From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

For, contrary to what has been so often said and written during the last thousand years and more, there is much, very much good in Islam. No less an authority than the illustrious Cardinal Hergenrœther declares:

Islamism ought to prepare for civilization the peoples most advanced in barbarism, notably those of Africa. Those peoples whom it is necessary to lead from fetishism to monotheism are in their low degree of culture and brutal sensualism materially aided by such a stepping-stone in their transition to Christianity.[240]

When Mohammed began his marvelous career of religious reform his countrymen in Arabia were, in many respects, as deeply sunk in vice as the most debased tribes of Central Africa. They were idolaters who were addicted to the grossest and most absurd fetishism. Trees, stones, shapeless masses of dough and the most trivial things in nature were objects of adoration. There was a special divinity for each of the countless tribes of the peninsula. In Beit-Alia—House of God—in Mecca, there was a different idol for each day of the year. Here also was the most jealously guarded object of worship—a black stone that was reputed to have fallen from heaven in the days of Adam—a stone which, it was averred, was originally of immaculate whiteness, but which was subsequently blackened by the myriad osculations of its sinful worshipers.

Nor was this all. Not only were the Arabians noted for their loathsome idolatry but also for their inhuman practice of disposing of female children at their birth by burying them alive. And so great was their superstition that it was not an infrequent occurrence for a father to sacrifice his child to appease the fancied anger of an offended deity. Besides this, blood feuds, sensuality of the vilest kind, drunkenness, and utter disregard of even the natural rights of women were as rampant as their general results were widespread and fatal.

When Mohammed set out to preach monotheism to these people who were so steeped in every vice—people who had heard the Gospel but had long abandoned its sublime teachings for the abominable practices of idolatry, he encountered the strongest opposition from all quarters. So relentless was the hostility displayed by friend and foe that his projected reform seemed foredoomed. But, notwithstanding the jeers which greeted him on every side and the persecutions which he endured for years, he was eventually successful beyond his most sanguine expectations.

Here we have the spectacle of a man that could neither read nor write who, after twenty years of incessant struggle, had succeeded in extirpating a system of idolatry which, by fostering morals the most depraved and practices the most hideous, had for centuries made the fairest parts of Arabia reeking sinks of iniquity. In place of a blighting and debasing fetishism he substituted the worship of one God, the Greater of heaven and earth—a God who is eternal, omnipotent, merciful; who presides over the destinies of all His creatures; who sees all their actions, even the most secret; who punishes the wicked in another world and rewards the good, and who never abandons them for a single instant either in this life or in the one to come. He preaches submission, the most humble and the most confiding submission, to the holy will of Him who is not only the Author of their existence but also their unfailing support and their just and omniscient judge. And the sole worship which the Mussulman is required to give to this one God is prayer at stated periods of the day and an annual fast during the month of Ramadan—a fast which is designed to direct his thoughts to Him who has created him, who sustains him during life and who, for weal or for woe, will be his Sovereign Lord after death.

Such essentially is Islam in all its simplicity as preached to the Arabian world by the unlettered camel driver of Mecca; such the doctrine which was destined to be adopted by many races and nations in every clime. There is nothing new in it. Mohammed never pretended to introduce anything new. He simply proclaimed to his benighted countrymen not a new revelation, but, as he always insisted, the long-forgotten faith of Abraham and Moses and Christ, as he understood it.

With the exception, therefore, of Christianity, based on the Old and New Testaments, with all its marvelous and beneficent consequences, there is no religion in the world which can justly be compared with Islam or which even remotely deserves to be placed in the same category.[241]

And, with the exception of Christianity and Judaism, it is the only religion in the world which has recognized and consecrated monotheism. It is, therefore, far superior to the debasing paganism of Greece and Rome. It is loftier and nobler than the repugnant dualism of Zoroaster and the selfish and materialistic utilitarianism of Confucius. It is incomparably more elevating than the fantastic metempsychosis and the atheistic Nirvana of Gautama Buddha, which, with Confucianism, holds in spiritual bondage a great majority of the teeming millions of Central and Eastern Asia.

The eminent doctor of the Church, St. John of Damascus, shows how near he considers Islam to Christianity when, in his account of the creed of Mohammed, he treats it as a heresy analogous to Arianism.[242] Peter the Venerable, the illustrious Abbot of Cluny, the first one to have a translation made of the Koran, was of a similar opinion, as is evinced in his work against Mohammedanism—a work which treats not of the paganism but of the heresy of the Saracens, as its title—Adversus Nefandam Hæresim sive Sectam Saracenorum—conclusively indicates.[243] In like manner Dante, who was almost as distinguished as a theologian as he was as a poet, places Mohammed in hell not as a heathen but as a sower of “scandal and schism.”[244]