet having made war against infidels a pious duty. Hitherto war among the Arabs had been for the most part merely a raid or hunt. Now it was given an ethical-religious motive and thus made a crusade. In the space of a single century a large part of the countries which had formed the historic lands of antiquity had been brought by the Arabian warriors under the sway of Islam.
But this was not all. These conquests brought Islam in contact with Christendom along all its extended frontier from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Bosporus, and thus created the conditions which led to the Holy Wars between Moslem and Christian, which filled the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such were the momentous and far-reaching consequences of the giving by the Arabian Prophet of a religious sanction to war, and the reënforcing of the war spirit among a martial race by making warfare a duty and death in battle a sure passport to the bliss of paradise.
While adopting and sanctifying the war system, Islam did something in the way of mitigating its savagery. Up to this time the war code of the Asian peoples had lost little or none of its primitive barbarity. The indiscriminate slaughter of the vanquished, without regard to age or sex, had been a common practice. But when the second Arabian caliph, Omar, sent out his warriors to effect the conquest of the world for the true religion, he strictly enjoined them to spare the women and children and the old men. This injunction became a part of the Mohammedan war code, and, though not always observed, it did much to make the earlier wars waged for the spread of Islam, compared with most of the recorded wars among the Oriental races, merciful and humane.
Intimately related to the subject of the Mohammedan ethics of war is the subject of toleration. As we have seen, the natural tendency of the teaching that right religious belief is necessary to salvation, and that fighting for the spread of the true religion is a paramount duty, is to foster intolerance, indeed, is to make intolerance a virtue. These doctrines of Islam have in the main restricted to the faithful the outgoings of the moral sympathies. To the moral consciousness of the Moslem masses tolerance has not presented itself as a virtue at all, but rather as a reprehensible disposition of mind, since it argues lack of zeal for the true faith. There is to-day more religious intolerance in Moslem lands than in any other regions of the earth. In this respect the Mohammedan world is about at the standpoint held by Christendom in the Middle Ages.
But fortunately it is the same with a bad principle as with a good one—it never produces its full logical consequences. There is that in the constitution of things and in human nature which prevents this. Hence there has been in Mohammedan lands a larger measure of toleration than, in view of the teachings of Islam, we should have looked for. But the toleration enjoyed by non-Moslems under Mohammedan rule has been at best precarious. With lamentable frequency, in lands where large sections of the population are ignorant and debased, outbursts of fanaticism have resulted in terrible massacres of “unbelievers.”
Not until Moslem civilization has felt the broadening effect of those material, intellectual, and moral revolutions which have finally brought in toleration in a once intolerant Christendom, will this virtue, without which a true and progressive moral life is impossible, find a place in the ethical code of Islam.
The slave trade in Mohammedan lands has been fostered through the consecration of the war system by Mohammed and his recognition of slavery as a part of the established social order. Throughout the first century of the career of Islam the propaganda of the faith by the sword provided an unfailing source of slaves, such as had not been opened up since the completion of the conquest of the world by the Roman legions.668 This religious legitimatizing of the slave trade filled Moslem lands with slave markets, and, when the wars of the religious propaganda had ceased, tended to give a fresh impulse to the African slave traffic, which had been in existence from time immemorial. This trade by Mohammedans has been just such a curse to eastern and central Africa as the European Christian slave traffic—which, beginning in the fifteenth century, continued till its final suppression in the nineteenth—was to the west African coast and the hinterland. The Moslem trade is still carried on clandestinely,669 since there has as yet been little or no moral disapprobation of the traffic awakened in Mohammedan lands.
The absolute prohibition in the Koran of the use of all intoxicating liquors has been wonderfully effective in preserving Mohammedan lands from the great evil of drunkenness. This vice, so common in Christian lands, is almost unknown in countries where the faith of the Koran is really dominant and the influence of Europeans has not been felt.
In Afghanistan the penalty inflicted for drunkenness is death. So rigorously is the law of Islam in this matter enforced that persons in a state of intoxication are almost never seen. Nor is the evil simply driven under cover; there is practically very little drinking going on in the privacy of the home.
