Selections from the Kur-an

by Unknown

A great change now comes over the Prophet’s life. It is still the same man, but the surroundings are totally different; the work to be done is on a wider, rougher stage. Thus far we have seen a gentle, thoughtful boy tending the sheep round Mekka;—a young man of little note, of whom the people only knew that he was pure and upright and true;—then a man of forty whose solitary communion with his soul has pressed him to the last terrible questions that each man, if he will think at all, must some time ask himself—What is life? What does this world mean? What is reality, what is truth? Long months, years perhaps, we know not how long and weary, filled with the tortures of doubt and the despair of ever attaining to the truth, filled with the dreary thought of his aloneness in the relentless universe, and the longing to end it all, brought at last their fruits—sure conviction of the great secret of life, a firm belief in the Creator in whom all things live and move and have their being, whom to serve is man’s highest duty and privilege, the one thing to be done. And then ten years of struggling with careless, unthinking idolators; ten years of slow results, the gaining over of a few close friends, the devoted attachment of some slaves and men of the meaner rank; finally, the conversion of half-a-dozen great citizen chiefs, ending in the flight of the whole brotherhood of believers from their native city and their welcome to a town of strangers, where the faith had forced itself home to the hearts of perhaps two hundred citizens. It was but little that was done; so many years of toil, of indomitable courage and perseverance and long-suffering, and only about three hundred converts at the end! But it was the seed of a great harvest. Moḥammad had shown men what he was; the nobility of his character, his strong friendship, his endurance and courage, above all, his earnestness and fiery enthusiasm for the truth he came to preach,—these things had revealed the hero, the master whom it was alike impossible to disobey and impossible not to love. Henceforward it is only a question of time. As the men of Medina come to know Moḥammad, they too will devote themselves to him body and soul; and the enthusiasm will catch fire and spread among the tribes till all Arabia is at the feet of the Prophet of the One God. ‘No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of His own clouting.’ He had the gift of influencing men, and he had the nobility only to influence them for good.

We have now to see Moḥammad as king. Though he came as a fugitive, rejected as an impostor by his own citizens, yet it was not long before his word was supreme in his adopted city. He had to rule over a mixed and divided people, and this must have helped him to the supreme voice. There were four distinct parties at Medina. First, the ‘Refugees’ (Muḥájiroon), who had fled from Mekka; on these Moḥammad could always rely with implicit faith. But he attached equal importance to the early converts of Medina, who had invited him among them and given him a home when the future seemed very hopeless before him, and who were thenceforward known by the honourable title of the ‘Helpers’ (Anṣár). How devoted was the affection of these men is shown by the well-known scene at El-Ji´ráneh, when the Helpers were discontented with their share of the spoils, and Moḥammad answered, ‘Why are ye disturbed in mind because of the things of this life wherewith I have sought to incline the hearts of these men of Mekka into Islám, whereas ye are already steadfast in the faith? Are ye not satisfied that others should obtain the flocks and the camels, while ye carry back the Prophet of the Lord unto your homes? Nay, I will not leave you for ever. If all mankind went one way, and the men of Medina went another way, verily I would go the way of the men of Medina. The Lord be favourable unto them, and bless them, and their sons, and their sons’ sons, for ever!’ And the ‘Helpers’ wept upon their beards, and cried with one voice, ‘Yea, we are well satisfied, O Prophet, with our lot.’ To retain the allegiance of the Refugees and the Helpers was never a trouble to Moḥammad; the only difficulty was to rein in their zeal and hold them back from doing things of blood and vengeance on the enemies of Islám. To prevent the danger of jealousy between the Refugees and the Helpers, Moḥammad assigned each Refugee to one of the Anṣár to be his brother; and this tie of gossipry superseded all nearer ties, till Moḥammad saw the time was over when it was needed. The third party in Medina was that of the ‘Disaffected,’ or in the language of Islám the ‘Hypocrites’ (Munáfiḳoon). This was composed of the large body of men who gave in their nominal allegiance to Moḥammad and his religion when they saw they could not safely withstand his power, but who were always ready to turn about if they thought there was a chance of his overthrow. Moḥammad treated these men and their leader ´Abdallah ibn Ubayy (who himself aspired to the sovranty of Medina) with patient courtesy and friendliness, and, though they actually deserted him more than once at vitally critical moments, he never retaliated, even when he was strong enough to crush them, but rather sought to win them over heartily to his cause by treating them as though they were what he would have them be. The result was that this party gradually diminished and became absorbed in the general mass of earnest Muslims, and though up to its leader’s death it constantly called forth Moḥammad’s powers of conciliation, after that it vanished from the history of parties.

