And in the middle of the late departed century—which rushed across the great void of Time like a hissing meteor—thus Tennyson:
While to Wordsworth, with a faith in Nature and Nature’s God as deep as Mohammed, the meanest flower that blows, gave thoughts that often lay too deep for words.
Society is only too apt to judge or condemn facts and men; also to ridicule the age and its spirit. This drastic method saves the trouble of comprehending them. The society of keen Arab traders and wily Bedouins which environed Mohammed did not comprehend him. To them he was not so much like a fish out of water, as a land quadruped at sea, altogether out of his element as well as out of his depth—a flotsam struggling to get to dry land as a jetsam.
Immeasurably above and beyond his social contemporaries either morally or spiritually, to them Mohammed was an enigma and a mystery. “Scenting a mystery is like the first bite at a piece of scandal, and holy souls do not detest it. In the secret compartments of bigotry there is some curiosity for scandal.” But among Mohammed’s opponents—the Koreish more particularly—it was not merely scandal that moved them: it was jealousy, envy, malice, and in the end sheer diabolical hatred. In describing the state of a mind that is advancing, we must remember that all progress is not made in one march or even series of marches. Mohammed’s march was entirely uphill, dead against the collar, the whole way and all the time, except, perhaps, just towards the end. Yet each day’s march brought him nearer to the goal of his desires. Slowly but surely he made progress, and with it reputation. The slowness of his movement, his advance, made progress and reputation all the more not a dead, but a living certainty. But there is always anarchy in reputation. It was this reputation—this individuality that dared to insolently assert itself in the overthrow of their ancestral gods—which explained Koreish hostility.
Mohammed was a calm, yet by no means an unprogressive agent of Providence. Brains that are absorbed either in mania or wisdom, or, as often happens, in both at once, are permeated very very slowly by the things of this world. But even admitting that there was melancholia, there was no mania about Mohammed. If ever a man was sane and healthy, he was. “You grant a devout man, you grant a wise man: no man has a seeing eye without first having had a seeing heart.” This fits his case to a nicety. A more devout man than Mohammed never lived. He was as pre-eminently wise as he was devout. He utilized his wisdom to the fullest extent of his capacity, and he proved his devoutness by putting his beliefs to the infallible test of stern and rigid practice. A trader to his finger tips, a clear-sighted man of business, and a statesman with prophetic instincts, who profited by the past, utilized the present, and prepared for the future, in this sense he was a contradiction. The being absorbed in wisdom did not prevent him from carrying on his worldly duties in the most conscientious and thorough manner. Per contra, his worldly duties did not prevent him from philosophical absorption. The one was his duty, the other the breath of life to him. His veneration of God gradually crystallized the religion in him into a creed. This is generally the result of concentration. His absorption of God ended in God’s absorption of him. It was a long and gradual process which occupied twenty years. During this period of embryonic development he withdrew, as it were, into himself. Then when the crisis arrived, it came out of him, as a river flows out of a spring, and was called Islam. “Our chimeras,” says Victor Hugo, “are the things which most resemble ourselves, and each man dreams of the unknown, and the impossible according to his nature.” Mohammed’s chimera, as we know, was God and Arabian unity. But there was nothing chimerical about the former, and with this invincible lever, the latter too was a distinct probability. For although he was doubtless superstitious—that is natural—and wrestled with shadows and visions, Mohammed dealt in realities. To him God was the most real thing, the sternest reality of all in the universe. God, in fact, was the Universe. These, which to another would have been the unknown and the impossible, were to him the possible and the inevitable. The nature that was in him was the nature of God and the universe. There is a point where profundity is oblivion, when light becomes extinguished. Though from a literary aspect Mohammed was not profound, in a religious sense his profundity, centring as it did in God, burst forth into the Cimmerian darkness which enveloped his country with the brilliancy of a meteor that illumines the blackest night.
There is too a way of encountering error by going all the way to meet the truth, also by a sort of violent good faith which accepts everything unconditionally. There was nothing violent (certainly not for a long period), but there was everything that stands for goodness and stability in Mohammed’s faith. It was thus—in the spirit of a hero and the valour of a Paladin—he encountered the error and opposition of his enemies by first of all going out of his way to meet the truth; then, in spite of themselves and their hostility, by enforcing it upon those who would not be persuaded. According to Fontenelle, “there is only truth that persuades, and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were only remembering.” This was very much the case with Mohammed. This was why he tried at first to lead and not to drive his countrymen to the truth. To him who saw the truth of God’s existence, His mercy written as plainly in the falling raindrop as His power of retribution is in the lightning that flashes across the sky as if it would rend it, their stubbornness in rejecting God was utterly incomprehensible. His mind had two attitudes. The one was turned to God, the other to man. In contemplating God, he but studied man’s interests and his own. But contemplation with Mohammed did not end by becoming a form of indolence. Imaginative—visionary, in fact—as he was, he did not allow his imagination to play tricks with him. He did not fancy that he wanted for nothing. Even when married to Khadija, and in tolerable affluence, there was obviously a great void in his life. This want of course was spiritual. Exact and punctilious as he was in his temporal duties, his whole bent and inclination was towards the former. As a younger and poorer man, he had looked so much at the humanity around him that he saw right down into its very soul. With the same fervent intensity he had looked into nature until he saw or rather felt the creator and controller thereof. “There are times when the unknown reveals itself in a mysterious way to the spirit of man. