Mahomet, Founder of Islam

by Gladys M. Draycott

In the sphere of ideas, indeed, Mahomet gave his people nothing original, for his power did not lie in intellect, but in action. His mind had not passed the stage that has just exchanged many fetishes for one spiritual God, still to be propitiated, not alone by sacrifices, but by prayers, ceremonies, and praise. In the world of action lay the strength of Islam and the genius of its founder; it is therefore in the impress it made upon events and not in its theology and philosophy that its secret is to be found. But besides the acceptance of one God as Lord, Islam forced upon its devotees a still more potent idea, whose influence is felt both in the spheres of thought and action.

As an outcome of its political and military needs Mahomet created and established its unassailable belief in fatality—not the fatalism of cause and effect, bearing within itself the essence of a reason too vast for humanity to comprehend, but the fatalism of an omnipotent and capricious power inherent in the Mahomedan conception of God. With this mighty and irresponsible being nothing can prevail. Before every event the result of it is irrevocably decreed. Mankind can alter no tiniest detail of his destined lot. The idea corresponds with Mahomet's vision of God—an awful, incomprehensible deity, who dwells perpetually in the terrors of earth, not in its gentleness and compassion. The doctrine of fatalism proved Islam's greatest asset during its first hard years of struggle, for it gave to its battlefields the glory of God's surveillance: "Death is a favour to a Muslim." But with prosperity and conquest came inaction; then fatalism, out of the weakening of endurance, created the pessimism of Islam's later years. Being philosophically uncreative, it descended into the sloth of those who believe, without exercise of reason or will, in the uselessness of effort.

Before Islam decayed into inertia it had experienced a fierce and flaming life. The impulse bestowed upon it by its founder operated chiefly in the religious world, and indirectly in the realm of political and military power. How far the religion of Islam is indebted to Mahomet's knowledge of the Jewish and Christian systems becomes clear upon a study of the Kuran and the Muslim institutions. That Mahomet was familiar with Jewish Scriptures and tradition is beyond doubt.

The middle portion of the Kuran is filled to the point of weariness with reiterations of Jewish legend and hero-myths. It is evident that Mahomet took the God of the Jews to be his own deity, combining in his conception also the traditional connection of Jehovah and His Chosen People with the ancient faith and ceremonies of Mecca, purged of their idolatries. From the Jews he took his belief in the might and terror of the Lord and the admonitory character of his mission. From them also he took the separatist nature of his creed. The Jewish teachers postulated a religion distinct from every other belief, self-sufficient, owning no interpreter save the Law and the Scriptures. Mahomet conceived himself also as the sole vehicle during his lifetime and after his death for the commands of the Most High. He aimed at the superseding of Rabbinical power, and hoped to win the Jews into recognition of himself as successor to their own teachers and prophets.

But his claims were met by an unyielding reliance upon the completed Law. If the Jewish religion had rejected a Redeemer from among its own people, it was impossible that it should accept a leader from an alien and despised race. Mahomet, finding coalition impossible, gave free play to his separatist instinct, so that in this respect, and also in its fundamental conception of the deity, as well as in its reliance upon inspired Scriptures and oral traditions, Mahomedanism approximates to the Jewish system. It misses the influence of an immemorial history, and receives no help in its campaign of warfare from the traditional glories of long lines of warrior kings. Chief of all, it lacks the inspiration of the matchless Jewish Scriptures and Sacred Books, depending for instruction upon a document confined to the revelation of one man's personality and view of life.

Still the narrowness of the Mahomedan system provoked its power; its rapid rush to the heights Of dominion was born of the straitening of its impulse into the channel of conquest and the forcible imposition of its faith.

Of Christianity Mahomet knew far less than of Judaism. He went to the Christian doctrines as they were known in heterodox Syria, far off from the main stream of Christian life and teaching. He went to them with a prejudiced mind, full of anger against their exponents for declaring the Messiah to be the Son of God. The whole idea of the Incarnation and the dogma of the Trinity were thoroughly abhorrent to him, and the only conception he entertains as to the personality of Jesus is that of a Prophet even as he is himself, the receiver of divine inspiration, but having no connection in essence with God, whom he conceived pre-eminently as the one supreme Being, indivisible in nature. Certainly he knew far less of the Christian than of the Jewish Scriptures, and necessarily less of the inner meaning of the Christian faith, still in fluid state, unconsidered of its profoundest future exponents. His mind was assuredly not attuned to the reception of its more revolutionary ideas. Very little compassion and no tenderness breathe from the pages of the Kuran, and from a religion whose Founder had laboured to bring just those two elements into the thorny ways of the world, Mahomet could only turn away baffled and uncomprehending. The doctrine of the non-resistance to evil, and indeed all the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount, he passed by unseeing.

It is useless and indeed unfair to attempt the comparison of Mahomedanism with Christianity, seeing that without the preliminary culture of Greece and Rome modern Christian doctrines would not exist in their present form, and of the former Mahomet had no cognisance. He stands altogether apart from the Christian system, finding no affinity in its doctrines or practices, scorning its monasticism no less than its conception of the Trinity. His position in history lies between the warriors and the saints, at the head of the Prophets, who went, flail in hand, to summon to repentance, but unlike the generality, bearing also the sword and sceptre of a kingdom.

No other religious leader has ever bound his creed so closely to definite political conceptions, Mahomet was not only the instrument of divine revelation, but he was also at the end of his life the head of a temporal state with minutest laws and regulations—chaotic it may be, but still binding so that Islamic influence extended over the whole of the lives of its adherents. This constitutes its strength. Its leader swayed not only the convictions but the activities of his subjects.

His position with regard to the political institution of other countries is unique. His temporal power grew almost in spite of himself, and he unconsciously adopted ideas in connection with it which arose out of the circumstances involved. Any form of government except despotism was impossible among so heterogeneous and unruly a people; despotism also bore out his own idea as to the nature of God's governance. Political ideas were largely built upon religious conceptions, sometimes outstripping, sometimes lagging behind them, but always with some irrefragable connection. Despotism, therefore, was the form best suited to Islam, and becomes its chief legacy to posterity, since without the religious sanction Islam politically could not exist.