From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Far less excusable than ignorance of Moslem doctrine and practices, is the disposition everywhere manifested in Europe and America to regard Islam not only as a disintegrating organization but also as a decaying power. Those who thus minimize the ever-growing strength of one of the largest religious bodies in the world exhibit the fatuity of the ostrich which imagines danger does not exist because it is unseen.

For generations past the western world has been periodically informed that Mohammedanism as a religion is moribund and that Christendom has nothing more to apprehend from it. It has been assured that the mosques are unfrequented and crumbling into ruins; that schools and colleges of Moslem law are neglected or languishing for lack of financial support; that the precepts of the Koran are generally disregarded and frequently openly flouted; and that Islam is under an eclipse which portends disaster and extinction.

But what are the facts? I can best answer them in the words of Palgrave whose sixteen years of investigations of Mohammedan conditions from the shores of the Euxine to the interior of Arabia makes his words on the question authoritative. Writing in 1872, he declares:

Were I to attempt the catalogue of mosques, colleges, schools, chapels and the like, repaired or wholly fresh—built within the circle of my own personal inspection alone—several pages would hardly suffice to contain it. Trebizond, Batoom, Samsoon, Sivas, Keysareeyah, Chorum, Amasia, and fifty other towns of names unknown, or barely known in Europe, each can boast its new and renovated places of Mahometan worship; new schools, some of law, others of grammar, others primary, have sprung up on every side; new works of charity and public bequest adorn the highways.... Meanwhile, year after year sees a steady increase in the number of pilgrims to the holy places of Islam; and, although the greater facilitation consequent on steam has undoubtedly contributed not a little to this result, much must also be put down to the growing eagerness manifested by all, high and low, to visit the sacred soil, the birthplace of their religion and Prophet; while the pride that each village takes in its “hajjees” is manifested in the all-engrossing sympathy that accompanies their departure, and the triumphant exultation of the entire populace that welcomes them home. It may not have been less a thousand years ago: it certainly could not have been more.[254]

Although it is nearly half a century since the noted author of the Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia penned the paragraph just quoted, there is no evidence, so far as I have been able to gather in my travels in Asia and Africa, that the current of Moslem revival is running lower than it was fifty years ago, nor is the rejuvenescence of Islam less marked nor its power less resistant or less persistent.

Not only has Mohammedanism long been declared to be moribund but it has also, from time immemorial, been represented as changeless in doctrine as are the agricultural implements of the East—which are the same to-day as “when Proserpine went a-Maying through Enna”—and “the difficulty of bringing Islam and its ways into harmony with modern society as comparable to squaring the circle.”

Again, what are the facts? So far is Moslemism from being what it was when it came from the hands of the Prophet, or from what it is as exhibited in the Koran, that it has been constantly undergoing modification in religious doctrine and practice since the days of the first caliphs. Not to speak of the countless changes which have insensibly been effected by the quiet but continuous action of Christianity, innumerable others have been brought about by the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, by Roman law, Neo-Platonism, and other similar but persistent and irresistible influences. This is practically manifest in the hadith as modified and developed by canonists, dogmatists, and mystics to enable Islam “to shape religious ordinances of old customs” or “to adapt itself to the peculiar characteristics and stages of development of the people whose allegiance it wishes to win.”

For not only have law and custom, religious teachings and political doctrines clothed themselves in Hadith form [writes one of the most eminent authorities on Mohammedanism], but everything in Islam, both that which has worked itself out through its own strength, as well as that which has been appropriated from without. In this work foreign elements have been so assimilated that one has lost sight of their origin. Sentences from the Old and New Testaments, rabbinical sayings as well as those from the apochryphal gospels, the teaching of Greek philosophers, sayings of Persian and Indian wisdom have found room in this garb among the sayings of the prophet of Islam. Even the Lord’s prayer is not lacking in well confirmed Hadith-form.[255]

To say, then, that Islam has always been inflexibly opposed to the influence of foreign science, or law, or philosophy, or theology when these elements enabled it “to mould its intellectual heritage” and adjust itself to an alien spirit or a new environment is not in consonance with the facts of history. So far, indeed, is this from the truth that “it may safely be said that there is nothing more extraordinary in the whole history of Islam than the way in which the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Koran and the consequent stereotyped and unalterable nature of its precepts have, by ingenuity, by legal fictions, by the ‘Sunna,’ or traditional sayings of Mohammed or by responsa prudentum been accommodated to the changing circumstances and the various degrees of civilization of the nations which profess it.”[256] Such being the case, one is not surprised in finding so distinguished a writer as Stanley Lane-Poole making the categorical assertion that “the faith of Islam has passed through more phases and experienced greater revolutions than perhaps any other of the religions of the world.”[257]

No less misleading and mischievous are the continuously repeated statements that the days of Mussulman missionary activity have long since passed; that Mussulman zeal for propagating the teachings of the Koran and the Prophet no longer exists; that Pan-Islamism, as a religious force with which Christianity must reckon, was long ago dealt its death blow in the Gulf of Lepanto by Don Juan of Austria and under the walls of Vienna by the immortal Sobieski.