And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment he looked upon himself as Allah’s vicegerent, through whom Allah’s incontestable decrees were to be given to man—although Gabriel, or the Holy Ghost (for Mohammed’s slipshod knowledge of Christian theogony led him into the regrettable error of perpetually confusing those two eminent divinities), continued in his capacity as interpreter of the intermittently revealed series of tablets. And so careful was Allah to eliminate the possibility of merely human invention that He prefaced every Sura, or individual revelation, with the express or implied injunction “SAY” or “SPEAK”—the irrefutable proof of divine authorship. Mohammed’s every doubt had now vanished, his soul was completely at ease; and from his lips there burst the wildly exultant chant: “La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah!”
Such, we may believe if we so desire, was the origin of the Koran, of Mohammed the Prophet, and of Islam itself—those three interacting and inseparable forces (a sort of Pagan Trinity, in fact) which, emerging when Rome was dying and Christianity was barely out of its cradle, convulsed the civilized and uncivilized world for centuries to come. Inasmuch, however, as Mohammed himself, not to mention his commentators, has added certain clarifying details that were touched with an earthiness foreign to the pretty picture, it may not be wholly presumptuous or irreverent to glance briefly at the other side of the canvas.
The conception of a flexible revelation—of one that could be indefinitely extended, amended, expurgated, or even abrogated in part—was excellent in many ways. Christianity and Mormonism, to cite only two counter cases, have both suffered somewhat, perhaps, from the inexorable nature of their scriptures. Woe unto him who alters a jot or tittle of their contents! At the same time, the precise meaning of the Christian creed, in particular, is very indefinite; it permits a latitude of interpretation, even in fundamental matters, that has brought about those lamentable schisms into major, minor and microscopic sects with which everyone is familiar. But, however much civil strife Islam may have endured from political factionalism or antagonism over inconsequential tenets in the Koran, it has remained indissolubly firm in its adherence to its supereminent divinities: Allah and Mohammed. And the credit for this, it is to be suspected, is due principally to the one whom all orthodox Moslems believe—or profess they believe—to be the lesser.
Poetry and oratory—the only forms of literature known to the Arabs—were both oracular and rudely rhythmical; and Mohammed, who from his childhood had been familiar with the yearly contests of poets and orators at the fairs, naturally adopted a cognate medium of expression. His thoughts, whether conceived in a white heat of frenzy or with deliberate coolness and sly calculation for the main chance, were probably not written down in any definite way during his life. It is not certain, in fact, that he could either read or write. He delighted in the appellation “the illiterate Prophet,” possibly on account of his humility, and possibly because he knew that inspired ignorance had been the indisputable prerogative of all successful prophets in the past. Indeed, the very fact that he was unlearned was rightly supposed to increase the miraculous nature of his revelations. As he tossed the divine emanations from his lips, they were sometimes recorded by hired or willing scribes upon palm leaves, leather, stones, the shoulder-blades or ribs of camels and goats, or were even tattooed upon the breasts of men. But often they were not immediately written down at all; the Prophet would go around spouting them forth to his followers who, trained from infancy to memorize verses and songs of every sort with infallible precision, would piously commit them to memory. As a result of this divinely haphazard procedure, the time of composition of the different Suras has never been definitely fixed. Two facts, however, are well established: the revelations, at first very short, steadily increased in length; and, doubtless for that reason, the interminable later Suras do not even contain ashes—for ashes prove that flame was once present—whereas the earlier songs are occasionally touched with fire.
Occasionally ... but only so. The indefeasible privilege of all Holy Writ to be dull—a privilege only too generously exercised—is abused in the Koran with an enthusiasm matched only by the third part of the Pentateuch. The spasmodic structure of the Koran—its absence of cohesion between chapters and even between sentences, its dithyrambic convulsions, its hodge-podge of inchoate and irrelevant ideas, its pervasive lack of charm—may be due, it has been hazarded, to Mohammed’s neurotic idiosyncrasy; yet epileptic men of genius in many branches of mental activity have been by no means uncommon, and it seems simpler to assume that he was not born to be a poet. In any case, it is certain that his predilection for non-didactic poetry showed itself only at rare intervals: perhaps because, as the Koran puts it, “We have not taught him poetry, nor is it meet for him,” perhaps because he had had no genuine love-affair in his youth, and perhaps because he believed that his commission was too serious to allow any protracted indulgence in such a frivolous thing as verse. Like the Hebrew prophets, he was at his best when raining heavenly maledictions on his enemies; like them, too, he was at his worst when he used repetition as a substitute for ideas. But they at least had good stories, taken from a long and rich racial history, to redecorate as they saw fit, whereas Arabia had almost no history worth the telling; and so Mohammed was compelled to fall back on Hebrew literature to help him out. He did fall back—again and again, and yet again. Even if he could not read, it was easy to get the necessary material from friendly Jews in Mecca; but an unfortunate, though apparently disregarded, difficulty attended this procedure: different Jews would tell the same story in different ways. So it came about that, when the Prophet was hard pressed for material, he would use one version; again, when his clock of inspiration had run down or been left unwound, he would use another garbled rendition of the same narrative. While the story of Joseph was his favorite, his collection of trophies pillaged from Biblical folklore included the activities of Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and less important notables; at the same time, he was quite innocent of the common Christian complaint that he had plagiarized the Bible, inasmuch as he had never read it. Carlyle was certainly not a tepid admirer of Mohammed, but, when he read the Koran, even his Berserker rage for great men suffered a serious shock—a shock that might justly be criticized for the very thing it criticizes. “I must say,” he confessed, “it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty would carry any European through the Koran.” And indeed, so far as that volume is concerned, the European sense of duty has been very small.
But with Mohammed’s acolytes the case has been wholly different. For from the beginning they believed in the Koran with an appallingly artless simplicity, at once noble and absurd. Through its instrumentality, Allah the Wise, the Only Wise, revealed his immutable decrees: to the good, the rewards of a Paradise that utterly beggared the Christian Heaven, and to the bad the punishments of a Hell that contained an infinity of such refined tortures of heat, and even of cold, as neither the most imaginatively gifted Jew nor Christian had yet conceived—for Dante was undreamed of. Mohammed of course properly approved of Allah’s decisions and judgments, as an employee should rightly behave toward his employer; and he was especially fond of his superior’s delight in describing Hell—“I swear,” he gravely announced one day, “that it is one of the most serious things.”
The earlier part of the Koran, or “Recitation,” is mostly concerned with these elemental and primitive things; only at a later day did Allah—or Mohammed?—deal separately with the many matters touching the growth of a definite code of religious, social and governmental precepts. When scoffers poked ridicule at the rather sloppy grammar and metre of the Koran, Mohammed did two things: in the first place, after brandishing the doom of an eternity of roaring flames over their heads, he challenged them to produce better verses than his—or Allah’s?—own; and, in the second place, he incautiously prepared a loophole of escape by revealing, in Sura 69, the fact that the Koran was “not the word of a poet,” but “a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds.” This lofty gesture temporarily squelched his defamers, who promptly dug off with their tails between their legs; but its effect did not last long when they reflected how damaging an admission he had made. It may of course be readily granted that precepts concerned with daily washing, food, taxes, and so on, were not especially well adapted to rhythmical prose; but, after all, that was Allah’s and Mohammed’s lookout. Perhaps, indeed, the confession of non-poetical power was scarcely necessary; for the inexplicable man who, in the pristine freshness of poetic glow, could indite this terse stanza, instinct with brooding doom:
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men,
The King of men,