Muhammad and Islam.

— Sometimes, concerning men and things, there are opinions that are believed and pass into the state of accepted facts, however erroneous they may be, because it is found easier to accept them already completely finished. Such is the case with Muhammad and his religion, of which almost only the legendary side is known. Moreover, the antagonism of beliefs, whether through party spirit or through ignorance, has striven to bring out the points most accessible to criticism, often intentionally leaving in the shadows the more favorable parts. As for the impartial and disinterested public, it must be said in its defense that the elements indispensable to judge for itself were lacking. The works that might have enlightened it, written in a language known only to a few scholars, were inaccessible to it; and since, in the final analysis, there was no direct interest for it, it believed on someone's word what was told to it, without asking further. From this it resulted that ideas often false or ridiculous, based on prejudices, which found no corrective in discussion, were formed about the founder of Islam. The persevering and conscientious labors of certain modern orientalist scholars, such as Caussin de Perceval, in France, Dr. W. Muir, in England, G. Weil and Sprenger, in Germany, today permit us to view the question in its true light. n Thanks to them, Muhammad appears to us entirely different from the popular tales. The considerable place that his religion occupies in Humanity and its political influence today make this study a necessity. For a long time the diversity of religions was one of the principal causes of antagonism among peoples. At the moment when they have a manifest tendency to draw closer together, making the barriers that separate them disappear, it is useful to know, in their beliefs, what may favor or retard the application of the great principle of universal fraternity. Of all religions, Islam is the one that, at first glance, seems to enclose the greatest obstacles to this rapprochement. From this point of view, as one sees, the subject could not be indifferent to Spiritists, which is why we have judged it our duty to treat it here. A religion is always poorly judged when one takes one's personal beliefs as the exclusive point of departure, because then it is difficult to justify a feeling of partiality in the appraisal of principles. To understand its strength and its weakness, one must view it from a more elevated point of view, embrace the whole of its causes and its effects. If we go back to the milieu in which it arose, we shall almost always find there, if not a complete justification, at least a reason for being. It is necessary, above all, to immerse oneself in the founder's initial thought and in the motives that guided him. Far from us the intention of absolving Muhammad of all his faults, nor his religion of all the errors that shock the most common good sense. But for the sake of truth we must say that it would also be little logical to judge that religion according to what fanaticism made of it, as it would be to judge Christianity according to the manner in which certain Christians practice it. It is quite certain that, if the Muslims followed in spirit the Koran, which the Prophet gave them as a guide, they would be, in many respects, entirely different from what they are. Yet that book, though so sacred to them, who touch it only with respect, who read and reread it ceaselessly, which the most fervent even know by heart, how many understand it? They comment on it, but from the point of view of preconceived ideas, from whose abandonment they would make a matter of conscience, seeing there, therefore, only what they want to see. Besides, the figurative language permits one to find there all that one wishes, and the priests, who there as elsewhere govern by blind faith, do not seek to discover what might embarrass them. It is not, then, from the doctors of the law that one should inquire into the spirit of the law of Muhammad. The Christians too have the Gospel, much more explicit than the Koran, as a code of morals, which does not prevent them from having, in the name of that same Gospel, which commands love even of enemies, tortured and burned thousands of victims, and from having made of a law wholly of charity a weapon of intolerance and persecution. Can one require that peoples still semi-barbarous make a juster interpretation of their sacred scriptures than civilized Christians do? To appreciate the work of Muhammad one must go back to its source, know the man and the people to whom he had been given the mission to regenerate, and only then does one understand that, for the milieu in which he lived, his religious code was a real progress. Let us first cast a glance over the region.

— In times immemorial Arabia was peopled by a multitude of tribes, almost all nomadic, and perpetually at war with one another, supplying by pillage the little wealth that a painful labor provided, under a scorching climate. The herds were their principal resources; some tribes engaged in commerce, which was carried on by caravans, departing annually from the South, to go to Syria or Mesopotamia. The center of this near-island being almost inaccessible, the caravans kept little distant from the coast; the principal ones followed the Hejaz, a region that forms, on the shores of the Red Sea, a narrow strip five hundred leagues in extent, separated from the center by a chain of mountains, a prolongation of those of Palestine. The Arabic word Hejaz means barrier and was said of the chain of mountains that flanks this region and separates it from the rest of Arabia. The Hejaz and Yemen to the south are the most fertile parts; the center is nothing but a vast desert. These tribes had established markets to which they came from all parts of Arabia; there common affairs were settled; the enemy tribes exchanged their prisoners of war and often decided their differences by arbitration. A singular thing, these populations, however barbarous they were, were passionate about poetry. In these places of gathering and during the intervals of leisure left by the cares of business, there was a contest among the most skillful poets of each tribe; the competition was judged by the bystanders, and for a tribe it was a great honor to win the victory. The poems of exceptional merit were transcribed in letters of gold and nailed on the sacred walls of the Kaaba, at Mecca, whence came to them the name of Moudhahbat, or golden poems.

