Mahomet - Gladys M. Draycott
MAHOMET
FOUNDER OF ISLAM
BY G. M. DRAYCOTT
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. MAHOMET'S BIRTHPLACE
II. CHILDHOOD
III. STRIFE AND MEDITATION
IV. ADVENTURE AND SECURITY
V. INSPIRATION
VI. SEVERANCE
VII. THE CHOSEN CITY
VIII. THE FLIGHT TO MEDINA
IX. THE CONSOLIDATION OF POWER
X. THE SECESSION OF THE JEWS
XI. THE BATTLE OF BEDR
XII. THE JEWS AT MEDINA
XIII. THE BATTLE OF OHOD
XIV. THE TYRANNY OF WAR
XV. THE WAR OF THE DITCH
XVI. THE PILGRIMAGE TO HODEIBIA
XVII. THE FULFILLED PILGRIMAGE
XVIII. THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY
XIX. MAHOMET, VICTOR
XX. ICONOCLASM
XXI. LAST RITES
XXII. THE GENESIS OF ISLAM
INDEX
"Il estimait sincerement la force.... Jetee dans le monde, son
ame se trouva a la mesure du monde et l'embrassa tout.... C'est
l'etat prodigieux des hommes d'action. Ils sont tout entiers dans la
moment qu'ils vivent et leur genie se ramasse sur un point."
ANATOLE FRANCE
MAHOMET
INTRODUCTION
The impetus that gave victory to Islam is spent. Since its material
prosperity overwhelmed its spiritual ascendancy in the first years of
triumph its vitality has waned under the stress of riches, then beneath
lassitude and the slow decrease of power. The Prophet Mahomet is at once
the glory and bane of his people, the source of their strength and the
mainspring of their weakness. He represents more effectively than any
other religious teacher the sum of his followers' spiritual and worldly
ideas. His position in religion and philosophy is substantially the
position of all his followers; none have progressed beyond the primary
thesis he gave to the Arabian world at the close of his career.
He closes a long line of semi-divine teachers and monitors. After him the
curtains of heaven close, and its glory is veiled from men's eyes. He is
the last great man who imposed enthusiasm for an idea upon countless
numbers of his fellow-creatures, so that whole tribes fought and died at
his bidding, and at the command of God through him. Now that the vital
history of Islam has been written, some decision as to the position and
achievements of its founder may be formulated.
Mahomet conceived the office of Prophet to be the result of an
irresistible divine call. Verily the angel Gabriel appeared to him,
commanding him to "arise and warn." He was the vehicle through whom the
will of Allah was revealed. The inspired character of his rule was the
prime factor in its prevailing; by virtue of his heavenly authority he
exercised his sway over the religious actions of his followers, their
aspirations and their beliefs. In order to promulgate the divine
ordinances the Kuran was sent down, inspired directly by the angel
Gabriel at the bidding of the Lord. Upon all matters of belief and upon
all other matters dealt with, however cursorily, in the Kuran Mahomet
spoke with the power of God Himself; upon matters not within the scope of
religion or of the Sacred Book he was only a human and fallible
counsellor.
"I am no more than man; when I order you anything with respect to
religion, receive it, and when I order you about the affairs of the
world, then am I nothing more than man."
There is no question of his equality with the Godhead, or even of his
sharing any part of the divine nature. He is simply the instrument,
endowed with a power and authority outside himself, a man who possesses
one cardinal thesis which all those within his faith must accept.
The idea which represents at once the scope of his teaching and the
source of his triumphs is the unity and indivisibility of the Godhead.
This is the sole contribution he has made to the progressive thought of
the world. Though he came later in time than the culture of Greece and
Rome, he never knew their philosophies or the sum of their knowledge. His
religion could never he built upon such basic strength as Christianity.
It sprang too rapidly into prominence, and had no foundation of slowly
developed ideas upon which to rest both its enthusiasm and its earthly
endeavour.
Mahomet bears closer resemblance to the ancient Hebrew prophets than to
any Christian leader or saint. His mind was akin to theirs in its
denunciatory fury, its prostration before the might and majesty
of a single God. The evolution of the tribal deity from the local
wonderworker, whose shrine enclosed his image, to the impersonal and
distant but awful power who held the earth beneath his sway, was
Mahomet's contribution to the mental development of his country, and the
achievement within those confines was wonderful. But to the sum of the
world's thought he gave little. His central tenet had already gained its
votaries in other lands, and, moreover, their form of belief in one God
was such that further development of thought was still possible to them.
