The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

In the first place, it is determined to be merely a perceptive faith, and therefore adapted only to that portion of mankind whose minds, still undeveloped and uncultivated, are unripe for a religion of principles. This is partly correct of the corrupted, untrue of the pure, belief; it will somewhat apply to the tenets of the Turks and Persians, but not to those of the first Muslims and the modern Wahhabis. The spirit of the religion, its sentiments, and its æsthetics were committed to the poets of El Islam, and right worthily have they fulfilled their task. It is not too much to assert that almost every celebrated metrical composition amongst Muslims is either directly or indirectly devotional. Even the licentious Anacreons of Persia and India, Hafiz and Jafar i Zatalli, disguise their grossness under a garb of mystical double entente.

But even in their purely spiritual songs and hymns the poets of El Islam do not betray that poverty of invention and puerility of imagination that distinguish the religious rhymesters of Christianity. In the great and noble literature of England, for instance, there is but one poem founded upon the base of revelation—Paradise Lost. Who can arise from its perusal without the conviction that a splendid genius has so fettered himself with his theme that many ballad-mongers have produced more poetical effects upon the reader? Who rises without disgust at the dialogues of the Father and the Son in which is discussed at length Calvinistic sectarianism? And what Christian, who deems his Holy Trinity a sacred mystery of the Spirit beyond, not contrary to, material reason, would not blush to see his Divinity thus degraded in the eyes of the stern deistical Muslim?

The Koran—the only standard of divine Truth universally admitted by El Islam—consists of threefold matter: of historical and legendary lore, of principles moral and psychical, and of materials for a loose and scattered code of laws. And here, it may be observed, that, with perhaps the exception of the Pentateuch, which we have seen required its tradition, no code embodied in the sacred writings of any race has sufficed to govern it. What Christian nation has ever been ruled by Christian law? Even its codes are either of its own invention or borrowed from ancient custom or translated from Pagan legislation. No divine system yet promulgated to mankind has sufficed for the civil and criminal wants of future and more civilized generations. And thus it was with the Koran. The precepts of the Saving Faith were not fixed and definite enough for the sensuous and objective spirit of the East. In religion, as in politics, wherever public opinion is lax and impotent, law is, and must be, a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency. Such codes cannot deal in principles and spirit; these must be extracted—by the few that require them—from a well-organized system of practical precepts. Thus the Muslim in the earliest ages sought to supply the imperfections of the code bequeathed to him. A remedy was at hand. The deceased Prophet’s sayings were still fresh in the minds of his wives and immediate descendants, of his companions, and his early successors. All lent their best endeavours to the pious task. The earliest traditions were of sensible and useful import. Presently the most trivial precepts and the most puerile practices were either forged or remembered by so-called saints who made this collection the business of their lives. Thus in course of time and by slow degrees appeared that bulky mass of traditional lore popularly known as the Ahadis or Sayings and the Sunnat or Doings of the Prophet.

By such arts were subtle practices and silly legends grafted by scholasticism upon the primitive annals and laws of El Islam. In that faith almost every tenet or practice to which the philosopher could object may be traced to the Sunnat and Ahadis; the Koran is wholly free from them. Amongst others, upon these, and upon these solely, must be charged the defect of making the system eminently perceptive. Muhammad, like all other Eastern lawgivers, had suited his ordinances to the genius of his people by addressing them as semi-civilized men. The schools degraded their Muslims to the intellectual rank of babes and sucklings.

Regarding these Sunnat and Ahadis, however, it must be borne in mind that they are purely sectarian. The four self-called orthodox schools hold to one tradition. The principal heresies, as the Shiahs and the Bayzawi, have their own recognized collections, whence all emanations from impure, that is to say, from other sources, have been carefully removed. But El Islam has existed, and can exist, independently of them. Had the Wahhabis, those Puritans or rather Reformers of the Saving Faith, succeeded in restoring to the Arabs their simple primitive belief, little of the Ahadis and the Sunnat would have been left to misguide and offend mankind.

