History of Religion Part 13

Domestic.--The history of Mahomet during the Medina period is taken up to some extent with the various marriages into which he entered, and with the scandals of his household. On several occasions he produced revelations to warrant a step in this connection which he felt to require justification, and the modern reader is forced to wonder how his credit survived some of those proceedings. While it is undoubtedly the case that he did much to improve the position of women in Arabia, the absence of any high ideal in this matter is very apparent.

Conquest of Mecca.--In giving his followers a new kiblah and bidding them turn their faces towards Mecca at their prayers, Mahomet declared that city to be the religious capital of Arabia. Though he had left Mecca in anger, he could not forget or ignore the city which held this place in his eyes. At first his thoughts of Mecca were those of vengeance; he had a score to settle with the Coreish, who had scorned and persecuted him, and had driven him forth. For several years there was war between Medina and the Coreish; the Moslems plundered the rich caravans of Mecca; in the great battle of Bedr (A.D. 623) Mahomet defeated his enemies and compelled them to respect and fear him; and they afterwards attacked and besieged him at Medina, with no decisive result. The next step was that Mahomet made use of the sacred month to attempt a pilgrimage to Mecca, from which he had been absent for six years (628); and though he was prevented from performing his devotions at the Caaba on this occasion, the Coreish found it good to make a treaty with him, thus recognising him as a potentate, and to promise that he should be allowed to make the pilgrimage on a future occasion. That pilgrimage took place; and so quickly was Mahomet's power increasing in the rest of Arabia that the Meccans began to feel that they could not long resist him. In the year 630 he moved against Mecca with a large army, and met with but faint opposition. Mecca fell into his hands. He used his victory n.o.bly: only four persons were put to death. It was at once shown that no injury was to be done to the city. The old wors.h.i.+p and its various ceremonies were preserved. All idols, of course, were destroyed, both those about the Caaba, of which there are said to have been one for each day in the year, and those in private houses.

Mecca made the Capital of Islam.--In fact Mecca gained new importance from this conquest. It was const.i.tuted by the irresistible power of Mahomet the central sanctuary of the true religion. A year after the victory Mahomet again visited Mecca, and performed the pilgrimage with all its rites in his own person, setting the correct pattern in every detail, which all pilgrims were to observe in all time coming.

Those who wish to know what the rites of Mecca are, will find them graphically and minutely described in Captain Burton's _Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca_; that gallant officer was one of the three Europeans who, during the nineteenth century, a.s.sumed the disguise of pilgrims and took part in the observances. The kissing of the sacred black stone in the wall of the Caaba, the sevenfold circuit of the building, the drinking of the water of the well Zem-zem, the race from one hill-top to another in the neighbourhood of Mecca, the throwing of seven stones at a certain spot, and the sacrifice of an animal in a certain valley--these form a collection of rites each of which had probably a separate origin, and of some of which the original meaning can scarcely be made out.[4] This "block of heathenism" Mahomet made part of his religion. He could not have abolished it, and by adopting it in an improved form as a part of his own system he served himself heir to the national religious traditions, and acquired for his own religion the authority of a national faith. "This day have I appointed your religion unto you,"

are his words after fixing the forms of the pilgrimage, "and applied Islam for you to be your religion." Islam adopts the Mecca rites, and thereby becomes the national religion of Arabia. Hubal, the chief G.o.d of the Caaba, disappears; Allah becomes the sole G.o.d of the shrine.

The legend that Abraham founded it is put in circulation, and it is thus connected with the supposed earliest Arabian religion, the religion before idolatry, the Islam before Islam. As Paul appeals to the faith of Abraham as being a Christianity before Christ, so Mahomet claims the Caaba for the pure wors.h.i.+p of Allah in primeval times. It is sacred henceforth to him alone. The rule was set up that no idolater should be admitted to the pilgrimage, and it thus lost its character as a heathen, and became instead a Moslem, inst.i.tution.

[Footnote 4: See for this Wellhausen's _Reste arabischen Heidenthums_, pp. 64-98.]

Spread of Islam.--Mecca once converted, the rest of Arabia could not long remain outside. There was reluctance in various places to make the change which Mahomet now required of all his countrymen. But the penalty of refusing it was the prophet's wrath, with its terrible attendants, war and rapine, and none of the Arabs cared enough for their old G.o.ds to brave such terrors for their sake. The inhabitants of Taif endeavoured to make terms, so that the change might be less abrupt. Their amba.s.sadors urged that fornication, usury, and the use of wine might be allowed them, but this could not be granted; the Taifites must accept the deprivations to which all the Moslems had agreed. Then they asked that their Rabba, their G.o.ddess, might be spared to them for three years, and as this was refused, for two years, a year, a month. But the only concession they could obtain was that they should not be obliged to destroy their G.o.ddess with their own hands. The ancient paganism, it will be seen, fell easily and without any tragedy.

