Five Years in a Persian Town

by Napier Malcolm

It may be asked whether the mullas in Persia are justified in making no more persistent efforts to enforce Mohammedan law, and whether their winking at such irregularities is not in itself disloyalty to the system of Islam. Probably it would be easy for them to show that they were justified by the example of Mohammed himself. If Mohammed enforced a much stricter discipline in the town where he was himself present—a matter which I think is open to doubt—it would be almost impossible to maintain that he caused such discipline to be enforced among the Arab tribes. These tribes were generally accepted through the medium of their chief, who usually came to Mohammed in person, had a short interview with him, part of which was devoted to political subjects, and often went back to his tribe on the same day. It is true that Mohammed made a distinction between hypocrites—munāfiqīn, and true believers, but he generally meant by hypocrites people who were not really on his side against others, and here the ordinary Shiah is unimpeachable.

The fact is that Islam contains much more than an assortment of commandments. Otherwise it would never have impressed its adherents in so distinct and remarkable a manner with special characteristics. The central idea of the religion is that we are all under the dominion of an invisible and absolutely powerful God, Who has created all things, and has willed and ordained everything both good and evil that is to be found in the universe. It is true that there is a Shiah dogma against the extreme predestinarianism which characterises the Sunni creed, but I do not believe that it has in the least affected the fatalistic view of the ordinary people. In Islam God may be called good because it is our duty to accept as good whatever He does, and He may also be called by other names according to the character of His known actions towards us; but His own nature is absolutely different from that of man; consequently nothing can be known of His moral character beyond the fact of certain explicit actions. This God from time to time sends to the world prophets, whose duty is to teach mankind the doctrine of His unity, the necessity of worship, and the necessity of doing what is for the time being His will. According to the popular opinion there have been a hundred and forty-four thousand of these prophets, but of this number only a few have been authorised to publish a new code of human duty. Those so authorised are known as book-bearers, and Adam, Seth, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and Mohammed were all of this class. The Behāīs add the name of Behāu’llah after that of Mohammed. These book-bearers are always marked by the possession of some sort of supernatural powers appealing to the intellect, and also, in the case of the latter ones, by the fulfilment of signs mentioned by the former prophets. Obedience to them is rewarded by various degrees of bliss in Heaven, disobedience is punished by Hell. The prophet must conform to previous revelations in the assertion of God’s unity, invisibility and omnipotence, but it is not necessary that there should be any coherence between the directions about human action as set forth in successive dispensations, nor is any difference made between ceremonial and moral commandments.

This central doctrine of Mohammedanism concerns God, the prophet, man and creation; so we come across it under four names, giving the four possible points of view. First of all there is the name of tauhīd, or assertion of the Divine unity. The Mussulman means by this very much more than the mere assertion that God is a single Being. He includes in it the doctrine of the invisibility of God and of His absolutely separate nature, and it appears to clash with the Christian conception in two important particulars. There is an absolute denial of the statement, upon which most Christians more or less consciously base their belief in the perpetuity and absolute nature of the law of human morals, that “in the image of God created He man.” Consequently we shall afterwards find that in Islam there is no belief in the permanency of the moral law, for nothing is thought by the Mussulman to be necessarily permanent except things connected with the nature of God; and as our nature differs entirely from that of the Creator the law given for it cannot be necessarily permanent. There is also in reality a fundamental contradiction of Christian doctrine in the Mohammedan’s rendering of the statement that God is a single Being. This is best explained by a simple illustration. Supposing a man were to say, “London is one place,” it is conceivable that he might mean one of two things. Either he might mean that the City of London was the only true London, and that there was no other part of the town in Middlesex or Surrey that ought to be called by the same name; or he might mean that the whole of those places which go by the name of the County of London are in reality only one place; and these two statements are not similar statements with a slight difference, but they are absolutely contradictory. So the Christian says there is only one God, by which he means to assert the unity of the all-good Creator, the all-good Personality Who was revealed as the Son, and the all-good Spirit Who is the only source of good in the heart. As God to the Christian means the All-good, what he needs is a doctrine that asserts the essential unity of the All-good wherever he finds it. The Christian is of course not a pantheist, but his conception of the one God has to be sufficiently inclusive to cover those Three Who, as he knows, certainly possess the attributes of Deity. The Mussulman on the other hand does not pretend to know anything about the attributes of Deity, excepting that God is one, invisible and omnipotent. Consequently he frames his definition of the Deity so as to purposely exclude what the Christian with his larger knowledge knows to be the manifestation of the same essence.

To pass on to the Mussulman’s conception of his religion as it relates to the prophet. The paighambarī, or the bringing of messages from the Deity, is in many ways a peculiar idea. Mohammed himself had very little notion of his message being an advance on what had been given before, and of the gradual growth of revelation he had no conception at all. He was content to assert that his teaching was the religion of Abraham, a phrase of which he frequently made use. It is true that Mussulmans sometimes say that parts of God’s Word were revealed to former paighambars, but that the complete commandment was given to Mohammed, and although this is very different from the Christian doctrine of the growth of revelation, it might possibly be regarded as a substitute for it; but the fact is that, though it may be traceable to the prophet, it is quite foreign to the essential system of Islam. We frequently find such foreign ideas which have been imported into Islam, occasionally by Mohammed but more frequently by his followers, simply to answer some specific objection, or to maintain the superiority of the system over all others. Such importations can as a rule be easily separated from the essential doctrines of Islam, and in most cases they have not affected the general character of the religion. This is due to the religion as first conceived by Mohammed having been clear in its essential points, and it is these points rather than the accretions that have left such a strong mark upon the body of Mussulmans. The paighambari, more than any other doctrine or expression of doctrine, brings out with intense plainness the fundamental distinction between the Mussulman and the Christian, that enormous divergence of view regarding the moral law which lies at the root of almost all their differences in subordinate theories and tenets. So when we are discussing the influence of Mohammedan ideas upon character, it is well to remember that sects which do not hold this theory of the paighambari ought to be regarded separately.

