Thus in the year 632 a robber who was compelling the whole Arabian people to submit to his authority had somewhat suddenly died. His companions, robbers like himself, met together after his death. They proclaimed the dead chieftain “to be supreme teacher of religion, [pg 218] and, in that capacity, law-giver over the whole extent of the social, civil, and political domain”.[108] They elected one of themselves to continue this authority by the name of chalif, or successor. In this act I note four things. The successor is not taken out of Mohammed's family, but by free choice of the faithful. Secondly, he is chosen as a spiritual head: but this headship carries in itself the whole temporal power. Thirdly, the place of Mohammed among his own faithful, corresponds to the place of Christ in his Church, if we bear in mind all the differences which distinguish the two communities. Fourthly, the chalif in the Mohammedan community corresponds to the Pope in the Christian. He is the successor of Mohammed, God's Apostle, as the Pope is the successor of St. Peter. The chalif is the bearer of Mohammedanism, as Mohammed's vicegerent: the Pope is the bearer of Christendom, as the vicegerent of Christ, and the spiritual Peter. As Christ and Mohammed answer to each other in religions radically antagonistic to each other, so Pope answers to chalif, with the same requisite differences.
It is to be noted that Christendom and Islam coincide as to the time of their rise. A Catholic Church there had been through all the six preceding centuries. But the allegiance of different bodies politic to one Christian faith and legislation was only beginning when Mohammed arose. The various kingdoms which the Teuton races were forming in all the countries of the West drew their common spiritual life from the Pope in Rome. [pg 219] The eastern emperor was becoming one of many sovereigns who acknowledged the authority of Peter. If Heraclius thought himself to wield the one sovereignty displayed by Justinian, he was undeceived before his death. If his grandson kidnapped a Pope out of his Lateran Church and Palace, and then martyred him as a traitor to his absolute power, the isles of the West were looking upon him at the same time as the bestower to them of the Christian faith, and of all the blessings which that faith brought with it to their civil life. St. Wilfrid spoke to the Northumbrian king concerning the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven. The king listened and obeyed. Thus the roots of Christendom were sprouting in France and Spain and Britain at the moment that Omar guided the suffrages of Mohammed's companions to choose the aged Abu Bekr for his successor. From that time these powers are formed over against each other in perpetual contrast and antagonism. The union of the two powers in Islam becomes the centre of a complete despotism. The distinction of the two powers in Christendom—which Pope Gelasius had marked with so much emphasis to the encroaching emperor Anastasius a hundred and forty years before—which St. Martin exercised at the cost of his life in the time of the third chalif—was the pledge and guarantee to Christendom of authority, supreme but temperate, of spiritual rule protecting civil liberty. A long succession of Popes—at the mercy of eastern despots as to civil matters—maintain their spiritual independence and their guidance of that new assemblage of nations in a [pg 220] common Christendom through the terrible seventh century. At the same moment Northern Africa, and Egypt, and Syria fall passively into the hands of the chalifate, and Byzantium loses the half of its power and trembles for its own existence.
How vast in its importance for future ages the establishment of the chalifate upon the death of Mohammed was, may be seen from the following considerations.[109] It cannot be denied that the absolutely despotic form of government in lands under the sway of Mohammed has been created by the influence of the religion. It has indeed often been maintained that the genius of Asiatic peoples specially produces this form of rule. But states which are not Mohammedan rest on quite a different basis: and their rulers are or were subject to great and essential limitations. A Hindu king who reigned under the laws of Manu could not break through the immunities of the Brahmins, or the separation of the castes. An emperor of China, though he be called the son of heaven, and his throne be approached only with forms of the deepest submission, can name no officer except according to the list of candidates provided by the learned order. Not so the Princes of the Faithful. Two elements here concur to produce the most complete form of despotism: the mixing together or more properly unification of the spiritual and the temporal power; and the military power resting on conquest. According as the theocratic or the military principle prevailed, the sovereignty would take a distinct colouring: the [pg 221] despotism assume a milder or a sterner aspect. When, as in the case of the Arabian chalifs, and in a certain degree of the Turkish sultans since Selim, the religious character prevailed, and the political power, in accordance with the original spirit of Islam, appeared only as an issue and endowment of the spiritual, the unconditional submission would take more of a religious and conscientious devotedness. Then the dynasty, clothed in the divinity which hedges a king, could enjoy greater stability and security: the ruler himself, reminded ever of his consecrated character, of the duties and the higher responsibility which lay upon him, would make through regard for the prescriptions of religion a more moderate use of an authority in itself unlimited. Where, on the contrary, the spirit of an arbitrary military lordship prevailed, as in most of the kingdoms formed after the overthrow of the chalifate in Central Asia, the blind obedience of the subject would rather be the result of fear and custom. An attempt to overthrow the possessor of supreme power, with the self-same violence by means of which he had raised himself to it, would appear at once as allowable and attractive. Thence would follow more frequent change of dynasty, indifference to it on the part of the population, continual suspicion, and tyrannical exercise of even the bloodiest means to put down every opposing force.