Mahomet did not long survive the national acceptance of his religion; he died on 8th June 632. But he did not die without having opened up to his followers very wide views for the future of his cause, and started them on a career of religious war and conquest which was not soon to be arrested. From a comparatively early period of his career he had considered that Islam was destined to prevail not only in Arabia but in other lands. Starting with the idea that his revelation was only a later stage of that which had taken place in Judaism and Christianity, he had advanced to the position that these were false religions, and his own the only true one. Wherever he looked in the world he could see no true religion but his own; it must therefore take the place of all others. Accordingly he sent emba.s.sies from Medina to Heraclius the emperor of the East, to the king of Persia, to the governor of Egypt, and to other potentates, announcing himself to be the "Prophet of G.o.d," and calling upon them to give up their idolatrous wors.h.i.+ps and return to the religion of the one true G.o.d.

These emba.s.sies had small effect; but Mahomet was prepared to take much more forcible measures in order to spread the faith. War against infidels being one of the standing duties of the faithful, various regulations were laid down for the treatment of captives and the disposal of booty in such wars. G.o.d, who is said in every verse to be forgiving and merciful, encourages the faithful in such pa.s.sages to slay and rob, and to make concubines of women taken in sacred wars.

At the moment of his death an expedition, not the first, was ready to start against the Greek power. It is in this guise that Islam a.s.sumes the _role_ of a universal religion.

The Duties of the Moslem.--The missionary of Islam requires of his converts nothing very difficult either in the way of belief or in the way of action. His demands are brief and precise. They consist of the following five points:--1. The profession of belief in the unity of G.o.d and the mission of Mahomet. The formula runs: "There is no G.o.d but Allah, and Mahomet is the prophet of Allah." 2. Prayer. This consists of the repet.i.tion of a certain form of words at five separate times each day, the wors.h.i.+pper standing up with his face towards Mecca. The mosques are always open for prayer, and there is a special service on Friday, the day of the week chosen by Mahomet in contradistinction to the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. 3.

Almsgiving. This is done on a fixed scale, and the contributions were, in Mahomet's time, devoted to the support of war against infidels. 4. Fasting. This takes place during the month of Ramadan, and the fast is very strictly observed. 5. The Hagg or pilgrimage to Mecca.

The Koran is the sacred book of Islam. The name means "reading"; see above in this chapter. Like other sacred books, the Koran is arranged in such an order that he who reads it as it stands finds it very confused, and fails to grasp its historical meaning. The claim to divine inspiration is made in every chapter and every line of it; G.o.d himself is the speaker. But the divine oracles refer to very various matters. All sorts of legal decisions, military orders, injunctions about religious affairs, legends and speculations, have a place in it. Of prediction of the future, indeed, there is but one instance; the prophet disclaimed the power to work miracles, and held that no wonders beyond those of the splendid order of the universe are necessary to faith; and similarly he does not pose as a foreteller, but as an organ of the divine will for the present. As the ruler of a theocracy, the leader of armies, the judge in many a civil case, the guardian of the manners of the people, the officiating minister in public wors.h.i.+p, and, let it also be mentioned, the head of a very peculiar domestic establishment, he has a hundred matters of immediate concern to attend to; and when he has formed his decision on any of these matters, it takes its place in the Koran. The book thus produced is far from being an attractive one; even in the translation of Professor Palmer[5] it can afford pleasure to no reader. The translation, it is true, loses the poetry and music of the original, which are highly spoken of; but the main obstacle to reading the Koran is its want of arrangement. The earliest suras (chapters; literally courses of bricks) stand mostly towards the end of the collection; the long ones in the beginning and middle are later, and many of them are composite: two or several chapters have been joined into one. When read in their historical order, the suras can be read with pleasure by the student as showing the growth of the prophet's ideas and of his cause. The earliest ones are short, poetical, and intense. These are the suras which threw the prophet into such excitement and distress that his hair turned white. They are full of the wonders of G.o.d in nature and in history, of fiery denunciation of idolatry, and of fearful threatenings. In later pieces we come to long legends taken chiefly from the Jewish Haggadah and the Christian Apocrypha, in which the prophet displays much ignorance of the commonest facts of the Bible history; and as his power increases and his functions multiply, we come to the miscellaneous matters spoken of above. The style, at first poetic and exalted, becomes afterwards prosaic and diffuse; it is not the inspired seer who speaks, but the statesman or the judge; and the placing of these later utterances in the mouth of G.o.d could not deceive the original hearers. The Koran, like the Vedas and the Gathas and the Jewish Scriptures, was exalted in later stages of the religion to the highest conceivable honours; and one of the greatest controversies of Islam raged round the question whether it had existed from eternity and was uncreated.