There are in Persia sects which are only nominally Mussulman, and which largely owe their origin to non-Mohammedan sources. The Sūfis, for instance, are only half Mohammedan, and their philosophy is really pantheistic. Sufis are to be found in Yezd, but there are not very many serious ones, and the sect has largely lost its direct influence in the country. But the Babis, of whom the Behāī branch is rapidly spreading everywhere throughout the Persian towns, have been influenced by Sufi ideas to a much greater extent than have the orthodox Shiahs, who, we agreed, are not pantheistic. Perhaps some professing Behāīs are really very near to the Sufis in ideas, but this is not the case with the more orthodox, who, though they have modified the fundamental doctrines of Mohammedanism in such a way as to remove the gulf between God and the prophet, have not produced a theology which is free from the obvious defects of that of Islam. The Behāī appears to hold that the superior prophet, that is, the book-bearer, is in every case an incarnation of the Deity, but he goes on to say that there is an absolute distinction between the prophet and his people; for the book-bearer is God, and the people are not God; nor are they, so far as I can understand, capable of receiving the Spirit of God, either from the prophet or directly from God Himself. They can only be impressed by the prophet as wax is impressed by a seal. Whether this doctrine is really Behāu’llah’s or not, it was certainly given to me by men who ought to have known the truth about the Behāī faith.

The adherents of this sect in Persia are now exceedingly numerous, and many people believe that in the end the whole country will become Behāī; so the question whether the Behāīs are more reliable than the orthodox Shiahs has become an important one. Certainly they teach a cleaner and purer doctrine on points of ethics; but what Persia needs is not so much a higher moral teaching, but rather a higher basis for morality. A religion that puts the commandment not to steal on the same level as the direction not to stew your dates but to fry them, will never produce the high characters that are to be found in such communities as the Parsi. It would be irreverent to compare such a faith with the religion given to us by the Saviour.

During the late Behāī massacre, I had the opportunity of discussing what was going on with a Behāī muballigh, that is, an authorised Behāī teacher and missionary. I have no intention of unnecessarily dwelling on the ghastly horrors that were then being perpetrated, but a few details are unavoidable. The Behāī sectaries were not at that time being executed before the mujtahids, but were being torn in pieces by the crowd. What had excited the people was not simply religious feeling, but it was very largely the statement by the clerical authorities that the goods of the Behāīs were “lawful,” that is, that any one might plunder them who cared to do so. The attacks were often made by men who had lived for a long while in close companionship with the Behāīs, knowing them all the time to be members of the sect, and yet consorting and eating with them freely. Holes were bored in the heads of some of these poor wretches with awls, oil was then poured into the hole and lighted. Other forms of torture were used about which one cannot write. Women and children were very seldom actually killed, but were fearfully ill-treated, and sometimes left to die of starvation. It was reported that in one of the villages Babi children died within full sight of the villagers, after waiting for days under the trees where their murdered parents had left them.

The Behāī muballigh with whom I was talking was certainly well aware, in a general way, of what was going on; yet I could not get him to see that these things, done in the name of religion to his own sect, were in themselves wrong, and that man’s eyes had been opened, or could be opened, to their essential wrongness. Of course he maintained that the action of the Mussulmans was evil, but his reason was that, in the first place, those persecuted were spiritually right, and, in the second place, even had they not been so, the last book-bearer, the Behāu’llah, had promulgated a Divine commandment that there was to be no religious persecution. I then asked him if such persecution could again become lawful if another book-bearer appeared and promulgated a different commandment. He answered that it was impossible for another book-bearer to appear for a long period. I then asked him if he would accept a new book-bearer, who, besides satisfying the other conditions, exhibited a text in one of the previously received Scriptures, stating that one day in God’s sight is as a thousand years. He replied that, if such a verse could be shown, and the other conditions were satisfied, such a man might be accepted to-morrow, even although he taught a doctrine similar to that of Mohammed about religious persecution and other matters of the same sort.

Now there are three points to be noted by those who expect great things of the Behāī movement. First of all, the Behāīs accept the whole of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, which, of course, include a verse of the kind above mentioned. Secondly, they have already had three book-bearers; the Bab, who was the original founder of the Babi sects, and who not only exhibited a Divine book, but also claimed to be the resurrection of Mohammed in the same way that Mohammed was the resurrection of Jesus; Subhi Azal, whom for some years they recognised as the Bab’s successor; and lastly, Behāu’llah, whom the Behāīs now hold to be the only major prophet of the three. Thirdly, the Behāīs, in attempting to prove that the Bab was a lesser prophet and a mere forerunner of the Behāu’llah, and also that Subhi Azal was never a really great personage, have seriously falsified their records. The reader who desires further information on this subject cannot do better than consult Professor E. G. Browne’s admirable introduction to his translation of the Tārīkhi Jadīd.