“Islam was born in the desert, with Arab Sabeanism for its mother and Judaism for its father; its foster-nurse was Eastern Christianity.”—Edwin Arnold.
“A Prophet without miracles; a faith without mysteries; and a morality without love; which has encouraged a thirst for blood, and which began and ended in the most unbounded sensuality.”—Schlegel’s Philosophy of History.
“As we conceive God, we conceive the universe; a being incapable of loving is incapable of being loved.”—Principal Fairbairn.
Libraries have been written, not only in Arabic and Persian, but in all the languages of Europe, on the origin, character and history of Islam, the Koran and Mohammed. Views differ “as far as the east is from the west” and as far as Bosworth Smith is from Prideaux. The earlier European writers did not hesitate to call Mohammed a false prophet and his system a clever imposture; some went further and attributed even satanic agency to the success of Islam and to the words of the prophet. Carlyle, in his “Heroes and Hero-worship,” set the pendulum swinging to the other side so far that his chapter on the Hero-prophet is published as a leaflet by the Mohammedan Missionary Society of Lahore. So little did Carlyle understand the true nature of Islam that he calls it “a kind of Christianity.” What Carlyle said was only the beginning of a series of apologies and panegyrics which appeared soon after and placed Mohammed not only on the pedestal of a great reformer but “a very prophet of God,” making Islam almost the ideal religion. Syeed Ameer Ali succeeds in his biography in eliminating every sensual, harsh and ignorant trait from the character of the noted Meccan; and the recent valuable book of T. W. Arnold, professor in Aligarh College, India, attempts to prove most elaborately that Mohammedanism was propagated without the sword.
In contrast to this read what Hugh Broughton quaintly wrote in 1662: “Now consider this Moamed or Machumed, whom God gave up to a blind mind, an Ishmaelite, being a poor man till he married a widow; wealthy then and of high countenance, having the falling sickness and being tormented by the devil, whereby the widow was sorry that she matched with him. He persuaded her by himself and others that his fits were but a trance wherein he talked with the angel Gabriel. So in time the impostor was reputed a prophet of God and from Judaism, Arius, Nestorius and his own brain he frameth a doctrine.” In our day, the critical labors of scholars like Sprenger, Weil, Muir, Koelle and others have given us a more correct idea of Mohammed’s life and character. The pendulum is still swinging but will come to rest between the two extremes.
We have not space to give the story of Mohammed’s life or of the religion which he founded. An analysis of the religion has been attempted by means of two tables, one showing its development from its creed and the other the philosophy of its origin from outside sources.[56] The result of a century of critical study by European and American scholars of every school of thought has certainly established the fact that Islam is a composite religion. It is not an invention but a concoction; there is nothing novel about it except the genius of Mohammed in mixing old ingredients into a new panacea for human ills and forcing it down by means of the sword. These heterogeneous elements of Islam were gathered in Arabia at a time when many religions had penetrated the peninsula, and the Kaaba was a Pantheon. Unless one has a knowledge of these elements of “the time of ignorance,” Islam is a problem. Knowing, however, these heathen, Christian and Jewish factors, Islam is seen to be a perfectly natural and understandable development. Its heathen elements remain, to this day, perfectly recognizable in spite of thirteen centuries of explanation by the Moslem authorities. It is to the Jewish Rabbi Geiger that we owe our first knowledge of the extent to which Islam is indebted to the Jews and the Talmud. Rev. W. St. Clair Tisdall has recently shown how Mohammed borrowed even from the Zoroastrians and Sabeans, while as to the amount of Christian teaching in Islam, the Koran and its commentators are evidence.
There is a remarkable verse in the twenty-second chapter of the Koran, in which Mohammed seems to enumerate all the sources that were accessible to him in forming his new religion; and at that time he seems to have been in doubt as to which was the most trustworthy source. The verse reads as follows: “They who believe and the Jews and the Sabeans and the Christians and the Magians (Zoroastrians) and those who join other gods to God, verily God shall decide between them on the day of Resurrection.”
