Christianity and Islam

by Carl Heinrich Becker

Considerable parts of the doctrine of duties are concerned with the forms of Muhammedan worship. It is becoming ever clearer that only slight tendencies to a form of worship were apparent under Muhammed. The mosque, the building erected for the special purpose of divine service, was unknown during the prophet's lifetime; nor was there any definite church organisation, of which the most important parts are the common ritual and the preaching. Tendencies existed but no system, was to be found: there was no clerical class to take an interest in the development of an order of divine service. The Caliphs prayed before the faithful in the capital, as did the governors in the provinces. The military commanders also led a simple service in their own stations.

It was contact with foreign influence which first provided the impulse to a systematic form of worship. Both Christians and Jews possessed such forms. Their example was followed and a ritual was evolved, at first of the very simplest kind. No detailed organisation, however, was attempted, until Christian influence led to the formation of the class which naturally took an interest in the matter, the professional theologians. These soon replaced the military service leaders. This change denoted the final stage in the development of ritual. The object of the theologians was to subject the various occupations of life to ritual as well as to religion. The mediatorial or sacramental theories of the priestly office were unknown to Islam, but ritual customs of similar character were gradually evolved, and are especially pronounced in the ceremonies of marriage and burial.

More important, however, was the development of the official service, the arrangement of the day and the hour of obligatory attendance and the introduction of preaching: under Muhammed and his early followers, and until late in the Omajjad period, preaching was confined to addresses, given as occasion demanded, but by degrees it became part of the regular ritual. With it was afterwards connected the intercession for the Caliphs, which became a highly significant part of the service, as symbolising their sovereignty. It seems to me very probable that this practice was an adoption, at any rate in theory, of the Christian custom of praying for the emperor. The pulpit was then introduced under Christian influence, which thus completely transformed the chair (mimbar) of the ancient Arab judges and rulers and made it a piece of church furniture; the Christian cancelli or choir screens were adopted and the mosque was thus developed. Before the age of mosques, a lance had been planted in the ground and prayer offered behind it: so in the mosque a prayer niche was made, a survival of the pre-existing custom. There are many obscure points in the development of the worship, but one fact may be asserted with confidence: the developments of ritual were derived from pre-existing practices, which were for the most part Christian.

But the religious energy of Islam was not exclusively devoted to the development and practice of the doctrine of duties; at the same time this ethical department, in spite of its dependency upon Christian and Jewish ideas, remains its most original achievement: we have pursued the subject at some length, because its importance is often overlooked in the course of attempts to estimate the connection between Christianity and Islam. On the other hand, affinities in the regions of mysticism and dogma have long been matter of common knowledge and a brief sketch of them will therefore suffice. If not essential to our purpose within the limits of this book, they are none the less necessary to complete our treatment of the subject.

By mysticism we understand the expression of religious emotion, as contrasted with efforts to attain righteousness by full obedience to the ethical doctrine of duties, and also in contrast to the hair-splitting of dogmatic speculation: mysticism strove to reach immediate emotional unity with the Godhead. No trace of any such tendency was to be found in the Qoran: it entered Islam as a complete novelty, and the affinities which enabled it to gain a footing have been difficult to trace.

Muhammedan mysticism is certainly not exclusively Christian: its origins, like those of Christian mysticism, are to be found in the pantheistic writings of the Neoplatonist school of Dionysius the Areopagite: but Islam apparently derived its mysticism from Christian sources. In it originated the idea, with all its capacity for development, of the mystical love of God: to this was added the theory and practice of asceticism which was especially developed by Christianity, and, in later times, the influence of Indian philosophy, which is unmistakable. Such are the fundamental elements of this tendency. When the idea of the Nirwana, the Arab fan[=a], is attained, Muhammedanism proper comes to an end. But orthodoxy controls the divergent elements: it opposes any open avowal of the logical conclusion, which would identify "God" and the "ego," but in practice this group of ideas, pantheistic in all but name, has been received and given a place side by side with the strict monotheism of the Qoran and with the dogmatic theology. Any form of mysticism which is pushed to its logical consequences must overthrow positive religion. By incorporating this dangerous tendency within itself, Islam has averted the peril which it threatens. Creed is no longer endangered, and this purpose being secured, thought is free.

Union with God is gained by ecstasy and leads to enthusiasm. These terms will therefore show us in what quarter we must seek the strongest impulses to mysticism. The concepts, if not the actual terms, are to be found in Islam: they were undoubtedly transmitted by Christianity and undergo the wide extension which results in the dervish and fakir developments. Dervish and fakir are the Persian and Arabic words for "beggar": the word sufi, a man in a woollen shirt, is also used in the same sense. The terms show that asceticism is a fundamental element in mysticism; asceticism was itself an importation to Islam. Dervishes are divided into different classes or orders, according to the methods by which they severally prefer to attain ecstasy: dancing and recitation are practised by the dancing and howling dervishes and other methods are in vogue. It is an institution very different from monasticism but the result of a course of development undoubtedly similar to that which produced the monk: dervishism and monasticism are independent developments of the same original idea.

Among these Muhammedan companies attempts to reach the point of ecstasy have developed to a rigid discipline of the soul; the believer must subject himself to his master, resigning all power of will, and so gradually reaches higher stages of knowledge until he is eventually led to the consciousness of his absolute identity with God. It seems to me beyond question that this method is reflected in the exercitiis spiritualibus of Ignatius Loyola, the chief instrument by which the Jesuits secured dominion over souls. Any one who has realised the enormous influence which Arab thought exerted upon Spanish Christianity so late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, will not regard the conjecture as unfounded.

When a man's profession or position prevented him from practising these mystical exercises, he satisfied his religious needs by venerating persons who were nearer to the deity and whose intercession was effectual even after their death and sometimes not until they were dead: hence arose the veneration of saints, a practice as alien as pantheistic dogma to primitive Islam. The adoption of Christian saint worship was not possible until the person of Muhammed himself had been exalted above the ordinary level of humanity. Early Muhammedans observed that the founder of Christianity was regarded by popular opinion as a miracle worker of unrivalled power: it was impossible for the founder of Islam to remain inferior in this respect. Thus the early biographies of the prophet, which appeared in the first century of Muhammedanism, recount the typical miracles of the Gospels, the feeding of multitudes, healing the sick, raising the dead and so forth. Two methods of adoption may be distinguished. Special features are directly borrowed, or the line of advance is followed which had introduced the worship of saints and relics to Christianity a short time before. The religious emotions natural to any people produced a series of ideas which pass from one religion to another. Outward form and purport may be changed, but the essential points remain unaltered and are the living expression of that relation to God in which a people conceives itself to stand. Higher forms of religion—a fact as sad as it is true—require a certain degree not only of moral but of intellectual capacity.

Thus we have traversed practically the whole circle of religious life and have everywhere found Islam following in the path of Christian thought. One department remains to be examined, which might be expected to offer but scanty opportunity for borrowings of this kind; this is dogma. Here, if anywhere, the contrast between the two religions should be obvious. The initial divergencies were so pronounced, that any adoption of Christian ideas would seem impossible. Yet in those centuries, Christianity was chiefly agitated by dogmatic questions, which occupied men's minds as greatly as social problems at the present day. Here we can observe most distinctly, how the problems at least were taken over by Islam.