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will make manifest things hitherto unseen, and then close again upon the mysteries within. Such visions have occasionally the power to effect a transfiguration in those whom they visit. They convert a poor camel-driver into a Mahomet; a peasant girl tending her goats into a Joan of Arc.” A conscientious and faithful worker, Mohammed was at the same time a dreamer. But his dreams were but the reflex of his work and of his ideas. These came to him like mountainous waves, or the swell of an angry surf as it thunders on the beach with a threatening roar, a mass of water that would submerge the very earth. His ideas did not, however, submerge him. Nor did they destroy or bury him. Out of their unknown and bosky depths Mohammed invariably rose to the surface with the buoyancy of a life-belt, calm and unmoved, for his spiritual centre of gravity always held him up. He dreamt of man, but chiefly of God—of God’s goodness and greatness, of man’s impotence and frailty. He looked at the solid earth on which he stood, with its stones and its sand, its wheat and its tares, its joys and sorrows, but particularly its suffering children and helpless women. Then he looked at the vast void above, with its star-spangled sky, its sun and moon, and the God that made all and was in all. This led him to think of the void that was in himself, and to compare the one with the other. Then he pondered and compared. The greatness of it all passed into him and he dreamt again. There was no void above, for God filled it. So too his own emptiness gave place to the Supreme. All at once a great feeling of tenderness was aroused within him. From the egotism of the genus vir, he passed to the contemplation of the genus homo, the man who contemplates and feels. God had touched his heart. In forgetfulness of self was born a great compassion for all. For years and years Mohammed lived with his neck in a noose of obstacles composed of human thorns and millstones. He was, so to speak, an outcast, thrown on the dung heap, and into the brambles; at times even in the mud. Yet no mud clung to him, not even to his feet. His head at all events was always in the light, his hand always resting on the omnipotence of the Almighty. Invariably gentle, attentive, serious, benevolent, easily satisfied, he remained serene and peaceful. It was only in the last extremity, when all his persuasive earnestness failed him, that his enemies stirred him to wrath. But it was a just and dispassionate wrath; it was the wrath of God. For whether they liked or no, Mohammed in his dual capacity as God’s agent and Arabian patriot had made up his mind that they should have God. On this point he was inexorable. Feeling that there is an eternity in justice, he felt that in justice to God, and to themselves, and in spite of themselves, it was his duty to proclaim the truth. Many a less tenaciously sincere man, many a real hero, would have shrunk from and have succumbed before an ordeal so terrific, a contest so supremely Titanic. But Mohammed was made of sterner stuff, of the spirit that gods are made of. Failure was a word that he did not recognize. With God at his back, success was an absolute certainty—a foregone conclusion.
Whatever might be his desire to remain where he was and cling to it, he was impelled to advance, to continue, to go on further and still further. Yet to think and to ask himself where it was all going to lead him to? But although he thought, he never hesitated, never turned back. His hand was to the plough—the plough God. God was the goal, the end, the summit of human existence and ambition. Humanity was the soil, and to get there he must furrow his way through its enmities and affections. Firm and exceptional natures are thus moulded out of miseries, misfortunes and afflictions. As a result of his work history shows us more and more that Mohammed was firm and exceptional to the very highest degree. Yet there was nothing of that hypocrisy which Victor Hugo calls supreme cynicism about him. He was too human, too much in earnest, to be anything but Amin the Faithful. There is, after all, more in a name than meets the eye. In some names there is history and the tragedy of history. In others there is the might and majesty of a commanding magnetism, which recognizes the sublimity of truth. In Mohammed’s case, even to this day over two hundred and fifty million human beings bow the knee through him to God. Yes, there is much—a world of meaning—that is inexpressible in a name—a magic and a je ne sais quoi which under the label of Napoleon led men to the Kingdom Come of glory—in other words, to destruction and the devil—but that with Mohammed was the open sesame to the glory and power of God. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet. But Islam without the halo of time-honoured sanctity that attaches to the name of Mohammed, would sound as but a hollow brass or a tinkling cymbal. Just, in fact, as the man himself was sincere and faithful, there is, and there will continue to be, a magic in his name—more so even than that of Christ has for the Christian—drawing men to God, as he in person drew them not alone by sheer force of will and character, but by a force which was even stronger, the force of sincerity and truth.
A true son of the desert, it is impossible to understand the powerful and complex personality of Mohammed, unless we can appreciate the peculiar character and genius of the desert. More so in some ways even than the seaman, the dweller or sojourner in the desert is distinct and unique in himself. Possessing the courage of the Fatalist, and as free as the roving winds of heaven, he is all the same of a shrinking and timorous nature, confronted as he often is by certain aspects and phenomena that imperil his life and strike down to the very roots of his moral consciousness.
In the desert there is, comparatively speaking, little life. Unlike the forest region, it is naked and almost destitute. There, as at sea, man is face to face not only with the great elements, but with the greater Infinite and Invisible. He is nearer to God and the immensity of Nature. There is nothing—or little at least—to distract his attention—nothing between him and the ever watchful Inscrutable. There is no shade from the sun by day, no protection from the moon and stars at night. They look down on him as from the pinnacle of the sublimest elevation. The fiercer glory of the sun by day burns into his very soul, consumes his very marrow. The milder effulgence of the moon by night throws its silvery glamour over all his senses. The lesser and more distant splendour of the stars—those watch-fires of angelic spirits—in their countless myriads awe and bewilder him. In the choking breath of the simoom he feels the potentialities of God, and his own helpless impotence. Struck all of a heap by its stifling blast, he is filled with fear and trembling in the presence of a Power invisible yet tangible and deadly. Whether he wills or not, the fear of God—of the Inexorable and Inevitable—enters into his heart and takes possession of his inmost soul. Call it the fear of God or not, it is practically one and the same feature—the mere human label makes no difference to this awful and unseen reality—the same fear of the Unknown, the Unexpected and the Inevitable: the Inevitable that is always with us, the agnostic and the sophist no less than with the theologian, yet unseen, incomprehensible and omnipotent. But more than anything, it is the awful and impenetrable silence that impresses and appals the silent and dignified nomad of the desert.
