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 Mohammed and Mohammedanism 
 
 LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE 
 
 ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 IN 
 
 FEBRUARY and MARCH 1874 
 
 R^ BOSWORTH SMITH, M.A. 
 
 M 
 
 ASSISTANT-MASTER IN HARROW SCHOOL 
 LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 y^^ 
 
 LONDON 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1874 
 
 AH risJits reserved 
 

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 NULLIUS NON LABORIS PARTICIPI, 
 HUJUSCE PR^SERTIM OPUSCULI INSTIGATRICI ET ADMINISTRA". 
 
 STUDIORUM COMMUNITATIS 
 HAS, QUALESCUNQUE SINT, PRIMITIAS 
 
 D E D I C O. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The substance of these Lectures was written 
 early in 1872 : they were originally intended 
 only for a select audience of friends at Harrow, 
 but on the suggestion of some of those who 
 heard them they were afterwards considerably 
 enlarged, and were delivered before the Royal 
 Institution of Great Britain in the months of 
 February and March 1874. 
 
 They are an attempt, however Imperfect, 
 within a narrow compass, but, it is hoped, from 
 a somewhat comprehensive and independent 
 point of view, to render justice to what was great 
 in Mohammed's character, and to what has been 
 ofood In Mohammed's influence on the world. To 
 original Oriental research they lay no claim, nor 
 indeed to much originality at all ; perhaps the 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 subject hardly now admits of It: but, thanks to 
 the numerous translations of the Koran into 
 European languages, and to the great works of 
 Oriental scholars, such as Caussin de Perceval, 
 Sprenger, Muir, and Deutsch, the materials for 
 forming an impartial judgment of the Prophet 
 of Arabia are within the reach of any earnest 
 student of the Science of Religion, and of all who 
 care, as those who have ever studied Moham- 
 med's character must care, for the deeper 
 problems of the human soul. 
 
 The value of the estimate formed of the 
 influence of Mohammedanism on the world at 
 large must, of course, depend upon such a 
 modicum of general historical knowledge, and 
 such Catholic sympathies, as the writer has been 
 able, amidst other pressing duties, to bring to 
 his work. The only qualification he would 
 venture to claim for himself in the matter is that 
 of a sympathetic interest in his subject, and of a 
 conscientious desire first to divest himself of all 
 preconceived ideas, and then by a careful study 
 of the Koran itself, and afterwards of its best 
 expounders, to arrive as nearly as may be at the 
 truth. How vast is the interval between his 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 wishes and his performance the author knoAvs 
 full well, and any one who has ever been fairly 
 fascinated with a great subject, will know also ; 
 foi; he will have felt that to have the will is not 
 always to have the power, and that the framing 
 of an ideal implies the consciousness of failure 
 to attain to it. 
 
 A Christian who retains that paramount 
 allegiance to Christianity which is his birthright, 
 and yet attempts, without favour and without 
 prejudice, to portray another religion, is inevita- 
 bly exposed to misconstruction. In the study of 
 his subject he will have been struck sometimes 
 by the extraordinary resemblance between his 
 own creed and another, sometimes by the sharp- 
 ness of the contrast; and, in order to avoid those 
 misrepresentations, which are, unfortunately, 
 never so common as where they ought to be 
 unknown, in the discussion of religious ques- 
 tions, — he will be tempted, in filling in the 
 portrait, to project his own personal predilec- 
 tions on the canvas, and to bring the differences 
 into full relief, while he leaves the resemblances 
 in shadow. And yet a comparison between 
 
X PRE FA CE 
 
 two systems, if it is to have any fruitful results, 
 if its object is to unite rather than divide, if, in 
 short, it is to be of the spirit of the Founder of 
 Christianity, must, in matters of religion above 
 all, be based on what is common to both. There 
 is, in the human race, in spite of their manifold 
 diversities, a good deal of human nature ; enough, 
 at all events, to entitle us to assume that the 
 Founders of any two religious systems which 
 have had a great and continued hold upon a 
 large part of mankind must have had many 
 points of contact. Accordingly, in comparing, 
 as he has done to some extent, the founder of 
 Islam with the Founder of Christianity — a 
 comparison which, if it were not expressed, 
 would always be implied — the author of these 
 Lectures has thought it right mainly to dwell 
 on that aspect of the character of Christ, which, 
 being admitted by Mussulmans as well as Chris- 
 tians, by foes as well as friends, may possibly 
 serve as a basis, if not for an ultimate agreement, 
 at all events for an agreement to differ from 
 one another upon terms of greater S3^mpathy 
 and forbearance, of understanding and of 
 respect. 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 That Islam will ever give way to Christianity 
 in the East, however much we may desire it, 
 and whatever good would result to the world, 
 it is difficult to believe ; but it is certain that 
 Mohammedans may learn much from Chris- 
 tians and yet remain Mohammedans, and that 
 Christians have something at least to learn 
 from Mohammedans, which will make them 
 not less but more Christian than they were 
 before. If we would conquer Nature, we must 
 first obey her ; and the Fourth Lecture is an 
 attempt to show, from a full recognition of the 
 facts of Nature underlying both religions — of the 
 points of difference as well as of resemblance — 
 that Mohammedanism, if it can never become 
 actually one with Christianity, may yet, by a 
 process of mutual approximation and mutual 
 understanding, prove its best ally. In other 
 words, the author believes that there is a unity 
 above and beyond that unity of Christendom 
 which, properly understood, all earnest Chris- 
 tians so much desire ; a unity which rests upon 
 the belief that ' the children of one Father may 
 worship Him under different names ;' that they 
 may be influenced by one spirit, even though 
 
xii PRE FA CE 
 
 they know it not ; that they may all have one 
 hope, even if they have not one faith. 
 
 Harrow: April 15, 1873. 
 
 I have to return my best thanks to my friend 
 Mr. Arthur Watson, for a careful revision of 
 my manuscript, and for several valuable suggestions. 
 
 It may be serviceable to English readers to men- 
 tion the more accessible works upon the subject, 
 to the writers of which I desire here to express my 
 general obligations, over and above the acknowledg- 
 ment, in the text, wherever I am conscious of them, 
 of special debts. I am the more anxious to do this 
 fully here, as, while I am quite aware that I could not 
 have written on this subject at all without making 
 their labours the basis of mine, I have yet In the 
 exercise of my own judgment been often obliged to 
 criticise their reasonings and their conclusions. I can 
 only hope that even where I have ventured to express 
 a somewhat vehement dissent from my authorities, 
 they will kindly credit me with something at least of the 
 verecunde dissentio, which becomes a learner, and of 
 the zeal for truth, or for his Idea of It, which becomes 
 a writer, however diffident of himself, on a great 
 subject. 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 *The Koran,' translated by Sale, with an elaborate Intro- 
 duction and full Notes drawn from the Arabic Commentators 
 
 (1734). 
 
 ' The Koran/ translated by Savary (1782), also with instruc- 
 tive explanatory Notes. 
 
 *The Koran,' translated by Rodwell (1861) : the Suras ar- 
 ranged, as far as possible, chronologically. 
 
 V 
 
 Gagnier's 'Vie de Mahomet' (1732) ; drawn chiefly from 
 Abul Feda and the Sonna. 
 
 Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; ' Chapters 
 L., LI., LI I. (1788). A most masterly and complete picture. 
 ■^' Weil's 'Mohamed der Prophet' (1845). Able and to the point. 
 V Caussin de Perceval's 'Essaisur I'Histoire des Arabes,' &c. 
 . (1847) gives particularly full information upon the obscure sub- 
 ject of early Arabian history, and is written from an absolutely 
 neutral point of view. 
 
 Sprenger's 'Life of Mohammad,' Allahabad, 1851; and his 
 •^ greater work, ' Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohamad' (185 1- 
 1861), the most exhaustive, original, and learned of all, but by 
 no means the most impartial ; he is often, as I shall point out, 
 on one or two occasions, in the notes, flagrantly unfair to 
 Mohammed. 
 
 Sir William Muir's 'Life of Mahomet' (185 8-1 861). Learned 
 and comprehensive, able and fair ; though its scientific value is 
 somewhat impaired by theological assumptions as to the nature 
 of inspiration, and by the introduction of a personal Ahriman, 
 which, while it is self-contradictory in its supposed operation, 
 seems to me only to create new difficulties, instead of solving 
 old ones. 
 
 'The Talmud,* an article in the ' Quarterly Review' (October, 
 1867) ; * Islam,' an article in the ' Quarterly Review' (October, 
 1869) ; both full of most recondite Eastern learning. Had the 
 lamented author lived to finish the work he shadowed forth 
 in the last of these, he would probably have drawn a juster and 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 more vivid picture of Islam as a whole than has ever yet been 
 given to the world. 
 
 For less elaborate works : — 
 
 Ockley's * History of the Saracens from 632-705.' Pictu- 
 resque; dealing largely in romance (1708-1718). 
 
 Hallam's ' Middle Ages/ Chapter VI. (18 18); Milman's ' Latin 
 Christianity/ Book IV., Chapters I. and II. (1857) ; both good 
 samples of the high merits of each as an historian. 
 
 Carlyle's ^Hero as Prophet' (1846). Most stimulating. 
 
 Washington Irving's ^ Life of Mahomet' (1849). The work 
 of a novelist, but strangely divested of all romance. 
 
 Lecture by Dean Stanley in his 'Eastern Church' (1862). 
 Has the peculiar charm of all the author's writings. Catholic in 
 its sympathies, and suggestive, as well from his treatment of the 
 subject as from the place the author assigns to it on the 
 borders of, if not within, the Eastern Church itself. 
 
 Barth^lemy St.-Hilaire's * Mahomet et le Koran' (1865), a 
 comprehensive and very useful review of most of what has been 
 written on the subject. 
 
 On the general subject of Comparative Religion : — 
 
 ' Religions of the World/ by F. D. Maurice (1846). Perhaps 
 of all his writings the one which best shows us the character 
 and mind of the man. 
 
 ' Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse,' by Renan (1858). Ingenious 
 and fascinating, but not always, nor indeed often, convincing. 
 X '■ Les Religions et les Philosophies dans FAsie Centrale/ by 
 
 Gobineau (1866), gives the best account extant of Babyism in 
 Persia. 
 
 'Chips from a German Workshop' (1868), and 'Introduc- 
 tion to the Science of Religion' (1873), by Max Miiller. Un- 
 fortunately the author says very little about Mohammedanism, 
 but from him I have derived some very valuable suggestions as 
 
PREFACE XV 
 
 to the general treatment of the subject. Perhaps it is well that 
 the extraordinary learning and genius of Mr. Max Miiller should 
 be given mainly to subjects which are less within the reach of 
 ordinary European students than is Islam^ but it is impossible 
 not to wish that he may some day give the world a 'Chip' or 
 two on the Religion of Mohammed. 
 
 For books which throw light on the specialities of Moham- 
 medanism in different countries : — 
 
 Al-Makkari's ' History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in 
 Spain ' (Eng. Trans.). 
 
 Sir John Malcolm's '■ History of Persia/ 1815. 
 
 Condi's ' History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain ' 
 (1820-21). 
 
 Crawfurd's ' Indian Archipelago' (1820). 
 
 Colonel Briggs' ' Rise of the Mohammedan Power in India/ 
 translated from the Persian of Ferishta (1829). 
 
 Sir Stamford Raffles' 'History of Java' (2nd edition), (1830). 
 
 Burckhardt's 'Travels in Arabia' (1829). 
 
 Caille's ' Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo/ 1830. 
 
 Burckhardt's 'Notes on the Bedouins and Wah-Habees' 
 
 (1831). 
 
 Lane's ' Modern Egyptians ' (1836). 
 
 Burton's 'Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina' (1856). 
 
 Barth's 'Travels in Central Africa' (1857). 
 
 Waltz's 'Anthropologic der Naturvolker' (Leipsig, i860). 
 
 Lane's ' Notes to his Translation of the Thousand and One 
 
 Nights ' (new edition, edited by E. S. Poole, 1865). 
 
 Elphinstone's ' History of India'" (3rd edition), (1866). 
 
 Palgrave's 'Arabia' (1867). 
 
 V ^ Our Indian Mussulmans,' by W. W. Hunter (1871). 
 
 Burton's 'Zanzibar' (1872). 
 
 Shaw's ' High Tartary, Yarkaad, and Kashgar' (1871). 
 
 Palgrave's 'Essays on Eastern Subjects' (1872). 
 
 'Report of the General Missionary Conference at Allahabad' 
 
 (1873). 
 
xvi PRE FA CE 
 
 Three Articles in Periodical Literature, besides 'Islam' men- 
 tioned above, are of very high merit, and have furnished me, 
 in enlarging my work, with some matter for reflection or criti- 
 cism: — 
 
 * Mahomet,' 'National Review' (July 1858). 
 
 * The Great Arabian,' 'National Review' (October rS6i). 
 ' Mahomet,' ' British Quarterly Review ' (January 1872). 
 
 Among other works which I regret I have not been able to 
 consult may be mentioned: — 
 
 Gerock's ' Versuch einer Darstellung der Christologie des 
 Koran' (Homburg, 1839). 
 
 Freeman's ' Lectures on the History and Conquests of the 
 Saracens ' (1856). 
 vX Geiger's ' Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume auf- 
 
 genommen ? ' 
 -^ Noldeke's 'Gescbichte des Qorans.' 
 
 * Essays on the Life of Mohamnjed and subjects subsidiary 
 thereto,' by Syed Ahmed Khan Bahador, 1870. 
 
 ' A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of 
 Mohammed,' by Syed Ameer Ali Moulla (1873). 
 
 The last two books I had not heard of when 
 I wrote the substance of these Lectures ; and in en- 
 larging my work, I have purposely abstained from 
 consulting them, as I have been given to understand 
 that from a Mohammedan point of view they ad- 
 vocate something of the spirit, and arrive at some of 
 the results, which it had been my object to urge from 
 the Christian stand-point. I would not, of course, 
 venture to compare my own imperfect work, derived 
 as it is in the main from the study of books in the 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 European languages, and from reflection upon the 
 materials they supply, with works drawn, as I pre- 
 sume, directly from the fountain-head. But if the 
 starting-points be different, and the routes entirely 
 independent of each other, and yet there turns out 
 to be a similarity in the results arrived at, possibly 
 each may feel greater confidence that there is some- 
 thing of value in his conclusions. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 -«o«- 
 
 - LECTURE I. ■ 
 
 Introductory. 
 
 Comparative Religion. — Historical Religions of the world moral in 
 their origin, not theological. — ^Judaism — Buddhism — Christianity, — 
 Religion in Greece — Question of originality of Mohammedanism. — 
 Two views of Religion. — Obscurity of all origins, above all of Religion 
 — Dim knowledge of Founders of other Religions — Full knowledge of 
 Mohammed. — Bible and Koran contrasted. — Difficult in other creeds 
 to distinguish the foundation from the superstructure; possible in 
 Islam. — Problems connected with Mohammed's character, — Sm"vey of 
 the Saracen Conquests, and of what Mohammedanism overthrew. — 
 Its position nov/ — is it losing or gaining ground ? — China — East Indian 
 Archipelago — Africa — Extraordinary success of its missionaries there 
 now. — Its progress in the African continent traced historically. — 
 What it has done for Africa, and what Christians have done. — Its 
 probable future in Africa. — Armenia and Koordistan, Revival there, 
 — Inc^ia ; few, if any. Converts to Christianity. — Causes ordinarily 
 suggested for its success reviewed. — National and Religious prejudices 
 stand in way of a fair judgment. — Principles which must guide 
 investigation. — Do Religions differ in kind ? — Sacred Books and 
 their influence. — Missionary work; its limits and legitimate objects. — 
 Can the world be Christianised? .... page i 
 
 LECTURE LL 
 
 Mohammed. 
 
 History of Opinions about Mohammed : — the Troubadours — the Middle 
 Ages — the Reformers — Biblical Commentators — Gagnier — Sale — 
 Gibbon — Carlyle — other modern writers. — Arabia before Mohammed 
 — its Religions — its social condition — War — Poetry — Plunder — 
 
XX CONTENTS 
 
 Chivalry. — Could Mohammedanism have been predicted? — Was it 
 the voice of the spirit of the time, or of individual Religious Genius ? 
 — Moral and National upheaval — pre-Mohammedans. — Youth of 
 Mohammed — his call to be Prophet and its phenomena— his long 
 struggles. — The Hegirah— Sincerity of Mohammed examined — his 
 personal characteristics — The Prophetic office. — Mohammed's life at 
 Medina — his faults — his supposed moral declension examined — was he 
 consistent? — Did he use the Koran for his private purposes? — Illustra- 
 tions — the exact nature and limits of his mission — ^Illustrations — his 
 death page 56 
 
 - LECTURE III. 
 
 Mohammedanism. 
 
 Essence of Mohammedanism — claims to be universal — how far borrowed 
 from Jews, —Judaism and Christianity as known to Arabs. — Mission 
 of Mohammed. — Other Articles of Faith — Practical duties enjoined — 
 Pilgrimage, its use and abuse — How far alien to Mohammedanism and 
 to Christianity. — The Kaaba — the Hadj. — Dictum of Dr. Deutsch. — 
 The Talmud and its influence. — Mohammed's concessions to the 
 Jews, and his efforts to gain them over. — Why he failed. — The 
 Koran — its characteristics — its history — influence — variety — poetry. — 
 Relation of Mohammed to Miracles, compared with that of Christ. — 
 The Miraculous generally, — Fatalism. — What the Koran says. — 
 Opposite effects of the same doctrine — Mohammed's views of Prayer, 
 Predestination, and Free Will. — Wars of Islam — an essential par 
 of the system or not? — how accounted for. — Connection of the 
 Spiritual and Temporal Power — in Eastern Christendom — in Western 
 Christendom — and in Islam. — Character of early Mohammedan Wars 
 — Religious enthusiasm — the Crusades. — Results of Mohammedan 
 conquests — Literature — Science — and Civilization. — Attitude of 
 Christianity and Christians towards Religious wars — Morality of war. 
 — What wars are Christian ..... page 105 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Mohammedanism and Christianity. 
 
 The Future Life of Mohammedanism — of other Religions. — Use 
 Mohammed made of Heaven and Hell — their legitimate use. — Does 
 
CONTENTS ' xxi 
 
 Mohammedanism encourage self-indulgence ? — ^Morality of Moham- 
 medanism. — Mohammed's attitude towards existing institutions com- 
 pared with that of other Founders — Solon — Moses — Christ, — How 
 he dealt with Polygamy, Slavery, the Poor, and the Orphan — with 
 the lower animals — with moral offences. — How ought Christianity 
 to regard Mohammedanism? — How does it ? — Three Monotheistic 
 creeds — Heroes common to all — Spirituality of each. — Mohammed 
 and Moses compared. — Iconoclasm. — Reverence for Christ — three 
 reasons suggested for Mohammed's rejection of Christianity. — Moham- 
 med's views of Christ — of the Virgin Mary — of the Trinity — of the 
 Crucifixion — of God. — Lessons to be learnt from them, — Has Moham- 
 medanism kept back the East by hindering the spread of Christianity ? 
 — Is it a curse or blessing to the world at large? — Limits of 
 Mohammedanism and of Christianity. — Aspects of Mohammedanism 
 in different countries — Africa — Persia — India — Turkey — Spain. — 
 Contrast between Christianity and Mohammedanism and their 
 founders. — Is the East progressive or not? — Corruptions of Moham- 
 medanism — illustrated by other Religions, — Necessity of Revival in all 
 Religions — Wahhabees in Arabia and India — Revival in Eastern 
 Anatolia, — Limits to the influence of the West on the East. — Des- 
 potism — Polygamy — Slavery — the Slave Trade — Is Mohammedanism 
 reconcilable with the highest Civilization? — with Christianity? — 
 Modifications possible or necessary. — Mohammed's place in History, 
 
 PAGE 162 
 
 Appendix to Lecture 1 241 
 
 Appendix to Lecture HI 249 
 
LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE 
 
 ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 IN 
 
 FEBRUARY and MARCH I874 
 
LECTUEE I. 
 
 Delivered at the Royal Institution, 
 February 14, 1874. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Sua cuique genti religio est, nostra nobis. — Cicero. 
 
 'A/W eV rravTi iSvn u (pojSovfjievcg aiTov, koI Ipya^ofxevog SiKaicavvriVy 
 dsKTcQ avr<^ tan. — St. PETER. 
 
 The Science of Comparative Religion Is still In its 
 infancy ; and if there Is one danger more than 
 another against which It should be on Its guard, It Is 
 that of hasty and ill-considered generalisation. Hasty 
 generalisation is the besetting temptation of all young 
 Sciences; may I not say of Science in general .'* They 
 are in too great a hurry to justify their existence by 
 arriving at results which may be generally intelligible 
 instead of waiting patiently till the result shapes 
 itself from the premises ; as if, In the pursuit of truth, 
 the chase was not always worth more than the game 
 
 B 
 
2 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 and the process itself more than the result ! Theory- 
 has, it is true, its advantages, even in a young Science, 
 in the way of suggesting a definite line which enquiry 
 may take. A brilliant hypothesis formed, not by 
 random guess work, but by the trained imagination of 
 the man of Science, or by the true divination of 
 genius, enlarges the horizon of the student whom the 
 limits of the human faculties themselves drive to be a 
 specialist, but who is apt to become too much so. It 
 throws a flood of light upon a field of knowledge 
 which was before, perhaps, half in shadow, bringing 
 out each object in its relative place, and in its true 
 proportions ; finally, it gathers scattered facts into 
 one focus, and explaining them provisionally by a 
 single law, it makes an appeal to the fancy, which 
 must react on the other mental powers, and be a most 
 powerful stimulus to further research. In truth, much 
 that is now demonstrated fact was once hypothesis, 
 and would never have been demonstrated unless it had 
 been first assumed. But since there are few Keplers 
 in the world — men ready to sacrifice, without hesita- 
 tion, a hypothesis that had seemed to explain the 
 universe, and become, as it were, a part of them- 
 selves, the moment that the facts seem to require 
 it — great circumspection will always be needed lest 
 the facts may be made to bend to the theory, instead 
 of its being modified to meet them. 
 
ORIGIN OF RELIGION, MORAL 3 
 
 Bearing this caution in mind, we may, perhaps, 
 think that the Science of Comparative Religion, young 
 as it is, has yet been in existence long enough to enable 
 us to lay it down, at all events provisionally, as a general 
 law, that all the great religions of the world, the com- 
 mencement of which has not been immemorial, co- 
 eval that is with the human mind itself, have been in 
 the first instance moral rather than theological ; they 
 have been called into existence to meet social and 
 national needs ; they have raised man gradually to- 
 wards God, rather than brought down God at once to 
 man. 
 
 Judaism, for instance, sprang into existence at the 
 
 moment when the Israelites passed, and because they 
 
 passed, from the Patriarchal to the Political life, when 
 
 from slavery they emerged into freedom, when they 
 
 ceased to be a family, and became a nation. * I am 
 
 the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the 
 
 land of Egypt, and out of the house of bondage.' 
 
 The Moral Law which followed, the Theocracy itself, 
 
 was the outcome of this fundamental fact. The 
 
 nation that God has chosen, nay, that He has called 
 
 into existence, is to keep His laws and to be His 
 
 people. Consequently, all law to the ancient Hebrew 
 
 was alike Divine, whether written, as he believed, by 
 
 the finger of God on two tables, or whether applied 
 
 by the civil magistrate to the special cases brought 
 
 B 2 
 
4 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 before him. Moral and political offences are thus 
 offences against God, and the ideas of crime and sin 
 are identical alike in fact and in thought. 
 
 Again, take a glance at the religion of Buddha. We 
 speak of Buddhism, and are apt to think of it chiefly 
 as a body of doctrine, drawn up over two thousand 
 years ago, and at this day professed by four hundred 
 and fifty millions of human beings ; and we wonder, 
 as well we may, how a siunmiim bomnn of mere pain- 
 lessness in this world, and practically, and to the 
 ordinary mind, of total extinction when this world 
 is over, can have satisf5.ed the spiritual cravings of 
 Buddha's contemporaries ; and, in its various forms, 
 can now be the life guidance of a third of the human 
 race. But we forget that, in its origin at least, 
 Buddhism was more of a social than of a religious 
 reformation. It was an attack upon that web of 
 priestcraft which Brahmanism had woven round the 
 whole frame-work of Indian society.^ It was the 
 levelling of caste distinctions, the sight of a * man born 
 to be a king ' throwing off his royal dignity, sweeping 
 away the sacerdotal mummeries which he had himself 
 tested, and found unfruitful, preferring poverty to 
 riches, and Sudras to Brahmans. It was Buddha's 
 
 ^ See Max Miiller's ' Chips from a German Workshop/ vol. I., 
 210-226, especially p. 220; andSpence Hardy's ' Legends and Theories 
 of the Buddhists,' Introduction, p. 13-20. Cf. also Beal's 'Buddhist 
 Pilgrims,' Introduction, p. 49, seq. 
 
JUDAISM AND BUDDHISM 5 
 
 overpowering sense of the miseries of sin, his dim 
 yearnings after a better Hfe, his moral system of 
 which the sum is Love, whicli wrought upon the 
 hearts of his hearers. ^ He founded, it is true, a new 
 rehgion, but he began by attacking an old.' He re- 
 constructed society first, and it was his social reform 
 that led to his religion, rather than his religion which 
 involved his social reconstruction. The half we may, 
 perhaps, think would have been more than the vv^hole — 
 
 • Qusesivit coelo lucem ingemuitque reperta.' 
 
 Nor is it much otherwise with Christianity itself. 
 Christ Avas before all things the Founder of a new 
 Society ; not, it is true, of a political Society : had it 
 been so, more of His countr^-men would have seen in 
 his person the Messiah that was to come, and in His 
 kingdom the golden age of their own poets and 
 prophets. The political frame-work, indeed, of the 
 w^orld Christ came neither to destroy, nor to recon- 
 struct, except indirectly and remotely. He recognised 
 the logic of facts ; above all, the tremendous logic of 
 the Roman Empire. Tribute was to be paid to 
 Caesar, even though that Caesar was a Tiberius. The 
 new Society was potentially a world-wide one, a vast 
 democracy in which Jew and Roman, slave and free- 
 man, rich and poor were on a footing of absolute 
 equality. Enthusiastic love to Christ Himself, evi- 
 
6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 denced by purity of heart, by forgetfulness of self, and 
 by enthusiastic love to all mankind, was the one con- 
 dition and the one test of membership. 
 
 It is true, that to this new Creation of His, Christ 
 gives a name, which we are accustomed to look upon 
 as conveying mainly theological ideas ; He calls it 
 ^ the Kingdom of Heaven,' but how does He explain 
 the term Himself? His great precursor, John the 
 Baptist, had predicted its immediate advent. Christ 
 says. It is here already, it is zvithin you. At 
 the very opening of His work. He speaks of it as 
 already existing ; the outline was there, even if the 
 details were not filled in. Now if the Kingdom of 
 Heaven existed before it had dawned, even upon the 
 most favoured of His followers, that He was more 
 than * that Prophet,' it would seem to follow that the 
 essence of His Kingdom was, not the doctrine which 
 they did not and could not as yet accept, but the 
 higher life they saw Christ leading, the life of the soul ; 
 and which, seeing, they reverenced, and reverencing, 
 as far as might be, wished to imitate. The Sermon 
 on the Mount, so far as that which is indescribable 
 can be described at all, and that which is the fountain 
 head of goodness in infinitely varied types can be 
 judged by one or two of the rills which issue from it, 
 is little else than Christ's own life translated into 
 words ; and those who, least imperfectly, re-translated 
 
CHRISTIANITY 7 
 
 His words back into their own lives, were the very 
 ' salt of the earth.' They were members of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, even though they did not be- 
 lieve, as some did not even to the end, that He who 
 * spake as never man spake ' was something more 
 than man. 
 
 If we go back to the ipsissiina verba, so far as we 
 can now get at them, of Christ Himself, how much 
 of the doctrine that we are apt to attribute to Christ, we 
 shall find to be Pauline — how much more Patristic, 
 Scholastic, Puritan ! /How little dogma, and how much 
 morality, there is in the Founder of our religion ;/how 
 few words, and how many works ; how little about 
 consequences, how much about motives ; in a word, 
 how little theology, and how much religion ! I do not 
 of course mean to deny that Moses, Buddha, Christ 
 Himself were founders of a theology as well as of a 
 life ; I only say that the life came first, since it was 
 that which was most called for by the time, and it was 
 their new views of life which prepared their followers 
 to receive and develope their new views of God. * If 
 any man will do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
 trine whether it be of God.' ' He that loveth not his 
 brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God 
 whom he hath not seen .'' ' * Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God.' 
 
 I am aware that distinguished German philoso- 
 
8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 / 
 
 pherS; Max Miiller among them,^ have laid it down 
 that men cannot form themselves into a people till 
 they have come to an agreement about their religion, 
 and that community of faith is a bond of union more 
 fundamental than any other bond at all. But I do 
 not think that if the distinction which I have drawn 
 between the primeval and the historical Religions of 
 the world be kept in sight, there is much necessary 
 antagonism between their view and mine ; that a new 
 religion is, in order of time, the outcome and not the 
 cause of a general movement towards a higher life, 
 whether moral or national. Religion is, no doubt, 
 practically all that they say it is, a tie so strong that 
 it can give an ideal unity, as it did in Greece, to tribes 
 differing from one another in degrees of civilisation, 
 in interests and in dialect ; but it does not follow that 
 it was historically ever the original moving power in 
 the aggregation of scattered tribes, or that a new 
 religion was at first a revelation of God rather than 
 a revelation of morality. There must have been 
 a previous community of race and language for the 
 religion to work upon ; there must also have been 
 a strong, though very possibly an ill-directed and a 
 desultory upheaval of society. The fragments still 
 existing of the primeval creed are no doubt a factor 
 in that upheaval, and feel its force ; but the new 
 
 ' ' Introduction to the Science of Religion,' Lecture III., 144-153. 
 
RELIGION IN GREECE 9 
 
 religion is the result and not the cause of the general 
 movement. It is not till later that it pays the debt it 
 owes to what gave it birth, by lending a higher sanc- 
 tion to each institution of the . new society, and so 
 does in truth become, what philosophers say it is, the 
 most important bond in a national life. First the as- 
 pirations, then that which satisfies them ! First a new 
 conception of the relation of men to one another, then 
 that conception sanctioned, vivified, lit up by the 
 newly perceived relation of all alike to God ! 
 
 I would also remark that Greece itself, though 
 Max Miiller appeals to it in favour of his own con- 
 clusions, seems to supply an argument in favour 
 of my view. For even in the Persian wars the com- 
 mon danger and the common hatred of the * Bar- 
 barian ' failed to bring about more than a very tran- 
 sitory coalition between two or three of the leading 
 states. The ideal unity of the Greek races was only 
 an ideal, and Panhellenism never went so far as 
 to unite the different states into a homogeneous 
 people. If there had been a real and spontaneous 
 movement among the autonomous cities' of Greece 
 towards centralisation, a great reformer might have 
 taken advantage of it, and working upon the 'dim 
 recollection of the common allegiance they owed 
 from time immemorial to the great Father of Gods 
 and men, the old Zeus of Dodona, the Panhellenic 
 
lO MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Zeus,' ^ have welded the fragments into a nation. 
 The One would not merely have been dimly discerned 
 behind the Many by the highest minds, but the per- 
 ception would have been converted into a practical 
 reality. The intellectual mission of Socrates might 
 have taken something of the shape, and realised some- 
 thing of the results of the mission of Mohammed. 
 But there was no such national movement in Greece, 
 and therefore no opportunity either for the birth of a 
 new religion, or a revival of the old one. In Greek 
 Polytheism we see historically nothing but decay, 
 Mythology having completely overgrown the Religion. 
 The gross stories of Homer and of Hesiod which so 
 scandalized Socrates and Plato, had, even at that early 
 time, concealed from all but the highest minds the 
 vague primitive belief, common probably to the whole 
 Indo-Germanic race, in one Father who is in Heaven. 
 
 To what extent the principle I have laid down as 
 to the origin of the three great historical religions, is 
 also true of that of Mohammed, will develope itself 
 gradually in the sequel. 
 
 It has been remarked, indeed, by writer after 
 writer, that Islam is less interesting than other reli- 
 gions, inasmuch as it is less original. And this is one 
 of the favourite charges brought against It by Chris- 
 tian apologists. In the first place, I am Inclined to 
 
 * ' Science of Religion,' p. 148. 
 
IS ISLAM ORIGINAL? ' ii 
 
 think that the charge of want of originaHty, though it 
 cannot be denied, has been overdone by recent writers ; 
 most conspicuously so by M. Renan, who, ingenious 
 and beautiful as his Essay is, seems disposed to ex- 
 plain the whole fabric of Islamism by the ideas that 
 existed before Mohammed ; and the political direction 
 given to it by his successors, most notably by Omar ; 
 in fact, it seems to me that the only element left out, 
 or not accounted for, in his analysis of Mohammedan- 
 ism, is Mohammed himself His Mohammedanism 
 resembles a Hamlet with not only the Prince of Den- 
 mark, but with Shakespeare himself cut out. The 
 disjointed members and some few elements of the 
 fabric remain ; about as much as we should have of 
 the Hamlet of Shakespeare in the Amlettus of Saxo- 
 Grammaticus ; but the informing, animating, inspiring 
 soul is wanting. 
 
 It is undeniable that a vague and hearsay acquaint- 
 ance with the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the 
 New Testament, and the undefined religious cravings 
 of a few of his immediate predecessors, or contempo- 
 raries, influenced Mohammed much, and traces of them 
 at second hand may be found in ever}^ other page of 
 the Koran ; but then, in the second place, it may be 
 asked whether want of originality is any reproach to 
 a religion ; for what is religion } 
 
 It is that something, which, whether it is a collec- 
 
12 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 tion of shadows projected by the mind itself upon the 
 mirror of the external world, explaining the Macro- 
 cosm by the Microcosm, and invested with a reality 
 which belongs only to the mind that casts them, if 
 indeed even to that, or whether it is indeed an insight 
 of the soul into realities which exist independently of 
 it, and which underlie alike the world of sense and the 
 world of reason ; it is something, at all events, which 
 satisfies the spiritual wants of man. Man's spiritual 
 wants, v/hatever their origin, are his truest wants ; and 
 the something which satisfies those wants is the most 
 real of all realities to him. 
 
 The founder, therefore, of a religion which is to 
 last must read the spiritual needs of a nation correctly, 
 or at all events must be capable of seeing the direc- 
 tion in which they lead, and the development they will 
 one day take. If he read them correctly, he need not 
 care about any originality beyond that which such 
 insight implies ; he Avill rather do well to avoid it. The 
 religious world was startled a few years ago by the 
 revelations of an Oriental scholar that much supposed 
 to be exclusively the doctrine of the New Testament 
 is to be found in the Talmud, as though some reflec- 
 tion was thereby cast upon the Founder of our religion ! 
 Positivists, again, have laid great stress on the fact 
 that some of the moral precepts supposed to be exclu- 
 sively Christian are to be found in the sacred writings 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 13, 
 
 of Confucius and the Buddhists. But what then ? Is a 
 religion less true because it recognises itself in other 
 garbs, because it incorporates in itself all that is best 
 in the system which it expands or supplants ? What 
 if we found the whole Sermon on the Mount dispersed 
 about the writings of the Jewish Rabbis, as we unques- 
 tionably find some part of it ? Christ himself was 
 always the first to assert that He came, not to destroy,/ 
 but to fulfil. But it is strange that the avowed relation 
 of Christianity to Judaism has not protected Islam 
 from the assaults of Christian apologists, grounded 
 on its avowed relation to the two together ! 
 
 But what of interest, I am free to admit, the religion 
 of Mohammed loses on the score of originality, it gains 
 in the greater fulness of our knowledge of its origin. 
 It is the latest and most historical of the great reli- 
 gions of the world. / 
 
 Renan has remarked that the origin of nearly all 
 the leading phenomena of life and history is obscure. 
 What, for instance, can Max Miiller tell us of the 
 origin of language 1 What well-authenticated facts can 
 political philosophers like Hobbes or Locke, or even 
 scientific antiquaries like Sir Charles Lyell or Sir John 
 Lubbock, tell us of the origin of society t What can 
 Darwin tell us of the origin of life t Trace the genea- 
 logy of all existing languages into the three great groups 
 of Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian ; find, if you can, the 
 
14 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 parent language from which even these three famihes 
 have originally diverged ; are we any nearer an expla- 
 nation of what language really is ? Our hopes, indeed, 
 are aroused by hints dropped throughout Max Miiller's 
 fascinating book that he has a secret to divulge to 
 those who have gone through an adequate process of 
 initiation. But to our disappointment we find that 
 the explanation of * Phonetic Types ' is only a round- 
 about way of saying what, no doubt, is true, that lan- 
 guage is instinctive, and that we know nothing what- 
 ever of its origin. That sound expresses thought we 
 knew before ; but how does it express it .-* That is 
 the question. Trace elaborately through Geological 
 Periods, if you can, the steps by which the Monad has 
 been developed into Man, and show that there is no. 
 link wanting, and that Nature, so far as w^e can trace, 
 never makes a leap. Perhaps not ; but there is a leap 
 somewhere, and who can say how vast the leap before 
 the Protoplasm can have received the something that 
 is not Protoplasm but Life, and which has all the dig- 
 nity of life, even though it be a Monad's } 
 
 So, too, if the Science of Religion lasts long enough, 
 we may one day be able to trace a continuity of 
 growth from the very dawn of man's belief till, as in 
 history so in religion, 
 
 * We doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs 
 And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.' 
 
ELEMENTS OF RELIGION 15 
 
 We shall find, however, that, even in the dimmest- 
 dawn of history, the essence of religion was already 
 there, not forming, but already formed ; a feeling of 
 mystery which, as it is the beginning of philosophy, 
 so, perhaps, it is the very first beginning of rehgion ; 
 the distinction between right and wrong ; the idea of 
 a Power which is neither Man's nor external Nature's, 
 though it is evidenced by them both ; the sense that 
 there is something in this world amiss ; and the fear, 
 or, possibly, the hope, that it may be unriddled by- 
 and-bye.^ Where did those ideas come from ? And 
 do we know anything more of the origin of religion 
 itself by having traced it to some of its elements ? 
 
 And, what is true of religion generally, is also true, 
 unfortunately, of those three religions which I have 
 called, for want of a better name, historical — and 
 of their founders. We know all too little of the first 
 and earliest labourers ; too much, perhaps, of those 
 who have entered into their labours. We know less 
 
 * I do not mean to touch here upon the disputed question M'hether 
 there are races without any definite rehgious ideas at all. Sir John 
 Lubbock ('Origin of Civilisation,' cap. iv.) has brought together the 
 testimony of many missionaries and travellers as to a great variety of 
 tribes, which seem to be, at all events, without anything beyond the 
 elements I have named ; but I much doubt whether these elements, 
 or some of them, do not exist in all tribes, even in the lowest. It is 
 certain that a longer acquaintance and minuter observation among 
 savage tribes, especially the African, have often led to the reversal of an 
 opinion naturally but hastily formed in the first instance. See Waitz, 
 * Anthropologic der Naturvolker, ' ii. 4. 
 
i6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAAiMEDANISM 
 
 of Zoroaster and Confucius than we do of Solon and 
 Socrates ; less of Moses and of Buddha than we do of 
 Ambrose and Augustine. We know indeed some 
 fragments of a fragment of Christ's life ; but who can 
 lift the veil of the thirty years that prepared the way 
 for the three ? What we do know indeed has renovated 
 a third of the world, and may yet renovate much 
 more ; an ideal of life at once remote and near ; pos- 
 sible and impossible ; but how much we do not know ! 
 What do we know of His mother, of His home life, of 
 His early friends, and His relation to them, of the 
 gradual dawning, or, it may be, the sudden revelation, 
 of His divine mission ? How many questions about 
 Him occur to each of us that must always remain 
 questions ! 
 
 But in Mohammedanism everything is different ; 
 here instead of the shadowy and the mysterious we have 
 history.^ We know as much of Mohammed as we do 
 even of Luther and Milton. The mythical, the 
 legendary, the supernatural is almost wanting in the 
 original Arab authorities, or at all events can easily 
 be distinguished from what is historical.^ Nobody 
 
 ^ Cf. Renan, 'Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse,' pp. 220 and 230. 
 
 2 The belief in Jinn, beings created of smokeless fire 2,000 years 
 before Adam, as a part of the original Arab mythology, was not discarded 
 by Mohammed (Koran, Sura i. 7-8 ; xlvi. 28, 29 ; Ivii. 17-18, Ixxii. i, 
 &c.), but, in other respects, the miraculous and mythological element 
 in. Mohammedanism comes almost exclusively from Persian sources. 
 
FULL KNOWLEDGE OF LSLAM . 17 
 
 here is the dupe of himself or of others ; there is the full 
 light of day upon all that that light can ever reach at all. 
 * The abysmal depths of personality ' indeed are, and 
 must always remain, beyond the reach of any line and 
 plummet of ours. But we know everything of the 
 external history of Mohammed — his youth, his ap- 
 pearance, his relations, his habits ; the first idea and 
 the gradual growth, intermittent though it was, of his 
 great revelation ; while for his internal history, after 
 his mission had been proclaimed, we have a book 
 absolutely unique in its origin, in its preservation, 
 and in the chaos of its contents, but on the authenti- 
 city of which no one has ever been able to cast a 
 serious doubt. There, if in any book, we have a 
 mirror of one of the master-spirits of the world ; often 
 inartistic, incoherent, self-contradictory, dull, but im- 
 pregnated with a few grand ideas which stand out 
 from the whole ; a mind seething with the inspiration 
 pent within it, * intoxicated with God,' but full of 
 human weaknesses, from which he never pretended — 
 
 Persia has revenged the destruction of her national faith by corrupting 
 in many particulars the simplicity of the creed of her conquerors. For 
 an exhaustive account of Arab ideas on the Jinn, their creation, their 
 influence on human affairs, and their abode, see Note 21 to the Intro- 
 duction of Lane's edition of 'The Thousand and One Nights.' The 
 legends illustrating the power of Solomon over the Genii are well 
 known. The notes to Lane's edition of the ' Arabian Nights ' form 
 a storehouse of accurate information upon Arab manners and cus- 
 toms. 
 
1 8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 and it is his lasting glory that he never pretended — 
 to be free.^ 
 
 Upon the striking resemblances between the Ko- 
 ran and the Bible — the book with which it is most 
 naturally compared — and the still moi-e striking dif- 
 ferences, I need not now dwell at length, especially 
 as the latter have been admirably drawn out by Dean 
 Stanley.^ 
 
 To compress, as best I may, into a few sentences 
 what he has said so well, making only a few amend- 
 ments where, from my point of view, they seem to be 
 called for. — The Koran lays claim to a verbal, literal, 
 and mechanical inspiration in every part alike, and is 
 regarded as such by almost all Mohammedans. The 
 Bible makes no such claim, except In one or two con- 
 troverted passages ; and there are few Christians who 
 do not now admit at least a human element in every 
 part of it. The text of the Koran is stereotyped ; in the 
 Bible there is an immense variety of readings. The 
 Koran has hitherto proved to be incapable of har- 
 monious translation into other languages ; the Bible 
 loses little or nothing in the process. The Bible is 
 the work of a large number of poets, prophets, states- 
 men, and lawgivers, extending over a vast period of 
 
 * It was a proverbial saying in very early times among Mussulmans 
 that • Mohammed's character was the Koran.' 
 
 ^ ' Lectures on the Eastern Church,' viii. p. 266-273. 
 
KORAN AND BIBLE COMPARED 19 
 
 time, and incorporates with itself other and earher, 
 and often conflicting documents; the Koran comes 
 straight from the brain, sometimes from the ravings, 
 of an unlettered enthusiast, who yet in this proved 
 himself to be poet and prophet, statesman and law- 
 giver in one. /Finally, the strength of the Koran lies 
 in its uniformity, in its intolerance, in its narrow^ness ; 
 the strength of the Bible in its variety, its toleration, 
 its universality. In all these points, as in the more 
 important one of the morality of its highest revela- 
 tions, the supremacy of our sacred books over the one 
 sacred book of the Mohammedans is indisputable. 
 
