But there is besides in the desert the fateful mirage that, like the ocean sirens, has lured so many to their doom. Finally there is the oasis which stands out of the sea of shimmering sand, like an island paradise that towers over the waste of seething waters which encircle it. The desert too, like the sea, has its ships and its men. Ships that pass by day as well as by night. Ships that stride across the great sandy wastes, grunting and gawky, with unwearying patience, unyielding tenacity, and unerring instinct. As are the ships, so are the men. But in place of gawkiness and grunts, the golden virtue of silence, and the conscious pride of natural dignity. Men who in their very port and carriage are the very spirit and personification of the desert. Men who represent not the genii, but the genius of the great dry sea of sand and silence. Indeed, if ever men on this planet of ours were patriarchal, if ever men bore themselves with the gait and the simple dignity of free men, the Bedawins of Arabia and the North African deserts do. With the lynx-like, yet enigmatic expression that calls to mind a combination of eagle keenness and owl-like solemnity, there is about them a freedom of manner and bearing, a dignity of carriage, an independence of character, that are the peculiarly glorious and distinctive heirlooms of the air, expanse and grandeur of these inland seas. In every sense, moral and physical, they are the products of an unrestricted environment that has made them what they are—wanderers on the face of the earth. But wanderers from choice. Untrammelled even to licence; giving an unbridled rein to their spirit of independence. Regarding with supreme contempt the luxuries and even necessaries of civilization. Yet with it all slaves to the spiritual fears that haunt them. Relics of a primitive and old-world civilization, there is about these Bedawins a flavour of antiquity, of a past that is hoary with the hoariness of eternal age, so distant that we cannot conjecture about it, even in the vaguest of terms. In addition to this everlasting antiquity and conservatism, there is about these patriarchs a naturally dignified reticence, and an air of calm, quiet assurance and authority, that are peculiarly their own personal property. But there is even more than this. There is that same universal concept—common to all primitive people who have not outlived it—of belief in the fear of a supreme power. That same awe and reverence for the patriarchal authority connected with that of the ancestors which has preceded it; that calm and philosophical acceptation of Karma or Fatalism; that same dread of consequences; that identical terror of malignant demons; that same shrinking from the inevitable, which is the heritage of all natural people. Inherent instincts that even twelve centuries of Islam have scarcely modified. When we get underneath the surface of human nature as represented by the Arab, whether he came from the east, the west, the south, or the centre, it is obvious that the underlying motive for most, if not all, of his social customs is inspired by that personal or religious instinct which is so closely allied to the primary instincts of all. Out of such fundamental material did Mohammed emerge!
Nevertheless, with all its drawbacks, there is about the desert, only in a different degree, the pleasure of the pathless woods, the rapture of the lonely shore. Just as by the deep and rolling sea whose very roar is music, there is a society where none intrudes, so with the desert. Right in the very core and centre of its silence and solitude, the man whose ears and eyes are open to receive impressions, finds himself in the presence of that invisible but omniscient power of Nature. The power that, while it causes the earnest thinker to pause and reflect, makes the average human being yearn for the companionship of his own kind. But it was not so with Mohammed. Mohammed was not as other men are. He was a thought leader. Not a deep thinker by any means; but profoundly in earnest. Few men in the world’s history—judging at least by results—have been more in earnest than he was. In Hannibal there is the same earnest fixity of purpose, only different in kind, the same unquenchable ardour, and the same iron will that kept him faithful to the sacred vow of undying vengeance against the Romans, that his father exacted from him on the altar of their ancestral gods. In William the Silent too, but also in another direction, we find the same relentless purpose and the same inflexible sincerity to attain the independence and autonomy of the United Provinces. Cromwell likewise gave his life and his services—all that was best in him in fact—in the firm and sincere conviction that he was God’s chosen instrument. But in none of these men, not even in the great and heroic Ironside, was there the same fervent godliness, i.e. the fear and veneration of God. It was Luther most of all who approached Mohammed in the sincerity of his purpose, i.e. of his religion. For although Luther was essentially a priest, and did not found a new creed, his sincerity showed itself as a Protestant and Reformer. In his whole life the fear and veneration of God as the motive factor of his existence was manifest.
It is, of course, just possible, as Tennyson surmises, that:
“... Through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.”
This, however, is vague and brings us no nearer to an exact comprehension of the matter. The better to understand this feeling of fear that so dominated men of the Numa, Buddha, Luther, John Knox, Cromwell and Mohammed type, it is essential that the student grasps and measures the actual measure of difference that divides religion from creed. It is but meet that we should accept the rational axiom, that religion is natural, and creed the egotistical and personal interpretation placed upon religion by human beings. As Draper says: “When natural causes suffice, it is needless to look for supernatural.” So Bacon, looking with the insight of true genius into the Book of Nature, up to Nature’s God, said in that immortal aphorism which opens the Novum Organum, “Homo Naturæ minister et interpres”—man is the servant and interpreter of Nature. This will make it easier to get at the root of this dual feeling of fear and veneration. But to do so it is necessary for the student to look as far back into the past as he can. In every ancient cult that has ever existed, in the Chaldæan, the Egyptian, the Aryan, the various (so-called Pagan) African, for example, the same overmastering element predominates. In Grecian annals and literature—in the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, in the great tragedies of Æschylus, in Plutarch and other writers—Fear is not merely reverenced as “Holy,” but in Greece, as elsewhere, altars were erected and worship offered to her as a goddess.
