Islam, Her Moral And Spiritual Value: A Rational And Pyschological Study

by Arthur Glyn Leonard

Taken as a whole, the Koran is certainly not a work of literary art. Mohammed, in a literary sense, was neither a poet nor a writer. He was, as he says of himself, only an illiterate apostle. This, from an artistic point of view, is of course regrettable. In his mother tongue he had a rich and splendid medium. A language of high philosophical and poetical character, that “follows the mind,” as Burton says, and gives birth to its offspring: that is free from the “luggage of particles” which clogs our modern tongues—leaves a mysterious vagueness between the relation of word to word, which materially assists the sentiment, not the sense of the poet. A language too that luxuriates in “rich and varied synonyms, illustrating the finest shades of meaning,” that are artfully used—“now scattered to startle us by distinctness, now to form as it were a star about which dimly seen satellites revolve.” Finally which revels in a wealth of rhyme that leaves the poet almost unfettered to choose the desired or exact expression. Undoubtedly in a literary sense, here at hand, was a mighty and magnificent weapon. A quiverful of musical arrows, quivering as they waited for the poetic muse—the fine frenzy, the seething imagination, the running ready fire—to launch them forth into the humming haunts and hearts of men. But in no sense was this Merchant-Prophet a knight-errant. Kindly and tender as he was towards women and children, he was not addicted (as his countrymen were) to chivalry in any form. The race of heroines of Al Islam had no attraction for him. The “Hawa (or ‘Ishk’) uzri,” “pardonable love,” of the Bedawin, a certain species of platonic affection, did not exist for him. He had no room for such trivialities in his life. It was too serious and pre-occupied. Too much occupied with the affairs of his Master, and worldly business matters that had to be attended to. So that he had no time to waste on such pleasantries. Trifles that were as light as air in contrast to the stern and deadly realities of existence. Yet without doubt he must have attended the annual fairs that were held at various places, at “Zul Mejaz,” at Majna, and at Okadh. The latter, Syed Ameer Ali tells us, was a place famous in Arab tradition. It was the Olympia of Yemen. The fair held here in the sacred month of “Zu’lkada,” was a great national gathering. A sort of “God’s truce” was then proclaimed. War and the shedding of human blood was forbidden. To it came merchants with their wares from all parts of Arabia and other distant lands; also the poets and heroes of the desert. These (many of whom were disguised from the avengers of blood feuds in masks or veils) recited their poems, displayed their literary talents, and sang of their glory and their prowess. But Mohammed’s aims and inclinations did not lie in this direction. He was too much of a working philosopher to be a mere poetic dreamer or play actor. His genius lay in his profound earnestness, his great moral strength, his capacity for work, his political foresight and acumen, his iron will and his inexhaustible patience. It is certain that he believed (in the philosophic principle) that “everything comes to him who waits.” For he himself says: “Wait therefore the event, for [I also will wait it with you.”] Obviously he was imbued with the same tenacity, and many of the imperturbable characteristics of the camel of his own Arabian deserts. Unquestionably he knew how “to wait,” recognized that the essence of all human wisdom lies in this single feature, and that the greatest, the strongest and the most successful is he who waits and watches. It was thus that he waited with the unvarying purpose and pertinacity of a man who knew and appreciated his own value at its proper worth. For he felt in every nerve and fibre of his consciousness, that as God makes no man or no thing in vain, the future must have some (great) thing, some great prize, in reserve for him. We know what that prize was. We know also that it only came to him after a life of unwearied toil, and assiduous devotion to his great and noble purpose, and then only in reality through the moral and spiritual victory which death gave him.

