Self-belief—“that thing given to man by his Creator,” as Carlyle calls it—was, as I shall show, a salient feature in Mohammed’s character. More than half a Bedawin (or what was practically the same thing, passing a great part of his life in deserts), this was only natural. But he did not allow this self-consciousness to degenerate, either into vanity or egotism. It neither spoilt nor conquered him. He knew his own weakness—none better—therefore relied all the more on the power of God. It was this outside influence which reacted on him so powerfully from within. It was this judicious blend or amalgam of two seemingly different thought-currents, which were in reality only a bifurcation of the same current, that gave him all his strength. It was this unique combination of an apparent dualism (through intense mental concentration) in one divine Monism that gave Mohammed victory over every obstacle. It was this compressed one-ness—the most sublime triumph of individual concentration in the world’s history—that carried Islam into the uttermost parts of the earth. It was this centralization of moral or religious gravity that swelled the belief of one man—a modest camel-driving trader only—into the perfervid belief of hundreds of millions. “For given a sincere man, you have given a thing worth attending to. Since sincerity, what is it but a divorce from earth and earthly feelings?”
One thing more. To thoroughly comprehend the spirit of Mohammed or the soul of Islam, the student himself must be thoroughly in earnest and sincere. He must in addition possess that moral, mental and intellectual sympathy which gives the ego an insight into human subtleties as well as simplicities. He must take Mohammed and Islam as he finds them—in the same intensely sincere spirit that constituted the one and inculcated the other. He must at the outset recognize that Mohammed was no mere spiritual pedlar, no vulgar time-serving vagrant, but one of the most profoundly sincere and earnest spirits of any age or epoch. A man not only great, but one of the greatest—i.e. truest—men that Humanity has ever produced. Great, i.e. not simply as a prophet, but as a patriot and a statesman: a material as well as a spiritual builder who constructed a great nation, a greater empire, and more even than all these, a still greater Faith. True, moreover, because he was true to himself, to his people, and above all to his God. Recognizing this, he will thus acknowledge that Islam is a profound and true cult, which strives to uplift its votaries from the depths of human darkness upwards into the higher realm of Light and Truth. It is in this deep sense of earnestness, and in this tense but even-minded spirit of equity, that I have endeavoured to make my study both rational and psychological: in other words, reasonable and true to the spirit. Naturally, therefore, I have avoided those narrow and devilish pitfalls of racial, creedal and colour prejudices—that awful curse of Humanity, that insuperable barrier to the cult of Humanitarianism—which leads to the deadly cancer of Misconception. Finally—making due allowance for space limitations—I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to get to the root of all that is good and great in the immortal work of this leader of men who was so good and so great in every sense. In this way only is it possible to get at the truth. Shallow, superficial and paradoxical inquiries are mere empty vanities as utterly useless, from a human standpoint, as those which are biassed and one-sided. To reach the depths, to touch the bottom, to get to the root of any true man’s motives, sincerity and thoroughness are as essential as intellectual acumen and profundity.
In this short study my one idea all through has been to delineate Mohammed as he was and Islam as she is. For this reason I have neither painted them with my own colouring, nor introduced into their natural complexion any outside flesh tints. In plain English, I have not placed upon their beliefs and principles a construction that, being ethnically foreign to the entire sociological system upon which they are based, would have been a fundamental error, at complete variance with them.
[ CHAPTER II ]
AN OUTLINE OF MOHAMMED’S TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTERISTICS
One of the first thoughts that a very careful perusal of the Koran brings home to me, is the intense humanity of Mohammed and his work. The more one studies the various motives that led to his so-called revelations, the more one is struck by the strong associations that connect these divine messages and ordinances with the actions and movements that were going on all round him, as well as in his own mind—owing in a great measure to his own preaching.
In estimating the moral value of either Christianity or Islam, it is necessary to take into consideration, also to make allowance for, the times in which their founders lived. To attempt to judge one or other of them from the scientific standpoint of modern culture and civilization would be not only uneven but impossible. To gauge the standard of their mental and moral attainments, the student must investigate their work, and compare, then contrast, it with the general intellectual level of their own age. When this has been done, he should try and, if possible, realize what effect the advent and the doctrines advocated by them (in the one case some 1,900 years, and in the other 1,300 years ago) would now produce. In this way only is it feasible to arrive at a true and legitimate conclusion. But in doing so, the inquirer must divest, certainly dissociate himself, from all existing ideas on the subject, and deal with it as it is, and not what he thinks it ought to be.
