Here Arab and Jew are one. Who has seen the desert understands: this indomitable urge born of the sand-sea, to be moving, to pass horizons, to be moving forever. The desert impulse in the Hebrew was sublimated. Not his body, but his god should pass horizons! When the Jews’ body migrated, Jehovah became static. Only when the body took deep roots—in Palestine, in Spain, in the Talmud at worst (in America perhaps tomorrow)—could the transfigured Jewish God pass the horizons. But the balance held: as the Jews’ spirit spread, their body remained an atom. With the Arabs, it was the body that expanded. Before the Prophet, it had expanded impotently in civil conflict. Mohammed brought this energy to order. But even he knew of no principle of expansion higher than the raid and the empire.
Arabia expanded. Persia, Abyssinia, India, Egypt, the Sahara, Spain became parts of Islam that was Araby in motion. The Jew discovered that to spread in the spirit was to be immobile in the life. Not so the Arab. The Jew learned that only an unmoving and an unmoved God could pass horizons. But in Islam, to expand still meant to move. The law of balance between inner and outer energy was not transcended. The Idea of Islam became all body: all moving, conquering body. Here went the Moslem energy. The energy that dwelt in that hid precinct of creative thought was sapped to a low ebb. In the person of Mohammed, there was energy both for conquest and for the subtler dominance of law and wisdom. He elected that the ideas, the forms, the rituals, the experience, and truth which he created should suffice for all time for his peoples. All their powers might hence be transformed into the stupendous business of outward conquest.
Of course, this was not strictly to be. Many ideas of Islam were born after the Prophet’s death. Even the Koran may have been amended. The Moslem architectures, the Moslem philosophies both mystical and materialistic, much of the Moslem ritual, would have been strange to Mohammed. But independent growths of the spirit could not become organic within Islam. For in the Idea, there was the law that only Body of Islam could expand: its thought and vision were create, forever. In consequence, the few new crystallizations called forth by the new needs of Islamic empire became endowed at once with the old principle of fixity, with the sanctity of intransigent stagnation. The body moved. The forms of the body did not move. Wherefore, as soon as the body ceased to add unto itself by outward conquest, it began to rot.
This is the tragedy of Islam. It is writ large in symbols of the present. Fez and Rbat and Bagdad are fetid relics of gone loveliness. Their life has no virtue of rejuvenation; there was in Islam no autonomy of method for the creating of ideas whereby life is recreated. The Arab literary language is identical with the Koran’s. Dogma declares that the hodge-podge splendor of Mohammed’s script is perfection: who shall dare change perfection? So Arabic literature today is an archaic grimace: a spirit muffled by the masque of thirteen hundred years. And the spoken language, as divergent from the classic as French from Latin, is noisy and yet mute. Moslem architecture has not evolved. The mosque of today is a faithful imitation of some antique model. Prayer has not changed. Science has not changed. The Idea of Islam has forbidden its own growth.
But if this death from inanition is patent in modern Islam, it is implicit in the source. The fruit, only, of the religious impulse lives, for it alone holds the rounding of life’s circle. The religious act—be it art or be it ethics—cannot exhaust itself, because each forward step is an approach to the beginning. The man possessed of religion is possessed of a universal principle; and what he does cannot die. The forms and words of his activity may grow archaic—like the sculpture of Egypt, like the gods of the Rig-Veda. But the activity itself is forever an approach to the Source. The farther the religious man goes afield, the closer he will come to the Primordial Fountain, since all his life is plotted to a circle. And if he lose his life, then will he win it. But with the unreligious will, each act is a severance from source. The unreligious is the incomplete. And its symbol is the unreal straight line which moves away from its beginning.[5]
Even in its classic mosque, Islam betrays its unreligious essence. The mosque is a patchwork of details, a mosaic of finery for the senses. The very character of the mosaic is unreligious. For it represents the analytic, not the One. The minaret has no relation with the aspirant Phallus, or with the sublimated Phallus of the Christian church. The minaret is a down-tending structure upon which the muedzin stands, not to send prayer to Allah, but orders to the people.
The religion of the Koran is a caricature of God drawn in the lying lines of time and space.