The Faith of Islam Part 1

The Faith of Islam.

by Edward Sell.

PREFACE.

The following pages embody a study of Islam during a residence of fifteen years in India, the greater part of which time I have been in daily intercourse with Musalmans. I have given in the footnotes the authorities from which I quote. I was not able to procure in Madras a copy of the Arabic edition of Ibn Khaldoun's great work, but the French translation by Baron M. de Slane, to which I so frequently refer, is thoroughly reliable.

The quotations from the Quran are made from Rodwell's translation. The original has been consulted when necessary.

A few slight and occasional errors in transliteration have occurred, such as Sulat for Salat, Munkar for Munkir, &c., but in no case is the meaning affected.

In some words, such as Khalif, Khalifate, and Omar, I have retained the anglicised form instead of using the more correct terms, Khalifa, Khilafat, 'Umr. The letter Q has been used to distinguish the Kaf-i-Karashat from the Kaf-i-Tazi.

E. S.

MADRAS, _December 1st, 1880._

INTRODUCTION.

It is necessary to enter into some explanation as regards the contents of this work. It does not fall in with its plan to enter into an account either of the life of Muhammad or of the wide and rapid spread of the system founded by him. The first has been done by able writers in England, France and Germany. I could add nothing new to this portion of the subject, nor throw new light upon it. The political growth of Muslim nations has also been set forth in various ways.

It seems to me that the more important study at this time is that of the religious system which has grown out of the Prophet's teaching, and of its effect upon the individual and the community. What the Church in her missionary enterprise has to deal with, what European Governments in the political world have to do with is Islam as it is, and as it now influences those who rule and those who are ruled under it.

I have, therefore, tried to show from authentic sources, and from a practical knowledge of it, what the Faith of Islam really is, and how it influences men and nations in the present day. I think that recent Fatvas delivered by the 'Ulama in Constantinople show how firmly a Muslim State is bound in the fetters of an unchangeable Law, whilst the present practice of orthodox Muslims all the world {x} over is a constant carrying out of the precepts given in the Quran and the Sunnat, and an ill.u.s.tration of the principles I have shown to belong to Islam. On this subject it is not too much to say that there is, except amongst Oriental scholars, much misconception.

Again, much that is written on Islam is written either in ignorant prejudice, or from an ideal standpoint. To understand it aright, one should know its literature and live amongst its people. I have tried faithfully to prove every statement I have made; and if, now and again, I have quoted European authors, it is only by way of ill.u.s.tration. I rest my case entirely upon Musalman authorities themselves. Still more, I have ascertained from living witnesses that the principles I have tried to show as existing in Islam, are really at work now and are as potent as at any previous period.

I have thus traced up from the very foundations the rise and development of the system, seeking wherever possible to link the past with the present. In order not to interfere with this unity of plan, I have had to leave many subjects untouched, such as those connected with the civil law, with slavery, divorce, jihad or religious wars, &c. A good digest of Muhammadan Law[1] will give all necessary information on these points. The basis of the Law which determines these questions is what I have described in my first chapter. Ijtihad, for example, rules quite as effectually in a question of domestic {xi} economy or political jurisprudence as on points of dogma. It was not, therefore, necessary for me to go into details on these points.

When I have drawn any conclusion from data which Muhammadan literature, and the present practice of Muslims have afforded me, I have striven to give what seems to me a just and right one. Still, I gladly take this opportunity of stating that I have found many Muslims better than their creed, men with whom it is a pleasure to a.s.sociate, and whom I respect for many virtues and esteem as friends. I judge the system, not any individual in it.

In India, there are a number of enlightened Muhammadans, ornaments to native society, useful servants of the State, men who show a laudable zeal in all social reforms, so far as is consistent with a reputation for orthodoxy. Their number is far too few, and they do not, in many cases, represent orthodox Islam, nor do I believe their counterpart would be found amongst the 'Ulama of a Muslim State. The fact is that the wave of scepticism which has pa.s.sed over Europe has not left the East untouched.