 Dean Stanley asks somewhat triumphantly, but on 
 the whole rightly enough, whether there is a single 
 passage in the Koran that can be named, as a proof 
 of inspiration, with St. Paul's description of Charity. 
 But it is worth remarking that a traditional sermon of 
 Mohammed's has been preserved, quoted by Washing- 
 ton Irving,^ which, though it is in no way equal to this, 
 the sublimest passage of the greatest of the Apostles, 
 yet shows a real insight into the nature and comprehen- 
 siveness of this Christian grace ; and may at all events 
 serve as a comment on i Corinthians xiii. It is in 
 the form of an Apologue : * When God made the 
 earth, it shook to and fro till He put mountains on it 
 to keep it firm.' — Then the angels asked, * O God, is 
 
 ' ' Life of Mahomet,' p. 87. He is quoting from Abu Hurairah. 
 
 c 2 
 
20 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 there anything in thy creation stronger than these 
 mountains ? — And God replied, ' Iron is stronger than 
 the mountains, for it breaks them.' — 'And is there 
 anything in thy creation stronger than iron ? ' — 
 ' Yes, fire is stronger than iron, for it melts it.' — ' Is 
 there anything stronger than fire V — 'Yes, water, for 
 it quenches fire.' — ' Is there anything stronger than 
 water } ' — ' Yes, wind, for it puts water in motion.' — 
 ' O our Sustainer ! is there anything in thy creation 
 stronger than wind } ' — ' Yes, a good man giving alms ; 
 if he .give with his right hand and conceal it from 
 his left, he overcomes all things.' But Mohammed 
 did not end here, or restrict his notion of charity to 
 the somewhat narrow sense which, in common lan- 
 guage, it bears now, that of liberal and unostentatious 
 almsgiving ; he went on to give almost as wide a 
 definition of Charity as St. Paul himself. ' Every 
 good act is charity ; your smiling in your brother's 
 face ; your putting a wanderer in the right road ; 
 your giving water to the thirsty is charity ; exhor- 
 tations to another to do right are charity. A man's 
 true wealth hereafter is the good he has done in 
 this world to his fellow-man. When he dies, people 
 will ask, what property has he left behind him } But 
 the angels will ask, what good deeds has he sent 
 before him } ' 
 
 But from one point of view the Koran has to the 
 
MOHAMMED'S VIEW OF CHARITY 21 
 
 comparative mythologlst, and therefore to the student 
 of human nature, an interest quite unique, and not the 
 less absorbing that it springs out of the very defects 
 that I have pointed out. By studying the Koran, 
 together with the history of Mohammedanism, we see 
 with our own eyes, what we can only infer or imagine 
 in other cases, the precise steps by which a religion 
 naturally and necessarily developes into a mythology. 
 In the Koran we have, beyond all doubt, the exact 
 words of Mohammed without subtraction and without 
 addition. We see with our own eyes the birth and 
 adolescence of a religion. In the history of Moham- 
 medanism we descry the parasitical growth that 
 fastens on it, even in its founder's lifetime. We see 
 the way in which a man who denied that he could 
 work miracles, is believed to work them even by his 
 contemporaries, and how in the next generation the ex- 
 travagant vision of the nocturnal flight to the seventh 
 heaven, with all its gorgeous imagery, arid the revo- 
 lutions of the moon round the Kaaba, is taken for 
 sober fact, and is propagated with all the elaboration 
 of details, which, if they came from anybody, could 
 have come only from Mohammed himself; and yet all 
 of it with the most perfect good faith. We see how a 
 man, who, though he had once in an outburst of anger 
 uttered a prophecy which turned out true, always 
 denied that he could predict the future, and was yet, 
 
22 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 in spite of himself, credited with all the supernatural 
 insight of a seer. Lastly, we mark how the formalities 
 and the sacrifices and the idolatries which he spent his 
 life in overthrowing, revived in another shape out of 
 the frequency of prayers and fasts that he enjoined, 
 and of the pilgrimages he permitted. The holy places 
 themselves became more holy, as having been the 
 scene of his preaching and of his death, and so, in 
 time, received more than human honours. We know 
 from history what the outgrowth and superstructure 
 have been, and we read in the Koran how narrow the 
 foundation was. 
 
 But from the Bible, by its very nature, and owing 
 to those peculiarities which constitute its special 
 strength, we fail to know, in the same sense, the exact 
 limits of the foundation of the Christendom that has 
 overspread the world. In the outward shape in which 
 it has come down to us, and in the questions con- 
 nected with the authorship of its different parts and the 
 variety of its contents, the Bible resembles not so much 
 the Koran as the Sonna, which is, of course, rejected by 
 the Sheeah half of the Mohammedan races. Even in 
 the Gospels as we have them, comment and inference 
 and the individuality of the writer are mixed with 
 verbal accuracy and exact observation. We can 
 detect conflicting currents of feeling and of thought 
 which it taxes the ingenuity and honesty, even of 
 
GROWTH OF MYTHOLOGY 23 
 
 harmonists to harmonise. The New Testament is not 
 less, but more valuable because of these discrepancies. 
 Its undesigned discrepancies have been as valuable in 
 widening the base of our Christianity as its unde- 
 signed coincidences are in assuring it. Whether we 
 may legitimately apply the inferences to be drawn 
 from our full knowledge of the growth of Moham- 
 medanism to our imperfect knowledge of the growth 
 of other religions is, of course, open to argument, but 
 the interest and importance of the enquiry can hardly 
 be over-estimated. 
 
 But over and above the interest attaching to the 
 one religion of the world which is strictly historical in 
 its origin, and which therefore may, rightly or wrongly, 
 be used to explain the origin of those of which 
 we know less, there is the fascination that must 
 always attach to those mixed characters of w^homi 
 we know so much, and yet so little ; who have made 
 the world what it is, and yet whom the world cannot 
 read. 
 
 ' Hero, impostor, fanatic, priest, or sage : ' 
 
 which element predominates in the man as a whole 
 we may perhaps discover, and most certainly we can 
 say now it was not the impostor ; but taking him at 
 different times and under different circumstances, the 
 more one reads the more one distrusts one's own con- 
 
24 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 elusions, and, as Dean Mllman remarks, answers with 
 the Arab * Allah only knows.' ^ 
 
 • Nor does Mohammedanism lack other claims on 
 our attention. Its ultimate enthusiastic acceptance 
 by the Arabs, the new direction given to it by the 
 later revelations to Mohammed, its rapid conquests, 
 the literature and civilisation it brought in its train, 
 the way in which it cru'mpled up the Roman empire 
 on one side and the Persian on the other ; how it 
 drove Christianity before it on the West and North, 
 and Fire- Worship on the East and South ; how it 
 crushed the false prophets that always follow in the 
 wake of a true one, as the jackals do the trail of a 
 lion ; how it spread over two continents, and how it 
 settled in a third, and at one time all but over- 
 whelmed the whole, till Charles the Hammer, on the 
 field of Tours, turned it back upon itself; how the 
 indivisible empire, the representative on earth of the 
 Theocracy in heaven, became many empires, with rival 
 Kaliphs at Damascus and Bagdad, at Cairo, Cairoan, 
 and Cordova ; how horde after horde of barbarians of 
 the great Turkish or Tartar stock were precipitated 
 on the dominions of the faithful, only to be conquered 
 by the faith of those whose arms they overthrew ; 
 how, when the news came that the very birth-place of 
 the Christian faith had fallen into their hands, ' a 
 
 ' Latin Christianity, I. 555. 
 
HISTORY OF ISLAM 25 
 
 nerve was touched,' as Gibbon says, * of exquisite 
 feeling, and the sensation vibrated . to the heart of 
 Europe ;' how Christendom itself thus became for two 
 hundred years half Mohammedanised, and tried to 
 meet fanaticism by counter-fanaticism — the sword, 
 the Bible, and the Cross, against the scymitar, the 
 Koran, and the Crescent ; how, lastly, when the tide 
 of aggression had been checked, it once more burst 
 its barriers, and seating itself on the throne of the 
 Cssars of the East, threatened more than once the 
 very centre of Christendom — all this is matter of 
 history, at which I can only glance. / 
 
 And what is its position now ? 
 
 It numbers at this day more than one hundred 
 millions, probably one hundred and fifty millions, of 
 believers as sincere, as devout, as true to their creed 
 as are the believers in any creed whatever. It still 
 has its grip on three continents, extending from 
 Morocco to the Malay peninsula, from Zanzibar to 
 the Kirghis horde. It embraces within its ample cir- 
 cumference two extensive empires, one Sonnee, the 
 other Sheeah, the first of which, though it has often 
 been pronounced sick unto death or even dead, is 
 not dead yet, and is even showing signs of reviving 
 vitality. It still grasps the cradles of the Jewish and 
 of the Christian faith, and the spots most dear to 
 both, Mount Sinai and the Cave of Macpelah, the 
 
26 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy 
 Sepulchre. Africa, which had yielded so early to 
 Christianity, nay, which had given birth to Latin 
 Christianity itself, the Africa of Cyprian and Ter- 
 tullian, of Antony and of Augustine, yielded still 
 more readily to Mohammed ; and from the Straits of 
 Gibraltar to the Isthmus of Suez may still be heard 
 the cry which with them is no vain repetition of 
 * Allahu-Akbar,' — God is great, there is no God but 
 God, and Mohammed is His prophet. 
 
 And if it be said, as it often is, that Mohammed- 
 anism has gained nothing since the first flame of re- 
 ligious enthusiasm, fanned, as it then often was, by the 
 lust of conquest, has died out, I answer that this is 
 far from the truth. 
 
 In the extreme East, Mohammedanism has since 
 then won and maintained for centuries a moral su- 
 premacy in the important Chinese province of Yun- 
 Nan, and has thus actually succeeded in thrusting a 
 wedge between the two great Buddhist empires of 
 Burmah and of China. Within our own memory, 
 indeed, after a fifteen years' war, and under the 
 leadership of Ta Wen Siu, one of those half-military, 
 half-religious geniuses, which Islam seems always ca- 
 pable of producing, it succeeded in wresting from the 
 Celestial Empire a territorial supremacy in the western 
 half of this province. Two years ago an embassy of 
 
ISLAM IN CHINA 27 
 
 intelligent and, it is worth adding, of progressive and 
 of tolerant Mussulmans from Yun-Nan, headed by 
 Prince Hassan, son of the chieftain who had now 
 become the Sultan Soliman, appeared in our own 
 country, and the future of the Panthays,^ as they are 
 called, began at length to attract attention, not so 
 much, I fear, from the extraordinary interest attach- 
 ing to their religious history — that interests few Eng- 
 lishmen — as to the possible opening to our Eastern 
 trade, the only Gospel which most Englishmen care 
 now to preach, and one which Ave did consistently 
 for many years propagate by our commercial wars 
 in China and Japan, at the expense of every principle 
 of religion and humanity. Unfortunately the interests 
 of our trade were not sufficiently bound up with the 
 existence of the Panthays to call for any representa- 
 tions on our part, and Prince Hassan was compelled 
 to return to Asia without any prospect of moral 
 support from us or from the Sultan of Turkey. 
 On arriving at Rangoon he was met by the news 
 that the Mussulmans had at length been over- 
 powered by the fearful odds arrayed against them ; 
 that Tali-Fu, the capital, had fallen, and men, women, 
 and children to the number of some thirty thousand 
 
 * A name given to them by their Burmese neighbours, from whom 
 the word has passed into the Western World. It is said to be a cor- 
 ruption of the Burmese 'Putthee,' i.e., Mohammedan. 
 
28 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 had been massacred by the victors. The fate of 
 Momlen, the other stronghold, was of course only a 
 question of time ; but though the short-lived Moham- 
 medan sovereignty has been destroyed, and what was 
 won by the sword has since perished by the sword, 
 Mohammedanism itself has not been extinguished in 
 the Celestial Empire. Within the last eight years 
 that vast tract of country called Western Chinese 
 Tartary or Eastern Turkestan, has thrown off the 
 yoke of China, and has added another to the list of 
 Mussulman kingdoms. Khoten and Yarkand and 
 Kashgar are united under the vigorous rule of the 
 Atalik Ghazee,^ Yakoob Beg. Whatever may be his 
 private character, the abolition of the slave trade 
 throughout his dominions, his rigid administration of 
 justice, his readiness to establish commercial relations 
 with India, and the respect shown even by the Meccan 
 pilgrims among his subjects for Christianity are some 
 indication of what Mohammedanism may yet have in 
 store for it in Central Asia under the influence of a 
 master mind, and with the modifications that are pos- 
 sible or necessary to it. Throughout the Chinese 
 
 ^ The title was given him by the Ameer of Bokhara. It means 
 ' Guardian of the Champions of Rehgion.' For the abolition of the 
 slave trade see the best authority on the subject, Shaw's ' High 
 Tartary,' p. 347 ; and for the view of Christians taken by some pil- 
 grims to Mecca from Central Asia, p. 65. The letters received from 
 Mr. Forsyth's Mission (see Ti?nes, of March 17, 1874) seem quite to 
 bear out the view I had formed of Yakoob Beg's position. 
 
ISLAM IN EAST INDIAN ISLANDS 29 
 
 Empire, at Karachar for instance, there are scattered 
 Mussulman communities who have higher hopes than 
 Buddhism or Confucianism, and a purer morality than 
 Taoism can supply. The- Panthays themselves, it 
 is believed, still number a million and a half, and the 
 unity of God and the mission of God's prophet are 
 attested day by day by a continuous line of wor- 
 shippers from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 Nay, even beyond, in the East Indian Archi- 
 pelago, beyond the Straits of Malacca, if I may 
 venture just now so to call them, in Java and 
 Sumatra, in Borneo and Celebes, Islam has raised 
 many of the natives above their former selves, and 
 has long been the dominant faith. It established 
 itself in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra in the 
 fourteenth, and in Java and Celebes in the fif- 
 teenth century ; and it is interesting to note, as is 
 remarked by Crawfurd, that about the time it was 
 being gradually expelled from Western Europe, it 
 made up for its expulsion by extending itself to 
 the East of Asia. The Arab missionaries were 
 just in time, for they anticipated by only a few years 
 the first advent of grasping Portuguese and ambitious 
 Spaniards. It cannot, of course, be supposed that 
 among races so low in the scale of humanity as 
 are most of the Indian islanders, Mohammedanism 
 would be able to do what it did originally for the 
 
36 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Arabs or for the Turkish hordes ; but it has done 
 something even for them. It expelled Hindooism from 
 some islands, and a very corrupt Buddhism from others. 
 It was propagated by missionaries who cared very 
 much for the souls they could win, and nothing for the 
 plunder they could carry off. They conciliated the 
 natives, learned their languages, and intermarried with 
 them ; and in the larger islands their success was 
 rapid, and, so far as nature would allow, complete.^ 
 The Philippines and the Moluccas, which were con- 
 quered by Spain and Portugal respectively, did not 
 become Mohammedan, for they had to surrender at 
 once their liberty and their religion. It is no wonder 
 that the religion known to the natives chiefly through 
 the unblushing rapacity of the Portuguese, and the 
 terrible cruelties of the Dutch, has not extended itself 
 beyond the reach of their swords. Here, as elsewhere 
 in the East, the most fatal hindrance to the spread of 
 Christianity has been the lives of Christians.^ I will 
 only add further that the Mussulmans of the East 
 India Islands are very lax in their obedience to many 
 of the precepts of their law, that they are tolerant of 
 
 ^ Crawfurd's ' Indian Archipelago,' II. 275 and 315. 
 
 - For the cruelties of the Portuguese, see Crawfurd, II. 403, and 
 for the Dutch, see especially II. 425 seq. and 441. For some startling 
 facts as to the comparative morality of some native and Christian com- 
 munities in India, see a paper by the Rev, J. N. Thoburn, in the Report 
 of the Allahabad Missionary Conference, held in 1872-73, p. 467-470. 
 
ISLAM IN AFRICA 
 
 31 
 
 other religions, and that the women enjoy a liberty, a 
 position, and an influence which contrasts favourably 
 with that allowed to them in any other Asiatic 
 country.^ 
 
 In Africa, again, Mohammedanism is spreading 
 itself by giant strides almost year by year. Everyone 
 knows that, within half a century from the Prophet's 
 death, the richest states of Africa, and those most acces- 
 sible to Christianity and to European civilisation, were 
 torn away from both, by the armies of the faithful, 
 with hardly a struggle or a regret ; but few except 
 those who have studied the subject, are aware that, 
 ever since then, Mohammedanism has been gradually 
 spreading over the northern half of the Continent. 
 
 Starting from the north-west corner, it first 
 marched southwards from Morocco, and by the time 
 of the Norman Conquest had reached the neighbour- 
 hood of Timbuctoo, and had got firm hold of the 
 Mandingoes ; thence it spread southwards again to the 
 Foulahs, and then eastward by the thirteenth century 
 to Lake Tchad, where finally the Arab missionaries 
 from the West joined hands with those from the East 
 in the very heart of Africa.^ Of course enormous 
 
 ^ Crawfurd, II. 260 and 269-271 j and Sir Stamford Raffles' 'Java,* 
 I. p. 261 and II. 2-5. 
 
 *' Anthropologic der Naturwolker,' by Dr. Theodor Waitz, p. 248- 
 251. 
 
32 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 tracts of heathenism were left, and are still left, in 
 various parts of this vast area, and it is mainly among 
 these that, at this day, Mohammedan missionaries are 
 meeting everywhere with a marked success which is 
 denied to our own. We hear of whole tribes laying 
 aside their devil-worship, or immemorial Fetish, and 
 springing at a bound, as it were, from the very lowest 
 to one of the highest forms of religious belief. Chris- 
 tian travellers, with every wish to think otherwise, 
 have remarked that the negro who accepts Moham- 
 medanism acquires at once a sense of the dignity of 
 human nature not commonly found even among those 
 who have been brought to accept Christianity. 
 
 It is also pertinent to observe here, that such pro- 
 gress as any large part of the negro race has hitherto 
 made is in exact proportion to the time that has elapsed, 
 or to the degree of fervour with which they originally 
 embraced, or have since clung to Islam. The Man- 
 dingoes and the Foulahs are salient instances of this ; 
 their unquestionable superiority to other negro tribes 
 is as unquestionably owing to the early hold that 
 Islam got upon them, and to the civilisation and cul- 
 ture that it has always encouraged. 
 
 Nor can it be said that it is only among those 
 negroes who have never heard anything of a purer 
 faith that Mohammedanism is making such rapid pro- 
 gress. The Government Blue Books on our West 
 
RAPID SPREAD IN AFRICA NOW 33 
 
 African settlements, and the reports of missionary 
 societies themselves, are quite at one on this head. 
 The Governor of our West African colonies, Mr. Pope 
 Hennessy, remarks that the liberated Africans are 
 always handed over to Christian missionaries for in- 
 struction, and that their children are baptised and 
 brought up at the public expense in Christian schools, 
 and are, therefore, in a sense, ready-made converts. Yet 
 the total number of professing Christians, 35,000 out of 
 a population of 5 13,000— very few even of these, as the 
 Governor says, and as we can unfortunately well 
 believe from our experience in countries that are not 
 African, being practical Christians — falls far short 
 of the original number of liberated Africans and their 
 descendants.^ On the other hand, the Rev. James 
 Johnson, a native clergyman, and a man of remarkable 
 energy and intelligence as well as of very Catholic 
 spirit, deplores the fact that, of the total number of 
 Mohammedans to be found in Sierra Leone and its 
 neighbourhood, three-fourths were not born Moham- 
 medans, but have become so by conversion, whether 
 from a nominal Christianity or from Paganism.^ 
 
 * Papers relating to Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions. Part II., 
 1873, 2nd division, p. 14. 
 
 2 Ibid, p, 15. As Mr. Pope Hennessy's Report has been much 
 criticised, chiefly on the gi'ound that he is a Roman Catholic 
 (see a letter to the Times, of Oct. 21, 1873, signed 'Audi alteram 
 partem'), and as I have based some statements upon it, it maybe 
 worth mentioning that I have had a conversation with Mr. Johnson, 
 
 D 
 
34 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 And, what is still more to our purpose to remark 
 here, Mohammedanism, as it spreads now, is not 
 attended by some of the drawbacks which accom- 
 panied its first introduction into the country. It is 
 spread, not by the sword, but by earnest and simple- 
 minded Arab missionaries. It has also lost, except 
 in certain well-defined districts, much of its in- 
 tolerant and exclusive character. The two leading 
 doctrines of Mohammedanism, and the general moral 
 precepts of the Koran, are, of course, inculcated 
 everywhere. But, in other respects, the Mussulman 
 missionaries exhibit a forbearance, a sympathy, and a 
 respect for native customs and prejudices, and even 
 for their more harmless beliefs, which is no doubt one 
 reason of their success, and which our own mis- 
 sionaries and schoolmasters would do well to imitate. 
 We are assured, on all hands, that the Mussulman 
 population has an almost passionate desire for educa- 
 tion, and those in the neighbourhood of our colonies 
 would throng our schools, first if the practical educa- 
 
 who is a strong Protestant himself, and that he bore testimony to the 
 bona fides of the Report, and to its accuracy even on some points which 
 have been most questioned. He told me that Mohammedanism was 
 introduced into Sierra Leone, not many years ago, by three zealous mis- 
 sionaries who came from a great distance. It seems now to be rapidly 
 gaining the ascendency, in spite of all the European influences at work. 
 It may perhaps be questioned, since he does not dwell much upon it, 
 whether Mr. Pope Hennessy, in his remarks on the diminished number 
 of Christians in Sierra Leone, made allowance for the return of a certain 
 number of true Christians, such as Bishop Cro wther, to their own countries. 
 
INTELLECTUAL BENEFITS IN AFRICA 35 
 
 tlon given was more worth having, and, secondly, if the 
 teachers would refrain from needlessly attacking their 
 cherished and often harmless customs. Wherever 
 Mohammedans are numerous, they establish schools 
 themselves ; and there are not a few who travel ex- 
 traordinary distances to secure the best possible 
 education. Mr. Pope Hennessy mentions the case 
 of one young Mohammedan negro who is in the habit 
 of purchasing costly books from Triibner in London, 
 and who went to Futah, two hundred and fifty miles 
 away, to obtain an education better than he could 
 find in Sierra Leone itself^ Nor is it an uncommon 
 thing for newly converted Mussulmans to make their 
 way right across the Desert from Bornu, or from Lake 
 Tchad, or down the Nile from Darfour or Wadal, a 
 journey of over one thousand miles, that they may 
 carry on their studies in El-Azhar, the great collegiate 
 Mosque at Cairo, and may thence bring back the results 
 of their training to their native country, and form so 
 many centres of Mohammedan teaching and example.^ 
 Nor as to the effects of Islam when first embraced 
 by a negro tribe, can there be any reasonable 
 doubt. Polytheism disappears almost instantaneously; 
 
 ' Ibid. p. 10. 
 
 "- Waitz, p. 251. He calculates the number of students returning each 
 year to be about fifty. To his book, and to the authorities to whom he 
 refers, I owe many of the facts mentioned in the text illustrative of the 
 influence of Islam on the native mind and character. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 sorcery, with its attendant evils, gradually dies away ; 
 human sacrifice becomes a thing of the past. The 
 general moral elevation is most marked ; the natives 
 begin for the first time in their history to dress, 
 and that neatly. Squalid filth is replaced by a scru- 
 pulous cleanliness ; hospitality becomes a religious 
 duty ; drunkenness, instead of the rule, becomes a 
 comparatively rare exception. Though polygamy is 
 allowed by the Koran, it is not common in practice, 
 and, beyond the limits laid down by the Prophet, 
 incontinence is rare ; Chastity is looked upon as one 
 of the highest, and becomes, in fact, one of the com- 
 moner virtues. It is idleness henceforward that de- 
 grades, and industry that elevates, instead of the reverse. 
 Offences are henceforward measured by a written 
 code instead of the arbitrary caprice of a chieftain — a 
 step, as everyone will admit, of vast importance in the 
 progress of a tribe. The Mosque gives an idea of 
 architecture at all events higher than any the negro 
 has yet had. A thirst for literature is created, and 
 that for works of science and philosophy as well as 
 for commentaries on the Koran. ^ There are whole 
 
 ^ Waitz, p. 252-254. Aristotle and Plato are known to not a few 
 Mohammedans in the interior — Earth, in his ' Travels in Central Africa,' 
 Vol. V. p. 63, mentions that Sidi Mohammed, of Timbuctoo, main- 
 tained that they were both Mussulmans, that is to say, worshippers of 
 the true God. Cf III., 373, for the case of a Pullo at Massera, who 
 had read Plato and Aristotle in Arabic, was well acquainted with the 
 history of Spain, and sympathised with the Wahhabees. 
 
MORAL BENEFITS IN AFRICA 37 
 
 tribes, such as the Jolofs on the river Gambia, and the 
 Haussas, whose manly quaUties we have had occasion 
 to test in Ashantee, which have become to a man 
 Mohammedans, and have raised themselves infinitely 
 in the process ; and the very name of Salt-water 
 Mohammedans given to those tribes along the coast 
 who, from admixture with European settlers, have 
 relaxed the severity of the Prophet's laws, is a striking 
 proof of the extent to which the stricter form of the 
 faith prevails in the far interior. 
 
 It is melancholy to contrast with these wide-spread 
 beneficial influences of IMohammedanism, the little 
 that has been done for Africa till very lately by the 
 Christian nations that have settled in it, and the still 
 narrower limits within which it has been confined. Till 
 a few years ago the good effects produced beyond the 
 immediate territories occupied by them were abso- 
 lutely nothing. The achievement of Vasco de Gama, 
 for which Te Deums were sung in Europe, proved for 
 centuries to be nothing but the direst curse to Africa. 
 If the Oceanic slave trade has been, to the eternal 
 credit of England in particular, at last abolished by 
 Christian nations, it cannot be forgotten that Africa 
 owes also to them its origin, and on the West Coast, 
 at all events, its long continuance. The message that 
 European traders have carried for centuries to Africa 
 has been one of rapacity, of cruelty, and of bad 
 
38 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 faith. It is a remark of Dr. Livingstone's^ that the 
 only art that the natives of Africa have acquired from 
 their 500 years' acquaintance with the Portuguese, 
 has been the art of distiUing spirits from a gun-barrel ; 
 and that the only permanent belief they owe to them 
 is the belief that man may sell his brother man ; for 
 this, he says emphatically, is not a native belief, but 
 is only to be found in the track of the Portuguese. 
 The stopping of the Oceanic slave trade by England 
 is an enormous benefit to Africa ; but, if we except 
 the small number of converts made within the limits 
 of their settlements, it has been the only benefit con- 
 ferred by Europeans. The extension of African 
 commerce is of more than doubtful benefit at present. 
 The chief articles that we export from thence are the 
 produce of slave labour, and, what is worse, of a vastly 
 extended slave trade, in the inaccessible interior.^ 
 
 Nor is it wholly without reason that in spite of 
 Krapf and Moffat, of Baker, of Frere, and of Living- 
 stone, and ofa score of other single-hearted and energetic 
 
 ' Livingstone's * Expedition to the Zambesi,' page 240. 
 
 2 For the introduction, or rather the invention, of the Slave Trade 
 by the Portuguese in the year 1444, see Helps' * Spanish Conquest in 
 America,' I. 35 sq.; and the quotation there given from the Chronicle 
 of Azurara, relating the capture of 200 Africans by a Portuguese 
 company at Lagos, and their shipment to Portugal. A disastrous pre- 
 cedent from that time down to the end of the last century, only too 
 fatally followed by all the Christian nations of Europe which had the 
 chance ! 
 
WHAT HAVE CHRISTIANS DONE IN AFRICA? 39 
 
 philanthropists, the white man is still an object of 
 terror, and his professed creed an object of suspicion and 
 repugnance, to the negro race. Truly, if the question 
 must be put, whether it is Mohammedan or Christian 
 nations that have as yet done most for Africa, the 
 answer must be that it is not the Christian. And if it 
 be asked, again, not what religion is the purest in 
 itself, and ideally the best, for to this there could 
 be but one answer ; but which, under the peculiar 
 circumstances, historical, geographical, and ethnolo- 
 gical, is the religion most likely to get hold on a vast 
 scale of the native mind, and so in some measure to 
 elevate the savage character, the same answer must 
 be returned. The question is, indeed, already half 
 answered by a glance at the map of Africa. Moham- 
 medanism has already leavened almost the whole of 
 Africa to within five degrees of the Equator ; and, to 
 the south of it, Uganda, the most civilised state in that 
 part of Central Africa, has just become Mohammedan.^ 
 
 ^ See some interesting remarks by Mr. Francis Galton at a meeting of 
 the British Association at Leeds, on Sept. 22, 1873. I have also to 
 thank him for giving me, in conversation, his experience of Mohammedan- 
 ism in Africa, and for directing me to the best authorities on the subject. 
 Along the coast -line Mohammedanism of a degraded kind has of course 
 extended much further South, beyond Zanzibar to Mozambique and the 
 Portuguese colonies. There are Mohammedans to be found even among 
 the Kaffirs and in Madagascar. The original Portuguese settlers found 
 the Arabs established along the coasts of Mozambique and in the interior. 
 They exterminated the former ; but as they failed to dispossess the latter, 
 it is possible that some of the terra incognita in the interior may be still 
 Mohammedan. 
 
40 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Last year, a Mosque was built on the shores of the 
 Victoria Nyanza itself, and the Nile, from its source 
 to its mouth, is now, with very few exceptions, a 
 Mohammedan river. 
 
 That Mohammedanism may, when mutual mis- 
 understandings are removed, as I hope to show in a 
 future Lecture, be elevated, chastened, purified by 
 Christian influences and a Christian spirit, and that 
 evils such as the slave trade, which are really foreign 
 to its nature, can be put down by the heroic efforts of 
 Christian philanthropists, I do not doubt ; and Lean, 
 therefore, look forward, if with something of anxiety, 
 with still more of hope, to what seems the destiny of 
 Africa, that Paganism and Devil-worship will die out, 
 and that the main part of the continent, if it cannot 
 become Christian, will become, what is rext best to 
 it, Mohammedan. 
 
 Anyhow, it is certain that the gains of Moham- 
 medanism, in Africa alone, counterbalance its apparent 
 losses from Russian conquests, and from Proselytism 
 everywhere else ; nor can I believe, notwithstanding 
 predictions inspired by the wish, that its work is yet 
 done, or nearly done, in any of the countries that have 
 ever owned its sway. 
 
 I speak of the apparent losses from Russian con- 
 quest, for the onward march of the Russian Colossus 
 through Central Asia, so far from carrying any form 
 
REVIVAL IN ARMENIA 41 
 
 of Christianity with it, seems to intensify the religious 
 convictions of the half-conquered or threatened races. 
 What was dead in the religion before, it revives ; to what 
 was only half-alive, it gives fresh vigour. Islam has 
 now become with them a patriotism as well as a creed ; 
 and Mr. Gifford Palgrave, an able and accurate observer, 
 has lately described how the distinctive precepts of 
 the Mohammedan religion — those enjoining the observ- 
 ance of the month of Ramadhan, the reading of the 
 Koran, the pilgrimage of the Hadj, the abstinence from 
 gaming, from tobacco, and from intoxicating drinks — 
 are now much more rigidly observed in the debateable 
 territories ; and, more than this, the Abkhasians with 
 their immemorial antiquity, and the heroic Circassians 
 driven from their homes after a desperate struggle by 
 Muscovite oppression and bad faith, dropping such 
 traces of Christianity as they had, but carrying with 
 them a legacy of immortal hate to the creed and 
 country of their tyrants, have crossed the frontier of 
 the more liberal Turkish Empire, and coalescing with 
 Koords, Turkomans, and Arabs, have settled down in 
 the uplands of Armenia, and are there forming the 
 nucleus of a new, and vigorous, and united Mahom- 
 medan nation.^ 
 
 In India, where the two religions are brought face 
 to face, and where, if anywhere, we may expect the 
 
 * Palgrave's 'Essays on Eastern Questions,' iv. and v. 
 
42 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 great drama to play itself out, Mohammedanism gives 
 no sign of yielding. Unlike Brahmanism, which the 
 thousand influences of Western civilisation are sapping 
 in every direction, Mohammedanism, on the contrary, 
 seems to concentrate the strength it already has, and 
 owing to the efforts of its zealous missionaries, is 
 giving symptoms at once of a Revival and of a Reform 
 that may, at any time, change the religious destinies of 
 the country. The Faithful are as courageous, as sincere, 
 as ardently monotheistic as they ever were ; witness 
 it the Indian Mutiny, the Wahhabee Revival, and the 
 last terrible argument of assassination. The heroism 
 and self-devotion of our missionaries seems to be 
 wasted on them in vain, and except in individual 
 cases I see no sign that it v/ill ever be otherwise. 
 Buddhism and Brahmanism may be driven out of 
 India, but Mohammedanism never, except by the 
 Mohammedan method of the sword.^ 
 
 Such are the leading facts of Mohammedanism 
 viewed from the outside ; and now how are we to 
 account for them t 
 
 One thing is certain, that the explanations so 
 readily offered by historians and Christian apologists 
 till within a very recent period will not suffice now. 
 People who think they have nothing to do with 
 a system except to attack it, are not those who can 
 
 ^ See Appendix to this Lecture. 
 
ISLAM IN INDIA 43 
 
 best explain the causes of its vitality or its success. 
 One historian tells us that Mohammedanism triumphed 
 by the mere force of arms ; another, by the use Moham- 
 med made of the tendency so deeply planted in man 
 to fail victims in masses to any well-conceived im- 
 posture ; a third traces his success to his skilful 
 plagiarisms from faiths purer than his own ; and a 
 fourth to the elevated morality, or to the lax 
 morality, inculcated in the Koran ; for both of these 
 are strangely enough urged almost in the same 
 breath by the same people : while, lastly, others dwell 
 on the inherent strength of the founder's character 
 and the enthusiasm that must accompany a crusade 
 against idolatry.^ We feel that most of these have 
 some truth in them, some of them have much ; and one 
 or two of them are not only not true, but they are the 
 very reverse of the truth. But we also feel that none 
 of them singly, nor all of them together, adequately 
 account for the phenomena they profess to explain. 
 
 In treating of Mohammedanism, as remarked by 
 M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire,^ we have to try in limine 
 to discard alike our national and our religious preju- 
 dices. It was not till Mohammedanism had existed 
 for eight hundred years that it was possible to discard 
 the one ; and not till very lately that it was even 
 
 * See some of these explanations admirably dealt with by F. D. 
 Maurice, 'Religions of the World,' Lecture I. 
 ' Mahomet et le Koran, preface, p. 6. 
 
44 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 attempted to discard the other. Since the conquest 
 of Constantinople, or rather since the brilliant naval 
 victory of Don John of Austria at Lepanto, and its 
 final repulse by John Sobieski from the walls of 
 Vienna two hundred and thirty years later, Moham- 
 medanism has ceased, in Europe at least, to be an 
 aggressive and conquering power ; and since then, it 
 has been possible for the states of Christendom to 
 breathe more freely, and to forget the infidel in the 
 ally or the subject. 
 
 Religious prejudice is more difficult to overcome. 
 Men who are ardently attached to their own religion 
 find it difficult to judge another dispassionately, and 
 from a neutral point of view. The philosopher who, 
 according to Gibbon's famous aphorism, looked upon 
 all religions of the Roman Empire as equally false, 
 and the magistrate who looked upon all as equally 
 useful, would be alike incapacitated for viewing the 
 Mussulman creed from the Mussulman stand-point. 
 Perhaps the populace who looked upon all religions as 
 equally true would have been the best judges of the 
 three ; but I doubt whether in this, as in most 
 epigrammatic sentences, something of truth has not 
 been sacrificed to the antithesis. Nature does not 
 arrange herself in antithetical groups for our conveni- 
 ence ; and I doubt whether the mass of any people, at 
 any time, have looked upon all religions as equally true. 
 
NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS PREJUDICES 45 
 
 But the comparative study of religion is beginning 
 to teach, at all events, the more thoughtful of man- 
 kind, not indeed that all religions are equally true or 
 equally elevating, but that all contain some truth ; 
 that no religion is exclusively good, none exclusively 
 bad ; that any religion which has a real and continued 
 hold on a large body of mankind must satisfy a 
 real spiritual need, and is so far good. God is in all 
 His works, and not the least so in the thoughts 
 and aspirations of His creatures towards Himself; 
 and what we have to do is to feel after Him in 
 each and all, assured that He is there, even if haply 
 in our ignorance we can find no trace of Him. 
 
 Truly, when we are dealing with religion at all, 
 even though it be Polytheism or Fetishism, we are 
 * treading upon holy ground,' and in order that we 
 may treat that creed, sublime in its simplicity, which is 
 our special subject, with that union of candour and 
 of reverence which alone befits it, it is necessary 
 before concluding this introductory Lecture that I 
 should lay down clearly one principle which must 
 guide us in our investigation. 
 
 It is this, that for the purposes of scientific in- 
 vestigation, religions must be regarded as differing 
 from one another in degree rather than in kind. 
 This is the one postulate, itself the result of a 
 careful induction, upon which alone the existence 
 
46 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 of any true science of religion must depend. Without 
 a clear perception of this truth you enter upon the 
 study of the religions of the world, with a precon- 
 ceived idea, which will colour all your conclusions, 
 and will invalidate them the more gravely, the more 
 favourable those conclusions are to your own creed. 
 The ordinary distinctions of kind, therefore, drawn 
 between true and false, natural and supernatural, 
 revealed and unrevealed religions are, for our present 
 purpose, unreal and misleading. The fact is, that 
 from one point of view all religions are more or 
 less natural, from another all are more or less super- 
 natural ; and all alike are to be treated from the same 
 stand-point, and investigated by the same methods. 
 In the Science of Religion, to quote an expression 
 of Max Miiller's used in this place, Christianity ' owns 
 no prescriptive rights, and claims no immunities.' It 
 challenges the freest inquiry ; and as it claims to 
 come from God Himself, so it fears not the honest 
 use of any faculties that God has given to man. Chris- 
 tianity is indeed a revelation, and what it really reveals 
 is true ; and, so far, if the alternative must needs be 
 put in this shape, no Christian would have any doubt 
 in which category to place his own creed. 
 
 But does Christianity claim any such monopoly of 
 what is good and true as is implied in this crude classifi- 
 cation, or will any one say that there is no real revela- 
 
DO RELIGIONS DIFFER IN KIND? 47 
 
 tion of God in the noble lives of Confucius or Buddha, 
 and no fragments of Divine truth in the pure morality 
 of the systems which they founded ? Truth, happily 
 for man, is myriad-sided, and happy he who can catch 
 a far-off glance of the one side of it presented to him ! 
 Claim, if you like, for the Bible what the Koran does 
 claim for itself and the Bible does not — a rigid or a 
 verbal inspiration. Grant that the truth revealed 
 passed mechanically through the mind of the sacred 
 writer without contamination and without alloy, yet 
 who can say that since the Verities with which re- 
 ligion deals are all beyond the world of sense, the 
 precise meaning attached by him to any one word in 
 his creed is the same as that attached to it by 
 any other ? — qiwt homines tot sententicB. The recipient 
 subject colours every object of sensation or of thought 
 as it passes into it, and is conscious of that object, 
 not as it entered, but as it has been instantaneously 
 and unconsciously transformed in the alembic of the 
 mind. In religion, as in external nature, the human 
 mind is, as Bacon says, an unequal mirror to the rays 
 of things, mixing its ov/n nature indissolubly with 
 theirs. And this relative element once admitted into 
 religion at all, it follows that to divide religions by an 
 impassable barrier into true and false, natural and 
 revealed, is like dividing music into sacred and secular, 
 and history into sacred and profane. It is a division 
 
48 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 convenient enough for those — the majority of the 
 human race — who are content with an artificial classifi- 
 cation, and who care for no religion but their own ; 
 but, for scientific purposes, it is a cross division, it 
 begs the question at issue, and is as unphilosophical 
 as it is misleading.^ 
 
 Nor do Sacred Books, whatever be the theory of 
 inspiration on which they rest, lend to the religion to 
 which they belong any distinction of kind ; they fix 
 the phraseology of a religion, and we are apt to 
 believe that they also fix the thought. They do not 
 do so, however. The 'poetic and literary terms 
 thrown out,'^ to use Mr. Matthew Arnold's happy 
 expression, by the highest minds at the highest 
 objects of thought, as faint approximations only to 
 the truth respecting them, become enshrined in the 
 Sacred Canon. They are misunderstood, or half un- 
 derstood, even by those who hear them from the 
 Psalmist's or the Prophet's own lips, and in a few 
 years the misunderstanding grows till they become 
 fixed and rigid.^ Poetic imagery is mistaken for 
 scientific exactness, and dim outlines for exhaustive 
 definitions. A virtue is attached to the words them- 
 
 ^ For a full discussion of the ordinary methods of classifying religion, 
 see Max Miiller's 'Science of Religion,' pp. 123-143. 
 
 2 ' Literature and Dogma,' passim: but see especially pp. 38-41 and 58. 
 
 ^ For admirable illustrations of this, see * Literature and Dogma, ' 
 cap. II. and V. p. 123. This part of Mr. Arnold's work, it may be 
 pretty confidently asserted, is done once for all; and its influence will 
 be felt, avowedly or not, throughout the domain of Biblical criticism. 
 
INFLUENCE OF SACRED BOOKS 49 
 
 selves, and the thought, which is the jewel, is hidden 
 by the letter, which is only the casket. If it be true 
 that man never knows how anthropomorphic he him- 
 self is, still less do sacred writers know the anthropo- 
 morphism and the materialism which will eventually 
 be drawn even from their highest and most spiritual 
 utterances. How little did the author of the prayer 
 at the dedication of the temple of Solomon — the 
 grandest assertion, perhaps, in the Old Testament of 
 the infinite power and the infinite goodness of God, 
 His nearness to us and His distance from us — imagine 
 that the time would ever come when it would be held 
 that in that temple alone, and by Jews alone, men 
 could worship the Father ! 
 
 Christians may and must rise from an impartial 
 study of the religions of the world with their belief 
 vastly deepened that their Sacred Books stand as a 
 whole on a far higher level than other Sacred Books, 
 and that the ideal life of Christianity, while it is 
 capable of including the highest ideals of other creeds, 
 cannot itself be attained by any one of them. But the 
 value of this belief will be exactly proportioned to the 
 extent to which they have been able, for the purposes 
 of scientific study, to divest themselves of any arbi- 
 trary assumption in the matter ; and they must also 
 acknowledge that it is possible and natural for sincere 
 Mohammedans or Buddhists to arrive at the same 
 
 E 
 
50 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 conclusions concerning their own faiths. It is not easy 
 to be thoroughly convinced of this, or to act upon it ; 
 for intolerance is the ' natural weed of the human 
 bosom,' and there is no religion which does not seem 
 superstitious to those who do not believe in it.^ 
 
 But this belief is far from necessitating in practical 
 life a religious indifference, nor, however it may seem so 
 at first sight, is it averse to all missionary efforts. Mis- 
 sionaries will not cease to exist, nor will they lose their 
 energy, their enthusiasm, and their self-sacrifice. But 
 they will go to work in a different way, will view other 
 religions in a different light, and will test their success 
 by a different standard. They will no doubt be forced 
 to acquiesce in what seems the will of Providence, that 
 a national religion is as much a part of man's nature 
 as is the genius of his language, or the colour of his 
 skin ; they will admit that the precise form of a creed 
 is a matter of prejudice and of circumstance with most 
 of us, and that, in spite of the rise of historical reli- 
 gions which have shattered other faiths and risen upon 
 their ruins, nine-tenths of the whole human race have 
 died, and will in all probability continue to die, in the 
 profession of that faith into which they were born ; 
 but this will no longer seem to them, as it must seem 
 
 ^ See Grote, VI. p. 156, sq., on the death of Socrates. The boast 
 of Cicero, * Majores nostri superstitionem a rehgione separaverunt ' (de 
 Nat. Deomm, II. 28), is the natural belief of every one, even of the 
 Fetish-worshipper, concerning his own, and none but his own, creed. 
 
MISSIONARY WORK 51 
 
 now, a mysterious and overwhelming victory of evil 
 over good, which appals the moral sense, and, if a man 
 be not better than the letter of his creed, must tend to 
 shake at once his belief in the Universal Fatherhood 
 of God, and the true brotherhood of humanity ; they 
 will rather, in proportion to the strength of their belief 
 in the goodness of God, believe that His creatures can- 
 not grope after Him, even in the dark, without getting 
 that light which is sufficient for them ; they will not 
 seek to eradicate wholly any existing national faith, 
 if only it be a living one ; nor, as the phrase is, will 
 they aim at ' bringing its adherents over to Christia- 
 nity ; ' they will seek rather to bring Christianity to 
 them, to infuse a Christian spirit into what is, at worst, 
 not an anti-Christian, but merely a non-Christian, or, 
 it may be, a half-Christian faith. 
 
 The Apostles did not cease to be Jews because 
 they became Christians, or to look up to Moses less 
 because they reverenced Christ more. And yet the 
 difference between Judaism and Christianity, between 
 the forms and the ceremonies and the exclusiveness of 
 the one, and the spirituality and the freedom and the 
 universality of the other, is at least as great, as I hope 
 to show, as the difference between a sincere believer 
 in the teaching of the prophet of Arabia and a humble 
 follower of the character of Christ. 
 
 St. Paul, the one model given us in the New 
 
 E 2 
 
52 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Testament of what a missionary should be, in dealing 
 with the faith of a cultivated people much dissimilar 
 to his own, a faith, most people would say now, differ- 
 ing in kind as well as in degree from Christianity, 
 never thought himself of drawing so broad a distinc- 
 tion between the two. He might well have been 
 disposed to do so, for the Polytheism of Athens had 
 long ceased to be an adequate expression of the 
 highest religious life of the people. It was in its 
 decadence even when it had inspired the profoundest 
 utterances of iEschylus or Sophocles ; it could not have 
 inspired them then, even had there existed genius like 
 theirs to be inspired. Its oracles were dumb ; and yet 
 St. Paul dropped not a word of scorn for the echoes 
 that still lingered, and the flames that were still 
 flickering, on its shattered altars. He did not talk of 
 false gods or of devil-worship, of imposture or of super- 
 stition. Those whom our translation calls * super- 
 stitious ' he calls ' God-fearing.' He quotes their great 
 authors with sympathy and with respect. He pro- 
 fesses only to give articulate utterance to their own 
 thoughts, and to declare more fully to them that God 
 whom, unknowingly, they already worshipped. 
 
 And so, again, in writing to the converts to be 
 found even in the metropolis of the world, and, it must 
 be added, the head -quarters of its vices, while he 
 lashes its moral iniquities and its religious corruptions 
 
EXAMPLE OF ST. PAUL 53 
 
 with an unsparing hand, yet, with a toleration wholly- 
 alien to the Jewish race, and without forfeiting his 
 supreme allegiance to his Master, he strikes at the 
 root of the impassable distinction between revealed 
 and unrevealed religion, by pointing out that those 
 who, not having the law, yet did by nature the things 
 contained in the law, were in truth a law unto them- 
 selves. He showed that the Eternal could reveal 
 Himself as well by His unwritten as by His written 
 law, and that the voice of conscience is, in very truth, 
 to everyone who follows it, the voice of the living God. 
 The missionaries of the future, therefore, will try 
 to penetrate to the common elements which, they will 
 have learnt, underlie all religions alike, and make the 
 most of those. They will be able, with a sympathy 
 which is real because it is drawn from a knowledge of \ 
 
 the history of their own faith, to point out the abuses 
 which have crept, and always will creep, into an origi- 
 nally spiritual creed. They will inculcate in their 
 teaching, and exhibit in their lives, as they do now, 
 something of that highest morality which they have 
 learned from their Master, and which they will then 
 have learned is the very essence of their faith, and 
 which, in its broad outlines at least, in the 'secret' 
 as well as in the 'method' of Jesus,^ may adapt itself 
 to the wants of every nation and every creed. 
 