To those who have never been outside the confines of civilization, it is not logically possible even to guess at the extraordinary influence—a fascination amounting to witchery—that the silence and solitude of the desert exercises over one. Yet if I were asked to define the essence and subtlety of this influence, I could but answer that it is indefinable; all the same a glamour that, like the force of gravity, is irresistible. Free and open like the sea (but fresh only at night), it is not the witchery of the soft blue sky, for the sky of the desert is hard and steely; it is not the fierce white heat of the fervid sun that melts into the very marrow of one’s bones; but rather is it the soothing magic of the moon at night, under the brilliant canopy of the heavens, when the earth, cooling rapidly, is lulled into eternal silence, that one falls under the magic spell of its wondrous influence. But even the glamour of the moon is out-glamoured by the darkness of the night under whose funereal pall even the great suns and planets hide their diminished heads. There is in the darkness and the silence of the night a mystery and a profundity that arouses the sluggish, even the stagnant consciousness of the dullard—that much more so attracts the quickening soul of the mystic and visionary, which springs to it with the same eager avidity that a lean and hungry trout leaps at the first fly which he sees after a long and enforced abstinence. It is in this darkness and silence of the night, rather than in the fierce glare of the midday sun, that the fear of the great Infinite comes to man. For if we but think of it, what a spectre-teeming spectacle is night. We hear strange, weird sounds. We know not whence they come or whither they go. Or it may be that all around us is as the silence of the grave—of eternal death. We see the evening star looming large like a great world on fire. The blue of the sky looms black. The stars seem to speak to us; the whole scene is impressive—a sight for the gods. In the desert, however, and to the earnest thinker whose centre of gravity is God, night is something more than a mere spectacle—a something greater, grander and more terrifying than a simple impression—a feeling deeper and sublimer even than a conviction: a revelation of the Unseen Unknown which is all the time behind that which he sees and knows.
Full as night is of phantoms, shades, sounds and silence, it is no illusive mirage, no mere empty simulacrum. But in every way it is a reality and a substance which is tangible, that touches one not only on the spot, on the raw, but everywhere; that fills one with vague fears, and brings even the proudest and the sternest to their knees before the power of the great Omnipotence. The very stars which hang out in the great firmament appear as God’s sign-posts—great all-seeing eyes that are ever upon us—or like eternal watch-fires which contrast the eternity of God with the momentary mortality of man; they enhance the blackness of the blue. Peering as they do into the awesome watcher’s inmost soul, they either drive him headlong into the blackness and terrors of evil, or lead him by their kindly light into the glory of the Almighty Presence. Unquestionably the night is either diabolical or sacred. Not only this, she is the brooder and breeder of all primitive doctrines, the conceiver and the mother of all human creeds. In her immense womb there is a latent light, a smouldering volcano full of ashes, cinders, and dead men’s bones; yet full also of fire-sparks that are capable of flashing into luminosity, even of bursting into hissing, leaping and devouring flames. It was thus that Christianity and Islam came into being. It was thus out of the primeval sacrifices, the shadows and silence of death and darkness, that all creeds have crept into and out of the minds of men. Tortuous human ant-heaps bored and tunnelled through and through by human ideas, human hopes, and human aspirations; worlds in the low-lying limbo of the fœtus stage, fecundating in all directions into beliefs, faiths, creeds, sects, denominations, quackeries, dissimulations and charlatanism. Labyrinthine, subterranean, and full of subtleties as all these creeds appear to be, they are easy enough to comprehend. They have all sprung from the same simple seed if we would but recognize it. If we but looked at this vista of the past as through a mental telescope, if we but grasped the substance and not the shadow, went straight to the simple root instead of to the theological and metaphysical subtleties of it all, we would find it absolutely simple. If we would but for a moment drop from our eyes the dense scales of dogma, bigotry and prejudice, there would be no difficulty in tracing back all these enigmatic ramifications and gloomy obscurities of pristine darkness and chaos to the one central germ idea, the one vitalizing spark that inspires and illumines them all.
It is obvious that Wordsworth, when he speaks of only “two voices,” the one “of the sea,” the other “of the mountains”—“each a mighty voice,” quite overlooked the bleakness and silence of the desert. This overpowering blackness that pervades the very soul, creeps through every vent into the bones and chills one to the very marrow. This sublime silence, that speaks to one as the still small voice of God spoke to Moses, and that fills the thinker with even greater awe and veneration than the crashing and rolling thunder. This silence which is of eternity, therefore golden, while speech is of to-day and only silvern, for as Carlyle reminds us: “After speech has done its best, silence has to include all that speech has forgotten or cannot express.”
