III
ALLAH AND MOHAMMED
I
The steps by which Mohammed emerged from obscurity into the full glow of his messianic mission can never be traced with any certainty. Explanations and interpretations in plenty—economic, rationalistic, psychological, mediumistic, and so on—have too often been advanced with placid and perfect assurance; but unfortunately they have not overcome the main difficulty: Mohammed himself. The enigma of his character—a fusion of the furthest limits of charlatanism, demagoguery, bombastic egotism, and general intellectual incompetency, with the opposite extremes of willing martyrdom, unaffected simplicity and sincerity, and lightning flashes of divine poetry—still remains essentially unchallenged and intact. He used tricks common to fakirs—was he therefore a complete and unabashed fakir? He began as a humble religious leader, and he ended as an adroit politician and powerful general—was he therefore dishonest from the start? He hid himself during battles—was he therefore always a coward? He often broke faith with friend and foe alike—was he therefore utterly unscrupulous? And yet.... He quite certainly believed in the divinity of his mission—was he therefore wholly sincere? He wrote some passages almost incomparable in their emotional beauty—was he therefore inspired? He kept Allah in the foreground while he himself remained in the background—why, then, did the influence of Allah wane as the prestige of Mohammed waxed? In short, was he a vicious paranoiac who developed into a maniacal monster, or an unrivaled genius who was all that his worshipers claimed—or both?
Such interrogations face the tracker of Mohammed’s career at every turn of the journey, and, in avoiding the pitfalls on one side, he is very likely to stumble into the abysses on the other. For the facts of his life are at once too abundant and too few; and he who ponders them is ever apt to discover that, just at the moment when he confidently believes he is on the right path, he knows both too much and too little. The rainbow’s end is forever at hand and yet forever distant; and similarly the intangible, chameleon-like personality of Mohammed constantly eludes and mocks one at the precise time when one is most confident of touching and cornering the flitting phantom. Under the circumstances, a rapid recapitulation of such concrete events as have been handed down with a minimum of bias is perhaps least likely to lead one too far astray.
II
When Mohammed was about thirty-five, the holy Kaba, beaten and broken by a violent flood, was in sad need of repair. A Grecian ship, that had been providentially wrecked on the coast of the Red Sea near by, furnished the materials necessary for its reconstruction. So great was the reverence emanating from the sacred walls, however, that the Koreish feared the imposition of heavenly wrath on those who made bold to tear the building down; but one fellow, braver than the rest, raised an apologetic prayer to Allah and simultaneously struck a heavy blow with a pickaxe. All those present, including the assaulter, then fled and lingered timorously until morning, when the incredible fact was noted that Allah had not spoken one way or the other, and so the structure was rapidly demolished. All went well with the building operations until the time came to replace the Black Stone in the eastern corner—an honor so great that each branch of the Koreish contended for it, until bloodshed was imminent. Finally the eldest patriarch in the city arose and advanced this ingenious solution: “O Koreish, hearken unto me! My advice is that the man who chanceth first to enter the court of the Kaba by yonder gate, he shall be chosen either to decide the difference amongst you, or himself to place the stone.” Universal applause followed and everyone waited to learn who should be the lucky man. Just at this moment the unostentatious yet dignified form of Mohammed was seen to approach, and all the people shouted in unison: “Here comes the faithful arbiter; we are content to abide by his decision.” Mohammed, ever cool and composed in public, calmly accepted the appointment and immediately devised a supremely clever diplomatic scheme that would certainly be satisfactory to all. He removed his cloak and laid it on the ground; then, putting the awful stone on it, he said: “Now let one from each of your four divisions come forward, and raise a corner of this mantle.” This was done and, when the rock was level with the cavity, he himself thrust it in position. Thus the unpretentious tradesman rose in the twinkling of an eye to high eminence in the esteem of his townsmen. Since Mohammed’s mind always took to omens and auguries as a duck takes to water, it is possible that this occurrence marked the vague inception of his mission.