 * 'Literature and Dogma,' p. 343. 'Of the all-importance of righteous- 
 
54 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 They will never, therefore, think it necessary to 
 present Christianity to those of an alien creed as a 
 collection of defined yet mysterious doctrines which 
 must be accepted whole or not at all, but will rather 
 be content to show them Christ Himself as He ap- 
 peared to His earliest disciples — before the mists of 
 metaphysics had gathered round His head, and the 
 watchwords of theology had half hidden Him from the 
 view — glorious in His moral beauty, sublime in His 
 self-surrender, Divine in His humanity and by reason of 
 it. And they may then leave it to the moral sense of 
 some, at least, in every section of the race whose greatest 
 glory and Ideal Representative He is, to judge of Him 
 aright, and to recognise in His person the supreme 
 and the final Revelation of God. Here, in the am- 
 bition to set before the eyes of all a higher Ideal, 
 and a more perfect example than any they have yet 
 known ; in the proclamation of the truth, which 
 Christ came to proclaim, of the universal Father- 
 hood, and the perfect love of God — here is ample 
 
 ness there is a knowledge in Mohammedanism, but of the method and 
 secret of Jesus, by which alone is righteousness possible, hardly any 
 sense at all.' There is substantial truth in this ; but few can read Mr. 
 Arnold's own account of what he conceives the secret and method of 
 Jesus to have been, without feeling that all the higher religions of the 
 world, — any religion, in fact, which controlling the lower part of man's 
 nature and stimulating the higher, makes him to be at peace with him- 
 self, which gives hope in adversity, and calmness in the prospect of 
 death, must contain much both of the one and of the other. 
 
HOW MAY CHRISTIANITY SPREAD? 55 
 
 work for , the enthusiasm of humanity ; in this sense 
 Christ may Hve again upon the earth, and in this 
 sense, and only in this, is it Hkely that Christianity 
 will overspread the world. I have premised this much, 
 even at the risk of anticipating some of the con- 
 clusions to which we shall, I believe, ultimately come, 
 because I think it necessary to prevent any misunder- 
 standing as to my point of view. 
 
 gf oioov oioz ; how far the way was prepared for 
 Mohammed by circumstances, and what part he him- 
 self bcre in the great revolution that goes by his name ; 
 what we are to say on the nature of his mission, on 
 the much-disputed question of his sincerity, of the 
 inconsistencies in his career and the blots upon it, 
 this will form the subject of my next Lecture. 
 
 ^ 
 
56 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 LECTUEE II. 
 
 February 21, 1874. 
 
 MOHAMMED. 
 
 MfyaXwj^ tavTov d^Lul at,icg wv. — Aristotle. 
 
 There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his conversation 
 in the heavens. — The Koreishites. 
 
 A COMPLETE history of the opinions that have been 
 held by Christians about Mohammed and Moham- 
 medanism would not be an uninstructive chapter, how- 
 ever melancholy, in the history of the human mind. 
 To glance for a moment at a few of them. 
 
 During the first few centuries of Mohammedanism, 
 Christendom could not afford to criticise or explain ; 
 it could only tremble and obey. But when the 
 Saracens had received their first check in the heart of 
 France, the nations which had been flying before them, 
 faced round, as a herd of cows will sometimes do when 
 the single dog that has put them to flight is called 
 off; and though they did not yet venture to fight, 
 they could at least calumniate their retreating foe. 
 
MEDIAEVAL VIEW OF MOHAMMED 57 
 
 Drances-like, they could manufacture calumnies and 
 victories at pleasure : — 
 
 * Qu;5e tuto tibi magna volant; dum distinct hostem 
 Agger murorum, nee inundant sanguine fossae,' 
 
 The disastrous retreat of Charles the Great through 
 Roncesvalles is turned by Romance mongers and 
 Troubadours into a signal victory ; Charles, who 
 never went beyond Pannonia, is credited, in the follow- 
 ing century, with a successful Crusade to the Holy 
 Sepulchre, and even with the sack of Babylon ! 
 The age of Christian chivalry had not yet come, and 
 was not to come for two hundred years. 
 
 In the romance of ' Turpin,' quoted by Renan, 
 Mohammed, the fanatical destroyer of all idolatry, is 
 turned himself into an idol of gold, and, under the 
 name of Mawmet, is reported to be the object of 
 worship at Cadiz ; and this not even Charles the 
 Great, Charles the Iconoclast, the destroyer of the 
 Irmansul, in his own native Germany, would venture 
 to attack from fear of the legion of demons which 
 guarded it. In the song of Roland, the national Epic 
 of France, referring to the same events, Mohammed 
 appears with the chief of the Pagan Gods on the one 
 side of him and the chief of the Devils on the other ; 
 a curious anticipation, perhaps, of the view of Satanic 
 inspiration taken by Sir William Muir. Marsilles, 
 
58 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Kaliph of Cordova, is supposed to worship him as a 
 god, and his favourite form of adjuration is made to be 
 * By Jupiter, by Mohammed, and by Apollyon,' — 
 strange metamorphosis and strange collocation ! 
 Human sacrifices are offered to him, if nowhere else 
 indeed, in the imagination and assertions of Christian 
 writers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, under the 
 various names of Bafum, or Maphomet, or Mawmet ; 
 and in the same spirit Malaterra, in his ' History of 
 Sicily,' describes that island as being, when under 
 Saracenic rule, ' a land wholly given to idolatry,' ^ and 
 the expedition of the Norman Roger Guiscard is 
 characterised as being a crusade against idolatry. 
 Which people were the greater idolaters, any candid 
 reader of the Italian annalists of this time, collected 
 by Muratori, can say. It is not a little curious that 
 both the English and French languages still bear wit- 
 ness to the popular misapprehension ; the French by 
 the word 'Mahomerie ' ; the English by the word * mum- 
 mery,' still used for absurd or superstitious rites.^ 
 Nor has a Mohammedan nothing to complain of in 
 the etymology and history, little known or forgotten, 
 of the words ' Mammetry ' ^ and ' Paynim/ ' terma- 
 
 ^ B. II. I. 'Terram idolis deditam.' 
 ' Renan, ' Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse/ p. 223, note. 
 ^ Mammetry, a contraction of Mahometry, used in early English 
 for any false religion, especially for a worship of idols, insomuch that 
 
MISCONCEPTIONS SHOIVN BY LANGUAGE 59 
 
 gant' and 'miscreant' ; but to these I can only refer 
 in passing. 
 
 In the twelfth century * the god Mawmet passes 
 into the heresiarch Mahomet,'^ and, as such, of course 
 he occupies a conspicuous place in the * Inferno.' 
 Dante places him in his ninth circle among the 
 sowers of religious discord ; his companions being Fra 
 Dolcino, a communist of the fourteenth century, and 
 Bertrand de Born, a fighting Troubadour : his flesh 
 is torn piecemeal from his limbs by demons who 
 repeat their round in time to re-open the half-healed 
 wounds. The romances of Baphomet, so common in 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, attribute any 
 and every crime to him, just as the Athanasians did 
 to Arius. * He is a debauchee, a camel stealer, a 
 Cardinal, who having failed to obtain the object of 
 every Cardinal's ambition, invents a new religion to 
 revenge himself on his brethren ! ' ^ 
 
 With the leaderG of the Reformation, Moham- 
 
 Mammet or Ma\ATnet came to mean an idol. In Shakespeare the 
 name is extended to mean a doll : Juliet, for instance, is called by her 
 father ' a whining mammet. ' See Trench ' On Words, 'p. 112. Paynim = 
 Pagan or Heathen. Termagant, a term applied now only to a brawling 
 woman, was originally one of the names given to the supposed idol of 
 the Mohammedans. Miscreant, originally ' a man who believes 
 otherwise,' acquired its moral significance from the hatred of the 
 Saracens which accompanied the Crusades. The story of Blue Beard, 
 the associations connected with the name 'Mahound,' and the dislike 
 of European chivalry in Medi£eval times for the Mare — the favourite 
 animal of the Arabs — are other indications of the same thing. 
 ^ Renan, loc. cit. - Renan, p. 224. 
 
6o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 med, the greatest of all Reformers, meets with little 
 sympathy, and their hatred of him, as perhaps was 
 natural, seems to vary inversely as their knowledge. 
 Luther doubts whether he is not worse than Leo ; 
 Melancthon believes him to be either Gog or Magog, 
 and probably both.^ The Reformers did not see that 
 the Papal party, fastening on the hatred of priestcraft 
 and formalism which was common doubtless to Islam 
 and to Protestantism, would impute to both a com- 
 mon hatred of Christianity, even as the Popes had 
 accused the iconoclastic Emperors of Constantinople 
 eight centuries before. 
 
 Now, too, arose the invention, the maliciousness of 
 which was only equalled by its stupidity, but be- 
 lieved by all who wished to believe it — of the dove 
 trained to gather peas placed in the ear of Mohammed,^ 
 that people might believe that he was inspired by the 
 Holy Ghost — inspired, it would seem, by the very 
 Being, whose separate existence it was the first article 
 of his creed to deny ! In the imagination of Biblical 
 commentators later on, and down to this very day, 
 he divides with the Pope the credit or discredit of 
 being the subject of special prophecy in the books 
 of Daniel and the Revelation, that magnificent 
 
 ^ See 'Quarterly Review,' Art. Islam, byDeutsch, No. 254, p. 296, 
 2 A similar story is told of the great Schamyl; only in this case it is 
 
 Mohammed himself who takes the fonn of a dove, and imparts his 
 
 commands to the Hero. 
 
SUPPOSED SUBJECl OF PROPHECY 6i 
 
 series of tableaux, a part of which, on the prin- 
 ciple that * a prophecy may mean whatever comes 
 after it,' has been tortured into agreement with each 
 successive act of the drama of history ; while, from 
 another part, lovers of the mysterious have attempted 
 to cast, and, in spite of disappointment will always 
 continue to cast, the horoscope of the future. He is 
 Antichrist, the Man of Sin, the Little Horn, and I 
 know not what besides ; nor do I think that a single 
 writer, with the one strange exception of the Jew 
 Maimonides, till towards the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, treats of him as otherwise than a rank im- 
 postor and false prophet. 
 
 France and England may, perhaps, divide the 
 credit of having been the first to take a different view, 
 and to have begun that critical study of Arabian his- 
 tory or literature which, in the hands of Gibbon and 
 of Muir, of Caussin de Perceval and of St. Hilaire, of 
 Weil and of Sprenger, has put the materials for a fair 
 and unbiassed judgment within the reach of every- 
 one. Most other writers of the i8th century, such 
 as Dean Prideaux and the Abbe Maracci, Boulain- 
 villiers and Voltaire, and some subsequent Bampton 
 lecturers and Arabic professors, have approached the 
 subject only to prove a thesis. Mohammed was to be 
 either a hero or an impostor; they have held a brief 
 either for the prosecution or the defence ; and from 
 
62 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 them, therefore, we learn much that has been said 
 about Mohammed, but comparatively little of Mo- 
 hammed himself. 
 
 The founder of the reaction \vas Gagnier, a 
 Frenchman by birth, but an Englishman by adop- 
 tion. Educated in Navarre, where he had early 
 shown a mastery of more than one Semitic lan- 
 guage, he became Canon of St. Genevieve at Paris ; 
 on a sudden he turned Protestant, came to England, 
 and attacked Catholicism with all the zeal of a recent 
 convert. Having been appointed to the Chair of 
 Arabic at Oxford, he proceeded to write a history 
 of Mohammed, founded on the work of Abul Feda, 
 the qarliest and most authentic of Arabic historians 
 then known. 
 
 The translations of the Koran into two different 
 European languages by Sale and Savary soon fol- 
 lowed ; and from these works, combined with the vast 
 number of facts contained in Sale's Introductory Dis- 
 course, Gibbon, who was not an Arabic scholar him- 
 self, drew the materials for his splendid chapter, the 
 most masterly of his 'three master-pieces of biography,' 
 Athanasius, Julian, and Mohammed. * He has de- 
 scended on the subject in the fulness of his strength,* 
 has been inspired by it, and has produced a sketch 
 which, in spite of occasional uncalled-for sarcasms 
 and characteristic innuendoes, must be the delight 
 
REACTION IN HIS FAVOUR 63 
 
 and the despair even of those who have access, 
 as we now have, thanks especially to Sprenger 
 and Muir, to vast stores of information denied 
 to him. But Gibbon's unfair and unphilosophic 
 treatment of Christianity has, perhaps, prevented the 
 world from doing justice to his generally fair and 
 philosophic treatment of Mohammedanism ; and, as 
 a consequence of this, most Englishmen, who do not 
 condemn the Arabian prophet unheard, derive what 
 favourable notions of him they have, not from 
 Gibbon, but from Carlyle. Make as large deductions 
 as we will on the score of Carlyle's peculiar views on 
 *■ Heroes and Hero-worship,' how many of us can recall 
 the shock of surprise, the epoch in our intellectual and 
 religious life, when we found that he chose for his 
 * Hero as prophet,' not Moses, or Elijah, or Isaiah, but 
 the so-called impostor Mohammed ! 
 
 I admitted above that_the religionof Moharn- 
 med was m its e ssence not orig inal. Mohammed 
 n ever said it was : he called it a revival of the old one, 
 a return to the primitive creed of Abraham ; and there 
 is reason to believe that both the great religions of the 
 Eastern world existing in his time, Sabseanism, that is, 
 and Magianism, had been, in their origin^ at least, 
 vaguely monotheistic. They had passed through the 
 inevitable stages of spirituality, misunderstanding, 
 decline, and, lastly, intentional corruption, till the 
 
64 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 God whom Abraham, according to the well-known 
 Mussulman legend, had been the first to worship, 
 because, while He had made the stars and sun to 
 rise and set. He never rose nor set Himself, had with- 
 drawn behind them altogether ; the heavenly bodies, 
 from being symbols, had become the thing sym- 
 bolised ; temples were erected in their honour, and 
 idols filled the temples. 
 
 And as with Sabaeanism, so with Magianism ; 
 Ormuzd and Ahriman were no longer the principles 
 brought into existence, or existing, by the permission 
 of the one true God, who, as Zoroaster had taught, 
 would tolerate neither temples, nor altars, nor symbols ; 
 worshipped only on the hill-tops with the eye of faith, 
 quickened though it might be by the glory of the 
 rising or setting sun presented to the bodily eye. 
 Fire had itself become the Divinity ; and what offering 
 could be more acceptable to such a God, than the 
 human victim, overwhelmed by the mysterious flame, 
 whose divine power he denied .-* 
 
 And, combined with these two religions which had 
 been spiritual in their origin, and, probably, more 
 prominent and popular than either, was the grossest 
 Fetishism, the worship of actual stocks and stones, 
 or of the * grim array ' of three hundred and sixty 
 idols in the Kaaba ; among which the aerolite once 
 believed to have been of dazzling whiteness, but long 
 
PREVIOUS RELIGIONS IN ARABIA 65 
 
 since blackened by the kisses of sinful men, was at 
 once the most ancient and the most sacred. 
 
 Nor were Judaism and Christianity themselves un- 
 known in Arabia. The destruction of Jerusalem by 
 Titus had caused a very general migration of Jews from 
 Palestine, southwards and eastwards, beyond the limits 
 of the Roman Empire, and, from that time onwards, 
 the northern part of Arabia was dotted over by Jewish 
 colonies. In the third century a whole Arabian tribe, 
 even in the south of the Peninsula, had adopted the 
 Jewish faith, and the history of Mohammed proves 
 that the neighbourhood of Yathrib^ contained many 
 Jewish tribes, which, though they maintained in the 
 land of their exile that proud religious isolation which 
 was their national birthright, were not without their 
 influence on Arab politics. 
 
 As to Christianity, it is possible that the very first 
 converts made by St. Paul to the faith which once 
 he had destroyed, were of Arab blood.^ In the fourth 
 century we hear of Christian churches at Tzafar and at 
 Aden, under the protection of the half-Christianised 
 Himyarite king ; and the Abyssinian conquest made 
 a form of Christianity to be the dominant religion, at 
 all events in appearance, in Yemen. But neither of 
 
 ' Not called Medina, z.^. Medinat-an-Nabi, 'the City of the Pro- 
 phet,' till after the Hegira. 
 
 2 Epistle to Galatians, i. 17. 
 
66 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 these religions ever struck deep root in the Arabian 
 soil : either the people were not suited to them, or 
 they were not suited to the people. They lived on, 
 on sufferance only, till a faith, which to the Arabs 
 should be the more living one, should sweep them 
 away. 
 
 Such were the religious conditions under which 
 Mohammed had to work ; and what were the social 
 conditions ? Arabia had from time immemorial been 
 split up into a vast number of independent tribes, 
 always at war with one another. The scanty suste- 
 nance which an arid soil yielded they were fain to eke 
 out by trading themselves, or by plundering others 
 who conducted caravans along the sea coast of the 
 Hedjaz, to exchange the spices and precious stones 
 of India or of Hadramaut or of Yemen with the 
 manufactures of Bozra and Damascus. Their hand 
 was against every man, and every man's hand was 
 against them ; and a prophecy is hardly needed 
 to explain the fact, that an impenetrable country 
 was never penetrated by foreign conquerors. Nor 
 were they as uncivilised as has often been sup- 
 posed. They were as passionately fond of poetry as 
 they were of war and plunder. What the Olympic 
 Games did for Greece in keeping up the national 
 feeling, as distinct from tribal independence, in 
 giving a brief cessation from hostilities, and acting 
 
ARAB POETRY AND CHIVALRY 67 
 
 as a literary centre, that the annual fairs at Okatz 
 and Mujanna were to Arabia. Here tribes made up 
 their dissensions, exchanged prisoners of war, and, 
 most important of all, competed with one another in 
 extempore poetic contests. Even in the * times of 
 ignorance,' each tribe produced its own poet-laureate ; 
 and the most ready and the best saw his poem 
 transcribed in letters of gold,^ or suspended on th^ 
 wall of the entrance of the Kaaba, where it would be 
 seen by every pilgrim wdio might visit the most sacred 
 place in the country. There was a wild chivalry, too, 
 about them, a contempt of danger and a sensibility of 
 honour, which lends a charm to all we hear of their 
 loves and their wars, their greed and their hospitality, 
 their rapine and their revenge. The Bedouin has been 
 the same in these respects in all ages. * Be good enough 
 to take off that garment of yours,' says the Bedouin 
 robber politely to his victim ; * it is wanted by my 
 wife ; ' and the victim submits, with as good a grace as 
 he can muster, to the somewhat unreasonable demands 
 of a hypothetical lady. El Mutanabi, a poet, prophet, 
 and ^yarrior, three hundred years after the Hegira, 
 but who no doubt had his prototypes before it, was 
 
 ' Called Moallacat. Sprenger and Deutsch agree that this word' 
 means not 'suspended,' but 'strung loosely together,' and question 
 the truth of the story of the suspension in the ' Kaaba.' Some of these 
 poems, as, for instance, that of the poet Labyd, still survive, and are a 
 standing proof of the untaught poetic genius of the Arabs. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 journeying with his son through a country infested by 
 robbers, and proposed to seek a place of refuge for 
 the night : * Art thou then that Mutanabi,' exclaimed 
 his slave, * who wrote these lines, — 
 
 * I am known to the night, and the wild and the steed, 
 To the guest and the sword, to the paper and the reed ? ' 
 
 The poet-warrior felt the stain like a wound, and 
 throwing himself down to sleep where he then was, 
 met his death at the hands of the robbers.' The pas- 
 sion indeed for indiscriminate plunder had, before the 
 time of Mohammed, so far given way to the growing 
 love of commerce that a kind of Treuga Dei, or 
 Truce of God, was observed, in theory at least, during 
 four months of the year. But what the law forbade 
 then, ex hypothesi it allowed at other times, and it is 
 likely that the enforced abstention gave, at once, the 
 zest of novelty and a clear conscience to the pur- 
 veyors of the trade when the four months were 
 over. 
 
 Such, very briefly, was the condition of the Arabs 
 when, to use an expression of Voltaire, quoted by 
 Barthelemy St. Hilaire, 'The turn of Arabia' came ;^ 
 
 * Burton's 'Pilgrimage to Mecca,' III. p. 60, where he tells this 
 story and translates the Arabic lines. See the whole of chap. XXIV. 
 for a graphic account drawn from personal observation of Bedouin 
 knight errantry, and poetry, and generosity. 
 
 "^ P. 211. See Cap. II., generally, for a description of Pre-Moham- 
 medan Arabi.i. 
 
COULD ISLAM HA VE BEEN PREDICTED ? 69 
 
 when the hour had already struck for the most com- 
 plete, the most sudden, and the most extraordinary- 
 revolution that has ever come over any nation upon 
 earth. 
 
 One of the most philosophical of historians has 
 remarked that of all the revolutions which have had a 
 permanent influence upon the civil history of man- 
 kind, none could so little be anticipated by human 
 prudence as that eflected by the religion of Arabia. 
 And at first sight it must be confessed that the 
 Science of History, if indeed there be such a science, 
 is at a loss to find that sequence of cause and effect 
 which it is the object and the test of all history, which 
 is worthy of the name, to trace out. 
 
 The Emperor Justinian, not the least shrewd of the 
 Byzantine Emperors, who, some forty years before, 
 had thought it necessary to protect his empire from 
 every possible and from many impossible dangers, 
 had neglected to erect a line of fortresses on the side 
 of his empire which, in defiance of nature, really was 
 the most vulnerable.^ ' By a precaution which in- 
 spired the cowardice it foresaw,' he had erected a 
 fortress even at Thermopylae, where the religio loci 
 would rather have called for a Spartan rampart of 
 three hundred men, if only they had been forth- 
 coming. He had kept the Sclavonians out of Con- 
 
 » Cf. Gibbon, Vol. V. 102-111. 
 
70 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 stantinople by one long wall, and the Russians out of 
 the Crimea by another ; he had fortified Amida and 
 Edessa against the fire-worshippers ; had built St. 
 Catherine's half-monastery and half-fortress in the 
 wilderness of Mount Sinai ; and had even taken pre- 
 cautions against the savages of Ethiopia : but he 
 had trusted to the six hundred miles of desert, which 
 nature had interposed between him and a set of 
 robber tribes, intent only on molesting one another. 
 What hostile force could pass such an obstacle 1 
 
 But we can see now, and Mohammed himself per- 
 haps saw, that the ground was in many respects prepared 
 for a great social and religious revolution. * It de- 
 tracts nothing from the fame of a great man to show, 
 so far as we can, how his success was possible.'' It is 
 only another proof, if proof were wanting, that genius 
 is little else than insight joined to sustained effort ; 
 the eye sees what it brings with it the power of seeing ; 
 and the great man differs from his contemporaries 
 chiefly in this, that he can read the dark riddle of his 
 time with an eye a few degrees less obscured than those 
 around him. He is the greatest product of his age, but 
 he is still its product, and he is only the father of the 
 age that is to succeed in so far as he owns his paren- 
 tage. He marches indeed in front of his age ; but his 
 influence will be permanent or fleeting precisely so far 
 
 1 M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire, 'Maliomet et le Koran,' p. 51. 
 
GREAT MEN AND THEIR INFLUENCE 71 
 
 as he discerns the direction in which it would advance 
 at a slower pace without him.^ When he tries to go 
 beyond this, and to force the world out of its groove, 
 to adopt hobbies of his own, then begins the region of 
 the remote, the selfish, the personal ; in this the great 
 man fails, and hence the commonplaces on the failure 
 of greatness, and the greatness of failure, with which 
 Ave are all familiar. * Perish my name,' said Danton, 
 * but let the cause triumph ; '^ and personal failure of 
 this kind is to the great man no failure at all, it is only 
 another word for success. The truth is that greatness, 
 so far as it is the truest greatness, rarely fails altogether 
 of its object ; and that failure is great only when the 
 end proposed is good, and the human means, though 
 inadequate to its attainment, are yet a real advance 
 towards it. 
 
 It must be remembered therefore as regards what 
 seems the sudden birth of the Arabian nation, fully 
 armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, that the 
 annual resort to Mecca for purposes of trade, poetry, 
 and religion, had pointed to the Holy City as to a 
 possible metropolis ; and to the Koreishites, the 
 hereditary guardians of the Kaaba, as the potential 
 
 » Cf. Guizot's 'Lectures on Histor>^' Vol. III. Lect. XX.; and 
 Mill's Review of them in 'Dissertations and Discussions,' II. 249, 
 250. 
 
 " A similar sajing is attributed to Cavour : ' Perish my name and 
 memory, so that Italy be made a nation ! ' 
 
72 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 rulers of a future people ; while, as regards the new 
 religion, there was the groundwork of Monotheism 
 underlying all the abuses and corruption of Magianism 
 and Sabseanism. There was also a class of people, 
 called Hanyfs, who prided themselves on preserving 
 the original creed of Abraham, and even his sacred 
 books ; while Ibn Ishac,^ the earliest known historian 
 of Islam, records a meeting of four or five among 
 the Koreishites at which it was resolved to open a 
 crusade against idolatry, and to seek for the original 
 and only true faith ; and they straightway abandoned 
 
 ^ He died A.H. 15 1. His work has been preserved for us in the 
 Sirat-er-racoul of Ibn-Hisham, who died in the year of the Hegira 
 213. The fullest and most trustworthy historian, in the judgment of 
 Muir and Sprenger, whose writings have come down to us is the Katib 
 al Wakidy, or secretary of the historian Wakidy : died 207 A.H. The 
 MS. was discovered by Sprenger at Cawnpore. Among other dis- 
 coveries of Sprenger may be mentioned a portion of the biography of 
 Mohammed by Tabari, who died A.H. 310, and a complete biographical 
 dictionary, termed Igaba, of the companions of Mohammed, com- 
 • piled by Ibn-Hidjr, in the fifth century, from writers, whose names 
 he gives, of earlier and incontestable authority. It contains the 
 biographies of some 8,000 people. And it may be hoped that the 
 Government of India, which numbers among its subjects more than 
 thirty million Mussulmans, may recognise, if they have not already 
 done so, the imperial importance of publishing the three remain- 
 ing folios of the work. Sprenger brought out one volume, but 
 an order of the Court of Directors suspended the publication of the 
 rest. See Sprenger, Preface, p. 12, where it may be observed how 
 modestly he passes over his own great discoveries, and does not even 
 allude to the slight shown it by the Directors. Learned and critical 
 Mohammedans, it would seem, do not think so highly of Wakidy and 
 his secretary as Muir and Sprenger do ; they prefer Ibn-Hisham. — 
 See Muir, I. 77-105. 
 
PRE-MOHAMMEDANS 73 
 
 their homes and spread over the world in the quest of 
 this Holy Grail.^ 
 
 Mohammedanism therefore is no real exception 
 to the principle I have laid down above as to the 
 origin of the Historical Religions of the world, though, 
 at first sight, it may appear to be so. To Moham- 
 med's own mind it is quite true that the theological 
 element was the predominant and inspiring one, but 
 Mohammed's mind itself was the outcome, at least 
 as much as it was the cause, of the great revolution 
 which goes by his name. There was a general social 
 and religious upheaving at the head of which the 
 Prophet placed himself, and which partly carried him 
 on with it, partly he himself carried it on ; the train 
 was already laid, and the spark from heaven was all 
 that was needed to set the Arab world ablaze. In 
 this sense it is perhaps true, as Renan has remarked 
 and the Koran itself declares, that Mohammedan- 
 ism was preached before the time of Mohammed ; 
 but there were Mohammedans before Mohammed, 
 only in the sense in which there were Zoroas- 
 trians before Zoroaster, Lutherans before Luther, 
 and Christians before Christ. Renan has him- 
 self remarked elsewhere, though he seems to have 
 forgotten it in dealing with Mohammedanism, that 
 
 ' Sprerger, p. 81. These four ' enquirers ' were Waraka, Othman, 
 Abayd, and Zayd. 
 
74 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 the glory of a religion belongs to its founder, and not 
 to his predecessors or to his successors.^ It is easy, he 
 says himself, to try to awake faith, and it is easy to be 
 possessed by it when once it has been awakened ; 
 but it is not easy to inspire it. It is the grandest gift, 
 ' a veiy gift of God. 
 
 But though, as I have said, the hour had come, 
 the youth of Mohammed gave few signs that he was 
 the man. The portents which ushered in his birth, 
 and that attended his early youth, are the offspring 
 of another country and of a later age. The celestial 
 light that beamed in the sky and from his newly- 
 opened eyes ; the Tigris overflowing its banks ; the 
 
 * It seems to me, though I would speak with the utmost diffidence in 
 venturing to dissent from the greatest European authority on the subject, 
 that Sprenger errs in the same direction as Renan, when he says in his 
 volume, published at Allahabad (p. 171), that Abu Bakr did more for 
 the success of Islam than the Prophet himself; and again (p. 174), 
 after enumerating all those who, merely from their vague Monotheism, he 
 calls the predecessors of Mohammed, he says that even after Mohammed 
 was acknowledged as the messenger of God, Omar had more influence 
 on the development of the ■ Islam than Mohammed himself. ' The 
 Islam is not the work of Mohammed ; it is not the doctrine of the 
 impostor .... it is the offspring of the spirit of the time, and 
 
 • the voice of the Arabic nation There is, however, no 
 
 doubt that the impostor has defiled it by his immorality and perverseness 
 of mind.' It is fair to say that this tone seems somewhat moderated, 
 or even'altered in the author's subsequent and greater work. Cf., how- 
 ever. Vol. II. 83-88, One is inclined to ask, if Islam was merely the 
 spirit of the time, who proved himself best able to read that spirit ? Was 
 it Abu Bakr and Omar, or was it Mohammed that produced the Koran ? 
 And is it their personality, or his, which has stamped itself with inefface- 
 able clearness for all time upon the Eastern world ? 
 
YOUTH OF MOHAMMED 75 
 
 palace of Chosroes toppling over to the ground ; the 
 sacred fire of Zoroaster, which had burned for one 
 thousand years, suddenly extinguished ; the mules that 
 talked, and the sheep that bowed to him, were un- 
 known to the contemporaries of Mohammed, and 
 Mohammed himself says nothing of them ! He was 
 a man of few words, and he had few friends : 
 notable chiefly for his truthfulness and good faith, they 
 called him ' Al Amyn,' the Trusty. His tending his 
 employer's flocks ; his journeys to Syria ; possibly his ^^ 
 
 short-lived friendship there with Sergius or Bahira, a 
 Nestorian monk; his famous vow to succour the 
 oppressed ; his employment by Kadijah in a trade 
 venture, and his subsequent happy marriage with her, 
 are about the only note-worthy external incidents in 
 his early life. 
 
 Up to the age of forty, there is nothing to show 
 that any serious scruple had occurred to him indivi- 
 dually as to the worship of idols, and in particular of 
 the Black Stone, of which his family were the heredi- 
 tary guardians. The sacred month of Ramadhan, like 
 other religious Arabs, he observed with punctilious 
 devotion ; and he would often retire to the caverns of 
 Mount Hira for purposes of solitude, meditation, 
 and prayer. He was melancholic in temperament, to 
 begin with; he was also subject to epileptic fits, upon 
 which Sprenger has laid great stress, and described 
 
76 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 most minutely/ and which, whether under the name 
 of the * sacred disease ' among the Greeks, or * posses- 
 sion by the devil ' among the Jews, has in most 
 ages and countries been looked upon as something 
 specially mysterious or supernatural. It is possible 
 that his interviews with Nestorian monks, with Zeid, 
 or with his wife's cousin Waraka, may have turned his 
 thoughts into the precise direction they took. Dejec- 
 tion alternated with excitement ; these gave place to 
 ecstasy or dreams ; and in a dream, or trance, or fit, 
 he saw an angel in human form, but flooded with 
 celestial light, and displaying a silver roll. * Read ! ' 
 said the angel. * I cannot read,' said Mohammed. 
 The injunction and the answer were twice repeated.^ 
 * Read,' at last said the angel, ' in the name of the 
 Lord, who created man out of a clot of blood ; read, 
 in the name of the Most High, who taught man the 
 use of the pen, who sheds on his soul the ray of know- 
 ledge, and teaches him what before he knew not.' 
 
 ' Sprenger, Vol. I. cap. III. 207. lie thinks Mohammed suffered 
 from hysteria, followed by catalepsy, rather than epilepsy ; for the 
 Prophet does not seem to have lost all consciousness. It is worth re- 
 marking that Sprenger's medical knowledge is not very favourable in 
 its result to Mohammed. He starts by saying, p. 210, that all 
 hysterical people have a tendency to lying and deceit. This is his major 
 premise. His minor is that Mohammed was hysterical, and the infe- 
 rence is obvious. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find him (Vol. 
 I. Cap, IV. p. 306, note) speaking of the ' vision ' of the flight to Jeru- 
 salem as one 'lie,' and that to the seventh heaven as another lie. 
 
 * Cf Sura XCVI. Deutsch (Islam, p. 306) renders the word 
 usually translated 'Read ' by 'Cry,' comparing Isaiah xi. 6. 
 
CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE *j*i 
 
 Upon this Mohammed felt the heavenly inspiration, 
 gnd read the decrees of God, which he after^vards 
 promulgated in the Koran. Then came the announce- 
 ment, ' O Mohammed, of a truth thou art the Prophet 
 of God, and I am his angel Gabriel.'^ 
 
 This was the crisis of Mohammed's life. It was 
 his call to renounce idolatry, and to take the office of 
 Prophet. Like Isaiah, he could not at first believe 
 that so unworthy an instrument could be chosen for 
 such a purpose. ' Woe is me, for I am undone, be- 
 cause I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the 
 midst of a people of unclean lips ;' but the live 
 coal was not immediately taken from the altar and 
 laid upon his, as upon Isaiah's lips. Trembling and 
 agitated, Mohammed tottered to Kadijah and told 
 
 ' Strangely enough, Sir \Yilliam Muir, vol. ii. p. 89-96, selects 
 this period, above all others in Mohammed's life, as the one in which 
 to suggest his peculiar view, that the Prophet's belief in his inspiration 
 was Satanic in its origin ; and he supports his view by a somewhat 
 elaborate parallel with the temptations which presented themselves to 
 Christ at the beginning of His work. Whether such a Detis ex 
 machind is required to untie the knot is hardly within my province to 
 inquire, since the whole matter is alike incapable of proof and dis- 
 proof ; but it seems pertinent to remark, first, that the developed and 
 quasi-scientific conception of such a being as Sir William Muir pictures 
 is Persian rather than Jewish in its origin, and is found in Palestine 
 only after the Capti^nty ; and, secondly, that if the spirit of evil did 
 suggest the idea to Mohammed, he never so completely outwitted 
 himself, since friend and foe must alike admit that it was Mohammed's 
 firm belief in supernatural guidance that lay at the root of all he 
 achieved. Without this we should never have heard of him except as 
 one of a thousand short-lived Arabian sectaries ; with it he created a 
 nation, and revivified a third of the then known world. 
 
, 78 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 her his vision and his agony of mind. He had 
 always hated and despised soothsayers, and now, in 
 the irony of destiny, it would appear that he was to 
 become a soothsayer himself ' Fear not, for joyful 
 tidings dost thou bring,' exclaimed Kadijah. ' I will 
 henceforth regard thee as the prophet of our nation. 
 Rejoice,' she added, seeing him still cast down ; 
 * Allah will not suffer thee to fall to shame. Hast 
 thou not been loving to thy kinsfolk, kind to thy 
 neighbours, charitable to the poor, faithful to thy word, 
 and ever a defender of the truth t ' First the life, 
 and then the theology, in the individual as in the 
 tribe and the nation. 
 
 But the assurances of the good Kadijah, and the 
 conversions of Zeid and Waraka, did not bring the 
 live coal from the altar. A long period of hesitation, 
 doubt, preparation followed. At one time Moham- 
 med even contemplated suicide, and he was only 
 restrained by an unseen hand, as he might well call 
 the bright vision of the future, pictured in one of the 
 earliest Suras of the Koran, ^ when the help of God 
 should come and victor}^, when he 'should see the 
 people crowding into the one true Faith, and he, the 
 Prophet, should celebrate the praise of his Lord, and 
 ask pardon of Him, for He is forgiving.' Three years, 
 the period of the Fatrah, saw only fourteen proselytes 
 
 » Sura ex. 
 
OPPOSITION TO THE PROPHET 79 
 
 attach themselves to him. His teaching seemed to 
 make no way beyond the very Hmited circle of his 
 earliest followers. His rising hopes were crushed. 
 People pointed the finger of scorn at him as he passed 
 by : ' There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his 
 converse with the heavens ! ' They called him a 
 driveller, a star-gazer, a maniac-poet. His uncles 
 sneered, and the main body of the citizens treated 
 him with that contemptuous indifference, which must 
 have been harder to him to bear than active persecu- 
 tion. Well might he, to take an illustration suggested 
 by Sir W. Muir himself, ^ like Elijah of old, go a day's 
 journey into the wilderness, and request for himself 
 that he might die, and say, ' It is enough, O Lord ; 
 now take away my life, for I am not better than my 
 fathers : ' or, again, ' I have been very jealous for the 
 Lord God of hosts, because the people have forsaken 
 Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars, and slain Thy 
 prophets with the sword ; and I, even I, only am left, 
 and they seek my life to take it away.' At times his 
 distress was insupportable : 
 
 * And had not his poor heart 
 Spoken with That, which being everywhere 
 Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, 
 Surely the man had died of solitude.' 
 
 But out of weakness came forth strength at last ; out 
 of doubt, certainty ; out of humiliation, victory. Another 
 
 1 Muir, Vol. II., 228. 
 
8o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 vision, in which he was commanded to preach pubhcly, 
 followed ; and now he called the Koreishites of the 
 line of Hachim together, those who had most to lose 
 and least to gain by his reform, and boldly announced 
 his mission. They tried persuasion, entreaties, bribes, 
 and threats. ' Should they array against me the sun 
 on my right hand, and the moon on my left,' said Mo- 
 hammed, * yet while God should command me, I would 
 not renounce my purpose.' These are not the words, 
 nor this the course, of an impostor. 
 
 Ten more years passed away ; his doctrine fought 
 its way amidst the greatest discouragements and 
 dangers by purely moral means, by its own inherent 
 strength. Kadijah was dead ; Abu Taleb, his uncle 
 and protector, died also. Most of Mohammed's dis- 
 ciples had taken refuge in Abyssinia, and at last Mo- 
 hammed himself was driven to fly for his life with 
 one companion, his early convert, Abu Bakr. For 
 three days he lay concealed in a cavern, a league from 
 Mecca. The Koreishite pursuers scoured the country, 
 thirsting for his blood. They approached the cavern. 
 * We are only two,' said his trembling companion. 
 ' There is a third,' said Mohammed ; ' it is God himself.' 
 The Koreishites reached the cave ; a spider, we are 
 told, had woven its web across the mouth, and a 
 pigeon was sitting on its nest in seemingly undis- 
 turbed repose. The Koreishites retreated, for it was 
 
THE HEGIRA 8i 
 
 evident the solitude of the place was unviolated ; and, 
 by a sound instinct, one of the sublimest stories in all 
 history has been made the era of Mohammedan 
 Chronology. 
 
 It is unnecessary to follow connectedly and in detail 
 any other incidents in Mohammed's life. The above 
 may be found, with some variety in the details, in any 
 History of Mohammed,' but I have thought it essen- 
 tial to dwell upon them, however familiar they may 
 be to some of us, as they seem to me, apart from their 
 own intrinsic beauty, to supply the key to almost 
 everything else in Mohammed's career. 
 
 The question of the sincerity of Mohammed has 
 been much debated, but to me, I must confess, that 
 to question his sincerity at starting, and to admit the 
 above indisputable facts, is very like a contradic- 
 tion in terms. Nor could anyone have done what 
 Mohammed did without the most profound faith in 
 the reality and goodness of his cause. Fairly con- 
 sidered, there is no single trait in his character up to 
 the time of the Hegira which calumny itself could 
 couple with imposture : on the contrary, there is every- 
 thing to prove the real enthusiast arriving slowly and 
 painfully at what he believed to be the truth. 
 
 It has been remarked by Gibbon that no incipient 
 prophet ever passed through so severe an ordeal as 
 
 ^ See especially W. Irving, 32, 33; and Muir, Vol. II. 
 
 G 
 
82 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Mohammed, since he first presented himself as a 
 prophet to those who were most conversant with his 
 infirmities as a man. Those who knew him best, his 
 wife, his eccentric slave, his cousin, his earliest friend, 
 he who, as Mohammed said, alone of his converts, 
 * turned not back, neither was perplexed,' were the first 
 to recognise his mission. The ordinary lot of a pro- 
 phet was in his case reversed ; he was not without 
 honour save among those who did not know him well. 
 Strange that Voltaire, who himself wrote on Moham- 
 med, and even made him the subject of a drama, 
 should, with Mohammed's example before him, have 
 ventured on his immoral paradox that ' No man is 
 a hero to his valet ! ' Explained in one sense, that a 
 small mind cannot fully understand or appreciate a 
 great one, it is a feeble truism ; explained in another, 
 which was the sense Voltaire meant, that the hero is 
 only a hero to those who see him at a distance, and 
 that there is no such thing as true greatness, it is an 
 audacious falsehood. It is almost equally strange 
 that Gibbon, who has done such full justice to 
 Mohammed in the general result, should say at start- 
 ing, * Mohammed's religion consists of an eternal 
 truth, and a necessary fiction — There is one God, and 
 Mohammed is his prophet.' It was, as I have 
 endeavoured to show, no fiction to Mohammed himself 
 or to his followers ; had it been so, Mohammedanism 
 
SINCERITY OF MOHAMMED 83 
 
 could never have risen as it did, nor be what it is 
 now. 
 
 But before we go on to consider those points in 
 Mohammed's career which are really open to question, 
 it may be well to recall a few prominent characteristics 
 of the man who has stamped his impress so deeply on 
 the Oriental world. Minute accounts of his appear- 
 ance and of his daily life have been preserved to us ; 
 they may be found in most of the biographies, and 
 Sir William Muir in particular has given us copious 
 extracts from the writings of the secretary of Wakidy.* 
 Mohammed was of middle height and of a strongly 
 built frame ; his head was large, and across his ample 
 forehead, and above finely arching eyebrows, ran a 
 strongly marked vein, which, when he was angry, 
 would turn black and throb visibly. His eyes were 
 coal black, and piercing in their brightness ; his hair 
 curled slightly ; and a long beard, which, like other 
 Orientals, he would stroke when in deep thought, 
 added to the general impressiveness of his appear- 
 ance. His step was quick and firm, ' like that of 
 one descending a hill.' Between his shoulders was 
 the famous mark, the size of a pigeon's ^^g^ which 
 his disciples persisted in believing to be the sign of 
 his prophetic ofRce ; while the light which kindled m 
 
 » Muir, Vol. IV. , Supplement to Chap. XXXVII. ; cf. also Deutsch's 
 ' Islam,' pp. 302-304. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 h's eye, like that which flashed from the precious 
 stones in the breast-plate of the High Priest, they 
 called the light of prophecy. 
 
 In his intercourse with others, he would sit silent 
 among his companions for a long time together, but 
 truly his silence was more eloquent than other men's 
 speech, for the moment speech was called for, it was 
 forthcoming in the shape of some weighty apothegm 
 or proverb, such as the Arabs love to hear. When he 
 laughed, he laughed heartily, shaking his sides, and 
 showing his teeth, which ' looked as if they were hail- 
 stones.' He was easy of approach to all who wished 
 to see him, even as * the river bank to him that 
 draweth water therefrom.' He was fond of animals, 
 and they, as is often the case, were fond of him. He 
 seldom passed a group of children playing together 
 without a few kind words to them ; and he was never 
 the first to withdraw his hand from the grasp of one 
 who offered him his. If the warmth of his attachment 
 may be measured, as in fact it may, by the depth of 
 his friends' devotion to him, no truer friend than Mo- 
 hammed ever lived. Around him, in quite early days, 
 gathered what was best and noblest in Mecca ; and in 
 no single instance, through all the vicissitudes of his 
 chequered life, was the friendship then formed, ever 
 broken. He wept like a child over the death of his 
 faithful servant Zeid. He visited his mother's tomb 
 
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROPHET 85 
 
 some fifty years after her death, and he wept there 
 because he believed that God had forbidden him 
 to pray for her. He was naturally shy and retiring ; 
 
 * as bashful,' said Ayesha, ' as a veiled virgin.' He 
 was kind and forgiving to all. ' I served him from the 
 time I was eight years old,' said his servant Anas, 
 
 * and he never scolded me for anything, though I 
 spoiled much.' The most noteworthy of his external 
 characteristics was a sweet gravity and a quiet 
 dignity, which drew involuntary respect, and which 
 was the best, and often the only protection he enjoyed 
 from insult. 
 
 His ordinary dress was plain, even to coarseness ; ,^ 
 yet he was fastidious in arranging it to the best ^ 
 advantage. He was fond of ablutions, and fonder 
 still of perfumes ; and he prided himself on the neat- 
 ness of his hair, and the pearly whiteness of his teeth. / 
 His life was simple in all its details. He lived with 
 his wives in a row of humble cottages, separated from 
 one another by palm branches, cemented together 
 with mud. He would kindle the fire, sweep the 
 floor, and milk the goats himself Ayesha tells us 
 that he slept upon a leathern mat, and that he mended 
 his clothes, and even clouted his shoes, with his own 
 hand. For months together, Ayesha is also our 
 authority for saying that he did not get a sufficient 
 meal. The little food that he had was always shared 
 
86 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 with those who dropped In to partake of it. Indeed, 
 outside the Prophet's house was a bench or gallery, on 
 which were always to be found a number of the poor 
 who lived entirely on the Prophet's generosity, and were 
 hence called the 'people of the bench.' His ordinary 
 food was dates and water, or barley bread ; milk and 
 honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which he 
 rarely allowed himself The fare of the desert seemed 
 most congenial to him, even when he was sovereign of 
 Arabia. One day some people passed by him with a 
 basket of berries from one of the desert shrubs. * Pick me 
 out,' he said to his companion, ' the blackest of those 
 berries, for they are sweet — even such as I was wont 
 to gather when I fed the flocks of Mecca at Adgad.' 
 