Islam has been only less effective than Buddhism and Christianity in fostering the attractive virtue of charity. The precepts of the Koran respecting almsgiving and other deeds of benevolence have greatly promoted the habit of giving among the followers of the Prophet. The giving of direct relief to the poor in the form of alms is probably quite as general as among Christians, though much of this charity is indiscriminate and tends to foster that mendicity which is such an ever-present evil in Mohammedan lands. The building of caravansaries, the construction of aqueducts, the opening of fountains along the routes of travel, and the founding of asylums are forms of benevolence which recall similar works of philanthropy in the later period of the pagan Roman Empire.
Respecting this charity, however, it must be said that much of it has the taint of self-interest. Many of these good works are performed not so much from genuine philanthropy as from self-regarding motives, the dominant thought of the doer being to gain religious merit for himself.
The spread of Islam has been almost from the first largely among tribes and peoples low in the scale of civilization. In the earlier centuries of its career, besides its conquests among the peoples of ancient culture, it won over a great part of the uncivilized clans and tribes of Asia, and to-day is making constant and rapid progress among the negro tribes of central Africa. What renders this fact of significance to the historian of morals is that Islam has shown itself to be one of the most potent forces at work in the world to-day for the moral elevation of peoples still on or near the level of savagery. Canon Isaac Taylor affirms that it “causes the negro tribes of Africa to renounce paganism, devil worship, fetishism, cannibalism, human sacrifices, infanticide, witchcraft, gambling, drunkenness, unchastity, cruelty, and personal uncleanliness.”670
That the moral code of Islam should be even more effective than the Christian in lifting savages to a higher moral level is attributed by Canon Taylor to the fact that the moral standard of Christianity is so high that “its virtues are only vaguely understood and not generally practiced, while the lower virtues which Islam enforces are understood and generally practiced.”
In a word, it is with Islam’s morality the same as with its theology. Its doctrine of one God is simple, concrete, and easily understood, and for this reason Islam is admittedly more readily accepted by races low in culture than Christianity with its metaphysical doctrine of the Trinity. As the simplicity and concreteness of its teachings respecting deity adapt its creed to the savage mind, so do the lower concrete practical virtues of its moral code adapt it to the rudimentary moral sense of the primitive man.
One of the most striking and instructive phenomena of universal history is the contrasted fortunes of Mohammedan and Christian civilization. In the eighth century of our era Mohammedan culture was in many respects superior to that of Christendom. It held forth great promises for the future. But these promises were not kept. Stagnation quickly followed the period of brilliant achievement, and a blight fell upon the Moslem world, while the history of Christendom has been a record of wonderful development and progress, until to-day the two worlds cannot be placed in comparison with one another, but only in contrast.
Beyond question many agencies, such as race, religion, and government, have concurred to produce this contrast in history and fortune, but equally certain is it that a potent contributory cause is the difference in the moral systems which the two civilizations respectively inherited. The moral life of the Christian world, happily freed from the bondage of the rigid Mosaic law, an outer law of positive minute commands, has expatiated under the comprehensive, flexible law of the Gospel, a law of love and liberty. As a result the moral life of Christendom has been, on the whole, notwithstanding certain Mohammedanizing tendencies, an expansive growth under the guidance of a moral consciousness gradually purified and refined by experience and advancing culture. On the other hand, the moral life of the Mohammedan world has been subjected to the authority of an external, unchanging law, a law conceived to have been given for all time, a republication practically of that rigid Mosaic law from the bondage of which the Christian world had fortunately escaped. But the moral life cannot be thus subjected to a rigid external authority without resulting inanition and death. “The blight that has fallen on the Moslem nations,” declares a well-informed and thoughtful Mohammedan writer, “is due to the patristic doctrine which has prohibited the exercise of individual judgment.”671 The ethical code of a people, like its civil code, must be elastic and responsive to the ever-changing needs and demands of the growing moral life.