[Footnote 5: _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. vi. and xi.]

Islam a Universal Religion.--What is most remarkable about Islam is the rapidity of its growth. Mahomet begins life a poor and lowly herdsman, and at his death bequeaths to his successors a kingdom which he has formed, and which is shortly to prevail over all its neighbours. In the same way his doctrine, confined at first to a small circle and bitterly opposed, becomes within half a century the faith of his nation, and not only of his nation, but of many other lands. Within that brief s.p.a.ce it has entered on the career of a national religion, and has also pa.s.sed beyond the national into the universal stage, at which only two other religions have arrived at all. The progress which Christianity took centuries to accomplish, Islam accomplished in so many decades. The t.i.tle of a universal religion cannot be denied to it. The truth which it declared--the doctrine of the unity and the omnipotence of G.o.d, and of the responsibility of every human being to his Creator and Judge--is one which does not belong to any particular race of men, but to all men.

The att.i.tude of soul which is called Islam--that of implicit surrender to the great G.o.d, of entire acquiescence in his decrees and entire obedience to his will--is good for all. All should be called to take an earnest view of their life and to realise their deep responsibilities; and the idea expressed by the t.i.tle given to G.o.d on every page of the Koran, "The Merciful and Compa.s.sionate," that G.o.d sympathises with the aspirations and efforts of his servants, and that they may look up to him with love as well as fear, is one which all can understand and feel helpful. Especially at the stage when the world is given up to idolatry, Islam may well rank as a universal religion; when each place has its idol, each nation its greater idols, religion divides instead of uniting, and the frivolous and senseless service of such petty deities prevents men from realising their solemn obligations to the great G.o.d before whom they are all alike, since he is the Governor and Judge of all. Islam is an admirable corrective of heathenism; it brings the scattered and bewildered wors.h.i.+ppers of idols together in one lofty faith and one simple rule.

The weakness of Islam is that it is not progressive. Its ideas are bald and poor; it grew too fast; its doctrines and forms were stereotyped at the very outset of its career, and do not admit of change. Its morality is that of the stage at which men emerge from idolatry, and does not advance beyond that stage, so that it perpetuates inst.i.tutions and customs which are a drag on civilisation. Mahomet's Paradise, in which the warrior is to be ministered to by beauteous houris (the number of whom is not mentioned), may not have been an immoral conception in his day; but it is so now, and apparently cannot be left behind. An admirable instrument for the discipline of populations at a low stage of culture, and well fitted to teach them a certain measure of self-restraint and piety, Islam cannot carry them on to the higher development of human life and thought. It is repressive of freedom, and the reason is that its doctrine is after all no more than negative. Allah is but a negation of other G.o.ds; there is no store of positive riches in his character, he does not sympathise with the manifold growth of human activity; the inspiration he affords is a negative inspiration, an impulse of hostility to what is over against him, not an impulse to strive after high and fair ideals. He remains eternally apart upon a frosty throne; his voice is heard, but he cannot condescend. He does not enter into humanity, and therefore cannot render to humanity the highest services.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_The Life of Mahomet_, by Sir W. Muir, 1858.

_Mohammed_, by Wellhausen, and "The Koran," by Noldeke, in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, vol. xvi.

The Preliminary Discourse prefixed to Sale's _Koran_; and Professor Palmer's Introduction in _S. B. E._, vol. vi.

_Islam_, by J. W. H. Stobart, in the "Non-Christian Religious Systems" Series of the S.P.C.K.

_Der Islam_, by Houtsma, in De la Saussaye.

Hughes, _A Dictionary of Islam_ (1885, 1896).

Sell, _The Faith of Islam_, Second Edition, 1896.

Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Speeches and Table-talk of Mohammad_, 1882; the most important parts of the Koran, chronologically arranged, with a very useful introduction.

Margoliouth. _Mohammed and the Rise of Islam_, 1905.