 Such were some of the characteristics of the man 
 whom ■ the Arabs were now called upon to recognise 
 as the prophet of their country, and as a messenger 
 direct from God. 
 
 Monotheism, pure and simple, if it is to be a life as 
 well as a creed, almost postulates the prophetic office. 
 The Creator is at too great a distance from His crea- 
 tures to allow of a sufficiently direct communication 
 with them. The power, the knowledge, the infinity of 
 God overshadow His providence. His sympathy, and 
 His love. Renan has remarked that in only two 
 ways can such a gap be bridged over : first, if, as in 
 the Indian Avatar, from time to time, or, as in Chris- 
 
PROPHETIC OFFICE AMONG SEMITIC RACES 87 
 
 tianity, once for all, there is an actual manifestation 
 of the Godhead upon earth ; or, secondly, if, as in 
 Judaism or in Buddhism, the Deity chooses a favoured 
 mortal, who may give to his brother men a fuller 
 knowledge of the Divine mind and will.^ The latter 
 would seem the form most congenial to the Semitic 
 mind, if one may be allowed to use that convenient, 
 but since the bold generalisations in which Renan has 
 indulged respecting them, somewhat misleading word. 
 The Arabs themselves looked up to Adam, Noah, 
 Abraham, and Moses as prophets ; Mohammed did 
 the same, and added Christ to their number. He 
 held that each successive revelation had been higher 
 than the preceding one, though each was complete in 
 itself, as being adequate to the circumstances of the 
 time. Was there, Mohammed might ask, any reason 
 to suppose that Christ had been the last of the 
 prophets, and that His revelation was absolutely as 
 well as relatively final ; and were there not evils 
 enough in Arabia and in the world to call for a 
 further communication from heaven 1 To say that 
 Arabia needed renovation was to say in other words 
 that the time for a new prophet had come, and why 
 might not that prophet be Mohammed himself.^ 
 Sprenger, the most recent and exhaustive writer on 
 the subject, has shown that for some hundred years 
 
 * Renan, p. 278. 
 
88 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 before Mohammed the advent of another prophet had 
 been expected and even predicted. So strong was 
 the general conviction on the subject that the Arab 
 tribes were guided by it even in their politics.^ 
 
 But, if we admit the sincerity of Mohammed and 
 the naturalness of his belief up to the time of the 
 Hegira, what are we to say of him during his first 
 years of exile at Medina, and again of his subsequent 
 successes ? 
 
 It is unquestionably true that a change does seem 
 to come over him. The revelations of the Koran 
 are more and more suited to the particular circum- 
 stances and caprices of the moment. They are often 
 of the nature of political bulletins, or of personal apo- 
 logies rather than of messages direct from God. Now 
 appears for the first time the convenient but dangerous 
 doctrine of abrogation, by which a subsequent revela- 
 tion might supersede a previous one.^ 
 
 The limitation to the unbounded license of Oriental 
 polygamy which he had himself imposed, he relaxes 
 in his own behalf ; ^ the greatest stain, and an indelible 
 one, on his memory, though it is possible that he may 
 
 * Sprenger, I., p. 245, quotes a saying of the Arabs that the children 
 of Shem are prophets, of Japhet kings, of Ham slaves. We are told 
 that the Arab women were at this time in the habit of praying for male 
 children, in the hope that of them the long-expected prophet might be 
 bom, 
 
 « Sura XVI. 103, II. lOO. 
 
 » Sura XXXIII. 49, and LXVI. i. 
 
APPARENT CHANGE IN MOHAMMED 89 
 
 have justified himself to his own mind by the 
 Ethiopian marriage not condemned in the case of 
 Moses.^ The pubHc opinion even of the harem was 
 scandahsed by his marriage with Mary, an Egyptian, 
 a Christian, and a slave. His marriage with Zeinab, 
 the wife of Zeid, his freedman and adopted son, 
 divorced as she was by Zeid for the express purpose 
 that Mohammed might marry her, was still worse. It 
 was felt as an outrage even upon the lax morality of 
 an Oriental nation, till all reclamations were hushed 
 into silence by a Sura of the Koran which rebuked 
 Mohammed, not for his laxity, but for his undue 
 abstinence ! ^ 
 
 The doctrine of toleration gradually becomes one of 
 extermination ; persecuted no longer, he becomes a 
 persecutor himself ; with the Koran in one hand, the 
 scymitar in the other, he goes forth to offer to the 
 nations the threefold alternative of conversion, tribute, 
 death. He is once or twice untrue to the kind and 
 
 ^ See Lecture IV. p. 184. 
 
 ^ Sura XXXIII. 37. See a good passage on the subject in ' British 
 Quarterly Review' for January 1872, page 131. 
 
 It should be remembered, however, that most of Mohammed's marriages 
 are to be explained, at least, as much by his pity for the forlorn condition 
 of the persons concerned, as by other motives. They were almost all 
 of them with widows who were not remarkable either for their beauty 
 or their wealth, but quite the reverse. May not this fact, and his un- 
 doubted faithfulness to Kadijah till her dying day, and till he himself 
 was fifty years of age, give us some ground to hope that calumny has 
 been at work in the story of Zeinab ? There are some indications on 
 the face of it that this is the case. 
 
90 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 forgiving disposition of his best nature ; and is once 
 or twice unrelenting in the punishment of his personal 
 enemies, especially of the Jews, who had disappointed 
 his expectation that they would join him, and of such 
 as had stung him by their lampoons or libels. He is 
 even guilty more than once of conniving at the assas- 
 sination of inveterate opponents ; and the massacre of 
 the Bani Koreitza, though they had deserted him 
 almost on the field of battle, and their lives were forfeit, 
 by all the laws of war, moved the misgivings of others 
 than the disaffected. He might, no doubt, believing, 
 as he did, in his own inspiration, have found an ample 
 precedent for the act in the slaughter of the Canaanites 
 by Joshua two thousand years before, or even in the 
 wars of Saul and David with neighbouring tribes; but, 
 judged by any but an Oriental standard of morality, 
 and by his own conspicuous magnanimity on other 
 occasions, his act, in all its accessories, was one of 
 cold-blooded and inhuman atrocity. 
 
 Can we explain away or extenuate these blots 
 on his memory, or, if we cannot, are they inconsis- 
 tent with substantial sincerity and singlemindedness } 
 Here is a problem of surpassing interest to the psy- 
 chologist, and I have only time to touch lightly upon it. 
 /^In the first place, the change in his character and 
 aims is not to be separated from the general condi- 
 tions of his life. At first he was a religious and moral 
 
HOW EXPLAINED 91 
 
 reformer only, and could not, even if he would, have 
 met the evils of his time by any other than by moral 
 means. If he was without the advantages, he was 
 also free from the dangers, of success. A religion 
 militant is, as all ecclesiastical history shows, very 
 different from a religion triumphant. The Prophet in 
 spite of himself became, by the force of circumstances, 
 more than a prophet. Not, indeed, that with him 
 height ever begot high thoughts. He preserved to 
 the end of his career that modesty and simplicity of 
 life which is the crowning beauty of his character ; but 
 he became a temporal ruler, and, where the Koran did 
 not make its way unaided, the civil magistrate natu- 
 rally used temporal means. Under such circumstances, 
 and when his followers pressed upon him their 
 belief in the nature of his mission, who can draw the 
 line where enthusiasm ends, and self-deception or even 
 imposture begins "i No one who knows human nature 
 will deny that the two are often perfectly consistent 
 with each other. Once persuaded fully of his divine 
 mission as a whole, a man unconsciously begins to 
 invest his personal fancies and desires with a like sanc- 
 tion : it is not that he tampers with his conscience ; 
 he rather subjects conscience and reason, appetite and 
 affection, to the one dominating influence ; and so, as 
 time goes on, with perfect good faith gets to confound 
 what comes from below with what comes from above. 
 
92 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 What is the meaning of the term * pions frauds,' ex- 
 cept that such acts are frauds in the eyes of others, 
 acts of piety in the eyes of the doer ? The more fully 
 convinced a man is of the goodness of his cause, the 
 more likely is he to forget the means in the end ; he 
 need not consciously assert that the end justifies the 
 means, but his eyes are so fixed upon the end that 
 they overlook the interval between the idea and its 
 realisation. He has to maintain a hold over the 
 motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered 
 round him. Must he not become all things to all to 
 meet their several wants t Perhaps he does become 
 so, and, in the process, what he gains in the bulk of 
 his influence he loses in its quality. Its intensity is 
 in inverse proportion to its extension. No man — I 
 quote here, with only such slight alteration as adapts 
 them to my subject, the noble words of George 
 Eliot : * No man,whether prophet, statesman, or popular 
 preacher, ever yet kept a prolonged hold over a mixed 
 multitude without being in some measure degraded 
 thereby. His teaching or his life must be accommo- 
 dated to the average wants of his hearers, and not to 
 his own finest insight. But, after all, we should regard 
 the life of every great man as a drama, in which there must 
 be important inward modifications accompanying the 
 outward changes.'^ Rigid consistency in itself is no 
 
 ' Romola, Vol. II., Chap. V. p. 5. 
 
MORAL VALUE OF CONSLSTENCY 93 
 
 great merit, rather the reverse : what one has a right to 
 demand in a great man is that the intensity of the 
 central truth he has to deliver should become, not 
 less, but more intense ; that that flame shall burn so 
 clear as to throw into the shade other objects which 
 shine with a less brilliant light ; that the essence shall 
 be pure even if some of the surroundings be alloyed ; 
 and this, I think, if not more than this, with all his 
 faults, we may affirm of Mohammed. 
 
 On the whole the Avonder is to me not how much, but 
 how little, under different circumstances, Mohammed 
 differed from himself. In the shepherd of the desert, 
 in the Syrian trader, in the solitary of Mount Hira, in 
 the reformer in the minority of one, in the exile of 
 Medina, in the acknowledged conqueror, in the equal 
 of the Persian Chosroes and the Greek Heraclius, we 
 can still trace a substantial unity. I doubt whether 
 any other man, whose external conditions changed so 
 much, ever himself changed less to meet them : the 
 accidents are changed, the essence seems to me to be 
 the same in all. 
 
 Power, as the saying is, no doubt put the man to 
 the test. It brought new temptations and therefore 
 new failures, from which the shepherd of the desert 
 might have remained free. But happy is the man 
 who, living 
 
 * In the fierce light that beats upon a throne, 
 And blackens every blot,' 
 
94 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 can stand the test as well as did Mohammed. A 
 Christian poet has well asked : — 
 
 ' What keeps a spirit wholly trae 
 To that ideal which he bears ? 
 What record ? not the sinless years 
 That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.' 
 
 ' But it is a current misconception, and, subject to the 
 above explanation, a very great one, that a gradual, but 
 continuous and accelerating moral declension is to be 
 traced from the time when the fugitive unexpectedly 
 entered Medina in triumph. * Truth is come — let 
 falsehood disappear,' he said, Avhen, after his long 
 exile, and after the temptations of Medina had done 
 their worst for him, he re-entered the Kaaba, and its 
 three hundred and sixty idols, the famous Hobal 
 amongst them, vanished before him ; and in his 
 treatment of the unbelieving city he was marvel- 
 lously true to his programme. There was now 
 nothing left in Mecca that could thwart his pleasure. 
 If ever he had worn a mask at all, he would now 
 at all events have thrown it off; if lower aims 
 had gradually sapped the higher, or his moderation 
 had been directed, as Gibbon supposes, by his selfish 
 interests, we should now have seen the effect ; now 
 would have been the moment to gratify his ambition, 
 to satiate his lust, to glut his revenge. Is there any- 
 thing of the kind } Read the account of the entry of 
 Mohammed into Mecca, side by side with that of 
 
NO CONTINUOUS DECLENSION 95 
 
 Marius or Sulla into Rome. Compare all the at- 
 tendant circumstances, the outrages that preceded, 
 and the use made by each of his recovered power, and 
 we shall then be in a position better to appreciate the 
 magnanimity and moderation of the Prophet of 
 Arabia. There were no proscription lists, no plunder, 
 no wanton revenge. 
 
 The chief blots in his fame are not after his undis- 
 puted victory, but during his years of chequered war- 
 fare at Medina, and, such as they are, are distributed 
 very evenly over the whole of that time. In other 
 words, he did very occasionally give way to a strong 
 temptation ; but there was no gradual sapping of 
 moral principles, and no deadening of conscience — a 
 very important distinction. One or two acts of sum- 
 mary and uncompromising punishment ; possibly, one 
 or two acts of cunning, and, after Kadijah was dead, 
 the violation of one law which he had from veneration 
 for her imposed on others, and had always hitherto 
 kept himself, form no very long bill of indictment 
 against one who always admitted he was a man of 
 like passions with ourselves, who was ignorant of 
 the Christian moral law, and who attained to power 
 after difficulties, and dangers, and misconceptions 
 which might have turned the best of men into a 
 suspicious and sanguinary tyrant.^ 
 
 * Yet Sprenger (I. p, 359), on no more grounds than those here 
 
96 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 It is no doubt true that some of the revelations of 
 the Koran, particularly the later ones, bear the ap- 
 pearance of having been given consciously for personal 
 and temporary purposes, and these have led, with 
 some show of reason, even such impartial writers as 
 Sir William Muir to accuse Mohammed of * the high 
 blasphemy of forging the name of God.' But it would 
 be strange indeed if, viewed in the light of what I have 
 said above as to Mohammed's unfaltering belief in his 
 own inspiration, he had not occasionally, or even often, 
 revealed in the Koran the mental processes by which 
 he justified to himself acts about which he may have 
 himself, at first, felt scruples, or which his contem- 
 poraries may have called in question. And it seems 
 pertinent to ask, by way of rebutting the charge, 
 whether he was not at least equally ready, when 
 occasion required, to blame himself for what he had 
 said or done, and to call the whole Mussulman world 
 to be witnesses of his self-condemnation } And, again, 
 if he was ever, in the matter of the Koran, a conscious 
 impostor, why was he not so much oftener } If he 
 had once knowingly tripped, and gained thereby, the 
 
 mentioned, can say of Mohammed, that when he attained to power in 
 Medina, * er wurde zum wollustigen Theokraten und blutdiirstig Ty- 
 rannen, Pabst und Konig.' "What Christian Pope or King — to say 
 nothing of Oriental rulers, with whom alone is it fair to compare him 
 — had as great temptations and succumbed to them as little as did 
 Mohammed ? 
 
DID HE FORGE THE NAME OF GOD? 97 
 
 path must have been too slippery and the descent 
 must have seemed too easy and inviting for him to 
 recall his footsteps. But what are the facts ? Take 
 two samples. 
 
 On one occasion, in a moment of despondency, he 
 
 made a partial concession to idolatry. He thought to 
 win over the recalcitrant Koreishites to his views by 
 allowing that their gods might make intercession with 
 the supreme God. 
 
 * What think ye of Al-Lat, and Al-Uzza, and Manah, the third besides ? 
 They are the exalted Females, and their intercession with God may be 
 hoped for.' 
 
 The Koreishites, overjoyed, signified their adhesion to 
 Mohammed, and it seemed that they would bring 
 over all Mecca with them. His friends would have 
 passed the matter over as quietly as possible. So 
 great was the scandal among the Faithful that some 
 of his earliest historians omit it altogether. But the 
 Prophet's conscience was too tender for that. In an 
 hour of weakness Mohammed had mistaken ex- 
 pediency for duty, and having discovered his mistake, 
 he would recall the concession, at all hazards, as 
 publicly as he had made it, even at the risk of 
 the Im^putatlon of weakness and of Imposture. The 
 amended version of the Sura ran thus : 
 
 ' What think ye of Al-Lat, and Al-Uzza, and Manah, the third besides ? 
 They are nought but empty names which ye and your fathers have invented.' ' 
 
 1 Sura LIII. ; cf. also XVII. 75, and XXII. 51 ; see Muir, II. 
 
 H 
 
98 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 I will give one more instance. It is a memorable 
 one. Mohammed was engaged in earnest conversa- 
 tion with Wallid, a powerful Koreishite, whose con- 
 version he much desired. A blind man in very 
 humble circumstances, Abdallah by name, happened 
 to come up, and, not knowing that Mohammed was 
 otherwise engaged, exclaimed, * Oh, Apostle of God, 
 teach me some part of what God has taught thee.' 
 Mohammed, vexed at the interruption, frowned and 
 turned away from him. But his conscience soon 
 smote him for having postponed the poor and humble 
 to the rich and powerful, and the next day's Sura 
 showed that this ' forger of God's name ' was at least 
 as ready to forge it for his own condemnation as in his 
 defence. The Sura is known by the significant title 
 ' He frowned,' and runs thus : 
 
 ' The Prophet frowned, and turned aside, • 
 
 Because the blind man came unto him. 
 And how knowest thou whether he might not have Been cleansed from 
 
 his sins, 
 Or whether he might have been admonished, and profited thereby ? 
 
 As for the man that is rich. 
 
 Him thou receivest graciously ; 
 And thou carest not that he is not cleansed. 
 
 But as for him that cometh unto thee earnestly seeking his salvation, 
 And trembling anxiously, him dost thou neglect. 
 
 By no means shouldst thou act thus.' 
 
 p. 149-158, and Sprenger, II, 17, where there is a curious disserta- 
 tion on the word Gharanyk, used for Females — 'swans which mount 
 higher and higher towards God.' 
 
NATURE AND LIMITS OF HIS MISSION 99 
 
 And, ever after this, we are told that, when the 
 Prophet saw the poor bhnd man, he went out of his way 
 to do him honour, saying ' The man is thrice welcome 
 on whose account my Lord hath reprimanded me,' 
 and he made him twice Governor of Medina.^ 
 
 Mohammed never wavered in his belief in his own 
 mission, nor, what is more extraordinary, in his belief 
 as to its precise nature and well-defined limits. He 
 was a prophet charged with a mission from God ; no- 
 thing less, but nothing more. He might make mis- 
 takes, lose battles, do wrong acts, but none the less 
 did he believe that the words he spoke were the very 
 words of God. To every Sura of the Koran he pre- 
 fixed the words * In the name of God, the Compas- 
 sionate, the Merciful,' even as the Hebrew prophet 
 would open his message with his 'Thus saith the Lord ;' 
 and before every sentence and every word of the 
 Sacred Book is to be read, between the lines, the word 
 * say,' indicating that Mohammed believed, what Moses 
 and Isaiah only believed on special occasions, that in 
 his utterances he was the mere mouthpiece, and there- 
 
 ^ Sura LXXX., with Sale's note ad loc. ; and Muir, II. p. 128. Sir 
 Wm. Muir tells the story much as I have related it, but seems quite unable 
 to see its grandeur, for he only remarks upon it, ' This incident illus- 
 trates at once the anxiety of Mohammed to gain over the principal men 
 of the Koreish, and when he was rejected, the readiness with which he 
 turned to the poor and i\ninfluential.' Was ever moral sublimity 
 so ^maiTed, or heroism so vulgarised? How Mohammed towers above 
 even his best historians! 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 fore the unerring mouthpiece, of the Infinite and the 
 Eternal. He might win his way against superhuman 
 difficulties, preserve a charmed life, do deeds which 
 seemed miracles to others, gain the homage of all 
 Arabia, and present in his own person an ideal of 
 morality never before pictured by an Arab ; and yet 
 he never forgot himself, or claimed to be more than a 
 weak and fallible mortal. 
 
 As his view of his own mission is an all-important 
 point in estimating his character, let us deal, in con- 
 cluding this Lecture, with facts alone, and watch his 
 conduct at a few critical epochs which I have purposely 
 selected, as throwing light upon the matter, in its dif- 
 ferent aspects, away from their chronological order and 
 from very different periods of his life. 
 
 When the Persian monarch Chosroes was con- 
 templating with pride, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, 
 the great Artemita that he had built and all its fabu- 
 lous treasures, he received a letter from an obscure 
 citizen of Mecca,bidding him acknowledge Mohammed 
 as the Prophet of God. Chosroes tore the letter into 
 pieces. ' It is thus ,' exclaimed the Arabian Prophet 
 when he heard of it, ' that God will tear his kingdom 
 and reject his supplications.' No prediction could 
 have seemed at the time less likely to be accomplished, 
 since Persia was at its height, and Constantinople at 
 its lowest. But Mohammed lived to see its fulfilment, 
 
MOSEILAMA, THE LIAR lor 
 
 and yet never claimed in consequence, as others might 
 have done, the power of prophecy. 
 
 While he had as yet only half established his 
 position, a powerful Christian tribe tendered their 
 submission, if only he would leave their chief some 
 remnant of his power. ' Not one unripe date/ replied 
 Mohammed.^ We remember how the French rheto- 
 rician the other day, knowing that his nation, if they 
 are slaves to nothing else, are always slaves to an 
 epigram, prolonged resistance to the bitter end by his 
 famous declaration that not ' an inch of their territory 
 nor a stone of their fortresses ' would the French sur^ 
 render. And we may imagine the effect produced 
 upon the handful of Mohammed's Meccan followers 
 who were still in exile at Medina by such an answer, 
 coming from one who was certainly no vapid rhetori- 
 cian, who preferred silence to speech, and who never 
 said a thing he did not really mean. 
 
 Moseilama, the most formidable of the rival pro- 
 phets whom Mohammed's success stirred up, thinking 
 that Mohammed's game was a merely selfish one, and 
 that two might play at it, sent to Mohammed to offer 
 to go shares with him in the good things of the world, 
 which united they might easily divide. The letter was 
 of Spartan brevity: 'Moseilama the apostle of God to 
 Mohammed the apostle of God. — Now let the earth be 
 
 ^ Muir, Vol. IV. p. 59. 
 
102 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 half mine and half thine.' Mohammed's reply was 
 hardly less laconic : * Mohammed the apostle of God 
 to Moseilama the liar. — The earth is God's, He giveth it 
 to such of His servants as He pleaseth, and they who 
 fear Him shall prosper.' 
 
 Again mark his conduct under failure or rebuff. 
 He had lost, within three days of each other, Abu 
 Taleb his one protector, and his venerable wife 
 Kadijah, that toothless old woman, as Ayesha long 
 afterwards in the bloom of her beauty called her; 
 the wife who, as Mohammed indignantly replied, 
 * when he was poor had enriched him, when he 
 was called a liar had alone believed in him, when 
 he was opposed by all the world had alone remained 
 true to him.' ^ What was he to do t Silence and the 
 desert seemed the one chance of safety, but what did 
 he do 1 Followed only by Zeid, his faithful freedman, 
 he went to Tayif, the town after Mecca most wholly 
 given to idolatry ; and like Elijah in Samaria he 
 boldly challenged the protection and obedience of the 
 
 ^ Sprenger characteristically remarks (I, 151) that Mohammed's 
 faithfulness to Kadijah to her dying day was due probably not to his 
 inclination, but to his dependence on her. Why, then, the interval 
 before Mohammed married again ? And why, long afterwards, his noble 
 burst of gratitude to her memory when Ayesha contrasted her own 
 youth and beauty with Kadijah's age and infirmities, and asked, ' Am 
 not I much better than she?' 'No, by Allah,' replied Mohammed; 
 ' no, by Allah ; when I was poor she enriched me,' &c. Was Moham- 
 med dependent upon the dead ? For cynical remarks of a similar kind 
 see, amongst many other instances, Sprenger, II. 19, 23, 86. 
 
DEATH OF THE PROPHET 103 
 
 inhabitants. They stoned him out of the city. He 
 returned to Mecca defeated, but not disheartened ; 
 cast down, but not destroyed ; quietly saying to himself, 
 
 * If thou, O Lord, art not angry, I am safe ; I seek 
 refuge in the light of thy countenance alone.' ^ 
 
 After the tide had turned in his favour, and the 
 battle of Bedr had, as it seemed, put the seal to his mili- 
 tary success, he was signally defeated and wounded 
 almost to the death at Mount Ohud. People began to 
 desert him; but a Sura, Mohammed's 'order of the day,' 
 appeared : ' Mohammed is no more than a prophet. 
 What if he had been killed, needs ye go back '^. He that 
 turneth back injureth not God in the least, but himself.* ^ 
 The spell of his untaught eloquence recalled them to 
 themselves, and we are assured that his defeat at 
 Ohud advanced his cause as much as did his victory 
 at Bedr. 
 
 Ayesha, his favourite wife, one day asked of him, 
 
 * O Prophet of God, do none enter Paradise but through 
 God's mercy .'* ' ' None, none, none,' replied he. * But 
 will not even you enter by your own merits .'' ' 
 Mohammed put his hand upon his head and thrice 
 replied, 'Neither shall I enter Paradise unless God 
 cover me with His mercy.' There was no ' false certi- 
 tude of the Divine intentions,' the besetting temptation 
 
 ^ See the story in full in Muir, Vol. II. p. 198-203. 
 2 Sura III. 138. 
 
104 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 of spiritual ambition ; no facile dogmatising upon 
 what he had only to hint to be believed — his own pre- 
 eminent position in the unseen world. It would have 
 been safe to do so : Ig a(pa.vs§ tov ;xy5ov avivsUag ovx, 'iysi 
 sKsy^ov :^ and how few could have resisted a like 
 temptation ! 
 
 And at the last grand scene of all, when the Pro- 
 phet had met his death, as he had always told his 
 doubting followers he must, and Omar, the Simon 
 Peter of Islam, in the agony of his grief drew his 
 scymitar and wildly rushing in among the weeping 
 Mussulmans swore that he would strike off the head 
 of any one who dared to say that the Prophet was 
 dead — the Prophet could not be dead — it was by a 
 gentle reminder of what the Prophet himself had 
 always taught, that the venerable Abu Bakr, the 
 earliest of the Prophet's friends, and his successor in 
 the Kaliphate, calmed his excitement : ' Is it then 
 Mohammed, or the God of Mohammed, that we have 
 learned to worship ? ' 
 
 » Hdt. II. 23. 
 
LECTUEE III. 
 
 February 28, 1874. 
 
 MOHAMMEDANISM. 
 
 Allahu Akbar — God is great — there is no God but God, and 
 JVIohammed is his Prophet. 
 
 In the concluding part of my last Lecture I dis- 
 cussed at length the question of the character of 
 Mohammed, and we arrived, I think, at the conclusion 
 that, on the one hand, he had grave moral faults which 
 may be accounted for, but not excused, by the circum- 
 stances of the time, by the exigencies of his situation, 
 and by the weaknesses of human nature. And on the 
 other, we saw reason to believe that he was not only 
 passionately impressed with the reality of his divine 
 mission in early life, but that the common view of a 
 great moral declension to be traced in his latter years 
 is not borne out by the evidence, and that to the end of 
 his career, amidst failures and successes, in life and in 
 preparation for death, he was true to the one principle 
 
io6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 ^vith which he started. He became indeed, by the 
 force of circumstances, general and ruler, lawgiver and 
 judge of all Arabia ; but above all and before all, he 
 was still a simple prophet delivering God's message in 
 singleness of heart, obeying, as far as he could, God's 
 will, but never claiming to be more than God's weak 
 and erring servant. 
 
 ^ And now, perhaps, it is time to ask what was the 
 -essence of Mohammed's belief, that which made him 
 what he was, which has given his religion its inex- 
 liaustible vitality .'' How did it resemble^ and how did 
 it differ from, the religions which it overthrew, and one 
 of which at least we are accustomed to look upon, and 
 shall, in its pure form as it came from Christ's own 
 lips, and can still be read in Christ's own acts, and 
 ■even to some extent in the character of His ser- 
 vants, always continue to look upon, as immeasurably 
 .superior to Mohammedanism t 
 
 The essence of Mohammedanism is not merely the 
 sublime belief in the unity of God, though it is difficult 
 to us to realise the tumult of the feelings, and the 
 intensity of the life, which must be awakened in a 
 Polytheistic people, who are also imaginative and 
 ■energetic, when, on a sudden, they recognise the One 
 in and behind the Many. Mohammed started indeed 
 with the dogmatic assertion that there was but one 
 God, the Creator of all things in heaven and earth, all 
 
ESSENCE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 107 
 
 powerful, knowing all things, everywhere present. He 
 reiterates this in a thousand shapes as the forefront 
 of his message ; ^ and sublimely confident that it need 
 only be stated to ensure ultimate acceptance, he 
 deigns not to offer proof of that which, in -his judg- 
 ment, must prove itself. 
 
 But it was more than the unity of God, and the 
 attributes which flow from that conception, which 
 Mohammed asserted. A theoretic assent to this 
 might have had but httle influence on practice. What 
 is by its nature immeasurably above man, may also 
 be immeasurably removed from him ; and accordingly 
 Mohammed reasserted that which had been the life of 
 the old Hebrew nation, and the burden of the song of 
 every Hebrew prophet — that God not only lives, but 
 that He is a righteous and a merciful ruler ; and that to 
 His will it is the duty and the privilege of all living 
 men to bow.^ Nor was the sublimity of this doctrine 
 
 ' See especially Suras I. and CXII., the beo;inning and end of the 
 Koran in the orthodox arrangement; also Sura XXXV. 41 -44. Cf. also 
 Sura II. 19-20, 109; VI. 1-6; XIII. 10, 11 ; XVI. 12-17; LIII. 
 and XCVI. 
 
 ' See this well drawn out in Maurice's 'Religions of the World,' p, 
 21-24. The passage is a most suggestive one. I owe much to it, and 
 it seems to me that here, and in many other passages of his writings, 
 Mr. Maurice did far more, and penetrated far deeper, than is allowed 
 in a very brilliant passage of a recent work (see ' Literature and Dogma,' 
 P- 345)- When the unacknowledged debts of the nineteenth century 
 to its great writers come to be added up, I am convinced that it will be 
 fully recognised that the mental powei-s of Mr. Maurice rank as high 
 as did the purity and nobility of his life ; and more can hardly be said. 
 
io8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 marred in its application by the old Hebrew exclu- 
 siveness. The Arabian nation was first called indeed ; 
 but as in Christianity, and as it was not in Judaism, 
 the obligations of the Arabs were to be measured by 
 their privileges, and the call was to be extended 
 through them to the world at large. The Jew sur- 
 rendered his birthright if he imparted his faith 
 to other peoples. The Arab surrendered his if he 
 did not spread his faith wherever and however he 
 could/ 
 
 But Mohammed's assertion of the unity of God, and 
 of His rule over every detail of man's life, was no mere 
 plagiarism from an older faith. The Jewish people 
 at large had, even in their best days, rushed wildly 
 after the worship of alien gods ; at last, indeed, the 
 iron of the Captivity had entered into their souls ; they 
 learned much during their sojourn in the East, but 
 they unlearned more ; they unlearned there, once 
 and for ever, the sin of idolatry. But though they 
 never henceforward worshipped other gods, the higher 
 teaching of their prophets they still too much ignored, 
 and the period which might have been the culmination 
 of their glory ended in that tragedy of tragedies which 
 was the immediate precursor of their fall. The sceptre 
 departed from Judah, but the Jewish exiles in Arabia 
 still clung desperately to the phantom of those proud 
 religious privileges when all which had given some 
 
WHAT MOHAMMEDANISM SWEPT AWAY 109 
 
 claim to them had disappeared. Christians too, such 
 Christians as Mohammed had ever met, had for- 
 gotten at once the faith of the Jews, and that higher 
 revelation of God given to them by Christ which 
 the Jews rejected. Homoousians and Homoiou- 
 sians, Monothelites and Monophysites, Jacobites and 
 Eutychians, making hard dogmas of things wherein 
 the sacred writers themselves had made no dogma, 
 disputing fiercely whether what was mathematically 
 false could be metaphysically true, and nicely dis- 
 criminating the shades of truth and falsehood in the 
 views suggested to bridge over the abysmal gulf 
 between them ; turning figures into facts, rhetoric 
 into logic, and poetry into prose, had forgotten the ' 
 unity of God, while they were disputing about it 
 most loudly with their lips. They busied themselves 
 Avith every question about Christ except those which 
 might have led them to imitate Christ's life. Now 
 /Mohammed came to make a clean sw^eep of such 
 unrealities. Images : what are they ? * Bits of 
 black wood, pretending to be God ; ' ^ philosophical 
 theories, and theological cobwebs. Away with them all ! 
 God is great, and there is nothing else great. This is 
 the Mussulman Creed. ^ Islam,' that is, man must resign 
 his will to God's, and fxud his highest happiness in so 
 doing. This is the Mussulman life, y' And I would 
 
 ^ Carlyle, 'Hei'oes,' p. 226. 
 
no MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 remark here, and would particularly beg those who 
 are doing me the honour to attend these Lectures, to 
 bear in mind that though I have, in compliance with 
 European custom, often spoken of Mohammedanism 
 and Mohammedans, the name was never used by 
 Mohammed himself, or by his earlier disciples, and, in 
 spite of the reverence paid to their Prophet, it has 
 always been rejected by his followers themselves as a 
 rightful appellation. To quote once more the noble 
 words of Abu Bakr, it was not Mohammed, but the God 
 of Mohammed, that the Prophet taught his followers 
 to worship. ^ The creed is ' Islam,' a verbal noun, 
 / derived from a root meaning ' submission to ' and 
 / *■ faith in God,' and the believers who so submit them- 
 selves are called Moslems, a participle of the same 
 root, both being connected with the words * Salam,' or 
 j * peace,' and ' Salym,' or ' healthy.' ^ There was nothing, 
 ' therefore, theoretically new in what I have described 
 as the central truth of Islam, for it was this belief that 
 lay at the root of the greatness of the Jewish nation, 
 and their separation from all other nations. Certain 
 forms of Christianity have asserted it as strongly as 
 did Mohammed. It is this principle which has been 
 the strength of Calvinism and of Puritanism, and in 
 this direction perhaps lies the explanation of the fact 
 that those forms of religion which have been theoreti- 
 cally most fatalistic have by their acts given the 
 
 ' Sprenger, vol. i. p, 69. 
 
* MOHAMMEDANISM A MISNOMER nt 
 
 strongest practical assertion of free-will. This was the \ 
 spark from heaven which lit the train. In his assertion 
 of this, lay the religious genius of Mohammed. This 
 gave the Arabs ' unity as a nation, discipline and 
 enthusiasm as an army.' ' This sent them forth in 
 their wild crusade against the world ; and, armed with 
 this, they swept away before them every creed, or 
 memory of a creed, which did not then contain any 
 principle so inspiring. 
 
 Such then were the two leading principles of the .^ 
 new creed ; the existence of one God, whose will was ■ 
 to be the rule of life, and the mission of Mohammed/ 
 to proclaim what that will was. The one doctrine as 
 old, if not older than the time when the father of the 
 faithful left his Chaldean home in obedience to the 
 Divine will ; the other sanctioned indeed, in its general 
 assertion of the prophetic office, by the traditionary 
 belief of both Jews and Arabs ; but startling enough 
 in the time at which the revelation came, in the 
 instrument selected, and in the way in which he 
 proclaimed it. In this consists the real originality, 
 such as it is, of Mohammedanism. The other articles 
 of faith, added to the two I have already discussed — 
 the written revelation of God's will, the responsi- 
 bility of man, the existence of angels and of 
 Jinn, the future life, the resurrection, and the 
 final judgment — are to be found, either developed 
 
 * Maurice, loc. cit. 
 
J 12 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 •or in germ, in the systems, either of Jews, or 
 Zoroastrians, or Christians. Even in the times of 
 ignorance, the camel tethered to a dead man's grave 
 was an indication that the grave was, even to the wild 
 Arab, not the end of all things.^ 
 
 Nor was there anything much more original in the 
 four practical duties of Islam — in prayer and alms- 
 ,giving, in fasting and in pilgrimage.^ Prayer is the 
 aspiration of the human soul towards God, common 
 to every religion, from the rudest Fetishism to the 
 most sublime Monotheism. Almsgiving is the most 
 •easy and obvious method of evidencing that love to 
 man which leads up to, and is, in its turn, the result 
 of love to God. Fasting is an assertion, though a 
 superficial one, of the great truth that self-denial is a 
 step towards God ; but it is peculiarly liable to abuse 
 as fostering the belief, so common among the ruder of 
 the Semitic nations, and still commoner among ascetics 
 in modern times, that God is to be feared rather than 
 loved, and that there is something pleasing to Him in 
 
 ^ Sprenger says (I. 4, 301) that the reason why Mohammed refers so 
 often, e.g. , in the very first Sura in chronological order, to the ' clot of 
 lolood' from which man was created, is because he looked upon it much 
 as Christians have done to the emerging of the butterfly from the 
 chrysalis, as a proof or illustration of the resurrection. In Sura LIII. 
 Mohammed says he took not the doctrine merely, but the illustra- 
 tion also, from the roll of Abraham, Cf. Sura LXXV., entitled ' The 
 Resurrection,' ad Jin. : * Is not the God who formed man from a mere 
 embryo powerful enough to quicken the dead ? ' 
 
 2 Cf. Milman, ' Latin Christianity,' I. 453. 
 
PRACTICAL DUTIES OF ISLAM 113 
 
 pain as such ; pain, that is, apart from its effect upon 
 the will, and so upon the character. Pilo^rimage is a 
 concession to human feelings, not to say to human 
 weakness, common again, in practice, to all the reli- 
 gions of the world. But this last calls, perhaps, for 
 some special remark here, since its actual influence 
 has been so great, while in theory and in reality it is 
 alien alike to Mohammedanism and to Christianity. 
 
 * The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this 
 mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.' 
 ^ God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth.' But from the 
 time the words were spoken, even to this day, a con- 
 tinuous living stream has poured towards the Holy 
 Land. For nineteen centuries Christian Pilgrims have 
 been seen to leave their homes and kindred, facing, now 
 privations, now dangers, and now ridicule, that they 
 might enjoy the sacred luxury, the ineffable re- 
 ligious rapture, of beholding the city over which the 
 Saviour wept, of standing on the spot which gave 
 Him birth, of gazing on the lake whereon He taught, 
 and of worshipping in the shrine which covers the 
 rock wherein His body lay. And far be it from me 
 to say, spite of the invention of the true Cross, spite 
 of St. Andrew's lance and the relics of the Apostles, 
 spite of the Crusades themselves, spite of the keys of 
 the Holy Sepulchre, and even of the imposture of the 
 
 I 
 
114 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Holy Fire, that the evils belonging to this reverence 
 for places have altogether predominated over the good. 
 A scientific and unimaginative age laughs at the 
 weaknesses and the follies involved, but it forgets the 
 dauntless faith and the heroic endurance, the sacrifice 
 of self, and the romance of danger ; it forgets that it 
 is the office of religion to deal with these very human 
 weaknesses and follies, and make the best of such 
 materials as it has to work upon. 
 
 Christ swept away some of the abuses of the 
 temple worship, and looked forward to its ultimate 
 abolition ; but He did not sweep away the temple 
 itself. He rather paid it its customary honours. Mo- 
 hammed saw the dangers of the Kaaba worship, and, 
 once and again, proposed to destroy it altogether ; 
 but he had to deal with an historical faith, and with a 
 shrine of immemorial antiquity, one which Diodorus 
 Siculus, a hundred years before the Christian era, tells 
 us, was even then ^ most ancient, and was exceedingly 
 revered by the whole Arab race.' The traditions of 
 the Kaaba ran back to Ishmael and Abraham, nay 
 even to Seth and Adam,^ and, as its very name, 'Beit 
 
 ' Cf. Sura III. 90. ' The first temple that was founded for mankind 
 was that in Becca (place of resort, i.e.^ Mecca) — Blessed, and a guid- 
 ance to human beings. In it are evident signs, even the standing-place 
 of Abraham, and he who entereth it is safe. And the pilgrimage to the 
 temple is a service due to God from those who are able to journey 
 thither.' This sentence is still woven into the covering of the Kaaba, 
 sent annually by the Sultan. 
 
PILGRIMAGE— ITS USE AND ABUSE 115 
 
 Allah/ shows, it might, in its first rude shape, have 
 been erected by some such ancient patriarch as he 
 who raised a pillar of rough stone where in his sleep 
 he had seen the angels ascending and descending, and 
 called it ' Bethel or Beit Allah : this is the house of God, 
 and this the gate of heaven.' Mohammed cherished also 
 all the family associations of a Haschimite,J and all 
 the local affections of a Meccan patriot ; and the family, 
 and the place, and the country, the historical lore 
 and the religious imagination, combined to save the 
 sacred shrine. Mohammed swept away the idols of 
 the Kaaba ; he abolished the nude processions^ and 
 the other abuses of its worship ; but he retained the 
 Kaaba itself; and the quaint rites, which were old in 
 Mohammed's time, are still religiously observed by 
 the whole Mohammedan world. Seven times the \ 
 
 ' pilgrim walks around the sacred mosque, seven times 1 
 
 he kisses the Black Stone ; he drinks the brackish ' 
 
 water of the sacred well Zemzem, buries the parings 
 of his nails and the hair he has at length shaved, in 
 the consecrated ground ; he ascends Mount Arafat 
 and showers stones on the three mysterious pillars.^ 
 
 ^ See a curious conversation between Mohammed and Ayesha on 
 the Kaaba, illustrating the strong family feelings of the Prophet. 
 Sprenger, I. iv. 315. 
 
 2 Sura VII. 27 sq. Cf. XXII. 27-40. 
 
 ' A plan of the Kaaba, as taken by Ali Bey, and a full description 
 of the Pilgrim ceremonies, which he himself went through, may be 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Nor is the Kaaba present to the mind at those times 
 only when the prescribed pilgrimage is near at hand, 
 in prospect or in retrospect. The first architectural 
 requisite of every Mussulman house is the niche or 
 arch which points with mathematical precision to the 
 sacred pile ; and, guided by this, every devout Mussul- 
 man turns five times a day towards the Kiblah of the 
 world, in earnest prayer to God. * That man,' says 
 Dr. Johnson, 'has little to be envied whose patriotism 
 would not gain force on the plains of Marathon, or 
 whose piety would not grow warm among the ruins 
 of lona.' The ceremonies of the Kaaba may perhaps 
 seem to us ridiculous, but the shrine is one which 
 kindled the feelings of the Arab patriot, and roused 
 the hopes of the Bedouin of the desert, ages before 
 Miltiades fought, and tens of ages before Columban 
 preached. It has been consecrated in its later history 
 by its connection with the grandest forward movement 
 that the Eastern world has ever known ; and, in spite 
 of the mummeries and the abuses which have grown 
 round the pilgrimage of the Hadj in the course of 
 ages, I should be slow indeed to assert that the feelings 
 Avhich still draw, year after year, Mussulmen by 
 myriads from the burning sands of Africa, from the 
 
 seen in Burton's 'Pilgrimage,' III. 6i. Burckhardt and Burton hare 
 both described the Black Stone minutely from personal observation ; 
 and a picture of it, the size of the original, is given in Muir, II. i8. 
 
THE KAABA AND ITS HISTORY 117 
 
 snows of Siberia, and the coral reefs of the Malays, 
 towards a barren valley in Arabia, do not, on the whole, 
 elevate rather than depress them in the scale of 
 humanity. In their own rough and imperfect way, 
 they raise the mind of the nomad and the shepherd 
 from the animal life of the present to the memories 
 of the distant past, and the hopes of the for future. 
 They are a living testimony to the unity of God, and 
 a homage paid by the unprogressive nations of the 
 world to that Prophet who softened the savage breast, 
 and elevated the savage mind, and taught them what, 
 but for him, they had never learned at all. 
 
 It will be apparent, from what I have already said, 
 that of the previous faiths existing in the world, the 
 one which influenced Mohammed most was, beyond 
 all question, Judaism. Insomuch, that one who pro- 
 bably, with the single exception of Dr. Sprenger, 
 knew more of the literature of the two faiths than 
 any living man — one whose loss all who take inte- 
 rest in Eastern questions are now deploring, and 
 one who, had he lived, would probably have done 
 ampler justice to Islam and its founder than per- 
 haps any one else has done or can do — the late 
 Emanuel Deutsch, summed up the connection 
 between them in the celebrated dictum, that ' when 
 the Talmud was gathered in, the Koran began — 
 post hoc ergo propter hoc' And he went on to 
 
Il8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 endorse and to develope what Dean Milman had 
 hinted before him, that Islam was Httle else than 
 a republication of Judaism, with such modifications 
 as suited it to Arabian soil, pliLs the important 
 addition of the prophetic mission of Mohammed.^ 
 The gifted author was, perhaps, from the very extent 
 of his knowledge of Talmudical literature, prone to 
 trace its influence everywhere ; and the proposition 
 is, perhaps, stated a little too nakedly, and, as he, 
 no doubt, would have been the first to admit, needs 
 some important qualifications ; but nobody would 
 deny that it is substantially true. Indeed, the 
 general connection between race and creed has 
 been proved by the Science of Comparative Religion 
 to be so intimate, that it could hardly in any case 
 have been otherwise. It seems a cruel destiny that 
 allows a man of great original genius to accumulate 
 such vast stores of recondite learning, and then snatches 
 him away before he has had time to do more than 
 leave the world dimly and sadly conscious of what it 
 has lost in losing him ! 
 
 Anyhow, the Koran teems with ideas, allusions, 
 and even phraseology, drawn not so much from the 
 
 ^ It must be remembered also that the ceremonialism of the Jews 
 for the time almost entirely disappeared. For a full account of the 
 influence of the Essenic communities and their doctrines on the rise of 
 Islam, see Sprenger, I. 17-21, and 30-35 ; and for that of the Ebio- 
 nites or Judaising Christians to the East of the Jordan, p. 21-28. 
 