Hindu and Muslim alike have felt its influence, but to judge of either the one system or the other from the very liberal utterances of a few men who expound their views before English audiences is to yield oneself up to delusion on the subject.

Islam in India has also felt the influence of contact with other races and creeds, though, theologically speaking, the Iman and the Din, the faith and the practice, are unchanged, and remain as I have {xii} described them in chapters four and five. If Islam in India has lost some of its original fierceness, it has also adopted many superst.i.tious practices, such as those against which the Wahhabis protest. The great ma.s.s of the Musalman people are quite as superst.i.tious, if not more so, than their heathen neighbours.

Still the manliness, the suavity of manner, the deep learning, after an oriental fashion, of many Indian Musalmans render them a very attractive people. It is true there is a darker side--much bigotry, pride of race, scorn of other creeds, and, speaking generally, a tendency to inertness. It is thus that in Bengal, Madras and perhaps in other places, they have fallen far behind the Hindus in educational status, and in the number of appointments they hold in the Government service. Indeed, this subject is a serious one and deserves the special attention of the Indian Government. In Bengal the proportion of Musalmans to Hindus in the upper ranks of the Uncovenanted Civil Service in 1871 was 77 to 341. In the year 1880 it had declined to 53 to 451. The state of affairs in Madras is equally bad. Yet an intelligent Muslim, as a rule, makes a good official.

Looking at the subject from a wider stand-point, I think the Church has hardly yet realised how great a barrier this system of Islam is to her onward march in the East. Surely special men with special training are required for such an enterprise as that of encountering Islam in its own strongholds. No better pioneers of the Christian {xiii} faith could be found in the East than men won from the Crescent to the Cross.

All who are engaged in such an enterprise will perhaps find some help in this volume, and I am not without hope that it may also throw some light on the political questions of the day.

{1}

THE FAITH OF ISLaM.

CHAPTER I.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ISLaM.

The creed of Islam, "La-ilaha-il-lal-lahu wa Muhammad-ur-Rasul-Ullah,"

(There is no deity but G.o.d, and Muhammad is the Apostle of G.o.d) is very short, but the system itself is a very dogmatic one. Such statements as: "The Quran is an all-embracing and sufficient code, regulating everything,"

"The Quran contains the _entire_ code of Islam--that is, it is not a book of religious precepts merely, but it governs all that a Muslim does," "The Quran contains the whole religion of Muhammad," "The Quran which contains the whole Gospel of Islam" are not simply misleading, they are erroneous.

So far from the Quran alone being the _sole_ rule of faith and practice to Muslims, there is not one single sect amongst them whose faith and practice is based on it alone. No one among them disputes its authority or casts any doubt upon its genuineness. Its voice is supreme in all that it concerns, but its exegesis, the whole system of legal jurisprudence and of theological science, is largely founded on the Traditions. Amongst the orthodox Musalmans, the foundations of the Faith are four in number, the Quran, Sunnat, Ijma' and Qias. The fact that all the sects do not agree with the orthodox--the Sunnis--in this matter ill.u.s.trates another important fact in Islam--the want of unity amongst its followers. {2}

1. THE QURaN.--The question of the inspiration will be fully discussed, and an account of the laws of the exegesis of the Quran will be given in the next chapter. It is sufficient now to state that this book is held in the highest veneration by Muslims of every sect. When being read it is kept on a stand elevated above the floor, and no one must read or touch it without first making a legal ablution.[2] It is not translated unless there is the most urgent necessity, and even then the Arabic text is printed with the translation. It is said that G.o.d chose the sacred month of Ramazan in which to give all the revelations which in the form of books have been vouchsafed to mankind. Thus on the first night of that month the books of Abraham came down from heaven; on the sixth the books of Moses; on the thirteenth the Injil, or Gospel, and on the twenty-seventh the Quran. On that night, the Laylut-ul-Qadr, or "night of power," the whole Quran is said to have descended to the lowest of the seven heavens, from whence it was brought piecemeal to Muhammad as occasion required.[3] "Verily we have caused it (the Quran) to descend on the night of power." (Sura xcvii. 1.) That night is called the blessed night, the night better than a thousand months, the night when angels came down by the permission of their Lord, the night which bringeth peace and blessings till the rosy dawn. Twice on that night in the solitude of the cave of Hira the voice called, twice though pressed sore "as if a fearful weight had been laid upon him," the prophet struggled {3} against its influence. The third time he heard the words:--

"Recite thou, in the name of thy Lord who created-- Created man from clots of blood." (Sura xcvi. 5.)

