Moreover, he was not master of the language, which partly explains the frequent repetitions to be found in the Koran. Mohammed had much trouble in composing; he seldom found at once the right word to express his thought; so he tried all methods, and hence it is that in the Koran the same ideas recur continually and only the expression changes. The Koran is crowded with degenerate words, borrowed from the Jewish, the Syrian, and the Ethiopian languages; the Arab commentators, who knew no other language than their own, wearied their brains in trying to explain them, without succeeding, however, in finding the true meaning. Moreover the Koran contains more than one infraction of the rules of grammar; and if these are less noticeable, it is because Arab grammarians, wishing to justify them, made these errors into rules or exceptions to the rules.
The Koran had, moreover, very little influence on Mohammed’s contemporaries. The Arabs had reached a very high degree of civilisation and of development—I refer to intellectual and not to material civilisation; while Mohammed was a mere enthusiast, like many others elsewhere—a fanatic, who was surpassed in understanding, science, intelligence, and even in morality by more than one of his fellow-citizens. The greater number of his contemporaries were indifferent to his pious effusions. And, in short, to find the Koran fine and sublime, faith must first have stifled common sense. The majority of the nation had not yet reached that stage. So the conversions one reads of which are attributed to certain passages of the Koran belong chiefly to the domain of pious legend and not to history; history, in fact, teaches that the multitude knew little or nothing of the Koran, and that they were moreover not at all anxious to know it.
DOCTRINE OF ISLAMISM
There is no religion less original than Islamism. It has as base Hanifitism and Mosaism as it was developed under the influence of Parseeism, together with facts borrowed from the ancient Arabic religion and Christianity, with the additional dogma that Mohammed is the greatest and the last prophet of God. That was the sum of the system preached by the Meccan prophet.
The Koran contains no deep thoughts, no poetic theories depicted in sublime and moving language. It does not try to resolve great problems by clothing them in a borrowed symbolic form. Islamism is certainly the most prosaic and monotonous of religions, and at the same time the least susceptible of modification and development. How explain this phenomenon? By the very character of the Arab people, who, in effect, hold specially to the positive. They seek even poetry in the form rather than the substance; and, everything taken into consideration, they rather resemble a developed and reasoning people of the nineteenth century than an ancient nation, still animated by the poetry of youth which other religions have produced.
Again, Mohammed counts for much. He was not a profound thinker, but an enthusiast of mediocre talent. Far from aspiring to originality, his great glory was to avoid it, since he never ceased repeating that the doctrine he preached had been announced from all time by prophets of old. There is a third reason still which must not be lost sight of: In other countries religion developed gradually—it was not the founder who wrote, but his disciples; thus each author imprinted more or less his individuality on his book, and this circumstance, which naturally excludes uniformity, imposed on future ages the duty of not keeping to the letter but entering into the very spirit of the text. There was nothing of this kind in Arabia. There, a single man regulated everything—faith, customs, even the law. The Koran is a book made by one man who exposes the immutable will of God. Islamism has thus a great fixity. One knows not how to contest it; but, far from being a cause of satisfaction, this must be deplored; for continual progress is a task imposed on humanity.
The laws of the Koran still flourish and will do so as long as Islamism exists. That they were good for those times, and then constituted real progress, may be admitted without difficulty. But the laws of Charlemagne were just as excellent for their epoch; yet where would now be all the people over whom he reigned, had they been condemned always to preserve and follow these laws? Would not progress have been impossible for western Europe? The legislation of the Koran hardly enters into the scope of our subject, and we will keep to its doctrines. It has been so often analysed, and moreover presents so little originality, that we shall make a very rapid survey of it.
The unity of God is the first article of faith; the second, the divine mission of Mohammed. The God of Mohammed resembles the Allah Taala of the primitive Arabic religion, the Jehovah of Mosaism, and the Ahuramazda of the Parsee monotheist not yet corrupted. The story of creation is borrowed from the Jews. The jinns of primitive religion have been preserved, transformed into angels and demons. That is what Zoroaster did with regard to the Indian divinities, the devas. It is forbidden to honour the angels, they are perishable and will die in the day of judgment. The arch-fiend also has the Hebrew name of Satan and the Greek one of Iblis (Diabolos); but as Ahriman of the duallist Neopardism has never taken his true signification in Judaism, the idea the Koran gives of the arch-fiend and his subjects is more Christian than Jewish. However, Mohammed diverges in one point from church doctrine—the impossibility of converting devils. According to him devils may be converted, and he himself has converted many.
The revelations of God are worked by means of prophets and holy books. Each period has its revelation which God modifies according to the needs of the time, and this idea, beautiful in itself, would be fecund if Mohammed had not given his revelation as the last and most perfect. Adam had already received the gift of prophecy, and the number of prophets was not inconsiderable, seeing they were ordinarily reckoned at 124,000, but the six greatest are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The Koran admits the miraculous birth of Jesus—for brevity’s sake we will not speak of all the others—but he was not the Son of God but a man in the proper sense of the word, and witnessed in speaking of himself that he was only a servant of the Divinity; he declares that not he but God alone is omniscient. On the judgment day, Allah will say: “Oh, Jesus, Son of Mary, hast thou said to men, place my mother and myself as gods by the side of God?” And Jesus will answer, “Far be the thought from me; how can I pretend to a name which does not belong to me?” It is not so clearly seen whether the Koran admits the Ascension. As to miracles, Jesus did a great number, even when his mother was still feeding him, and later he raised the dead, etc. To crown all, it was not he who was crucified, but a man whom they took for him. The principal object of his doctrine was, like that of all prophets, to announce the unity of God.