Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology

by James Freeman Clarke

"Moslems, men and women, have the name of Allah constantly on their lips, but it seems to have become a mere form. This may explain why they were so startled when I said, 'I was speaking to God.'" She adds that if she had only said, "I was saying my prayers," or, "I was at my devotions," it would not have impressed them."

Next morning, on awaking, Miss Rogers found the women from the neighborhood had come in "to hear the English girl speak to God," and Helweh said, "Now, Miriam, darling, will you speak to God?" At the conclusion she asked them if they could say Amen, and after a moment of hesitation they cried out, "Amên, amên!" Then one said, "Speak again, my daughter, speak about the bread." So she repeated the Lord's Prayer with explanations. When she left, they crowded around affectionately, saying, "Return again, O Miriam, beloved!"

After this pleasant little picture, we may hear something on the other side. Two recent travellers, Mr. Palgrave and Mr. Vambéry, have described the present state of Mohammedanism in Central Arabia and Turkistan, or Central Asia. Barth has described it as existing among the negroes in North Africa. Count Gobineau has told us of Islam as it is in Persia at the present day^[397]. Mr. MacFarlane, in his book "Kismet, or the Doom of Turkey," has pointed out the gradual decay of that power, and the utter corruption of its administration. After reading such works as these,—and among them let us not forget Mr. Lane's "Modern Egyptians,"—the conclusion we must inevitably come to is, that the worst Christian government, be it that of the Pope or the Czar, is very much better than the best Mohammedan government. Everywhere we find arbitrary will taking the place of law. In most places the people have no protection for life or property, and know the government only through its tax-gatherers. And all this is necessarily and logically derived from the fundamental principle of Mohammedan theology. God is pure will, not justice, not reason, not love. Christianity says, "God is love"; Mohammedanism says, "God is will." Christianity says, "Trust in God"; Mohammedanism says, "Submit to God." Hence the hardness, coldness, and cruelty of the system; hence its utter inability to establish any good government. According to Mr. MacFarlane, it would be a blessing to mankind to have the Turks driven out of Europe and Asia Minor, and to have Constantinople become the capital of Russia. The religion of Islam is an outward form, a hard shell of authority, hollow at heart. It constantly tends to the two antagonistic but related vices of luxury and cruelty. Under the profession of Islam, polytheism and idolatry have always prevailed in Arabia. In Turkistan, where slavery is an extremely cruel system, they make slaves of Moslems, in defiance of the Koran. One chief being appealed to by Vambery (who travelled as a Dervish), replied, "We buy and sell the Koran itself, which is the holiest thing of all; why not buy and sell Mussulmans, who are less holy?"

§ 6. The Criticism of Mr. Palgrave on Mohammedan Theology.

Mr. Palgrave, who has given the latest and best account of the condition of Central and Southern Arabia,^[398] under the great Wahhabee revival, sums up all Mohammedan theology as teaching a Divine unity of pure will. God is the only force in the universe. Man is wholly passive and impotent. He calls the system, "A pantheism of force." God has no rule but arbitrary will. He is a tremendous unsympathizing autocrat, but is yet jealous of his creatures, lest they should attribute to themselves something which belongs to him. He delights in making all creatures feel that they are his slaves. This, Mr. Palgrave asserts, is the main idea of Mohammedanism, and of the Koran, and this was what lay in the mind of Mohammed. "Of this," says he, "we have many authentic samples: the Saheeh, the Commentaries of Beydāwee, the Mishkat-el-Mesabeeh, and fifty similar works, afford ample testimony on this point. But for the benefit of my readers in general, all of whom may not have drunk equally deep at the fountain-heads of Islamitic dogma, I will subjoin a specimen, known perhaps to many Orientalists, yet too characteristic to be here omitted, a repetition of which I have endured times out of number from admiring and approving Wahhabees in Nejed.

"Accordingly, when God—so runs the tradition,—I had better said the blasphemy—resolved to create the human race, he took into his hands a mass of earth, the same whence all mankind were to be formed, and in which they after a manner pre-existed; and, having then divided the clod into two equal portions, he threw the one half into hell, saying, 'These to eternal fire, and I care not'; and projected the other half into heaven, adding, 'And these to paradise, and I care not.'