Since, in order to go to these annual markets and to return from them in safety, a certain time was needed, there were four months of the year in which combats were forbidden and during which the caravans and travelers could not be disturbed. To fight during these reserved months was regarded as a sacrilege, which provoked the most terrible reprisals.

The stopping points of the caravans, which halted in the places where they found water and trees, became centers where, little by little, cities were formed, of which the two principal ones, in the Hejaz, are Mecca and Yathrib, today Medina.

Most of these tribes claimed to descend from Abraham, which is why this patriarch was held in great honor among them. Their language, by its relations with Hebrew, attested, in fact, to a community of origin between the Arab people and the Jewish people. But it seems no less certain that the south of Arabia had its native inhabitants.

Among these populations there was a belief, held as certain, that the famous spring of Zemzem, in the valley of Mecca, was the one that the angel Gabriel had caused to gush forth, when Hagar, lost in the desert, was about to perish of thirst with her son Ishmael. Tradition likewise related that Abraham, having come to see his exiled son, had built with his own hands, not far from this spring, the Kaaba, a square house, nine cubits in height by thirty-two in length and twenty-two in width. n This house, religiously preserved, became a place of great devotion, which they made a duty to visit and which was transformed into a temple. The caravans naturally halted there and the pilgrims took advantage of their company to travel with greater safety. It was thus that the pilgrimage to Mecca existed since times immemorial. Muhammad did nothing but consecrate and make obligatory an established custom. In doing so he had a political objective, which we shall see later. In one of the outer corners of the temple was embedded the famous black stone, brought from the heavens, they say, by the angel Gabriel, to mark the point where the circuits should begin in which the pilgrims were to go seven times around the Kaaba. They claim that, in the origin, this stone was of a dazzling whiteness, but that the touches of sinners blackened it. According to the travelers who have seen it, it is no more than six inches in height by eight in length. It would appear to be a simple piece of basalt, or perhaps an aerolite, which would explain its celestial origin, according to popular beliefs.

Built by Abraham, the Kaaba had no door to close it and was at ground level. Destroyed by the irruption of a torrent around the year 150 of the Christian era, it was rebuilt and raised above the ground, to shelter it from similar accidents. About fifty years later, a tribal chief of Yemen placed on it a covering of precious fabrics and put a door with a lock to secure the valuable offerings ceaselessly accumulated by the piety of the pilgrims.

The veneration of the Arabs for the Kaaba and the territory that surrounded it was so great that they had not dared to build dwellings there. This area so respected, called Haram, comprised the whole valley of Mecca, whose circumference is about fifteen leagues. The honor of guarding this venerated temple was much coveted; the tribes disputed it and most often this attribution was a right of conquest. In the fifth century, Cossayy, chief of the tribe of the Coraicites, the fifth ancestor of Muhammad, having become master of the Haram and having been invested with the civil and religious power, had his palace built beside the Kaaba, permitting those of his tribe to establish themselves there. Thus was founded the city of Mecca. He seems to have been the first to place a wooden covering on the Kaaba. The Kaaba is today within the area of a mosque, and Mecca is a city of approximately forty thousand inhabitants, after having had, it is said, a hundred thousand.

— In the beginning, the religion of the Arabs consisted in the adoration of a single God, to whose will man must submit himself completely. This religion, which was that of Abraham, was called Islam and those who professed it called themselves Muslims, that is, submissive to the will of God. But, little by little pure Islam degenerated into gross idolatry; each tribe had its gods and its idols, which it defended with exaggeration by arms, to prove the superiority of its power. Often these were, among others, the causes or the pretext of long and bitter wars.