Speaking for myself, who have passed many days of my existence at sea, and many more still in the desert, there is that in the latter which always reminds me of the former. To be sure, the ever restless sea with its almost myriad moods—its calm, its motion, its rippling smiles, its wavy undulations, its heights and depths, its fickleness and treachery, its dazzling beauties, its fierce turbulence—is as unlike the desert, with its grim stiff grandeur and appalling sameness as it well could be: still—
There is no music in it by day or by night, only the dead still hush of silence. Yet the desert has its aspects, if it has not its moods and contrasts—as singular as they are striking. See, or rather feel it under the fierce and scorching glare of the fiery sun, that almost shrivels you into a mummy; see it also under the softer spell of the silvery orb, when the air is balmy, if not fresh, and you will at once imagine yourself to be in an altogether different and enchanted world. Then again, lose yourself in the desert on a dark night when for once in a way the stars are dim or obscured by clouds, and you will realize as you never before have done, the awesome reality of the sense of loneliness—a feeling which can only be compared to that felt by the hunted criminal hiding in a city, and against whom every man’s hand is raised.
But there is besides in the desert the fateful mirage that, like the ocean sirens, has lured so many to their doom. Finally there is the oasis which stands out of the sea of shimmering sand, like an island paradise that towers over the waste of seething waters which encircle it. The desert too, like the sea, has its ships and its men. Ships that pass by day as well as by night. Ships that stride across the great sandy wastes, grunting and gawky, with unwearying patience, unyielding tenacity, and unerring instinct. As are the ships, so are the men. But in place of gawkiness and grunts, the golden virtue of silence, and the conscious pride of natural dignity. Men who in their very port and carriage are the very spirit and personification of the desert. Men who represent not the genii, but the genius of the great dry sea of sand and silence. Indeed, if ever men on this planet of ours were patriarchal, if ever men bore themselves with the gait and the simple dignity of free men, the Bedawins of Arabia and the North African deserts do. With the lynx-like, yet enigmatic expression that calls to mind a combination of eagle keenness and owl-like solemnity, there is about them a freedom of manner and bearing, a dignity of carriage, an independence of character, that are the peculiarly glorious and distinctive heirlooms of the air, expanse and grandeur of these inland seas. In every sense, moral and physical, they are the products of an unrestricted environment that has made them what they are—wanderers on the face of the earth. But wanderers from choice. Untrammelled even to licence; giving an unbridled rein to their spirit of independence. Regarding with supreme contempt the luxuries and even necessaries of civilization. Yet with it all slaves to the spiritual fears that haunt them. Relics of a primitive and old-world civilization, there is about these Bedawins a flavour of antiquity, of a past that is hoary with the hoariness of eternal age, so distant that we cannot conjecture about it, even in the vaguest of terms. In addition to this everlasting antiquity and conservatism, there is about these patriarchs a naturally dignified reticence, and an air of calm, quiet assurance and authority, that are peculiarly their own personal property. But there is even more than this. There is that same universal concept—common to all primitive people who have not outlived it—of belief in the fear of a supreme power. That same awe and reverence for the patriarchal authority connected with that of the ancestors which has preceded it; that calm and philosophical acceptation of Karma or Fatalism; that same dread of consequences; that identical terror of malignant demons; that same shrinking from the inevitable, which is the heritage of all natural people. Inherent instincts that even twelve centuries of Islam have scarcely modified. When we get underneath the surface of human nature as represented by the Arab, whether he came from the east, the west, the south, or the centre, it is obvious that the underlying motive for most, if not all, of his social customs is inspired by that personal or religious instinct which is so closely allied to the primary instincts of all. Out of such fundamental material did Mohammed emerge!
Nevertheless, with all its drawbacks, there is about the desert, only in a different degree, the pleasure of the pathless woods, the rapture of the lonely shore. Just as by the deep and rolling sea whose very roar is music, there is a society where none intrudes, so with the desert. Right in the very core and centre of its silence and solitude, the man whose ears and eyes are open to receive impressions, finds himself in the presence of that invisible but omniscient power of Nature. The power that, while it causes the earnest thinker to pause and reflect, makes the average human being yearn for the companionship of his own kind. But it was not so with Mohammed. Mohammed was not as other men are. He was a thought leader. Not a deep thinker by any means; but profoundly in earnest. Few men in the world’s history—judging at least by results—have been more in earnest than he was. In Hannibal there is the same earnest fixity of purpose, only different in kind, the same unquenchable ardour, and the same iron will that kept him faithful to the sacred vow of undying vengeance against the Romans, that his father exacted from him on the altar of their ancestral gods. In William the Silent too, but also in another direction, we find the same relentless purpose and the same inflexible sincerity to attain the independence and autonomy of the United Provinces. Cromwell likewise gave his life and his services—all that was best in him in fact—in the firm and sincere conviction that he was God’s chosen instrument. But in none of these men, not even in the great and heroic Ironside, was there the same fervent godliness, i.e. the fear and veneration of God. It was Luther most of all who approached Mohammed in the sincerity of his purpose, i.e. of his religion. For although Luther was essentially a priest, and did not found a new creed, his sincerity showed itself as a Protestant and Reformer. In his whole life the fear and veneration of God as the motive factor of his existence was manifest.
It is, of course, just possible, as Tennyson surmises, that:
This, however, is vague and brings us no nearer to an exact comprehension of the matter. The better to understand this feeling of fear that so dominated men of the Numa, Buddha, Luther, John Knox, Cromwell and Mohammed type, it is essential that the student grasps and measures the actual measure of difference that divides religion from creed. It is but meet that we should accept the rational axiom, that religion is natural, and creed the egotistical and personal interpretation placed upon religion by human beings. As Draper says: “When natural causes suffice, it is needless to look for supernatural.” So Bacon, looking with the insight of true genius into the Book of Nature, up to Nature’s God, said in that immortal aphorism which opens the Novum Organum, “Homo Naturæ minister et interpres”—man is the servant and interpreter of Nature. This will make it easier to get at the root of this dual feeling of fear and veneration. But to do so it is necessary for the student to look as far back into the past as he can. In every ancient cult that has ever existed, in the Chaldæan, the Egyptian, the Aryan, the various (so-called Pagan) African, for example, the same overmastering element predominates. In Grecian annals and literature—in the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, in the great tragedies of Æschylus, in Plutarch and other writers—Fear is not merely reverenced as “Holy,” but in Greece, as elsewhere, altars were erected and worship offered to her as a goddess.