It is in its definition and conception of religion that humanity has gone astray. By general acceptation religion and creed have always been confounded. Natural religion is spoken of as a something different and widely apart from Christianity, as a religion revealed. This is not so. There is no difference between them. Christianity is but the development of natural religion on the lines and ideas of certain individuals. There is no such thing as revelation. Religion is an evolution. It is natural. It comes to us from Nature, i.e. from the God out of which Nature has evolved. Hence its constructive and destructive dualism. It is a living and vital force that is innate in man as being one with Nature. Obviously this veneration, this fear of the Unseen, the Unexpected and the Inevitable (which I have spoken of), is one of the root instincts out of which it unfolds itself. Most unquestionably it is the outward and visible expression of the inner consciousness or spirit that moves man to the adoration of veneration in the constructive direction, and of fear in the destructive. This varies in the individual. Thus on the one hand we have a Mohammed; on the other a Napoleon. From the very beginning of human existence right down until now this fear of God has predominated. It still exists. It will go on existing. Religion is as much a part of the human constitution as the primal instincts. Creed is acquired. It is environment and education that makes or forms creed. The child becomes what his teacher makes him, as he can neither distinguish, discriminate nor judge for himself. But to make him Jew, Gentile or Christian, the religion must be in him. Creed, in a word, is but the view that is taken of natural religion by the ego. But a matter so important as this, however, cannot here be entered into.
As it has been with all the great religious leaders of history, so too it was with Mohammed. Fearing, yet venerating, the might, the majesty and the goodness of God, the companionship that he most wanted was not human but divine. Communion with Him, through his own thought and through the great Infinity around him, was what his heart most desired. A town Arab by birth and breeding, a Bedawin by feeling and instinct, he was something more than a mere native of Arabia. Rather a son of men, an apostle chosen out specially from among men, that he might bear to them the message and truth of God.
“Men,” says Victor Hugo, “talk to themselves, speak to themselves, but the external silence is not interrupted. There is a grand tumult; everything speaks within us, excepting the mouth. The realities of the soul, for all they are not visible and palpable, are not the less realities.” The great reality, as I have shown, that obsessed Mohammed was God. Though invisible in person or even in spirit, God was none the less visible and palpable to him as much in the finest speck of sand as in the consuming glory of the sun. In the mocking spectres of the night, as well as in the shifting shadows of the morning, the might and majesty of Allah was supreme. In the dead silence of human solitude, the grand tumult within him was only grand and tumultuous because God talked to him and he to God in the suppressed sibilance of hushed and awesome whisperings. “Diamonds are only found in the darkness of the earth; [truths are only found in the depths of the thought.”] As it seemed to Father Madeline, the ex-convict Jean Valjean, so it appeared to Mohammed, “that after descending into these depths, after groping for some time in the densest of this darkness, he had found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, which he held in his hand, and which dazzled his eyes when he looked at it.” The brilliant which Mohammed searched for was the truth—the greatest brilliant of all! The truth that he found as it appeared to him was God. Thus he immolated his whole being to the will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone. Like Pascal, Mohammed believed that “one can be quite sure that there is a God without knowing what He is.” Or in the words of Hobbes: “Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no conception or image of the Deity, except only this, that there is a God.” This in sense if not in word was Mohammed’s idea of God as he tried to conceive Him. For him it was sufficient that God was the only God—the Creator and the Controller of the universe! “There are touching illusions which are perhaps sublime realities.” But to Mohammed, God was not even “the Great Illusion,” but a stern as well as a sublime reality! To him the desert and lone places were God’s dwelling-place—as far away from the busy hum and haunts of men as He could get. But only because of the delightful charm of golden silence and solitude—only because in the midst thereof, as in the heavenly paradise, God dwelt there. The one fair spirit that he dwelt and communed with—not in close proximity however, but with a great gulf fixed between—was the one and only God, who had at last constituted him His minister and apostle, because of his great love and devotion to Him. It was for this that Mohammed sought the desert. It was there under the stars—the flashing forget-me-nots of God’s great power—that alone with Nature and his own thoughts, he sought God. Who is there of us can say that he did or did not find Him? Can we, or can we not, by searching find God? Whether we can or no, however, is not the question—is not for us to decide! But one fact is certain—one fact is obvious. It was in the core and centre of the eternal silence and solitude of mountain fastnesses and desert expanses that the spirit of Islam had its origin. It was there, as it were under the myriad eyes of the great and infinite God, under the fiery blaze of the burning sun, under the cooler and more clinging glamour of the mellow moon, under the dimmer gloom and mystery of darkness, there with his face to the red-hot furnace blasts and suffocation of the simoom, that the message came to him. Alone with his thoughts:
“Alone, alone, all all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!”
No mere saint, but God Himself, “took pity on” his “soul in agony.” He was not alone, for God was with him. This self-communion of Mohammed with his thoughts, was to him none other than communion with God, because his thoughts were concentrated on Him with all the soul and strength he was humanly capable of.