§ 6
Of later freethought under Islam there is little to record as regards literary output, but the phenomenon has never disappeared. Buckle, in his haste, declared that he could write the history of Turkish civilization on the back of his hand;[168] but even in Turkey, at a time of minimum friendly contact with other European life, there have been traces of a spirit of freethinking nearly as active as that astir in Christendom at the same period. Thus at the end of the seventeenth century we have circumstantial testimony to the vogue of a doctrine of atheistic Naturalism at Constantinople. The holders of this doctrine were called Muserin, a term said to mean “The true secret is with us.” They affirmed a creative and all-sustaining Nature, in which Man has his place like the plants and like the planets; and they were said to form a very large number, including Cadis and other learned as well as some renegade persons.[169] But Turkish culture-conditions in the eighteenth century were not such as to permit of intellectual progress on native lines; and to this day rationalism in that as in other Moslem countries is mainly a matter of reflex action set up by the impact of European scientific knowledge, or social contact. There is no modern rationalistic literature.
Motazilism, so-called, is still heard of in Arabia itself.[170] In the Ottoman Empire, indeed, it is little in evidence, standing now as it does for a species of broad-church liberalism, analogous to Christian Unitarianism;[171] but in Persia the ancient leaning to rationalism is still common. The old-world pantheism which we have seen conserved in Omar Khayyám gave rise in later centuries to similar developments among the Parsees both in Persia and in India; and from the sixteenth century onwards there are clear traces among them of a number of rationalizing heresies, varying from pantheism and simple deism to atheism and materialism.[172] In Persia to-day there are many thinkers of these casts of thought.[173] About 1830 a British traveller estimated that, assuming there were between 200,000 and 300,000 Sufis in the country, those figures probably fell greatly short of the number “secretly inclined to infidelity.”[174] Whatever be the value of the figures, the statement is substantially confirmed by later observers;[175] missionaries reporting independently that in Persia “most of the higher class, of the nobility, and of the learned professions ... are at heart infidels or sceptics.”[176] Persian freethought is of course, in large part, the freethought of ignorance, and seems to co-exist with astrological superstition;[177] but there is obviously needed only science, culture, and material development to produce, on such a basis, a renascence as remarkable as that of modern Japan.
The verdict of Vambéry is noteworthy: “In all Asia, with the exception of China, there is no land and no people wherein there is so little of religious enthusiasm as in Persia; where freethinkers are so little persecuted, and can express their opinions with so little disturbance; and where, finally, as a natural consequence, the old religious structure can be so easily shattered by the outbreak of new enthusiasts. Whoever has read Khayyám’s blasphemies against God and the prophet, his jesting verses against the holiest ceremonies and commandments of Islam; and whoever knows the vogue of this book and other works directed against the current religion, will not wonder that Bâb with the weapon of the Word won so many hearts in so short a time.”[178]
The view that Bâbism affiliates to rationalism is to be understood in the sense that the atmosphere of the latter made possible the growth of the former, its adherents being apparently drawn rather from the former orthodox.[179] The young founder of the sect, Mirza-Ali-Mohammed, declared himself “The Bâb,” i.e. “the Gate” (to the knowledge of God), as against the orthodox Moslem teachers who taught that “since the twelve Imâms, the Gate of Knowledge is closed.” Hence the name of the sect. Mirza-Ali, who showed a strong tendency to intolerance, quickly created an aggressive movement, which was for a time put down by the killing of himself and many of his followers.