DEUTSCH AND THE TALMUD 119 
 
 written as from the oral Jewish law, from the tradi- 
 tions that grew round it, and the commentaries on it. 
 The Talmud, in its two divisions of Halacha and 
 Haggada, sums up the intellectual and social and 
 religious life of the Jews during a period of nearly 
 a thousand years. It is the meeting point of the 
 three Monotheistic creeds of the world ; and, even 
 with the imperfect information that Eastern scholars 
 have yet given respecting it, it has done much to 
 throw light upon them all. / Mohammed was never 
 backward to acknowledge the intimate connection 
 between his faith and that of the Jews. /And in 
 more than one passage of the Koran he refers with 
 equal respect to their oral and to their written law. 
 Nor did Christ really draw so broad a distinc- 
 tion between these two as might be imagined from the 
 sweeping way in which He sometimes denounces 
 the Scribes and Pharisees. 'Whatsoever they that 
 sit in Moses' seat bid you observe, that observe and 
 do.' ^ And it is incontestable that the Pharisees, 
 as a body, contained some of the best and noblest — 
 Hillel and Shammai, Gamaliel and St. Paul — as it 
 contained some of the worst and meanest, of their 
 nation. 
 
 And, accordingly, Mohammed, during the early 
 
 ^ St. Matt. XXIII. 2-3. See this well argued in an article on the 
 Talmud, Edinburgh Revieiv for July 1873. 
 
I20 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 years of the Hegira, struggled hard, and, as it might 
 have seemed to him, with every prospect of success, 
 to secure the adhesion of the Jewish tribes who dwelt 
 round Medina. He appealed to their Scriptures, 
 which, he said, he came not to destroy, but to fulfil, 
 and which, as he argued, for those who had eyes to 
 see, pointed to him. 1/ A prophet shall the Lord your 
 God raise up unto you of your brethren like unto me ; 
 to him shall ye hearken.' 'Was he not like unto 
 Moses ? ' he asked again and again ; ' and did he not 
 spring from their brethren, the children of Ishmael .-* ' 
 He adapted the fasts and the feasts of the new 
 religion to their model. He took from them the law 
 of usury and the law of inheritance. He owes to 
 them some of his regulations respecting ablutions and 
 unclean animals. He even, till he could hope no 
 longer, made Jerusalem the Kiblah of the world for 
 the five daily prayers. 
 
 It must have surprised Mohammed, with his half 
 knowledge of their history, that the Jews should be 
 unable to enter into his views of a great Catholic 
 creed, or Religion of Humanity — the creed of 
 Abraham — embracing Jews, Arabs, and Christians 
 in one body. But it can surprise no one who has 
 ever in any degree entered into the religious genius 
 of the Jewish race, or who has reflected on the 
 almost insuperable difficulties which lay in the way 
 
EXCLUSIVENESS OF JUDAISM 121 
 
 of the Jews accepting that higher creed, the Author 
 of which it is their eternal honour to have produced, 
 and their tragic destiny to have rejected. And the 
 Bani Kainucaa, and the Bani Nadhir, the Bani 
 Koreitsa, and the Jews of Kheibar, bitterly expe- 
 rienced in Mohammed's subsequent treatment of 
 them the truth of the now-all-too-familiar maxim in 
 ecclesiastical history, that they Avho differ least in 
 religious matters hate the most. ' 
 
 It is impossible to gain for oneself, and almost 
 equally so to give to others within a short space of 
 time, anything like an adequate idea either of the 
 form or of the contents of the book of which Moham- 
 med, whatever the general influences brought to bear 
 upon his mind, was the undisputed author, and which 
 still underlies the life of the vast fabric of the 
 Mohammedan world. In my first Lecture I com- 
 pared and contrasted the Koran with the Bible ; but 
 it is necessary, perhaps, to say something more of its 
 leading characteristics, or the w^ant of them. The 
 Koran defies analysis, for that presupposes something 
 like method in the thing to be analysed. It can 
 hardly be characterised by any one epithet, for there 
 is not a single Sura of any length which sustains a 
 uniform character throughout. It has often been re- 
 marked that there is no more striking proof of the 
 discrepancies of national taste than the diametrically 
 
122 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Opposite opinions held by the cultivated classes of 
 East and West on the literary merits of the Koran. 
 Having performed repeatedly, for the purpose of 
 these Lectures, a task which Bunsen and Sprenger and 
 Renan all pronounce to be almost impossible — that of 
 reading the Koran continuously from beginning to 
 end, both in the orthodox and chronological order 
 — I have acquired a better right, perhaps, than most 
 people to endorse the superficial opinion that dulness 
 is, to a European who is ignorant of Arabic, the pre- 
 vailing characteristic of the book as a whole until 
 he begins to make a minute study of it. The 
 importance of the subjects it handles, the unique 
 interest attaching to the speaker, and the unaffected 
 reverence with which every utterance is still regarded 
 by so large a portion of the world, are insufficient to 
 redeem it from this general reproach. 
 
 Endless assertions as to what the Koran is, and 
 what it is not, warnings drawn from previous Ara- 
 bian history, especially the lost tribes of Ad and 
 Thamud ; Jewish or Arab legends of the heroes 
 of the Old Testament, stories told, and, it must be 
 added, often spoiled in the telling of them ; laws, 
 ceremonial and moral,. civil and sumptuary; personal 
 apologies ; curses showered upon Abu Lahab or the 
 whole community of the Jews ; all this alternates 
 with sublime revelations of the attributes of the 
 
HISTORY 01 KORAN 123 
 
 Godhead, bursts of admiration for Christ Himself, 
 though not for the views held of Him by His so-called 
 followers, flights of poetry, scathing rebukes of the 
 hypocrite, the ungrateful, the unmerciful. 
 
 .' That the book as a whole is a medley, however it 
 may be arranged, will seem only natural when we 
 remember the way in which it was composed, pre- 
 served, edited, and stereotyped. Dictated from time 
 to time by Mohammed to his disciples, it was by them 
 partly treasured in their memories, partly written 
 down on shoulder-bones of mutton or oyster-shells, 
 on bits of wood or tablets of stone, which, being 
 thrown pell-mell into boxes, and jumbled up together, 
 like the leaves of the Cumean Sibyl after a gust of 
 wind, were not put into any shape at all till after the 
 Prophet's death by order of Abu Bakr. The work of 
 the editor consisted simply in arranging the Suras in 
 the order of their respective lengths, the longest first, 
 the shortest last ; and, though the book once after- 
 wards passed through the editor's hands, this is sub- 
 stantially the shape in which the Koran has come 
 down to us. Various readings, which would seem, 
 however, to have been of very slight importance, 
 having crept into the different copies, a revising 
 committee was appointed by order of the Kaliph 
 Othman, and, an" authorized edition having been thus 
 prepared ' to prevent the texts differing, like those of 
 
124 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 the Jews and Christians/ all previous copies were col- 
 lected and burnt ! 
 
 Nor is it to be wondered at that the principle 
 of arrangement, combined with the impossibility of 
 keeping the rhyme or rhythm in any translation, have 
 prevented European critics, as a body, from endorsing 
 the judgment, not merely of Mohammed himself, for 
 that, if it had stood alone, might be looked upon as 
 partial, but also of the whole Eastern world. 
 
 * If ye be in doubt as to our revelation to our ser- 
 vant, then produce a Sura like unto it, and summon 
 your witnesses, God and all, if ye be men of truth.' ^ 
 
 And again, ' If men and genii were assembled 
 together that they might produce a book like the 
 Koran, they must fail.' ^ 
 
 ' It is to be remarked that Mohammed and Mo- 
 hammed's enemies are quite at one as to the merits of 
 the book. The Arabs said that the Koran could not 
 be Mohammed's Avork because it was too good. Mo- 
 hammed replied to the effect that they were both right 
 and wrong. They were right, for it was too good for 
 Mohammed uninspired ; they were wrong, for it was 
 too good to have come originally from any one but 
 the All-Merciful. ^ 
 
 Of course, by the existing arrangement, even such 
 
 J Sura II. 21. - Sura XVII. 90. 
 
 3 Sura XVI. 105, compared with XXV. 5, etc. 
 
CHARACTERISTICS OF KORAN 125 
 
 psychological development as there was in the Koran 
 has been obscured ; for, as a rule, what the editor put 
 last comes really first. These are the burning utter- 
 ances of the Prophet who knows no influence but the 
 inspiration pent within him ; in these are the pith and 
 poetry of the whole ; while the elaborate and laboured 
 arguments, the apologies pro vita sua, are the product 
 of the mind which the force of circumstances and the 
 love of spiritual power, that most exquisite and most 
 dangerous of fascinations, had driven to become con- 
 scious of itself The very titles of the earlier Suras, 
 the imprecations with which they abound, the imagery 
 they employ, suggest the shepherd of the desert, the 
 despised visionary, the poet and the prophet. ' The 
 folding up,' ' the cleaving in sunder,' * the celestial 
 signs,' ' the unity,' ' the overwhelming,' ' the striking,' 
 
 * the inevitable,' ' the earthquake,' * the war-horses,' 
 tell their own story. There are passages in these, 
 though it must be admitted they are rare, which may 
 be compared in grandeur even with some of the sub- 
 limest passages of Job, of David, or of Isaiah. 
 
 Take, for instance, the vision of the last day with 
 which the eighty-first Sura, ' The folding up,' begins : 
 
 * When the sun shall be folded up, 
 And when the stars shall fall, 
 
 And when the mountains shall be set in motion, 
 
 And when the she-camels with young shall be neglected, 
 
 And when the wild beasts shall be huddled together. 
 
126 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 And when the seas shall boil, 
 
 And when souls shall be joined again to their bodies, 
 
 And when the female child that had been buried alive shall ask for 
 
 what crime she was put to death, 
 And when the leaves of the Book shall be unrolled, 
 And when the Heavens shall be stripped away like a skin, 
 And when Hell shall be made to blaze. 
 And when Paradise shall be brought near, 
 Every soul shall know what it has done.' 
 
 Allusions to the monotony of the desert ; the 
 sun in its rising brightness ; the moon in its splen- 
 dour ; are varied in the Koran by much more vivid 
 mental visions of the Great Day when men shall be 
 like moths scattered abroad, and the mountains shall 
 become like carded wool of various colours, driven by 
 the wind. No wonder that Labyd, the greatest poet 
 of his time, forbore to enter the poetic lists with 
 Mohammed when he recited to him the description of 
 the infidel in the second Sura. 
 
 * They are like one who kindleth a fire, and when it 
 hath thrown its light on all around him, God taketh 
 away the light and leaveth him in darkness, and they 
 cannot see.' 
 
 ' Deaf, dumb, blind, therefore they shall not retrace 
 their steps.' 
 
 * They are like those who, when there cometh a 
 storm-cloud out of heaven big with darkness, thunder 
 and lightning, thrust their fingers into their ears 
 because of the thunder-clap for fear of death. God is 
 round about the infidels.' 
 
POETRY OF KORAN 127 
 
 *The lightning almost snatcheth away their eyes : 
 so oft as it gleameth on them, they walk on in it ; 
 but when darkness closeth upon them, they stop ; 
 and if God pleased, of their ears and of their 
 eyes would he surely deprive them ; verily G-od is 
 almighty.' 
 
 And at the end of the same Sura, which, it is to be 
 remembered, appeared quite late in the Prophet's life, 
 at a period when it might have been expected that the 
 cares of government would dim the brightness of the 
 Prophet's visions, we find the sublime description of 
 Him whom it had been the mission of his life to 
 proclaim, and which is still engraved on precious stones, 
 and worn by devout Mussulmans. 
 
 ' God ! there is no God but He, the Living, the 
 Eternal. Slumber doth not overtake Him, neither sleep ; 
 to Him belongeth all that is in heaven and in earth. 
 Who is he that can intercede with Him but by His 
 own permission } He knoweth that which is past and 
 that which is to come unto them, and they shall not 
 comprehend anything of His knowledge but so far as 
 He pleaseth. His throne is extended over heaven and 
 earth, and the upholding of both is no burden unto 
 Him. He is the Lofty and the Great' 
 
 Almost equally well too, as a proof of his poetic 
 inspiration, might have Mohammed quoted that other 
 description of Infidelity also produced late in his 
 
128 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 life, and pronounced by Sir William Muir and by 
 Emanuel Deutsch to be one of the grandest in the 
 "Avhole Koran. 
 
 ' As to the Infidels, their works are like the Serab 
 <on ' the plain,^ which the thirsty traveller thinketh to 
 be water, and then Avhen he cometh thereto, he findeth 
 it to be nothing ; but he findeth God about him, and 
 he will fully pay him his account ; for swift in taking an 
 account is God ; 
 
 ' Or as the darkness over a deep sea, billows riding 
 upon billows below, and clouds above ; one darkness on 
 another darkness : when a man stretcheth forth his 
 hand he is far from seeing it ; he to whom God doth 
 not grant light, no light at all hath he.' ^ 
 
 Strange and graphic accounts have been preserved 
 to us by Ayesha of the physical phenomena attending 
 the Prophet's fits of inspiration. He heard as it were 
 the ringing of a bell ; he fell down as one dead ; he 
 .sobbed like a camel ; he felt as though he were being 
 rent in pieces, and when he came to himself he felt as 
 though words had been written on his heart. And 
 when Abu Bakr, ' he who would have sacrificed father 
 and mother for Mohammed,' burst into tears at the 
 sight of the Prophet's whitening hair, 'Yes,' said 
 
 ' i. e. the Mirage of the Desert. 
 
 2 Sura XXIV. 39, 40. See Mmr, III. 308 ; and Deutsch, ' Islam,' 
 in ' Quarterly Review,' No. 254, p. 346. 
 
FITS 01 INSPIRATION . 129 
 
 Mohammed, ' Hud and its sisters, the Terrific Suras, 
 have turned it white before its time.' ^ 
 
 But in order to make the general outhne of Mo- 
 hammed's system, which I am attempting to draw, as 
 little imperfect as it is possible for me to make it within 
 the limits I have prescribed myself, it is necessary to 
 touch upon three difficult questions, which have ac- 
 quired different degrees of prominence at successive 
 periods in the history of Mohammedanism — questions 
 which have been much misunderstood, and sometimes 
 intentionally misrepresented, and which call more 
 loudly even than other matters which we have been 
 considering for a laborious investigation and a candid 
 judgment. They need also above all things the his- 
 torical sense, which does not apply the standard of the 
 nineteenth century to the seventh, of Europeans to 
 Asiatics, or of a high civilisation to semi-barbarism ; 
 and which is content to balance the evil against the 
 good, without requiring a verdict either for an absolute 
 acquittal or an uncompromising condemnation. The 
 three questions I refer to are the relation of Moham- 
 medanism to Miracles, to Fatalism, and to wars for 
 the sake of Religion. I propose in the remainder of 
 to-day's Lecture to deal with these in succession ; not 
 I hope consciously shirking any difficulty, or glossing 
 
 » Suras XL, Ilud ; LVL, 'The Inevitable;' CI., 'The 
 Striking.' See Muir, II. 88. 
 
 K 
 
130 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 over what is unquestionably bad, but, of course, not 
 professing in any degree to exhaust the subject. 
 
 I. First, then. Miracles. Mohammedanism is a 
 system in many respects unique, but in none more 
 so than in this, that alone of the great religions of 
 the Avorld it does not, in its authoritative docu- 
 ments, rest its claims to reception upon miracles ; 
 and yet the attitude of Mohammed towards the 
 miraculous has been made the ground by different 
 people of very conflicting accusations. Superficial 
 observers up to the middle of the last century, and 
 Christian missionaries of later times, whose zeal has 
 not always been tempered by accurate knowledge 
 of their subject, fastening on the fantastic character 
 of the few miracles attributed to Mohammed by 
 the pious credulity of his followers or the ' succes- 
 sors,' have triumphantly torn the mask from the 
 ' impostor,' and have gone on to contrast, as well 
 they might from their point of view, the purposeless 
 character and impossibility of his supposed miracles, 
 with the sober nature and the moral purpose which 
 underlie the miracles of the New Testament, how- 
 ever supernatural they may be. Other writers — 
 White in his ' Bampton Lectures,' and Paley in his 
 * Evidences of Christianity,' and Butler in his ' Ana- 
 logy ' — preferring to appeal to what Mohammed said 
 of himself, rather than to what was said of him by 
 
THE MIRACULOUS 131 
 
 others, have driven home the contrast between Mo- 
 hammedanism and Christianity by pointing out that 
 Christianity is attested by supernatural manifesta- 
 tions, and is therefore Divine, while Mohammedanism 
 is neither the one nor the other. Let us enquire 
 what the Koran itself, the only reliable authority on 
 the subject, says, and then make one or two remarks 
 on the general question. 
 
 In the thirteenth Sura we read, — 
 
 * The unbelievers say. Unless a sign be sent down 
 with him from his Lord, we will not believe. But thou 
 art a preacher only, O Mohammed!' 
 
 Mohammed replies that God alone can work mira- 
 cles ; and, after specifying some of them, he says : — 
 
 ' God alone knoweth that which is hidden, and that 
 which is revealed. He is the great and the Most High.' 
 
 In the seventh Sura the Infidels ask why Mo- 
 hammed had not been sent wi,th miracles, like 
 previous prophets } Because, replied Mohammed, 
 miracles had proved inadequate to convince. Noah 
 had been sent with signs, and with what effect 1 
 Where was the lost tribe of Thamud } They had 
 refused to receive the preaching of the prophet Saled 
 unless he showed them a sign, and caused the rock to 
 bring forth a living camel. He did what they asked. 
 In scorn they had cut off the camel's feet, and then, 
 
 daring the Prophet to fulfil his threats of judgment, 
 
 K 2 
 
132 AfOIIAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 were found dead in their beds next morning, stricken 
 by the angel of the Lord. There are some seventeen 
 places in the Koran in which Mohammed is chal- 
 lenged to work a sign, and he answers them all to the 
 same effect. 
 
 There are in the whole of the sacred book only two 
 supposed exceptions to the attitude thus assumed by 
 him ; and those who know how large a part the Miraj, 
 or miraculous journey on the Borak,^ bears in popular 
 conceptions of Mohammedanism will learn with sur- 
 prise, if they have not gone much into the matter, 
 that there is only one passage in the Koran which can 
 be tortured into an allusion to the journey to heaven. 
 
 * Praise be to Him who transferred His servant by 
 night from the sacred temple to one that is more 
 remote.' ^ 
 
 To make this refer at all to the Miraj, we have to 
 insert the word ' Mecca ' in one place, and Jerusalem or 
 ^ seventh heaven ' in another, and this, though in the 
 sixtieth verse of the same Sura Mohammed tells us he 
 was not sent with miracles, because people would not 
 believe them ; and in the sixty-second verse express 
 mention is made of a vision he had had, beyond doubt 
 of this very journey ! So, too, in the verse : ' The hour 
 
 ' Borak after all means only Lightning ; the Barak of the Jews ; the 
 Barca of the Carthaginians. 
 2 Sura XVII. i. 
 
MOHAMMED S ATTITUDE TO MIRACLES 133 
 
 hath approached and the moon hath been split in 
 sunder : ' ^ people were so anxious to see an allusion to 
 the extravagant story of the moon's descending on the 
 Kaaba, and entering Mohammed's sleeve, that they 
 forgot that ' the hour ' means ' the hour of judgment/ 
 and that the tense used is the prophetic preterite. 
 To the eye of the Semitic ' nabi/ whether Jewish or 
 Arab, the future is as the past.^ 
 
 Without discussing the question of miracles at 
 length, I would make three remarks on the general 
 subject : — First, that in a new religion the real cause 
 for wonder is, not that it claims to be founded on 
 miracles, but that it should ever be able to profess to 
 do without them. In certain stages of the human 
 mind there is no natural phenomenon which will not 
 bear a supernatural interpretation. In fact, the super- 
 natural is then the rule ; the natural, the exception. 
 Gibbon, I think, has somewhere asked whether there 
 exists a single instance in ecclesiastical history of a 
 Father of the Church claiming for himself the power 
 of working miracles, and I am not aware that the 
 question has ever been answered in the affirmative. 
 And yet we know that during many centuries there 
 was hardly a Father of the Church who did not have 
 
 * Sura LIV. i. 
 
 ^ Cf. the past tense used in Sura XCVIII., called 'The Victory' — 
 ' Verily, we have won for thee an undoubted victoiy,' believed to 
 point to the conquest of Mecca two years later. 
 
134 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 miracles attributed to him by other men of equal, or 
 even greater, reputed sanctity. Among many others 
 I need only mention the names of St. Benedict and 
 St. Martin of Tours, of St. Bernard and St. Francis of 
 Assisi. They attribute even to inanimate remains, 
 and to relics, which were often fictitious, powers which 
 they would never dream of claiming for themselves. 
 St. Augustine, whose honesty is above suspicion, tells 
 us gravely that he had ascertained, on certain evi- 
 dence, that some small fragments of the disinterred 
 relics of St. Stephen had, in his own diocese, within 
 two years, performed no less than seventy miracles, 
 and three of them raisings from the dead ! St. Ber- 
 nard was believed by his admirers to have excommu- 
 nicated some flies which teased him, and ' they 
 straightway fell down in heaps.' And if such be the 
 mental atmosphere of a Church in its adolescence, 
 a fortioid will an age which is capable of pro- 
 ducing or receiving a new religion throw a mystic 
 halo of supernaturalism round the supreme objects of 
 its reverence. Even if the founder himself disclaims 
 the power of working miracles, they will be thrust 
 upon him in the most perfe(^t good faith by the warm 
 imagination of his disciples. 
 
 Second, and what would seem to follow from the 
 first: in proportion as exact knowledge advances, the 
 sphere of the supernatural is narrowed ; and there- 
 
RELIGIOUS INSTINCT AN ULTIMATE FACT 135 
 
 fore a proof which is fitted for an imaginative and 
 creative age is not best suited for a critical and 
 scientific one. Many minds, no doubt, will always 
 crave the supernatural, and they will always find 
 plenty of it ; but to many, also, in an age like this, 
 miracles have been a stumbling-block, and have seemed 
 a reason for rejecting the religion which is made to 
 rest mainly on them. Where there is a choice, it is at 
 least wise to select the strongest ground we have ; nor 
 is there any fear that Science will ever explain too 
 much. Behind what she explains, there will always 
 remain the unexplained and the unexplainable. Let 
 her classify and explain the phenomena of Mind and 
 Matter as she will, but will she ever be able to tell us 
 what Mind and Matter are themselves .'* Let her analyse 
 the springs of human action, and dissect the complex 
 anatomy of the human conscience ; but the religious 
 instinct will still remain, as an ultimate fact of human 
 nature ; and that instinct will find without, or supply 
 from its own resources, the verities with which it deals, 
 the verities which supplement and explain to it the 
 facts of Nature, and are not explained by them ; which 
 assure us that this life is not the only life, nor death 
 extinction ; and that love, the main source of human 
 happiness, is not given us to make all real happiness 
 impossible ; which, in a word, supply the soul with the 
 supreme objects for its worship and its aspirations. 
 
136 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Third, I would remark that the answers given by 
 
 Mohammed himself to those who demanded miracles, 
 
 that God gave the power of working miracles to whom 
 
 He pleased ; that other prophets had wrought miracles, 
 
 and had not been believed ; that he who could not 
 
 know even, himself adequately, could not know what 
 
 God had hidden ; that there were greater miracles in 
 
 nature than any which could be wrought outside of 
 
 it ; that the Koran itself was a miracle, find at least 
 
 one line of thought in a greater than Mohammed, 
 
 which is not opposed to, but identical with them. 
 
 People have raised questions about the authenticity 
 
 and meaning of much that is in the Gospels, but by 
 
 the rules of all critical interpretation, what they can 
 
 least question is the genuineness and accuracy of those 
 
 passages which the Disciples have, in their undoubted 
 
 honesty, recorded, as it were, in spite of themselves, 
 
 and which appear to run counter to other and loftier 
 
 conceptions of that majestic character on Avhose par- 
 
 tially-presei-ved utterances all Christendom still hangs. 
 
 He who said he could of His own self do nothing ; 
 
 it was the spirit which quickened, the flesh profiteth 
 
 nothing ; the words that He spake unto them, they 
 
 were spirit and they were life ; He who, when His 
 
 disciples wondered at the withered fig tree, told them 
 
 that the trust in God which underlay His act would 
 
 enable even them to do greater things ; who, we are 
 
CHRIST'S ATTITUDE TO MIR A C IE S 137 
 
 told, co2cldnot, in certain places, work miracles because 
 of their unbelief ; and when people declined to accept 
 His teaching on higher grounds, told them, with a 
 touch of scorn, that they might do so if they liked on 
 the lower ground, for ' His very Avorks' sake ; ' and, 
 lastly, who said it Avas an evil and adulterous genera- 
 tion which sought after a sign, and that no sign should 
 be given it ; and that if a man believed not Moses 
 and the Prophets, not even would he repent though 
 one rose from the dead ; in one aspect, at all events,, 
 of His teaching agreed wdth the Arabian Prophet 
 whom Christians have so much discredited. He, at 
 all events, treated the miraculous as subordinate to 
 the moral evidences of His mission, and struck upon 
 a vein of thought and touched a chord of feeling 
 which, it seems to me, is reconcilable at once Avith the 
 onward march of Science, and all the admitted weak- 
 nesses of human nature.^ 
 
 n. Second, P'atalism. I have spoken above of 
 the extraordinary impulse given to the earlier fol- 
 lowers of Mohammed by their vivid sense of God's 
 personal presence with them. Inspiring, indeed, this 
 principle then was ; for it must never be forgotten, 
 as I hope now to prove, that the belief in an 
 absolute predestination, which turns men into mere 
 
 * Compare throughout ' Literature and Dogma, ' Caps, V. and VI. „ 
 especially pages 129, 154. 
 
138 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 puppets, and all human life into a grim game of 
 chess, wherein men are the pieces, moved by the 
 invisible Hand of but a single Player, and which is 
 now so general in Mohammedan countries, was, 
 all appearances to the contrary, no part of the 
 creed of the Prophet himself or of his immediate 
 successors ; ^ and I venture, therefore, to think that 
 Gibbon is wrong in tracing the desperate valour of 
 the primitive Mussulmans mainly to the notion that 
 since there was no chance, there need be no fear : the 
 :germ, indeed, of fatalism was there, but its effects 
 were as yet anything but fatalistic. 
 
 It is of course true that there are many passages 
 in the Koran which assert in the strongest way the 
 foreknowledge of God. For instance, ' The fate of 
 ■every man have we bound about his neck ;' and the 
 relations of the slain at the battle of Ohud are 
 comforted by the assurance that every one must die 
 at his appointed time, whether it be in his own bed 
 or on the field of battle. Nor is it possible to any 
 religion to reconcile the conflicting dogmas of the 
 foreknowledge of God and of the free will of man. 
 The New Testament does not try to do so. Most 
 .assuredly our own Articles of Religion, however suc- 
 cessful they may be in finding a compromise between 
 opposing views on other things, fail to effect a compro- 
 
 1 Cf. 'National Review' for July, 1858, p. 154. 
 
MOHAMMED NOT A FATALIST 139 
 
 mise here. Press to its logical result either the omni- 
 230tence or the omniscience of God, and what becomes 
 of man's free will ? But logic is not the only criterion 
 of truth, nor is it the only rule of life ; and consequently 
 there is hardly a religion which does not, in words at 
 all events, assert as strongly as possible God's fore- 
 knowledge ; in acts, at all events, man's freedom. 
 Sometimes one will be the more prominent, some- 
 times the other. 
 
 The Prophet of Arabia naturally dwelt most on 
 those attributes of God which, throwing the widest 
 crulf between the Creator and His creatures, would, 
 once and for all, rescue the Arabs from worshipping 
 what their own hands had made.^ He inculcates hope 
 in adversity, and humility in success, on the ground 
 that there is a supreme Ruler who never leaves the 
 helm ; who knows what is really best for man when 
 man himself does not ; and whose supreme will and 
 power, where He asserts them, cannot be crossed by 
 the efforts of the creatures of His hand. But this is 
 not the only side to his teaching. He asserts that 
 man is a free agent ; free to refuse or to accept the 
 Divine message, responsible for his acts, and therefore 
 deserving, now of punishment, now of reward. The 
 future, in fact, is in his own hands, and Mohammed 
 
 * Cf. Gobineau, ' Les Religions et les Philosophies dans I'Asie 
 Centrale.' See the whole passage on this subject, p. 72, 73, 
 
I40 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 incessantly urges him to use his opportunities. Ah, 
 the most saintly, I would almost say the most 
 Christian, of all Mussulmans, pronounces those who 
 say the will is not free to be heretics. W There are at 
 least four sects among Mohammedans that differ from 
 one another on the one point of predestination and 
 free will. One of them, the Mutazalites, almost assert 
 what philosophers have called the ' liberty of in- 
 difference ; ' and there is little doubt that IMohammed 
 himself, if the alternative had been clearly presented 
 to him, would have had more in common with 
 Pelagius than with Augustine, with Arminius than 
 with Calvin. 
 
 It is difficult to believe that if Mohammed had 
 been the consistent fatalist he is often represented to 
 have been, he would have made prayer one of the 
 four practical duties enjoined upon the faithful, and 
 that on an equal or even a higher footing than alms- 
 giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. He is said to have 
 called it the Pillar of Religion and the Key of Paradise. 
 He told a tribe which, after its conversion, begged for 
 a remission of some of the daily prayers enjoined 
 upon them, that there could be no good in the 
 religion in which there was no prayer ; and, according 
 to one of his successors, prayer of itself lifts men half 
 way to heaven. Now, if all events are absolutely 
 
 ^ Quoted by Gobinean, loc. cit. 
 
MOHAMMEUS VIEW OF PRAYER 141 
 
 fixed by the Divine will, and foreseen by the Divine 
 mind, then there is no possibility, I do not say of 
 altering the fixed laws of nature, for that is a power 
 which few would claim for prayer, but even of a 
 man's improving in the smallest degree, by any 
 acts or petitions of his, his own spiritual condition. 
 Prayer would thus be a superfluity and delusion if 
 explained in any other way than as an aspiration of 
 the heart towards God, which, being an end in itself, 
 necessarily brings its own answer with it. Noav, 
 whether this last is a true view of prayer or not, it 
 was certainly not Mohammed's view. In neither case 
 Avould he have been quite a consistent fatalist ; but it 
 is not likely that he could have overlooked the 
 glaring inconsistencies involved between an absolute 
 predestination on the one hand, and material answers 
 to prayer on the other. The prayers that he enjoined 
 five times a day ^ are still offered with full confidence 
 in their efficacy by all devout Mussulmans, and the 
 cry of the Muezzin, before daybreak, from a myriad 
 mosques and minarets — ' Prayer is better than sleep, 
 prayer is better than sleep ' — is a living witness, 
 wherever the influence of the Prophet of Arabia has 
 
 ^ It is worth noticing, in passing, that the five daily prayers, like the 
 rite of circumcision, though universally observed by Mussulmans, are 
 not enjoined in the Koran itself. Circumcision is not even mentioned 
 in the Koran : it is one of the many Pre-Islamitic practices which 
 Mohammed tacitly sanctioned, y, 
 
142 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 extended, more vivid than the letter of the Koran 
 itself, overpowering even the lethargy and quietism of 
 the East, to Mohammed's belief in God's providen- 
 tial government of the world, and in the freedom of 
 man's will. 
 
 Mohammed, on one occasion, complains of the 
 Jews, that '■ if good fortune betide them, they say it is 
 from God ; if evil betide them, they say it is from 
 Mohammed :' say rather, he suggests, all is from God. 
 But what, he asks in the very next verse, has come 
 to these people that they are not near to understand- 
 ing what is told them ? 
 
 ' Whatever good betideth thee is from God, and 
 whatever betideth thee of evil is from thyself ^ 
 
 There are the two contradictories brought face to 
 face, and left fronting one another for all time ; and 
 can any religion do more, and, perhaps, I may add, 
 less, than this ? 
 
 It is not difficult to see how one and the same 
 doctrine of God's foreknowledge on the one hand, 
 and of His actual intervention in human affairs on 
 the other, may have diametrically opposite effects in 
 different natures, or in even the same natures under 
 different circumstances. 
 
 * There is a tide in the afifairs of men, 
 Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune ; 
 Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
 Is bound in shallows and in miseries.' 
 
 ' Sura IV. So, 8 1. 
 
OPPOSITE EFFECTS OF SAME DOCTRINE 143. 
 
 The early Mussulmans in the new burst of life 
 breathed into them by Mohammed, it inspired with 
 double energy and double enthusiasm, as in their best 
 days it inspired the Puritans, the Covenanters, the 
 Pilgrim Fathers. But to their descendants in their 
 more normal state — the lethargic Soufy, the brooding 
 Sepoy, the insensate Turk ; I would add, to those 
 religious people who refuse to prevent the miseries and 
 the diseases which Nature they think has attached to 
 guilt — it furnishes with a new excuse for that life of 
 inactivity to which they are already too much dis- 
 posed, since they believe that they are acquiescing, as 
 in duty bound, in the immutable decrees of God. ^ 
 
 III. One more question remains to be discussed to- 
 day — the wars of Islam and the relation they bear to 
 Mohammed's religion. It is true that it was not till 
 the Prophet found himself, to his surprise, in a position 
 of power at Medina, that we hear even a whisper of 
 the sword as an instrument of conversion. It is then, 
 and not till then, that we are told that other prophets 
 have been sent by God to attest His different attributes 
 in their own person and by their miraculous acts ; but 
 that men had closed their eyes to the character, and 
 denied the miracles, even of Moses and of Christ. 
 What remained to the last of the prophets except 
 
 ' See an eloquent passage on this subject in an article of the 
 'National Review' for October, 1861. entitled the Great Arabian, p. 312, 
 
144 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 that he should try the last argument of the sword ? 
 Was the sword then an after thought and an accidental 
 appendage merely to Mohammed's religion, or was it 
 an essential part ? I am inclined to think that the 
 nature of the case itself and the verdict of subsequent 
 experience will tend to show that, however absent it 
 was from Mohammed's thoughts at first, and however 
 alien to his gentle and forgiving nature, it came in the 
 progress of events to some extent in his own life, and 
 still more so in the lives of his successors, to be the 
 latter. How this came about requires careful ex- 
 planation. 
 
 Mohammed's notion of God had never been that of 
 a great moral Being who designs that the creatures 
 He has created should, from love and gratitude to 
 Him, become one with Him, or even assimilated to 
 Him. Mohammed believed in God, feared, reverenced, 
 and obeyed Him after his light, as few Jews or 
 Christians ever did ; but he could hardly be said in 
 the Christian, or even the Jewish sense of the word, to 
 love God. It is possible that repeated acts of obedience 
 to a God whom he always represents as compassionate 
 and merciful might imply or result in love ; but at all 
 events with him love was not, as it is in Christianity, 
 the fulfilling of the law, the inspiring motive to 
 action, the sum of its theology as of its morality. 
 Had it been so, Mohammed would have seen more 
 
USE OF THE SWORD 145 
 
 reason to doubt whether the sword could ever be its 
 best ally ; but though he must in any case have seen 
 that it was impossible to force men to love God, it 
 may have crossed his mind that it was possible to 
 force men to abstain from idolatry, to acknowledge one 
 God with their lips, to fear and to obey Him, at all 
 events in their outward acts. 
 
 Had Mohammed remained master of himself — 
 had he remained, that is to say, the simple Prophet 
 throughout his career — it is possible, on the one hand, 
 that his message would never have spread in his life- 
 time beyond the walls of Mecca and Medina ; and it 
 is more than probable, on the other, that his character 
 might now be held up to the world as that which we 
 feel the Founder of a religion ought to be ; that w^hich 
 Confucius and Buddha were, and that which Mo- 
 hammed himself, throughout his life at Mecca, unques- 
 tionably was — a perfect model of the saintly virtues. 
 There is one glory of the founder of a religion, another 
 of the founder of a nation, another of the founder 
 of an empire. They are better kept distinct ; and the 
 limits of the human faculties are an adequate security 
 against their being often found united in one person. 
 It is the uncongenial mixture of earthly needs and 
 heavenly aspirations which has made Mohammed at 
 once a smaller and a greater man — at once more and 
 less commanding than he would otherwise have been^ 
 
 L 
 
146 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 What he gains as a ruler of men, he loses as a guide 
 and as an example ; and people are, naturally enough, 
 led to condemn the prophet for the drastic energy of 
 the leader, and the leader for the shortcomings of the 
 prophet. It is, perhaps, inevitable that Christians 
 should do so ; for the image of Him whose kingdom 
 was not of this world, who did not strive nor cry, 
 whose servants were never to draw the sword in 
 His defence, forces itself upon the mind, in silent 
 and reproachful antithesis to the mixed and sullied 
 character of the Prophet-soldier Mohammed. The 
 trumpet-call is not the still small voice ; it is im- 
 measurably below it : but there has been room for 
 both in the development of humanity. 
 
 /Now, on a sudden, Mohammed found himself in a 
 position he had not courted, which was forced on him 
 by his enemies ; and the exigencies of his exiled 
 followers — the need of sustenance, the appetite for 
 plunder, the desire of revenge, and the longing for 
 their homes, no less than the impending attack of the 
 Koreishites — drove the Prophet for the first time to 
 place himself at their head ; and, for temporal pur- 
 poses only, to unsheath the sword. Mohammed thus 
 became a general by accident ; and the extraordinary 
 success of his first ventures deepened the impression, 
 already half natural to an Arab, that the sword might 
 be a legitimate instrument of spiritual warfare, and 
 
MOHAMMED SOLDIER AS WELL AS PROPHET 147 
 
 that God had put into his power a new means, where 
 all other means, as in the case of previous prophets, 
 had failed. At all events the sword, originally drawn 
 for temporal purposes only, was found to have, half- 
 unexpectedly, answered another end as well. It was 
 found that the religion, once started by the sword, was 
 • soon able to throw the sword away. The march of 
 the Faith anticipated the march of the army of the 
 Faithful, and the all but uniform success of the armies, 
 when they had to fight, seemed to stamp the means 
 used with the Divine approbation ; and so it was 
 that Mohammed felt less and less scruple as to the 
 use of the sword where it seemed to him to be 
 wanted ; and at the close of his life, in one of the last 
 Suras of the Koran, we are hardly surprised to find the 
 stern command and the ' magnificent presentiment : ' 
 ^ ' Fight on, therefore, till there be no temptation to 
 idolatry, and the religion becomes God's alone.' ^ 
 
 The early Kaliphs obeyed the precepts and imi- 
 tated the example of the warrior-Prophet, and went 
 forth on their enterprise in all the plenitude of auto- 
 cratic power ; there was no rivalry between Church 
 and State to tie their hands, for the Kaliph was the 
 head of both in one ; the State, so far as it had any 
 separate existence at all, being simply a creature of 
 
 ' Sura VIII. 40. Cf. also XXII. 40, and IX. passim : perhaps 
 the last Sura Mohammed composed. 
 
 L 2 
 
148 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 the Church. And let us here turn aside for a moment 
 to examine the relation then subsisting between the 
 spiritual and temporal power, first in the Western, 
 and then in the Eastern Empire, and to contrast it 
 with the extraordinary concentration of all the ener- 
 gies of a new-born enthusiasm, placed in the hands of 
 the Kaliph. We shall then see, on the one hand, from 
 what a vantage-ground the Arabs, at that precise 
 moment, entered the lists to contend with Christen- 
 dom ; but, on the other, we shall note how few are the 
 men, and how rare the occasions on which power of 
 any kind can afford to dispense with those checks 
 which are a condition of its permanence, and which 
 alone can prevent it from developing into unbridled 
 tyranny, or dying of inanition. 
 
 The Christianity of the West then had, centuries 
 before this, organized an iniperiuin in imperio which 
 afforded a substantial check to the tyranny of the 
 Emperors, and, by its moral majesty, could restrain a 
 savage barbarian even in the full career of conquest. 
 Ambrose had sternly rebuked Theodosius ; Innocent 
 had mitigated the horrors of the sack of Rome by 
 Alaric ; Leo had turned back Attila, and half-dis- 
 armed Genseric. The transference of the seat of 
 Empire to Constantinople forced the Bishops of Rome 
 into a political prominence which would not otherwise 
 « have belonged to them ; and, in process of time, 
 
SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL POWER 149 
 
 the Spiritual power thus fortified began to contend, 
 on something like equal terms, with the temporal, 
 Gregory the Great, whose pontificate ended shortly 
 before the * call ' of the Prophet of Arabia, was the 
 virtual sovereign of Rome, able to protect it alike 
 from the ferocity of the Lombards, and from the pre- 
 tentious weakness of the Exarchs. Before long the 
 sacerdotal monarchs who reigned on the Tiber were 
 to be seen deposing by right Divine one Frankish 
 dynasty which ruled upon the Rhine ; setting up an- 
 other of their own creation ; and, finally, in the person 
 of Charles the Great, giving new body to the phantom 
 of the ancient Roman Empire which had never ceased 
 to flit before the mind of Europe, and fancying, in 
 their superb audacity, that a breath might overthrow 
 what a breath had made. And by the time that 
 the Eternal City itself heard the dreaded Tecbir 
 at their gates, it Avas to a Pope and not a Caesar — 
 a Pope, too, elected in hot haste, without even the 
 formal sanction of the Caesar — that Rome owed her 
 safety ! * 
 
 But the religion of the Eastern Empire, to quote 
 Gibbon's epigram, could teach men only ' to suffer and 
 to yield.' The Patriarch of Constantinople, unlike the 
 Patriarch of Rome, was the puppet of the Emperor, 
 endorsed his worst deeds, or was swept away if he 
 
 i Leo IV. 
 
150 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 objected to them.^ And the Saracens who besieged 
 the ceremonious Emperor of the East in his own capi- 
 tal must have enjoyed, if they could read, the form of 
 service, prescribed by Church and State together, for 
 the day on which the Emperor should trample on the 
 necks of the captive Mussulmans, while the singers 
 were to chant, 'Thou hast made mine enemies my 
 footstool,' and the people were to shout forty times 
 the ' Kyrie Eleeson.' ^ The crusading spirit which 
 might have been evoked by a proposition of the great 
 Emperors, Nicephorus and Zimisces, to give a martyr's 
 crown to those who fell in battle with the infidels, was 
 checkmated by a counter-proposition of the Patriarch 
 to exclude from the highest rites of the Church all 
 those who took up arms, even in self-defence.^ Had 
 it been otherwise, the period of the Crusades might 
 have been anticipated by more than a hundred years ! 
 We see, therefore, that in the West, by the time that 
 the tide of Arab conquest had spread from Mecca 
 to Gibraltar, the spiritual power was independent of 
 
 * See the history of the Iconoclastic Emperors generally, a.d. 
 717-841, and their dealings with the Patriarchs of Constantinople. 
 Read especially, on the one hand, the account of the dastardly submis- 
 sion of the Patriarch Anastasius to Leo, and, on the other, the horrible 
 cruelties inflicted on the Patriarch Constantine by Copronymus. 
 Milman, II. Chap. VII. 
 
 ' See the ' De Ceremoniis Aula; et Ecclesi?e Byzantinse ' of Con- 
 stantine Porphyrogenitus, II. 19 ; quoted by Gibbon, Chap. LIII. 116, 
 and note. 
 
 ^ See Gibbon, loc. cit. 
 
KALIPHS, SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL RULERS 151 
 
 temporal, and was often able to control or neutralise 
 its action, even in temporal affairs ; while in the East, 
 on which the storm was first to burst, it was almost 
 non-existent ; and if ever it did cause its voice to be 
 heard, the cry it uttered was that of Phocion, not of 
 Demosthenes — of Jeremiah, not of Isaiah ; that of sub- 
 mission to the inevitable, not of resistance to the 
 bitter end. 
 
 But with the Saracens the case was different. The 
 God of Mohammed, like the God of the wanderers of 
 the wilderness, and unlike the God of Christendom, 
 was pre-eminently the God of battles. The early 
 Mussulmans shed tears when held back within their 
 leashes from the battle ; and the Emperor Leo, who 
 condemned the Mohammedan idea of God, must have 
 secretly envied the vigour that it brought. Military 
 zeal under a tried leader is a strong passion, so is 
 religious enthusiasm ; and never probably in the history 
 of the world have these two passions burned with so 
 consuming a flame as they did in the breasts of the 
 early followers of Mohammed. The civil, the religious, 
 and the military were as indissolubly blended together 
 in his system as they were in mediaeval chivalry. It 
 was not so much religion that became warlike, as war, 
 the normal condition of the Arabs on a small scale, 
 now itself became religious, with the whole world for 
 its battle ground. Probably in no army in the world, 
 
152 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 not even among the Scotch Covenanters, nor among 
 Cromwell's Ironsides, did religious exercises so form 
 part of the military discipline, and religious enthusiasm 
 so infuse an esprit de corps. 
 
 The early battles of Islam, Bedr and Ohud, Kade- 
 sla and Nehavend, the Yermuk and Aiznadin ; its 
 early sieges, Bozra and Damascus, Jerusalem and 
 Aleppo, Memphis and Alexandria, are more than 
 Homeric in the reckless valour and the chivalrous 
 devotion that they exhibit. And it is to be re- 
 membered that they are in the main historical. 
 Kaled is the Achilles of the siege of Damascus, Amrou 
 of that of Memphis, Dames of Aleppo. At Bedr, 
 Omeir, a mere stripling, who, fearing that he might be 
 rejected on account of his youth, had managed to join 
 the small army of the Faithful unknown to Moharnmed, 
 flung away the dates he was eating with the vow that 
 he would eat the next in the presence of God. ' Para- 
 dise is before you, the devil and hell-fire in your 
 rear,' was the exhortation of the generals at the battle 
 of Yermuk. The Faithful courted death with the 
 ecstasy of martyrs, and received a martyr's reward. 
 At Aiznadin, Derar maintained a flying fight single 
 handed against thirty infidels, and killed seventeen of 
 their number. At the siege of Damascus, a Saracen 
 heroine, who had followed her husband, Aban, to the 
 holy war, saw him killed by her side, stopped to bury 
 
RELIGIOUS AND MILITARY ENTHUSIASM 153, 
 
 him, and then fought on in the post of danger till she 
 slew the famous archer who had killed her husband. 
 Nor is there any period in the history of Mohamme- 
 danism, late or early, in which the intensity of the 
 crusading spirit does not on occasion manifest itself 
 It is God's battle that each Mussulman is fighting, and 
 as God may will, he is ready for either event, for victory 
 or defeat, for life or death. In the Crusades them- 
 selves, when Christendom seemed to be seized with a 
 double portion of the Mohammedan spirit, by the 
 confession of the Christians, the generosity, the reck- 
 -less valour, the self-sacrifice, and the chivalry, were 
 not all on one side. Richard of England and 
 Frederick Barbarossa found their match in Saladin ; 
 and even the history of our own Empire in India 
 teems with proofs that the vital spark of fanaticism 
 is latent only, not extinct. 
 
