III. The Moral Life
Mohammedan morality depressed by racial influences
In any comparison instituted between Christianity and Islam as moral regenerators of society there is need that the difference in the fields entered by these rival creeds be kept carefully in mind. Islam was placed at a disadvantage in that it went among the morally degenerate and dissolute peoples of the Orient, while Christianity had for its field the classical peoples and particularly the fresh German race. In those same Eastern lands and among those same Oriental or semi-Hellenized races Christianity had not only signally failed morally to reform and uplift society, but in that unfavorable environment had itself become lamentably degenerate and corrupt. In pointing out this disadvantage to which Islam has been subjected, a discerning Moslem writer says, “Like rivers flowing through varied tracts, both these creeds have produced results in accordance with the nature of the soil through which they have found their course.”[667] There is here the necessary recognition of the influence which the historical environment exercises upon the moral standard. The prerequisite of a good harvest in the field of morals, as in the physical world, is not only good seed but also a good soil.
Consequence of giving a religious sanction to war
The whole history of Islam, as already remarked, has been molded by the fact that fighting for the extension of the true religion was made by Mohammed a chief duty of the faithful. Islam’s wonderful career of conquest during the first century after its rise was in large measure the result of the Prophet having made war against infidels a pious duty. Hitherto war among the Arabs had been for the most part merely a raid or hunt. Now it was given an ethical-religious motive and thus made a crusade. In the space of a single century a large part of the countries which had formed the historic lands of antiquity had been brought by the Arabian warriors under the sway of Islam.
But this was not all. These conquests brought Islam in contact with Christendom along all its extended frontier from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Bosporus, and thus created the conditions which led to the Holy Wars between Moslem and Christian, which filled the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such were the momentous and far-reaching consequences of the giving by the Arabian Prophet of a religious sanction to war, and the reënforcing of the war spirit among a martial race by making warfare a duty and death in battle a sure passport to the bliss of paradise.
Mitigation of Oriental barbarities in war
While adopting and sanctifying the war system, Islam did something in the way of mitigating its savagery. Up to this time the war code of the Asian peoples had lost little or none of its primitive barbarity. The indiscriminate slaughter of the vanquished, without regard to age or sex, had been a common practice. But when the second Arabian caliph, Omar, sent out his warriors to effect the conquest of the world for the true religion, he strictly enjoined them to spare the women and children and the old men. This injunction became a part of the Mohammedan war code, and, though not always observed, it did much to make the earlier wars waged for the spread of Islam, compared with most of the recorded wars among the Oriental races, merciful and humane.
Intolerance as a corollary of religious principles
Intimately related to the subject of the Mohammedan ethics of war is the subject of toleration. As we have seen, the natural tendency of the teaching that right religious belief is necessary to salvation, and that fighting for the spread of the true religion is a paramount duty, is to foster intolerance, indeed, is to make intolerance a virtue. These doctrines of Islam have in the main restricted to the faithful the outgoings of the moral sympathies. To the moral consciousness of the Moslem masses tolerance has not presented itself as a virtue at all, but rather as a reprehensible disposition of mind, since it argues lack of zeal for the true faith. There is to-day more religious intolerance in Moslem lands than in any other regions of the earth. In this respect the Mohammedan world is about at the standpoint held by Christendom in the Middle Ages.
But fortunately it is the same with a bad principle as with a good one—it never produces its full logical consequences. There is that in the constitution of things and in human nature which prevents this. Hence there has been in Mohammedan lands a larger measure of toleration than, in view of the teachings of Islam, we should have looked for. But the toleration enjoyed by non-Moslems under Mohammedan rule has been at best precarious. With lamentable frequency, in lands where large sections of the population are ignorant and debased, outbursts of fanaticism have resulted in terrible massacres of “unbelievers.”
Not until Moslem civilization has felt the broadening effect of those material, intellectual, and moral revolutions which have finally brought in toleration in a once intolerant Christendom, will this virtue, without which a true and progressive moral life is impossible, find a place in the ethical code of Islam.
The slave trade under Islam
The slave trade in Mohammedan lands has been fostered through the consecration of the war system by Mohammed and his recognition of slavery as a part of the established social order. Throughout the first century of the career of Islam the propaganda of the faith by the sword provided an unfailing source of slaves, such as had not been opened up since the completion of the conquest of the world by the Roman legions.[668] This religious legitimatizing of the slave trade filled Moslem lands with slave markets, and, when the wars of the religious propaganda had ceased, tended to give a fresh impulse to the African slave traffic, which had been in existence from time immemorial. This trade by Mohammedans has been just such a curse to eastern and central Africa as the European Christian slave traffic—which, beginning in the fifteenth century, continued till its final suppression in the nineteenth—was to the west African coast and the hinterland. The Moslem trade is still carried on clandestinely,[669] since there has as yet been little or no moral disapprobation of the traffic awakened in Mohammedan lands.
