It has already been stated, that Mohammed’s health had been declining ever since the campaign of Chaibar, (see [page 34, note]); yet such was the strength and vigor of his constitution, that up to the time of his last and fatal illness, he remained equal to the physical and mental fatigues of his mission. However, soon after his return from the last pilgrimage to Mecca, he fell ill of an inflammatory fever, with occasional fits of delirium, which he endeavoured to combat by frequent affusions with cold water. When he became conscious of the fatal nature of his illness, he laid himself out to die, as an accomplished actor, like Octavianus Augustus. Leaning on his cousin and son-in-law, Ali,[40] and on his uncle, Abbas, or the son of the latter, Fadl, he dragged himself to the mosque to perform the functions of public prayer: from the pulpit he called upon his subjects freely and boldly to state any grievance that any one of them might have suffered at his hands, and to prefer any just claims against his estate. A safe challenge indeed: the victims of his lust of power and revenge were laid in their graves, and could not appear against him there; nor could they prefer any claim against his estate, who had been despoiled by him or his lieutenants, in their predatory expeditions. No wonder then that the immaculate justice and piety of the Apostle of God, were fully attested by the silence of the congregation in presence of this challenge,—excepting a paltry claim of three drachms of silver, which was, of course, at once duly settled by Mohammed, with a profusion of thanks into the bargain, that the “creditor” had rather demanded payment in this world, than waited to accuse him at the judgment-seat of God!
Up to the third day before his death, he continued to perform the function of public prayer; on that day his strength failed him, and he deputed Abu Bekr in his place, which was afterwards skilfully laid hold of by the latter and Ayesha, to found a claim to the successorship in the sacerdotal and regal office, in favor of Abu Bekr, to the prejudice of Ali.
He then made his last dispositions, enfranchised his slaves, (seventeen men and eleven women), had alms distributed to the poor of Medina, and minutely directed the order of his funeral. He expressed a desire to dictate to his secretary a new divine book, the sum and accomplishment of all his revelations, and which, according to Mohammed’s convenient maxim, would have superseded the authority of the Koran, in all points in which its teachings might happen to clash with the rules and precepts laid down in the latter. As Mohammed had preached an eternal and immutable God, and had declared the substance of the Koran to be uncreated and eternal, the gross absurdity of attempting a new, revised, and amended edition of it, could not fail to strike the more rational among his disciples. They, with Omar at their head, firmly refused, therefore, to consent to the prophet’s anxiously expressed wish—a curious comment on the sincerity of their professed conviction of his divine mission, and his communings with the messenger of heaven, and for which, their assumed belief that his mental faculties were, at the time, impaired by the effects of illness, afforded but an indifferent apology. Be this however as it may, the point was vehemently discussed between them and the more devout followers of the prophet; and the dispute, which was carried on in the chamber of the dying man, rose at last to such a pitch, that Mohammed reluctantly desisting from his desire, was forced to reprove the indecent vehemence of the disputants on either side.
Even to the last moment of his life, Mohammed consistently carried out his system of deception. He told his friends about him, that he had received a last visit of Gabriel, who had now bidden an everlasting farewell to the earth. In a familiar discourse, he had once boasted of the peculiar and exclusive prerogative granted to him, that the angel of death should respectfully solicit his permission before he was to be allowed to take his soul. When he felt the near approach of his dissolution, he calmly informed the Moslem chiefs assembled round him, that the Great Destroyer had just preferred his request, and that he, Mohammed, had granted the permission asked! Stretched on a carpet spread upon the floor, and with his head reclining on the lap of Ayesha, the best beloved of his wives, he expired on the 7th day of June, 632.[41] His last words were: “O God!... pardon my sins.... Yes, ... I come, ... among my fellow-citizens on high.”