 Whenever hitherto in the history of Mohamme- 
 danism, the belief has grown feeble that the Faithful 
 hold a commission from on high to put down evil,. 
 wherever it shows itself, with a strong hand, it 
 must be admitted that the religion itself has propor- 
 tionately failed to do its proper work, both as a com- 
 pelling and as a restraining power. In the Middle 
 Ages the vitality and energy of Mohammedanism 
 evidenced itself most clearly, not in Arabia, or 
 Persia, or Africa, w^here its success was most complete,. 
 
154 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 but in the Christian border lands, in Spain, in Pales- 
 tine, in Asia Minor, where the crusading spirit was 
 most evoked. Where there was no outlet for an 
 active, and even a material warfare, against what was 
 believed to be evil, there corruption crept in, and 
 stealthily paralysed all the energies of Mussulman 
 society. ' Corruptio optimi fit pessima! Ommiade, and 
 Abbasside, and Fatimite Kaliphs ; Ghaznevide, and 
 Seljukian, and Ottoman Sultans passed through the 
 same dreary stages of luxury and decay ; and the 
 government that now represents, or misrepresents, the 
 Kaliphate, and is by most people foolishly supposed 
 to be the main support of Islam, originally, in the 
 hands of men like Abu Bakr, or Omar, the best, 
 the simplest, and the most republican of all absolute 
 governments, has, in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, 
 ever since their faith ceased to be militant, become 
 the most hopeless of despotisms, since the abject 
 submission to the ruler remains, while all reason for 
 submission has vanished.^ / 
 
 In the eyes of many the admission I have frankly 
 made that the propagation of religion by the sword has 
 been an essential part of Mohammedanism will serve to 
 condemn it at once, and so in the abstract and from 
 the highest point of view it ought. The sword is a 
 
 * See this line of thought developed by Maurice, ' Religions of the 
 World,' p. 29 sq. I have done little more in this paragraph than con- 
 dense and illustrate his argument. 
 
CHARACTER OF WARS OF ISLAM 155 
 
 rough surgical instrument in any case ; but the doc- 
 trine that rehgion can ever be propagated by it, 
 paradoxical as it sounds now, has seemed a truism in 
 more ages than one ; and though the Arabs were 
 semi-barbarians, the conquered nations were con- 
 strained to admit that in their conquests they were 
 not barbarous. /Their wars were not mere wars of 
 devastation, like those of Alaric or Genseric in earlier 
 times, or of Zenghis Khan or Tamerlane in later. 
 It was the savage boast of Attila, the genius of 
 destruction, the 'scourge of God,' that the grass never 
 grew where his horse had once trodden. But, of the 
 Mohammedan conquests, it would rather be true to 
 say that after the first wave of invasion had swept by, 
 two blades of grass were found growing where one 
 had grown before; like the thunderstorm, they fer- 
 tilised while they destroyed ; and from one end of the 
 then known world to the other, with their religion 
 they sowed seeds of literature, of commerce, and of 
 civilisation. And as these disappeared, in the lapse 
 of years, in one part of the Mussulman world, they 
 reappeared in another. When they died out, with 
 the dying of the Abbasside Kaliphate, along the banks 
 of the Tigris and Euphrates, they revived again on 
 the Guadalquivir and Guadiana. To the splendours 
 and civilisation of Damascus succeeded Bagdad ; to 
 Bagdad, Cairo; to Cairo, Cordova. / 
 
I 
 156 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Mohammedanism has been accused of hostiUty to 
 the growth of the human intellect. It may have been 
 so in its earliest days, when Omar, as the story goes, 
 condemned the Alexandrian Library to the flames 
 by his famous dilemma : * If these books agree with 
 the Book of God, they are useless ; if they disagree, 
 they are pernicious ; and in either case they must be 
 destroyed.' It may be so whenever there is a passing 
 outburst of fanaticism ; but it is not so in its essential 
 nature, nor has it been so historically, not even in its 
 wars. The religion which has declared that ' the ink 
 of the learned is as precious as the blood of the 
 martyrs ; ' ^ and which declares that at the Day of 
 Decision a special account will be given of the use 
 made of the intellect, cannot fairly be accused of 
 obscurantism. It was not so when, during the darkest 
 period of European history, the Arabs for five hundred 
 years held up the torch of learning to humanity. It 
 
 ^ Quoted by Gobineau, p. 26. So, too, Abulpliaragius, in his 
 'Dynasties,' says that Almamun, Kah'ph of Bagdad, invited learned men 
 to his court because they were the elect of God, whose lives were 
 devoted to the development of the mind. (See Gibbon, VII. 34.) 
 Against the destruction of the Alexandrian library by Omar may fairly 
 be set the destruction by the Crusaders of an immense library at 
 Tripoli, in Palestine. The General, finding that the first room of the 
 library contained the Koran only, ordered the whole library to be 
 burnt. So, too, Cardinal Ximenes, on entering the Moorish capital, 
 showed that a crass fanaticism is not the prerogative of one religion only, 
 by his order to destroy the vast collection of Arabic MSS. there, 
 with the exception of 300 medical works, which he reserved for his 
 own university. 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 157 
 
 was the Arabs who then ' called the Muses from 
 their ancient seats ; ' who collected and translated the 
 writings of the great Greek masters ; who understood 
 the geometry of Apollonius, and wielded the weapons 
 found in the logical armoury of Aristotle. It was the 
 Arabs who developed the sciences of Agriculture 
 and Astronomy, and created those of Algebra and 
 Chemistry ; who adorned their cities with colleges and 
 libraries, as well as with mosques and palaces ; who 
 supplied Europe with a school of philosophers from 
 Cordova, and a school of physicians from Salerno. 
 When we condemn the Mohammedan wars, let us at 
 least remember what of good they brought with them. 
 
 Nor is Mohammedanism the only religion which has 
 tried to propagate itself by the sword. It is true, of 
 course, that a holy war waged by Christians is in direct 
 contravention of the spirit of their Founder, while one 
 waged by Mohammedans is in accordance with both 
 the practice and the precept of the Prophet, and so far 
 there is no parallel at all between the two religions. 
 The means authorised by Christ for the spread of His 
 religion were moral and spiritual only. The means 
 authorised by Mohammed were persuasion and ex- 
 ample first ; but, failing these, the sword./ 
 
 Yet, historically speaking, the contrast between 
 the practice of Christians and Mohammedans has not 
 been so sharp as is often supposed. The Saxon wars 
 
158 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 of Charles the Great were avowedly religious wars, and 
 differed chiefly from the Syrian wars of Omar and 
 of Ali, from the African wars of Amrou and Akbah, 
 and the Spanish wars of Moussa and of Tarik, in that 
 they were much more protracted and vastly less suc- 
 cessful Otto the Great, the best of Charles's succes- 
 sors, used the sword with vigour to extend the external 
 profession of Christianity among the Sclavonian tribes 
 who dwelt along the shores of the Baltic. The Mediaeval 
 Papacy, whatever its other services to progress, was 
 never backward to unfurl the standard of a religious 
 war, whether against the common enemy of Christen- 
 dom, or, as more often happened, against a sect of 
 heretics, the Albigenses or the Waldenses, nearer home. 
 Nor, in point of ferocity, is it clear that religious wars 
 waged by Christians will compare favourably with 
 those of Mohammedans. The Mohammedan wars 
 were never internecine. Even on the field of battle 
 the conquering Mussulman allowed his conquered foe 
 the two other alternatives of conversion or of tribute. 
 When Abu Bakr first invaded Syria, he charged his 
 troops not to mutilate the dead, not to slay old men, 
 women, and children, not to cut down fruit-trees, not 
 to kill cattle unless they were needed for food ; and 
 these humane precepts served like a code of laws of 
 war during the career of Mohammedan conquest. And 
 this, be it remembered, among Orientals, who had 
 
RELIGIOUS WARS OF CHRISTIANS 159 
 
 always been remarkable for their disregard of human 
 life. 'When we remember, on the other hand, the 
 massacre of 4,500 Pagan Saxons in cold blood by- 
 Charles the Great — when we remember the famous 
 answer by which the Papal Legate, in the Albigensian 
 war, quieted the scruples of a too conscientious 
 general, ^Kill all, God will know His own' — when- 
 we recall the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquest of 
 Mexico and Peru, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
 and the sack of Magdeburg by Tilly, we shall be 
 disposed never, indeed, to justify religious wars, 
 but to point out that, of the religious wars which the 
 world has seen, the Mohammedan are certainly not 
 the worst — in their object, in their methods, or in their 
 results. / 
 
 Nor is the extermination of moral evil in all cases 
 an unworthy object of war. There are occasions even 
 in our modern civilisation, and in an era of non- 
 intervention, when one longs to feel that the sword a 
 nation wields may be, in their eyes at all events, the 
 sword of the Lord and of Gideon. An unselfish war 
 to put down the slave trade or the opium traffic, to 
 counteract some ' Holy Alliance ' of Emperors against 
 the rights of peoples, to prevent a giant iniquity like 
 the partition of Poland, is perhaps the only kind of 
 war, except those of self-defence, to which the spirit of 
 Christianity is not opposed. Christianity is opposed 
 
i6o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 to wars of aggression, to dynastic wars, and, above 
 all, to religious wars ; for a religious war rests upon 
 the irreligious assumption that one fallible man holds 
 a fiat from Omnipotence to step between another 
 human soul and God ; and to enforce his partial views 
 of truth upon a fellow-mortal, who, for aught he 
 knows, may have as wide a prospect, and as deep an 
 insight, as he has himself ' Deoritni injuries Deis curce' 
 . The sword may silence ; it cannot convince : it 
 may enforce hypocrisy ; it can never force belief. 
 But this has not always seemed so self-evident ; and 
 I say it deliberately and with all the force of convic- 
 tion, compared with the war of the Confederate States 
 in the nineteenth century for the perpetuation of 
 slavery, compared with our own Japanese wars for the 
 extension of our trade, our Chinese wars for the sale 
 of our opium, and our miserable African wars waged 
 for the possession of a territory which we bought, 
 and had no moral right to buy, from those who sold 
 what they had no moral right to selV the Mohamme- 
 dan wars for the propagation of a comparatively pure 
 religion and a higher morality were, in their time and 
 according to their light, inasmuch as they were not 
 purely selfish, I do not say excusable, but they were 
 at least intelligible and natural. 
 
 Here I must close for to-day. What of good and 
 
 ^ See Appendix to Lecture III. 
 
WHAT WARS ARE CHRISTIAN? i6i 
 
 what of evil the world owes to Mohammed ; what is 
 the condition and what the prospects of Moham- 
 medanism now ; what, as a matter of fact, is the 
 historical connection between Mohammedanism and 
 Christianity — its points of difference as well as of 
 resemblance ; finally, and most important of all, how 
 that connection ought to be regarded by Christians,' 
 and under what conditions or modifications the two 
 great creeds may work together, or, if needs be, 
 apart, for their common object, the general good of 
 humanity — these are some of the points I hope to 
 be able to discuss in my fourth and concluding 
 Lecture. 
 
 M 
 
i62 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 LBCTUEE IV. 
 
 March 7, 1874. 
 
 MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Say unto the Christians, their God and my God is one. — 
 
 The Koran. 
 
 ^f 'li](TQVQ ELTTfj Mr) KouXvers avTov' og yap ovic tan icaB' I'jiim'y vwep 
 
 riixwv iariv. — St. MaRK. 
 
 It may have been observed that in attempting, in 
 my last Lecture, to deal with some of the questions 
 connected with Mohammedanism, such as miracles, 
 fatalism, religious wars, which have much perplexed 
 the Christian mind, I omitted to say anything on a 
 point which, more even than any of these, has scandal- 
 ised those who view Mohammedanism from a distance: 
 I mean the notions Mohammedans have formed of a 
 future state. The omission was not altogether acci- 
 dental, for I am inclined to think that too much stress 
 has been laid upon these notions, no less by Moham- 
 med's apologists than by his critics ; more stress than 
 the Koran itself, and more even than the current 
 Mohammedan belief, will warrant. But, remembering 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE OF ISLAM 163 
 
 a remark of Sprenger's/ that, although Islam has been 
 described in many books, yet educated people have 
 not got much further in the knowledge of it than that 
 the Turks are Mohammedans, and allow polygamy, I 
 think it will be well to add a few words to counteract 
 the common notion, which I should be disposed to 
 place on a par with this, that the Paradise of the 
 Mohammedans is nothing niore than the enjoyment 
 of polygamy, with its earthly drawbacks and limita- 
 tions removed. 
 
 So much has been said and written about the 
 gross nature of Mohammed's Paradise, the black-eyed 
 Houris, the perfumes and the spices, with which his 
 imagination furnished it, that ordinary people may be 
 excused for believing that it was mainly, if not wholly, 
 sensual. But this is not, in the main, a true, and still 
 less is it an adequate, account of the matter. The 
 passages are few in number in which Mohammed 
 dwells much on these aspects of the future, and, even 
 in these, much of w^hat is said is explained by ortho- 
 dox Mohammedans to be merely Oriental imagery, 
 while some of it is especially suitable — the bubbling 
 fountains and the shady gardens above all — to the inha- 
 bitants of a dry and thirsty land, such as Arabia is. ^ 
 
 1 Sprenger, Vol. II. Chap. XI. p. 18. 
 
 ^ See Sale's 'Introduction,' p. 73; and Lane's 'Modem Egyp- 
 tians,' I. Chap. III. 84. 
 
 M 2 
 
i64 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Few people now put a literal interpretation upon 
 the gorgeous imagery and the glowing colours used 
 in the Book of Revelation to describe the Celestial 
 City ; and every one will admit that in all religions, 
 even the most spiritual, the circumstances of this life 
 must necessarily, to some extent, lend both form and 
 colour to the views of the life to come. The Red 
 Indian dreams of a heaven behind the cloud-topped 
 hills, embosomed in woods, wherein his faithful dog 
 will bear him company. The fierce Norseman hoped 
 to be admitted after death to the Hall of Odin, and 
 there, reclining on a couch, to drink ale for ever from 
 the skulls of his enemies whom he had slain in battle. 
 The earnest Methodist pictures to himself a place 
 
 * Where congregations ne'er break up. 
 And Sabbaths never end,' 
 
 for the simple reason that he finds his highest 
 spiritual happiness in these things on earth. A 
 polygamous people could hardly have pictured to 
 themselves a heaven without polygamy. It would 
 never even have occurred to them that such a thing 
 was possible, since few of them had ever known a 
 society on earth which was without it ; nor do I sup- 
 pose that any individual Christian who has ever 
 known the luxury of home affection, has been able to 
 accept in any literal sense the doctrine that, in the 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE OF OTHER RELIGIONS 165 
 
 future world, there are to be no exclusive attachments,^ 
 for the simple reason, again, that without individual 
 love no human heart can conceive of the possibility 
 of any happiness as complete or real. 
 
 Again, it is to be remembered that much that is 
 material, or even gross, in the Mohammedan concep- 
 tion of a future life is due, not to Mohammed, but to 
 Mohammed's successors ; and it is not the least of 
 the enigmas that attach to the extraordinary and 
 unique character of the Prophet, that his views of a 
 future state are never more spiritual than at the time 
 when, according to the common theory, he had most 
 entirely, and, in fact, he had to some extent, fallen 
 away from his austerely moral life. Contrast the tone 
 of the Suras, referring to this subject, which were written 
 at Mecca early in his life,^ with the third, for instance, 
 which was written at Medina many years later. 
 
 ' Fair,' says he, ' in the sight of men are the plea- 
 sures of women and children ; fair are the treasured 
 treasures of gold and silver ; and fine horses ; and 
 flocks ; and corn-fields ! Such is the enjoyment of 
 this world's life. But God ! goodly is the home with 
 Him! 
 
 ' Shall I tell you of better things than these, pre- 
 pared for those who fear God in His presence } Theirs 
 
 1 St. Matt. XXII. 30. 
 
 2 SuraLV. 44-58; LVI. 17-36; LXXVI. 12-22. 
 
1 66 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 shall be gardens beneath which the rivers flow, and 
 in which they shall abide for aye, and wives of stain- 
 less purity, and acceptance with God, for God regard- 
 eth His servants. 
 
 * They who say, O our Lord, we have indeed be- 
 lieved, pardon our sins, and keep us from the torment 
 of the fire. 
 
 ' The patient are they, and the truthful, the lowly, 
 and the charitable, and they who ask for pardon as 
 each day breaks.' ^ 
 
 Surely here, as elsewhere, and increasingly so as 
 the Prophet drew near his end, it is the presence of 
 God, the knowledge of Him, the eternal Salaam or 
 Peace with which they shall salute one another, the 
 purity of love, and not its sensuality, which are the 
 most prominent ideas. 
 
 Heaven and hell, indeed, were realities to the 
 Mohammedan mind in a sense in which they have 
 hardly ever been to any other nation. With a more 
 than Dantesque realism, Mohammed saw the tortures 
 of the lost no less than the bliss of the faithful. 
 
 * They shall dw^ell,' he says, ' amidst burning winds 
 and in scalding water, under the shade of a black 
 smoke which is no shade, neither cool nor grateful, 
 
 and they shall surely eat of the fruit 
 
 of the tree Ez-Zakkoum, and shall fill their bellies 
 
 » Sura XIII. 12-15. 
 
REALITY OF FUTURE LIFE TO MOHAMMED i67 
 
 therewith, and they shall drink thereon boiling water, 
 even as a thirsty camel drinketh.' ^ 
 
 And again, he says : 
 
 ' They shall have garments of fire fitted unto them, 
 their bowels shall be dissolved thereby, and also their 
 skins, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron.' ^ 
 
 And once more, in one of his very early Suras, 
 which, if it is memorable for nothing else, is memor- 
 able for its superb audacity, when we recollect that 
 as yet Mohammed's prophetic claims were treated 
 only with contemptuous indifference, and he himself 
 was a mere outcast : 
 
 *Woe be,' he says, 'on that day to those who 
 accused the prophets of imposture ! 
 
 * It shall be said unto them. Go ye into that which 
 ye denied as a falsehood. 
 
 * Go ye into the shadow of th^ smoke of hell, 
 which, though it ascend in three columns, 
 
 ' Shall not shade you from the heat, neither shall it 
 be of service against the flames ; 
 
 * But it shall cast forth sparks as big as towers, 
 
 * And their colour shall be like unto that of red 
 camels. 
 
 * Woe be on that day unto those who accuse the 
 prophets of imposture.' ^ 
 
 J Sura LVI. 41-56. 2 gura XXII. 20-21. 
 
 ' Sura LXXVII. 29 to end. The ' Woe be,' &c. is a refrain which, 
 recurs ten times in the Sura. 
 
i68 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 ' What shall be our reward/ asked his earliest 
 followers of Mohammed, ' if we fall in battle ? ' 
 ' Paradise/ said the Prophet, without the slightest 
 hesitation. In the war of Tabuk his men demurred to 
 marching because it was harvest time. ' Your harvest 
 it lasts for a day,' said Mohammed ; ' what will come 
 of your harvest through all eternity ? ' They com- 
 plained of the burning sun. ' Hell is hotter,' said the 
 Prophet, and on they went.^ 
 
 That it was desirable to dwell with so much per- 
 sistence upon the enormous issues involved as re- 
 gards the future life, in every act and thought of this, 
 I am far from asserting ; since self-interest, how- 
 ever enlightened, and however refined, however even 
 spiritualised it may be, is self-interest still. But at all 
 events it was stern reality to Mohammed and to his 
 followers. The future was all as real and as instant 
 to him as it was to the Apostles when, expecting, as 
 they did, from the interpretation they put upon 
 Christ's words, to see Him in their own lifetime 
 coming in the clouds of heaven, they drove home their 
 warnings by bidding men flee from ' the wrath to come/ 
 In every successive crisis of the Christian Church, it 
 has been the belief of Christians that the darkest hour 
 
 * Carlyle's ' Heroes,' p. 239 ; and Sura IX. 82, &c. In this 
 expedition water was so scarce that the fainting troops were obhged to 
 kill the camels and drink the water out of their stomachs. 
 
LEGITIMATE INFLUENCE OF A FUTURE LIFE 169. 
 
 Is that before the dawn, and it has been used, however 
 mistakenly, yet with effect and with sincerity, to com- 
 fort the depressed, to awaken the sleeping, and ta 
 arouse the dead. ' Finem simin niundtts jam non 
 nuiiciat sohcm, sed oste?idit,' says St. Gregory amidst 
 the devastations of the Lombards. ' Appropinquante- 
 jam 77itindi iermino^ is the heading of even legal 
 documents amidst the deeper depression of the tenth 
 century caused by the ravages of the Hungarians by 
 land and the Norsemen by sea. This is the burden 
 of St. Bernard's hymns, of Savonarola's preachings, 
 of Bunyan's allegories. Truly, if Mohammed sinned 
 at all in this respect, he sinned in good company. 
 
 But the future world, ever present though it was 
 to the minds of the early Mohammedans, did not 
 supply the motive by which they were really inspired. 
 A selfish hope of Heaven, and a slavish fear of Hell, 
 may act as a ' negative stimulus ' — may possibly teach 
 passive resistance to temptation' — but it does not 
 nerve the arm to strike, or quicken the eye to see. 
 Perhaps, indeed, the highest heroism of all, that 
 which consists in absolute conscious self-sacrifice or 
 self-annihilation for the good of others — the heroism 
 of the ideal just man in the second book of Plato's 
 ReptLblic ; the heroism of Moses when he prayed to 
 be blotted out of the Book that God had written ; the 
 heroism of a greater than Moses when He died upon 
 
I70 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 the cross — is impossible to those who believe firmly 
 in a future life, the happiness or misery of which is to 
 be exactly determined by the life here. But there 
 may be true heroism even short of the truest ; and 
 all true heroism, even if it cannot deny or forget its 
 reward, is stimulated not so much by the reward as 
 by the difficulty of obtaining it. The reward, to use 
 an Aristotelian phrase, is an ^in'yi'yvoiJisvov tl teXos 
 something thrown in, an after-thought and accessory 
 merely ; and this is what a future life was to the 
 primitive warriors of the Crescent. 
 
 Nor is it true, in any sense of the word, that Mo- 
 hammed's is an easy or sensual religion. With its 
 frequent fasts, its five prayers a day, its solitudes, 
 its almsgivings, its pilgrimages, even in the tortures 
 of Indian fakirs and the bowlings of Mecca der- 
 vishes, which are the abuse, and not the use, of the 
 religion — it certainly does not appeal much to the 
 laziness, or the sensuality, or the selfishness of man- 
 kind. 
 
 In his capacity even of temporal ruler, Mohammed 
 rarely gave material rewards to his followers. Abu 
 Bakr, Ali, Omar, Hamza, when in his early days they 
 ranged themselves as friends round the then friendless 
 enthusiast, sacrificed, as it must have appeared to 
 them, all their worldly hopes ; they little thought that 
 they were enrolling themselves in that most select 
 
WAS ISLAM A SENSUAL RELIGION? 171 
 
 band of heroes who may be said to have made 
 History. On one occasion, late in his life, Moham- 
 med did give some material rewards to recent and 
 perhaps half-hearted converts, but the exception only 
 proved the rule, and that in the most memorable 
 manner. The Helpers of Medina were naturally dis- 
 satisfied, but Mohammed recalled them to their alle- 
 giance by words which went straight from his heart 
 to theirs : that he had given things of the world to 
 those who cared for such things, but to them he had 
 given himself. Others returned home with sheep 
 and camels, the Helpers with the Prophet of God. 
 Verily, if all the men of the earth went one way, and 
 the Helpers of Medina another, he would go the way 
 of the Helpers of Medina. ^ The Helpers burst into 
 tears, and exclaimed that they were more than 
 satisfied with what he had given them. And, just 
 before his death, Mohammed commended these same 
 Helpers of Medina to the protection of the exiles who 
 had accompanied him from Mecca. ^ Hold in honour/ 
 said he, ' the Helpers of Medina ; the number of be- 
 lievers may increase, but that of the Helpers never 
 can. ^ They were my family, and with them I found 
 
 • Alluded to in Sura LIX. 8 and 9, and VIII. 42. See Muir, IV. 
 
 151-154- 
 
 ^ Cf. Herodotus iii. II9. 5 ^aaiXev, avrjp fiiv (jloi tcu &\Kos yivoiro, el 
 daifjLcov 60eAot, Koi riKva ckXXa, ci ravra airofidXoifxi.' irarphs Se koI /xrjTphs 
 ovK €Ti fxev ^ooSvTuv uBeA^ehs Uu &\Xos ovdeyl rp6ir(f "y^voiro. Cf. also 
 Soph. Aniigofie, 909-912. 
 
172 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 a home ; do good to those who do good to them, and 
 break friendship with those who are hostile to them.' 
 
 Perhaps there is no remark one has heard more 
 often about Mohammedanism than that it was so suc- 
 cessful because it was so sensual ; but there is none more 
 destitute of truth, as if any religion could owe its perma- 
 nent success to its bad morality ! I do not say that its 
 morality is perfect, or equal to the Christian morality. 
 Mohammed did not make the manners of Arabia, and 
 he was too wise to think that he could either unmake 
 or remake them all a.t once. Solon remarked of his 
 own legislation that his laws were not the best that he 
 could devise ; but that they were the best the 
 Athenians could receive; and his defence has generally 
 been accepted as a sound one. Moses took the 
 institutions of a primitive society as he found them — 
 the patriarchal power, internecine war, blood feuds, 
 the right of asylum, polygamy and slavery — and did 
 not abolish any one of them ; he only mitigated their 
 worst evils, and so unconsciously prepared the way in 
 some cases for their greater permanence, in others for 
 their eventual extinction. 
 
 / In like manner the religion of Christ did not sweep 
 into oblivion any national or political institutions. 
 He contented Himself with planting principles in the 
 hearts of His followers which would, when the time was 
 ripe for it, work out their abolition. Willing to sow if 
 
ATTITUDE TOWARDS EXISTING INSTITUTIONS 173 
 
 others could reap, to labour if others could enter into 
 His labours, He cast into the ground the grain of 
 mustard seed, and was content, with the eye of faith 
 alone, to see it grow into the mighty tree whose 
 branches should overspread the world, and whose 
 leaves should be for the healing of the nations./ With 
 sublime self-restraint and self-sacrifice, governed by 
 His thought for the boundless possibilities of the 
 future of His Church, rather than by the impulse of 
 the moment. He forbore to denounce in so many words 
 the inveterate evils of the Roman Empire, which must 
 have gone to His soul's soul — foreign conquest, tyranny, 
 the amphitheatre, slavery. He even used words which 
 have been wrongly construed to mean that at all times 
 passive obedience is a duty, and that the people have 
 nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. Nor 
 has the Christian Church — sections of which have for 
 strange and various, but intelligible, reasons, canonised 
 a Constantine and a Vladimir, a Cyril and a Charles 
 the Great, a Dunstan and a Becket — ever attached the 
 name of Saint to some who, in the fulness of time, have 
 carried out far more fully and in spirit Christ's work, 
 albeit in seeming contradiction to the letter of the law 
 which inculcated submission to existing powers and in- 
 stitutions — toaTelemachusor aTheodoric,to an Alfred 
 or a Wilberforce. And yet no Christian will deny that 
 the monk Telemachus, who threw himself between the 
 
174 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 swords of the gladiators, and, braving the fury of the 
 spectators athirst for blood, accomplished by his death 
 what his life could never have won, did a deed which all 
 the ' Acta Sanctorum ' could be searched to parallel. 
 
 Now Mohammed was a legislator and a statesman, 
 as well as the founder of a religion ; and why is the 
 defence which we allow to Solon, and the praise we 
 bestow upon the limited scope of the Mosaic legisla- 
 tion, denied to Islam ? 
 
 Polygamy is, indeed, next to caste, the most 
 blighting institution to which a nation can become a 
 prey. It pollutes society at the fountain-head, for the 
 family is the source of all political and of all social 
 virtues. Mohammed would have more than doubled 
 the debt of gratitude the Eastern world owes to him had 
 he swept it away, but he could not have done so, even 
 if he had fully seen its evils. It is not fair to represent 
 polygamy as a part of Mohammedanism any more 
 than it is fair to represent slavery as a part of 
 Christianity. The one co-exists with the other with- 
 out being mixed with it, even as the muddy Arve 
 and the clear Rhone keep their currents distinct long 
 after they have been united in one river-bed. Perhaps 
 it is strange that they ever could have co-existed, 
 even for a day ; but we have to deal with facts as they 
 are ; and it is a fact that slavery has co-existed with 
 Christianity, nay, has professed to justify itself by 
 
TREATMENT OF WOMEN 175 
 
 Christianity, even till this nineteenth century. Mo- 
 hammed could not have made a tabula rasa of Eastern 
 society, but what he could do he did. He at least put 
 strict limitations on the unbounded license of Eastern 
 polygamy,^ and the facility of Eastern divorce.^ If the 
 two social touchstones of a religion are the way in 
 which, relatively to the time, it deals with the weaker 
 sex, and the way in which it regards the poor and the 
 
 1 
 
 oppressed, Mohammed's religion can stand the test.* 
 /He improved the condition of women by freeing them 
 from the arbitrary patriarchal power of the parents or 
 the heirs of their husbands, by inculcating just and kind 
 treatment of them by their husbands themselves, by 
 giving them legal rights in case of unfair treatment, 
 and by absolutely prohibiting the incestuous marriages 
 which were rife in the times of ignorance, and the still 
 more horrible practice of the burying alive of female 
 
 1 Sura IV. 3, &c. 
 
 2 Sura IV. 39 and 127, XXXIII. 48, 52, &c. 
 
 ' Among many other illustrations of this see [a) the oath taken early 
 in his life with other Koreishites, ' to defend the oppressed so long as 
 a drop of water remained in the ocean,' an act the remembrance of 
 which Mohammed said ' he would not exchange for the choicest camel 
 in Arabia ; ' {b) the account given by Jafar to the Najashy of Abys- 
 sinia of the change wrought by Mohammed among his followers ; 
 perhaps the noblest and truest summary we have of the moral teaching 
 of the Prophet; (<r) the pledge of Acaba, a.d. 621, taken by his first 
 converts from Medina ; {d) Sura II. 170 : ' There is no piety in turning 
 your faces towards the East or the West, but he is pious who believeth 
 in God . . . who for the love of God distributeth his wealth to 
 his kindred, and to the orphans, and the need}^, and the wayfarer.' 
 
176 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 infants.^ /Nor was this all, for besides imposing re- 
 strictions on polygamy, by his severe laws at first, and 
 by the strong moral sentiment aroused by these laws 
 afterwards, he has succeeded, down to this very day, 
 and to a greater extent than has ever been the case 
 •elsewhere, in freeing all Mohammedan countries from 
 those professional outcasts who live by their own 
 misery, and, by their existence as a recognised class, 
 are a standing reproach to every member of the 
 ^society of which they form a part. 
 
 Mohammed did not abolish slavery altogether, for 
 in that condition of society it would have been 
 neither possible nor desirable to do so ; but he en- 
 couraged the emancipation of slaves ; he laid down 
 the principle that every slave that embraced Islam 
 should be ipso facto free, and, what is more im- 
 portant, he took care that no stigma should attach to 
 the emancipated slave in consequence of his honest 
 and honourable life of labour. In Islam the emanci- 
 pated slave is actually, as well as potentially, equal to 
 a free-born citizen, and he often rises to one of the 
 liighest posts in the Empire.^ As to those who con- 
 
 ^ Sura VI. 138, 141, 152. 
 
 * Zeid, the freedman of the Prophet, often took the command in 
 war. Captain Burton mentions ('Pilgrimage,' I. p. 89) that the 
 pacha of the Syrian caravan with which he travelled to Damascus 
 had been the slave of a slave. Sebuktegin, the father of the magnifi- 
 cent Mahmoud, and founder of the Ghaznevide dynasty, was a 
 
TREATMENT OF SLAVES AND ORPHANS 177 
 
 tinued slaves, he prescribed kindness and considera- 
 tion in dealing with them.^ * See,' he said, in his 
 parting address at Mina, the year before his death, 
 *■ see that ye feed them with such food as ye eat 
 yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye your- 
 selves wear; for they are the servants of the Lord, and 
 are not to be tormented.' The equality of all men 
 before God was a principle which Mohammed every- 
 where maintained ; and which taking, as it did, all 
 caste feeling from slavery, took away also its chief 
 sting. To Mohammed's mind labour could never be 
 degrading, and the domestic slavery of the Arabs, 
 under which, thanks to him, parents were never to be 
 separated from their children, nor indeed relations 
 from each other at all, though always to be con- 
 demned in the abstract, became, under the Prophet's 
 hands, a bond closer and more lasting, and hardly 
 more liable to abuse, than domestic service else- 
 where. 
 
 The orphan, too, is the subject of his peculiar 
 care, for he had been an orphan himself ; and what 
 God had done for him, he was anxious, as far as 
 might be, to do for others.^ The poor were always 
 
 slave ; so was Kutb-ud-din, the conqueror and first king of Delhi, and 
 the true founder, therefore, of the Mohammedan Empire in India, 
 (See Elphinstone's ' India,' p. 320, and 363, and 370.) 
 
 ' Sura XXIV. 34, 57. 
 
 * Sura VIII. 42, and XCIII. 6 to end. 
 
 N 
 
178 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 present with him, and their condition never absent 
 from his mind. In one of his early Suras, ' the 
 steep,' as he calls it — that is to say, the straight and 
 narrow way, is said to be to release the captive, to 
 give food to the poor that lieth in the dust, and to stir 
 up one another to stedfastness and compassion.^ And 
 in another Sura, Jews and Arabs are alike warned in 
 their exclusive pride in their common progenitor, 
 Abraham, that verily the nearest of kin to Abraham 
 are they who follow him in his works.^ 
 
 Nor does Mohammed omit to lay stress on what I 
 venture to think is as crucial a test of a moral code, 
 and even of a religion, as is the treatment of the poor 
 and the weak — I mean the duties we owe to what we 
 call the lower animals. There is no religion which 
 has taken a higher view in its authoritative documents 
 of animal life, and none wherein the precept has 
 been so much honoured by its practical observance. 
 * There is no beast on earth,' says the Koran,^ ' nor 
 bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a 
 people like unto you — unto the Lord shall they 
 return ; ' and it is the current belief that animals will 
 share with men the general resurrection, and be judged 
 according to their works. At the slaughter of an 
 
 * Sura XC. 12, 15, zxA passim. 
 
 2 Sura III. 61. 
 
 ^ Sura VI. 38, and Sale's note ad loc. 
 
THE POOR AND ANIMALS 179 
 
 animal, the Prophet ordered that the name of God 
 should always be named, but the words * the Compas- 
 sionate, the Merciful,' were to be omitted ; for on the 
 one hand such an expression seemed a mockery to 
 the sufferer, and, on the other, he could not bring 
 himself to believe that the destruction of any life, 
 however necessary, could be altogether pleasing to the 
 All Merciful. ' In the name of God,' says a pious 
 Mussulman, before he strikes the fatal blow, ' God is 
 most Great ; God give thee patience to endure the 
 affliction which He hath allotted thee ! ' ^ In the East 
 there has been no moralist like Bentham to insist in 
 noble words on the extension of the sphere of morality 
 to all sentient beings, and to be ridiculed for it by 
 people who call themselves religious ; there has been 
 no naturalist like Danvin to demonstrate by his mar- 
 vellous powers of observation how large a part of the 
 mental and moral faculties which we usually claim 
 for ourselves alone we share with other beings ; there 
 has been no Oriental ' Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Animals ; ' but one reason of this is not far 
 to seek. What the legislation of the last few years has 
 at length attempted to do, and from the mere fact that 
 it is legislation, must do ineffectually, has been long 
 effected in the East by the moral and religious senti- 
 ment which, like almost everything that is good in that 
 
 ^ Lane's 'Modern Egyptians,' I., 119. 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 part of the world, can be traced back, in part at least, 
 to the great Prophet of Arabia.^ In the East, so far 
 as it has not been hardened by the West, there is a 
 real sympathy between man and the domestic ani- 
 mals ; they understand one another, and the cruelties 
 which the most humane of our countrymen uncon- 
 sciously inflict in the habitual use, for instance, of the 
 muzzle or the bearing-rein on the most docile, the 
 most patient, the most faithful, and the most intelli- 
 gent of their companions, are impossible in the East. 
 An Arab cannot ill-treat his horse ; and Lane bears 
 emphatic testimony to the fact that in his long resi- 
 dence in Egypt he never saw an ass or a dog (though 
 the latter is there looked upon as an unclean animal) 
 treated with cruelty, except in those cities which were 
 overrun by Europeans.^ 
 
 / By absolutely prohibiting gambling and intoxicat- 
 ing liquors, Mohammed did much to abolish, once and 
 
 * The sympathy of the Prophet for his domestic animals is well 
 kno-wnn. There is a great variety of traditions respecting his horses, 
 his mules, his milch and riding camels, and his goats. It would be 
 easy to write a complete biography of his favourite she-camel, Al 
 Kaswa. Her eccentricities and perversities exercised an influence on 
 some critical occasions in the Prophet's life — e.g. on his entrance to 
 Medina, and at Kodeiba. Among the phenomena attending Mo- 
 hammed's fits, it is recorded that if one came on him while riding, 
 his camel itself became first wildly excited, and then fixed and rigid ! 
 And I have little doubt that the story arose from the almost electric 
 sympathy that exists between an intelligent animal that is kindly 
 treated and its master. 
 
 2 Lane, I., 359-361. 
 
HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS REGARD ISLAM? i8i 
 
 for all, over the vast regions that own his sway, two of 
 the worst and most irremediable evils of European 
 society ; evils to the intensity of which the Christian 
 Governments of the nineteenth century are hardly yet 
 beginning to awake. ^ Can anyone then deny what I 
 have already hinted above, that, looking at him merely 
 as a moral reformer, and apart from his great religious 
 revolution, Mohammed was really doing Christ's work, 
 even if he had reverenced Christ less than in fact 
 he did ? / 
 
 And this brings me to the most important question 
 that I shall touch upon to-day ; and one, but for which, 
 in its various bearings, I do not know that I should 
 have written these Lectures \\\ mean the attitude that 
 Christianity ought to bear to Mohammedanism now. 
 To say that in spite of the theoretic intolerance of 
 Mohammedanism, it ought, unless its theory is put into 
 practice, itself to be tolerated, is happily now a mere 
 truism. But it ought not to be treated with a merely 
 contemptuous or distant recognition, or to be inserted 
 tanquam infamm causa — 'Jews, Turks, Infidels, and 
 Heretics' — in a collect, once a year, upon that day of 
 all others upon which the universality of Christ's self- 
 sacrifice is brought before us. When the draft of 
 a treaty was brought to the General of the armies 
 of revolutionary France, the first clause of which 
 
 * Sura V. 92. 
 
1 82 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 /contained a formal recognition by the Emperor Francis 
 of Austria — the representative of legitimacy, absolut- 
 ism, and divine right — of the existence of the French 
 Republic, ' Strike that clause out,' said Napoleon ; 
 *■ the French Republic needs no recognition from him — 
 it is as clear as the sun at noonday.' Mohammedanism 
 needs no formal recognition of its existence by a 
 faith with which it has so much in common. The 
 immemorial quarrel between Mohammedanism and 
 Christianity is, after all, a quarrel between near 
 relations ; and, like most immemorial quarrels, is 
 based chiefly on mutual misunderstandings. Without 
 any appearance of extraordinary condescension, we 
 should recognise the fact which Mohammedans 
 themselves might at present certainly be inclined 
 to deny, that Islam is the nearest approach to 
 Christianity, I would almost call it, remembering 
 Mohammed's intense reverence for Christ, the 
 only form of Christianity, which has proved itself 
 suited to the nations of the East. Even Dante 
 placed Mohammed in the ' Inferno,' not as a heathen, 
 but as a heretic; and is there any reason why our 
 notion of Christianity should be less comprehensive 
 than his 1 
 
 Mohammedanism is the one religion in the world, 
 besides our own and the Jewish, which is strictly and 
 avowedly Monotheistic. ' Dispute not,' said Moham- 
 
THREE MONOTHEISTIC CREEDS 183 
 
 med to his followers, *■ against those who have received 
 the Scriptures, that is Jews and Christians, except 
 with gentleness ; but say unto them we believe in the 
 revelation which hath been sent down to us, and also in 
 that which hath been sent down to you ; and our God 
 and your God is one.' ^ And again he says in another 
 place, * Verily the Believers, and those who are Jews, 
 those who are Christians and Sabeans, whoever 
 believeth in God, and the last day, and doeth that 
 which \s> right, they shall have their reward with their 
 L'ord, there shall come no fear upon them, neither 
 shall they be grieved.' ^ The three Creeds are branches 
 from the same parent stock, not different stocks ; and 
 they all alike look back to the majestic character of 
 Abraham as the first teacher of the unity of God. 
 Mohammed says, again and again, that the belief he 
 inculcates is no new belief — it is the original creed of 
 El-Khalil Allah, the Friend of God. The heroes of 
 the Old Testament history, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph 
 
 » Sura V. 73. 
 
 "^ Sura II. 59. There is a still more striking passage in V. 52-03 : 
 ' Unto every one have we given a law and a way. Now if God had 
 pleased, He would surely have made you one people, but He hath made 
 you to differ that He might try you in that which He hath given to each, 
 therefore strive to excel each other in good works. Unto God shall ye all 
 return, and He will tell you that concerning which ye have disagreed.' — 
 Cf. Acts X. 35. These are passages on which the comparative mythologist, 
 the Mussulman reformer, and the Christian missionaiy would alike do 
 well to dwell. It is noteworthy also that the fifth Sura, from which two 
 of them come, is placed by Rodwell and others last in the chronological 
 order. 
 
1 84 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 and Joshua, David and Solomon, are heroes of the 
 Mohammedan religion as well as of the Jewish and 
 Christian. 
 
 I remarked in my second Lecture that Mohammed 
 may have thought himself justified in breaking the 
 moral law he himself imposed, because a somewhat 
 similar concession had been made to Moses. This is 
 not a mere conjecture on my part, for it is certain that 
 Mohammed had, for one who was so careless of facts, 
 acquired somehow a full and fairly accurate knowledge 
 of the history of the great Lawgiver. He relates it 
 at length,^ and recurs to it with a passionate fondness 
 from an early period in his career, evidently dwelling 
 mentally on the striking parallels between himself and 
 Moses, the shepherd life, the call to the Prophet's 
 office, the rejection by their own countrymen, no less 
 than — be it always remembered to Mohammed's 
 credit that he does not disguise it — the main point of 
 difference, the prodigality of miracles performed by 
 the one, and the inability to work them in the other. 
 One most sacred spot actually connects the two 
 Prophets together. There is a tradition, to some ex- 
 tent authenticated, that Mohammed drove the camels 
 of Kadijah to the very place where Moses had tended 
 the flocks of Jethro. Moses and Mohammed may 
 have reposed on the same rock, watered their cattle 
 
 > See especially Suras VII. XVIIL XXVII. XXVIII. LV. 
 
SPIRITUALITY OF ISLAM 185 
 
 at the same springs, looked upon the same weird 
 mountains.^ And it is a redeeming point, perhaps 
 the only redeeming point, in the melancholy history 
 of St, Catherine's Monastery, that from age to age 
 within the convent walls, Mosque and Church have 
 stood side by side, and Mussulmans and Christians 
 have knelt together worshipping the same God ; and 
 there, if only there in the world, venerating with a 
 kindred, if not with an equal reverence, the same 
 prophets, Moses and Mohammed, and One who is 
 infinitely greater than them both.^ 
 / Again, Mohammedanism is essentially a spiritual 
 religion. As instituted by Mohammed it had ' no 
 priest and no sacrifice ;' ^ in other words, no caste of 
 sacrificing priests were ever to be allowed to come 
 between the human soul and God : forbidding the 
 representation of all living things alike, whether as 
 objects of use or of admiration, of veneration or of 
 
 ' Sura II. 57, VII. 160. 
 
 ' See the account of St, Catherine's and its degradation in ' The 
 Desert of the Exodus,' by E. H. Palmer; and in Stanley's ' Sinai and 
 Palestine,' p. 53-54. It is said that at Nijni Novgorod the same 
 phenomenon, mosque and church as near and not unfriendly neigh- 
 bours, may be observed ; but there no doubt it is commerce rather 
 than religious sympathy which we have to thank for it. 
 
 ^ The Sacrifice at the Annual Pilgrimage is a mere relic of the 
 Pagan practice ; it has little religious significance, and does not imply 
 priestcraft ; it indicates only the belief that sin deserves death. In 
 orthodox Mohammedanism there is no priestly caste, and therefore no 
 fictions of apostolical succession, inherent sanctity, indissoluble vows, or 
 powers of absolution. See Palgrave's ' Essays,' p. 82. 
 
i86 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 worship, Mohammedanism is more opposed to idolatry 
 even than we are ourselves. ' Mohammed hated images 
 more sternly even than the Iconoclasts of Constanti- 
 nople or the soldiers of Cromwell. Every mosque in 
 the world of Islam bears witness to this. Statuary 
 and pictures being forbidden, variegated marbles, 
 and festoons of lamps, and geometric shapes, and 
 tortuous inscriptions from the Koran, have to supply 
 their place as best they can, and form that peculiar spe- 
 cies of ornamentation, strictly confined to the inanimate 
 world, which we call Arabesque ; and which is still to be 
 traced in the architecture of so many churches and so 
 many mosques along the frontier line of four thousand 
 miles which divides the realm of the Crescent from that 
 of the Cross. ^ 
 
 This hatred of idolatry has been found even 
 among the most uncivilised followers of the Prophet. 
 The gorgeous ritual, the gaudy pictures, and the pious 
 frauds which play so large a part in the conversion of 
 the Sclavonian nations to Christianity seem only to 
 have alienated these semi-barbarians. Mahmoud, the 
 Ghaznevide, the son of a slave and the conqueror of 
 
 ^ Cf. Stanley's ' Lectures on Eastern Church,' p. 273. Without 
 discussing the general question at length, I may remark here that Gothic 
 architecture, though it is not very ready to acknowledge the debt, 
 owes much to Moorish architecture — in particular the Horse-shoe or 
 Crescent Arch. The pointed arch itself is to be found in many early 
 mosques, and some of the most famous Venetian buildings, St. Mark's 
 among them, owe much to Saracenic architecture. 
 