Since his execution the sect has greatly multiplied and its doctrines have much widened. For a time the founder’s intolerant teachings were upheld by Ezél, the founder of one of the two divisions into which the party speedily fell; while his rival Béha, who gave himself out as the true Prophet, of whom the Bâb was merely the precursor, developed a notably cosmopolitan and equalitarian doctrine, including a vague belief in immortality, without heaven, hell, or purgatory. Ezél eventually abandoned his claims, and his followers now number less than two thousand; while the Béhaïtes number nearly three millions out of the seven millions of the Persian population, and some two millions in the adjacent countries. The son of Béha, Abbas Effendi, who bears the title of “The Great Branch,” now rules the cult, which promises to be the future religion of Persia.[180] One of the most notable phenomena of the earlier movement was the entrance of a young woman, daughter of a leading ulema, who for the first time in Moslem history threw off the regulation veil and preached the equality of the sexes.[181] She was one of those first executed. Persecution, however, has long ceased, and as a result of her lead the position of woman in the cult is exceptionally good. Thus the last century has witnessed within the sphere of Islam, so commonly supposed to be impervious to change, one of the most rapid and radical religious changes recorded in history. There is therefore no ground for holding that in other Moslem countries progress is at an end.
Everything depends, broadly speaking, on the possibilities of culture-contact. The changes in Persia are traceable to the element of heretical habit which has persisted from pre-Moslem times; future and more scientific development will depend upon the assimilation of European knowledge. In Egypt, before the period of European intervention, freethinking was at a minimum; and though toleration was well developed as regarded Christians and Jews, freethinking Moslems dared not avow themselves.[182] Latterly rationalism tends to spread in Egypt as in other Moslem countries; even under Mohammed Ali the ruling Turks had begun to exhibit a “remarkable indifference to religion,” and had “begun to undermine the foundations of El-Islam”; and so shrewd and dispassionate an observer as Lane expected that the common people would “soon assist in the work,” and that “the overthrow of the whole fabric may reasonably be expected to ensue at a period not very remote.”[183] To evolve such a change there will be required a diffusion of culture which is not at all likely to be rapid under any Government; but in any case the ground that is being lost by Islam in Egypt is not being retaken by Christianity.
In the other British dominions, Mohammedans, though less ready than educated Hindus to accept new ideas, cannot escape the rationalizing influence of European culture. Nor was it left to the British to introduce the rationalistic spirit in Moslem India. At the end of the sixteenth century the eclectic Emperor Akbar,[184] himself a devout worshipper of the Sun,[185] is found tolerantly comparing all religions,[186] depreciating Islam,[187] and arriving at such general views on the equivalence of all creeds, and on the improbability of eternal punishment,[188] as pass for liberal among Christians in our own day. If such views could be generated by a comparison of the creeds of pre-British India they must needs be encouraged now. The Mohammedan mass is of course still deeply fanatical, and habitually superstitious; but not any more immovably so than the early Saracens. In the eighteenth century arose the fanatical Wahabi sect, which aims at a puritanic restoration of primeval Islam, freed from the accretions of later belief, such as saint-worship; but the movement, though variously estimated, has had small success, and seems destined to extinction.[189] Of the traditional seventy-three sects in Islam only four to-day count as orthodox.[190]
It may be worth while, in conclusion, to note that the comparative prosperity or progressiveness of Islam as a proselytizing and civilizing force in Africa—a phenomenon regarded even by some Christians with satisfaction, and by some with alarm[191]—is not strictly or purely a religious phenomenon. Moslem civilization suits with negro life in Africa in virtue not of the teaching of the Koran, but of the comparative nearness of the Arab to the barbaric life. He interbreeds with the natives, fraternizes with them (when not engaged in kidnapping them), and so stimulates their civilization; where the European colonist, looking down on them as an inferior species, isolates, depresses, and degrades them. It is thus conceivable that there is a future for Islam at the level of a low culture-stage; but the Arab and Turkish races out of Africa are rather the more likely to concur in the rationalistic movement of the higher civilization.
Even in Africa, however, a systematic observer notes, and predicts the extension of, “a strong tendency on the part of the Mohammedans towards an easy-going rationalism, such as is fast making way in Algeria, where the townspeople and the cultivators in the more settled districts, constantly coming in contact with Europeans, are becoming indifferent to the more inconvenient among their Mohammedan observances, and are content to live with little more religion than an observance of the laws, and a desire to get on well with their neighbours.”[192] Thus at every culture-level we see the persistence of that force of intellectual variation which is the subject of our inquiry.