It is in its definition and conception of religion that humanity has gone astray. By general acceptation religion and creed have always been confounded. Natural religion is spoken of as a something different and widely apart from Christianity, as a religion revealed. This is not so. There is no difference between them. Christianity is but the development of natural religion on the lines and ideas of certain individuals. There is no such thing as revelation. Religion is an evolution. It is natural. It comes to us from Nature, i.e. from the God out of which Nature has evolved. Hence its constructive and destructive dualism. It is a living and vital force that is innate in man as being one with Nature. Obviously this veneration, this fear of the Unseen, the Unexpected and the Inevitable (which I have spoken of), is one of the root instincts out of which it unfolds itself. Most unquestionably it is the outward and visible expression of the inner consciousness or spirit that moves man to the adoration of veneration in the constructive direction, and of fear in the destructive. This varies in the individual. Thus on the one hand we have a Mohammed; on the other a Napoleon. From the very beginning of human existence right down until now this fear of God has predominated. It still exists. It will go on existing. Religion is as much a part of the human constitution as the primal instincts. Creed is acquired. It is environment and education that makes or forms creed. The child becomes what his teacher makes him, as he can neither distinguish, discriminate nor judge for himself. But to make him Jew, Gentile or Christian, the religion must be in him. Creed, in a word, is but the view that is taken of natural religion by the ego. But a matter so important as this, however, cannot here be entered into.
As it has been with all the great religious leaders of history, so too it was with Mohammed. Fearing, yet venerating, the might, the majesty and the goodness of God, the companionship that he most wanted was not human but divine. Communion with Him, through his own thought and through the great Infinity around him, was what his heart most desired. A town Arab by birth and breeding, a Bedawin by feeling and instinct, he was something more than a mere native of Arabia. Rather a son of men, an apostle chosen out specially from among men, that he might bear to them the message and truth of God.
“Men,” says Victor Hugo, “talk to themselves, speak to themselves, but the external silence is not interrupted. There is a grand tumult; everything speaks within us, excepting the mouth. The realities of the soul, for all they are not visible and palpable, are not the less realities.” The great reality, as I have shown, that obsessed Mohammed was God. Though invisible in person or even in spirit, God was none the less visible and palpable to him as much in the finest speck of sand as in the consuming glory of the sun. In the mocking spectres of the night, as well as in the shifting shadows of the morning, the might and majesty of Allah was supreme. In the dead silence of human solitude, the grand tumult within him was only grand and tumultuous because God talked to him and he to God in the suppressed sibilance of hushed and awesome whisperings. “Diamonds are only found in the darkness of the earth; truths are only found in the depths of the thought.” As it seemed to Father Madeline, the ex-convict Jean Valjean, so it appeared to Mohammed, “that after descending into these depths, after groping for some time in the densest of this darkness, he had found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, which he held in his hand, and which dazzled his eyes when he looked at it.” The brilliant which Mohammed searched for was the truth—the greatest brilliant of all! The truth that he found as it appeared to him was God. Thus he immolated his whole being to the will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone. Like Pascal, Mohammed believed that “one can be quite sure that there is a God without knowing what He is.” Or in the words of Hobbes: “Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no conception or image of the Deity, except only this, that there is a God.” This in sense if not in word was Mohammed’s idea of God as he tried to conceive Him. For him it was sufficient that God was the only God—the Creator and the Controller of the universe! “There are touching illusions which are perhaps sublime realities.” But to Mohammed, God was not even “the Great Illusion,” but a stern as well as a sublime reality! To him the desert and lone places were God’s dwelling-place—as far away from the busy hum and haunts of men as He could get. But only because of the delightful charm of golden silence and solitude—only because in the midst thereof, as in the heavenly paradise, God dwelt there. The one fair spirit that he dwelt and communed with—not in close proximity however, but with a great gulf fixed between—was the one and only God, who had at last constituted him His minister and apostle, because of his great love and devotion to Him. It was for this that Mohammed sought the desert. It was there under the stars—the flashing forget-me-nots of God’s great power—that alone with Nature and his own thoughts, he sought God. Who is there of us can say that he did or did not find Him? Can we, or can we not, by searching find God? Whether we can or no, however, is not the question—is not for us to decide! But one fact is certain—one fact is obvious. It was in the core and centre of the eternal silence and solitude of mountain fastnesses and desert expanses that the spirit of Islam had its origin. It was there, as it were under the myriad eyes of the great and infinite God, under the fiery blaze of the burning sun, under the cooler and more clinging glamour of the mellow moon, under the dimmer gloom and mystery of darkness, there with his face to the red-hot furnace blasts and suffocation of the simoom, that the message came to him. Alone with his thoughts:
No mere saint, but God Himself, “took pity on” his “soul in agony.” He was not alone, for God was with him. This self-communion of Mohammed with his thoughts, was to him none other than communion with God, because his thoughts were concentrated on Him with all the soul and strength he was humanly capable of.