The faith of Abraham, despite the respect they preserved for his memory, had disappeared among these peoples, or at least had been so disfigured that in reality it no longer existed. The veneration for objects considered sacred had fallen into the most absurd fetishism; the cult of matter had replaced that of spirit; a supernatural power was attributed to the most common objects consecrated by superstition, to an image, to a statue. Thought having abandoned the principle for its symbol, piety was nothing but a series of minute exterior practices, of which the least infraction was regarded as a sacrilege.

Nevertheless, there were still found in certain tribes some worshipers of the single God, pious men who practiced the most entire submission to his supreme will and rejected the cult of idols; they were called Hanyfs. They were the true Muslims, those who had preserved the pure faith of Islam; but they were few in number and without influence over the spirit of the masses. For a long time Jewish colonies had established themselves in the Hejaz and had won a certain number of proselytes to Judaism, principally among the Hanyfs. Christianity too had there its representatives and propagators in the first centuries of our era, but neither one nor the other of these two beliefs produced there deep and durable roots. Idolatry had become the dominant religion; it suited better, by its diversity, the turbulent independence and the infinite division of the tribes, which practiced it with the most violent fanaticism. To triumph over this religious and political anarchy, there was needed a man of genius, capable of imposing himself by his energy and firmness, skillful enough to share in the customs and the character of these peoples, and whose mission was revealed to their eyes by the prestige of his qualities as a prophet. This man was Muhammad.

— Muhammad was born in Mecca on the 27th of August of the year 570 A.D., in the year called of the elephant. He was not, as is commonly believed, an obscure man. On the contrary, he belonged to a powerful and esteemed family of the tribe of the Coraicites, one of the most important in Arabia, and the one that then dominated in Mecca. They make him descend in a direct line from Ishmael, son of Abraham and of Hagar. His last ancestors, Cossayy, Abd-Menab, Hachim and Abd-el-Moutalib, his grandfather, had distinguished themselves by eminent qualities and high functions that they had filled. His mother, Amina, was of a noble Coraicite family and descended also from Cossayy. His father Abd-Allah having died two months before his birth, he was raised with much tenderness by his mother, who left him an orphan at the age of six years; then by his grandfather Abd-el-Moutalib, who became greatly attached to him and often took pleasure in predicting high destinies for him, but who, himself, died two years later. Notwithstanding the position that his family had occupied, Muhammad passed his childhood and his youth in a state bordering on misery; his mother had left him as his whole inheritance a flock of sheep, five camels and a faithful black slave woman, who had cared for him and for whom he always preserved a lively attachment. After the death of his grandfather, he was taken in by his uncles, whose herds he tended until the age of twenty years; he also accompanied them in their warlike expeditions against other tribes; but, being of a gentle and peaceful humor, he took no active part in them, without, however, fleeing or fearing danger, limiting himself to going to gather their arrows. When he reached the apogee of glory, he liked to recall that Moses and David, both prophets, had been shepherds like him.

He had a meditative and dreamy spirit; his character, of a precocious solidity and maturity, allied to an extreme rectitude, a perfect disinterestedness and irreproachable morals, won him such confidence on the part of his companions that they designated him by the surname of El Amin, “the sure man, the faithful man.” And, although young and poor, they summoned him to the assemblies of the tribe for the most important affairs. He was part of an association formed among the principal Coraicite families, with a view to preventing the disorders of war, protecting the weak and rendering them justice. He prided himself on having contributed to it and, in the last years of his life, he always saw himself bound by the oath that, in this sense, he had taken in his youth. He said that he was ready to answer the appeal that the most obscure man might make to him in the name of that oath, and that he would not, for the most beautiful camels of Arabia, fail in the faith he had sworn. By this oath the associates swore, before an avenging divinity, that they would take up the defense of the oppressed and would fight for the punishment of the guilty as long as there was a drop of water in the ocean. As for the physical, Muhammad was strongly constituted and of a stature a little above average; the head very large; the physiognomy, marked with a gentle gravity, was agreeable without being beautiful and breathed calm and tranquility.

At the age of twenty-five years he married his cousin Cadija, a rich widow, at least fifteen years older than he, whose confidence he had won by the intelligent probity that he had developed in the conduct of one of her caravans. She was a superior woman. This union, which lasted twenty-four years and ended only by the death of Cadija, at sixty-four years, was constantly happy. Muhammad was then forty-nine years old and this loss caused him profound grief.

After the death of Cadija his morals changed. He took several wives; he had twelve or thirteen in legitimate marriages and, on dying, left nine widows. Incontestably this was a capital error, whose lamentable consequences we shall see later.