At all events, about five years later his neighbors became much mystified by his behavior. He would retire, for days at a stretch, to a cave in the foothills of Mount Hira, a conical hill several miles north of Mecca, whither Khadija too sometimes went with him. Meanwhile his business languished, and various conjectures were advanced to account for his odd conduct—was the fellow crazy, or afflicted with some loathsome disease, or was he perchance engaged in some such nefarious occupation as counterfeiting? As the months passed, he still continued to act in the same incomprehensible manner, and it was noticed that, little by little, certain members of his immediate family attended him to his refuge, or gathered with him in some one of their own houses. This sort of thing went on for several years, until it was noised abroad that the quondam merchant and camel-driver was confidently claiming the honor of having made the epochal discovery which he phrased thus: “La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah”—which, freely interpreted, means: “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.”
This brief, twofold credo demands considerable attention. The first postulate was not entirely new, for Allah had hitherto been a well-behaved deity Who was highly regarded by many Arabs; yet, after all, He had been but one of many idols. By what process of thought had Mohammed come to exalt Allah not merely above all Arabian gods, but above the gods of all time? and furthermore, why was he so certain of his own intimate association with Allah?
Various explanations were offered by his simple-minded followers. According to one account, as Mohammed was wandering near the cave, “an angel from the sky cried to him, ‘O Mohammed, I am Gabriel!’ He was terrified, for as often as he raised his head, there was the apparition of the angel. He hurried home to tell his wife. ‘O Khadija,’ he said, ‘I have never abhorred anything as I do these idols and soothsayers; and now verily I fear lest I should become a soothsayer myself.’ ‘Never,’ replied his faithful wife, ‘the Lord will never suffer it thus to be.’” So she made haste to get the opinion of her own relative, the aged visionary Waraka, who, after listening attentively to her tale, cried aloud: “By the Lord he speaketh truth! Doubtless it is the beginning of prophecy, and there shall come upon him the Great Namus, like as it came upon Moses.” According to another story that is even more edifying, Khadija discreetly tested the genuineness of the angelic guest by making Mohammed sit first on her right knee, and then on her left; and the spirit did not object to either procedure. But when she took Mohammed in her lap and started to remove some of her garments, the virtuous apparition departed in great haste, and the crafty Khadija then exultantly cried: “Rejoice ... for by the Lord! it is an angel, and no devil.”
These enlightening tales, however, deserve to be supplemented by certain other considerations. Outside of Arabia, Paganism was in general disrepute. The dissolute and declining Romans were cracking lewd jokes in the very faces of their gods; the myriad followers of Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster were either too remote or too helpless to matter one way or another; Talmudic Judaism and Oriental Christianity despised idolatry and worshiped the same Jehovah, even though they disputed with each other, and indeed among themselves, concerning the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Now, to one who chose to regard himself as a prophet, monotheism had distinct advantages over polytheism. For one thing, it was rather confusing to attempt to obey the behests of conflicting deities; and for another, the different prophets of Jehovah in Judaism and Christendom had, so far as Mohammed knew, been uniformly successful—for he was familiar with the glorious history of Abraham, Moses and David, and he always held to the perverse belief that Jesus was not crucified. However deep in the dumps prophets may have been on occasion, they have invariably believed one thing: victory for their particular cause will inevitably come. Neither an unbroken series of worldly failures nor the chastisements of his God have ever shaken the faith of a first-class prophet in himself—or, as he would doubtless prefer to say, in his Divinity. Arabia—broken, unorganized, inglorious, idolistic Arabia—obviously lacked one Supreme Being whose prerogative was greater than all other Supreme Beings; and that Being, in turn, needed a messenger to exploit His supremacy. The messengers who had served Jehovah had certainly prospered well; but Jehovah Himself appeared to be on the decline—His Unity was steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical Trinity. Why, therefore, not give Allah, perhaps the leading icon in Arabia, an opportunity? Such considerations quite probably never entered the head of Mohammed with any definiteness; yet his behavior for the rest of his days seems to indicate that these, or similar conceptions, were subconsciously egging him on.