The philosophy of Islam blocks the way of evolution for itself, because
its system leaves no room for such pregnant ideas as divine incarnation,
divine immanence, the fatherhood of God. It has been content to formulate
one article of faith: "There is no God but God," the corollary as to
Mahomet's divine appointment to the office of Prophet being merely an
affirmation of loyalty to the particular mode of faith he imposed.
Therefore the part taken by Islam in the reading of the world's
mystery ceased with the acceptance of that previously conceived central
tenet.
In the sphere of ideas, indeed, Mahomet gave his people nothing original,
for his power did not lie in intellect, but in action. His mind had not
passed the stage that has just exchanged many fetishes for one spiritual
God, still to be propitiated, not alone by sacrifices, but by prayers,
ceremonies, and praise. In the world of action lay the strength of Islam
and the genius of its founder; it is therefore in the impress it made
upon events and not in its theology and philosophy that its secret is to
be found. But besides the acceptance of one God as Lord, Islam forced
upon its devotees a still more potent idea, whose influence is felt both
in the spheres of thought and action.
As an outcome of its political and military needs Mahomet created and
established its unassailable belief in fatality--not the fatalism
of cause and effect, bearing within itself the essence of a reason too
vast for humanity to comprehend, but the fatalism of an omnipotent and
capricious power inherent in the Mahomedan conception of God. With this
mighty and irresponsible being nothing can prevail. Before every event
the result of it is irrevocably decreed. Mankind can alter no tiniest
detail of his destined lot. The idea corresponds with Mahomet's vision of
God--an awful, incomprehensible deity, who dwells perpetually in the
terrors of earth, not in its gentleness and compassion. The doctrine of
fatalism proved Islam's greatest asset during its first hard years of
struggle, for it gave to its battlefields the glory of God's
surveillance: "Death is a favour to a Muslim." But with prosperity and
conquest came inaction; then fatalism, out of the weakening of endurance,
created the pessimism of Islam's later years. Being philosophically
uncreative, it descended into the sloth of those who believe, without
exercise of reason or will, in the uselessness of effort.
Before Islam decayed into inertia it had experienced a fierce and flaming
life. The impulse bestowed upon it by its founder operated chiefly in the
religious world, and indirectly in the realm of political and military
power. How far the religion of Islam is indebted to Mahomet's knowledge
of the Jewish and Christian systems becomes clear upon a study of the
Kuran and the Muslim institutions. That Mahomet was familiar with Jewish
Scriptures and tradition is beyond doubt.
The middle portion of the Kuran is filled to the point of weariness with
reiterations of Jewish legend and hero-myths. It is evident that Mahomet
took the God of the Jews to be his own deity, combining in his conception
also the traditional connection of Jehovah and His Chosen People with the
ancient faith and ceremonies of Mecca, purged of their idolatries. From
the Jews he took his belief in the might and terror of the Lord and the
admonitory character of his mission. From them also he took the
separatist nature of his creed. The Jewish teachers postulated a religion
distinct from every other belief, self-sufficient, owning no interpreter
save the Law and the Scriptures. Mahomet conceived himself also as the
sole vehicle during his lifetime and after his death for the commands of
the Most High. He aimed at the superseding of Rabbinical power, and hoped
to win the Jews into recognition of himself as successor to their own
teachers and prophets.
But his claims were met by an unyielding reliance upon the completed Law.
If the Jewish religion had rejected a Redeemer from among its own people,
it was impossible that it should accept a leader from an alien and
despised race. Mahomet, finding coalition impossible, gave free play to
his separatist instinct, so that in this respect, and also in its
fundamental conception of the deity, as well as in its reliance upon
inspired Scriptures and oral traditions, Mahomedanism approximates to the
Jewish system. It misses the influence of an immemorial history, and
receives no help in its campaign of warfare from the traditional glories
of long lines of warrior kings. Chief of all, it lacks the inspiration of
the matchless Jewish Scriptures and Sacred Books, depending for
instruction upon a document confined to the revelation of one man's
personality and view of life.
Still the narrowness of the Mahomedan system provoked its power; its
rapid rush to the heights Of dominion was born of the straitening of its
impulse into the channel of conquest and the forcible imposition of its
faith.
