Mohammed.
Speaking of religion, while wandering about the streets and byways of Constantinople I used often to wonder whether, were it not for the voice of the muezzin, Christians would see anything to remind them that there was any difference between the religion of this people and their own. The Byzantine architecture of the mosques makes them seem very like churches; of the Islam rites there is no external evidence; while Turkish soldiers may be seen escorting the viaticum through the streets. An uneducated Christian might remain a year in Constantinople without being aware that Mohammed, not Christ, claimed the allegiance of the greater part of the population; and this led me on to reflect upon the slight nature of the fundamental difference—the blade of grass, as the Abyssinian Christians called it in speaking to the first followers of Mohammed—which divides the two religions, and the trifling cause which led Arabia to adopt Islamism instead of Christianity, or, if not Christianity, at all events something so closely resembling it that, even had it never developed into that outright, it would have seriously altered the destinies of the entire Eastern world. This slight cause was nothing more or less than the voluptuous nature of a certain handsome young Arabian, tall, fair, ardent, with black eyes and musical voice—he lacked the force to dominate his own passions, and so, instead of cutting at the root of his people’s prevailing sin, he contented himself with pruning the branches, and in lieu of proclaiming conjugal unity as he proclaimed the unity of God, merely confined within somewhat narrower bounds, and then proceeded to give the countenance of religion to, the dissolute selfishness of men. No doubt he would have had to encounter a more determined opposition in the one case than in the other, but that it was in his power to succeed who can question when it is remembered that in order to establish the worship of one sole God among a people given over to idolatry he was obliged to first overthrow an enormous superstructure of tradition and superstition, including innumerable grants and privileges all closely interlaced, the result of centuries of growth, and that he made them accept, as one of the dogmas of his religion for which millions of believers subsequently died, a paradise which at its first announcement aroused a universal feeling of scorn and indignation? Unfortunately, however, this handsome young Arab temporized with his passions, and as a consequence the face of half the globe is changed, since polygamy was, without doubt, the besetting vice of his rule and the principal cause of the decadence of all those races who have adopted his religion. It is the degradation of one sex for the benefit of the other, the open sanction of a glaring injustice which disturbs the entire course of human rights, corrupts the rich, oppresses the poor, encourages ignorance, breaks up the family, and by causing endless complications in the rights of birth among the reigning dynasties overturns kingdoms and states, finally placing an insuperable barrier in the way of the union of Mussulman society with the people of other faiths who populate the East. If, to return to the original proposition, that handsome young Arab had only been endowed with a little more strength of character, had the spiritual in his nature but outweighed, by ever so small an amount, the animal, who knows?—perhaps we would now have an Orient orderly, well-governed, and the world be a century nearer universal civilization.