Arabic Authors Part 9

Indisposition of Muhammad, and the three revolts--one headed by Tulaihah bin Khuwailid, a famous warrior of Najd; one by Musailamah; and one by Al-Aswad, all of which were eventually completely crushed after Muhammad's death by Abu Bakr and his generals.

Another expedition to Syria projected.

Muhammad's health becomes worse. His retirement to Ayesha's apartment.

His final discourses.

Abu Bakr appointed to lead the public prayers.

Muhammad's last appearance in the mosque at Madinah.

His death and burial, June, A.D. 632.

From the above summary of the princ.i.p.al events of Muhammad's life, it will be perceived that up to the age of forty he was a student and acquirer of knowledge, much alone and occupied with his thoughts. At forty-one he began his public ministry, and stood forth as a reformer, preacher, and apostle at Mecca, and this continued till he finally left that place, in June, A.D. 622. As a reformer he proposed to do away with idols, to suppress gambling and drinking, and to abolish female infanticide, at that time much practised by the Arabs. As a preacher and apostle he urged the people to accept the belief in one G.o.d, whose injunctions were communicated to him by Gabriel for the benefit of the humanities. Prayer and ablution were also then ordained; fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimages were inst.i.tuted later on.

Before Muhammad's time there had been several earnest seekers after the one G.o.d, the G.o.d of Abraham. Of these persons Zaid, the Inquirer, may be mentioned, as also Warakah, a cousin of Muhammad's first wife, Khadijah; Othman bin Huwairith, and Obaid Allah bin Jahsh. The people who professed this theism were termed Hanyfs; but their state of mind was as yet a purely speculative one, and they had announced nothing definite. But the ground was so far laid open, and had been prepared to a certain extent for Muhammad and his express revelation, that 'There was no G.o.d but the G.o.d, and that Muhammad was His apostle.'

It is highly probable that when Muhammad first began his public exhortations he had a strong idea of bringing not only the Arabs, but also the Jews and Christians, into his fold, and establishing one universal faith on the basis of one G.o.d, Almighty, Eternal, Merciful, Compa.s.sionate. It was on this account that he made Jerusalem the Kiblah, or consecrated direction of worship, and introduced into the Suras, or chapters, that he issued from time to time a good deal of matter connected with our Old and New Testaments. He particularly mentioned Abraham as the Father of the Faith, and acknowledging that there had already existed many thousand prophets, and three hundred and fifteen apostles, or messengers, he quoted nine of these last as special messengers, viz., Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Job, David, Jesus, the son of Mary, and himself. To five of these he gave special t.i.tles. He called Noah the preacher of G.o.d; Abraham the friend of G.o.d; Moses the converser with G.o.d; Jesus the spirit of G.o.d; and himself the apostle, or messenger, of G.o.d. But of the nine above mentioned four only, viz., Moses, David, Jesus, and Muhammad, held the highest rank as prophet-apostles.

It would, therefore, appear that Muhammad really hoped to establish one religion, acknowledging one G.o.d and a future life, and admitting that the earlier prophets had emanated from G.o.d as apostles or messengers. The world was too young and too ignorant in Muhammad's time to accept such an idea. It may, however, be accepted some day, when knowledge overcomes prejudice. Nations may have different habits, manners, and customs, but the G.o.d they all worship is one and the same.

Muhammad's life, from the age of forty to fifty, was one long struggle with the Koraish. Had it not been for the support given him by some of his influential relations at Mecca, he would either have been killed, or compelled to leave the place before he did. It is true that during these twelve years he made some excellent converts and faithful followers; but still it must be regarded as an historical fact that Muhammad failed at Mecca, as Jesus had failed at Jerusalem. In the one case Jesus was sacrificed, and pa.s.sed away, leaving the story of His life, His words and His works in the heads of His disciples, who, with the suddenly converted Paul, certain Alexandrian Jews, the Emperor Constantine, some literary remains of Plato, along with a destruction of adverse ma.n.u.scripts and doc.u.ments, finally established the Christian religion. In the other case Muhammad, failing at Mecca, succeeded at Madinah, and before his death had so far settled matters that the religion was fairly established, and was thus saved the severe and bitter struggles of the first centuries of the Christian Churches.

