§ 1
The freethinking of Mohammed may be justly said to begin and end with his rejection of popular polytheism and his acceptance of the idea of a single God. That idea he ostensibly held as a kind of revelation, not as a result of any traceable process of reasoning; and he affirmed it from first to last as a fanatic. One of the noblest of fanatics he may be, but hardly more. Denouncing all idolatry, he anchored his creed to the Ka’aba, the sacred black stone of the remote past, which is to this day its most revered object.
That the monotheistic idea, in its most vivid form, reached him in middle age by way of a vision is part of the creed of his followers; and that it derived in some way from Jews, or Persians, or Christians, as the early unbelievers declared,[2] is probable enough. But there is evidence that among his fellow-Arabs the idea had taken some slight root before his time, even in a rationalistic form, and it is clear that there were before his day many believers, though also many unbelievers, in a future state.[3] There is no good ground for the oft-repeated formula about the special monotheistic and other religious proclivities of “the Semite”;[4] Semites being subject to religious influences like other peoples, in terms of culture and environment. The Moslems themselves preserved a tradition that one Zaid, who died five years before the Prophet received his first inspiration, had of his own accord renounced idolatry without becoming either Jew or Christian; but on being told by a Jew to become a Hanyf,[5] that is to say, of the religion of Abraham, who worshipped nothing but God, he at once agreed.[6] In the oldest extant biography of Mohammed an address of Zaid’s has been preserved, of which six passages are reproduced in the Koran;[7] and there are other proofs[8] that the way had been partly made for Mohammedanism before Mohammed, especially at Medina, to which he withdrew (the Hej’ra) with his early followers when his fellow-tribesmen would not accept his message. He uses the term Hanyf repeatedly as standing for his own doctrine.[9] In some of the Arab poetry of the generation before Mohammed, again, there is “a deep conviction of the unity of God, and of his elevation over all other beings,” as well as a clearly developed sense of moral responsibility.[10] The doctrine of a Supreme God was indeed general;[11] and Mohammed’s insistence on the rejection of the lesser deities or “companions of God” was but a preaching of unitarianism to half-professed monotheists who yet practised polytheism and idolatry. The Arabs at his time, in short, were on the same religious plane as the Christians, but with a good deal of unbelief; “Zendēkism” or rationalistic deism (or atheism) being charged in particular on Mohammed’s tribe, the Koreish;[12] and the Prophet used traditional ideas to bring them to his unitary creed. In one case he even temporarily accepted their polytheism.[13] The several tribes were further to some extent monolatrous,[14] somewhat as were the Semitic tribes of Palestine; and before Mohammed’s time a special worshipper of the star Sirius sought to persuade the Koreish to give up their idols and adore that star alone. Thus between their partially developed monotheism, their partial familiarity with Hanyf monotheism, and their common intercourse with the nominally monotheistic Jews and Christians, many Arabs were in a measure prepared for the Prophet’s doctrine; which, for the rest, embodied many of their own traditions and superstitions as well as many orally received from Christians and Jews.
“The Koran itself,” says Palmer, “is, indeed, less the invention or conception of Mohammed than a collection of legends and moral axioms borrowed from desert lore and couched in the language and rhythm of desert eloquence, but adorned with the additional charm of enthusiasm. Had it been merely Mohammed’s own invented discourses, bearing only the impress of his personal style, the Koran could never have appealed with so much success to every Arab-speaking race as a miracle of eloquence.”[15]
Kuenen challenges Sprenger’s conclusions and sums up: “We need not deny that Mohammed had predecessors; but we must deny that tradition gives us a faithful representation of them, or is correct in calling them hanyfs.[16] On the other hand, he concedes that “Mohammed made Islam out of elements which were supplied to him very largely from outside, and which had a whole history behind them already, so that he could take them up as they were without further elaboration.”[17]
“During the first century of Islam the forging of Traditions became a recognized political and religious weapon, of which all parties availed themselves. Even men of the strictest piety practised this species of fraud, and maintained that the end justified the means.”[18]
The final triumph of the religion, however, was due neither to the elements of its Sacred Book nor to the moral or magnetic power of the Prophet. This power it was that won his first adherents, who were mostly his friends and relatives, or slaves to whom his religion was a species of enfranchisement.[19] From that point forward his success was military—thanks, that is, to the valour of his followers—his fellow citizens never having been won in mass to his teaching.[20] Such success as his might conceivably be gained by a mere military chief. Nor could the spread of Islam after his death have taken place save in virtue of the special opportunities for conquest lying before its adherents—opportunities already seen by Mohammed, either with the eye of statesmanship or with that of his great general, Omar.[21] It is an error to assume, as is still commonly done, that it was the unifying and inspiring power of the religion that wrought the Saracen conquests. Warlike northern barbarians had overrun the Western Empire without any such stimulus; the prospect of booty and racial kinship sufficed them for the conquest of a decadent community; and the same conditions existed for the equally warlike Saracens,[22] who also, before Mohammed, had learned something of the military art from the Græco-Romans.[23] Their religious ardour would have availed them little against the pagan legions of the unbelieving Cæsar; and as a matter of fact they could never conquer, though they curtailed, the comparatively weak Byzantine Empire; its moderate economic resources and traditional organization sufficing to sustain it, despite intellectual decadence, till the age of Saracen greatness was over. Nor did their faith ever unify them save ostensibly for purposes of common warfare against the racial foe—a kind of union attained in all ages and with all varieties of religion. Fierce domestic strifes broke out as soon as the Prophet was dead. It would be as true to say that the common racial and military interest against the Græco-Roman and Persian States unified the Moslem parties, as that Islam unified the Arab tribes and factions. Apart from the inner circle of converts, indeed, the first conquerors were in mass not at all deeply devout, and many of them maintained to the end of their generation, and after his death, the unbelief which from the first met the Prophet at Mecca.[24] Against the creed of Mohammed “the conservative and material instincts of the people of the desert rose in revolt; and although they became Moslems en masse, the majority of them neither believed in Islam nor knew what it meant. Often their motives were frankly utilitarian: they expected that Islam would bring them luck.... If things went ill, they blamed Islam and turned their backs on it.”[25] It is told of a Moslem chief of the early days that he said: “If there were a God, I would swear by his name that I did not believe in him.”[26] A general fanaticism grew up later. But had there been no Islam, enterprising Arabs would probably have overrun Syria and Persia and Africa and Spain all the same.[27] Attila went further, and he is not known to have been a monotheist or a believer in Paradise. Nor were Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane indebted to religious faith for their conquests.
On the other hand, when a Khalifate was anywhere established by military force, the faith would indeed serve as a nucleus of administration, and further as a means of resisting the insidious propaganda of the rival faith, which might have been a source of political danger. It was their Sacred Book and Prophet that saved the Arabs from accepting the religion of the states they conquered as did the Goths and Franks. The faith thus so far preserved their military polity when that was once set up; but it was not the faith that made the polity possible, or gave the power of conquest, as is conventionally held. At most, it partly facilitated their conquests by detaching a certain amount of purely superstitious support from the other side. And it never availed to unify the race, or the Islamic peoples. On the fall of Othman “the ensuing civil wars rent the unity of Islam from top to bottom, and the wound has never healed.”[28] The feud between Northern and Southern Arabs “rapidly developed and extended into a permanent racial enmity.”[29] And when, after the Ommayade dynasty had totally failed to unify Semite and Aryan in Persia, the task was partially accomplished by the Abassides, it was not through any greater stress of piety, but by way of accepting the inevitable, after generations of division and revolt.[30]