"When the voice had ceased to speak, telling how from minutest beginnings man had been called into existence, and lifted up by understanding and knowledge of the Lord, who is most beneficent, and who by the pen had revealed that which man did not know, Muhammad woke up from his trance and felt as if "a book had been written in his heart." He was much alarmed.

Tradition records that he went hastily to his wife and said--"O Khadija!

what has happened to me!" He lay down and she watched by him. When he recovered from his paroxysm, he said "O Khadija! he of whom one would not have believed (_i.e._, himself) has become either a soothsayer (kahin) or mad." She replied, "G.o.d is my protection, O Ab-ul-kasim. He will surely not let such a thing happen unto thee, for thou speakest the truth, dost not return evil for evil, keepest faith, art of a good life and art kind to thy relatives and friends, and neither art thou a talker abroad in the bazaars.

What has befallen thee? Hast thou seen aught terrible?" Muhammad replied "Yes." And he told her what he had seen. Whereupon she answered and said:--"Rejoice, O dear husband and be of good cheer. He in whose hands stands Khadija's life, is my witness that thou wilt be the Prophet of this people."[4] The next Sura, the 74th, was revealed at Mecca, after which there seems to have been an intermission, called the Fatrah. It was during this time that the Prophet gained some knowledge of the contents of the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures.

Gabriel is believed to have been the medium of communication. This fact, however, is only once stated in the Quran:--"Say, whoso is the enemy of Gabriel--For he it is {4} who by G.o.d's leave hath caused the Quran to descend on thy heart" (Sura ii. 91.) This Sura was revealed some years after the Prophet's flight to Madina. The other references to the revelation of the Quran are:--"Verily from the Lord of the worlds hath this book come down; the Faithful Spirit (Ruh-ul-amin) hath come down with it"

(Sura xxvi. 192.) "The Quran is no other than a revelation revealed to him, one terrible in power (Shadid-ul-Qua) taught it him." (Sura liii. 5.) These latter pa.s.sages do not state clearly that Gabriel was the medium of communication, but the belief that he was is almost, if not entirely, universal, and the Commentators say that the terms "Ruh-ul-amin" and "Shadid-ul-Qua" refer to no other angel or spirit. The use of the word "taught" in the last Sura quoted, and the following expression in Sura lxxv. 18. "When we have _recited it_, then follow thou the recital," show that the Quran is entirely an objective revelation and that Muhammad was only a pa.s.sive medium of communication. The Muhammadan historian, Ibn Khaldoun, says on this point:--"Of all the divine books the Quran is the only one of which the text, words and phrases have been communicated to a prophet by an audible voice. It is otherwise with the Pentateuch, the Gospel and the other divine books: the prophets received them under the form of ideas."[5] This expresses the universal belief on this point--a belief which reveals the essentially mechanical nature of Islam.

The Quran thus revealed is now looked upon as the standing miracle of Islam. Other divine books, it is admitted, were revelations received under the form of ideas, but the Quran is far superior to them all for the actual text was revealed to the ear of the prophet. Thus we read in Sura lxxv.

16-19:--

{5}

"Move not thy tongue in haste to follow and master this revelation; For we will see to the collecting and recital of it; _But when we have recited it_, then follow thou the recital; And verily it shall be ours to make it clear to thee."