REVERENCE FOR CHRIST 187 
 
 Hindoostan, was offered a sum of ten millions sterling 
 if only he would spare the famous idol in the pagoda 
 of Somnat. Avarice is said to have been his beset- 
 ting fault, but he replied in the memorable words, 
 * Never shall Mahmoud be handed down to posterity 
 as an idol seller, rather than an idol destroyer ; ' and 
 broke it into pieces.^ 
 
 Finally, Mohammedanism, in spite of centuries 
 of wars and misunderstandings, looks back upon the 
 Founder of our religion with reverence only less than 
 that with which the most devout Christians regard Him. 
 ' So far from its being true, as is commonly sup- 
 posed, that Mohammedans regard Christ as Chris- 
 tians have too often regarded Mohammed, with 
 hatred and with contempt ; Sir William Muir re- 
 marks that devout Mussulmans never mention the 
 name of Seyyedna Eesa, or Our Lord Jesus, 
 without adding the words ' on whom be peace.' The 
 highest honour that a Mussulman can conceive is 
 given to Christ in the grave reserved for Him by the 
 side of the Prophet himself in the great Mosque at 
 Medina. Mohammedans expect that He will one day 
 return to earth, and having slain Antichrist, will 
 establish perfect peace among men. And Mr. Hunter^ 
 
 * Ferishta's ' History of Mohammedan Power in India ' (Briggs's 
 translation), I, p. 72 ; and Elphinstone's ' History of India,' p. 336. 
 2 ' Our Indian Mussulmans,' p. 120, by W. W. Hunter. 
 
1 88 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 tells us that the Indian Sheeahs avowedly look 
 forward to His reappearance simultaneously with that 
 of the last of their twelve Imams, and to an amalga- 
 mation of the two creeds ; of Islam as the followers of 
 Ali hold it, and of Christianity, not as it is, but as they 
 believe it was taught by Christ Himself^ 
 
 If it be asked, why then did Mohammed not 
 accept Christianity, I apprehend that the reasons are 
 threefold ; and that it appears from the chronological 
 order lately assigned to the Suras of the Koran, that 
 at one period, that of the Fatrah, Mohammed did 
 consider whether first Judaism, and secondly Chris- 
 tianity, as he knew it, contained the message he had 
 to give. 
 
 ) I. The first explanation I would suggest is, that 
 the Christ known to him was the Christ, not of the 
 Bible, but of tradition ; the Christ, not of the 
 Canonical, but of the Apocryphal Gospels, and even 
 these only from general tradition. The wonder is, 
 Mohammed's information being confined to the in- 
 coherent rhapsodies and the miraculous inanities of 
 the Gospels of the Infancy, the Acta Pilati and the 
 ' Descensus ad Inferos,' not that he reverenced Christ 
 so little, but so much. In the whole of the Koran 
 there are only three passages which look like any direct 
 
 ^ For a curious discussion on the return of the Messiah to earth 
 held at Timbuctoo, see Earth's ' Travels in Central Africa,' V., p. 4. 
 
WHV DID MOHAMMED REJECT CHRISTIANITY? 189 
 
 acquaintance with the Evangelists ; and one of these, 
 the well-known passage about the Paraclete, he 
 misunderstands himself, and accuses Christians of 
 intentionally perverting from its proper meaning, a 
 prediction of the coming of the Periclyte, the Greek 
 form of Mohammed, the Illustrious, or the Praised.^ 
 '' 11. Secondly, the worship of saints and images, and 
 the shape which certain floating ideas had taken when 
 they were stereotyped in the formulas of the Christian 
 Church, seemed to Mohammed to conflict with his fun- 
 damental doctrine of the unity of God. The mysteries 
 of the Trinity were to be appraised and handled by 
 every one who called himself a Christian, not merely 
 as a test, but as the test of his Christianity. Moham- 
 med accuses even the Jews of having lost sight of 
 their primary truth, which was also his, in calling 
 Ezra the Son of God,^ and what wonder if he 
 rejected a religion the essence of which he understood, 
 and too many Christians of his time understood, 
 to be, not a holy life, but, as it is still represented in 
 the Athanasian Creed, an elaborate and unthinkable 
 mode of thinking of the Trinity .'' ^ 
 
 » Sura LXI. 6. 2 Sura IX. 30. 
 
 * It is doubtful whether a people that has once become monotheis- 
 tic in any other form than the Christian, can ever be brought to accept, 
 I do not say Christianity altogether, but the doctrines that are often 
 supposed to be of its very essence. Among such a people the missionary 
 invariably finds that the doctrine of the Trinity, however explained, in- 
 volves Tritheism, and their ears are at once closed to his teaching. To 
 
190 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Let US hear on these points Mohammed himself, 
 remembering all the while how slight was his know- 
 ledge of the doctrine which he travestied, and how 
 dim the outline of the majestic character which yet 
 filled his imagination : — 
 
 ' They surely are infidels who say God is the third 
 of three, for there is no God but one God.' ^ 
 
 * Say not three ; forbear, it will be better for thee ; 
 God is only one God.'^ 
 
 Christ was with Mohammed the greatest of 
 Prophets.^ He had the power of working miracles ; 
 He spoke in his cradle ; He made a bird out of clay.' 
 (Incidents drawn from the Gospels of the Infancy or 
 of St. Thomas.) He could give sight to the blind, 
 and even raise the dead to life.^ He is the Word 
 proceeding from God ; His name is the Messiah. 
 Illustrious in this world and in the next, and one 
 of those who have near access to God.^ * He is 
 strengthened by the Holy Spirit,' for so Moham- 
 med, in more than one passage, calls the Angel 
 Gabriel.^ Mohammed all but believes in the Imma- 
 culate Conception of the Virgin,^ and certainly in the 
 
 a Pagan who accepts Christianity the change no doubt is one 
 from Polytheism to Monotheism, but to the Jew or Mohammedan, 
 except in very rare instances, it is the opposite. 
 
 1 Sura V. 77. " Sura III. 41-43- 
 
 2 Sura IV. 6. ' Sura III. 40. 
 
 3 Sura II. 254. « Sura II. 81. 
 
 ' Sura III. 30. There was a well-known sect of Christians called 
 
MOHAMMED'S VIEWS OF THE TRINITY 191 
 
 miraculous nature of the birth of Christ, to which he 
 recurs repeatedly. ^ But that Jesus ever claimed, as 
 is affirmed by the writers of the New Testament, and 
 as we know He did, to be the Son of God, still less 
 that He ever claimed to be equal with God, Moham- 
 med could not bring himself to believe. 
 
 * It becometh not a man that God should give him 
 the Scriptures, and the Wisdom, and the spirit of 
 Prophecy, and that then he should say to his followers. 
 Be ye worshippers of me as well as of God, but rather 
 Be ye perfect in things pertaining to God, since ye 
 know the Scriptures, and have studied them.' ^ 
 
 And again, * For the Messiah himself said. Oh 
 children of Israel, worship God, my Lord and 
 yours.' ^ 
 
 And once more, * Those who say that Jesus, the 
 Son of Mary, is the Son of God, are infidels, for who 
 could stop the arm of God if He were to destroy the 
 Messiah and His mother, and all who are in the earth 
 together } ' ^ 
 
 Neither can Mohammed ever believe that Jesus 
 could have been crucified. ' It is so long ago, let us hope 
 that it is not true,' said an old Cumberland woman 
 
 Collyridians in Arabia who paid the Virgin divine honours, and offered 
 her a twisted cake {KoKKvpis). Thence, no doubt, came Mohammed's 
 idea that the Virgin was one of the Persons of the Trinity. 
 
 1 Sura XIX. 20. ^ gura V. 76. 
 
 2 Sura III. 73. 4 Sura V. 19. 
 
192 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 when she heard for the first time in her Hfe the story 
 of the Crucifixion. ' If I and my brave Franks had 
 been there, we would have avenged His injuries,' 
 was the exclamation of the fierce barbarian Clovis 
 when he received his first lesson in the Christian life. 
 The Dreamer of the Desert sympathised rather with 
 the first of these. As Stesichorus^ believed that 
 the Greeks and Trojans fought for the phantom of 
 Helen, and not for Helen herself; as the Docetists 
 held that the phantom of Jesus and not Jesus had 
 been crucified ; so Mohammed rebels at the thought 
 that God can ever have allowed such a tragedy to 
 take place. Some one else, he curiously supposes, 
 who deserved such a death — perhaps it was Judas 
 himself — may have been substituted for Christ ; and 
 Christ being taken up to heaven, must have felt 
 that the deception thus practised on the Jews was a 
 kind of punishment to himself for not having taken 
 greater pains to prevent men calling him the Son of 
 God."-^ And at the resurrection Jesus will Himself 
 testify against both Jews and Christians ; the Jews for 
 not having received Him as a prophet, the Christians 
 for having received Him as God. 
 
 There is a short chapter in the Koran which Mus- 
 sulmans look upon as equal to a third of the whole in 
 value : 
 
 1 Plato, 'Republic,' IX. 386. 2 Sura III. 49, IV. 156. 
 
MOHAMMED'S VIEWS OF CHRIST 193 
 
 ' Say there is one God alone — 
 
 God the Eternal ; 
 He begetteth not, and He is not begotten, 
 And there is none like unto Him.' ^ 
 
 And once more, * They say the Merciful hath 
 gotten offspring. Now have ye done a monstrous 
 thing; almost might the very heavens rend thereat, 
 and the earth rend asunder, and the mountains fall 
 down in fragments, that they ascribe a son to the 
 Merciful, when it becometh not the Merciful to beget 
 a son. Verily there is nobody in the heavens nor 
 in the earth that shall approach the Merciful but 
 as a servant.' ^ 
 
 I have dwelt thus at length upon Mohammed's 
 views of Christ, partly because of the intrinsic in- 
 terest and importance attaching to the views held by 
 one so great of one so infinitely greater ; partly 
 because they show how little Mohammed, and in- 
 deed how little Christians themselves, understood 
 the real nature of Christianity ; partly also because 
 the strictures of Mohammed, however exaggerated 
 and however mistaken, seem to me to suggest a 
 caution necessary for us all. Christ came to reveal 
 God, not to hide Him ; to bring Him down to earth, 
 not to shroud Him in an immeasurable distance ; to 
 tell us that God is not primarily Justice, or Truth, 
 
 » Sura CXII. 2 Sura XIX. 91-94. 
 
 O 
 
194 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 or Power, but Love. Do Christians always remem- 
 ber this ? Are our views of Justification, of Origi- 
 nal Sin, of a Future Life, when drawn out in the 
 forensic and almost legal language in which some 
 Churches foolishly delight to clothe them, always 
 consistent with it ? Do our prayers always pre- 
 suppose a God who, in His own intrinsic nature, is 
 anxious to receive them ? Are we not apt to forget 
 the unity of God, while we dogmatise on the Trinity ? 
 Do we not sometimes place Christ as it were in front 
 of God, thinking so much of the Son who sacrificed 
 Himself, that we ignore the Father who ' spared Him 
 not ; ' forgetting the Giver in the very magnitude of 
 the gift ? 
 
 IIL And the third reason, and perhaps the 
 most important of all, for Mohammed's rejection of 
 Christianity is the fact that Christianity as. he knew 
 it had been tried and had failed. It had been known 
 for three hundred years in Arabia, and had not been 
 able to overthrow, or even weaken, the idolatry of 
 the inhabitants. 
 
 It is strange, with this fact and the whole course 
 of history before him, with which evidently few are 
 more familiar, that a great writer can conclude a 
 review of Mohammedanism, which is otherwise fair 
 and able, by endorsing the charge made against it, 
 that it has kept back the East by hindering the spread 
 
IS ISLAM ANTI-CHRISTIAN? 195 
 
 of Christianity. The charge has been often made 
 before, ^ but it rests on so slender a basis that I should 
 not have thought it necessary to disouss it here, had 
 I not found at the last moment that one who is 
 apparently so high an authority has lent the weight 
 of his name to it. That I may do him no injustice, I 
 quote his own words : — 
 
 ' Mohammed in his own age and country was the 
 greatest of reformers — a reformer alike religious, 
 
 moral, and political But when his 
 
 system passed the borders of the land in which it was 
 so great a reform, it became the greatest of curses to 
 mankind. The main cause which has made the reli- 
 gion of Mohammed exercise so blighting an influence 
 on every land where it has been preached, is because 
 it is an imperfect system standing in the way of one 
 more perfect. Islam has in it just enough of good to 
 
 hinder the reception of greater good. . ■ 
 
 Because Islam comes nearer to Christianity than any 
 other false system, because it comes nearer than any 
 other to satisfying the wants of man's spiritual nature, 
 for that very reason it is, above all other false systems, 
 pre-eminently anti-Christian. It is, as it were, the 
 personal enemy and rival of the Faith, disputing on 
 equal terms for the same prize ! ' ^ 
 
 ^ As, for instance, by Sir W. Muir, IV. 321. 
 
 2 British Quartej-ly Review, Jan. 1872, p. 132-134. 
 
 o 2 
 
196 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 This indictment is so well drawn, at first sight it 
 so carries conviction with it, and yet, if true, it is so 
 fatal to any favourable or any fair judgment of 
 Mohammedanism, that I am compelled, while I gladly 
 acknowledge the author's fair and sympathetic treat- 
 ment of the subject in every page that precedes and 
 follows those I have quoted, to contest, from my 
 point of view, as strongly as I can, upon this question, 
 alike his facts and his inferences. 
 
 Upon what single fact then, either before or after 
 Mohammed's time, does the writer ground this charge? 
 If the purest Christianity of all, preached by Christ 
 and His Apostles, did not make way in the Eastern 
 world ; if the few Christian Churches which did exist 
 among the half Roman or Hellenic inhabitants of 
 Syria and of Africa had sunk to the condition in which 
 we know they were when Mohammedanism swept 
 them away, what reason have we, either a priori or a 
 posteriori, for supposing that the Christianity of any 
 later time would have been more successful ? Have 
 Christian nations been so energetic or so successful in 
 converting any of those African or Asiatic nations 
 which Mohammedanism has never reached, as to en- 
 title us to turn round upon the religion which has re- 
 moulded so large a portion of the human race, and tell 
 it that it is a curse to humanity because, forsooth, while 
 we admit it was in its time a grand forward movement 
 
SPIRIT OF CHRIST 197 
 
 and has been a higher hfe to untold millions since, we 
 wish that Fetish worship should have lasted on perhaps 
 till now, that Christianity may now have the chance of 
 doing the work somewhat better ? If this is Chris- 
 tianity, I only say most certainly it is not of Christ. 
 It is not of the spirit of Him who said that those who 
 were not against Him were with Him ; and rejoiced 
 that good was done by others, even if it seemed an 
 infringement of His own Divine commission. Christ 
 was not like the Praetorian prefect of Tacitus, ' Consiliiy 
 qiiavivis egregii, quod non ipse ajferret iiiiuiiais,' 
 though some Christians would have it that He was. 
 The only monopoly of good that Christianity, if it is 
 of the spirit of its Founder, may claim, is the monopoly 
 not of doing good, but of rejoicing at it whenever it 
 is done, and whoever does it ; of showing, if it carries 
 out its Founder's intentions, that it is wide enough to 
 recognise as its own and to embrace within its ample 
 bosom all honest ' seekers after God,' and all true 
 benefactors of humanity. The most * anti-Christian ' 
 religion is not that which comes nearest to Christianity, 
 but that which is furthest removed from it ; and the 
 religion which after Christianity comes nearest to 
 * satisfying the wants of man's spiritual nature ' is 
 really not its most deadly enemy, but its best ally. 
 To say othenvise, liberal and tolerant as the author 
 unquestionably is, is to encourage weaker men under 
 
198 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 the shadow of his name,^ not merely to indulge in the 
 odiiun theologicum ; but to assert that the odium theo- 
 logicum itself is Christian. 
 
 ' Non tali auxilio nee defensoribus istis 
 Tempus eget.' 
 
 Can it be forgotten that the churches planted by 
 the great Apostle were, without exception, to the west 
 of Palestine — that star-worship and fire-worship were 
 unaffected by Christianity then, even as Brahminism 
 and Buddhism are unaffected by it now ? Can we 
 point to a single Oriental nation which has been able 
 to accept and to retain Christianity in its pure form, 
 or to a single religion to be named with Mohammed- 
 anism in point of purity and sublimity, which has ever 
 been able to overthrow any national Oriental faith? 
 And, if we cannot, what right have we to say that it is 
 Islam, and not Nature, that has hitherto stood in the 
 way of Christianity in Arabia and Persia, in Africa and 
 India ? The triumphs of the Cross have indeed been 
 far purer, far wider, far sublimer than those of the 
 Crescent ; but they have been hitherto confined to 
 the higher races of the world. Uncivilised nations of 
 
 ^ This has aetually been the case, for the passage I have quoted 
 was the only one in an othei'wi-se most temperate essay upon which 
 religious periodicals pounced, and, by quoting apart from its context, 
 fanned the flame of misconception and prejudice which, even when 
 read with everything which tends the other way, it would, in my judg- 
 ment, be likely to kindle. 
 
CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF THE WEST 199 
 
 the higher stock, Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals 
 and Lombards, Franks and Northmen, the Celt, the 
 Teuton, and the Sclavonian, invaded Christianity only 
 to be conquered by it. But upon the Oriental bar- 
 barians of a lower race who invaded Europe, with 
 the one exception of the Magyars, whose case is 
 special,^ Huns and Avars, Turks and Tartars, it has 
 had no influence. Shall Christians, then, complain 
 of Mohammedans for having succeeded in sqme 
 measure in doing for the East what they have failed 
 to do ; or would Christ have rejected what good 
 service Mohammed did because his credentials were 
 not precisely those of the Apostles t What super- 
 ficial appearance of truth there is in the charge is this 
 — that no Mohammedan nation has hitherto accepted 
 Christianity, while some nations that were nominally 
 
 ' The Magyars, whatever their original home — and it seems that 
 they were of the Finnish stock — are probably the most mixed race on the 
 Continent of Em-ope, and were so even before they settled within the 
 limits of the present Hungary. In their march towards Europe they 
 were joined by hosts of Chazars, Bulgarians, and Sclavonians. During 
 their ravages, which lasted for some fifty years, and spread from the 
 Oural Mountains to the Pyrenees, they transported women and 
 children wholesale from the countries they oveiTan to their head- 
 qiiarters on the Danube ; and it is probable that at the time of 
 their avowed conversion by Adalbert, about a.d. iooo, they had at 
 least as much Genr.an and Italian as they had Tartar blood in their 
 veins. St. Piligiinus (quoted by Gibbon, VII. 172), the first mis- 
 sionaiy who entered Hungary, says that he found the ' majority of the 
 population to be Christians,' qui ex omiii parte viundi illuc tracti sunt 
 captivi. 
 
20O MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Christians have accepted Mohammedanism. But to 
 establish the charge it would, of course, be necessary 
 to show that the East, if it had not accepted Moham- 
 medanism, would have accepted a real Christianity, 
 or any religion so much like Christianity as Moham- 
 medanism unquestionably is ; and to do this we must 
 read history backwards. 
 
 ^ Now Mohammed offered to the Arabs an idea of 
 God less sympathetic and less loveable, indeed, but as 
 sublime as the Christian, and perhaps still more 
 intense, and one, as it turned out, which they could 
 receive. Christianity was compelled to leave its birth- 
 place — the inhabitants and subsequent history of which 
 it has scarcely affected, except indirectly — to find its 
 proper home in the Western world, among the inhabit- 
 ants and progressive civilisation of Greece and Rome. 
 The lot of Mohammedanism has been different ; ' it is 
 the religion of the shepherd and the nomad, of the burn- 
 ing desert and the boundless steppe.' So admirably 
 suited was it to the region in Avhich it was born, that 
 it needed no foreign air or change of circumstances to 
 develope it.^ ' 
 
 In its simple grandeur it has been able, without 
 tampering with that which is its Alpha and Omega — 
 the belief in one God, who reveals Himself by His 
 
 * Compare throughout this paragraph, M. Earth. St, Hilaire, 
 p. 230 seq. 
 
ISLAM THE RELIGION OF PASTORAL RACES 201 
 
 prophets — to leave the most essential elements of 
 national life to the various nations which made up the 
 Arabian empire ; and to adapt itself to every peculi- 
 arity, mental and moral, of the inhabitants of Central 
 and Western Asia. The rapid intuition and the wild 
 flights of imagination ; the vivid mental play around 
 the Antinomies of the reason, and the craving for 
 the supernatural in the utmost particularity of detail ; 
 the fervid asceticism of the Dervish, and the mystic 
 Pantheism of the Soufy, have each found in Islam 
 something to meet their wants. 
 
 But, on the other hand, Mohammedanism has 
 never passed into countries of a wholly different 
 nature, and held them permanently. Spain is not a 
 case in point, though it was never so well governed as 
 under the Mohammedans ; for the Spaniards them- 
 selves never became Mohammedan, and the Moorish 
 settlement there was only like a Greek sTTLTsl'y^LaiLia or a 
 Roman colonia — an outpost in the heart of the 
 enemy's country. Much the same may be said of 
 Turkey, where the subject population has always re- 
 mained Christian. I cannot, therefore, '_^ace tanti 
 nommis,' follow Gibbon in his picture of the probable 
 consequences to European civilisation had Charles 
 Martel been conquered at Tours ; of Mussulman 
 preachers demonstrating to a circumcised audience, in 
 the mosques of Paris and of Oxford, the truth of the 
 
202 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 religion of Mohammed ! The wave of conquest might 
 have spread over Europe ; but it would have been 
 but a wave, and few traces would have been left when 
 it had swept on. In Africa the case was different ; 
 the Greek colonists and Roman conquerors — the 
 higher races, in fact — were driven out by the Sara- 
 cens, and, ' in their climate and habits, the wandering 
 Moors who remained behind already resembled the 
 Bedouins of the desert.' ^ Mohammedanism is the 
 only form in which the knowledge of the true God has 
 ever made way with the native races of Africa ; and 
 the form of Christianity which it supplanted in the 
 North — the Christianity of the Donatists and of the 
 Nitrian monks ; of Cyril, strangely called a saint ; and 
 of the infamous George of Cappadocia, still more 
 strangely transformed into St. George of England, the 
 patron of chivalry and of the Garter — was infinitely 
 inferior to Mohammedanism itself. 
 
 I fully admit that Mohammedanism, if indeed it 
 had succeeded in conquering the most civilised races 
 •of the world and the Christianity of the West, 
 as it succeeded in conquering the Eastern nations 
 and their various forms of belief, would have con- 
 quered something that was potentially better than 
 itself, and then it would have been what Christian 
 waiters are so fond of calling it — a curse to the world 
 
 J Gibbon, VI. LI. p. 473. 
 
ISLAM IN AFRICA AND SPAIN 203 
 
 rather than a blessing. It would have stepped beyond 
 what I conceive to have been its proper mission ; but I 
 maintain that it stopped short of this, and that it de- 
 stroyed nothing that was not far inferior to itself I 
 should hesitate to say that even its conquest of Spain 
 was not, while it lasted, a blessing to Spain itself, and 
 through Spain to the whole of Europe. Has Spain 
 exhibited more order, more toleration, more industry, 
 better faith, more material prosperity, under her most 
 Christian Kings, or under her Ommiade Kaliphs ? 
 The names of the three Abdal Rahmans, and of 
 Almamun, suggest all that is most glorious in Spanish 
 history, and much that has conferred benefit on the 
 rest of Europe in the darkest period of her annals — 
 religious zeal without religious intolerance, philosophy 
 and literature, science and art, hospitals, and libraries, 
 and universities. 
 
 It follows, from what I have said, that Moham- 
 medanism is not a world-wide religion. The sphere 
 of its influence is vast, but not boundless ; in catholi- 
 city of application it is as much below the purest 
 Christianity as the Semitic and Turanian nations 
 Avhich have embraced it are below the Western 
 Indo-Germanic. I say the Western Indo-Germanic 
 races, for among the Eastern branches of that great 
 family, the inhabitants of Persia and of Hindoostan, 
 Mohammedanism did establish itself 
 
204 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 The Persians are of a race and genius widely diffe- 
 rent from the Arabs ; but the surroundings and the 
 general mode of life are the same in each, and the ex- 
 ception, so far as it is an exception, to the rule I have 
 laid down, tends rather, in its results, to prove its 
 general truth, for the hold of Mohammedanism on 
 them has been much modified by the difference of 
 race. The religion which proclaimed the absolute 
 supremacy of God was no doubt an infinite advance 
 upon the ' chilling equipoise ' of good and evil to which 
 the creed of Zoroaster had at that time sunk. ^ Nor 
 was the national existence of Persia stamped out, as 
 has been often said, by the Kaliphs ; for the Persian 
 province of Khorasan was itself strong enough to 
 place the Abbasside Kaliphs on the throne of Bag- 
 dad ; and the Persian dynasties of the Samanides and 
 Dilemites gave to the nation a new lease of life, and a 
 wholly new national literature ; and it is to a Moham- 
 medan Sultan of the Turkish race that Persia owes 
 her greatest literary glory, her national epic, the 
 * Shahnameh' of Ferdousi. Still it cannot be said that 
 the religion proved itself altogether suited to the 
 people. In other countries the scymitar had no sooner 
 been drawn from its scabbard than it was sheathed 
 again. But in Persia the scymitar had not only to 
 clear the way, but for some time afterwards to main- 
 
 ^ See Elphinstone's 'India,' V. I. 313. 
 
ISLAM IN PERSIA AND INDIA 205 
 
 tain the new religion.^ The Persians corrupted its 
 simpHcity with fables and with miracles ; they actually 
 imported into it something of saint-worship, and some- 
 thing of sacerdotalism; and, consequently, in no nation 
 in the Mohammedan world has the religion less hold on 
 the people as a restraining power. The most stringent 
 principles of the Koran are set at nought ; beng and 
 opium are common ; the Ketman, or religious equivo- 
 cation, is held to be as allowable as it has been by 
 the Casuists or the Jesuits ; and the nation which 
 Herodotus tells us devoted a third of its whole 
 educational curriculum to learning to speak the 
 truth, now contains hardly an individual who will 
 speak the truth unless he has something to gain 
 by it. 
 
 In Hindoostan, amidst the other branch of the great 
 Aryan race which did not move westward, Mohammed- 
 anism has obtained finally a very strong footing ; but it 
 w^as slow in winning its way ; and the thirty million 
 Mussulmans over whom we rule — and a tremendous 
 and but half-recognised responsibility it is ^ — devout as 
 they are, have become so by long lapse of time, by social 
 influences, and by intermixture with conquering Arabs, 
 
 ' See Sir John jNIalcolnvs ' History of Persia,' I. VIII. p. 277, &c. 
 
 2 Since this was written the grievances of Mohammedans in India, 
 so ably and temperately stated by Mr. Hunter, have been in part 
 alleviated by the adoption of some of the remedies he suggests, at leas 
 as far as regards education. 
 
2o6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Ghaznevides, and Affghans, rather than by the sudden 
 fervour of reHgious enthusiasm.^ 
 
 Those who have followed me thus far will perceive 
 that my main object in writing these Lectures has 
 been, if possible, to render some measure of that jus- 
 tice to Mohammed and to his religion which has been 
 all too long, and is still all too generally, denied to 
 them. I have naturally, therefore, been led to dwell 
 rather on the points in which Mohammedanism 
 resembles Christianity than on the points in which it 
 differs, and I have been led, also, to some extent, to 
 compare the persons of their respective Founders. It 
 is not possible to avoid this. Of the Founder of 
 Christianity I have necessarily spoken only under 
 that aspect of His character which Mussulman as well 
 as Christian, friend as well as foe, will perforce allow 
 Him ; and in which alone, by the nature of the case. 
 He can be compared with any other Founder at all. 
 In like manner, in comparing the two creeds, I have 
 insisted mainly on the points in which they approxi- 
 mate to each other ; and to do this is more necessary, 
 more just, and, I venture to think, more Christian, than 
 to do the opposite. 
 
 But if, in order to prevent misconception, the two 
 creeds must necessarily be contrasted rather than 
 
 ^ Elphinstone, V. I, 314, and Cap. III. on the Reign of the Sultan 
 Mahmoud. 
 
CONTRAST BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY 207 
 
 compared, nothing that I have said, or am going to 
 say, will prevent my admitting fully — what, indeed, is 
 apparent upon the face of it — that the contrasts are 
 at least as striking as the resemblances. 
 
 ^ The religion of Christ contains whole fields of 
 morality and whole realms of thought which are all but 
 outside the religion of Mohammed. It opens hiimi- 
 lity, purity of heart, forgiveness of injuries, sacrifice 
 of self to man's moral nature ; it gives scope for 
 toleration, development, boundless progress to his 
 mind ; its motive power is stronger, even as a friend 
 is better than a king, and love higher than obedience. 
 Its realised ideals in the various paths of human 
 greatness have been more commanding, more many- 
 sided, more holy, as Averroes is below Newton, 
 Haroun below Alfred, and Ali below St. Paul. 
 Finally, the ideal life of all is far more elevating, 
 far more majestic, far more inspiring, even as the 
 life of the founder of Mohammedanism is below the 
 life of the Founder of Christianity. ' 
 
 And when I speak of the ideal life of Moham- 
 medanism I must not be misunderstood. There is in 
 Mohammedanism no ideal life in the true sense of 
 the word, for Mohammed's character was admitted 
 by himself to be a weak and erring one. It was 
 disfigured by at least one huge moral blemish ; 
 and exactly in so far as his life has, in spite of 
 
2o8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 his earnest and reiterated protestations, been made 
 •an example to be followed, has that vice been 
 perpetuated. But in Christianity the case is different. 
 The words, '■ Which of you convinceth me of sin } ' 
 forced from the mouth of Him who was meek and 
 lowly of heart, by the wickedness of those who, 
 priding themselves on being Abraham's children, 
 never did the works of Abraham, are a definite chal- 
 lenge to the world. That challenge has been for 
 nineteen centuries before the eyes of unfriendly, as well 
 as of believing, readers, and it has never yet been fairly 
 met ; and at this moment, by the confession of friend 
 and foe alike, the character of Jesus of Nazareth 
 stands alone in its spotless purity and its unapproach- 
 able majesty. We have each of us probably at some 
 period of our lives tried hard to penetrate to the 
 inmost meaning of some one of Christ's short and 
 ■weighty utterances — 
 
 ' Those jewels, five words long, 
 Which on the stretched forefinger of all time 
 Sparkle for ever. ' 
 
 But is there one of us who can say there is no more 
 iDehind t Is there one thoughtful person among 
 us who has ever studied the character of Christ, and 
 has not, in spite of ever-recurring difficulties and 
 doubts, once and again, burst into the centurion's ex- 
 clamation, ' Truly this was the Son of God ' ? 
 
CONTRAST BETWEEN MOHAMMED AND CHRIST 209 
 
 Nor are the methods of drawing near to God the 
 same in the two reHgions. The Mussulman gains a 
 knowledge of God — he can hardly be said to approach 
 Him — by listening to the lofty message of God's 
 Prophet. The Christian believes that he approaches 
 God by a process which, however difficult it may 
 be to define, yet has had a real meaning to 
 Christ's servants, and has embodied itself in countless 
 types of Christian character — that mysterious some- 
 thing which St. Paul calls a ' union with Christ' 
 * Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in 
 God.' 
 
 But this unmistakeable superiority does not shake 
 my position that Mohammedanism is, after all, an 
 approach to Christianity, and perhaps the nearest 
 approach to it which the unprogressive part of huma- 
 nity can ever attain in masses ; and yet how large 
 a part of the whole human race are unprogressive ! 
 Whatever we may wish, and however current con- 
 versation and literature may assert the contrary, 
 progress is the exception, and not the rule, with man- 
 kind. The whole Eastern world, with very few ex- 
 ceptions, has been hitherto, and is still, stationary, not 
 progressive. What Oriental society is now, it was 
 in the time of Solomon — I might say, in the time 
 of Abraham. Even those nations which, like the 
 Chinese, have considerable powers of invention and 
 
 P 
 
2IO MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 mechanical skill, reach a certain height rapidly, and 
 then stop short.^ 
 
 Accepting, then, the non-progressiveness of a large 
 part of the human race, when left to themselves, 
 as a fact, cannot we estimate other religions, not by 
 our conception of what we want, but by their bearing 
 on the life of those whom they affect, ennobling them 
 so far as the other conditions of their existence may 
 render possible ? Judged by this relative standard — 
 which is, as I conceive, the only true one — Moham- 
 medanism has nothing to lose, and everything to 
 gain, by the keenest criticism.^ I grant to the full 
 
 ^ I specify China ; for I cannot accept the changes relied upon by 
 Dr. Bridges, in his very able essay on China, in ' International 
 Policy,' as being evidence of continuous and progressive change, which 
 is the i-eal point at issue. Of course this in no way affects the more 
 important questions treated of in the essay, the moral elevation of which 
 seems to me almost unequalled in the writings even of those Vho, like the 
 contributors to the volume referred to, and the followers 'of Auguste 
 Comte generally, have laboured most earnestly to treat all political 
 questions from a moral standpoint. 
 
 ^ Abyssinia is a case in point for those who think that a religion, 
 because it is better and purer in itself, is necessarily better than all 
 other religions, wherever and whenever and in whatever degi^ee of 
 purity it may be found. Abyssinia has been nominally Christian since 
 very early times, and yet it would puzzle the greatest enemy of Islam 
 to name a single particular in which the inhabitants are superior to their 
 Mussulman neighbours. Spain may suggest similar thoughts. We 
 are apt to forget that there are two factors to be considered in testing 
 the value, of a religion in any given case, the Creed itself and the 
 people who receive it. There are of course good and bad men, and 
 these of every degree of goodness and badness, to be found professing 
 every Creed, but the average morality of the followers of an imperfect 
 
RELATIVE STANDARD THE ONLY TRUE ONE 21 r 
 
 everything that can be said by travellers such as Burck- 
 hardt, and Burton, and Palgrave upon the degrada- 
 tion of the mass of the Bedouins and the Turks, and 
 the want of all vital religion, sometimes of the very 
 elements of religion, among them. But is the state 
 of the Mohammedan world as a whole worse in pro- 
 portion to its light than was that of Christendom 
 when the cup of iniquity was full and a Luther was 
 born ? To take a particular instance, has religion less 
 hold upon the Arabs than it had upon the English 
 throughout the last century, till the evangelical revival 
 of Wesley and Whitefield roused it from its sleep ? 
 Has it less hold even upon the ' Frenchmen of 
 the East,' as the Persians have been called — liars, 
 drunkards, profligate though they are — than it has 
 at this moment upon the Frenchmen of the West ? 
 What account do travellers in Russia give us of the 
 state of religion among the masses there ? And what 
 judgment must pious Mohammedans form of Chris- 
 tianity, if their knowledge of it is confined to the 
 average lives of Europeans who profess it ? 
 
 To say that gross abuses have crept into Moham- 
 medanism — that the lives of many, or even of the 
 majority, who profess it are a disgrace to their name — 
 
 Creed may, in this very imperfect world, be better than the average 
 morality of those who profess a higher one, and of course vice versa. 
 irdvTOiiv fjiirpov avQoonvos. 
 
 P 2 
 
212 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 is only to say that it is not exempt from the common 
 
 conditions of humanity. . 
 
 Take one instance, drawn from the history of the 
 
 Christian Church. Christianity was in its origin and 
 in its essence a creed entirely spiritual ; but Christians, 
 forming, as they did, a new human society, were 
 allowed by their Founder to symbolise this close 
 union, and to bring it home more vividly to them- 
 selves and to the world, by two external rites. The 
 mere fact that they were external, in a religion which 
 was otherwise a matter of the heart, ought to have 
 put men on their guard, lest they should assume in 
 time a too prominent place ; lest what was accidental, 
 and secondary, and relative should dominate over 
 what was absolute, and primary, and eternal. Baptism 
 was of considerable importance in the infancy of the 
 Church, for it was a pledge of fidelity consciously and 
 voluntarily given by a new recruit, in the face of the 
 enemy, to a cause whose victories were yet in the 
 future. It was, as it were, the uniform assumed by 
 the small army which at its Master's bidding went 
 forth against the world. The love-feast also was of 
 special importance among the earliest Christians, as 
 a constant reminder that those who had taken upon 
 themselves the commission of the Cross, that crown- 
 ing act of love, were bound to one another by the 
 same enthusiasm of love which bound them to their 
 
ALL RELIGIONS LIABLE TO CORRUPTIONS 21 
 
 O" 
 
 common Master. Both did good service then, and in 
 the history of the Christian Church have done good 
 service since, in so far as they have acted upon the 
 heart, and thence upon the conduct, through the 
 medium of a very powerful appeal to the religious 
 imagination. But in so far as any mysterious or 
 supernatural efficacy has been attached to the form 
 of either, they have sapped the root of Christianity, 
 They have done for Christianity what of good, no 
 doubt, Mohammed thought, and, half rightly, half 
 wrongly, thought, that pilgrimages to the holy places 
 might do for Mohammedanism. Both were so far 
 concessions to human weakness that they introduced 
 formal, or even material, conceptions into a spiritual 
 religion ; both, in fact, were capable of being used to 
 advantage ; and experience has proved that they were 
 both alike liable to the same kind of abuse. 
 
 Every human institution, therefore — religion itself, 
 so far as man can affect it — is exposed to inevitable 
 decay ; and the purer the religion, the more inevitable 
 the degradation which contact with the world, which is 
 not of it, must bring.^ Accordingly, a religion which 
 is not waiting for a revival is waiting only till it be 
 swept away. 
 
 But, on the other hand, we must not judge of a 
 religion by its perversions or corruptions ; and it is as 
 
 * Max Miiller, ' Chips,' Preface, p. 23. 
 
214 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 fair to take Turkish despots, and maniac dervishes, 
 and Persian libertines as types of the Mohammedan 
 life, as It would be to take Anabaptists, or Pillar Saints, 
 or Jesuits, as types of the Christian life. Most of the 
 well-known vices of our Mohammedan fellow-subjects 
 in India are Indian vices, and not Mohammedan. 
 Max Miiller has remarked with truth, that without 
 constant reformation — that is to say, without a constant 
 return to the fountain head — every religion, however 
 pure, must gradually degenerate. / Christianity has 
 always reformed itself, and will to the end of time 
 continue to reform itself, by going back to the words 
 and to the life of Christ. It is a maxim of the 
 Buddhists that ^ what has been said by Buddha, that 
 alone Is well said ;' ^ and it is currently believed that 
 Mohammedanism Is dying out because it has no such 
 power of revival. But the very reverse of this is, rather, 
 true. Probably no religion has produced. In the various 
 parts of Its vast empire, a more continuous succession 
 of reformers, whose aim has been to bring it back to 
 its original simplicity and purity. Such was one object, 
 however wildly they set about it, of the Carmathlans 
 in the ninth century ; and, to select one amongst many 
 individual reformers, such was the career of Abdul 
 Wahhab, the son of a petty Arabian sheik, a hundred 
 and fifty years ago. The facts I take almost verbatim 
 
 * Quoted by Max Mliller, loc. cit. p. 23. 
 
ISLAM HAS THE POWER OF REVIVAL 215 
 
 from an interesting and able essay on * Our Indian 
 Mussulmans,' by Dr. Hunter.^ 
 
 Commencing by a moral attack upon the profli- 
 gacy of the Turkish pilgrims and the mummeries which 
 profaned the holy cities, Abdul Wahhab gradually 
 elaborated a theological system which is substantially 
 identical with the original creed of Mohammed. He 
 taught, first, absolute reliance on one God, and the 
 rejection of all mediators between man and God, 
 whether saints or Mohammed himself ; second, the 
 right of private interpretation of the Koran ; third, 
 the prohibition of all .forms and ceremonies with which 
 the pure faith has been overlaid in the lapse of cen- 
 turies ; finally — and this is the only part to be regretted 
 in the movement — he reasserted the obligation to wage 
 war upon the infidel. In 1803 Wahhab's successors 
 took the holy cities, and desecrated the sacred 
 mosque at Mecca and the Prophet's tomb at Medina, 
 to save them from the greater desecration, as it 
 seemed to those Puritans of the Desert, involved in 
 the almost Divine honours lavished on them by igno- 
 rant or profligate pilgrims. 
 
 Here was an act upon the significance of which 
 we may well dwell for a moment, and endeavour, by 
 comparing it with somewhat parallel and better- 
 
 ^ See Hunter, p. 55-60; and for a further account of the Arab move- 
 ment, see Burckhardt's ' Notes on the Bedouins and Wahhabees.' 
 
2i6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 known cases, to realise what it must have seemed Hke 
 then, and what it proves about Mohammedanism 
 now. Imagine the feehngs of pious Jews when their 
 most rehgious king broke into pieces the reHc of 
 reHcs, the memorial of the Divine deliverance and of 
 their desert life, and stigmatised it as a bit of brass ! 
 Imagine, if you can, the feelings of the Apostles when 
 it dawned upon them that one of their number, even 
 then, was a traitor in his heart ! Imagine, to take a 
 parallel case suggested by Mr. Hunter,^ mediaeval 
 Christendom, when the news spread that Bourbon's 
 cut-throats were installed in the Vatican, and that the 
 head of the Christian Church had been taken captive 
 by the Church's eldest son ! Imagine Luther, when 
 in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm he visited the 
 Rome of the Martyrs and of the Apostles, and found 
 it to be the Rome of the Papacy, the Rome of 
 impostures and indulgences, of the Borgias and the 
 Medici ! And we can then picture to ourselves the 
 thrill of horror that must have passed through the 
 orthodox Mussulman world when they heard that a 
 sect of reformers, whose one idea of reform was a re- 
 turn to the life and doctrine of the Prophet, had rifled 
 the mosque whose immemorial sanctity the Prophet 
 had himself increased by making it the Kiblah of the 
 world, and had even violated the Prophet's tomb. 
 
 1 Hunter, p. 59. 
 
THE WAHHABEES 217 
 
 Imagine, on the other hand, what it must have cost 
 the Wahhabees to have, Hke Luther, the courage of 
 their convictions, to appear to stultify themselves, to 
 dishonour their Prophet, and all that they might make 
 their religion the spiritual religion that it had once 
 been ! And then say, if you can, that jMohammedan- 
 ism has no power of self-reform, and is dying gra- 
 dually of inanition ! 
 
 Beaten down at last by the strong arm of Mehemet 
 Ali, Pasha of Egypt in 18 12, helped, I regret to say, by 
 Englishmen, the Wahhabees disappeared temporarily 
 from Arabia,^ only to reappear in 1821 in India, under 
 the leadership of the prophet Sayyed Ahmad; and the 
 despised sect of Wahhabees are now, perhaps, the real 
 ruling spirit of Mussulman politics in India, and 
 enjoy the singular honour of having as much, no 
 doubt, by their gloomy fanaticism as by their moral 
 lives and their missionary zeal, attracted to themselves 
 considerable attention even from their English rulers 
 at home. Puritans of the Puritans of Islam, they are 
 despised and hated by the so-called orthodox Mus- 
 sulmans, as the Lutherans were hated by Leo, and the 
 Covenanters by Claverhouse. 
 
 ' For a graphic and not very favourable account of the Wahhabee 
 Empire, as it exists now in Arabia and its seat of Govermnent at Riad, 
 see Palgrave's 'Arabia,' Chap. IX. -XIII. There are one or two 
 passages in this account, e.g., Vol. I. 365-373 ; 427-437, in which I 
 cannot but think, with all my admiration for Mr. Palgrave's varied 
 powers, that he has not been, even on his own showing elsewhere, 
 altogether fair to Islam as a system. 
 
2i8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 The extraordinary phenomena attending the great 
 religious movement called Babyism now going on in 
 Persia, the ecstatic martyrdoms and the prodigality 
 of tortures submitted to amidst songs of triumph by 
 women and children, the followers of the ' Bab,' are 
 well worth the study of all who are interested in the 
 history of religion ; and, however we explain the 
 facts, much that I have said of Wahhabeeism may, 
 fjiittatis iniLtandis, be said of it ; and at all events its 
 •existence is a standing proof that Persian Moham- 
 medanism possesses so much of vitality as is necessary 
 to adapt an old creed to a new belief.' 
 
 When I first wrote the above paragraphs on the 
 power of revival which I conceive to be inherent in 
 Islam, I did not know that my words were at that 
 very time being illustrated in the most striking way, 
 not only in India and Persia and Arabia upon which 
 I then dwelt, but also throughout the Asiatic domi- 
 nions of the Ottoman Sultans. Since then Mr. Pal- 
 grave's most interesting * Essays on Eastern Questions * 
 have come into my hands ; and I find in them both 
 evidence to show that there is such a revival, and a 
 graphic account of its leading symptoms. 
 
 Secular and denominational schools are everywhere 
 ■giving place to schools of the most strictly Mussulman 
 
 ^ See Gobineau, ' Les Religions et les Philosophies dans I'Asie 
 Cientrale,' p. 141-215. 
 
THE OTTOMAN SUPREMACY 219 
 
 type. Mosques which were deserted are now crowded 
 with worshippers ; mosques which were in ruins are 
 rebuilt There is a general reaction, not perhaps to 
 be wondered at, against the employment in public 
 offices of the European and the Christian. Wine and 
 spirit shops are closed, for their trade is gone except 
 among the Levantine residents. Even opium and 
 tobacco are becoming luxuries which are not only 
 forbidden, but also forsaken. 
 