Yet, in spite of its artistic defects, Mohammed’s work turned out, as we know, into a success that even he himself could never have anticipated. But in a spiritual sense, judging merely by results, the Koran has lost nothing because of its lack of literary art and beauty. Had it gushed all over with the eastern music of the Songs of Solomon, had it arrested the attention by the same aphoristic wisdom of the Proverbs, thrilled its readers by the recital of a tragedy so intensely powerful, so realistic and majestic as the drama of Job, and appealed to them through the joys, the sorrows and the grand poetry of the Psalms! Had it, in fact, sparkled all over with those beauties of language and metaphor that distinguish the Bible, the result that it might have attained could scarcely have been greater than that which it has accomplished without these trappings. It is, in fact, probable that it might have lost. It is just possible that what it would have gained as an ornate work, it would have lost in sincerity. The Koran, in fact, was essentially the offspring of Mohammed’s own unique personality. This, as I have tried to show, was the peculiar outcome of his dual environment—the frowning, rugged and arid aspect of stony mountains and sandy wastes, plus the commercial and political instincts that were inherent as well as developed on his trade journeys and at the various towns and marts which he visited. Nevertheless there was in this Semitic Puritan, as there is in almost every Arab, a certain rugged vein of poetry—the wild song of freedom—that bursts out here and there. But only now and then like the thunderstorm that is so great a rarity in the desert. For the gravity and over-concentration of his thoughts on the one definite object, oppressed him so weightily, that it left no time for others. Just as fast as rain is swallowed up by the parched and thirsty sand after a long spell of drought, so his soul, thirsting as it did after God, gulped and kept down the poetry and sentiment at bottom of him. All the same, if a book is to be gauged by its net results—by the effect it has produced on all that is deepest and best in human nature—then the Koran must necessarily take high rank as one of the world’s greatest works. In much the same way, only in another and more material direction, the Wealth of Nations has also left its impress on the shaping of human destinies.

Mohammed’s sincerity and fixity of purpose is a fact we cannot get away from. It is this which has chained his followers as with the sure cord of God to the Faith. Islam, in a word, is a creed of practice not theory. By practice it was formed. On practice it has lived. It was because Mohammed practised what he preached, that the small seed of his original idea blossomed at last into the mighty “Igdrasil” of the East—the great banyan tree of existence. Verily this sun-burnt son of Arabia Petræa was a tangible reality and no desert simulacrum. A reality that lives in the soul of Islam. A reality that will endure until the end of all things human. It is not manners that maketh the man. It is man that makes the manners. It is the nature that is around him, the nature that is in him, and that comes out of him as mental and moral energies, that makes the man. Town bred as he was, it was the desert in all its naked and silent grandeur that made Mohammed, that inspired him with all the might and majesty of God, and turned him into a prophet. Yet it was his career as a trader and the inherent tribal instinct that developed the political element in him. As Longfellow says: “Glorious indeed is the world of God around us; but more glorious is the world of God within us. There lies the land of song, there lies the poet’s native land.” But in Mohammed’s case, as in the case of all great workers and thinkers, the world that is around us, is the world of our inner consciousness. The two are synonymous if not one. Only with him the native earth was religion, and he was the Prophet, not the Poet of it. “It is Nature’s highest reward to a true, simple, great soul, that he gets thus to be a part of herself.” It was thus with Mohammed. Thought, though changeable, is eternal. It never dies. So the one idea that possessed Mohammed now possesses (differing only in merely superficial degrees) some two hundred and fifty millions.

Carlyle is mistaken, certainly much too premature, when he says: “Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahommet will have exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be young; while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a priest of mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come.” Religion is entirely an universal matter, Thought a question of environment. Roughly speaking, the world of Thought is divided into two camps of east and west. To the former belongs Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam; to the latter Christianity and the growing cult of Rationalism. It is impossible to predict or in any way to foreshadow any fusion of these hostile elements. The day when humanism—i.e. the religion of humanity, as the natural product of her highest intellectual effort—shall have fused and humanized all the nations of the Earth into one great civilized family, is too far distant and beyond the present scope of human speculation.

If men are to be regarded especially as to the weight and power with which they operate on the minds of their fellow-men, then this camel-driving trader must without question be estimated as a great man—a man a long way above his fellows. Assuredly too it is chiefly through the Koran that his great and God-like thoughts, crystallized into greater motives and actions, have filtered down through the events and developments of thirteen centuries, as a purifying, fertilizing, and elevating factor.