Of Christianity Mahomet knew far less than of Judaism. He went to the
Christian doctrines as they were known in heterodox Syria, far off from
the main stream of Christian life and teaching. He went to them with a
prejudiced mind, full of anger against their exponents for declaring the
Messiah to be the Son of God. The whole idea of the Incarnation and the
dogma of the Trinity were thoroughly abhorrent to him, and the only
conception he entertains as to the personality of Jesus is that of a
Prophet even as he is himself, the receiver of divine inspiration, but
having no connection in essence with God, whom he conceived pre-eminently
as the one supreme Being, indivisible in nature. Certainly he knew far
less of the Christian than of the Jewish Scriptures, and necessarily less
of the inner meaning of the Christian faith, still in fluid state,
unconsidered of its profoundest future exponents. His mind was assuredly
not attuned to the reception of its more revolutionary ideas. Very little
compassion and no tenderness breathe from the pages of the Kuran, and
from a religion whose Founder had laboured to bring just those two
elements into the thorny ways of the world, Mahomet could only turn away
baffled and uncomprehending. The doctrine of the non-resistance to evil,
and indeed all the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount, he passed by
unseeing.
It is useless and indeed unfair to attempt the comparison of Mahomedanism
with Christianity, seeing that without the preliminary culture of Greece
and Rome modern Christian doctrines would not exist in their present
form, and of the former Mahomet had no cognisance. He stands altogether
apart from the Christian system, finding no affinity in its doctrines or
practices, scorning its monasticism no less than its conception of the
Trinity. His position in history lies between the warriors and the
saints, at the head of the Prophets, who went, flail in hand, to summon
to repentance, but unlike the generality, bearing also the sword and
sceptre of a kingdom.
No other religious leader has ever bound his creed so closely to definite
political conceptions, Mahomet was not only the instrument of divine
revelation, but he was also at the end of his life the head of a temporal
state with minutest laws and regulations--chaotic it may be, but still
binding so that Islamic influence extended over the whole of the lives of
its adherents. This constitutes its strength. Its leader swayed not only
the convictions but the activities of his subjects.
His position with regard to the political institution of other countries
is unique. His temporal power grew almost in spite of himself, and he
unconsciously adopted ideas in connection with it which arose out of the
circumstances involved. Any form of government except despotism was
impossible among so heterogeneous and unruly a people; despotism also
bore out his own idea as to the nature of God's governance. Political
ideas were largely built upon religious conceptions, sometimes
outstripping, sometimes lagging behind them, but always with some
irrefragable connection. Despotism, therefore, was the form best suited
to Islam, and becomes its chief legacy to posterity, since without the
religious sanction Islam politically could not exist.
Together with despotism and inextricably mingled with it is the second
great Islamic enthusiasm--the belief in the supremacy of force. With
violence the Muslim kingdom was to be attained. Mahomet gave to the
battle lust of Arabia the approval of his puissant deity, bidding his
followers put their supreme faith in the arbitrament of the sword. He
knew, too, the value of diplomacy and the use of well-calculated
treachery, but chief of all he bade his followers arm themselves to seize
by force what they could not obtain by cunning. In the insistence upon
these two factors, complete obedience to his will as the revelation of
Allah's decrees and the justification of violence to proclaim the merits
of his faith, we gain the nearest approach to his character and beliefs;
for these, together with his conception of fate, are perhaps the most
personal of all his institutions.
Mahomet has suffered not a little at the hands of his immediate successors.
They have sought to record the full sum of his personality, and finding
the subject elude them, as the translation of actions into words must
ever fall short of finality, they have overloaded their narrative with
minutest and almost always apocryphal details which leave the main
outlines blurred. Only two biographies can be said to be in the nature
of sources, that of Muhammad ibn Hischam, written on the model of
an earlier biography, undertaken about 760 for the Abbasside Caliph
Mansur, and of Wakidi, written about 820, which is important as
containing the text of many treaties made by Mahomet with various tribes.
Al-Tabari, too, included the life of Mahomet in his extensive history of
Arabia, but his work serves only as a check, consisting, as it
does, mainly of extracts from Wakidi. By far the more valuable is the
Kuran and the Sunna of tradition. But even these are fragmentary and
confused, bearing upon them the ineradicable stamp of alien writers and
much second-hand thought.
In the dim, pregnant dawn of religions, by the transfusing power of a
great idea, seized upon and made living by a single personality, the
world of imagination mingles with the world of fact as we perceive it.
