[42] August Müller, vol. ii. p. 29. [↑]
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE MONGOLS AND TATARS.
There is no event in the history of Islam that for terror and desolation can be compared to the Mongol conquest. Like an avalanche, the hosts of Chingīz K͟hān swept over the centres of Muslim culture and civilisation, leaving behind them bare deserts and shapeless ruins where before had stood the palaces of stately cities, girt about with gardens and fruitful corn-land. When the Mongol army had marched out of the city of Herāt, a miserable remnant of forty persons crept out of their hiding-places and gazed horror-stricken on the ruins of their beautiful city—all that were left out of a population of over 100,000. In Buk͟hārā, so famed for its men of piety and learning, the Mongols stabled their horses in the sacred precincts of the mosques and tore up the Qurʼāns to serve as litter; those of the inhabitants who were not butchered were carried away into captivity and their city reduced to ashes. Such too was the fate of Samarqand, Balk͟h and many another city of Central Asia, which had been the glories of Islamic civilisation and the dwelling-places of holy men and the seats of sound learning—such too the fate of Bag͟hdād that for centuries had been the capital of the ʻAbbāsid dynasty.
Well might the Muhammadan historian shudder to relate such horrors; when Ibn al-At͟hīr comes to describe the inroads of the Mongols into the countries of Islam, “for many years,” he tells us, “I shrank from giving a recital of these events on account of their magnitude and my abhorrence. Even now I come reluctant to the task, for who would deem it a light thing to sing the death-song of Islam and of the Muslims, or find it easy to tell this tale? O that my [[219]]mother had not given me birth! ‘Oh, would that I had died ere this, and been a thing forgotten, forgotten quite!’[1] Many friends have urged me and still I stood irresolute; but I saw that it was of no profit to forego the task and so I thus resume. I shall have to describe events so terrible and calamities so stupendous that neither day nor night have ever brought forth the like; they fell on all nations, but on the Muslims more than all; and were one to say that since God created Adam the world has not seen the like, he would but tell the truth, for history has nothing to relate that at all approaches it. Among the greatest calamities in history is the slaughter that Nebuchadnezzar wrought among the children of Israel and his destruction of the Temple; but what is Jerusalem in comparison to the countries that these accursed ones laid waste, every town of which was far greater than Jerusalem, and what were the children of Israel in comparison to those they slew, since the inhabitants of one of the cities they destroyed were greater in numbers than all the children of Israel? Let us hope that the world may never see the like again.”[2] But Islam was to rise again from the ashes of its former grandeur and through its preachers win over these savage conquerors to the acceptance of the faith. This was a task for the missionary energies of Islam that was rendered more difficult from the fact that there were two powerful competitors in the field. The spectacle of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam emulously striving to win the allegiance of the fierce conquerors that had set their feet on the necks of adherents of these great missionary religions, is one that is without parallel in the history of the world.
Before entering on a recital of this struggle, it will be well in order to the comprehension of what is to follow briefly to glance at the partition of the Mongol empire after the death of Chingīz K͟hān, when it was split up into four sections and divided among his sons. His third son, Ogotāy, succeeded his father as K͟hāqān and received as his share the eastern portion of the empire, in which Qūbīlāy afterwards included the whole of China. Chag͟hatāy the second son took the middle kingdom. Bātū, the son of [[220]]his first-born Jūjī, ruled the western portion as K͟hān of the Golden Horde; Tulūy the fourth son took Persia, to which Hūlāgū, who founded the dynasty of the Īlk͟hāns, added a great part of Asia Minor.
The primitive religion of the Mongols was Shamanism, which while recognising a supreme God, offered no prayers to Him, but worshipped a number of inferior divinities, especially the evil spirits whose powers for harm had to be deprecated by means of sacrifices, and the souls of ancestors who were considered to exercise an influence on the lives of their descendants. To propitiate these powers of the heaven and of the lower world, recourse was had to the Shamans, wizards or medicine-men, who were credited with possessing mysterious influence over the elements and the spirits of the departed. Their religion was not one that was calculated to withstand long the efforts of a proselytising faith, possessed of a systematic theology capable of satisfying the demands of the reason and an organised body of religious teachers, when once the Mongols had been brought into contact with civilised races, had responded to their civilising influences and begun to pass out of their nomadic barbarism. It so happened that the civilised races with which the conquest of the Mongols brought them in contact comprised large numbers of Buddhists, Christians and Muhammadans, and the adherents of these three great missionary faiths entered into rivalry with one another for the conversion of their conquerors. When not carried away by the furious madness for destruction and insult that usually characterised their campaigns, the Shamanist Mongols showed themselves remarkably tolerant of other religions, whose priests were exempted from taxation and allowed perfect freedom of worship. Buddhist priests held controversies with the Shamans in the presence of Chingīz K͟hān; and at the courts of Mangū K͟hān and Qūbīlāy the Buddhist and Christian priests and the Muslim Imāms alike enjoyed the patronage of the Mongol prince.[3] In the reign of the latter monarch the Mongols in China began to yield to the powerful influences of the surrounding Buddhism, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century [[221]]the Buddhist faith seems to have gained a complete ascendancy over them.[4] It was the Lamas of Tibet who showed themselves most zealous in this work of conversion, and the people of Mongolia to the present day cling to the same faith, as do the Kalmuks who migrated to Russia in the seventeenth century.