History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

In any comparison instituted between Christianity and Islam as moral regenerators of society there is need that the difference in the fields entered by these rival creeds be kept carefully in mind. Islam was placed at a disadvantage in that it went among the morally degenerate and dissolute peoples of the Orient, while Christianity had for its field the classical peoples and particularly the fresh German race. In those same Eastern lands and among those same Oriental or semi-Hellenized races Christianity had not only signally failed morally to reform and uplift society, but in that unfavorable environment had itself become lamentably degenerate and corrupt. In pointing out this disadvantage to which Islam has been subjected, a discerning Moslem writer says, “Like rivers flowing through varied tracts, both these creeds have produced results in accordance with the nature of the soil through which they have found their course.”[667] There is here the necessary recognition of the influence which the historical environment exercises upon the moral standard. The prerequisite of a good harvest in the field of morals, as in the physical world, is not only good seed but also a good soil.

Consequence of giving a religious sanction to war

The whole history of Islam, as already remarked, has been molded by the fact that fighting for the extension of the true religion was made by Mohammed a chief duty of the faithful. Islam’s wonderful career of conquest during the first century after its rise was in large measure the result of the Prophet having made war against infidels a pious duty. Hitherto war among the Arabs had been for the most part merely a raid or hunt. Now it was given an ethical-religious motive and thus made a crusade. In the space of a single century a large part of the countries which had formed the historic lands of antiquity had been brought by the Arabian warriors under the sway of Islam.

But this was not all. These conquests brought Islam in contact with Christendom along all its extended frontier from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Bosporus, and thus created the conditions which led to the Holy Wars between Moslem and Christian, which filled the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such were the momentous and far-reaching consequences of the giving by the Arabian Prophet of a religious sanction to war, and the reënforcing of the war spirit among a martial race by making warfare a duty and death in battle a sure passport to the bliss of paradise.

Mitigation of Oriental barbarities in war

While adopting and sanctifying the war system, Islam did something in the way of mitigating its savagery. Up to this time the war code of the Asian peoples had lost little or none of its primitive barbarity. The indiscriminate slaughter of the vanquished, without regard to age or sex, had been a common practice. But when the second Arabian caliph, Omar, sent out his warriors to effect the conquest of the world for the true religion, he strictly enjoined them to spare the women and children and the old men. This injunction became a part of the Mohammedan war code, and, though not always observed, it did much to make the earlier wars waged for the spread of Islam, compared with most of the recorded wars among the Oriental races, merciful and humane.

Intolerance as a corollary of religious principles

Intimately related to the subject of the Mohammedan ethics of war is the subject of toleration. As we have seen, the natural tendency of the teaching that right religious belief is necessary to salvation, and that fighting for the spread of the true religion is a paramount duty, is to foster intolerance, indeed, is to make intolerance a virtue. These doctrines of Islam have in the main restricted to the faithful the outgoings of the moral sympathies. To the moral consciousness of the Moslem masses tolerance has not presented itself as a virtue at all, but rather as a reprehensible disposition of mind, since it argues lack of zeal for the true faith. There is to-day more religious intolerance in Moslem lands than in any other regions of the earth. In this respect the Mohammedan world is about at the standpoint held by Christendom in the Middle Ages.

But fortunately it is the same with a bad principle as with a good one—it never produces its full logical consequences. There is that in the constitution of things and in human nature which prevents this. Hence there has been in Mohammedan lands a larger measure of toleration than, in view of the teachings of Islam, we should have looked for. But the toleration enjoyed by non-Moslems under Mohammedan rule has been at best precarious. With lamentable frequency, in lands where large sections of the population are ignorant and debased, outbursts of fanaticism have resulted in terrible massacres of “unbelievers.”

Not until Moslem civilization has felt the broadening effect of those material, intellectual, and moral revolutions which have finally brought in toleration in a once intolerant Christendom, will this virtue, without which a true and progressive moral life is impossible, find a place in the ethical code of Islam.