The real is felt to be merely the frail shell of forces more powerful and
permanent. Legend and myth crowd in upon actual life as imperfect
vehicles for the compelling demand made by that new idea for expression.
Moreover, personality, that subtle essence, exercises a kind of
centripetal force, attracting not only the devotion but the imaginations
of those who come within its influence.
Mahomet, together with all the men of action in history, possessed an
energy of will so vast as to bring forth the creative faculties of his
adherents, and the legends that cluster round him have a special
significance as the measure of his personality and influence. The
story, for instance, of his midnight journey into the seven heavens
is the symbol of an intense spiritual experience that, following the
mental temper of the age in which he lived, had to be translated into
the concrete. All the affirmations as to his intercourse with Djinn,
his inspiration by the angel Gabriel, are inherent factors in the
manifestation of his ceaseless mental activity. His marvellous birth and
the myths of his childhood are the sum of his followers' devotion, and
reveal their reverence translated into terms of the imagination.
Character was the mysterious force that his co-religionists tried
unconsciously to portray in all those legends relative to his life at
Medina, his ruthlessness and cruelty finding a place no less than his
humility, and steadfastness under discouragement.
But beneath the weight of the marvellous the real man is almost buried.
He has stood for so long with the mists of obscure imaginings about him
that his true lineaments are almost impossible to reproduce. The Western
world has alternated between the conception of him as a devil, almost
Antichrist himself, and a negligible impostor whose power is transient.
It has seldom troubled to look for the human energy that wrought out his
successes, the faith that upheld them, and the enthusiasm that burned in
the Prophet himself with a sombre flame, lighting his followers to prayer
and conquest.
And indeed it is difficult, if not impossible, to re-create effectively
the world in which he lived. It is so remote from the seas of the
world's progression, an eddy in the tide of belief which loses itself in
the larger surging, that it makes no appeal of familiarity. But that a
study of the period and Mahomet's own personality operating no less
through his deeds, faith, and institutions than in the one doubtfully
reliable record of his teachings, will result in the perception of the
Prophet of Islam as a man among men, has been the central belief during
the writing of this biography. Mahomet's personality is revealed in his
dealing with his fellows, in the belief and ritual that he imposed upon
Arabia, in the mighty achievement of a political unity and military
discipline, and therein he shows himself inexorable, cruel, passionate,
treacherous, bad, subject to depression and overwhelming doubt, but
never weak or purposeless, continually the master of his circumstances,
whom no emergency found unprepared, whose confidence in himself nothing
could shake, and who by virtue of enthusiasm and resistless activity
wrested his triumphs from the hands of his enemies, and bequeathed to
his followers his own unconquerable faith and the means wherewith they
might attain wealth and sovereignty.
CHAPTER I
MAHOMET'S BIRTHPLACE
"And how many cities were mightier in strength than thy city that
hath cast thee forth?"--_The Kuran_.
In Arabia nature cannot be ignored. Pastures and cornland, mountain
slopes and quiet rivers may be admired, even reverenced; but they are
things external to the gaze, and make no insistent demand upon the spirit
for penetration of their mystery. Arabia, and Mecca as typical of Arabia,
is a country governed by earth's primal forces. It has not yet emerged
from the shadow of that early world, bare and chaotic, where a blinding
sun pours down upon dusty mountain ridges, and nothing is temperate or
subdued. It fosters a race of men, whose gods are relentless and
inscrutable, revealing themselves seldom, and dwelling in a fierce
splendour beyond earthly knowledge. To the spirit of a seeker for truth
with senses alert to the outer world, this country speaks of boundless
force, and impels into activity under the spur of conviction; by its very
desolation it sets its ineradicable mark upon the creed built up within
it.
Mahomet spent forty years in the city of Mecca, watching its temple
services with his grandfather, taking part in its mercantile life,
learning something of Christian and Jewish doctrine through the varied
multitudes that thronged its public places. In the desert beyond the city
boundaries he wandered, searching for inspiration, waiting dumbly in the
darkness until the angel Gabriel descended with rush of wings through the
brightness of heaven, commanding:
"Cry aloud, in the name of the Lord who created thee. O, thou enwrapped
in thy mantle, arise and warn!"
