A Literary History of the Arabs

by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson

2. Muḥammad is the Apostle of God, and the Koran is the Word of God revealed to His Apostle.

3. The dead shall be raised to life at the Last Judgment, when every one shall be judged by his actions in the present life.

4. The pious shall enter Paradise and the wicked shall go down to Hell.

Taking these doctrines separately, let us consider a little more in detail how each of them is stated and by what arguments it is enforced. The time had not yet come for drawing the sword: Muḥammad repeats again and again that he is only a warner (nadhír) invested with no authority to compel where he cannot persuade.

1. The Meccans acknowledged the supreme position of Allah, but in ordinary circumstances neglected him in favour The Unity of God. of their idols, so that, as Muḥammad complains, "When danger befalls you on the sea, the gods whom ye invoke are forgotten except Him alone; yet when He brought you safe to land, ye turned your backs on Him, for Man is ungrateful."[321] They were strongly attached to the cult of the Ka‘ba, not only by self-interest, but also by the more respectable motives of piety towards their ancestors and pride in their traditions. Muḥammad himself regarded Allah as Lord of the Ka‘ba, and called upon the Quraysh to worship him as such (Kor. cvi, 3). When they refused to do so on the ground that they were afraid lest the Arabs should rise against them and drive them forth from the land, he assured them that Allah was the author of all their prosperity (Kor. xxviii, 57). His main argument, however, is drawn from the weakness of the idols, which cannot create even a fly, contrasted with the wondrous manifestations of Divine power and providence in the creation of the heavens and the earth and all living things.[322]

It was probably towards the close of the Meccan period that Muḥammad summarised his Unitarian ideas in the following emphatic formula:—

THE SÚRA OF PURIFICATION (CXII).[323] (1) Say: 'God is One; (2) God who liveth on; (3) Without father and without son; (4) And like to Him there is none!'

2. We have seen that when Muḥammad first appeared as a prophet he was thought by all except a very few to Muḥammad, the Apostle of God. be majnún, i.e., possessed by a jinní, or genie, if I may use a word which will send the reader back to his Arabian Nights. The heathen Arabs regarded such persons—soothsayers, diviners, and poets—with a certain respect; and if Muḥammad's 'madness' had taken a normal course, his claim to inspiration would have passed unchallenged. What moved the Quraysh to oppose him was not disbelief in his inspiration—it mattered little to them whether he was under the spell of Allah or one of the Jinn—but the fact that he preached doctrines which wounded their sentiments, threatened their institutions, and subverted the most cherished traditions of old Arabian life. But in order successfully to resist the propaganda for which he alleged a Divine warrant, they were obliged to meet him on his own ground and to maintain that he was no prophet at all, no Apostle of Allah, as he asserted, but "an insolent liar," "a schooled madman," "an infatuated poet," and so forth; and that his Koran, which he gave out to be the Word of Allah, was merely "old folks' tales" (asáṭíru ’l-awwalín), or the invention of a poet or a sorcerer. "Is not he," they cried, "a man like ourselves, who wishes to domineer over us? Let him show us a miracle, that we may believe." Muḥammad could only reiterate his former assertions and warn the infidels that a terrible punishment was in store for them either in this world or the next. Time after time he compares himself to the ancient prophets—Noah, Abraham, Moses, and their successors—who are represented as employing exactly the same arguments and receiving the same answers as Muḥammad; and bids his people hearken to him lest they utterly perish like the ungodly before them. The truth of the Koran is proved, he says, by the Pentateuch and the Gospel, all being Revelations of the One God, and therefore identical in substance. He is no mercenary soothsayer, he seeks no personal advantage: his mission is solely to preach. The demand for a miracle he could not satisfy except by pointing to his visions of the Angel and especially to the Koran itself, every verse of which was a distinct sign or miracle (áyat).[324] If he has forged it, why are his adversaries unable to produce anything similar? "Say: 'If men and genies united to bring the like of this Koran, they could not bring the like although they should back each other up'" (Kor. xvii, 90).

3. Such notions of a future life as were current in Pre-islamic Arabia never rose beyond vague and barbarous superstition, Resurrection and Retribution. e.g., the fancy that the dead man's tomb was haunted by his spirit in the shape of a screeching owl.[325] No wonder, then, that the ideas of Resurrection and Retribution, which are enforced by threats and arguments on almost every page of the Koran, appeared to the Meccan idolaters absurdly ridiculous and incredible. "Does Ibn Kabsha promise us that we shall live?" said one of their poets. "How can there be life for the ṣadá and the háma? Dost thou omit to ward me from death, and wilt thou revive me when my bones are rotten?"[326] God provided His Apostle with a ready answer to these gibes: "Say: 'He shall revive them who produced them at first, for He knoweth every creation" (Kor. xxxvi, 79). This topic is eloquently illustrated, but Muḥammad's hearers were probably less impressed by the creative power of God as exhibited in Nature and in Man than by the awful examples, to which reference has been made, of His destructive power as manifested in History. To Muḥammad himself, at the outset of his mission, it seemed an appalling certainty that he must one day stand before God and render an account; the overmastering sense of his own responsibility goaded him to preach in the hope of saving his countrymen, and supplied him, weak and timorous as he was, with strength to endure calumny and persecution. As Nöldeke has remarked, the grandest Súras of the whole Koran are those in which Muḥammad describes how all Nature trembles and quakes at the approach of the Last Judgment. "It is as though one actually saw the earth heaving, the mountains crumbling to dust, and the stars hurled hither and thither in wild confusion."[327] Súras lxxxii and ci, which have been translated above, are specimens of the true prophetic style.[328]

4. There is nothing spiritual in Muḥammad's pictures of Heaven and Hell. His Paradise is simply a glorified pleasure-garden, The Muḥammadan Paradise. where the pious repose in cool shades, quaffing spicy wine and diverting themselves with the Houris (Ḥúr), lovely dark-eyed damsels like pearls hidden in their shells.[329] This was admirably calculated to allure his hearers by reminding them of one of their chief enjoyments—the gay drinking parties which occasionally broke the monotony of Arabian life, and which are often described in Pre-islamic poetry; indeed, it is highly probable that Muḥammad drew a good deal of his Paradise from this source. The gross and sensual character of the Muḥammadan Afterworld is commonly thought to betray a particular weakness of the Prophet or is charged to the Arabs in general, but as Professor Bevan has pointed out, "the real explanation seems to be that at first the idea of a future retribution was absolutely new both to Muḥammad himself and to the public which he addressed. Paradise and Hell had no traditional associations, and the Arabic language furnished no religious terminology for the expression of such ideas; if they were to be made comprehensible at all, it could only be done by means of precise descriptions, of imagery borrowed from earthly affairs."[330]