Mahomet - Founder of Islam | Page 3

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