Drunkenness in Mohammedan countries
The absolute prohibition in the Koran of the use of all intoxicating liquors has been wonderfully effective in preserving Mohammedan lands from the great evil of drunkenness. This vice, so common in Christian lands, is almost unknown in countries where the faith of the Koran is really dominant and the influence of Europeans has not been felt.
In Afghanistan the penalty inflicted for drunkenness is death. So rigorously is the law of Islam in this matter enforced that persons in a state of intoxication are almost never seen. Nor is the evil simply driven under cover; there is practically very little drinking going on in the privacy of the home.
Moslem charity
Islam has been only less effective than Buddhism and Christianity in fostering the attractive virtue of charity. The precepts of the Koran respecting almsgiving and other deeds of benevolence have greatly promoted the habit of giving among the followers of the Prophet. The giving of direct relief to the poor in the form of alms is probably quite as general as among Christians, though much of this charity is indiscriminate and tends to foster that mendicity which is such an ever-present evil in Mohammedan lands. The building of caravansaries, the construction of aqueducts, the opening of fountains along the routes of travel, and the founding of asylums are forms of benevolence which recall similar works of philanthropy in the later period of the pagan Roman Empire.
Respecting this charity, however, it must be said that much of it has the taint of self-interest. Many of these good works are performed not so much from genuine philanthropy as from self-regarding motives, the dominant thought of the doer being to gain religious merit for himself.
Moral influence of Islam on races low in civilization
The spread of Islam has been almost from the first largely among tribes and peoples low in the scale of civilization. In the earlier centuries of its career, besides its conquests among the peoples of ancient culture, it won over a great part of the uncivilized clans and tribes of Asia, and to-day is making constant and rapid progress among the negro tribes of central Africa. What renders this fact of significance to the historian of morals is that Islam has shown itself to be one of the most potent forces at work in the world to-day for the moral elevation of peoples still on or near the level of savagery. Canon Isaac Taylor affirms that it “causes the negro tribes of Africa to renounce paganism, devil worship, fetishism, cannibalism, human sacrifices, infanticide, witchcraft, gambling, drunkenness, unchastity, cruelty, and personal uncleanliness.”[670]
That the moral code of Islam should be even more effective than the Christian in lifting savages to a higher moral level is attributed by Canon Taylor to the fact that the moral standard of Christianity is so high that “its virtues are only vaguely understood and not generally practiced, while the lower virtues which Islam enforces are understood and generally practiced.”
In a word, it is with Islam’s morality the same as with its theology. Its doctrine of one God is simple, concrete, and easily understood, and for this reason Islam is admittedly more readily accepted by races low in culture than Christianity with its metaphysical doctrine of the Trinity. As the simplicity and concreteness of its teachings respecting deity adapt its creed to the savage mind, so do the lower concrete practical virtues of its moral code adapt it to the rudimentary moral sense of the primitive man.
Effects upon Mohammedan morality of an unpliant law
One of the most striking and instructive phenomena of universal history is the contrasted fortunes of Mohammedan and Christian civilization. In the eighth century of our era Mohammedan culture was in many respects superior to that of Christendom. It held forth great promises for the future. But these promises were not kept. Stagnation quickly followed the period of brilliant achievement, and a blight fell upon the Moslem world, while the history of Christendom has been a record of wonderful development and progress, until to-day the two worlds cannot be placed in comparison with one another, but only in contrast.
Beyond question many agencies, such as race, religion, and government, have concurred to produce this contrast in history and fortune, but equally certain is it that a potent contributory cause is the difference in the moral systems which the two civilizations respectively inherited. The moral life of the Christian world, happily freed from the bondage of the rigid Mosaic law, an outer law of positive minute commands, has expatiated under the comprehensive, flexible law of the Gospel, a law of love and liberty. As a result the moral life of Christendom has been, on the whole, notwithstanding certain Mohammedanizing tendencies, an expansive growth under the guidance of a moral consciousness gradually purified and refined by experience and advancing culture. On the other hand, the moral life of the Mohammedan world has been subjected to the authority of an external, unchanging law, a law conceived to have been given for all time, a republication practically of that rigid Mosaic law from the bondage of which the Christian world had fortunately escaped. But the moral life cannot be thus subjected to a rigid external authority without resulting inanition and death. “The blight that has fallen on the Moslem nations,” declares a well-informed and thoughtful Mohammedan writer, “is due to the patristic doctrine which has prohibited the exercise of individual judgment.”[671] The ethical code of a people, like its civil code, must be elastic and responsive to the ever-changing needs and demands of the growing moral life.