His death dismayed his followers; the more fanatical among them could not bring themselves to believe in the actual departure of his spirit from this world. The idea of a trance, or of a resurrection after a few days’ apparent death, found ready credence with them. Omar, unsheathing his scymitar, threatened to strike off the heads of the infidels who should dare to affirm that the prophet was no more!—a curious comment upon his refusal to allow the dying prophet to re-write the Koran. At last, Abu Bekr succeeded in making them listen to reason: “Is it Mohammed,” he said, “or Mohammed’s God whom you worship? Has not the apostle himself predicted that he should experience the common fate of mortality?” This calm and rational address had the desired effect; the death of the prophet was admitted by all, and his body was piously interred by the hands of Ali, on the same spot on which he expired, and which is now surrounded by the great mosque of Medina. The story of the hanging coffin at Mecca is a vulgar and puerile invention, not worth the trouble of refutation.
I have been led by the superior importance and interest which attach to the subject, to extend this chapter, perhaps, considerably beyond the limits compatible with the nature and size of the present work; still I cannot abstain from adding a short sketch of Mohammed’s habits of life, and a few brief remarks on the Koran.
In his domestic life and intercourse, Mohammed was most simple and unassuming. The ruler of Arabia fed usually upon barley bread and dates; water was his ordinary drink, though he delighted, and occasionally indulged, in the taste of milk and honey; he never drank wine. The powerful chieftain who could command the services of thousands, did not disdain performing the menial offices of the household: he kindled the fire, swept the floor, milked the ewes, and mended with his own hands, his shoes and his woollen garment (the use of silk he rejected as too effeminate); nor was it an uncommon circumstance to see the Apostle of God barefoot. He slept on the bare ground, or on a carpet or straw mat spread upon the floor. He always performed, with the most rigorous strictness, the prayers and ablutions enjoined by the Koran. With the regal and sacerdotal office, he had assumed the reserve and austerity that befitted his high position; yet he would occasionally unbend in the circle of his friends, when he enchanted all around him by the graceful, though dignified, affability of his manners, and the charms of his conversation. He was passionately fond of fairy tales. He delighted in perfumes and cats, which latter partiality he shared with one of his cotemporaries, the learned Abu Horaira, who gained for himself the surname of “the father of a cat.” His hair, beard, and eyebrows, were the objects of his most anxious care and solicitude; he dyed them with considerable skill, a glossy light-chesnut color.
He was most passionately addicted to the fair sex: in the indulgence of his amorous desires, he set his own laws at nought. The Arabians had enjoyed, from time immemorial, an unbounded licence of polygamy; the Koran limited the number of legitimate wives or concubines to four, the prophet had seventeen wives; but then, Gabriel had descended with a special revelation, dispensing the favored apostle from the laws which he had imposed on the nation. Zeineb, the beautiful wife of Zeid, his freedman and adopted son, excited his desire. The grateful husband consented to a divorce, and the prophet added her to the number of his wives; but as the filial relation in which the young woman stood to Mohammed, even though only by adoption, was likely to produce some scandal, and to raise some scruples in the minds of the faithful, the complaisant Gabriel descended with another verse of the Koran, appropriate to the occasion. Again, in the case of Mary, the Egyptian slave, the indefatigable angel was at hand to oblige the Apostle of God. Had Mohammed liked wine, there can be no doubt, but that Gabriel would have been ready with another verse of the Koran, to dispense the prophet from the restriction imposed upon all other mortals. A better proof than the nature of these successive “revelations,” so entirely subservient to the gratification of his passions, could not well be adduced, to show that Mohammed was not, as some good-natured historians would fain believe him to have been, the enthusiastic dupe of his own illusions, but simply a cool and calculating politician, who made the institution of a new religious system the basis and engine of his power and dominion; most probably, sincerely believing also, that he was really conferring an immense boon upon his people. His vengeful and sanguinary disposition, has been already fully exposed in the narration of his life. The impartiality of history relieves those darker touches in the picture of Mohammed’s character, by a trait of unaffected humanity. His decree that, in the sale of captives, mothers should never be separated from their children, may well, as Gibbon says, moderate the censure of the historian. How the thousands of hapless negro mothers that have had their children ruthlessly torn from their arms in Christian America, would bless the memory of the Arabian legislator, could that humane decree of his find force and application in the Western Hemisphere!
