In the course of the twenty-three years of Mohammed's work as God's messenger, the over-excited state, or inspiration, or whatever we may call the peculiar spiritual condition in which his revelation was born, gradually gave place to quiet reflection. Especially after the Hijrah, when the prophet had to provide the state established by him at Medina with inspired regulations, the words of God became in almost every respect different from what they had been at first. Only the form was retained. In connection with this evolution, some of our biographers of Mohammed, even where they do not deny the obvious honesty of his first visions, represent him in the second half of his work, as a sort of actor, who played with that which had been most sacred to him. This accusation is, in my opinion, unjust.
Mohammed, who twelve years long, in spite of derision and contempt, continued to inveigh in the name of Allah against the frivolous conservatism of the heathens in Mecca, to preach Allah's omnipotence to them, to hold up to them Allah's commands and His promises and threats regarding the future life, "without asking any reward" for such exhausting work, is really not another man than the acknowledged "Messenger of Allah" in Medina, who saw his power gradually increase, who was taught by experience the value and the use of the material means of extending it, and who finally, by the force of arms compelled all Arabs to "obedience to Allah and His messenger."
In our own society, real enthusiasm in the propagation of an idea generally considered as absurd, if crowned by success may, in the course of time, end in cold, prosaic calculation without a trace of hypocrisy. Nowhere in the life of Mohammed can a point of turning be shown; there is a gradual changing of aims and a readjustment of the means of attaining them. From the first the outcast felt himself superior to the well-to-do people who looked down upon him; and with all his power he sought for a position from which he could force them to acknowledge his superiority. This he found in the next and better world, of which the Jews and Christians knew. After a crisis, which some consider as psychopathologic, he knew himself to be sent by Allah to call the materialistic community, which he hated and despised, to the alternative, either in following him to find eternal blessedness, or in denying him to be doomed to eternal fire.
Powerless against the scepticism of his hearers, after twelve years of preaching followed only by a few dozen, most of them outcasts like himself, he hoped now and then that Allah would strike the recalcitrant multitude with an earthly doom, as he knew from revelations had happened before. This hope was also unfulfilled. As other messengers of God had done in similar circumstances, he sought for a more fruitful field than that of his birthplace; he set out on the Hijrah, i.e., emigration to Medina. Here circumstances were more favourable to him: in a short time he became the head of a considerable community.
Allah, who had given him power, soon allowed him to use it for the protection of the interests of the Faithful against the unbelievers. Once become militant, Mohammed turned from the purely defensive to the aggressive attitude, with such success that a great part of the Arab tribes were compelled to accept Islâm, "obedience to Allah and His Messenger." The rule formerly insisted upon: "No compulsion in religion," was sacrificed, since experience taught him, that the truth was more easily forced upon men by violence than by threats which would be fulfilled only after the resurrection. Naturally, the religious value of the conversions sank in proportion as their number increased. The Prophet of world renouncement in Mecca wished to win souls for his faith; the Prophet-Prince in Medina needed subjects and fighters for his army. Yet he was still the same Mohammed.
Parallel with his altered position towards the heathen Arabs went a readjustment of his point of view towards the followers of Scripture. Mohammed never pretended to preach a new religion; he demanded in the name of Allah the same Islâm (submission) that Moses, Jesus, and former prophets had demanded of their nations. In his earlier revelations he always points out the identity of his "Qorâns" with the contents of the sacred books of Jews and Christians, in the sure conviction that these will confirm his assertion if asked. In Medina he was disillusioned by finding neither Jews nor Christians prepared to acknowledge an Arabian prophet, not even for the Arabs only; so he was led to distinguish between the true contents of the Bible and that which had been made of it by the falsification of later Jews and Christians. He preferred now to connect his own revelations more immediately with those of Abraham, no books of whom could be cited against him, and who was acknowledged by Jews and Christians without being himself either a Jew or a Christian.
This turn, this particular connection of Islâm with Abraham, made it possible for him, by means of an adaptation of the biblical legends concerning Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael, to include in his religion a set of religious customs of the Meccans, especially the hajj.[1] Thus Islâm became more Arabian, and at the same time more independent of the other revealed religions, whose degeneracy was demonstrated by their refusal to acknowledge Mohammed.
[Footnote 1: A complete explanation of the gradual development of the
Abraham legend in the Qorân can be found in my book Het Mekkaansche Feest
(The Feast of Mecca), Leiden, 1880.]
All this is to be explained without the supposition of conscious trickery or dishonesty on the part of Mohammed. There was no other way for the unlettered Prophet, whose belief in his mission was unshaken, to overcome the difficulties entailed by his closer acquaintance with the tenets of other religions.
How, then, are we to explain the starting-point of it all—Mohammed's sense of vocation? Was it a disease of the spirit, a kind of madness? At all events, the data are insufficient upon which to form a serious diagnosis. Some have called it epilepsy. Sprenger, with an exaggerated display of certainty based upon his former medical studies, gave Mohammed's disorder the name of hysteria. Others try to find a connection between Mohammed's extraordinary interest in the fair sex and his prophetic consciousness. But, after all, is it explaining the spiritual life of a man, who was certainly unique, if we put a label upon him, and thus class him with others, who at the most shared with him certain abnormalities? A normal man Mohammed certainly was not. But as soon as we try to give a positive name to this negative quality, then we do the same as the heathens of Mecca, who were violently awakened by his thundering prophecies: "He is nothing but one possessed, a poet, a soothsayer, a sorcerer," they said. Whether we say with the old European biographers "impostor," or with the modern ones put "epileptic," or "hysteric" in its place, makes little difference. The Meccans ended by submitting to him, and conquering a world under the banner of his faith. We, with the diffidence which true science implies, feel obliged merely to call him Mohammed, and to seek in the Qorân, and with great cautiousness in the Tradition, a few principal points of his life and work, in order to see how in his mind the intense feeling of discontent during the misery of his youth, together with a great self-reliance, a feeling of spiritual superiority to his surroundings, developed into a call, the form of which was largely decided by Jewish and Christian influence.