Thus the government of the Ottoman kingdom did not take that character of brutal tyranny which marks the history of Persia. The Persian king is so absolutely lord of the life and property of his subjects, that a sentence [pg 222] even issued in a drunken revel without the least formality receives immediate execution. A Persian proverb truly says: To be near the shah is to be near a burning fire. The general view that a king is naturally tyrannical and unjust has passed into the very language, so that a complainant for the strongest expression of the wrong which he has suffered says: He played the king over me. Thus the learned in the law maintain that the king's commands are superior to the right of nature, they only yield to a positive divine command. The lordship of the Ottoman sultans, though resting on the same principle of unlimited power, appears on the whole milder and more moderate. Here too, as the founder of the line declared, all property belongs to the sultan; here also “the slave's neck is thinner than a hair,” and all subjects rank as the sultan's slaves, and even call themselves so: here too the sultan's mother calls her son “my lion” or “my tiger,” and Moslim name the sultan not only “the Shadow of God,” or “the Refuge of the World,” but also “the Executioner, the Slayer,” since he alone possesses the absolute right over the life of all. Turkish doctors ascribe to him also a holy character not to be effaced by any immorality. If his actions shew a scorn of all admitted conceptions of justice or prudence, yet in force of a Mohammedan fiction it is assumed that he does much or most of this in consequence of a divine suggestion, and therefore that his motives can neither be discerned nor judged by men. In the same spirit the learned in the law maintain that the sultan can put to death every day fourteen persons, [pg 223] without giving reason, or lying under imputation of tyranny. Whoever receives death without resistance from his hand or by his order becomes thereby a martyr, and many of his servants are said to have striven after the honour of such a death as a secure pledge of eternal happiness. A tyrannical power such as this as a rule naturally strikes those only who stand near the throne. The members of his own family, the higher officers of state, fall victims to it. The mass of the people seldom feels such direct effects of their despot. Here the principle holds, the higher the dignity, the more perfect the confidence, the greater the danger. The grand visiers, the other selves of the sultans in temporal matters have experienced this. A hundred and eighty statesmen have held this highest office of the kingdom from 1370 to 1789: most of them therefore scarcely more than two years. Many have been executed after a short time. One of the most esteemed Mohammedan princes, Soliman the Magnificent, executed during his government, one after the other, most of the men on whose shoulders he had laid the most important works and the highest offices of his kingdom. An instinct of obedience, an inclination to unconditional absolute subjection under absolute authority prevails among Mohammedans, to which the utmost cruelty appears endurable, the utmost perversity natural.
It must be added that the Sultan of Morocco unites the spiritual, and the temporal power, as sheriff, that is descendant of the prophet through Hosein and Ali. He is a despot as absolute as the king of Persia. All depends [pg 224] upon his will. He makes, alters, suppresses, and restores laws. He changes them according to his humour, convenience, or interests. Here there is no body of Ulema, no Mufti clothed with an authority independent of the sovereign, no divan, colleges, or ministerial departments. All follows the single command of the ruler.
The nature of the supreme authority in these three Moslem empires speaks at the present day of its origin in the person of Mohammed.
What we see is this. The misuse of Cæsarean power in applying to the Church of God, which from the beginning by divine order was independent, a supremacy in spiritual things not belonging to the civil ruler, is allowed by Divine Providence to call forth a far more terrible despotism, in the guise of a false prophet who invents a religion of which he is to be the apostle, and then claims all power, spiritual and temporal, as belonging to him in the character of apostle, and the use of force as the means of propagation. That despotism is allowed to seize for permanent occupation the richest provinces of the eastern empire, and to make its capital in fear of perpetual subjection. But it is also used to check the imperial usurpation over the Church, and to begin an era, now lasting for twelve centuries and a half, in which two religions, and two forms of government springing from these religions, stand over against each other in perpetual and irreconcilable opposition.
The structure of the Church was vehemently shaken by the earthquake[110] which attended the pouring out of [pg 225] Islam upon the south-eastern and southern countries of the former Roman empire. It had to be seen whether the whole fabric would maintain itself upon its foundation of rock when such mighty portions of its structure were torn by main force away. Moslem writers say, when the locust swarm darkened vast countries, they bore on their wings these Arabic words:—“We are God's host, each of us has nine and ninety eggs; and if we had a hundred we should lay waste the world with all that is in it”.
The hundredth egg has never been granted, but if the assassin's stroke had not carried off Chalif Omar in 644, and again Chalif Osman in the year 656, and again Chalif Ali in the year 661, perhaps the desolation might have been fully accomplished; as also if the chalifate, created by election in 632, had not become within thirty years a mere hereditary kingdom, in which rival pretenders and rival families exhausted the strength of Islam by perpetual conflicts. The empire of the sword has also illustrated the divine decree: “All that take the sword shall perish with the sword”.