— Until the age of forty his peaceful life offers nothing extraordinary. Only one fact drew him for an instant out of obscurity; he was then thirty-five years old. The Coraicites resolved to rebuild the Kaaba, which threatened to collapse. Only with much effort were the contentions raised by the rivalry of the families that wished to participate in it appeased, by the apportionment of the works. These conflicts resurged with extreme violence when it came to replacing the famous black stone. No one wished to yield his right, the works had been interrupted and on all sides they ran to arms. On the proposal of the eldest they agreed to accept the decision of the first person who should enter the hall of deliberations: it was Muhammad. As soon as they saw him, everyone cried: “El Amin! El Amin! the sure and faithful man.” And they awaited his judgment. By his presence of mind he resolved the difficulty. Having thrown his mantle on the ground, he placed the stone on it and asked four of the principal factious chiefs to take it, each one by a corner, and to lift it, all together, to the height that the stone was to occupy, that is, four or five feet above the ground. Then he took it and placed it with his own hands. The bystanders declared themselves satisfied and peace was reestablished.

— Muhammad liked to walk alone in the surroundings of Mecca and, annually, during the sacred months of truce, he withdrew to Mount Hira, in a narrow grotto, where he gave himself over to meditation. He was forty years old when, in one of his retreats, he had a vision during sleep. The angel Gabriel appeared to him, showing him a book and ordering him to read it. Three times Muhammad resisted this order, and only to escape the constraint exercised upon him did he consent to read it. On awakening he said he had felt “that a book had been written in his heart.” The sense of this expression is evident; it means that he had had the inspiration of a book. Later, however, it was taken literally, as often happens with things said in figurative language.

Another fact proves to what errors of interpretation ignorance and fanaticism can lead. Somewhere in the Koran Muhammad says: “Have we not opened thy heart and taken the burden from thy shoulders?” These words, connected with an accident that happened to Muhammad when he was a child, gave rise to the fable, believed among the faithful and taught by the priests as a miraculous fact, that two angels opened the belly of the boy and took from his heart a black spot, sign of original sin. Should one accuse Muhammad for these absurdities, or those who did not understand him? The same occurs with an immensity of ridiculous tales, on which they accuse him of having founded his religion. This is why we do not hesitate to say that an enlightened and impartial Christian is in better conditions to give a sound interpretation of the Koran than a fanatical Muslim.

Be that as it may, Muhammad was profoundly troubled by his vision, which he hastened to recount to his wife. Having returned to Mount Hira, in the grip of the most lively agitation, he believed himself possessed by malignant Spirits and, to escape the evil he feared, he was about to hurl himself from the top of a rock, when a voice, coming from heaven, made itself heard and said to him: “O Muhammad! thou art the messenger of God; I am the angel Gabriel.” Then, raising his eyes, he saw the angel under a human form, disappearing, little by little, on the horizon. This new vision did nothing but increase his trouble; he communicated it to Cadija, who endeavored to calm him; but, little sure of herself, she went to seek her cousin Varaka, an old man famed for his wisdom and converted to Christianity, who said to her: “If what thou hast just told me is true, thy husband was visited by the great Nâmous, who formerly visited Moses; he will be the prophet of this people. Announce it to him, and let him be tranquil.” Some time afterward Varaka, having met Muhammad, made him recount his visions and repeat to him the words he had said to his wife, adding: “They will treat thee as an impostor; they will expel thee; they will combat thee violently. May I be able to live until that hour to assist thee in that struggle!” What results from this and from many other facts is that the mission of Muhammad was not a premeditated calculation on his part; it was confirmed by others, but it was not yet so by himself; he was a long time persuading himself of it; but once he was, he took it very seriously. To convince himself, he desired a new apparition of the angel which, according to some, was delayed two years and, according to others, six months. It is to this interval of uncertainty and hesitation that the Muslims give the name of the fitreh. During all this time his spirit was a prey to perplexities and to the most lively fears. It seemed to him that he was going to lose his reason, and that was also the opinion of some who surrounded him. He was subject to faintings and syncopes, which modern authors have attributed, without other proofs than their personal opinion, to attacks of epilepsy, and which rather might be the effect of an ecstatic, cataleptic or spontaneous somnambulic state. In these moments of extra-corporeal lucidity, there were often produced, as is known, strange phenomena, of which Spiritism gives a perfect account. In the eyes of certain people, he must have passed for mad; others saw in these phenomena, singular to them, something supernatural, which placed the man above Humanity. “When one admits the action of Providence in human affairs,” says M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, “one cannot but find it, also, in those dominating intelligences that appear at long intervals to enlighten and lead the rest of men.”

