I.—Message of the Prophet.
The day before I left England for Persia some seven years ago, I went to see my uncle, the author of the “Siege of Metz.” On saying good-bye he made me a present of the Kurán. “Here,” said he, “is the thing to be read. It will be the best introduction to the new life awaiting you in the East. If you can lay hold of the spirit of this book you will not be alone out there, but among men and brothers, for the Kurán is a sincere revelation of much that is eternally true.” I never saw George Robinson again: in less than a week—before I had left Paris—his spirit had passed to the bourne whence all revelations come, and where truth, in its completeness, will be revealed.
Now, it should be the critic’s aim, in dealing with all true books, to place himself on the same plane as the author, and to look in the same direction, fixing the same end. This is more especially true of what his attitude should be towards a message that has been held sacred by countless millions for more than thirteen hundred years. The merits of the Kurán and the far-reaching reforms of the Prophet of Islám can be appreciated worthily only by such men as have taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the idolatrous superstitions of the Arabians in the time of Ignorance, and with the empty logical jangling of the rival Syrian Christian sects at the close of the Sixth Century. And the critic having grasped the lifelessness of religious practice before the coming of Muhammad, would be wise to reveal, first of all, what there is of truth, and to spread what light there is in the written word of the great reformer, abandoning to the bigot and the purblind the less fruitful occupation of stirring in the cauldron of religious controversy. To that end, indeed, it were not amiss that he should cultivate his imagination, for the imaginative have turned the corner of their narrower selves, and theirs is an ever-widening vision. To those who, living by the word of Christ, diffuse darkness, Muhammad will ever be either a charlatan or an unscrupulous man of the sword. Well, the Prophet’s followers must take heart of grace. History itself as well as the Kurán has proclaimed the charges to be false.
The keynote to Muhammad’s character is sincerity. Sincerity rings out clear enough in every word of his book. He was a man in whom the fire-thought of the desert burned so fiercely that he could not help being sincere. He was so truly sincere, indeed, as to be wholly unconscious of his sincerity. Now, of all the stories related of him none affords a more convincing proof of his thorough honesty than the one which shows him to have been, at least once in practice, a backslider from the high ideal of conduct that he preached. This story, from Al-Beidáwí’s commentary, is thus related by Sale:
“A certain blind man named Abdallah Ebn Omm Mactúm came and interrupted Muhammad while he was engaged in earnest discourse with some of the principal Kuraish, of whose conversion he had hopes; but, the Prophet taking no notice of him, the blind man, not knowing that Muhammad was otherwise busied, raised his voice, and said, ‘O apostle of God, teach me some part of what God hath taught thee’; but Muhammad, vexed at this interruption, frowned, and turned away from him,” for which he was reprehended afterwards by his conscience. This episode was the source of the revelation entitled “He Frowned.” “The Prophet frowned, and turned aside,” so runs Chapter lxxx. of the Kurán, “because the blind man came unto him; and how dost thou know whether he shall peradventure be cleansed from his sins; or whether he shall be admonished, and the admonition shall profit him? The man who is wealthy thou receivest with respect; but him who cometh unto thee earnestly seeking his salvation, and who fearest God, dost thou neglect. By no means shouldst thou act thus.” We are also told that the Prophet, whenever he saw Ebn Omm Mactúm after this, showed him marked respect, saying, “The man is welcome on whose account my Lord hath reprimanded me,” and that he made him twice Governor of Medina. And yet many still persist in calling Muhammad a charlatan. Surely a prophet who, in reproving others, spared not himself, has won the right to be respected as an honest man. For my part I believe him to have been one whose word was his bond, and whose hand it had been good to grasp.
As for his having been a mere victorious soldier, he was in the beginning “precisely in a minority of one.” Your Napoleon finds in patriotism his most successful recruiting sergeant. But the call of patriotism had summoned to Muhammad’s standard not a single recruit, because he was despised by the patriotic (if the Kuraish, the predominant tribe in Arabia, and the keepers of the Ka’bah, deserved to be so called) and was rejected by them. Assuredly Muhammad drew the sword; he was driven to draw it in the end. But how did he get the sword, and to what purpose did he put it when he had it? Muhammad’s sword was forged in the furnace of that passionate, human soul of his, was tempered in the flame of divine compassion, and gave to every Arab an Empire and a creed. Islám was the sword! The blade of steel achieved no miracle, it merely drew blood—sufficiently corrupt. It was the sword of Muhammad’s word which freed the Arab heart from its vices and fired it with a wider patriotism and a purer faith. His battle-cry was the declaration of God’s unity; his sword was the faith; his battlefield the human heart and soul; and his enemy idolatry and corruption. “Yá Alláh!” and “Yá Muhammad!” carried the Arabian conquest from Mecca to Granada, and from Arabia to Delhi. The conquering hosts fought rather with their hearts and with their souls than with their swords and their strong right hands; inculcating in the conquered no earthly vanities, as do modern Muhammadan rulers, but the principles of liberty, solidarity, unity, equality, and compassion.
