The position of woman remains as it was left by Muhammad thirteen hundred years ago—for there is no growth in Islam—and it is not easy to define it. On the one hand is the marriage law, which gives to the husband full power over his wife or wives; on the other, the property law, which grants to a woman holding property in her own right, absolute control over it. In the latter respect, therefore, the law of Islam is in advance of the law of Great Britain. I have known the curious anomaly of a woman whose person was at the mercy of a brutal drunken wretch, whom she yet held in some degree in check through his dependence upon her for the means with which to live his chosen life.
The Solidarity of Islam.
“They seek to extinguish God’s light with their mouths; but God will perfect His light, though the infidels be averse thereto. It is He Who hath sent His Apostle with the direction, and the religion of truth, that He may exalt the same above every religion, although the idolators be averse thereto.”
There are two closely associated characteristics of Islam which impress every student:—Rigiditythe immovable rigidity which paralyzes individual action as well as social and religious progress and for ever holds its professors arrested at the stage and within the limit of Arab conditions as they were thirteen centuries ago;Solidarity and the solidarity of the world of Islam as it exists to-day.
It is at this point that the contrast between the methods of Jesus and of Muhammad is most sharply emphasized. The founder of Christianity neither wrote, nor left instructions for the preservation of His teachings; His method is best typified by His own favourite illustration; His message is a seed, growing of its own living life, mysteriously, silently, slowly, producing fruit after its kind indeed, but each several fruit during each several season drawing its own share of nourishment even as it drew its life directly from the root, original and distinct from any other. Muhammad spoke, in the most literal sense, the last word; the teaching has crystallized; principle and detail are alike unyielding.
Muhammad’s Vision Muhammad was a statesman as well as a poet; he had in view not only the conversion of the world to God and to himself, but also a world kingdom based upon the religious idea; and for the second end he worked possibly even “better than he knew.”
Symbols of Solidarity: The study of the symbols of this bond of uniformity—not of union—is illuminating:—1. CreedThe Creed, binding to the God of Islam through the Apostle of that God; 2. Prayerthe daily Prayer Ritual: it has been truly said that “each Muslim is a Church,” it is no less true that the Muslim world is a Church, bound indissolubly by this uniform service of devotion;3. Quran the Quran and 4. FastRamadhán, the Book, and the Fast which commemorates the gift of the Book; and above all, 5. Pilgrimagethe Pilgrimage to Mecca, the local habitation of Islam, sublime notwithstanding the apparent foolishness of the ceremonial. “Thither the tribes go up,” from Turkey, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, India, China, Egypt and other North African lands, and Arabia herself. National distinctions are forgotten; slave and master travel as brother worshippers; Islam feels her solidarity through the far-seeing provision of the centralization of her religious life, in the city which is sacred to the memory of the Apostle.