A Dictionary of Islam Being a cyclopedia of the...

“According to one record, the doubts, indecision, and preparation of the Prophet for his office lasted seven years; and so sincere and intense were his meditations on matters of religion, that they brought him to the brink of madness. In the Quran we can trace three phases in the progress of the mind of Mohammad from idolatry to the formation of a new creed. First, the religion of the Kaʿbah, in which he sincerely believed, seems to have formed the principal subject of his meditations. The contemplation of nature, probably assisted by instruction, led him to the knowledge of the unity of God; and there is hardly a verse in the Quran which does not shew how forcibly he was struck with this truth. By satisfying the faith of his fathers, he tried to reconcile it with the belief in one God; and for some time he considered the idols round the Kaʾbah daughters of God, who intercede with Him for their worshippers. But he gave up this belief, chiefly because he could not reconcile himself to the idea that God should have only daughters, which was ignominious in the eyes of an Arab; and that men should have sons, who reflect honour on a family. He also connected the idolatrous worship of the black stone, and the ceremonies of the Hajj, and almost all the other pagan usages of the Haramites, with their Abraham. This idea was not his own. The sceptics who preceded him held the same opinion; yet it was neither ancient nor general among the pagan Arabs.

“It has been mentioned that the vision in which he was ordered to read, caused him finally to renounce idolatry; we are told that after this vision an intermission of revelation, called fatrah, took place, which lasted upwards of two years. The meaning of fatrah is simply that, though this vision was a revelation, he did not assume his office for two or three years. It is certain that he composed many Surahs of the Quran during this time; and it must have been during this period that the tenets of the Jews and Christians seriously occupied his mind. Before the vision he was an idolater; and after the fatrah he possessed the acquaintance with the scriptural history which we find in the Quran. Even after he had declared himself a prophet, he shewed, during the beginning of his career, a strong leaning towards, and a sincere belief in, the scriptures and Biblical legends; but in proportion to his success he separated himself from the Bible.

“This is the second phase in the progress of the Prophet’s mind. His belief in the scriptures does not imply that he ever belonged to the Christian or Jewish Church. He never could reconcile his notions of God with the doctrine of the Trinity, and with the Divinity of Christ, and he was disgusted with the monkish institutions and sectarian disputes of the Christians. His creed was: ‘He is God alone, the Eternal God; He has not begotten, and is not begotten; and none is His equal.’ (See Sūrah cxii.) Nothing, however, can be more erroneous than to suppose that Mohammad was, at any period of his early career, a deist. Faith, when once extinct, cannot be revived; and it was his enthusiastic faith in inspiration that made him a prophet. Disappointed with the Jewish and Christian religions, he began to form a system of faith of his own; and this is the third phase of the transition period. For some time, it seems, he had no intention to preach it publicly, but circumstances, as well as the warm conviction of the truth of his creed, at length prevailed upon him to spread it beyond the circle of his family and friends.

“The mental excitement of the Prophet was much increased during the fatrah, and like the ardent scholar in one of Schiller’s poems, who dared to lift the veil of truth, he was nearly annihilated by the light which broke in upon him. He usually wandered about in the hills near Makkah, and was so long absent, that on one occasion, his wife being afraid that he was lost, sent men in search of him. He suffered from hallucinations of his senses, and, to finish his sufferings, he several times contemplated suicide by throwing himself down from a precipice. His friends were alarmed at his state of mind. Some considered it as the eccentricities of a poetical genius; others thought that he was a kahin, or soothsayer; but the majority took a less charitable view (see Sūrahs lxix. 40, xx. 5), and declared that he was insane; and, as madness and melancholy are ascribed to supernatural influence in the East, they said that he was in the power of Satan and his agents, the jinn. They called in exorcists; and he himself doubted the soundness of his mind. ‘I hear a sound,’ he said to his wife, ‘and see a light. I am afraid there are jinn in me.’ And on other occasions he said, ‘I am afraid I am a kahin.’ ‘God will never allow that such should befall thee,’ said Khadyjah; ‘for thou keepest thy engagements, and assistest thy relations.’ According to some accounts, she added, ‘Thou wilt be the prophet of thy nation.’

And, in order to remove every doubt, she took him to her cousin Waraqah; and he said to her, ‘I see thou (i.e. thy explanation) art correct; the cause of the excitement of thy husband is the coming to him of the great nomos, law, which is like the nomos of Moses. If I should be alive when he receives his mission, I would assist him; for I believe in him.’ After this Khadyjah went to the monk, ʾAddas, and he confirmed what Waraqah had said. Waraqah died soon after, before Mohammad entered on his mission.