Forty thousand Arabs, under their famous leader, Sád Vaghás, having defeated five hundred thousand Persians and overthrown the mighty Persian Empire, in the battle of Khadasieh, on the plain of Nahavend, deeply rooted their faith in the heart of the alien race, and then left her to be ruled by her own people, in accordance with the precepts of the new revelation. Omar, perhaps the greatest Caliph, is said to have lived throughout his life on a loaf of barley bread and a cup of sour milk a day. And Alí’ the Prophet’s son-in-law, whom the Persians revere as his true successor, lived for no other purpose than to help the poor and to succour the weak. He was, as Carlyle assures us, a man worthy of Christian knighthood. So also was his son, Huseyn, whose glorious martyrdom has endeared him to the hearts of the Persian people.
In the East men are ruled and guided by religious laws and not by positive ones, so Muhammad’s aim was to make the Arabians free and united by lessening the sufferings of the poor and by establishing equality among the people. That these aims and aspirations cannot be consummated through positive laws alone must be abundantly clear to every man in the civilised West who has watched the gradual rise among us of Socialism and the deadly growth of Anarchy. We Western peoples merely pray that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Whereas Muhammad, being, as he was, a practical reformer, made it incumbent on his followers to contribute to the consummation of the Divine Law by bestowing on the poor a fair share of the things that they loved.
The very core of the Muhammadan faith lies, as I conceive, in three broad principles. First, in the declaration of God’s unity. “Say, God is one God; the eternal God: He begetteth not, neither is He begotten: and there is not one like unto Him.” This short chapter, as is well known, is held in particular veneration by the Muhammadans, and declared, by a tradition of the Prophet, to be equal in value to a third part of the whole Kurán. It is said to have been revealed in answer to the Kuraish, who had asked Muhammad concerning the distinguishing attributes of the God he invited them to worship. For Muhammad held that all the prophets from the creation of the world have been Unitarians; that as Moses was a Unitarian so also was Christ; that Christianity, as practised in Syria, was a break in God’s revelation of Himself as One, and that he, Muhammad, had been specially chosen by God to re-admonish mankind of this fundamental truth.
As this ground idea satisfies the Oriental’s reason, so the second, Islám, that is, resignation from man to God, responds to the inner voice of his soul, and seems to lead his heart warmly to embrace the third principle of the Muhammadan faith, which, in the golden age of the Muhammadan Era, was the means of establishing equality among the people—I mean the principle of charity, of alms-giving, of compassion from man to man. Unswerving obedience to the spirit and the letter of these three laws carried with it the obligation of unswerving loyalty to the Prophet. When we pray, we Christians, we say “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Muhammadans, under penalty of everlasting torment, are obliged to sacrifice, to the poor and needy, a due proportion of the things that they love—not merely of their superfluity—with the result that each man among them, by that fact alone, constitutes himself, as it were, a willing instrument of God’s will that His Kingdom of Heaven shall reign on earth. Another fact that proves Muhammad to have been something far more than a man of the sword is that to this day Muhammadans hail one another on meeting with the word “Salám” (have peace). Indeed, peace being an essential condition of undertaking the sacramental Pilgrimage to Mecca, it is unlawful to wage war during the three months’ journeying of the Muslim lunar year, namely, in Shavvál, Zú-’l-ka’dah, and Zú-’l-hijjah.
“Contribute out of your subsistence towards the defence of the religion of God,” says Muhammad, “and throw not yourself with your own hands into perdition [that is, be not accessory to your own destruction by neglecting your contributions towards the wars against infidels, and thereby suffering them to gather strength], and do good, for God loveth those who do good. Perform the Pilgrimage of Mecca, and the visitation of God; and if ye be besieged send that offering which shall be the easiest, and shave not your heads until your offering reacheth the place of sacrifice. But whoever among you is sick, or is troubled with any distemper of the head, must redeem the shaving of the head by fasting, by alms, or by some offering [either by fasting three days, by feeding six poor people, or by sacrificing a sheep]. But he who findeth not anything to offer shall fast three days in the Pilgrimage, and seven when he be returned: these shall be ten days complete. This is incumbent on him whose family shall not be present at the Holy Temple.”