It has seldom been a matter of speculation as to what would have been the course of the world's history if Muhammad had been slain by the Koraish before he left Mecca, or if Jesus had not been crucified by the Jews. It is probable that in the end both religions would have been eventually established in other ways, and by other means, depending a good deal on the followers of the two men. But as the subject is purely speculative, it can hardly be entertained in this purely historical chapter.

Once at Madinah, Muhammad became a personage. Supported by his Meccan followers (al-Muhajirun), and the Madinese auxiliaries (Ansars), he a.s.sumed immediately a spiritual and temporal authority, and became a sort of Pope-King. He kept that position for the rest of his life, improving it by his military successes, his diplomatic arrangements, his spiritual instructions, and his social legislation.

It was probably shortly before he went to Madinah, or very soon after his arrival there, that he gave up all ideas of bringing over Jews, Christians, and Sabaeans to his views. He determined to adapt them to the manners and customs of the Arabs only. In this he showed his wisdom and his knowledge of business. He changed the Kiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca. In the place of the Jewish trumpet, or the Christian bell, he introduced the call to prayer still heard from the tapering minarets of every mosque throughout the Muhammadan world.

By the Christian world it has been sometimes considered that Muhammad was good and virtuous at Mecca, but vicious and wicked at Madinah.

Such calls to mind the reply of an Indian youth when asked in an examination to give an outline of the character of our good Queen Elizabeth. He briefly described her as 'a great and virtuous princess, but in her old age she became dissolute, and had a lover called Ess.e.x.'

But the position of Muhammad at Madinah was entirely different to what it had been at Mecca. At the latter place he was unable to a.s.sert himself. Indeed, it was as much as he could do to keep himself and his followers going at all, constantly subject as they were to persecution from the Koraish. All this was changed at Madinah, and his ten years rule there was remarkable for his various military expeditions, his organization of the different tribes, his bitter persecution of the Jews, his still-continued inspired utterances, which now included spiritual, social, and legal matters, and his repeated marriages.

It has been frequently said that Muhammad, in his virtuous days, was content with one wife at Mecca, but in his vicious days at Madinah he had ten wives and two concubines. As a matter of fact, after Khadijah's death Muhammad's marriages were in most cases more or less a matter of business. By them he allied himself to Abu Bakr, Omar, Abu Sofyan, Khalid bin Walid, and other important persons. He further married the widows of some of his followers killed in battle, perhaps 'pour encourager les autres.' It is also probable that he was very anxious to have children, all of his having died except Fatima, who was married to Ali.

At the same time it must be admitted that Muhammad had a weakness for women in his later years--witness the case of Zainab bint Jahsh, the Jewish concubine Rohana, and the Coptic maid Mary. Indeed, his favourite wife Ayesha used to say of him: 'The Prophet loved three things--women, scents, and food; he had his heart's desire of the two first, but not of the last,' The reasons for this want of food, and many other traditions connected with the character of Muhammad, are to be found in the last chapter and the supplement at the end of Sir William Muir's most excellent and interesting work on the life of this extraordinary man, who, if author of the Koran only, would be ent.i.tled to rank among the immortals.

According to Muslim orthodox theology, the Koran is the inspired Word of G.o.d, uncreated, and eternal in its original essence. 'He who says the word of G.o.d is created is an infidel,' such is the decree of Muhamniadan doctrine. Leaving everybody to form their own opinion on such a matter, it is only necessary here briefly to allude to the work, and to suppose that Muhammad was the inspired author of it.

The Koran is divided into 114 suras, or chapters, and 6,666 verses.