The power of persuasion does not always lie in the flow and eloquence of speech. The strongest are often the most silent. God never speaks but in the still small voice of consciousness, that comes to every man in the dark watches of the night, when the hum and movement of life is hushed into the silence of sleep!
Solitude, too, that twin-sister of Silence, “though,” as De Quincey says, “it may be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man.” But if essential to the ordinary man, it is as the breath of life to men of God and prophets. Solitude, in fact, sinks deep into a pure and simple nature, and changes him in a great measure. Unconsciously it intensifies him to a superlative degree, and inspires him with an awe of itself that becomes sacred to him. Within himself the recluse feels weak, unstable and inconsistent. Without he is strong in the consciousness of the omnipotence and supremacy of the Infinite. “Solitude generates a certain amount of sublime exaltation. It is like the smoke arising from the burning bush. A mysterious lucidity of mind results, which converts the student into the seer, and the poet into a prophet.” In a word, there is an enthusiasm, an influence, and a power in solitude that the civilized man, or the man who has never been subjected to it, cannot form the slightest or faintest conception of. For the silence of solitude and the solitude of silence is a state (common to all primitive people) in which the being believes himself to be not only “πλήρης θεοῦ,” i.e. full of God, but that the God predominates. Hence the enthusiasm, the rapture, and the power to divine and speak in divers tongues.
Surely, if ever man was in deadly earnest, this faithful son of Arabia was. If ever man opened his heart and soul to the Father and Mother of all things, this Mohammed, the merchant, did. Truly if ever the great Author of our being responded to a soul in silent agony, i.e. in conflict, in a struggle for victory, it was to this great descendant of the bond-woman Hagar! For in Islam, and the soul of Islam, such as he inculcated, the victory was greater than any Marathon or Thermopylæ.
Mohammed, as I have more than once said, was all for unity and cohesion, therefore against division and disintegration of any kind. Concentration was as the breath of life to him. Dissension a deadly evil. In his scheme of religion and politics there was no place for schism. Schism meant discord, and discord the devil. To him discord was as Ate, the mother of dissension. He recognized, as Spenser evidently did, that “discord harder is to end than to begin”:
And above all things, this Statesman Prophet was the essence and personification of centralization and concord. For unity alone rendered Islam feasible. Thus in the second Surah he insists that mankind was of one faith from the beginning. Thus too as a just, faithful and consistent man, he is opposed to violence and taking the offensive, even in the name and under the cloak of religion; he constantly advocates and authorizes (that is, has God’s authority for) the defensive. He even recommends, at the same time that he excuses, war and retaliation on the unbeliever and infidel. On the whole, however, I am bound to admit that Mohammed disapproves of and discountenances violence in religion. He, in fact, distinctly forbids his followers from enforcing it. Their own persecution was to be met by patience. Apostates and unbelievers were to be given time meet for repentance. Yet to him, fanatic as he was with regard to religion, Islam was the only true Faith, the covenant, the sure ark of God that alone could secure salvation. Of this and of God he was no more than an Apostle—i.e. a messenger; also an expounder—but as such he obviously tried to live up to his name of Faithful. This speaks volumes for his toleration and humanity in an age when neither one nor the other of these attributes were much in repute; when both, in fact, were at a low ebb. Yet it shows us how intensely human the Prophet was. A man of great patience, prudence and trustworthiness, of retentive memory, strong character, and with the disposition of a judge—a very commander of men. Thus he acknowledges the divinity of God in forgiving, and the humanity of man in demanding reparation and restitution. Here the moral excellence of Mohammed shines out as a brilliant. In Surah xiv., “a grievous punishment is prepared for the unjust. But they who shall have believed and wrought righteousness, shall be introduced into gardens, wherein rivers flow; they shall remain therein for ever by the permission of their Lord, and their salutation therein shall be Peace.” From this and many other similar passages, it would seem that Mohammed, by his constant reiteration of Promises and Threats, by his determined insistence thereon, hoped ultimately to convince even his enemies of his sincerity also of the fact that Islam, as the creed of the one and only God, was the true Faith. Again in this passage (Surah vi.), “God causeth the grain and the date-stone to put forth, He bringeth forth the living from the dead, and He bringeth forth the dead from the living. This is God,” etc., etc.; we get a clear insight into the intensity and comprehensiveness of the divine conception as it appeared to him. A little further on in the same passage he speaks of God as “He who hath produced you from one soul; and hath provided for you a sure receptacle and a repository,” namely in the loins of your fathers, and the womb of your mothers—one of those gleams of pantheism that I have already alluded to.
