We heard Mohammed summoning Medina to the battle of Badr. He did not hesitate then to appeal to the plunder-motive, nor did the early Caliphs and their successors ever since. Mothanna, who led the Moslem soldiers against the army of Persia—their first trial of strength against the organized army of a mighty empire—'haranguing his troops at the outset of the campaign, and, in the very first flush of religious enthusiasm, says much of plunder, captives, concubines, and forfeit lands, but not one word about Islam, God, and the Faith.' Sir William Muir tells the story of a Moslem soldier eighty years old who, seeing a comrade fall by his side, cried out, 'O Paradise, how close thou art beneath the arrow's point and the falchion's flash! O Hâshim, even now I see Heaven opened, and black-eyed maidens all bridally arrayed, who clasp thee in their fond embrace.' True to its formal character, Islam asks no question as to motives of 'belief.' Those who struck for God alone, or for God plus Paradise, or for Paradise and plunder without God, or for plunder pure and simple, were all the 'Blessed of the Lord,' heroes and saints, and, if they perished, martyrs in the 'path of God.'
(c) Simplicity of Creed and Practice.
(3) The simplicity of Islam was and always has been part of its charm. That simplicity is without doubt supposed rather than real; still, for the peoples whom the Moslem hosts conquered, and on whom, moreover, they imposed their Faith, it was simple enough—God and His Prophet; Islam—we must submit to God. Once that was acknowledged, the ritual of Moslem religious practice easily followed. It swept away the superstitious fears of pagan peoples, and the sectarian animosities of feeble Christians. It made but the smallest demands upon the character of a man, and gave but the slightest curb to his passions. Then, as now, he might be bandit, assassin, adulterer, anything but a drunkard or a denier of the Prophet, and yet the best of fighting Moslems.
(d) Patriotism of Arabs.
(4) No nation that is not utterly degenerate, whatever its government or lack thereof, whatever its divisions, is impervious to a patriotic cry that summons a nation to realize itself, to be united in one common cause and take its place among the other nations of the world. This and more than this Mohammed meant to Arabia, and Draper has showed us how quickly the Arabs passed through the various stages of intellectual and national life.[[1]] Till almost the end of the Prophet's life (632 A.D.), Arabia was an unknown and quite negligible peninsula to the civilized world. A century later (732 A.D.) the Saracens (as the Moslems came to be called), conquerors of Spain, were fighting a seven days' battle at Tours on the banks of the Loire with Charles Martel, the Frank.
(e) Enthusiasm of a Great Cause.
(5) Is it suggesting another cause, or is it perhaps the sum of these four, to say that, once it was going, it was the enthusiasm of a great campaign that drove the Moslem hosts along? History has shown what this can do in lesser causes. What was it sustained the Carthaginian soldiers as they painfully followed Hannibal through the passes of the Alps? What sustained Napoleon's troops through the miseries of that Russian winter? Was it the purpose, or was it the fact that they had a purpose? Was it discipline and fear, or enthusiasm for their general's name? Before Mohammed's time, an Arab lived to drive his camel and attend his caravan. Now there was a purpose—a Divine purpose—for every Arab's life, a cause demanding all his manhood and perhaps his life. To carry the white standard of the Prophet to the limits of the world in a great and glorious campaign—that was the will of Allah!
There are few things in history more magnificent than the picture of Ugba leading his army across Syria, Egypt, Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Morocco, to the Atlantic shore, and urging his horse into the waves, exclaiming, 'Great God, if I were not stopped by this raging sea, I would go on to the nations of the West, preaching the unity of Thy Name, and putting to the sword those who would not submit.'
There are few things to-day more magnificent than the zeal of the average Moslem for his Faith.