Looking at him and his work from every aspect, Mohammed was not merely a heroic prophet. He was much more. A king and a leader of men. A ruler and a judge over them. If we are to judge of him, to take him for what he is worth, by his work—the rich ripe fruit of his rare and strenuous effort—the Koran on the one hand, and, on the other, the mighty spiritual force he has left behind him in the Church of Islam, we must pronounce him to have been a great and remarkable man. A man who, when his true value is understood and appreciated, will stand out in history as a political and religious reformer of a virile and heroic type. A man who will be regarded in even a greater light than he now is, when humanity shall have become less denominational and more rationally humanitarian. In reality Mohammed was an ultra great man. The difference (as it appears to me) between other great men and himself was wide. The ordinary type of great man—a John Knox for example—is a patriot essentially. He is for his country first, then for God and humanity. As I have shown, with Mohammed it was just the reverse. An Arab by accident of birth, he put God and nature before everything. It was this that made him a humanist; this that placed him before his age. For Mohammed, without a shadow of a doubt, was centuries before his age. In his God concept, in his rejection of the ancient myth of immaculate conception, in his refusing to acknowledge Christ’s divinity, he was essentially a modern—a modern of the twentieth century. It was this catholicity therefore that made Islam blossom into a spiritual energy that embraces so many national units.

Mohammed fought with all his might and main. In exact proportion to his labour he has prevailed. Prevailed over the issues of life and death. Death had no terrors for him. Life alone was full of terror—i.e. of the fear of God. In death there was no sting. In the grave there was no victory. Death but killed the mortal part of him. The spiritual it has increased and multiplied out of all proportion. The present soul of Islam is the spirit of Mohammed. Only when this exhausts itself will Islam wither and die! To this day he is, and for many æons to come he will be in spirit, the ruler and judge over Islam. In spite of sects and theological speculators, as long as Islam lasts, his spirit will continue to preside over its destinies. His spirit lives in the spirit of the creed that he bequeathed as a divine legacy to humanity—i.e. to those sections of it which have been nurtured in the system and adoration of the Patriarch. For though the material part of him is dead, the spiritual still speaks with a voice that is myriad-tongued. As God’s word, there is a sanctity in the Koran for every Moslem that exceeds the reverence of the Christian for the Bible, as much as the fiery splendour of the sun surpasses the cold pale glamour of the moon—which is but a shadow, a pale reflection of the substance and reality. There is, in fact, on the part of the Moslem a veneration accorded to the Koran that practically equals the veneration of the African or the Irish for their land. Compatible with this, there is for the Moslem but one Prophet. As God’s chosen agent for the dissemination of His word, Mohammed stands alone and aloof on a pinnacle that is humanly unapproachable. Many faults have been imputed to him, many charges brought against him. To the average, indeed even to the educated Christian, Mohammed is nothing but the very strangest compound of right and wrong, of error and truth, the abolisher of superstition according to his own showing, yet a believer in charms, dreams, omens, and jinns. But what of all this? Does not reasoning such as this itself prove how very inconsequent and inconsistent is man, even though he be a European and a Christian? Is not superstition of the same kind as rife at this very moment in Europe, nay in the very centres and strongholds of Christendom? What about the ikons, the charms, the amulets, the sacred relics and the images of the Greek and Romish Churches? Is not this but a form of materialism which itself is a phase or part—a very large part—of Nature? Did not superstition (derived from “super,” above or beyond measure, and “sto,” to stand) originally imply excess of scruple, or of ceremonial observances in religion? Did it not describe a superfluity of worship that exceeded what was either enjoined or fitting? What does Cicero say of it in his treatise on The Nature of the Gods? (I quote from an old translation): “Not only Philosophers, but all our forefathers dydde ever separate superstition from true religion. For they whiche prayed all day that theyr children might overlyve (superstites essent), were called superstitious; which name after was larger extended.” Is not this thing we call superstition—this belief in the super or rather outside natural as distinguished from the vague and merely vulgar absurdities that are so common—but the result of inherent instincts that humanity, as simply one form of natural development, derives direct from Nature? Is not this Naturism more or less developed in us all—more in the ignorant, less in the educated, and least of all in the scientist; the sceptic who knows most, because he has looked and searched more into the truth and reality of things; because he has learnt by experience, fact, knowledge, therefore a greater intelligence to discriminate which from what and why from wherefore? In any case, does not the fact that Mohammed was superstitious all the more clearly prove that he was no mere vulgar designer who practised self-deception and pretensions with regard to his mission, but that he was thoroughly sincere in believing himself to be the specially selected Apostle of the Great Designer and Controller of the universe?

