Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

While thus a degraded and degrading polytheism was the prevailing religion of Arabia, many Jews were to be found at Medina and in the cities bordering on Syria, and there was also a corrupted form of Christianity incrusted with numerous errors and superstitions, so that in no part of the world did Christianity give forth so feeble a light.

A very decided reform was imperatively needed to restore the belief in the unity of God and set up a higher standard of morality.

It is claimed by his admirers that Mohammed brought about such a reform. He was born in the year 570 of the family of Hashem and the tribe of Koreish to whom was entrusted the guardianship of the pagan temple and the Black Stone. Early left an orphan and in poverty, he was reared in the family of one of his uncles under all the influences of idolatry. This uncle was a merchant, and the youth made long journeys with him to distant fairs, especially into Syria where he became acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, especially with the Old Testament. At the age of twenty-five he entered the service of Cadijeh, a very wealthy widow conducting her immense caravans to fairs in distant cities. His personal beauty, his intelligence and spirit, won the heart of this powerful mistress and she became his wife.

He was now second to none in Arabia and his soul began to meditate on great things. There was in his household his wife’s cousin, Waraka, a man of flexible faith and of speculative spirit; originally a Jew, then a Christian, and withal a pretender to astrology. His name is worthy of notice as being the first on record to translate parts of the Old and New Testaments into Arabic.

As Mohammed contrasted these spiritual religions with the surrounding idolatry, he became more and more sensible of its grossness and absurdity. It appeared to him that the time for another reform had arrived. He talked with his uncles, they laughed at him. Only Cadijeh listened to him, believed in him, and encouraged him. Long afterwards, when she was dead, Ayeshah, his young and favorite wife, once asked him: “Am I not better than Cadijeh? Do you not love me better than you did her? She was a widow, old and ugly?” “No, by Allah,” said the prophet, “she believed in me when no one else did. In the whole world I had but one friend, and she was that friend.”

Without her sympathy and faith he probably would have failed. He told her, and her alone, his dreams, his ecstasies, his visions; how that God at different times had sent prophets and teachers to reveal new truth: how this one God who created the heavens and the earth had never left himself without witness in the most degraded times.

It was in the fortieth year of his age while spending the month Ramadhan in the cavern of Mount Hara in fasting and prayer that an angel appeared to him and commanded him to read the writing displayed to him on a silken cloth.

Instantly he felt his understanding illumined with celestial light and read what was written thereon:—they were the decrees of God as afterwards promulgated in the Koran. When he had finished reading the angel said: “O Mohammed of a truth, thou art the prophet of God! and I am His angel Gabriel—”

In the morning, as we are told, Mohammed came trembling to Cadijeh not knowing whether what he had heard and seen was indeed true; and that he was a prophet decreed to effect that reform so long the object of his meditations; or whether it might not be a hallucination or worse than all, the apparition of an evil spirit. Cadijeh, however, saw everything with the eye of faith and the credulity of an affectionate wife. “Rejoice, Allah will not suffer thee to fall to shame.” Waraka caught eagerly at the oracle and exclaimed, “Thou speakest true, O Cadijeh! The angel who has appeared to thy husband is the same who, in days of old, was sent to Moses the son of Amram. His annunciation is true. Thy husband is indeed a prophet.” The wavering mind of Mohammed was thus confirmed and throughout his life and even in the hour of death he never uttered a word of doubt concerning his heaven-sent mission.

“This,” says Carlyle, “is the soul of Islam. This is what Mohammed felt and now declared to be of infinite moment, that idols and formulas were nothing: that the jargon of argumentative Greek sects, the vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab idolatry were a mockery and a delusion; that there is but one God: that we must let idols alone and look to Him. He alone is reality. He made us and sustains us. Our whole strength lies in submission to Him. The thing He sends us, be it death even, is good, is the best. We resign ourselves to Him.”