The Quran is, then, believed to be a miraculous revelation of divine eloquence, as regards both _form_ and _substance_, arrangement of words, and its revelation of sacred things. It is a.s.serted that each well-accredited prophet performed miracles in that particular department of human skill or science most flourishing in his age. Thus in the days of Moses magic exercised a wide influence, but all the magicians of Pharaoh's court had to submit to the superior skill of the Hebrew prophet. In the days of Jesus the science of medicine flourished. Men possessed great skill in the art of healing; but no physician could equal the skill of Jesus, who not only healed the sick, but raised the dead. In the days of Muhammad the special and most striking feature of the age was the wonderful power of the Arabs in the art of poetry. Muhammad-ud-Damiri says:--"Wisdom hath alighted on three things--the brain of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese and the tongue of the Arabs." They were unrivalled for their eloquence, for the skill with which they arranged their material and gave expression to their thoughts. It is in this very particular that superior excellence is claimed for the Quran.[6] It is to the Muhammadan mind a sure evidence of its miraculous origin that it should excel in this respect. Muslims say that miracles have followed the revelations given to other prophets in order to confirm the divine message. In this case the Quran is both a revelation and a miracle. {6} Muhammad himself said:--"Each prophet has received manifest signs which carried conviction to men: but that which I have received is the revelation. So I hope to have a larger following on the day of resurrection than any other prophet has." Ibn Khaldoun says that "by this the Prophet means that such a wonderful miracle as the Quran, which is also a revelation, should carry conviction to a very large number."[7] To a Muslim the fact is quite clear, and so to him the Quran is far superior to all the preceding books. Muhammad is said to have convinced a rival, Lebid, a poet-laureate, of the truth of his mission by reciting to him a portion of the now second Sura. "Unquestionably it is one of the very grandest specimens of Koranic or Arabic diction.... But even descriptions of this kind, grand as they be, are not sufficient to kindle and preserve the enthusiasm and the faith and the hope of a nation like the Arabs.... The poets before him had sung of valour and generosity, of love and strife and revenge ... of early graves, upon which weeps the morning cloud, and of the fleeting nature of life which comes and goes as the waves of the desert sands, as the tents of a caravan, as a flower that shoots up and dies away.

Or they shoot their bitter arrows of satire right into the enemy's own soul. Muhammad sang of none of these. No love-minstrelsy his, not the joys of the world, nor sword, nor camel, nor jealousy, nor human vengeance, not the glories of tribe or ancestor. He preached Islam." The very fierceness with which this is done, the swearing such as Arab orator, proficient though he may have been in the art, had never made, the dogmatic certainty with which the Prophet proclaimed his message have tended, equally with the pa.s.sionate grandeur of his utterances, to hold the Muslim world spell-bound to the letter and imbued with all the narrowness of the book.

So sacred is the text supposed to be that only the {7} Companions[8] of the Prophet are deemed worthy of being commentators on it. The work of learned divines since then has been to learn the Quran by heart and to master the traditions, with the writings of the earliest commentators thereon. The revelation itself is never made a subject of investigation or tried by the ordinary rules of criticism. If only the Isnad, or chain of authorities for any interpretation, is good, that interpretation is unhesitatingly accepted as the correct one. It is a fundamental article of belief that no other book in the world can possibly approach near to it in thought or expression. It deals with positive precepts rather than with principles.

Its decrees are held to be binding not in the spirit merely but in the very letter on all men, at all times and under every circ.u.mstance of life. This follows as a natural consequence from the belief in its eternal nature.