The God of Islam. Gibbon characterizes the first part of the Moslem’s creed as “an eternal truth “—(“there is no god but God”); but very much depends on the character of the God, who is affirmed to displace all other gods. If Allah’s attributes are unworthy of deity then even the first clause of the briefest of all creeds, is false. There has been a strange neglect to study the Moslem idea of God and nearly all writers take for granted that the God of the Koran is the same being and has like attributes as Jehovah or the Godhead of the New Testament. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all the Mohammedan conception of Allah is purely negative. God is unique and has no relations to any creature that partake of resemblance. He cannot be defined in terms other than negative. As the popular song has it,
Absolute sovereignty and ruthless omnipotence are his chief attributes while his character is impersonal—that of a monad. Among the ninety-nine beautiful names of God, which Edwin Arnold has used in his poem “Pearls of the Faith,” the ideas of fatherhood, love, impartial justice and unselfishness are absent. The Christian truth “God is love” is to the learned, blasphemy and to the ignorant an enigma. Palgrave, who certainly was not biased against the religion of Arabia and who lived with the Arabs for long months, calls the theology of Islam “the pantheism of force.” No one has ever given a better account of Allah, a more faithful portrait of Mohammed’s conception of deity than Palgrave. Every word of his description tallies with statements which one can hear daily from pious Moslems. Yet no one who reads what we quote in all its fullness will recognize here the God whom David addresses in the Psalms or who became incarnate at Bethlehem and suffered on Calvary. This is Palgrave’s statement:
“There is no god but God—are words simply tantamount in English to the negation of any deity save one alone; and thus much they certainly mean in Arabic, but they imply much more also. Their full sense is, not only to deny absolutely and unreservedly all plurality, whether of nature or of person, in the Supreme Being, not only to establish the unity of the Unbegetting and Unbegot, in all its simple and uncommunicable Oneness, but besides this the words, in Arabic and among Arabs, imply that this one Supreme Being is also the only Agent, the only Force, the only Act existing throughout the universe, and leave to all beings else, matter or spirit, instinct or intelligence, physical or moral, nothing but pure, unconditional passiveness, alike in movement or in quiescence, in action or in capacity. The sole power, the sole motor, movement, energy, and deed is God; the rest is downright inertia and mere instrumentality, from the highest archangel down to the simplest atom of creation. Hence, in this one sentence, ‘La Ilāh illa Allāh,’ is summed up a system which, for want of a better name, I may be permitted to call the Pantheism of Force, or of Act, thus exclusively assigned to God, who absorbs it all, exercises it all, and to whom alone it can be ascribed, whether for preserving or for destroying, for relative evil or for equally relative good. I say ‘relative,’ because it is clear that in such a theology no place is left for absolute good or evil, reason or extravagance; all is abridged in the autocratic will of the one great Agent: ‘sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas’; or, more significantly still, in Arabic, ‘Kemā yesha’o,’ ‘as he wills it,’ to quote the constantly recurring expression of the Koran.
“Thus immeasurably and eternally exalted above, and dissimilar from, all creatures, which lie levelled before him on one common plane of instrumentality and inertness, God is one in the totality of omnipotent and omnipresent action, which acknowledges no rule, standard, or limit save his own sole and absolute will. He communicates nothing to his creatures, for their seeming power and act ever remain his alone, and in return he receives nothing from them; for whatever they may be, that they are in him, by him, and from him only. And secondly, no superiority, no distinction, no preëminence, can be lawfully claimed by one creature over its fellow, in the utter equalization of their unexceptional servitude and abasement; all are alike tools of the one solitary Force which employs them to crush or to benefit, to truth or to error, to honor or shame, to happiness, or misery, quite independently of their individual fitness, deserts, or advantage, and simply because he wills it, and as he wills it.
“One might at first think that this tremendous autocrat, this uncontrolled and unsympathizing power, would be far above anything like passions, desires or inclinations. Yet such is not the case, for he has with respect to his creatures one main feeling and source of action, namely, jealousy of them lest they should perchance attribute to themselves something of what is his alone, and thus encroach on his all-engrossing kingdom. Hence he is ever more prone to punish than to reward, to inflict than to bestow pleasure, to ruin than to build.
