MOHAMMED

T1he man whose energy gave clear and practical expression to the obscure impulse towards a purer religion arose amidst the worldly-wise Koreish. Flouted at first by his sober-minded fellow tribesmen, he gradually won the victory for his faith, and died the temporal and spiritual ruler of Arabia. To the very combination of qualities to some extent contradictory in his character, he owed his success with such a race as this. He firmly believed in his mission and was unscrupulous in his choice of means; he was a cataleptic visionary, and a great statesman; steadfast in his fundamental convictions and often weak and vacillating in details, he had great practical sagacity and was incapable of keen logical abstraction; he had a bias towards asceticism and a temperament strongly sensuous.

2We not only have the fullest accounts of Mohammed’s whole character, but we possess his authentic work, the _Koran_, which he preached in the name of his God; and yet the extraordinary, attractive, and repulsive man remains in many respects an enigma. He had come across much of Judaism and Christianity, but by verbal report only. For though it remains an open question whether Mohammed was actually ignorant of reading and writing, it is certain that he had neither read the Bible nor any other books. The persons from whom he gathered his information concerning the older monotheistic religions must have been somewhat unlettered folk. This holds good of his Christian instructors more particularly.

3Certain Judæo-Christian ideas, however, had early laid powerful hold upon him; resurrection, judgment, heaven and hell, strict monotheism and the vanity and culpability of all forms of idolatry. Feeling in himself the divine call, he uttered the thought that possessed him as the word of God; that which the prophets of Israel had done in exceptional cases became with him the set form of his teaching. We may be but ill pleased with the grossness of imagination, the lack of logic, the undeniable poverty of thought, and much besides in the _Koran_, but this was not the effect it wrought upon his hearers, especially when once their attention had been riveted.

4It was all new to them, they were thrilled with terror and delight by those gross representations of hell and heaven, to these naïve people the weakness of the reasoning was not apparent, while the strenuousness of assertion took full effect. Moreover they heard only scattered fragments at a time. The revelation of the _Koran_ was accomplished gradually, it extended over a period of more than twenty years, and thus the monotony that repels us was not realised.

5But, as has already been said, Mohammed met with small success in his native town, although he was joined by some of the best and most earnest-minded men, like Saad ben Abi Wakkas and Omar. It was not until he took a step unprecedented among the Arabs, and, abandoning his own tribe, migrated with his handful of Meccan followers to dwell among the inhabitants of Yathreb, that he gained a firm footing. The latter, palm-dressers and husbandmen, were a vigorous race, but not intellectually equal to the Koreish. They had given proof of their valour chiefly by perpetual civil broils between the two clans of which they consisted. Through their Jewish neighbours they were at least superficially acquainted with many of the religious ideas with which Mohammed was occupied. The prophet soon gained a large following among them. He established peace within their borders, they recognised him (though not without some exceptions) as their leader, and together with the companions of his wanderings constituted at first the bulk and afterwards the flower of his army.

6Mohammed conquered the Meccans mainly by paralysing their caravan trade. When, in the eighth year after his departure from his native town, he made his triumphal entry into it once more, it needed only one great encounter with certain Bedouin tribes to bring the whole of Arabia to his feet and to his faith. If the Bedouins had concluded binding alliances against him in defence of the religious usages of their forefathers and (what was still more important to them) their own independence, he would have laboured in vain; but the inability of the pure Arab to unite for common action and act under discipline, even for the attainment of great ends, made it possible for him to bring one tribe after another over to his side by force or friendly means.

7He even contrived to turn to practical account the old connection between his family and the tent-dwelling Choza’a in the neighbourhood of Mecca. He retained old customs wherever it was possible so to do, instinctively rather than by deliberate intention. Thus even the greater part of the heathen worship of Mecca was adapted in externals to monotheism and incorporated _bona fide_ into Islam. The first important successes, especially the battle of Bedr (a great battle according to Arab notions), in which the men of Mecca lost about seventy dead and seventy wounded, made a deep and immediate impression: success is the test of proselytisers.

8The costly presents which Mohammed gave out of his spoils to such distinguished men as had not at once become converts at heart also wrought effectively; in most cases a genuine conversion followed in time. One fact (among others), by which we can estimate the striking impression the prophet produced upon the Arabs, is that as each tribe submitted or adopted his religion it renounced the right of retaliation for the blood shed in the struggle. Under other circumstances this renunciation of blood-revenge, or of wergild at least, would have seemed to the Arab the lowest depth of humiliation. But hard as it might be for the Arabs in general to acknowledge the prophet as their lord, there was at that time no pagan who would have fought in earnest for his religion.

9At the utmost, an old woman here and there raised a clamour when Mohammed destroyed her idols. Compare this with the fashion in which other Semites fought for their faith, in which the Arabs themselves afterwards fought for Islam. Hence, it is evident that, as has been said, the Arabs of that period had outgrown their religion.