The word itself signifies reading or recitation, and Muhammad always a.s.serted that he only recited what had been repeated to him. But the Koran represents Muhammad from many points of view, in different capacities, and under different necessities. Ayesha, his favourite wife, when asked in later years as a widow to relate something about the Prophet, replied: 'Have you not the Koran, and have you not read it? for that will tell you everything about him.'

The Koran was not collected or arranged until after Muhammad's death.

It is to be regretted that there is no reliable record of the exact order in which its various verses and chapters were given to the world by the Prophet, as that would have given us a great insight into the working of his mind from the time that he began his first recitals up to the time of his death. It is true that attempts have been made to formulate the order of delivery, but these can only be more or less conjecture. At the same time, though earlier and later verses appear mixed up in the different chapters, in some cases, of course, the period to which they belong can be pretty accurately fixed and determined.

As an interesting work, it can hardly be compared with our Old and New Testaments, nor would it be fair to make such a comparison. It must be remembered that the Koran is the work of Muhammad alone, while the Biblos, or Book, commonly called the Bible, is the work of many men.

In its compilation many authors were rejected, and it represents as a whole the united talents of the ages. Indeed, the Bible may be considered as the most wonderful book in existence, and certainly the most interesting after visiting the countries it describes and the localities it refers to. If read from a matter-of-fact point of view, it gives an abundance of various kinds of literature, and describes the workings of the human mind from the earliest ages, and the progress of ideas as they gradually and slowly dawned upon man and drove him onwards. If read from a spiritual or mystical point of view, it can be interpreted in many ways to meet the views of either the readers or the hearers. In a word, the Bible is full of prose and poetry, fact and imagination, history and fiction. It was lately described in an Italian newspaper, _Il Secolo_, about to issue a popular edition of it in halfpenny numbers, as follows:

'There is one book which gathers up the poetry and the science of humanity, and that book is the Bible; and with this book no other work in any literature can be compared. It is a book that Newton read continually, that Cromwell carried at his saddle, and that Voltaire kept always on his study table. It is a book that believers and unbelievers should alike study, and that ought to be found in every house.'

As a scientific work it has little value except that it represents the extent of scientific knowledge possessed by the authors at the time the different books were written.

To return to the Koran, which may, then, be regarded as the Bible of the Muslims. According to Mr. Badger: 'It embodies the utterances of the Arabian Prophet on all subjects, religious and moral, administrative and judicial, political and diplomatic, from the outset to the close of his career, together with a complete code of laws for regulating marriage, divorce, guardianship of orphans, bargains, wills, evidence, usury, and the intercourse of private and domestic life, as they were dictated by him to his secretaries, and by them committed to writing on palm-leaves, the shoulder-blades of sheep, and other tablets. These, it appears, were thrown pell-mell into chests, where they remained till the reign of Abu Bakr, the immediate successor of Muhammad, who, during the first year of his Khalifate, entrusted Zaid-bin Harithah, an Ansar, or auxiliary, and one of the amanuenses of the Prophet, with the task of collecting them together, which he did, as well from "the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of men" as from the afore-named materials, meaning thereby that he availed himself of the memories of those who had committed parts of the Prophet's utterances to memory. [Tradition states that one of the contemporary Muslims had learnt as many as seventy chapters by heart.] Zaid's copy continued to be the standard text during the Khalifate of Abu Bakr, who committed it to the keeping of Hafsah, one of Muhammad's widows. Certain disputes having arisen regarding this text, owing mainly to the variations of dialect and punctuation occurring therein, Omar, the successor of Abu Bakr, in the tenth year of his Khalifate, determined to establish a text which should be the sole standard, and delegated to Zaid, with whom he a.s.sociated several eminent Arab scholars of the Al-Koraish, the task of its reduction. On its completion copies were forwarded to the princ.i.p.al stations of the empire, and all previously existing copies were submitted to the flames. This is the text now in general use among Muslims, and there is every reason to believe it to be a faithful rescript of the original fragmentary collection, amended only in its dialectical variations, and made conformable to the purer Arabic of the Al-Koraish, in which the contents of the Koran were announced by Muhammad.'