"Commentary would here be superfluous. But in this we have before us the adequate idea of predestination, or, to give it a truer name, pre-damnation, held and taught in the school of the Koran. Paradise and hell are at once totally independent of love and hatred on the part of the Deity, and of merits and demerits, of good or evil conduct, on the part of the creature; and, in the corresponding theory, rightly so, since the very actions which we call good or ill deserving, right or wrong, wicked or virtuous, are in their essence all one and of one, and accordingly merit neither praise nor blame, punishment nor recompense, except and simply after the arbitrary value which the all-regulating will of the great despot may choose to assign or impute to them. In a word, he burns one individual through all eternity, amid red-hot chains and seas of molten fire, and seats another in the plenary enjoyment of an everlasting brothel, between forty celestial concubines, just and equally for his own good pleasure, and because he wills it.

"Men are thus all on one common level, here and hereafter, in their physical, social, and moral light,—the level of slaves to one sole master, of tools to one universal agent. But the equalizing process does not stop here: beasts, birds, fishes, insects, all participate of the same honor or debasement; all are, like man, the slaves of God, the tools and automata of his will; and hence Mahomet is simply logical and self-consistent when in the Koran he informs his followers that birds, beasts, and the rest are 'nations' like themselves, nor does any intrinsic distinction exist between them and the human species, except what accidental diversity the 'King,' the 'Proud One,' the 'Mighty,' the 'Giant,' etc., as he styles his God, may have been pleased to make, just as he willed it, and so long as he may will it."

"The Wahhabee reformer," continues Mr. Palgrave, "formed the design of putting back the hour-hand of Islam to its starting-point; and so far he did well, for that hand was from the first meant to be fixed. Islam is in its essence stationary, and was framed thus to remain. Sterile like its God, lifeless like its First Principle and Supreme Original, in all that constitutes true life,—for life is love, participation, and progress, and of these the Koranic Deity has none,—it justly repudiates all change, all advance, all development. To borrow the forcible words of Lord Houghton, the 'written book' is the 'dead man's hand,' stiff and motionless; whatever savors of vitality is by that alone convicted of heresy and defection.

"But Christianity, with its living and loving God, begetter and begotten, spirit and movement; nay more,—a Creator made creature, the Maker and the made existing in one; a Divinity communicating itself by uninterrupted gradation and degree, from the most intimate union far off to the faintest irradiation, through all that it has made for love and governs in love; one who calls his creatures not slaves, not servants, but friends,—nay sons,—nay gods: to sum up, a religion in whose seal and secret 'God in man is one with man in God,' must also be necessarily a religion of vitality, of progress, of advancement. The contrast between it and Islam is that of movement with fixedness, of participation with sterility, of development with barrenness, of life with petrifaction. The first vital principle and the animating spirit of its birth must, indeed, abide ever the same, but the outer form must change with the changing days, and new offshoots of fresh sap and greenness be continually thrown out as witnesses to the vitality within; else were the vine withered and the branches dead. I have no intention here—it would be extremely out of place—of entering on the maze of controversy, or discussing whether any dogmatic attempt to reproduce the religious phase of a former age is likely to succeed. I only say that life supposes movement and growth, and both imply change; that to censure a living thing for growing and changing is absurd; and that to attempt to hinder it from so doing by pinning it down on a written label, or nailing it to a Procrustean framework, is tantamount to killing it altogether. Now Christianity is living, and, because living, must grow, must advance, must change, and was meant to do so: onwards and forwards is a condition of its very existence; and I cannot but think that those who do not recognize this show themselves so far ignorant of its true nature and essence. On the other hand, Islam is lifeless, and, because lifeless, cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot change, and was never intended so to do; stand-still is its motto and its most essential condition; and therefore the son of Abd-el-Wahhāb, in doing his best to bring it back to its primal simplicity, and making its goal of its starting-point, was so far in the right, and showed himself well acquainted with the nature and first principles of his religion."