“It is his singular satisfaction to let created beings continually feel that they are nothing else than his slaves, his tools, and contemptible tools also, that thus they may the better acknowledge his superiority, and know his power to be above their power, his cunning above their cunning, his will above their will, his pride above their pride; or rather, that there is no power, cunning, will, or pride save his own.
“But he himself, sterile in his inaccessible height, neither loving nor enjoying aught save his own and self-measured decree, without son, companion, or counsellor, is no less barren for himself than for his creatures, and his own barrenness and lone egoism in himself as the cause and rule of his indifferent and unregarding despotism around. The first note is the key of the whole tune, and the primal idea of God runs through and modifies the whole system and creed that centres in him.
“That the notion here given of the Deity, monstrous and blasphemous as it may appear, is exactly and literally that which the Koran conveys, or intends to convey, I at present take for granted. But that it indeed is so, no one who has attentively perused and thought over the Arabic text (for mere cursory reading, especially in a translation, will not suffice) can hesitate to allow. In fact, every phrase of the preceding sentences, every touch in this odious portrait has been taken, to the best of my ability, word for word, or at least meaning for meaning from the “Book” the truest mirror of the mind and scope of its writer. And that such was in reality Mahomet’s mind and idea is fully confirmed by the witness-tongue of contemporary tradition.”
The Koran shows that Mohammed had in a measure a correct knowledge of the physical attributes of God but an absolutely false conception of his moral attributes. This was perfectly natural because Mohammed had no idea of the nature of sin—moral evil—or of holiness—moral perfection.
The Imam El Ghazzali a famous scholastic divine of the Moslems says of God: “He is not a body endued with form nor a substance circumscribed with limits or determined by measure. Neither does He resemble bodies, as they are capable of being measured or divided. Neither is He a substance nor do substances exist in Him; neither is He an accident nor do accidents exist in Him. Neither is He like to anything that exists; neither is anything like to Him; nor is He determinate in quantity nor comprehended by bounds nor circumscribed by the differences of situation nor contained in the heavens.... His nearness is not like the nearness of bodies nor is His essence like the essence of bodies. Neither doth He exist in anything; neither does anything exist in Him.” God’s will is absolute and alone; the predestination of everything and everybody to good or ill according to the caprice of sovereignty. For there is no Fatherhood and no purpose of redemption to soften the doctrine of the decrees. Hell must be filled and so Allah creates infidels. The statements of the Koran on this doctrine are coarse and of tradition, blasphemous. Islam reduces God to the category of the will; He is a despot, an Oriental despot, and as the moral-law is not emphasized He is not bound by any standard of justice. Worship of the creature is heinous to the Moslem mind, and yet Allah punished Satan for not being willing to worship Adam. (Koran ii. 28-31.) Allah is merciful in winking at the sins of the prophet but is the avenger of all unbelievers in him.
This is not “the only True God” whom we know through Jesus Christ and so knowing have life-eternal. “No man knoweth the Father but the Son and he to whom the Son revealeth Him. He who denies the incarnation remains ignorant of God’s true character. As Fairbairn says, “the love which the Godhead makes immanent and essential to God, gives God an altogether new meaning and actuality for religion; while thought is not forced to conceive Monotheism as the apotheosis of an Almighty will or an impersonal ideal of the pure reason.” Islam knows no Godhead, and Allah is not love.
Transcribers Note: To fit within page and layout constraints the Chart above has been converted into the linked tabular format. The section beginning with A; Faith and B:Practice Appears to derrive equally from “The Doctrine of God” and “The Doctrine of Revelation” so has been abstracted and linked from the position the author seems to have intended. General notes have been abstracted and displayed as footnotes.
[58] Verbally handed down from mouth to mouth and finally sifted and recorded by both sects:
[59] Not one of them flourished until three cenruries after Mohammed.
[59a] By Abu Jaafar.