Secondly, men object that the Saving Faith is one of pure sensuality. It is difficult to divine how this most erroneous estimate could have been formed except by the grossest ignorance. Possibly it was a vicious conclusion thus drawn: that as the Muslim’s Paradise is one of sense, consequently there is no limit to his sensuality in this world. But El Jannat, or the Heavenly Garden, has many mansions; the ignorant and savage, the hungry and sensual Bedawin will taste the flesh of birds, live in a golden house, command any number of angelic wives, and drink the nectars of Kafur and Zingibil. But, as in Christianity so in El Islam, eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, nor hath fancy conceived the spiritual joys of those who in mundane life have qualified themselves for heavenly futurity. The popular error that the Muslim Prophet denied immortal souls to women, and therefore degraded them to the mere instruments of man’s comfort and passions, might also have tended to represent El Islam as a scheme of sense. Possibly, again, the monogamic races of a Northern clime—for monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry are an affair of geography—shocked by the permission to marry four wives and to maintain an indefinite number of concubines, overlooked in characterizing Muhammad’s ordinances the strict limits therein laid down for luxury and pleasure. The Muslim may not take to himself a single spouse, unless able to make a settlement upon her, to support, clothe, and satisfy her. He must act with the most rigid impartiality towards the whole household, and strictly avoid showing undue preference. He is allowed four wives with a view of increasing and multiplying his tribe. Man in hot and enervating climates coming to maturity early, and soon losing the powers which he is tempted by moral as well as physical agencies to abuse, would never raise up a large family as the husband of only one wife. Like the Patriarchs, he must have handmaids. Like the Jews, he must be allowed polygamy and power of divorce. These, forbidden by the ascetic Essene, are necessary to the increase of mankind in the East, and no religion can consecrate an ordinance which, directly opposed to the first law given by the Creator to his creatures (Genesis), tends to check that natural increase of population which is the foundation of all progress and civilization.

Laying aside these considerations as too shallow for discussion, can we call that faith sensual which forbids a man to look upon a statue or a picture? Which condemns even the most moderate use of inebrients, and indeed is not certain upon the subject of coffee and tobacco? Which will not allow even the most harmless game of chance or skill? Which rigorously prohibits music, dancing, and even poetry and works of fiction upon any but strictly religious subjects? Above all things, which debars man from the charms of female society, making sinful a glance at a strange woman’s unveiled face? A religion whose votaries must pray five times a day at all seasons, in joy as in sorrow, in sickness as in health? A system which demands regular almsgiving and forbids all manner of interest upon money to those who would be saved? Whose yearly fast often becomes one of the severest trials to which the human frame can be exposed? To whom distant pilgrimage with all its trials and hardships is obligatory at least once in life? Whose Prophet exclaimed, like the Founder of Christianity, [Arabic: الفقر فخري: Al-faqru fakhary][217] (Poverty is my pride), and who taught his followers that two things ruin men, “much wealth and many words”?

Those who best know El Islam, instead of charging it with sensuality, lament its leaven of asceticism. They regret to see men investing these fair nether scenes with mourning hues; “the world is the Muslim’s prison, the tomb his stronghold, and Paradise his journey’s end.” But this could not be otherwise. Asceticism and celibacy are the wonted growth of hot and Southern climates, where man appears liable to a manner of religious monomania. The Brahman householder, after doing his duty to mankind by becoming a husband and the father of a family, ought by the law of Menu to leave the world and to end life a Sanyasi amongst the beasts of the jungle. No religion is more monastic than Buddhism; yet it is atheistic. Thus the votaries of this organized system of selfishness, this vast scheme of profits and losses, reduced to regularity, are deprived of all hope in death, and yet live the most comfortless and unnatural of lives. “The world knows nothing of its greatest men,” is true in more views than one. To the Muslim, time is but a point in illimitable eternity, life is but a step from the womb to the tomb. He passes from this world directly into the other, but not into a new existence; its every aspect and circumstance is as familiar to his mind as is the routine of earthly existence. He has no great secret to learn. The Valley of Death has no shadow for him;[218] no darkness of uncertainty and doubt horrifies his fancy. So it came to pass that, although Muhammad expressly and repeatedly declared, “There is no monkery in El Islam,” few schemes have produced a more systematic or rigid asceticism. Even before his death monasticism began to appear; and now the Muslim world is overrun with Sufis and Kalandars, with Fakirs and Derwayshes, with Santons and recluses.

The third error is that the Founder of the Saving Faith began his ministry as an enthusiast and ended as an impostor. This is the improved modern fashion of treating the “perjuryose lying Machomete” of our forefathers. We are less gross and dogmatical than they were, though scarcely more charitable or philosophical. The recognized proofs of “imposition” seem to be:

Firstly, the convenient appearance of the Ayát, or inspired Versets. But what would have been their use had they not descended when wanted to solve a difficulty or convey a precept? Do we doubt the Books of Moses because Revelation is conducted upon precisely the same principle? And who will deny that enthusiasm would have produced them more effectually than fraud? It is a general rule that to deceive others well we must first deceive ourselves. He that would be believed in by others must thoroughly believe in himself. Is it likely that such men as Abubekr and Umar would become the victims of a mere fraud, so palpable to every petty annalist and compiler in this our modern day? Neither they nor Muhammad even at his dying hour seem to have doubted his inspiration. The Prophet’s last words were, “Prayer! Prayer!” And, according to the Shiahs, a few minutes before breathing his last he called for an inkholder and a pen to write the name of his successor. Is this the death-bed scene of a hypocrite or an impostor?