From a literary point of view the Koran is regarded as a specimen of the purest Arabic, and written in half poetry and half prose. It has been said that in some cases grammarians have adapted their rules to agree with certain phrases and expressions used in it, and that though several attempts have been made to produce a work equal to it, as far as elegant writing is concerned, none have as yet succeeded.

With the Koran, then, as a basis to work upon, Muhammad became the author and, it may be said, also founder of the Muhammadan faith, although as regards the foundation of any religion the followers of the author are generally the real founders of his faith. Of the three authors of great religions, viz., Moses, Buddha, and Jesus, who had gone before, Moses seems to have had much in common with Muhammad, and the two resembled each other in some ways. Buddha and Jesus were, on the other hand, entirely spiritualistic, their ideas on many subjects much the same, and their preachings and teachings run together very much on parallel lines.

The connecting links, however, between Buddhism and Christianity, if any, have yet to be discovered and determined. It may happen that some day further light may be thrown upon the subject; but at present, in spite of similarity of ideas, of sentiments, and of parables in the two religions, there is no positive proof of any connection between them, except that one preceded the other. While history has recorded every detail of Muhammad's life, both before and after his public ministry, which did not begin until he was forty years of age, history, alas! gives us no detailed record of the life of Jesus prior to the commencement of His public ministry in His thirtieth year. Had He travelled Himself to the further East? Had He studied under Buddhist missionaries? Had He taken the vows of poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience, before He was baptized by John the Essene? Had He anything to do with the sects called Essenes, Therapeuts, Gnostics, Nazarites, the Brethren, which existed both before and during His lifetime?

These, and many other questions which might be asked, can now probably never be answered, and the only thing that can be confidently a.s.serted is that the character and the spiritual teachings of Christ, as handed down to us, much resemble the character and spiritual teachings of Buddha.

A few paragraphs must be devoted to Moses and Muhammad, as the first organizers of the Jews and the Arabs into separate and distinct nationalities. The two men had very different material to work upon, but they succeeded with the aid of Eloah, or Allah, supporting their own efforts.

It is probably historically true that the good old patriarch Abraham once lived, and may be considered to be the father of the Jewish, Christian, and Muhammadan religions. According to Arab tradition, Abraham, a.s.sisted by Ishmael, built the Kaabah at Mecca, so called because it was nearly a kaabah, or square. Anyhow, Abraham has ever been regarded with the greatest veneration by the Muslims, and his tomb at Hebron at the present day is so jealously guarded by them that the Jews and the Christians are not permitted to enter its sacred precincts.

Abraham and his followers worshipped Eloah, or the Almighty G.o.d, as the one and only G.o.d, offering up to Him at times various sacrifices.

According to Renan, in his 'History of the People of Israel,' 'the primitive religion of Israel was the worship of the Elohim, a collective name for the invisible forces that govern the world, and which are vaguely conceived as forming a supreme power at once single and manifold.'

'This vague primitive monotheism got modified during the migrations of the children of Israel, and especially during their struggles for the conquest of Palestine, and at last gave place to the conception of Jahveh, a national G.o.d conceived after the fashion of the G.o.ds of polytheism, essentially anthropomorphic, the G.o.d of Israel in conflict with the G.o.ds of the surrounding nations.'

'It was the task of the prophets to change this low and narrow conception of the Deity for a n.o.bler one, to bring back the Jews to the Elohistic idea in a spiritualized form, and to transform the Jahveh or Jehovah of the times of the Judges into a G.o.d of all the earth--universal, one and absolute, that G.o.d in spirit and in truth of whom Jesus, the last of the prophets, completed the revelation.'