“The Pilgrimage must be performed in the known months (i.e., Shavvál, Zú-’l-ka’dah, and Zú-’l-hijjah); whosoever therefore purposeth to go on Pilgrimage therein, let him not know a woman, nor transgress, nor quarrel in the Pilgrimage. The good which ye do, God knoweth it. Make provision for your journey, but the best provision is piety, and fear me, O ye of understanding. It shall be no crime in you if ye seek an increase from your Lord by trading during the Pilgrimage. And when ye go in procession from Arafat i.e., the Ka’bah, which the Muhammadans pretend was the first edifice built and appointed for the worship of God]. This let them do. And whoever shall regard the sacred ordinances of God: this will be better for him in the sight of his Lord. All sorts of cattle are allowed you to eat, except what hath been read unto you, in former passages of the Kurán, to be forbidden. But depart from the abomination of idols, and avoid speaking that which is false: being orthodox in respect to God, associating no other god with him; for whosoever associateth any other with God is like that which falleth from heaven, and which the birds snatch away, or the wind bloweth to a far distant place. This is so....”
One of the benefits of this Pilgrimage, and, perhaps, the greatest of all, if we regard the sacrament either from the political and social or from the religious standpoint, was, and is, the gathering together in Mecca of Muhammadans of every race and of every sect. There, and in the city of Medina, they first saw the dawn of their religious faith and their political power; there their hearts were drawn together in unity and strength; and there, in the early days of the Caliphs, they discussed their latest achievements, the glory of their future conquests, and studied the wants and needs of their co-religionists. Within the walls of the Holy of Holies they wept and prayed that God might renew within them a cleaner spirit through faith; and there, too, they strove with all earnestness to raise themselves to the full height of the Prophet’s conception of manhood, which encouraged such virtues as hospitality, generosity, compassion, heroism, courage, parental love, filial respect, and passive obedience to the will of God. Thus Mecca, in the days of Pilgrimage, might be looked upon as an immense club or a university where Muhammadans, from every quarter of the globe, meet and discuss their political and social problems, and prostrate themselves in prayer to the one and only Divinity.
Another effect of this Pilgrimage—an effect which has grown less marked with the increased facility and comfort of travelling—is that it kindled energy and courage in such people as would never have left the safe seclusion of their harems had it not been for the rewards which the undertaking is said to gain for them hereafter. For the Oriental nations, be it remembered, are not as a rule of a roving spirit; they are far more inclined by nature to a life of ease and security than to one of danger and privation. “Travel,” says an Arab proverb, “is a portion of hell-fire,” and so, perhaps, nothing save the hope of paradise or the dread of perdition would ever have induced the meditative Oriental to brave the trials and the hardships of the long road to Mecca.
In our hearts we believe the proof of the Divine Spirit using any religion is that it does not deteriorate. The chief objection to Welsh Calvinism, which, like Muhammadanism, is based on the theory of Predestination, is that it grows worse. It was once simply and sincerely religious: it is now mainly political spite. Has Muhammadanism deteriorated beyond recognition—say, in the eyes of the student of the Kurán, or does it still hold tight by “the cord of God”? Do the Sunnís hold themselves aloof from the Shi’ahs, or do they dwell together, within the Holy Temple, in brotherly love and concord? Their daily salutation of “Salám,” is it sunk to a mere empty form, or is it still the expression, as it once undoubtedly was, of a hearty wish to bring about the Prophet’s single aim? And of all the nationalities congregated yearly in the city of concourse—the Arabians, the Persians, the Afghans, the Egyptians, the Muhammadans of India and China—which among them all is the most worthy to be commended for its enlightenment and progress? All these questions, and many more on the social and religious life of the East, will be answered in the course of the second and third parts of this volume. And in the meanwhile, I cannot do better than gather into focus the preliminary notes of my literary partner, beginning with the customs incidental to the pilgrimage; for the main thing now is to leave nothing unsaid which would enable the reader to enter into the spirit and the form of the sacred journey. And henceforward, though I shall always express myself in my own words, the personal pronoun, whenever used, will apply, throughout this work, to my collaborator, Hadji Khan, with the exception of the contents of the Appendix.