The various portions recited by the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his prophetical career were committed to writing by some of his followers, or treasured up in their memories. As the recital of the Quran formed a part of every act of public worship, and as such recital was an act of great religious merit, every Muslim tried to remember as much as he could. He who could do so best was ent.i.tled to the highest honour, and was often the recipient of a substantial reward.[9] The Arab love for poetry facilitated the exercise of this faculty. When the Prophet died the revelation ceased. There was no distinct copy of the whole, nothing to show what was of transitory importance, what of permanent value. There is nothing which proves that the Prophet took any special care of any portions. There seems to have been no definite order in which, when the book was {8} compiled, the various Suras were arranged, for the Quran, as it now exists, is utterly devoid of all historical or logical sequence. For a year after the Prophet's death nothing seems to have been done; but then the battle of Yemana took place in which a very large number of the best Quran reciters were slain. Omar took fright at this, and addressing the Khalif Abu Bakr, said, "The slaughter may again wax hot amongst the repeaters of the Quran in other fields of battle, and much may be lost therefrom. Now, therefore, my advice is that thou shouldest give speedy orders for the collection of the Quran." Abu Bakr agreed, and said to Zeid who had been an amanuensis of the Prophet:--"Thou art a young man, and wise, against whom no one amongst us can cast an imputation; and thou wert wont to write down the inspired revelations of the Prophet of the Lord, wherefore now search out the Quran and bring it all together." Zeid being at length pressed to undertake the task proceeded to gather the Quran together from "date leaves, and tablets of white stone, and from the hearts of men." In course of time it was all compiled in the order in which the book is now arranged. This was the authorized text for some twenty-three years after the death of Muhammad. Owing, however, either to different modes of recitation, or to differences of expression in the sources from which Zeid's first recension was made, a variety of different readings crept into the copies in use. The Faithful became alarmed and the Khalif Osman was persuaded to put a stop to such a danger. He appointed Zeid with three of the leading men of the Quraish as a.s.sistants to go over the whole work again. A careful recension was made of the whole book which was then a.s.similated to the Meccan dialect, the purest in Arabia. After this all other copies of the Quran were burnt by order of the Khalif, and new transcripts were made of the revised edition which was now the only authorised copy. As it is a fundamental tenet of Islam that the Quran is incorruptible and absolutely free {9} from error, no little difficulty has been felt in explaining the need of Osman's new and revised edition and of the circ.u.mstances under which it took place; but as usual a Tradition has been handed down which makes it lawful to read the Quran in seven dialects.

The book in its present form may be accepted as a genuine reproduction of Abu Bakr's edition with authoritative corrections. We may rest a.s.sured that we have in the Quran now in use the record of what Muhammad said. It thus becomes a fundamental basis of Islam. It was a common practice of the early Muslims when speaking of the Prophet to say:--"His character is the Quran."

When people curious to know details of the life of their beloved master asked 'ayesha, one of his widows, about him, she used to reply:--"Thou hast the Quran, art thou not an Arab and readest the Arab tongue? Why dost thou ask me, for the Prophet's disposition is no other than the Quran?"

Whether Muhammad would have arranged the Quran as we now have it is a subject on which it is impossible to form an opinion. There are Traditions which seem to show that he had some doubts as to its completeness. I give the following account on the authority of M. Caussin de Percival. When Muhammad felt his end draw near he said:--"Bring ink and paper: I wish to write to you a book to preserve you always from error." But it was too late. He could not write or dictate and so he said:--"May the Quran always be your guide. Perform what it commands you: avoid what it prohibits." The genuineness of the first part of this Tradition is, I think, very doubtful, the latter is quite in accordance with the Prophet's claim for his teaching. The letter of the book became, as Muhammad intended it should become, a despotic influence in the Muslim world, a barrier to freethinking on the part of all the orthodox, an obstacle to innovation in all spheres--political, social, intellectual and moral. There are many topics connected with it which can be better explained in the next chapter. All {10} that has now to be here stated is that the Quran is the first foundation of Islam. It is an error to suppose it is the only one: an error which more than anything else has led persons away from the only position in which they could obtain a true idea of the great system of Islam.

The Shia'hs maintain, without good reason, that the following verses favourable to the claims of 'Ali and of the Shia'h faction were omitted in Osman's recension.

"O Believers! believe in the two lights. (Muhammad and 'Ali).

'Ali is of the number of the pious, we shall give him his right in the day of judgment; we shall not pa.s.s over those who wish to deceive him.

We have honoured him above all this family. He and his family are very patient. Their enemy[10] is the chief of sinners.

We have announced to thee a race of just men, men[11] who will not oppose our orders. My mercy and peace are on them living[12] or dead.