The Muslin has no ideal of chivalry like this to make his life pure and honourable: his religion encourages an opposite view, and the women among whom he is brought up only confirm it.
If Islám is to be a power for good in the future, it is imperatively necessary to cut off the social system from the religion. At the beginning, among a people who had advanced but a little way on the road of civilisation, the defects of the social system were not so apparent; but now, when Easterns are endeavouring to mix on equal terms with Europeans, and are trying to adopt the manners and customs of the West, it is clear that the condition of their women must be radically changed if any good is to come of the Europeanising tendency. The difficulty lies in the close connection between the religious and social ordinances in the Ḳur-án: the two are so intermingled that it is hard to see how they can be disentangled without destroying both. The theory of revelation would have to be modified. Muslims would have to give up their doctrine of the syllabic inspiration of the Ḳur-án and exercise their moral sense in distinguishing between the particular and the general, the temporary and the permanent: they would have to recognise that there was much in Moḥammad’s teaching which, though useful at the time, is inapplicable to the present conditions of life; that his knowledge was often partial, and his judgment sometimes at fault; that the moral sense is capable of education as much as the intellect, and, therefore, that what was apparently moral and wise in the seventh century may quite possibly be immoral and suicidal in a society of the nineteenth century. Moḥammad himself said, according to tradition, ‘I am no more than a man: when I order you anything respecting religion, receive it; and when I order you about the affairs of the world, then I am nothing more than man.’ And he seemed to foresee that the time would come when his minor regulations would call for revision: ‘Ye are in an age,’ he said, ‘in which, if ye abandon one-tenth of what is ordered, ye will be ruined. After this, a time will come when he who shall observe one-tenth of what is now ordered will be redeemed.’[21]
If Muslims would take these warnings of their prophet to heart, there would be some hope for Islám. Some few of the higher intellects among them have already admitted the principle of moral criticism applied to the Ḳur-án; but it is very doubtful whether ‘rational Islám’ will ever gain a wide following, any more than ‘rational Christianity.’ People in general do not care to think for themselves in matters religious. They like their creed served up to them as cooked meat, not raw flesh. They must have definite texts and hard-and-fast commandments to appeal to. They will not believe in the spirit, but prefer the letter. They will have nothing to say to tendencies, but must have facts. It is of no avail to speak to them of the spirit of a life or of a whole book; they must hang their doctrine on a solitary sentence. They will either believe every letter of their scripture, or they will believe nothing.
Such people make up the majority of the professors of Islám; and with them no reform, within Islám, seems possible. Among the upper (I will not call them the higher) classes, they are either fanatics or concealed infidels; and their lives are a proof of the incompatibility of ordinary Mohammadanism, real or nominal, with a high social and national life. Among the poorer classes, the social system has a more restricted field of operation, for the poor are naturally less able to avail themselves of the permissions of their Prophet. In a poor community Islám exerts an eminently salutary influence, as the condition of the Mohammadan converts in Western Africa conclusively proves. An able observer,[22] whose African birth and training qualify him in a high degree for properly understanding the true state of his countrymen, whilst his Christian profession serves as a guarantee against excessive prejudice in favour of Islám, has recorded his experience of the work of Mohammadan missionaries in Liberia and the neighbouring parts of Africa. ‘All careful and candid observers,’ he remarks, ‘agree that the influence of Islám in Central and West Africa has been, upon the whole, of a most salutary character.... As an eliminatory and subversive agency it has displaced or unsettled nothing as good as itself.’ It has inculcated habits of moderation and soberness over the whole of the vast region covered by its emissaries; and so great is the influence of its teaching, that where there are Muslim inhabitants, even in pagan towns, it is a very rare thing to see a person intoxicated. The Mohammadan converts drink nothing but water. ‘From Senegal to Lagos, over two thousand miles, there is scarcely an important town on the seaboard where there is not at least one mosque and active representatives of Islám, side by side with the Christian teacher. And as soon as a pagan, however obscure or degraded, embraces the Muslim faith, he is at once admitted as an equal to the society.... The pagan village possessing a Muslim teacher is always found to be in advance of its neighbours in all the elements of civilisation.... The introduction of Islám into Central and West Africa has been the most important, if not the sole, preservative against the desolations of the slave trade. Mohammadanism furnished a protection to the tribes who embraced it, by effectually binding them together in one strong religious fraternity, and enabling them by their united efforts to baffle the attempts of powerful slave-hunters. Enjoying this comparative immunity from sudden hostile incursion, industry was stimulated among them; industry diminished their poverty; and as they increased in worldly substance, they also increased in desire for knowledge. Receiving a desire of letters by a study of the Arabic language, they acquired loftier views, wider tastes, and those energetic habits which so pleasingly distinguish them from their pagan neighbours.’ Students often travel on foot from the west coast right across Africa to study at the great mosque of the Azhar in Cairo. It must be remembered that these results were observed in the very centre of African Christianity, in Sierra Leone and other coast settlements. It is said that in Sierra Leone three-fourths of the Muslim population were not born Muslims, but were converted from Christianity or paganism; and this, although ‘all liberated Africans are always handed over to Christian missionaries for instruction, and their children are baptized and brought up at the public expense in Christian schools, and are thus, in a sense, ready-made Christians.’
These facts show that, even in the present day, and with the competition of Christian missionary societies, Islám may be a power for good in poor communities—that it can not only give them a pure instead of a degraded faith, but can raise them socially and intellectually. The effects of a simple form of Islám on these African converts may give one some notion of its influence on its hearers in the early days, before the theologians had corrupted it.
But this good influence is very partial and limited, even among the poorer classes. In communities where all are poor, Islám is an excellent agent for improvement; but in countries where there are many grades of wealth and rank, the poor only ape in a humble manner the vices of those whom they are taught to regard as their ‘betters.’ In all civilised and wealthy countries the social system of Islám exerts a ruinous influence on all classes, and if there is to be any great future for the Mohammadan world, that system of society must be done away.
The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free.