 Add to this, what Mr. Palgrave has also shown, 
 that a new nation is as it were growing up under our 
 eyes in Eastern Anatolia, rich with all the elements 
 of a vigorous national and religious life ; and we shall 
 then have reason to believe that though the Ottoman 
 supremacy may pass away, as Kaliphs and Sultans, 
 Attabeks and Khans, Padishahs and Moguls, have 
 passed away before them,'yet Islam itself is a thing of 
 indestructible vitality, and may thrive the more when 
 rid of the magnificent corruptions and the illusor}^ 
 prestige of the Stamboul successors of the Prophet./ 
 In truth, Islam has existed for centuries in spite of 
 Osmanlee rule, and not because of- it ; and this the 
 ambassadors lately sent to the Porte from the most 
 distant parts of the Mussulman world — from Bokhara 
 and Khokand, from the Sultan of Atchin and the 
 Sultan of the Panthays — must have learnt to their 
 cost, when they found that the so-called Commander 
 
220 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 of the Faithful was sufficiently employed nearer home, 
 and had neither the power nor the will to give them 
 the help or even the advice they asked. 
 
 / Mohammedanism, therefore, can still renew its 
 youth, and it is possible that the present generation, in 
 face of the advance of semi-barbarous and intolerant 
 Russia, may see a revival of the old Crusading spirit — 
 an outburst of stern fanaticism, which, armed with the 
 courage of despair, obliterating, as in the Circassian 
 war,^ even the immemorial schism of Sonnee and 
 Sheeah, may hurl once more the united strength of the 
 Crescent upon the vanguard of advancing Christendom. 
 It is a prospect formidable to every Christian Power — 
 formidable above all to those who for good or for evil 
 rule thirty millions of Mussulmans in India ; but I 
 cannot think, even if the result were to be that a 
 stop should be put to all further conquests of Euro- 
 peans in the East, that the world would be altogether 
 a loser thereby. / In the East a revived Islam contains 
 more elements of hope for the future than a corrupt 
 
 ^ See Baron Von Haxthausen's ' Tribes of the Caucasus ; ' especially 
 his interesting account of the rise of Muridism, and the heroic stntggle 
 of Schamyl, his personal influence, and his genius for military and 
 political organisation. Truly while Mohammedanism can throw off 
 geniuses like Schamyl, it may well be able to dispense with such govern- 
 ments as that of the Turks. The Baron's prophecies of a general 
 collapse of Mohammedanism are being signally falsified. The union of 
 Sonnees and Sheeahs was one principle of Muridism as taught by 
 Moollah Mohammed, and after him by Schamyl. 
 
LIMITS TO INFLUENCE OF EAST ON WEST 221 
 
 Christianity— and Christianity in Asia has rarely been 
 otherwise than dead ; ^ and the religious enthusiasm of 
 some new Commander of the Faithful, of some heroic 
 Schamyl or Abdel Kader on a vaster scale, than the 
 dull, heavy tread of military despotism beneath the 
 shadow of the Czars of all the Russias. 
 
 And here, perhaps, ^vill be the place to make 
 a few remarks upon a subject which cannot have 
 failed to attract the attention of the more thoughtful 
 among us in recent years — I mean the attempt made 
 to introduce Western manners and customs into 
 Eastern countries. 
 
 We live in days when we hear of Khans and 
 Khedives, Shahs and Sultans, giving up their imme- 
 morial passivity and seclusion, and even coming to 
 Europe with the avow^ed intention of carrying back to 
 Asia what they can of Western science and civilisa- 
 tion. I should be slow indeed to complain of any 
 steps taken by the Western Powers to do away with 
 any institutions which, like the Suttee, the festivals of 
 
 ' For the marked superiority, for instance, of the tribes of the Cau- 
 casus which are Mohammedan, to those which are nominally Christian, 
 see Freshfield's 'Caucasus,' p. 454-457: 'In the Caucasus the tra- 
 veller will be compelled to contrast the truthfulness, industiy, and 
 courteous hospitality of the Mohammedans north of the chain with the 
 lying indolence and churlishness of the Christians in the south ; ' and 
 for the general subject of Oriental Christianity as it is found in Ar- 
 menia, Georgia, Syria, Egj'pt, &c., see Palgrave's essay entitled 'Eastern 
 Christians.' 
 
222 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Juggernaut, the East African slave trade, or the 
 traffic in opium, are a curse to our common humanity, 
 or are not grounded on any fundamental peculiarity 
 of the Eastern world. But to attempt by force, or 
 even by influence brought to bear upon Eastern rulers, 
 to do away with any domestic or national institutions, 
 such as the form of government, or patriarchal slavery, 
 or even polygamy, can do no good. 
 / Eastern despotism is not what Western despotism 
 Is, nor is Oriental slavery like American. Nor is even 
 polygamy In the East so Intolerable an evil as it 
 would be in the social freedom of the West. For 
 example, an Eastern sovereign has all the power over 
 his subjects that a father had in the most primitive 
 times, and had even In Rome, over his children. His 
 power is liable to the same abuses ; but it has also 
 some of its safeguards and redeeming points. To 
 introduce Into his government, as the Shah has been 
 supposed to wish, a system of Boards and Parliaments, 
 of checks and counter-checks, such as works fairly w^ell 
 in this country because It has grown with our growth 
 and is suitable to our Instinct of compromise in every- 
 thing, would be to make many tyrants Instead of 
 one, and to cripple the power and lessen the respon- 
 sibility of the only man in Persia whose interest it is 
 to let no one commit injustice but himself. Asia, till 
 its whole nature be changed, can probably never be 
 
EASTERN DESPOTISM 223: 
 
 better governed than it was by the early Kaliphs ; 
 and if an Abou Bakr or an Omar, or even a Haroun 
 or a Mahmoud, a Baber or an Akbar, do not come 
 twice in a century, it is probable that Nature has 
 endowed Asiatics with precisely those qualities of 
 patience, docility, and inertness which harmonise better 
 with the evils of such a government than with those of 
 any other. , 
 
 Polygamy is a more difficult question, and it is 
 impossible, for obvious reasons, to discuss it adequately 
 here. It is a gigantic evil, worse even than slavery ; 
 for with its attendant mischiefs, so far as it extends, it 
 does away with all real sympathy and companion- 
 ship between man and woman ; it is unnatural in 
 the fullest sense of the word, in a highly civi- 
 lised nation, for Nature, by making the number 
 of men and women equal, has declared decisively 
 for monogamy. But, in a barbarous people, poly- 
 gamy has this one redeeming point, that it is less 
 likely that any woman will be left without a natural 
 protector ; and, as a matter of fact, it is almost 
 universally allowed in primitive stages of civilisation.^ 
 
 * In an uncivilised nation split up, as Arabia was before Mohammed, 
 into a number of hostile tribes, or ovenam by its more powerful neigh- 
 bours, as was Palestine in the time of the Judges, the number of births 
 of men and women is no doubt about equal ; but the male population 
 is reduced by war to half its proper number ; the preponderance of 
 women in such a state of society renders Polygamy possible, and the 
 insecurity renders it from that one point of view allowable. Sir Samuel 
 
.224 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 In the East it is the almost inevitable result of that 
 fundamental institution of Eastern, as well as of 
 Moslem society, the absolute seclusion of women. 
 There is an impervious bar to all social intercourse 
 between the sexes before marriage. The husband's 
 knowledge of his future wife is at second hand only, 
 and rests on the report of a Khatibeh,^ or professional 
 match-maker. Such a marriage is more than a 
 lottery ; there can be no affection to begin with, and, 
 except on rare occasions, it is not likely that it will 
 turn out to be really happy. If it be thoroughly 
 uncongenial, a man tries his luck once more in the 
 same miserable lottery, and for his own happiness, and 
 probably also for that of all concerned, annuls the 
 previous bond. Hence polygamy implies freedom of 
 divorce, and both together are the inevitable result of 
 the seclusion of the female sex. But to abolish by 
 law the two former without dealing with the far more 
 fundamental institution which is its root, would be to 
 carry on a war with symptoms only, and to introduce 
 ■evils worse than those it is wished to prevent. The 
 only way of going to the root of the matter would be, 
 
 Baker, in his ' Albert Nyanza,' Introduction, p. 25, remarks that ' In 
 all tropical countries Polygamy is the prevailing evil.' He might have 
 gone on to say much the same of slavery ; but then what would become 
 of the charge he so often makes against Islam — that it is responsible 
 for polygamy and slavery ? 
 
 1 Lane's ' Modern Egyptians,' I. 199. 
 
POLYGAMY 225 
 
 if it were possible, to allow a freer intercourse between 
 the sexes at all times ; and Sir William Muir allows 
 that this could not be done at all with the present free- 
 dom of divorce.^ It is a melancholy fact, but a fact still, 
 that the strict checks imposed by Mohammed on mar- 
 ried women, degrading though they are,^ are essential 
 to prevent what is still worse, and, be it remembered, 
 what was far worse before the reforms and limitations 
 which Mohammed himself imposed. It is a complete 
 dead-lock ; and the greatest reformers, Moses no less 
 than Mohammed, have been, unable to deal with the 
 root of the evil. It is to be remembered, on the other 
 hand, that both Moses and Mohammed did what they 
 could to restrain and modify its abuses ; and at present 
 neither polygamy nor divorce is so common as is 
 often supposed. The humanity of human nature has 
 asserted itself; and Lane, the most accurate observer, 
 says that polygamy is in Egypt at all events very 
 rare among the higher classes, and not common even 
 among the lower.^ 
 
 ^ Muir, III. 234, and note. 
 
 2 Sura XXXIII. 6 and 56. Also Sura XXIV. 32. 
 
 ^ Lane, I. 231 : 'Not more than one husband in twenty has two wives 
 at the same time.' But divorce is very common. If it were not for 
 Lane's proverbial accuracy, one would be inclined to suspect that in the 
 passage referred to in the text he had transposed the words higher and 
 lower. Certainly in other parts of the Mohammedan world polygamy 
 is, for obvious reasons, much more common among the rich than among 
 the poor. But the current of opinion, Ijke the general conditions of 
 society, seems to be everywhere setting against it, especially in India. 
 
 Q 
 
226 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Much the same may be said of slavery. The 
 slavery of the East is a patriarchal institution, coeval 
 with the very dawn of history. It is an institution 
 allowed and modified by Moses, even as it was allowed 
 and modified by Mohammed, for people in that stage of 
 civilisation which required it. In neither nation has it 
 anything in common with slavery as it was in America, 
 or slavery as practised at all by civilised nations. 
 To do away with it by force, as has been the case in 
 Khiva, though we naturally rejoice at it, will probably 
 do little permanent good. It will revive in another, 
 and probably a worse, shape. Perhaps we have hit 
 upon the one possible means of gradually getting rid 
 of it, in making it impossible to recruit slavery from 
 without by means of the slave trade. Much will 
 have to be done henceforward by free labour in 
 Arabia, in Persia, and in Egypt, which has hitherto 
 been done by slaves ; and we need not fear but that 
 the result will be so good, that even in a stolid 
 Oriental people the gradual movement will be one 
 in the direction of abolition. The foreign slave trade, 
 in fact, is, owing to the remonstrances of Dr. Living- 
 stone and the expeditions of Sir Samuel Baker and 
 Sir Bartle Frere, already, for the time at all events, 
 almost at an end, and it is a mistake to suppose that 
 it ever received any sanction either from Moses or 
 Mohammed. Moses ordered the man-stealer and the 
 
SLAVERY 227 
 
 man-seller to be put to death, V/ Mohammed is re- 
 ported by the ' Sonnah ' to have said, ' The worst of 
 men is the seller of men.'^ / 
 
 Western science, with its railways, its canals, and 
 its printing-presses, may, no doubt, do something for the 
 material prosperity of Eastern countries, but by itself 
 it will do little for their moral welfare ; and a thin var- 
 nish of Western civilisation introduced by rulers who 
 have been forced to admire the material power of the 
 West, and have lost their own self-respect in the pro- 
 cess, is earnestly to be deprecated. Those Orientals 
 who have been most influenced by the Franco-mania 
 of Stamboul are, beyond all comparison, the most 
 degraded and profligate of their race, and no earnest 
 observer can wish to see imported into other parts of 
 the Mohammedan world that indescribable combina- 
 tion of all that is contemptible in human nature 
 conveyed by the word Levantine. 
 
 The heroic and unselfish lives of a few such men 
 as Livingstone — alas that it is now all too certain that 
 his life is a thing of the past ! — are the only legitimate 
 
 1 Exodus XXI. 16. 
 
 2 The slave trade rests for its support on no religion at all, but only 
 on that which is cruel and selfish in human nature. It is no more fair 
 to tax Islam, as is often done, with the horrors of the East African 
 slave trade, than it would have been in the last century to tax Chris- 
 tianity with the still greater horrors of the West African traffic and its 
 sequelce in America. It has been remarked with truth that the cruel 
 treatment of domesticated slaves is the shameful and exclusive preroga- 
 tive of civilisation. 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 means of introducing into semi-civilised countries such 
 benefits as we think we have to bestow. A Hfe and 
 character Hke Livingstone's has done more to rege- 
 nerate the African races than any amount of direct 
 preaching, or any number of European settlements ; 
 with the miserable and immoral wars that so often 
 follow in their train. Such men are the true pioneers 
 of civilisation and Christianity, of the only species 
 of civilisation and the only form of Christianity which 
 we have any reason to expect will be a real benefit 
 to the East. 
 
 But does it follow, from what I have said of the 
 immobility of the East, that it is impossible for Islam 
 to make any advance at all ; that it is impossible for 
 it to yield anything to the progressive civilisation of 
 Christianity and of the West ? 
 
 How Christianity and civilisation should deal with 
 Mohammedanism I have partly indicated already, 
 and shall have a very few more words to say upon the 
 subject presently. But, first, what can Islam do on its 
 part } Where religion and law are indissolubly bound 
 up together, as they are in the Koran, each loses, and 
 each gains, something. What they gain in stability, 
 they more than lose in flexibility. And yet it may 
 be safely said that there is nothing more extraordi- 
 nary in the whole history of Islam, than the way in 
 which the theory of the verbal inspiration of the 
 
CAN ISLAM PROGRESS? 229 
 
 Koran, and the consequent stereotyped and unalter- 
 able nature of its precepts, have, by ingenuity, by 
 legal fictions, by the * Sonnah,' or traditional sayings 
 of Mohammed, and by respoitsa prtidentum^ been 
 accommodated to the changing circumstances and the 
 various degrees of civilisation of the nations which 
 profess it. When the Kadi fails to find in the law 
 laid down for the nomad Arabs a rule precisely appli- 
 cable to the more complex requirements of Smyrna 
 or of Delhi, he places the sacred volume upon his 
 head, and so renders homage to human reason and to 
 the law of progress. He does what Puritans and 
 Churchmen would alike do well to remember, when 
 each professes to find in the varying or convertible 
 expressions of the writers of the New Testament a 
 divinely ordered and unalterable model of Church 
 government.^ It is not, therefore, quite so true as is 
 commonly supposed, that Islam is reconcileable with 
 one narrow form of government or society only ; and 
 it is quite possible that where so much has been done 
 already, more may be done in future, and means may 
 be found for reconciling, for instance, the laws against 
 taking interest for money with the requirements of 
 modern society. The intolerant principles of the 
 
 ^ Compare Acts XX. 17. . fxereKaXicraro robs Trpea^vrepovs rrjs 
 eKKXrjO-ias, with v. 28, vfxas eQero diriffKoirovs. The watchwords of the 
 bitterest ecclesiastical jealousy and hatred are in this passage of the New 
 Testament seen to be, after ail, synonymous and convertible terms. 
 
230 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Koran have long since been reconciled, except where 
 there is a passing outburst of fanaticism, with the 
 utmost practical toleration ; and the standard of the 
 'Jihad,' or holy war, will probably never henceforward 
 be raised on an extensive scale, except in a war of 
 self-defence, and unless the lives and liberties of 
 Mohammedans, as well as their religion, are at stake. 
 And, what is infinitely more important, it seems 
 to me that while Mohammedans cling as strongly as 
 ever to their rigid Monotheism, and to their unfaltering 
 belief in the Divine mission of their Prophet — and 
 what serious person could wish them to do otherwise? 
 — to give up those beliefs which have made them 
 what they are, which have given them a glorious 
 history, and which have influenced half a world ; to 
 give up — 
 
 ' . . . Those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain-light of all their day, 
 Are yet a master-light of all their seeing ; 
 
 Uphold them— cherish — and have power to make 
 Their noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal silence : truths that wake 
 To perish never ! ' — 
 
 while they cling, I say, to these as strongly, yes, more 
 strongly than ever, they may yet be brought to see that 
 there is a distinction between what Mohammed said 
 himself, and what others have said for him ; and that 
 
CAN tr APPROXIMATE TO CHRISTIANITY? 231 
 
 there is a still broader distinction between what he said 
 as a legislator and a conqueror, and what he said as a 
 simple prophet. ./There are some among them who see 
 now, and there will be more who will soon see, that 
 there may be an appeal to the Mohammed of Mecca 
 from the Mohammed of Medina ; that there may be 
 an idolatry of a book, as well as of a picture, or a sta- 
 tue, or a shapeless mass of stone ; and that the Prophet, 
 who always in other matters asserted his fallibility, 
 was never more fallible, though certainly never more 
 sincere, than when he claimed an equal infallibility for 
 the whole Koran alike./ Finally, with the growth of 
 knowledge of the real character of our faith, Moham- 
 medans must recognise that the Christ of the Gospel 
 was something ineffably above the Christ of those 
 Christians from whom alone Mohammed drew his 
 notions of Him ; that He was a perfect mirror of that 
 one primary attribute of the Eternal of which Moham- 
 med could catch only a far-off glance, and which, had 
 it been shown to him as it really was, must needs have 
 taken possession of his soul. 
 
 All this may or may not be in our own time ; but 
 in a sympathetic study even of Mohammedanism as 
 it is, Christians have not a little to gain. There is the 
 protest against Polytheism in all its shapes ; there is 
 the absolute equality of man before God ; there is the 
 sense of the dignity of human nature ; there is the 
 
232 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 simplicity of life, the vivid belief in God's providence, 
 the entire submission to His will ; and last, not least, 
 there is the courage of their convictions, the fearless 
 avowal before men of their belief in God, and their^ 
 pride in its possession as the one thing needful. There 
 is in the lives of average Mohammedans, from what- 
 ever causes, less of self-indulgence, less of the mad 
 race for wealth, less of servility, than is to be found 
 in the lives of average Christians. Truly we may 
 think that these things ought not so to be ; and if Chris- 
 tians generally were as ready to confess Christ, and to 
 be proud of being His servants, as Mohammedans are 
 of being followers of Mohammed, one chief obstacle to 
 the spread of Christianity would be removed. And 
 the two great religions which started from kindred 
 soil, the one from Mecca, the other from Jerusalem, 
 might work on in their respective spheres — the one the 
 religion of progress, the other of stability ; the one of 
 a complex life, the other of a simple life ; the one 
 dwelling more upon the inherent weakness of humian 
 nature, the other on its inherent dignity ; ' the one the 
 religion of the best parts of Asia and Africa, the other 
 of Europe and America — each rejoicing in the success 
 of the other, each supplying the other's wants in a 
 generous rivalry for the common good of humanity. 
 
 > Perhaps Ihe two views are, after all, only different aspects of the 
 same truth. 
 
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS lEARN FROM 2SLAM? 233 
 
 A few words more about Mohammed himself, and 
 I have done. The world, in its wisdom or unwisdom, 
 has never thought proper to distinguish Mohammed 
 from the milhons of Mohammeds named after him, 
 by calling him 'the Great.' Perhaps he was too 
 great for such an external distinction. People call 
 the conqueror of Constantinople, eight centuries later, 
 Mohammed the Second. But I do not think they 
 ever speak of the Prophet as Mohammed the First ; 
 and perhaps the unconscious homage thus rendered 
 to him by a world which ostensibly, and till very 
 lately, has done him such scant justice, is the 
 highest tribute that can be given to his greatness. 
 The Greeks paid the highest compliment they could 
 to the surpassing splendour of the King of Persia 
 when, consciously or unconsciously, they dropped the 
 article before his name, and so put him on a level, 
 grammatical and moral, with the sun, the moon, and 
 the earth, which could by no possibility need any 
 such distinguishing mark. Compare Mohammed with 
 the long roll of men whom the world by common 
 consent has called ' Great ; ' while I admit that there 
 is no one point in his character in which he is not 
 surpassed by one or other, take him all in all, what he 
 was, and what he did, and what those inspired by him 
 have done, he seems to me to stand alone, above and 
 beyond them all. A distinguished writer on the Holy 
 
234 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 Roman Empire has remarked of Charles the Great 
 that, ' hke all the foremost men of our race, he was 
 all great things in one.' ' But though Mr. Bryce 
 does not illustrate the truth of his remark by Moham- 
 med — nay, by not including him among the foremost 
 men of the world whom he goes on to enumerate, he 
 seems designedly to exclude him — I venture to think 
 that of no one of them all is the remark more strictly 
 true. 
 
 Mohammed did not, indeed, himself conquer a 
 world like Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon. He 
 did not himself weld together into a homogeneous 
 whole a vast system of states like Charles the Great. 
 He was not a philosophic king like Marcus Aure- 
 lius ; nor a philosopher like Aristotle or like Bacon, 
 ruling by pure reason the world of thought for cen- 
 turies with a more than kingly power ; he was not 
 a legislator for all mankind, nor even the highest 
 part of it, like Justinian ; nor did he cheaply earn the 
 title of ' the Great ' by being the first among rulers to 
 turn, like Constantine, from the setting to the rising 
 sun. He was not a universal philanthropist, like the 
 greatest of the Stoics, 
 
 ' Non sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo ;' 
 
 nor was he the apostle of the highest form of reli- 
 
 ' Bryce's ' Holy Roman Empire,' p. 73. 
 
CHARACTER OF MOHAMMED 235 
 
 gion and civilisation combined, like Gregory or Boni- 
 face, like Leo or Alfred the Great. He was less, in- 
 deed, than most of these in one or two of the elements 
 that go to make up human greatness, but he was also 
 greater. Half Christian and half Pagan, half civilised 
 and half barbarian, it was given to him in a marvel- 
 lous degree to unite the peculiar excellences of the 
 one with the peculiar excellences of the other. ' I 
 have seen,' said the ambassador sent by the trium- 
 phant Koreishites to the despised exile at Medina ; 
 ' I have seen the Persian Chosroes and the Greek 
 Heraclius sitting upon their thrones, but never did I 
 see a man ruling his equals as does Mohammed.' 
 
 Head of the State as well as of the Church, he was 
 Caesar and Pope in one ; but he was Pope without the 
 Pope's pretensions, and Caesar without the legions of 
 Caesar. Without a standing army, without a body- 
 guard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue, if ever 
 any man had the right to say that he ruled by a right 
 Divine, it was Mohammed ; for he had all the power 
 without its instruments and without its supports. He 
 rose superior to the titles and ceremonies, the solemn 
 trifling, and the proud humility of court etiquette. To 
 hereditary kings, to princes born in the purple, these 
 things are, naturally enough, as the breath of life ; but 
 those who ought to have known better, even self-made 
 rulers, and those the foremost in the files of time — a 
 
2^,6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 ■J 
 
 C^sar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon — have been unable to 
 resist their tinsel attractions. Mohammed was con- 
 tent with the reality, he cared not for the dressings, of 
 power. ^ The simplicity of his private life was in keep- 
 ing with his public life. * God,' says Al Bokhari, 
 ' offered him the keys of the treasures of the earth, 
 but he would not accept them.' 
 
 Hagiology is not history ; but the contemporaries 
 of Mohammed, his enemies who rejected his mission, 
 with one voice extol his piety, his justice, his vera- 
 city, his clemency, his humility, and that at a time 
 before any imaginary sanctity could have enveloped 
 him. A Christian even, as is remarked by a great 
 writer whom I have quoted above, with his more per- 
 fect code of morality before him, must admit that 
 Mohammed, with very rare exceptions, practised all 
 the moral virtues but one ; and in that one, as I have 
 shown, he was in advance of his time and nation. 
 
 Assuredly, if Christian missionaries are ever to win 
 over Mohammedans to Christianity, they must alter 
 their tactics. It will not be by discrediting the great 
 Arabian Prophet, nor by throwing doubts upon his 
 mission, but by paying him that homage which is his 
 due ; by pointing out, not how Mohammedanism 
 differs from Christianity, but how it resembles it ; by 
 dwelling less on the dogmas of Christianity, and more 
 
 1 See ' British Quarterly Review,' Jan. 1872, p. 128. 
 
CAN CHRISTIANS INFLUJiNCE MUSSALMANSl 237 
 
 on its morality ; by showing how perfectly that 
 Christ, whom Mohammed with his half-knowledge so 
 reverenced, came up to the ideal which prophets and 
 kings desired to see, and had not seen, and which 
 Mohammed himself, Prophet and King in one, could 
 only half realise. In this way, and in this alone, is it 
 likely that Christianity can ever act upon Moham- 
 medanism ; not by sweeping it into oblivion — for w^hat 
 of truth there is in it, and there is very much truth, 
 can never die — but by gradually, and perhaps un- 
 consciously, breathing into its vast and still vigorous 
 frame a newer, a purer, and a diviner life. 
 / By a fortune absolutely unique in history, Mo- 
 hammed is a threefold founder — * of a nation, of an 
 empire, and of a religion.' Illiterate himself, scarcely 
 able to read or write, he was yet the author of a 
 book which is a poem, a code of laws, a Book of 
 Common Prayer, and a Bible in one, and is rever- 
 enced to this day by a sixth of the whole human 
 race as a miracle of purity of style, of wisdom, and of 
 truth. It was the one miracle claimed by Moham- 
 med — his ' standing miracle' he called it ; and a miracle 
 indeed it is. But looking at the circumstances of the 
 time, at the unbounded reverence of his followers, and 
 comparing him with the Fathers of the Church or 
 with mediaeval saints, to my mind the most miraculous 
 thing about Mohammed is, that he never claimed the 
 
238 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 power of working miracles. Whatever he had said he 
 could do, his disciples would straightway have seen him 
 do. They could not help attributing to him miraculous 
 acts which he never did, and which he always denied 
 he could do. What more crowning proof of his sin- 
 cerity is needed .'' Mohammed to the end of his life 
 claimed for himself that title only with which he had 
 begun, and which the highest philosophy and the truest 
 Christianity will one day, I venture to believe, agree 
 in yielding to him — that of a Prophet, a very Prophet 
 of God.' 
 
 The religion, indeed, that he taught is below the 
 purest form of our own as the central figure of the 
 Mohammedan religion is below the central figure of 
 the Christian — a difference vast and incommensurable ; 
 but, in my opinion, he comes next to Him in the long 
 roll of the great benefactors of the human race ; next 
 to Him, longo intervallo certainly, but still next. He 
 had faults, and great ones, which he was always the 
 first himself, according to his light, to confess and to 
 deplore ; and the best homage we can render to the 
 noble sincerity of his character is to state them, as I 
 hope I have tried to do, exactly as they were. ' It 
 was the fashion of old,' to quote once more the words 
 of our greatest novelist and greatest psychologist — 
 and so to conclude this course of Lectures, of the 
 manifold imperfections and shortcomings of which 
 
MOHAMMED A TRUE PROPHET 239 
 
 no one of those who have so kindly listened to me 
 week after week can be half so conscious as myself 
 — ' It was the fashion of old, when an ox was 
 led out for sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark 
 spots, and give the offering a false show of un- 
 blemished whiteness. Let us fling away the chalk, 
 and boldly say — the victim is . spotted, but it is 
 not therefore in vain that his mighty heart is laid on 
 the altar of men's highest hopes.' 
 
APPENDICES. 
 
 APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 
 
 Sir Bartle Frere, in an interesting and able and catholic 
 essay in * The Church and the Age ' on Indian Missions, takes 
 a hopeful view of the future of India, as influenced by Western 
 civilisation and Christianity. He begins (p. 318) by showing, 
 rightly enough, that almost everything we do in India tends 
 to break up old beliefs, and so to prepare the way for a new 
 one, and is, therefore, more or less Missionary work ; ' not 
 only railways and printing-presses, education, commerce, and 
 the electric telegraph; our impartial codes and uniform 
 system of administration; but our misfortunes and our 
 mistakes, our wars, our famines, and our mutinies.' He 
 then gives (p. 334-337) elaborate statistics of the Missionary 
 agencies at work in 1865 in Western India; they have 
 enormously increased in the last 30 years, and he estimates 
 the number of Missionaries at work at about 105, and the 
 number of converts at somewhere about 2,200; and this, 
 multiplied by six or seven, would probably, he thinks, give 
 a general idea of the direct results of Missionary work 
 during that period throughout all India (I would remark 
 here that an official statement published in 1873 gives a 
 much more favourable account, estimating the number 
 
 R 
 
242 APPENDICES 
 
 of communicants at 78,494); but when Sir Bartle Frere comes 
 to deal with Mohammedanism (p. 354-356) he gives no 
 statistics on the point we most desiderate — the number of 
 converts, if it be at all appreciable, from Islam to Christi- 
 anity ; the general remarks, indeed, he does make, seem to 
 me to go exactly contrary to the conclusions he draws from 
 them — e.g.^ Mohammedans study portions of the Bible more 
 than they did formerly; but these portions unfortunately 
 seem to be the prophetical writings, especially those of 
 Daniel ; and they find therein the denunciations of Chris- 
 tianity which Christians find in it against other creeds ; they 
 are humiliated by the fact that Mohammedanism is no longer 
 the imperial creed of India ; but the upshot of their depres- 
 sion is not Christianity^ but Wahhabeeism, i.e.^ a return 
 to Islam in its simplest and sternest shape. Brahmoism, 
 which is really Brahmanism as modified by Christianity, 
 Brahmanism minus caste and minus idolatr}-- of every kind, 
 seems to be in some respects the beginning of a national 
 movement, and, judging from the authoritative sermon 
 (p. 346-352) delivered in Calcutta on the 39th anniversary 
 of the Brahma Samaj, and entitled ' The Future Church,' 
 seems to me to give real hope for the future, and to be very 
 suggestive as to the way in which Missionaries should go to 
 work. * The answer,' says the preacher, ' of Jesus the 
 immortal Son of God, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
 soul, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thyself, 
 is the essence of true religion simply and exhaustively 
 expounded.' ' The composite faith of the future Church is 
 to combine in perfect harmony the profound devotion of 
 the Hindoo and the heroic enthusiasm of the Mussulman ; ' 
 
APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 243 
 
 but, unfortunately, the simplicity and intelligibility of the 
 Mohammedan creed render it incapable at present of 
 actually coalescing with the eclectic spirit of Brahmoism. It 
 is strange at first sight that Mohammedanism, originally the 
 most eclectic of religions, should, in India at all events, 
 prove itself to be the least capable of settling down on 
 terms of equality with other creeds, or of combining with 
 them. No doubt the fact that Mohammedanism has been 
 the Imperial creed and is so no longer, and the proud 
 memories of Mahmoud and Akbar, of Baber and of 
 Aurungzebe, are a formidable, though it is to be hoped a 
 passing, difficulty. If the Mohammedan revival now going 
 on in India under the influence of the Wahhabees, the 
 Firazees, and the followers of Dudu Miyan, can only be 
 accompanied by a great moral reformation, such as 
 Sprenger himself does not seem to despair of (L, p. 
 459, 'the Arabs only want another Luther'), the result, par- 
 tially at least, of Christian influences, the simplicity of Islam 
 will no doubt in its turn give it a great advantage over the 
 Brahma Samaj in the struggle to fill the void created by the 
 crumbling fabric of Hindooism. It has another great 
 advantage in being already to some extent in possession of 
 the ground. I observe that one of the speakers at the 
 recent Allahabad Missionary Conference says that thirty 
 millions, the estimated number of Mussulmans in India, is 
 much below the mark. 
 
 The unfavourable opinion expressed by Dr. Livingstone 
 on the effects of Mohammedanism in Africa (Expedition to 
 the Zambesi, p. 513-516, and 602-603) appears opposed to 
 the general view I have taken in the Lecture ; and of course, 
 so far as his personal experience goes, is unimpeachable and 
 
 R 2 
 
244 APPENDICES 
 
 conclusive. But it is clear that Dr. Livingstone drew his 
 general conclusions almost entirely from his acquaintance 
 with the Arab slave traders in the south and east of Africa, 
 whom it was the main purpose of his noble and heroic life 
 to put down. In the Lecture I have purposely not dwelt 
 upon the extension of Islam along the coast to the south of 
 the Equator, for the simple reason that the inhabitants are 
 Mohammedans in nothing but the name. The Arabs there 
 are of the most degraded type, and are engaged almost to a 
 man in the brutalising slave trade, which by itself is a com- 
 plete obstacle to every species of civilisation and religion. 
 No doubt, as Dr. Livingstone remarks, the native African 
 there contrasts favourably with the Mohammedan — as favour- 
 ably, I would add, as he does even with the Portuguese ; 
 but tli^t Dr. Livingstone judged of the whole of Moham- 
 medan Africa by his experience of its worst part, is clear 
 from his remark — opposed as it is to the unanimous 
 testimony of travellers in Northern and Central Africa — 
 ' that the only foundation for the statements respecting the 
 spread of Islam in Africa is the fact that in a remote 
 corner of North-West Africa, the Foulahs and Mandingoes, 
 and some other tribes in Northern Africa, have made con- 
 quests of territory ; but that even they care so little for the 
 extension of their faith, that after conquest no pains whatever 
 are taken to indoctrinate the adults of the tribe' (p. 513). 
 Captain Burton asserts that ' Mohammedans alone make 
 proselytes in Africa.' Dr. Livingstone says as explicitly ' in 
 Africa the followers of Christ alone are anxious to propagate 
 their faith.' Here is a direct contradiction ; and it is obvious 
 that in a country of such vast extent as Africa no such sweep- 
 ing statement can be absolutely true. Perhaps Sierra Leone, 
 
APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 245 
 
 to which Dr. Livingstone paid a visit for the purpose of testing 
 the results of missionary enterprise, and to which he specially 
 refers (p. dd'^^ will furnish us with the best materials for 
 pointing out how far the two statements are reconcileable 
 with each other, and with substantial accuracy. In Sierra 
 Leone there is a large negro community, the members of 
 which having been brought for many years into contact not 
 only with direct Christian preaching, but, what is more 
 important, with Christian education, government, and 
 example, are both excellent citizens and sincere Christians, 
 and, as one would expect, contrast favourably in point of 
 morality even with the best Mohammedans. This is un- 
 questionably true ; and of the self-denying efforts of the 
 missionaries, especially the native ones, within certain 
 limits, it is impossible to speak too highly. As to the exact 
 number of Christians in the colony at this moment it is 
 rather difficult to arrive at an accurate conclusion ; but to 
 take Dr. Livingstone's figures, he remarks (p. 605) that in 
 the census of 1861 the whole population of Sierra Leone 
 itself was 41,000 souls, 27,000 of them being Christian, and 
 1,774 Mohammedan, 'not a very large proportion,' he 
 observes, ' for the only sect in Africa which makes proselytes.' 
 It is not a large proportion, but what is the number now ? 
 Sierra Leone now affords the most striking proof that can be 
 given of the extent to which on the one hand Islam is 
 spreading in that part of Africa by the efforts of unassisted 
 missionaries, and on the other of the absence of any such 
 propagation of the Christian faith among the tribes beyond 
 the limits of the settlement. When Dr. Livingstone visited 
 Sierra Leone a few years ago, Islam was, as he says, hardly 
 known there ; since then Mohammedan missionaries have 
 
246 APPENDICES 
 
 come thither from the Foulahs and from the far interior, 
 and with what result ? No one will say that it is the sword 
 to which they owe their success, for the peace of Sierra 
 Leone has been for years undisturbed. And now we have 
 (Government Report of West African Colonies, 1873) the 
 testimony of Mr. Johnson (p. 15), the able and excellent 
 missionary whom I have quoted in my Lecture, endorsed as 
 it would seem by the Bishop of the Diocese, that the 
 Christian community at Sierra Leone, however flourishing 
 itself, has exercised no influence on the large number of 
 native Africans resorting annually to the town for the pur- 
 pose of trade, and still less has it done anything to propagate 
 itself by sending out missionaries among adjoining tribes. 
 On the other hand, a few active and zealous Mohammedan 
 missionaries have carried their peaceful war into the 
 enemies' country, and have produced great results even 
 among the Christian and native population of Sierra Leone 
 itself; insomuch that the religion of a large portion, the 
 Governor says of the majority, of the Christians within the 
 settlement has been actually changed by their preaching ! 
 There may be, and it is to be hoped there is, exaggeration 
 as to the numbers ; but there can be no doubt, looking to 
 the coftsensus of testimony, that Islam is propagated in 
 Western, Northern, and Central Africa ; that it is propagated 
 by simple preaching and with marked success even where a 
 Christian Government, and, what is better, Christianity itself, 
 is to a great extent in possession of the ground. One wishes 
 that Dr. Livingstone, the greatest and most single-minded 
 of all the friends of Africa, had himself come into contact 
 with a few of these simple and single-minded Mohammedan 
 missionaries. They come so near in many respects to his 
 
APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 247 
 
 own ideal of what a Christian missionary ought to be, that 
 one feels sure he would have been led to modify his judg- 
 ment as to the system which produces them, and to the 
 great teacher whom he rarely mentions but as the 'false 
 prophet.' 
 
 The remarks I have made in the Lecture as to the atti- 
 tude which it seems to me that Christian Missionaries should 
 adopt, wherever their efforts appear to have a chance of 
 being successful — and surely there is too much evil in the 
 world that is remediable, to allow of a great expenditure of 
 labour or money where there is no such prospect — have been 
 suggested to me mainly by way of contrast to what I have 
 read in most books devoted to the cause of Missions. Even 
 so noble, and self-sacrificing, and single-hearted a man as 
 Henry Martyn appears to have gone out as a missionary to 
 India, nay to have argued with Mohammedans, without 
 having first read a word of the Koran, even in its English 
 dress (Memoir of Rev. Henry Martyn, by Rev. J. Sargent, 
 p. 177 : cf. 225 ) ; and throughout his career he treats it as an 
 ' imposture ; ' ' the work of the devil.' He is sent to fight 
 'the four faced-devil of India,' — i.e. Hindoos, Mohammedans, 
 Papists, and Infidels (p. 259) ; and see a summary of his 
 written argumxents against Mohammedans (on p. 335), which 
 are quite enough by themselves to account for his ill success. 
 See also the account by another devoted missionary, the Rev. 
 C. B. Leupolt, of his mission at Benares (' Recollections of 
 an Indian Missionary '), who takes much the same position. 
 ' The so-called Prophet of the Mohammedans ;' ' the Koran 
 is an assemblage of facts and passages taken from the Bible 
 mixed with a great number of gross and cunningly devised 
 fables / ' no Mohammedan who believes the whole Koran 
 
248 APPENDICES 
 
 can have the notion of the true God ;' ' the Koran is cal- 
 culated to lead man daily further from God, and to unite him 
 closer to the Prince of darkness ;' ' Satan holds them 
 enthralled by a false religion,' and so on. How not to deal 
 with a different faith could hardly be better demonstrated 
 than by the writings of two such admirable and devoted men. 
 Surely the system has been to blame ! Happily, as is shown 
 from the general tone of the Allahabad Conference, and the 
 explicit testimony of the Government of India in 1873, there 
 has been a great advance in the right direction lately. Not to 
 go beyond the limited circle of one's own acquaintance, such 
 men as Bishop Cotton ; the Rev. George and the Rev. Arthur 
 Moule, now in China; and the Rev. James Johnson, native 
 of Sierra Leone ^ — though I would not venture to say that 
 they would in any degree accept my point of view — yet in 
 reality would have much in common with it ; and all would 
 certainly admit the immense amount of good that is to be 
 found in the creeds, which it is their duty to controvert. 
 Alas, that those who knew Bishop Cotton well, and who 
 therefore know what his catholic spirit might have done 
 for India, can only now, when they think of him, repeat 
 to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, the touching 
 lament, 
 
 ' But oh for a touch of the vanished hand, 
 And a sound of the voice that is still ! ' 
 
APPENDIX TO LECTURE IIL 
 
 That the assertions I have made in the third lecture, as to 
 the comparative ferocity of Christian and MussiUman 
 religious wars, are within the mark, it would be easy to 
 bring abundance of proof. I will adduce here one illustra- 
 tion only, drawn from the chief battle-ground of the con- 
 tending forces, the Holy Land. Jerusalem capitulated to 
 Omar, the third Kaliph, after a protracted blockade in the 
 year 637. No property was destroyed except in the in- 
 evitable operations of the siege, and not a drop of blood was 
 shed except on the field of battle. Omar entered the city 
 with the Patriarch, conversing amicably about its history ; at 
 the hour of prayer he was invited by the Patriarch to worship 
 in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but he refused to do so 
 for fear that his descendants might claim a siriiilar right, and 
 so the freedom of religious worship, which he wished to secure 
 to the inhabitants by the articles of capitulation, might be 
 endangered. In the year 1099 the Holy City fell before the 
 arms of the Crusaders after a much shorter siege. It was 
 taken by storm, and for three days there was an indiscriminate 
 slaughter of men, women, and children; 70,000 Mussulmans 
 were put to the sword, 10,000 of them in the mosque of 
 Omar itself : ' in eodevi te?nplo decern millia decollata sunt ; 
 
 S 
 
250 APPENDICES 
 
 pediies nostri bisque ad bases cruore pej'emptoriim tingehantur^ 
 nee feminis iiec pai'vulis peperccriintJ This comes not from 
 an enemy but from the monkish historian, an eyewitness and 
 a partaker of what he relates, Foulcher of Chartres. Ray- 
 mond of Agiles and Daimbert, Archbishop of Pisa, give simi- 
 lar details, and all with approval. The city itself was 
 pillaged ; but the turn of the Saracens came once more in 
 the year 1187. The breach was already forced, when the 
 great Saladin retracted a hasty vow he had made to avenge 
 the innocent blood that had been shed when the city had 
 been sacked by the Crusaders, and took not Godfrey de 
 Bouillon but Omar for his model. No blood was shed, and 
 the captives were allowed to ransom themselves, the Frankish 
 Christians leaving the city, the Eastern Christians continuing 
 to reside there in peace. 
 
 As to humanity in war in general, the progress made has 
 not been so great as is commonly supposed, even among 
 those who pride themselves, and who to some extent 
 pride themselves with reason, on being the pioneers 
 of Christianity and civilisation. Take the case of Africa. 
 I am not aware that the Saracens in the full career of 
 conquest deliberately burnt a single city in the whole of the 
 North of Africa, whether as a precautionary measure, or to 
 support their prestige, or to glut their revenge. Can England 
 say the same ? If we assume — a large assumption — that the 
 war on the Gold Coast in 1874 is wholly justifiable, if we 
 also assume that the burning of the enemy's capital was 
 indeed a necessity, it w^as a necessity for which a Christian 
 nation should go into mourning, and should contemplate not 
 with feelings of triumph, but with those of humiliation and 
 regret. Is there anything of the kind, or has one single 
 
APPENDIX TO LECTURE III. 251 
 
 ruler either in Church or State — now that the elections are 
 over, and the moral iniquity of the war has been condoned 
 by its success — been heard to raise his voice in condem- 
 nation of it, as even Omar or Saladin might have done ? It 
 is difficult to see how the English nation, which has abolished 
 the slave trade in the West of Africa, and is, in its best 
 portions, profoundly philanthropic, can honestly believe 
 that they are advancing the objects they have at heart when, 
 in support of such a treaty as I have alluded to in the 
 lecture, they lead on a weaker barbarous nation, whom pro 
 hac vice we designate as ' our allies,' against a more powerful 
 one, and deliberately burn out of their homes a people who, 
 barbarous and cruel as they were, have offended us not by 
 their cruelty, or by their human sacrifices, but by their honest 
 belief that we had come to Africa to bar them from access to 
 their own coast. It seems not to have occurred to anyone 
 that our * prestige ' would have been sufficiently vindicated, 
 and our future security sufficiently provided for, if we 
 had burned down the palace of the king, the chief offender. 
 But our ' prestige ' serves as an ample excuse for committing 
 what we should condemn as crimes in any other nation. It 
 is an entity that has juggled us into the belief that to destroy 
 what we cannot retain and cannot use is the prerogative, 
 not of barbarism, but of civilisation and of Christianity. 
 Had the war upon the Gold Coast been avowedly a war 
 not for the spread of our influence, or for the security of 
 a territory acquired by questionable means, but a moral 
 crusade against human sacrifice, or for any purely unselfish 
 object, the case would have been different. Truly this war 
 will be a damnosa hereditas to posterity, alike whether we 
 accept or disclaim the fearful responsibihties in which it 
 has involved us. 
 
252 APPENDICES 
 
 There is an anecdote related of Mahmoud the Ghaznevide, 
 the great Turkish conqueror of Central Asia, which seems 
 to me to be suggestive. Soon after the conquest of Persia, 
 a caravan was cut off by robbers in one of its deserts, and 
 the mother of one of the merchants who was killed went 
 to Ghazni to complain. Mahmoud urged the impossi- 
 bility of keeping order in so remote a part of his terri- 
 tories, when the woman boldly answered : ' Why, then, do 
 you take countries which you cannot govern, and for the 
 protection of which you must answer in the Day of Judg- 
 ment ? ' Mahmoud was struck with the reproach ; whether 
 it would have prevented all further conquests on his part 
 we do not know, for he died soon*after\vards ; but he liberally 
 rewarded the woman, and took immediate and effectual steps 
 for the protection of the caravans. 
 
 LONDON: I'KINTED 15Y 
 
 SPOTTISWGODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 AND PARLIAMENT STREET 
 
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