PART IV THE ARYAN GROUP

CHAPTER XIV THE ARYAN RELIGION

The science of language has placed it beyond dispute that the languages of the leading European peoples are genealogically related to each other, and that the languages of India and of Persia also belong to the same family of speech. The Indo-European languages, those, namely, of the higher race in India, and of the Persians, and those of the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Letts, and Albanians, approach each other always more nearly as they are traced upwards. Sanscrit is not the source of these tongues but an older sister of the group; the mother language, which the facts prove to have at one time existed, was a highly-inflected speech, and is perhaps more nearly represented by Lettic than by Sanscrit; but it can now be known only by a study of the common features of its surviving children.

The fact that the peoples named above are related to each other in point of language led at once, when it was discovered, to the conclusion that they were also of the same race, and must have come originally from the same quarter of the world. Where, then, was the early home of the undivided Aryan[1] race, from which the swarms first issued which were to conquer and rule the various lands? At first it was found in the East; the fact that Indian civilisation was much earlier in time than that of any other Aryan people, naturally suggested this. Professor Max Muller described in a very poetical way how the European as well as the Indian must find in the East the cradle of his race. From the high tableland of Asia, it was held, the superior races came who were to rule nearly the whole of Europe, while another migration descended towards Persia and the plains of India.

[Footnote 1: "Aryan" was the name of the conquering race of India.

The t.i.tle "Indo-European" tells us that the race now dwells in India and in Europe. "Indo-Germanic" describes the group by its Eastern, and what is supposed to be its princ.i.p.al Western, member.]

The theory, however, which placed the home of the Aryans on the inhospitable steppes, the "high Pamere," of Asia, did not long command a.s.sent; and attempts were made to place that home elsewhere, in the valley of the Danube, on the south sh.o.r.es of the Baltic, or even in the Scandinavian peninsula. The conquest, it is argued, cannot have come from the East; it is much more probable that Aryan speech and custom originated in the West, where it has the larger number of representatives, and that it spread eastward. The more extreme step has also been taken of denying that the Aryans are related to each other at all in point of race. Unity of language, it is argued, is no proof of unity of race--a glance over the British Empire or even the British Islands is enough to show this. It is maintained, therefore, that the relations.h.i.+p of the Aryan peoples is not one of race but only of language and of culture; the word Aryan denotes no more than a certain type of speech, and of accompanying civilisation, which spread over all the peoples in question at a very early time. Aryan language and civilisation laid hold of a number of races not otherwise related to each other.

The view, however, still prevails that the various lands where Aryan speech and culture prevail were settled from one centre. When society was in the nomadic stage, it may naturally be presumed that a superior civilisation which had established itself in any one quarter of the world would be carried by wandering hordes in various directions, and that the bearers of the new civilisation would become the conquerors and masters of the countries to which their wanderings led them. And there is now some agreement on the part of leading authorities as to the quarter of the world from which the migrations of the Aryans proceeded. In the Southern Steppes of Russia, in the great plains north of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea of Aral, there dwelt, we are told, in times far before the dawn of history, hordes rather than tribes of men, who, though they had originally spoken the same language, were coming to differ from each other in speech and culture. These hordes were peoples in the process of formation. It was natural to them to wander, and as each wandered farther from the centre, it came to differ more markedly from the common type. Some of these went southwards and eastwards to Persia and India; others went westward, to conquer and possess the countries of Europe.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_; Schrader and Jevons (Griffin, 1890). This is the English of Schrader's _Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_. Compare Dr. E. Meyer's _History of Antiquity_, vol. i. book vi. Dr. Isaac Taylor's _Origin of the Aryans_ gives a compendious account of the question, concluding against the unity of the Aryans in point of race.]

The Aryan question lies at the threshold of the history of each of the Aryan peoples, and has to be met in the study of each of the religions. It must be confessed that the world now knows less on this point than it thought it did a generation ago. The difference between the Semitic and the Aryan spirit is real and substantial, as will appear from the study of the Aryan religions, but it is more important as well as more possible to know these well in their individual character than to have a correct theory of their historical relation to each other. The student ought, however, to be informed as to the course of a deeply interesting enquiry.

The civilisation of the Aryans was primitive enough. The following is from Dr. Taylor:--

The undivided Aryans were a pastoral people, who wandered with their herds as the Hebrew patriarchs wandered in Canaan. Dogs, cattle, and sheep had been domesticated, but not the pig, the horse, the goat, or the a.s.s; and domestic poultry were unknown. The fibres of certain plants were plaited into mats, but wool was not woven, and the skins of beasts were sc.r.a.ped with stone knives, and sewed together into garments with sinews by the aid of needles of bone, wood, or stone.

