A Moslem seeker after God

by Samuel Marinus Zwemer

Diglot manuscripts in Syriac and Arabic are quite numerous. The manuscript of the four Gospels, of which a few leaves are now in the British Museum, is a good specimen of such a diglot. It was brought by Tischendorf from the Syrian Convent of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert. In the early part of the eleventh century an Arabic scholar made a version of Tatian’s Diatessaron, that early Syriac Harmony of the Gospels which helped the Christian Church to realize the main facts concerning our Saviour. A version of the Psalms was prepared in the middle of the same century for use in the Church services of the papal or Melchite Greeks. This was translated from the Greek Psalter, and, from the place where it was first printed, became known afterwards as the Aleppo Psalter.[10] It remains an interesting question whether Al-Ghazali in his travels, or while still in Khorasan, ever examined the New Testament.

We are told that the Jews translated their law into Persian by 827 A. D. It is, therefore, hard to acquit the Christians of Persia of negligence. Their bishops found time to write learned treatises in Persian and Arabic, and even to translate Aristotle, but not to give Moslems the Scriptures. Yet Al-Kindi and others like him, many of whose names and writings are lost, were not afraid to give their testimony even at the court of the Caliphs. “The Church,” says W. T. Whiteley,[11] “had not failed to exercise an influence on Islam around it, while Christians might not, on peril of death, seek to win converts direct, a command occasionally violated with honour and success, yet all the development of Islam at Damascus and Bagdad was in a Christian atmosphere.”

The Christianity of that period was, however, not the religion of Christ in its purity nor after the example of His love and toleration. Mutual hatred and suspicion prevented real intercourse of those who, as devout Christians and devout Moslems, were both seeking God. The Moslem was feared and the Christian despised. The followers of Jesus were the enemies of Allah in the eyes of Moslems.

How Christians were regarded at this time we may learn from the books of canon law of this period, and that immediately following upon it. They were considered infidels in the Moslem sense of the word, and were protected only by the payment of a poll tax, which gave them certain rights as subjects. The most distinguished jurist of the Shafiʾite sect, An-Nawawi, who taught at Damascus in 1267, lays down the law[12] as follows: “An infidel who has to pay his poll tax should be treated by the tax collector with disdain; the collector remaining seated and the infidel standing before him, the head bent and the body bowed. The infidel should personally place the money in the balance, while the collector holds him by the beard and strikes him upon both cheeks. Infidels should be forbidden to have houses higher than those of their Moslem neighbours, or even to have them as high; a rule, however, that does not apply to the infidels who inhabit a separate quarter. An infidel subject of our Sovereign may not ride a horse; but a donkey or a mule is permitted him, whatever may be its value. He must use an ikaf, and wooden spurs, those of iron being forbidden him, as well as a saddle. He must go to the side of the road to let a Moslem pass. He must not be treated as a person of importance, nor given the first place at a gathering. He should be distinguished by a suit of coloured cloth and a girdle outside his clothes. If he enters a bathing house where there are Moslems, or if he undresses anywhere else in their presence, the infidel should wear round his neck an iron or leaden necklace, or some other mark of servitude.[13] He is forbidden to offend Moslems, either by making them hear his false doctrines, or by speaking aloud of Esdras or of the Messiah, or by ostentatiously drinking wine or eating pork. And infidels are forbidden to sound the bells of their churches or of their synagogues, or celebrate ostentatiously their sacrilegious rites.”[14]

“The history of Christian communities,” says Margoliouth,[15] “under Moslem rule cannot be adequately written; the members of those communities had no opportunity of describing their condition safely, and the Moslems naturally devote little space to their concerns. Generally speaking, they seem to have been regarded as certain old Greek and Roman sages regarded women: as a necessary annoyance. Owing to their being unarmed their prosperity was always hazardous; and though it is true that this was the case with all the subjects of a despotic state under an irresponsible ruler, the non-Moslem population was at the mercy of the mob as well as of the sovereign; they were likely scapegoats whenever there was distress, and even in the best governed countries periods of distress frequently arose.”

There are darker shades in the treatment of Christians and in the moral condition of this period over which one might well draw the veil, but some of the chapters of Ghazali’s Ihya reflect such terrible conditions as Margoliouth describes: “A form of passion which is nameless would appear at one time to have been as familiar among Moslems as of old among Hellenes. Christian lads seem often to have been the unhappy objects of this passion. A story is told us by the biographer Yakut of a young monk of Edessa or Urfah who had the misfortune to attract the fancy of one Saʾad the copyist. The visits and attentions of this Moslem became so offensive that the monks had to put a stop to them. Thereupon this personage pined away, and was finally found dead outside the monastery wall. The Moslem population declared that the monks had killed him, and the governor proposed to execute and burn the young monk who had occasioned the disaster, and scourge his colleagues. They finally got off by paying a sum of 100,000 dirhems.”

Not only among Moslems, however, but among Christians as well, morals were at a low ebb in the eleventh century. One of the annalists of the Roman Church says it was an iron age barren of all goodness, a leaden age abounding in all wickedness. “Christ was then, as it appears, in a very deep sleep, when the ship was covered with waves; and what seemed worse, when the Lord was thus asleep, there were no disciples, who by their cries might awaken him, being themselves all fast asleep.”

Enemies of the Papacy have perhaps exaggerated the vices and crimes of the popes in this and the preceding century; but the Church, on the testimony of its own writers, was immersed in profaneness, sensuality, and lewdness. When Otho I, Emperor of Germany, came to Rome, he introduced moral reforms by the power of the sword, but according to Milner,[16] “The effect of Otho’s regulations was that the popes exchanged the vices of the rake and the debauchee for those of the ambitious politician and the hypocrite; and gradually recovered, by a prudent conduct, the domineering ascendency, which had been lost by vicious excesses. But this did not begin to take place till the latter end of the eleventh century.”

Missionary effort in this century was confined to work in Hungary, the unevangelized portions of Denmark, Poland, and Prussia. Adam of Bremen, who wrote in 1080, says: “Look at the very ferocious nation of the Danes. For a long time they have been accustomed, in the praises of God, to resound Alleluia. Look at that piratical people. They are now content with the fruits of their own country. Look at that horrid region, formerly altogether inaccessible on account of idolatry; they now eagerly admit the preachers of the word.”