Certain events in the life of Joseph brought the family of Jacob to Egypt, separated it from the other tribes, and made the Israelites into a peculiar people.[5] As the twelve families of the sons of Jacob expanded into twelve tribes, they grew in number to such an extent that the Egyptian Government of the day began to be alarmed, and commenced coercive proceedings, which led to the appearance of Moses, first as a liberator, and then as the organizer of the twelve tribes into a Jewish nationality.

[Footnote 5: The actual dates of these events and of the exodus from Egypt have not yet been historically fixed. How the Israelites first migrated to the land of Goshen, and how they eventually left Egypt, is still a question of considerable controversy. Further discoveries may yet throw further light on the subject.]

When Moses first took the children of Israel out of Egypt, it was probably his intention to lead them at once to the promised land.

Finding, however, that their physical strength and courage was not equal to the conquest of Canaan, he kept them in the desert for forty years, until the open-air life and the hardy fare had produced a new generation of men fit to cope with the warriors of the land they were about to attempt to conquer.

Doubtless, during this residence in the desert Moses legislated both morally and socially for the Jews, as Muhammad did for the Arabs at Madinah. But as the Koran was not put together during Muhammad's lifetime, so it is also highly probable that the Pentateuch, or five books of Moses, were not collected and collated till some time after his death, which last is described in the work itself.[6] Indeed, many things mentioned in them show a more advanced state of civilization than the children of Israel enjoyed during their wanderings in the desert.

[Footnote 6: This subject is treated at considerable length by Dr. A. Kuenen in 'The Religion of Israel,' translated by Alfred Heath May from the Dutch. Williams and Norgate: London, 1882.]

But, still, to Moses the Jews owe their nationality, as the Arabs owed theirs to Muhammad. The former found a weak people, united to a certain extent, but quite unaccustomed to fighting and hardship, and he welded them sufficiently together to enable them, under his successors, to establish themselves in the promised land. The latter found Arabia inhabited by a quant.i.ty of tribes, more or less hostile to each other, but brave to a degree; fond of fighting and plundering, and always at it; full of local jealousies and internal enmities, which kept them separate. Muhammad not only induced them to believe in one G.o.d, but also brought them together to such, an extent that his successors were able to launch them as united warriors and conquerors throughout the East, and to found an empire for the time being far greater, grander, and more important than Canaan, as divided among the twelve tribes, or the dominions of David and Solomon.

As a military leader Muhammad was not particularly celebrated. The military expeditions undertaken by him in person are variously stated to have been from nineteen to twenty-seven in number, whilst those in which he was not present are stated to have amounted to more than fifty. With the exception of one or two to the Syrian frontier, they were chiefly directed against the Arabs and the Jews in Arabia, but none of them were of the magnitude of those undertaken by his successors, Abu Bakr and Omar, who, with the aid of the generals Khalid, son of Walid, Mothanna, Amr bin Al'Aasi, and others, made great conquests, and finally established the Muslim faith on a firm and lasting basis. The details of these successes are admirably told in Muir's 'Annals of the Early Khalifate.'

There appears to be a great resemblance between many of the military and warlike expeditions undertaken by Muhammad in Arabia, and those of the Jews, as narrated in the historical works of the Old Testament, in Palestine. In both countries G.o.d was used as the authority, and individuals and tribes were attacked and slaughtered much in the same way. Indeed, if the numbers slain, as recorded by the Jewish historians, are to be depended upon, it can only be inferred that the G.o.d of the Jews was more vindictive and bloodthirsty than the G.o.d of the Arabs. At the present time the Soudanese and their Khalifahs seem to be following very much in the steps of Muhammad, constantly sending forth military expeditions, and issuing letters to foreign potentates.

In conclusion, the dogmas and precepts of Islam, as embodied in the Koran, may be summed up as follows:

(1) Belief in Allah or G.o.d, or, more correctly, 'The G.o.d;' that is, the only G.o.d. 'Al,' the; 'Ilah,' a G.o.d.

(2) Belief in the Messengers or Angels.

(3) Belief in the Books or Scriptures, and in the Prophets.

(4) Belief in h.e.l.l and Paradise.