“The words of Mohammad, ‘I am afraid I am a kahin,’ require some explanation. The Arabs, previous to the promulgation of Islam, believed in kahins, soothsayers; and even in our days they have greater faith in saints and inspired persons than other equally uncivilized nations. Such a belief is so necessary a limitation of the personal freedom of the Bedouins, which knows no other bounds, that I consider it as the offspring of liberty. Even the most refractory spirit sees no humiliation in confessing his wrong-doings to a helpless seer, and in submitting to his decisions; and by doing so, if he has embroiled himself, he can return to peace with himself and with society. We find, therefore, in the ancient history of Arabia, that litigations were frequently referred to celebrated kahins. These, it would appear, were eccentric persons, of great cunning, and not without genius. The specimens which we have of their oracles are obscure, and usually in rhymed prose and incoherent sentences; and they are frequently preceded by a heavy oath to the truth of what they say, like some of the Surahs of the Quran. It was believed that they knew what was concealed from the eyes of the common mortals; but they were looked upon with awe; for the Arabs conceived that they were possessed by, or allied with, Satan and the jinn. The evil spirits used to approach the gates of heaven by stealth, to pry into the secrets which were being transacted between God and the angels, and to convey them to the kahins.

“Khadyjah and her friends advised him to adopt the former course; and, after some hesitation, he followed their advice, as it would appear, with his own conviction. His purer notions of the Deity, his moral conduct, his predilection for religious speculations, and his piety, were proofs sufficiently strong to convince an affectionate wife that the supernatural influence, under which he was, came from heaven. But, as the pagan Arabs had very imperfect notions of divine inspiration, it was necessary for him to prove to them, by the history of the prophets, that some seers were inspired by God; and to this end, he devoted more than two-thirds of the Quran to Biblical legends, most of which he has so well adapted to his own case, that if we substitute the name of Mohammad for Moses and Abraham, we have his own views, fate, and tendency. And, in order to remove every doubt as to the cause of his excitement, Mohammad subsequently maintained, that since he had assumed his office, heaven was surrounded by a strong guard of angels; and if the jinn venture to ascend to its precincts, a flaming dart, that is to say, a shooting star, is thrown at them, and they are precipitated to the lower regions; and, therefore, the kahins ceased with the commencement of his mission.

“The declaration of Waraqah, and of the monk ʾAddas, that the great nomos would descend upon him, and the faith of his wife, neither conveyed full conviction nor gave they sufficient courage to Mohammad to declare himself publicly the messenger of God; on the contrary, they increased the morbid state of his mind. A fatalist, as he was, it was a hallucination and a fit which decided him to follow their advice. One day, whilst he was wandering about in the hills near Makkah, with the intention to destroy himself, he heard a voice; and, on raising his head, he beheld Gabriel, between heaven and earth; and the angel assured him that he was the prophet of God. This hallucination is one of the few clearly stated miracles to which he appeals in the Quran. Not even an allusion is made, in that book, to his fits, during which his followers believe that he received the revelations. This bears out the account of Wáqidy, which I have followed, and proves that it was rather the exalted state of his mind, than his fits, which caused his friends to believe in his mission. Frightened by this apparition, he returned home; and, feeling unwell, he called for covering. He had a fit, and they poured cold water upon him; and when he was recovering from it, he received the revelation, ‘O thou covered, arise and preach, and magnify thy Lord, and cleanse thy garment, and fly every abomination’; and henceforth, we are told, he received revelations without intermission; that is to say, the fatrah was at an end, and he assumed his office.

“This crisis of Mohammad’s struggles bears a strange resemblance to the opening scene of Goethe’s Faust. He paints, in that admirable drama, the struggles of mind which attend the transition, in men of genius, from the ideal to the real—from youth to manhood. Both in Mohammad and in Faust the anguish of the mind, distracted by doubts, is dispelled by the song of angels, which rises from their own bosoms, and is the voice of the consciousness of their sincerity and warmth in seeking for truth; and in both, after this crisis, the enthusiasm ebbs gradually down to calm design, and they now blasphemously sacrifice their faith in God to self-aggrandisement. In this respect the resemblance of the second part of Faust to Mohammad’s career at Madinah is complete. As the period of transition in the life of the Prophet has hitherto been completely unknown in Europe, Goethe’s general picture of this period, in the life of enthusiasts, is like a prediction in reference to the individual case of Mohammad.

