Even the Koran contained little that was new. With the exception of some legends, the addition of some regulations touching the daily prayers and the purification of property, with a few ordinances as that of Diyat or blood-money, disallowed by the Pentateuch (Numb. xxxv. and Deut. xix.), but rendered necessary by the state of Arab society, and some dietetic modifications—the camel for instance and the horse were recognized as pure food,—the Koran might almost be extracted from the Mosaic and Rabbinical writings, from the Evangelists and apocryphalists of the Christian era. There is also but little to commend in it, except its fiery and commanding eloquence. As a code of laws it is eminently defective. He who could write such a work could have written much better. Muhammad, however, relied for the success of his mission upon far higher claims than any book.
Muhammad laid no claims to prophecy or to miracles. He called himself El Rasúl, and El Nabbi, the announcer of good tidings from Allah to the Adamites. He did not give his name to a new system of belief; his ordinances were designated in a mass as El Islam, the Salvation or the Saving Faith. His night journey to heaven, the subject of so much opprobrious declamation, was either a vision or a dream. The splitting of the moon, a tale so monstrously told by his posterity, rests upon no broader basis than a line in the Koran which might properly be translated: “The hour [of Judgment] shall come, and the moon shall cleave asunder.” Probably this absurdity was the invention of followers who determined to dispute for their lawgiver with Joshua’s command over the host of heaven. An ignorant Afghan is said to have boasted that his Pir, or spiritual pastor, the celebrated poet Abd el Kahman, was in the habit of making night journeys like Muhammad to Paradise, and to have bastinadoed the holy man severely when, taxed with impiety, he denied the irreverent assertion. Such a Muhaddis, or relater of the Prophet’s sayings, as Abu Hurayrah, the Father of the Kitten, may fairly, to judge him by his recognized writings, be suspected of such a forgery. Muhammad the more especially disdained the claim to miraculous powers which, as those who know Eastern lands, belong to every petty saint and village santon. The “most extraordinary of ordinary men,” the historian Hume, inferred that, because he himself had never seen a miracle, no one else ever saw a miracle. The Oriental traveller will disbelieve in miracles for the opposite reason—because he has seen so many.
The rapid and extensive spread of El Islam, considered by the Faithful a remarkable instance of divine aid, is to be accounted for without the intervention of a Deity. The Arabs poured forth from their great centre, till the whole surplus population was exhausted. Everywhere they appeared as liberators of slaves, especially in Turkey and Persia, where an artificial and over-refined state of society had produced tyrannical despots, an innumerable and insatiable nobility, and a people robbed and spoiled. Another circumstance favoured the growth of “the Religion of the Heavens and the Earth.” Whether we consider the Arabs to have been the aborigines of their native wilds, or, as the modern theory is, we derive them from the Highlands of Æthiopia, it is certain that their great success lay amongst a kindred people speaking cognate languages. From the earliest times, indeed, Arabia had sent forth several extensive streams of emigration. Essentially an Asiatic form of belief, El Islam could not progress beyond the barriers opposed to it by geography. Not having a St. Paul to modify, to change it, the Saving Faith broke upon the rock of a new race.
But this I claim for El Islam.
The recurring purpose which runs through the world is chiefly manifested by the higher esteem in which man holds man. David made him little lower than the angels. Christianity, a system of asceticism, confirmed this estimate: we are fallen beings, fallen not through our own fault; condemned to eternal death, not by our own demerits; ransomed by a Divine Being, not through our own merits. El Islam, on the contrary, raised man from this debased status, and with the sound good sense which characterizes the creed inspired and raised him in the scale of creation by teaching him the dignity of human nature. Thus modern Spiritualism is giving a shock to Christianity, whereas El Islam has power to resist it.
But, however El Islam prospered amongst the kindred races, it fell flat elsewhere. No power of propagandism availed in China. In Southern Spain the faith maintained itself for a long time; its letter and spirit, however, were almost lost. The Zegris and Abencerrages were European knights, not Eastern. And when pushed forward into a Northern people, a single destructive defeat sufficed to set for it bounds which it has never attempted to cross. In Hungary and Austria again, with a tenfold power, it failed to establish a footing; and when “Holy Russia” became sufficiently united to be powerful, El Islam was cast out like a corpse.
Again, what reconciled the ancient Muslim and endears the modern to his creed is its noble simplicity. The votary has little or nothing comparatively speaking to pay for his moral and spiritual necessary—religion. He has no tithes, and few fees. His places of worship are built and maintained by religious bequests, carefully guarded by law and custom. Muhammad Ali, it is true, confiscated the “Wakf” left to many of the Cairene mosques and tombs. He also, following the example of Turkey, substituted at Mecca and El Medinah yearly pensions for the produce of their ancient extensive church lands. But he carried out these measures among Egyptians, a race of men whose languor and apathy require repeated inducements to fight for the faith; in Kabul and Bokhara the boldest and most powerful extortioners would hardly venture upon such a sacrilege. The Islam Muslim, moreover, has no priesthood; those whose duty it is to preach and pray to the people are not churchmen; they temporarily receive from the Wahil, or mosque-warden, a few piastres per month; but all must live by some honest secular calling. Even the Sultan, the Defender of the Faith, the Representative of the Khalifs, and the Vicegerent of Allah upon earth, does not disdain handicraft, to make and sell toothpicks. Finally, the Muslim has no baptism; he is circumcised by a barber; he can marry himself with a reason for deviating from popular custom; and he can be bathed, buried, and prayed over by any lay fellow-religionist.
It is generally believed in Europe that El Islam is on the decline; and the old prejudices bequeathed by Crusades tend to make the assertion popular. It is based upon insufficient grounds. With as much correctness might the Muslim predict the present fall of Christianity by the heresies and schisms that distract the Church, from the wide spread of visionary Swedenborgians and of the shallow imposture Mormonism.[221] Turkey and Egypt may show traces of latitudinarianism, even as France and Germany have done; no Muslim people, however, has yet ventured to abolish El Islam by law. But Arabia and Afghanistan still stand firm as in the first ages of the faith. Generally it may be remarked that in Eastern religions the propagandism and missioning of the West has tended to strengthen and confirm the tenets against which they have been directed. Thus Hinduism, after giving a few outcasts to Christianity, has entrenched itself behind the stronghold of Vedantism; the learned are pure Deists, the ignorant pure idolaters. Buddhism remains untouched, and the very nature of its encyclopedian tenets renders it unassailable. Even the sect of Guebres has been strengthened by polemical arguments, and bids fair to rival its antagonists in disputative theology. In spite of the mighty force brought against it, the Parsee converts to Christianity might be numbered on a man’s fingers. Nor can these faiths yield to compulsion. The laws of Menu, of Zoroaster, and of Muhammad have still bulwarks not easily to be battered down. And should Christianity, as it has often threatened, ever meet the Saving Faith in mortal conflict, and the Cross assail the Crescent in the latest of crusades, the Muslim scimitar, rusty as it is with the rust of ages, will prove the good metal of which it was in the beginning forged.
Supposing, however, El Islam abolished by civilization, underminded by the slow action of the Christian Powers closing around it, or become decrepit from old age, what would be the result? Some renewal essentially the same, formally different; some revival of its eternal principle, Monotheism, disguised under a fresh garb of those outward accidents that constitute a religion. Such has ever been the history of the world’s creeds. At all times
emerging from the storm,