Christianity and Islam | Page 6

prophet of God. Afterwards Jesus performs all kinds of miracles, forms birds out of clay and makes them fly, heals the blind and lepers, raises the dead, etc., and even brings down from heaven a table ready spread. The Jews will not believe him, but the youth follow him. He is not killed, but translated to God. Christians are not agreed upon the manner of his death and the Jews have invented the story of the Crucifixion.
Muhammed's knowledge of Christianity thus consists of certain isolated details, partly apocryphal, partly canonical, together with a hazy idea of the fundamental dogmas. Thus the influence of Christianity upon him was entirely indirect. The Muhammedan movement at its outset was influenced not by the real Christianity of the time but by a Christianity which Muhammed criticised in certain details and forced into harmony with his preconceived ideas. His imagination was profoundly impressed by the existence of Christianity as a revealed religion with a founder of its own. Certain features of Christianity and of Judaism, prayer, purification, solemn festivals, scriptures, prophets and so forth were regarded by him as essential to any religious community, because they happened to belong both to Judaism and to Christianity. He therefore adopted or wished to adopt these institutions.
During the period of his life at Medina, Muhammed abandoned his original idea of preaching the doctrines which Moses and Jesus had proclaimed. This new development was the outcome of a struggle with Judaism following upon an unsuccessful attempt at compromise. In point of fact Judaism and Christianity were as widely different from one another as they were from his own teaching and he was more than ever inclined to regard as his special forerunner, Abraham, who had preceded both Moses and Jesus, and was revered by both religions as the man of God. He then brought Abraham into connection with the ancient Meccan Ka'ba worship: the Ka'ba or die was a sacred stone edifice, in one corner of which the "black stone" had been built in: this stone was an object of reverence to the ancient Arabs, as it still is to the Muhammedans. Thus Islam gradually assumed the form of an Arab religion, developing universalist tendencies in the ultimate course of events. Muhammed, therefore, as he was the last in the ranks of the prophets, must also be the greatest. He epitomised all prophecy and Islam superseded every revealed religion of earlier date.
Muhammed's original view that earlier religions had been founded by God's will and through divine revelation, led both him and his successors to make an important concession: adherents of other religions were not compelled to adopt Islam. They were allowed to observe their own faith unhindered, if they surrendered without fighting, and were even protected against their enemies, in return for which they had to pay tribute to their Muslim masters; this was levied as a kind of poll-tax. Thus we read in the Qoran (ix. 29) that "those who possess Scriptures," i.e. the Jews and Christians, who did not accept Islam were to be attacked until they paid the gizja or tribute. Thus the object of a religious war upon the Christians is not expressed by the cry "Death or Islam"; such attacks were intended merely to extort an acknowledgment of Muhammedan supremacy, not to abolish freedom of religious observance. It would be incorrect for the most part to regard the warrior bands which started from Arabia as inspired by religious enthusiasm or to attribute to them the fanaticism which was first aroused by the crusades and in an even greater degree by the later Turkish wars. The Muhammedan fanatics of the wars of conquest, whose reputation was famous among later generations, felt but a very scanty interest in religion and occasionally displayed an ignorance of its fundamental tenets which we can hardly exaggerate. The fact is fully consistent with the impulses to which the Arab migrations were due. These impulses were economic and the new religion was nothing more than a party cry of unifying power, though there is no reason to suppose that it was not a real moral force in the life of Muhammed and his immediate contemporaries.
Anti-Christian fanaticism there was therefore none. Even in early years Muhammedans never refused to worship in the same buildings as Christians. The various insulting regulations which tradition represents Christians as forced to endure were directed not so much against the adherents of another faith as against the barely tolerated inhabitants of a subjugated state. It is true that the distinction is often difficult to observe, as religion and nationality were one and the same thing to Muhammedans. In any case religious animosity was a very subordinate phenomenon. It was a gradual development and seems to me to have made a spasmodic beginning in the first century under