But of all the passages in the Koran, the following is, in many ways, one of the most significant: “Whatever good befalleth thee, O man, it is from God; and whatever evil befalleth thee, it is from thyself.” It is obvious from this that the prophet believed evil to be a human weakness with man as an active and self-willed agent. Sale in a note thereon says: “These words are not to be understood as contradicting the preceding verse, that all is from God, since the evil that befalls mankind, though ordered by God, is yet the consequence of their own wicked actions.” But as Mohammed regarded the sublime divinity of God, it would be more accurate to interpret the evil not as being ordained or even sanctioned by God, but as being permitted, or rather not prevented by Him as a thing inevitable. To him the purity, sanctity and inviolability of God was of such vast moment, that it was unjust—a mortal sin—to devise even a lie against Him. “And who is more unjust than he who deviseth a lie against God, that he may seduce men without understanding?” The frequent repetition of this and other like passages is significant of Mohammed’s sincerity, also of his moral persistence and tenacity. It was from his point of view bad enough to have doubt thrown on the authenticity of his mission. This he could to some extent put up with. But it was as naught compared to the reflection, the crime of perjury committed against the Almighty. To cast a slur on His holiness in this audacious way, was nothing short of blasphemy, a crime worthy of eternal hell fire and damnation. Few men in the world’s history were as loyal to their God as this grim but faithful product of Arabia the Stony. In this respect, and particularly with regard to the depth and intensity of their religious zeal and fervour, there was a strong resemblance between Cromwell and Mohammed. To both of these moral ironsides, those who did not believe as they believed were unbelievers, and as such outside the pale of God’s mercy. For believers, however, nothing was too good. To such an extent did these principles influence the latter, that he even went so far as to promise that all grudges should be removed from the minds of the faithful. Here again we have evidence of Mohammed’s unquestionable humanity; also of civilization to a marked degree. For a grudge, although fundamentally and characteristically human, was at the same time, and still is among the Bedawins, a peculiarly Arabian idiosyncrasy; associated as it was, and often culminating as it did, in acts of vengeance identical to the Corsican vendetta, “the terrible blood feud which even the most reckless fear for their posterity.”
In spite, however, of his eagerness and zeal for conversion, consistent as this was with his idea of national autonomy, in nothing did Mohammed show his sincerity so much as in his thoroughness and honesty. He was nothing if not thorough. The long and arduous probation he passed through in preparing and fitting himself for his mission—the mental concentration, the wrestlings with all that is evil and inexorable in man’s nature, the night watches, the agonies, the communings with God—all go to prove this. And if to be outspoken and candid is honesty, then indeed no one has surpassed him in that respect. In his eyes a true disciple of Islam meant a man who lived and acted up to the tenets and principles of its faith. For instance, with him there was no such fiasco as a death-bed repentance. “But no repentance shall be accepted from those who do evil until the time when death presenteth itself unto one of them, and he saith verily I repent now; nor unto those who die unbelievers: for them have we prepared a grievous punishment.” Such an act was wholly repugnant to the fine sense of equity and justice that he possessed, advocating as he so strenuously did the use of “a full measure and just balance.” As one who had given practically his whole life to the service and adoration of God, his soul rose in revolt and abhorred so vile a subterfuge. It was adding insult to injury. A mere sneaking stratagem of priestly artifice, held out as an alluring but offensive bait. A despicable and devilish cunning on the part of the unbeliever, who would endeavour to throw dust into the sun-piercing vision of the Most High, all unconscious of the thinness and transparency of his device and of God’s searching penetration, that could pierce through all eternity even unto the uttermost ends of His mighty universe! To serve mammon a lifetime, and then at the last moment, when on the brink of death’s unending precipice, to turn to God and expect to reap the same reward of eternal bliss as the whole-hearted believer who has given all or a great part of his life to God’s service, was impossible. The very thought of it was monstrous. The choice lay with the ego himself! Evil was his own doing! Good also lay within his reach. It was in a great measure a matter of choice. Every man was more or less responsible for his own undoing. To a life of evil, a death-bed repentance was not capable of producing more than its own equivalent of happiness, i.e. the merest possible fragment. This was in accordance with God’s principle of the scales of justice and an even balance. Yet Mohammed was not against repentance and contrition when sincere and made in due and proper time. Over and over again he holds out the olive branch, and reiterates the forgiveness and mercy of God, as attributes that belonged to Him alone. Mercy, indeed, was not so much an attribute as a monopoly. “He hath prescribed unto Himself mercy,” as compatible with the fact that He was the final Court of Appeal. However adversely the theologian may criticize this from the modern Christian standpoint, it is clear and direct proof of Mohammed’s whole-hearted sincerity. Further it is equally direct and tangible evidence of the ardour and zeal that was in him as a prophet and reformer.
God, with all His sternness and inflexibility, as He appeared to Mohammed, was just and merciful. A strict comparison between Yahveh and Allah certainly inclines the balance in favour of the latter. Jehovah at His best was a God of blood and vengeance, at His worst a voracious monster. In Allah, stern and avenging God as He was, there was at least compassion and mercy and forgiveness. He was not inexorable. He would listen to reason. Mohammed himself was a distinct advance on the founder of the ancient Jewish faith. He was more humane, a man of broader and deeper sympathies. Stern and hard to a degree where God and the Faith was concerned; where men, but especially women and children, were concerned, he was all tenderness and pity.
Dutiful and obedient to his uncle who had been a father to him, he was a faithful servant, an exemplary husband, a kind father, a good master. The very name of Faithful, by which he was always distinguished, proves beyond a doubt what manner of man he was. An orphan himself in childhood, early inured to poverty, his heart went out to all those who had the misfortune to be similarly situated. For the poor, the weak, the helpless, he had a fellow-feeling. The degraded or at least dependent and unprotected position of women, their moral and legal helplessness most of all, appealed to him. But in no sense because he was sensual. Sensuality was not one of his many failings. A man from top to bottom, by birth, breeding and environment Mohammed was an Arab and a Patriarch. As such he only naturally liked women and children. To men and for the Faith a strong hard man, to the weak and helpless he was tender and affectionate. As he was strong, so he was merciful and full of human sympathies. His long and happy union with Khadija shows not only that he was faithful to a degree, but a man of high moral fibre. A man too full of the gravity of life to squander his substance in mere sensuality. But in all eastern and African countries where polygamy prevails, marriage is a pure matter of political convenience. Mohammed knew this. He recognized that marriage was a very important factor in securing influence and power. It threw out octopean feelers at various tangents and established certain associations and connexions to which it clung, as a limpet to a rock or a devil-fish to its victim. The same principle down almost to our own day has been a powerful factor in European statecraft. Even the earlier practice of keeping mistresses, so much indulged in by the sovereign holders of so-called “divine rights,” had much in common with this custom. It was undoubtedly this motive more than any other which influenced Mohammed. It was an essential feature in his great design. For in spite of his overwhelming devotion to God, notwithstanding God’s obsession of him, Mohammed was essentially human. There was room and sorrow in his heart for human frailties. His desire was strong to remedy them. He too like Luther was a Protestant, and a Reformer.