Their food consisted of flesh and milk, which was not yet made into cheese or b.u.t.ter. Mead, prepared from the honey of wild bees, was the only intoxicating drink, both beer and wine being unknown. Salt was unknown to the Asiatic branch of the Aryans, but its use had spread rapidly among the European branches of the race. In winter they lived in pits dug in the earth and roofed over with poles covered with turf, or plastered with cow dung. In summer they lived in rude waggons or in huts made of the branches of trees. Of metals, native copper may have been beaten into ornaments, but tools and weapons were mostly of stone. Bows were made of the wood of the yew, ... trees were hollowed out for canoes by stone axes, aided by the use of fire.

According to Hehn, the old or sick were killed, wives were obtained by purchase or capture, infants were exposed or killed. After a time, with tillage, came the possession of property, and established custom grew slowly into law. Their religious ideas were based on magic and superst.i.tious terrors, the powers of nature had as yet a.s.sumed no anthropomorphic forms, the great name of Dyaus, which afterwards came to mean G.o.d, signified only the bright sky.

They counted on their fingers, but they had not attained to the idea of any number higher than one hundred.[3]

[Footnote 3: _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 188.]

These sketches of the early Aryan certainly attest more vigour than refinement; and it takes some effort to realise that those who lived in this way had already made much progress, and that these early arts and inst.i.tutions were full of promise. Savage as the early Aryan is, he is better than his neighbours, and has made a good start in the way of civilisation. His family arrangements, especially, are fitted to survive and to develop. The early domestic architecture of the Aryan countries, while it belongs to a much later period, yet gives good evidence that the patriarchal ideal of the family was part of the common inheritance. In every country they conquered the Aryans lived in large patriarchal households. The sons, with their wives and children, remained under their father's roof, the father being judge and priest of this domestic community. We can specify other features of the society connected with this type of household. As the family increases and becomes too large to dwell under one roof, another house is built, in which son or grandson, with his wife, founds a new family. Thus a group of families arises, all related to each other by blood, and in a position of equality, but looking to the original house as their centre. This type of society must have been carried to India by the Aryan invaders, who there set up patriarchal establishments in houses which are similar in arrangement to those of North Holland, of Iceland, or of early England. The men who lived in this way were not agriculturists, they were shepherds and huntsmen, and when they settled in a district they were wont to force the former dwellers in it to till the land for them as their inferiors.[4]

[Footnote 4: See two recent works by Mr. G. L. Gomme, _The Village Community_ and _Ethnology in Folklore_; also Hearn's _Aryan Household_.]

It is this type of civilisation which overspread the lands in early times, and by its coming created in most instances a new world. Some of the Aryan peoples made more rapid progress than others. They pa.s.sed early into the age of metals, and appear before us at the dawn of history with fully-formed inst.i.tutions, which bear the impress of patriarchal ideas. Others remained longer in the stone age, and only in historic times received the impulse which caused them to advance to the rank of nations. The arts and inventions which are found in many or in all of them are not necessarily a common inheritance from the undivided Aryan age. Many of them may have come into being in each of the lands independently, or one Aryan people may have borrowed them from another at a later time. Starting from the common stock of civilisation, the various races worked it out each in a way of its own, and often, as we shall see, with wonderful similarities.

Is it possible to give any description of the religion the Aryans had in common before they developed it in different ways in their various lands? We can no longer, following Mr. Max Muller, look to India to tell us what was the common Aryan religion. Indian religion, when we first become acquainted with it, has already grown into an elaborate priestly system, and is evidently at a much later stage of Aryan development than the rustic cults, with which we have a good deal of acquaintance, in various European lands. If, however, we cannot follow the great German scholar in this, we gladly use his words on another aspect of the subject, when he is showing the etymological ident.i.ty of the chief G.o.d of the Aryan peoples.

In his _Lectures on the Science of Language_, vol. ii. p. 468, he tells us that "Zeus, the most sacred name in Greek mythology, is the same word as Dyaus in Sanscrit, Jovis or Ju in Jupiter in Latin, Tiw in Anglo-Saxon, preserved in Tiwsdaeg, Tuesday, the day of the Eddic G.o.d Tyr; Zio in old High-German.

"This word was framed," he says, "once and once only; it was not borrowed by the Greeks from the Hindus, nor by the Romans and Germans from the Greeks. It must have existed before the ancestors of those primeval races became separate in language and religion; before they left their common pastures to migrate to the right hand and to the left.... Here, then, in this venerable word, we may look for some of the earliest religious thoughts of our race."[5]