Mecca lies in a stony valley midway between Yemen, "the Blessed," and
Syria, in the midst of the western coast-chain of Arabia, which slopes
gradually towards the Red Sea. The height of Abu Kobeis overlooks the
eastern quarter of the town, whence hills of granite stretch to the
holy places, Mina and Arafat, enclosed by the ramparts of the Jebel
Kora range. Beyond these mountains to the south lies Taif, with
its glory of gardens and fruit-trees. But the luxuriance of Taif
finds no counterpart on the western side. Mecca is barren and treeless;
its sandy stretches only broken here and there by low hills of quartz
or gneiss, scrub-covered and dusty. The sun beats upon the shelterless
town until it becomes a great cauldron within its amphitheatre of hills.
During the Greater Pilgrimage the cauldron seethes with heat and
humanity, and surges over into Mina and Arafat. In the daytime Mecca is
limitless heat and noise, but under the stars it has all the magic of a
dream-city in a country of wide horizons.
The shadow of its ancient prosperity, when it was the centre of the
caravan trade from Yemen to Syria, still hung about it in the years
immediately before the birth of Mahomet, and the legends concerning the
founding of the city lingered in the native mind. Hagar, in her terrible
journey through the desert, reached Mecca and laid her son in the midst
of the valley to go on the hopeless quest for water. The child kicked the
ground in torment, and God was merciful, so that from his heel marks
arose a spring of clear water--the well Zemzem, hallowed ever after by
Meccans. In this desolate place part of the Amalekites and tribes from
Yemen settled; the child Ishmael grew up amongst them and founded his
race by marrying a daughter of the chief. Abraham visited him, and under
his guidance the native temple of the Kaaba was built and dedicated to
the true God, but afterwards desecrated by the worship of idols within
it.
Such are the legends surrounding the foundation of Mecca and of the
Kaaba, of which, as of the legends concerning the early days of Rome, it
may be said that they are chiefly interesting as throwing light upon the
character of the race which produced them. In the case of Mecca they were
mainly the result of an unconscious desire to associate the city as far
as possible with the most renowned heroes of old time, and also to
conciliate the Jewish element within Arabia, now firmly planted at
Medina, Kheibar, and some of the adjoining territory, by insisting on a
Jewish origin for their holy of holies, and as soon as Abraham and
Ishmael were established as fathers of the race, legends concerning them
were in perpetual creation.
The Kaaba thus reputed to be the work of Abraham bears evidence of an
antiquity so remote that its beginnings will be forever lost to us. From
very early times it was a goal of pilgrimage for all Arabia, because of
the position of Mecca upon the chief trade route, and united in its
ceremonies the native worship of the sun and stars, idols and misshapen
stones. The Black Stone, the kissing of which formed the chief
ceremonial, is a relic of the rites practised by the stone-worshippers of
old; while the seven circuits of the Kaaba, obligatory on all pilgrims,
are probably a symbol of the courses of the planets. Arab divinities,
such as Alilat and Uzza, were associated with the Kaaba before any
records are available, and at the time of Mahomet, idolatry mingled with
various rites still held sway among the Meccans, though the leaven of
Jewish tradition was of great help to him in the establishment of the
monotheistic idea. At Mahomet's birth the Kaaba consisted of a small
roofless house, with the Black Stone imbedded in its wall. Near it lay
the well Zemzem, and the reputed grave of Ishmael. The Holy Place of
Arabia held thus within itself traces of a purer faith, that
were to be discovered and filled in by Mahomet, until the Kaaba
became the goal of thousands, the recipient of the devotion and longings
of that mighty host of Muslim who went forth to subdue the world.
Mahomet's ancestors had for some time held a high position in the city.
He came of the race of Hashim, whose privilege it was to give service to
the pilgrims coming to worship at the Kaaba. The Hashim were renowned for
generosity, and Mahomet's grandfather, Abd al Muttalib, was revered by
the Kureisch, inhabitants of Mecca, as a just and honourable man, who had
greatly increased their prosperity by his rediscovery of the holy well.
Its healing waters had been choked by the accumulations of years, so
that even the knowledge of its site was lost, when an angel appeared to
Abd al Muttalib, as he slept at the gate of the temple, saying:
"Dig up that which is pure!"
Three times the command fell on uncomprehending ears, until the angel
revealed to the sleeper where the precious water might be found. And as
he dug, the well burst forth once more, and behold within its deeps lay
two golden gazelles, with weapons, the treasure of former kings. And
there was strife among the Kureisch for the possession of these riches,
until they were forced to draw lots. So the treasure fell to Abd al
Muttalib, who melted the weapons to make a door for the Kaaba, and set
up the golden gazelles within it.