The fourth party was the real thorn in the Prophet’s side. It consisted of the Jews, of whom three tribes were settled in the suburbs of Medina. They had at first been well disposed to Moḥammad’s coming. He could not indeed be the Messiah, because he was not of the lineage of David; but he would do very well to pass off upon their neighbours, the pagan Arabs, as, if not the Messiah, at least a great prophet; and by his influence the Jews might regain their old supremacy in Medina. Moḥammad’s teaching was very nearly Jewish—they had taught him the fables of their Haggadah, and he believed in their prophets—why should he not be one of them and help them to the dominion? When Moḥammad came, they found out their mistake; instead of a tool they had a master. He told the people, indeed, the stories of the Midrash, and he professed to revive the religion of Abraham: but he added to this several damning articles; he taught that Jesus was the Messiah, and that no other Messiah was to be looked for; and, moreover, whilst reverencing and inculcating the doctrine of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ, as he knew it, he yet insisted on his own mission as in nowise inferior to theirs—as, in fact, the seal of prophecy by which all that went before was confirmed or abrogated. The illusion was over; the Jews would have nothing to say to Islám: they set themselves instead to oppose it, ridicule it, and vex its Preacher in every way that their notorious ingenuity could devise.

The step was false: the Jews missed their game, and they had to pay for it. Whether it was possible to form a coalition,—whether the Jews might have induced Moḥammad to waive certain minor points if they recognised his prophetic mission,—it is difficult to say. It seems most probable that Moḥammad would not have yielded a jot to their demands, and would have accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender to his religion. And it is at least doubtful whether Islám would have gained anything by a further infusion of Judaism. It already contained all that it could assimilate of the Hebrew faith; the rest was too narrow for the universal scope of Islám. The religion of Moḥammad lost little, we may be sure, by the standing aloof of the Arabian Jews; but the Jews themselves lost much. Moḥammad, indeed, treated them kindly so long as kindness was possible. He made a treaty with them, whereby the rights of the Muslims and the Jews were defined. They were to practise their several religions unmolested; protection and security were promised to all the parties to the treaty, irrespective of creed; each was to help the other if attacked; no alliance was to be made with the Ḳureysh; war was to be made in common, and no war could be made without the consent of Moḥammad: crime alone could do away with the protection of this treaty.

But the Jews would not content themselves with standing aloof; they must needs act on the offensive. They began by asking Moḥammad hard questions out of their law, and his answers they easily refuted from their books. They denied all knowledge of the Jewish stories in the Ḳur-án—though they knew that they came from their own Haggadah, which was ever in their mouths in their own quarter,—and they showed him their Bible, where, of course, the Haggadistic legends were not to be found. Moḥammad had but one course open to him—to say they had suppressed or changed their books; and he denounced them accordingly, and said that his was the true account of the patriarchs and prophets, revealed from heaven. Not satisfied with tormenting Moḥammad with questions on that Tórah which they were always wrangling about themselves, they took hold of the every day formulas of Islám, the daily prayers and ejaculations, and, ‘twisting their tongues,’ mispronounced them so that they meant something absurd or blasphemous. When asked which they preferred, Islám or idolatry, they frankly avowed that they preferred idolatry. To lie about their own religion and to ridicule another religion that was doing a great and good work around them was not enough for these Jews; they must set their poets to work to lampoon the women of the believers in obscene verse, and such outrages upon common decency, not to say upon the code of Arab honour and chivalry, became a favourite occupation among the poets of the Jewish clans.

These were offences against the religion and the persons of the Muslims. They also conspired against the state. Moḥammad was not only the preacher of Islám, he was also the king of Medina, and was responsible for the safety and peace of the city. As a prophet, he could afford to ignore the jibes of the Jews, though they maddened him to fury; but as the chief of the city, the general in a time of almost continual warfare, when Medina was kept in a state of military defence and under a sort of military discipline, he could not overlook treachery. He was bound by his duty to his subjects to suppress a party that might (and nearly did) lead to the sack of the city by investing armies. The measures he took for this object have furnished his European biographers with a handle for attack. It is, I believe, solely on the ground of his treatment of the Jews that Moḥammad has been called ‘a bloodthirsty tyrant:’ it would certainly be difficult to support the epithet on other grounds.