“Some authors consider the fits of the Prophet as the principal evidence of his mission, and it is therefore necessary to say a few words on them. They were preceded by a great depression of spirits; he was despondent, and his face was clouded; and they were ushered in by coldness of the extremities and shivering. He shook, as if he were suffering of ague, and called out for covering. His mind was in a most painfully excited state. He heard a tinkling in his ears, as if bells were ringing; or a humming, as if bees were swarming round his head; and his lips quivered; but this motion was under the control of volition. If the attack proceeded beyond this stage, his eyes became fixed and staring, and the motions of his head became convulsive and automatic. At length, perspiration broke out, which covered his face in large drops; and with this ended the attack. Sometimes, however, if he had a violent fit, he fell comatose to the ground, like a person who is intoxicated; and (at least at a latter period of his life) his face was flushed, and his respiration stertorous, and he remained in that state for some time. The bystanders sprinkled water in his face; but he himself fancied that he would derive a great benefit from being cupped on the head. This is all the information which I have been able to collect concerning the fits of Mohammad. It will be observed that we have no distinct account of a paroxysm between the one which he had in his infancy, and the one after which he assumed his office. It is likely that up to his forty-fourth year they were not habitual.

The alarm of the nurse, under whose care he had been two years before he had the former of these two fits, shews that it was the first, and the age and circumstances under which he had it, render it likely that it was solitary, and caused by the heat of the sun and gastric irritation. The fit after which he assumed his office was undoubtedly brought on by long-continued and increasing mental excitement, and by his ascetic exercises. We know that he used frequently to fast, and that he sometimes devoted the greater part of the night to prayer. The bias of the Musalmans is to gloss over the aberration of mind, and the intention to commit suicide, of their prophet. Most of his biographers pass over the transition period in silence. We may, therefore, be justified in stretching the scanty information which we can glean from them to the utmost extent, and in supposing that he was for some time a complete maniac; and that the fit after which he assumed his office was a paroxysm of cataleptic insanity. This disease is sometimes accompanied by such interesting psychical phenomena, that even in modern times it has given rise to many superstitious opinions. After this paroxysm the fits became habitual, though the moral excitement cooled down, and they assumed more and more an epileptic character.” (The Life of Mohammad from Original Sources, by A. Sprenger, M.D., part i., Allahabad, 1851, p. 949.)

“But is Mohammed in no sense a prophet? Certainly he had two of the most important characteristics of the prophetic order. He saw truth about God which his fellow-men did not see, and he had an irresistible inward impulse to publish this truth. In respect of this latter qualification, Mohammed may stand comparison with the most courageous of the heroic prophets of Israel. For the truth’s sake he risked his life, he suffered daily persecution for years, and eventually banishment, the loss of property, of the goodwill of his fellow-citizens, and of the confidence of his friends; he suffered, in short, as much as any man can suffer short of death, which he only escaped by flight, and yet he unflinchingly proclaimed his message. No bribe, threat, or inducement, could silence him. ‘Though they array against me the sun on the right hand and the moon on the left, I cannot renounce my purpose.’ And it was this persistency, this belief in his call, to proclaim the unity of God, which was the making of Islam.

“Other men have been monotheists in the midst of idolaters, but no other man has founded a strong and enduring monotheistic religion. The distinction in his case was his resolution that other men should believe. If we ask what it was that made Mohammed aggressive and proselytizing, where other men had been content to cherish a solitary faith, we must answer that it was nothing else than the depth and force of his own conviction of the truth. To himself the difference between one God and many, between the unseen Creator and these ugly lumps of stone or wood, was simply infinite. The one creed was death and darkness to him, the other life and light. It is useless seeking for motives in such a case—for ends to serve and selfish reasons for his speaking; the impossibility with Mohammed was to keep silence. His acceptance of the office of teacher of his people was anything but the ill-advised and sudden impulse of a light-minded vanity or ambition. His own convictions had been reached only after long years of lonely mental agony, and of a doubt and distraction bordering on madness. Who can doubt the earnestness of that search after truth and the living God, that drove the affluent merchant from his comfortable home and his fond wife, to make his abode for months at a time in the dismal cave on Mount Hira?