— The Koran is not a work written by Muhammad, with a cool head and in a continuous manner, but the summary made by his friends of the words he pronounced when he was inspired. In these moments, of which he was not master, he fell into an extraordinary and very frightening state; the sweat ran from his brow; his eyes became red with blood, he uttered groans and, most often, the crisis ended with a syncope that lasted more or less time, which sometimes happened to him in the midst of the crowd, and even when mounted on his camel, as much as at home. The inspiration was irregular and instantaneous, and he could not foresee the moment in which he would be overcome.

According to what we know today of this state from a multitude of analogous examples, it is probable that, especially in the beginning, he had no consciousness of what he said, and that if his words had not been gathered, they would have remained lost; later, however, when he took seriously his role of reformer, it is evident that he spoke more with knowledge of the matter and mingled with the inspirations the product of his own thoughts, according to the places and the circumstances, the passions or the sentiments that agitated him, with a view to the objective he wished to attain, believing, perhaps in good faith, to speak in the name of God.

These isolated fragments, gathered at various epochs, numbering 114, form in the Koran as many chapters called suras; they remained scattered during his life, and only after his death were they officially reunited into a body of doctrine, through the cares of Abu-Becr and of Omar. From these sudden inspirations, gathered as they occurred, there resulted an absolute lack of order and of method; the most disparate subjects are treated there at random, often in the same sura, and present such confusion and so numerous repetitions that a continuous reading is painful and tedious for anyone who is not a believer.

— According to the common belief, made an article of faith, the pages of the Koran were written in heaven and brought ready to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, because in one passage it is said: “Thy Lord is powerful and merciful, and the Koran is a revelation of the Lord of the Universe. The faithful Spirit (the angel Gabriel) brought it down from on High and deposited it in thy heart, O Muhammad, that thou mightest be an apostle.” Muhammad expresses himself in the same manner in relation to the book of Moses and to the Gospel; he says (sura III, verse 2): “He sent down from on High the Pentateuch and the Gospel, to serve as direction to men,” meaning thereby that these two books had been inspired by God to Moses and to Jesus, as he had inspired the Koran to him.

His first preachings were secret during two years, and in this interval he attached to himself a hundred or so adherents among the members of his family and his friends. The first converts to the new faith were Cadija, his wife; Ali, his adopted son, of ten years; Zeid, Varaka and Abu-Becr, his most intimate friend, who was to be his successor. He was forty-two years old when he began to preach publicly and from that moment the prediction that Varaka had made to him was realized. His religion, founded on the unity of God and on the reform of certain abuses, being the ruin of idolatry and of those who lived by it, the Coraicites, guardians of the Kaaba and of the national cult, rose up against him. At first they treated him as mad; then they accused him of sacrilege; they incited the people; they persecuted him and the persecution became so violent that, twice, his partisans had to seek refuge in Abyssinia. Meanwhile, to the outrages he always opposed calm, cold blood and moderation. His sect grew and his adversaries, seeing that they could not reduce it by force, resolved to discredit it by calumny. Mockery and ridicule were not spared him. As has been seen, poets were numerous among the Arabs; they wielded satire skillfully and their verses were read with avidity; it was the means employed by ill-intentioned criticism and they did not fail to employ it against him. As he resisted everything, his enemies, at last, had recourse to plots to kill him and he escaped only by flight the danger that threatened him. It was then that he took refuge in Yathrib, afterward called Medina (Medinet-en-Nabi, city of the Prophet), in the year 622, and it is from this epoch that the Hegira, or era of the Muslims, dates. He had sent in advance, to this city, in small troops so as not to provoke suspicions, all his partisans from Mecca, withdrawing last, with Abu-Becr and Ali, his most devoted disciples, when he learned that the others were in safety. From this epoch dates also for Muhammad a new phase in his existence; from the simple prophet that he was, he was constrained to make himself a warrior.

(Continued in the next number.)

[1] M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, of the Institute, summarized these labors in an interesting work, entitled: Muhammad and the Koran. 1 vol. In-12. —Price: 3 fr. 50 c. Didier Bookshop.

[2] The cubit equals about 45 centimeters. It is one of the most ancient natural measures, which had as its base the distance between the elbow and the extremity of the fingers.