But it is not to Mohammed’s faults that we must look. All great men are moulded out of faults. It is in his virtues and greatnesses—and they are many—that we will find the true man. In this Carlyle was a right guide, and showed his own breadth of mind and greatness. These prove Mohammed to have been one of humanity’s greatest constructors. It is true that he destroyed, but on a small scale comparatively in proportion to the immensity of his constructive labour. As evidence of this, the physical, the moral and the spiritual wealth of Islam speaks in round numbers and solid realities. In another of his great romances, Dumas, speaking of John Knox, says: “He who had raised such a storm had need to be, and he was, a Titan; indeed John Knox was one of those men whom great religious and political revolutions invariably beget. Born in Scotland or England during the Presbyterian Reformation, they are called John Knox or Oliver Cromwell; born in France, in the time of political reform, they are called Mirabeau or Danton.” Mohammed was, in every sense of the word, more titanic than a Cromwell or a Mirabeau. He was not by nature or at heart a destroyer. When he destroyed it was only because his hand was forced by the crass and obstinate antagonism of those upon whom his sincerity and persuasiveness had aroused an envious and deadly hatred. The whole aim, end and object of his existence was to develop the adoration and religion of God. The storm he raised was conjured into being by the God that obsessed him. Hence the soul and constructiveness in it. Hence the mighty spirit of Islam, measurable only by a soul capacity which has never ceased to expand and develop. No sane man surely can deny that Islam was and is a great work? The moral figs and grapes that she has achieved are not such as could have been gathered from the thorn and thistle of human effort. Yet curiously enough, as I have shown, the environment in which it was born was strangely stern and sterile! This, however, is one of those natural anomalies that we would do well to leave alone. One of those paradoxes, those mysteries which Nature teems with, that are altogether beyond human comprehension.

Whether or not he had made a study of the Socratic precept “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν” “know thyself,” Mohammed knew himself as thoroughly as it is possible for a man to do. Early in life he took his own measure. Gauged his own strength and weakness. Estimated the breadth, the length, and the depth to which he could go. As a result of this moral estimate, he felt that his resources without God were as slender as a broken reed buffeted by storm winds. He knew that his real strength lay in the knowledge and power of God and of Nature. The temperament and character of the Psalmist—he who looked on God as the strong tower and rock of his defence, his refuge, not however in time of trouble alone, but at all times—was strongly developed in him. The genius of the whole Semitic race was centred in Mohammed. It was this, amounting as it does to the sublimest egotheism, that gave him confidence, then conviction. It was this righteous conviction that carried him as it were on the wings of the wind—immortal breath and soul, as he pictured it—of the living and eternal God. Through this feeling he converted the innate fear and veneration that inspired him into the hand and power of the Almighty. If genius implies a keen psychological insight into the nature and inner consciousness of life’s issues, added to inexhaustible energy, capacity for work and patience, then Mohammed was a genius. Certainly, if we accept Buffon’s definition of genius, as, “but a greater aptitude for perseverance,” he was without doubt a genius of the highest degree. The founder of a faith—one of the greatest the world has produced—spiritual commander of the faithful, his genius was essentially moral and religious. His whole life was one long labour of love and devotion to achieve his object, i.e. to proclaim God to the nations of the earth: the first half of it passed in secular work but in silent contemplation; the second half, itself divisible into two periods, twelve years of persuasion, followed to the close by active aggression and battle.

Impulsive, passionate, and spontaneous Mohammed may have been, for like all great leaders he was many-sided. But in no sense of the word can Islam be said to have been the outcome of spontaneity. On the contrary, it was in every way the result of calm and deliberate reflection, of long and continuous contact with the forces and phenomena of Nature; but above all of an unceasing concentration and communion with the unseen power that controls them. Stretching over some twenty years, it went on uninterrupted by domestic cares or trade transactions. All these were secondary matters and had to give way to the central idea that occupied his whole mind, that revolved around his work and his thoughts, as the earth gyrates about the sun. His centre of gravity was God. This gravity formed his character, gave him courage and endurance in all his trials and afflictions, counselled and guided him in his ordinary vocations. It was this gravity and concentration that commanded the respect and trust of all who knew him and came under his magnetic influence.