The bloodthirstiness consists in this: some half-dozen Jews, who had distinguished themselves by their virulence against the Muslims, or by their custom of carrying information to the common enemy of Medina, were executed; two of the three Jewish clans were sent into exile, just as they had previously come into exile, and the third was exterminated—the men killed, and the women and children made slaves. The execution of the half-dozen marked Jews is generally called assassination, because a Muslim was sent secretly to kill each of the criminals. The reason is almost too obvious to need explanation. There were no police or law-courts or even courts-martial at Medina; some one of the followers of Moḥammad must therefore be the executor of the sentence of death, and it was better it should be done quietly, as the executing of a man openly before his clan would have caused a brawl and more bloodshed and retaliation, till the whole city had become mixed up in the quarrel. If secret assassination is the word for such deeds, secret assassination was a necessary part of the internal government of Medina. The men must be killed, and best in that way. In saying this I assume that Moḥammad was cognisant of the deed, and that it was not merely a case of private vengeance; but in several instances the evidence that traces these executions to Moḥammad’s order is either entirely wanting or is too doubtful to claim our credence.

Of the sentences upon the three whole clans, that of exile, passed upon two of them, was clement enough. They were a turbulent set, always setting the people of Medina by the ears; and finally a brawl followed by an insurrection resulted in the expulsion of one tribe; and insubordination, alliance with enemies, and a suspicion of conspiracy against the Prophet’s life, ended similarly for the second. Both tribes had violated the original treaty, and had endeavoured in every way to bring Moḥammad and his religion to ridicule and destruction. The only question is whether their punishment was not too light. Of the third clan a fearful example was made, not by Moḥammad, but by an arbiter appointed by themselves. When the Ḳureysh and their allies were besieging Medina, and had well-nigh stormed the defences, this Jewish tribe entered into negotiations with the enemy, which were only circumvented by the diplomacy of the Prophet. When the besiegers had retired, Moḥammad naturally demanded an explanation of the Jews. They resisted in their dogged way, and were themselves besieged and compelled to surrender at discretion. Moḥammad, however, consented to the appointing of a chief of a tribe allied to the Jews as the judge who should pronounce sentence upon them. The man in question was a fierce soldier, who had been wounded in the attack on the Jews, and indeed died from his wound the same day. This chief gave sentence that the men, in number some six hundred, should be killed, and the women and children enslaved; and the sentence was carried out. It was a harsh, bloody sentence, worthy of the episcopal generals of the army against the Albigenses, or of the deeds of the Augustan age of Puritanism; but it must be remembered that the crime of these men was high treason against the State, during time of siege; and those who have read how Wellington’s march could be traced by the bodies of deserters and pillagers hanging from the trees, need not be surprized at the summary execution of a traitorous clan.

Whilst Moḥammad’s supremacy was being established and maintained among the mixed population of Mekka, a vigorous warfare was being carried on outside with his old persecutors, the Ḳureysh. On the history of this war, consisting as it did mainly of small raids and attacks upon caravans, I need not dwell; its leading features were the two battles of Bedr and Oḥud, in the first of which three hundred Muslims, though outnumbered at the odds of three to one, were completely victorious (a.d. 624, a.h. 2); whilst at Oḥud, being outnumbered in the like proportion and deserted by the ‘Disaffected’ party, they were almost as decisively defeated (a.h. 3). Two years later the Ḳureysh, gathering together their allies, advanced upon Medina and besieged it for fifteen days; but the foresight of Moḥammad in digging a trench, and the enthusiasm of the Muslims in defending it, resisted all assaults, and the coming of the heavy storms for which the climate of Medina is noted drove the enemy back to Mekka. The next year (a.h. 6) a ten years’ truce was concluded with the Ḳureysh, in pursuance of which a strange scene took place in the following spring. It was agreed that Moḥammad and his people should perform the Lesser Pilgrimage, and that the Ḳureysh should for that purpose vacate Mekka for three days. Accordingly, in March 629, about two thousand Muslims, with Moḥammad at their head on his famous camel El-Ḳaṣwá—the same on which he had fled from Mekka—trooped down the valley and performed the rites which every Muslim to this day observes.

‘It was surely a strange sight which at this time presented itself in the vale of Mekka,—a sight unique in the history of the world. The ancient city is for three days evacuated by all its inhabitants, high and low, every house deserted; and, as they retire, the exiled converts, many years banished from their birthplace, approach in a great body, accompanied by their allies, revisit the empty homes of their childhood, and within the short allotted space fulfil the rites of pilgrimage. The ousted inhabitants, climbing the heights around, take refuge under tents or other shelter among the hills and glens; and, clustering on the overhanging peak of Aboo-Ḳubeys, thence watch the movements of the visitors beneath, as with the Prophet at their head they make the circuit of the Kaạbeh and the rapid procession between Eṣ-Ṣafá and Marwah; and anxiously scan every figure if perchance they may recognise among the worshippers some long-lost friend or relative. It was a scene rendered possible only by the throes which gave birth to Islám.’[15]