The Koran is the sacred book of Islam; the successive “revelations” imparted to Mohammed, were diligently recorded by his disciples on palm-leaves, skins, and the shoulder-bones of mutton; and the fragments, or “pages,” were thrown into a domestic chest, in the custody of one of Mohammed’s wives. In 634, these fragments were collected and published by Abu Bekr; the sacred volume was revised by the Khalif Othman, in 651. It consists of 114 chapters (Surats, i.e. stages or degrees), of very unequal lengths, and jumbled together without chronological order, or systematic arrangement. The chapters are made up of plagiarisms from the Bible, rabbinical and apocryphal legends, religious and moral precepts, descriptions of the joys of paradise and the torments of hell, declamations and rhapsodies. The style is, for the most part, inflated, rarely poetical, never sublime; yet Mohammed had the cool audacity to rest the truth of his mission on the incomparable merit of the Koran, as an intellectual, linguistic, and poetical performance. He blasphemously asserted, that God alone could have penned, or dictated, its divine contents; as no human, nor even an angelic intelligence, could possibly have conceived anything like them!!!
The dogmatic part of the Koran (the Iman), comprises the two articles of faith, viz., the belief in one God, and in his prophet Mohammed; and the four practical duties of Islam, viz., prayer, ablutions, fasting, and alms-giving: these duties are reduced to the level of mere mechanical performances, without one atom of spontaneity about them, and are looked upon by most Mohammedans as irksome tasks, which must be accomplished, however, to secure the reward of paradise; the formal permission granted to supply with sand the scarcity of water, so that the prescribed lustration of the hands, the face, and the body may be practised even in the arid desert, shows how little capable the legislator must have been to conceive and comprehend the true spirit and intention of his own ordinances. The Koran pronounces—of course: is there a religion that does not?—sentence of eternal damnation against all unbelievers; it imagines a gradation of seven inconveniently hot places, of which the highest and least uncomfortable is, of course, appropriated for the exclusive use of Mohammedans who have been lacking in piety during their mortal career; according to the less or greater gravity of their respective offences, they are condemned to remain denizens of this the mildest of the seven hells, for periods varying from 900 to 9000 years, after which they are admitted to the joys of paradise. The place immediately beneath this purgatorial hell is assigned to the Christians; the hell next to this is allotted to the Jews, whom the prophet of Islam would indeed gladly have sent down lower, had he dared to treat monotheists worse than idolators; the Sabians inhabit the fourth, the Magians the fifth, the gross idolators the sixth hell; the deepest and hottest hell is destined to receive hypocrites in religion, and may therefore safely be assumed to be of larger dimensions and infinitely greater capacity than the other six together. The paradise of the Koran abounds in groves, fountains, and rivers; the blessed Moslems who are permitted to enter its gates will dwell in palaces of marble, eat artificial dainties and luscious fruits presented in dishes of gold, drink rich wines,[42] dress in robes of silk, adorned with pearls and diamonds, and have a numerous retinue of attendants; and above all, each Moslem will enjoy the society and possession of seventy-two Houris, or black-eyed girls, of resplendent beauty, blooming youth, virgin purity, and exquisite sensibility—rather a pleasant picture for a sensual people like the Arabians. To the female sex also the gates of paradise are open; but the privileges and enjoyments which may await the ladies of the Mohammedan faith, are not specified in the Koran. Still, we must not be unjust: above the vulgar joys and sensual pleasures borrowed from this world, Mohammed places the delights of familiar conversation with the sages, and he expressly declares that all meaner happiness will be forgotten and despised by the saints and martyrs who shall be permitted to behold the face of God.