As to the soulless theory regarding the fair sex, which has been literally thrust upon the Moslem world by an antipathetic if not inimical Christendom, I quite agree with Burton. “The Moslems never went so far.” At all events if some of them have done so, “Certain ‘Fathers of the Church,’ it must be remembered, did not believe that women have souls.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in one of that inimitable series of letters which she wrote, admits as much. In this particular letter written from Constantinople on May 29, 1717 (O.S.), to the Abbé Conti, she says: “Our vulgar notion that they (the Turks) do not own women to have any souls is a mistake.” And then she continues, but in not so accurate a vein: “’Tis true, they say they are not of so elevated a kind, and therefore must not hope to be admitted into the paradise appointed for the men, who are to be entertained by celestial beauties. But there is a place of happiness destined for souls of the inferior order, where all good women are to be in eternal bliss.” It is in no sense surprising, therefore, that to Mohammed Allah was the merciful. So in the sixth surah, he writes: “We (as if identifying himself with God) will not impose a task on any soul beyond its ability. For this self-same reason, God is minded to make his religion light unto you: for man was created weak.” Strong and enduring as sincerity and conviction made him, Mohammed knew his own weakness. Hence with a clemency that was divine he made concessions such as these. In these he acknowledged that, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” All the more, however, we cannot but admire his candour. Even as regards himself, his shortcomings and inadequacies, he speaks with an openness and straightforwardness that disarms suspicion—that forces the inquirer to respect him with all the greater reverence as a great leader of men. “So say I not unto you, the treasures of God are in my power; neither do I say, I know the secrets of God, neither do I say unto you, Verily I am an angel: I follow only that which is revealed unto me.” Indeed the more closely and carefully I look into his words in comparison with his life and acts, the more obvious do his candour and sincerity become. The more obvious is it to me that although essentially the product of a grim and petrified environment, he himself was unique. A man in advance of his time and people. For deep down in the soul of him, the rich milk of human kindness welled up out of the same eternal source from which he derived his fear and veneration for the Supreme! Truly the Prophet and spiritual ruler of the East and polygamy, as Christ stands for the West and monogamy!
It was with these weapons, combined with the tenacity of an elastic and imperishable patience, that Mohammed fought the Koreish and other tribes, and it was with them he finally conquered. Had he been insincere, there would have been no Islam. Had there been no spirit of a divine moral conception such as he infused into the creed (which came through him from the great fountain head of God and Nature), Islam would have withered and perished from sheer exhaustion and debility. From the standpoint of physical and moral purity, Mohammed was in every sense an Essene. Not only therefore was cleanliness of the body an absolute essential, but cleanliness of mind. Filthy immoral actions and depravities that he knew existed, unjust violence and iniquities, whether openly done or in concealment, were condemned and forbidden in scathing terms as a violation of God’s express command. The sophistry that would make an evil to be no crime unless found out, he denounced with all the fiery ardour of his fervent nature. From God there was no concealment. In his eyes it was a crime all the same—greater, in fact, because of attempted concealment.
In refuting those sceptics who have doubted the truth and sincerity of Islam, Carlyle condemns scepticism (rather too hastily it seems to me) as an indication of spiritual paralysis. Most unquestionably he was right in denouncing the former as an idiotic and godless theory. But scepticism itself in a general sense is not necessarily an evil. On the contrary, it is a natural tendency that arises out of the instinct of curiosity. Knowledge is not an inert and passive principle, but an active and dynamic force. Buckle in his history speaks of scepticism as stimulating curiosity. But he has put the cart before the horse. It is curiosity that excites scepticism. Curiosity is an animal instinct—the basis of all science. It exists in the lower animal creation—scepticism only in the upper human section. It is a higher or further development, a tendency that is certainly strengthened, if not acquired through education.
According to Lecky, “The first stage to toleration in England was due to the spirit of scepticism encroaching upon the doctrine of exclusive salvation”; and “the extinction of the spirit of intolerance both in Catholic and Protestant countries—due to the spirit of rationalism—was the noblest of all the conquests of civilization.” But as rationalism itself is chiefly the consequence of scepticism and the result of inquiry, it is obvious that in a deeply fundamental sense, the world is very considerably indebted to science or the spirit of scepticism. Indeed all knowledge has arisen from experience, and the desire to search into the root of things—to know what is what. Without curiosity and scepticism, human thought would have long since stagnated and the world remained sunk in ignorance. As Ghazali says, “No knowledge without assurance deserves the name of knowledge.” Seeing is not always devouring. Curiosity is not necessarily gluttony, or “scepticism, that curse of the intellect,” as Victor Hugo calls it. Gluttony is unnatural, unwholesome, and bestial. It is not so much overdoing, as a flagrant abuse and outrage of a natural appetite. It is a kicking against the pricks—a flying in the face of Providence. But curiosity as an instinct direct from Nature is healthy, therefore the use of it as also wholesome stands in need of stimulus and encouragement.
So Tennyson said of Shelley:—