If we respect the shrinking of Isaiah or Jeremiah from the heavy task of proclaiming unwelcome truth, we must also respect the keen sensitiveness of Mohammed, who was so burdened by this same responsibility, and so persuaded of his incompetency for the task, that at times he thought his new feelings and thoughts were a snare of the Devil, and at times he would fain have rid himself of all further struggle by casting himself from a friendly precipice. His rolling his head in his mantle, the sound of the ringing of bells in his ears, his sobbing like a young camel, the sudden grey hairs which he himself ascribed to the terrific Suras—what were all these but so many physical signs of nervous organization overstrained by anxiety and thought?

“His giving himself out as a prophet of God was, in the first instance, not only sincere, but probably correct in the sense in which he himself understood it. He felt that he had thoughts of God which it deeply concerned all around him to receive, and he knew that these thoughts were given him by God, although not, as we shall see, a revelation strictly so called. His mistake by no means lay in his supposing himself to be called upon by God to speak for Him and introduce a better religion, but it lay in his gradually coming to insist quite as much on men’s accepting him as a prophet as on their accepting the great truth he preached. He was a prophet to his countrymen in so far as he proclaimed the unity of God, but this was no sufficient ground for his claiming to be their guide in all matters of religion, still less for his assuming the lordship over them in all matters civil as well. The modesty and humility apparent in him, so long as his mind was possessed with objective truth, gradually gives way to the presumptuousness and arrogance of a mind turned more to a sense of its own importance. To put the second article of the Mohammedan creed on the same level as the first, to make it as essential that men should believe in the mission of Mohammed as in the unity of God, was an ignorant, incongruous, and false combination. Had Mohammed known his own ignorance as well as his knowledge, the world would have had one religion the less, and Christianity would have had one more reformer.” (Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, p. 17.)

“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments—nay, on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest, his common diet barley-bread and water; sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; something better in him than hunger of any sort—or these wild Arab men fighting and jostling three and twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so! These were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right, worth, and manhood, no man could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery, visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes, fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them, they must have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three and twenty years of rough actual trial, I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for that of itself.

“His last words are a prayer, broken ejaculations of a heart struggling-up in trembling hope towards its Maker. We cannot say his religion made him worse; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded of him; when he lost his daughter, the thing he answers is, in his own dialect, everyway sincere, and yet equivalent to that of Christians: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ He answered in like manner of Said, his emancipated well-beloved slave, the second of the believers. Said had fallen in the war of Tâbûc, the first of Mahomet’s fightings with the Greeks. Mahomet said it was well, Said had done his Master’s work, Said had now gone to his Master; it was all well with Said. Yet Said’s daughter found him weeping over the body; the old gray-haired man melting in tears! What do I see? said she. You see a friend weeping over his friend. He went out for the last time into the mosque two days before his death; asked, If he had injured any man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? A voice answered, ‘Yes, me; three drachms, borrowed on such an occasion.’ Mahomet ordered them to be paid. ‘Better be in shame now,’ said he, ‘than at the Day of Judgment.’ You remember Kadîjah, and the ‘No by Allah!’ Traits of this kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries, the veritable son of our common Mother.” (Lectures on Heroes, p. 66.)

“With respect to the private as distinct from the public character of Muhammad, from the time of his settlement at al-Madīnah, it does not appear to have deteriorated, except in one particular, from what it had been prior to the flight from Mecca. He was still frugal in his habits, generous and liberal, faithful to his associates, treasured up the loving memory of absent and departed friends, and awaited his last summons with fortitude and submission. That he entertained an excessive passion for women, was lustful, if you will, cannot be denied; but the fourteen wives whom from first to last he married, and his eleven (? two: see MUHAMMAD’S WIVES) concubines, figure favourably by the side of David’s six wives and numerous concubines (2 Sam. v. 13; 1 Chron. iii. 1–9; xiv. 3), Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings xi. 3), and Rehoboam’s eighteen wives and sixty concubines (2 Chron. xi. 21), a plurality expressly forbidden to the sovereign of Israel, who was commanded not to multiply wives to himself. (Deut. xvii. 17.)

“It is not so much his polygamy, considering all the circumstances of the case, which justly lays Muhammad open to reproach, but his having deliberately infringed one of his own alleged divine revelations, which restricted the number of wives to ‘four and no more’ (Sura iv. 3); also, for having in the first instance dallied with Zainab, the wife of his freedman and adopted son Zaid-ibn-Harithah, who complacently divorced her in order that she might espouse the Prophet. In this case, moreover, as has already been related, he adduced the authority of God as sanctioning on his behoof first, and thenceforth in the behoof of all Muslims, the marriage of a man with the divorced wife of his adopted son, which up to that time had been considered incestuous. Whatever apology may be adduced for Muhammad in this matter of polygamy, there is no valid plea to justify his improbity and impiety in the case of Zainab.”