The more one studies the Koran, the more obvious does it become that Mohammed had a powerfully receptive mind, and a specially retentive memory. Notwithstanding that he was illiterate, unable even to read and write, it is clear that he was well versed in all the tenets and traditions of his own people and of the Jews; and that in addition he had made himself acquainted with some of the doctrines and dogmas of the Christian Gospels. It is above all certain that for a great number of years Mohammed concentrated his mind thereon with the force and intensity of a sincere and ardent nature. But first and foremost the one great idea of the being, unity and providence of God predominated all his thoughts. Acting on a temperament that was highly emotional, and perceptibly neurotic or melancholic, the revelations embodied in the Koran were the natural result of so long and continuous a concentration. Still it is equally obvious that combining with this emotionalism and neurasthenia was a strong vein of commercialism and common sense, also marked political and administrative ability. It is further evident that in Mohammed’s character there commingled a very curious and conflicting number of elements and tendencies. Dominating all of these, however, was an intense zeal, an insatiable ambition, an overpowering individuality and egotism, and an inflexible doggedness and determination to attain his own ends. To convert, that is, the weakness and disintegration of the various tribes that composed the Arab nation into the union of one consolidated whole, with himself and family at its head, as a human representation of the unity and supremacy of the one and only God. This latter, as we know, was in no way original. It is clear all throughout that he had profited from his knowledge of Jewish tradition and experience, and that he based his theory on the dogmas of Moses and Abraham. He had long since realized that it was the worship of their own tribal and communal gods by the members of the various Arab tribes and communities that accentuated the differences and divisions between them. He determined, therefore, as the Jewish leaders long before him had attempted, to consolidate and weld them into a single nation, through the worship of the one supreme and indivisible God. It was on and through this divine indivisibility that he decided to base and construct the unity and nationalization of the people.
Unquestionably Mohammed’s movement was as much political as it was religious, as much material as it was spiritual. But being of a profoundly reflective, at the same time of a practical, turn of mind, he chose religion as the only possible and thoroughly reliable means of achieving his great and noble ends; not only possible and thorough, however, but the most potential. Mohammed, in fact, judged the capacity and characteristics of his countrymen to a nicety. Unconsciously—for legislation to him was a natural heritage—he followed the example of the most famous legislators, and instituted such laws as at the time were the best that the people were capable of receiving. Tactful and diplomatic to a degree, it was policy on his part to retain a certain number of the old beliefs and customs in order to satisfy the people. He knew, none better, the fierce and turbulent temper of his countrymen, and how it was most politic to deal with them. In making this concession he showed his political wisdom, if not a certain breadth and greatness of statecraft. After all it was, from an independent standpoint, but a small concession as compared to the prize that he got in return for it. It was a compromise in other words. Yet this and his own evidence in the Koran is important as showing that Mohammed was not so much in a strict sense [the originator of a new] creed as he was a reformer and the renovator of an old one. It was the impress of his great personality, distinguished as this was by the intense sincerity and earnestness of his nature, that has left its mark on human history.
Mohammed was a thinker and a worker not only for his own, but for all time. He recognized that man was equally a political and religious product of God’s creation. He understood that as a counterpoise to man’s materialism and to the destructive in his nature, is that indefinable essence which we call the spiritual and the constructive. The more one looks into and understands the Koran, the more obvious is it that Mohammed concentrated all the active and vigorous energies of his vivid and powerful imagination, also his virile mentality, on the accomplishment of his great design. For design it certainly was. The wish undoubtedly was father to the thought. Not, however, in an invidious sense, but in the firm conviction that design and not accident or chance is one of the controlling principles of God and His creation, and that, consistent with this principle, he, Mohammed, had been chosen as the divine agent. Personal ambition and aggrandizement never for a moment entered his head, or formed part of it. The national good, to be attained only by a national or universal God—the one and only God of the universe—was the one great ambition that inspired and impelled him. Because although every one for himself and God for us all is presumably a natural law, Mohammed managed to evade it. But in evading it, he was not revolutionary. On the contrary, in this way he rose one step upward above the lower human level towards that higher humanity which approaches the divine.
This design, as I have just said, originated from the doctrine of divine unity attributed to Moses and Abraham. Indeed, as one reads the Koran carefully and steadily through from beginning to end, it is manifested in every surah—almost, in fact, on every page. The whole work, in fact, is saturated with the one idea, inspired by the one thought. Everywhere there is evidence of the final object in view, the unconquerable will, the inflexible resolve, the fixed purpose, the indomitable perseverance, the unyielding persistency, the infinite and interminable patience, the calm endurance, the irresistible courage, and the grim tenacity of the ego. So much so is this evident, that when I compare this determinism with the neurotic element in Mohammed’s character, I am obliged to admit that the balance remains with the former. Yet—and this I think is the strangest feature about this strange but commanding personality—there is no getting away from the fact that he was much under the influence of the latter.