“I would warn the reader against seeking to portray in his mind a character in all its parts consistent with itself as the character of Mahomet. The truth is, that the strangest inconsistencies blended together (according to the wont of human nature) throughout the life of the Prophet. The student of the history will trace for himself how the pure and lofty aspirations of Mahomet were first tinged, and then gradually debased by a half-unconscious self-deception, and how in this process truth merged into falsehood, sincerity into guile, these opposite principles often co-existing even as active agencies in his conduct. The reader will observe that simultaneously with the anxious desire to extinguish idolatry, and to promote religion and virtue in the world, there was nurtured by the Prophet in his own heart, a licentious self-indulgence, till in the end, assuming to be the favourite of Heaven, he justified himself by ‘revelations’ from God in the most flagrant breaches of morality. He will remark that while Mahomet cherished a kind and tender disposition, ‘weeping with them that wept,’ and binding to his person the hearts of his followers by the ready and self-denying offices of love and friendship, he could yet take pleasure in cruel and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of an entire tribe, and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of hell.

Inconsistencies such as these continually present themselves from the period of Mahomet’s arrival at Medîna, and it is by the study of these inconsistencies that his character must be rightly comprehended. The key to many difficulties of this description may be found, I believe, in the chapter ‘on the belief of Mahomet in his own inspiration.’ When once he had dared to forge the name of the Most High God as the seal and authority of his own words and actions, the germ was laid from which the errors of his after life freely and fatally developed themselves.” (Life of Mahomet, new ed. p. 535.)

“Mohammed did not, indeed, himself conquer a world like Alexander, or Cæsar, or Napoleon. He did not himself weld together into a homogeneous whole a vast system of states like Charles the Great. He was not a philosophic king, like Marcus Aurelius, nor philosopher like Aristotle or like Bacon, ruling by pure reason the world of thought for centuries with a more than kingly power; he was not a legislator for all mankind, nor even the highest part of it, like Justinian; nor did he cheaply earn the title of the Great by being the first among rulers to turn, like Constantine, from the setting to the rising sun. He was not a universal philanthropist, like the greatest of the Stoics.

“Nor was he the apostle of the highest form of religion and civilisation combined, like Gregory or Boniface, like Leo or Alfred the Great. He was less, indeed, than most of these in one or two of the elements that go to make up human greatness, but he was also greater. Half Christian and half Pagan, half civilised and half barbarian, it was given to him in a marvellous degree to unite the peculiar excellences of the one with the peculiar excellences of the other. ‘I have seen,’ said the ambassador sent by the triumphant Quraish to the despised exile at Medina—‘I have seen the Persian Chosroes and the Greek Heraclius sitting upon their thrones; but never did I see a man ruling his equals as does Mohammed.’

“Head of the State as well as of the Church, he was Cæsar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without the Pope’s pretensions, Cæsar without the legions of Cæsar. Without a standing army, without a body-guard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by a right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments, and without its supports.

“By a fortune absolutely unique in history, Mohammed is a three-fold founder—of a nation, of an empire, and of a religion. Illiterate himself, scarcely able to read or write, he was yet the author of a book which is a poem, a code of laws, a Book of Common Prayer, and a Bible in one, and is reverenced to this day by a sixth of the whole human race, as a miracle of purity of style, of wisdom, and of truth. It was the one miracle claimed by Mohammed—his standing miracle he called it; and a miracle indeed it is. But looking at the circumstances of the time, at the unbounded reverence of his followers, and comparing him with the Fathers of the Church or with mediæval saints, to my mind the most miraculous thing about Mohammed is, that he never claimed the power of working miracles. Whatever he had said he could do, his disciples would straightway have seen him do. They could not help attributing to him miraculous acts which he never did, and which he always denied he could do. What more crowning proof of his sincerity is needed? Mohammed to the end of his life claimed for himself that title only with which he had begun, and which the highest philosophy and the truest Christianity will one day, I venture to believe, agree in yielding to him, that of a Prophet, a very Prophet of God.” (Mohammed and Mohammedanism, p. 340.)

“He (Muḥammad) was brought face to face with the question which every spiritual reformer has to meet and consider, against which so many noble spirits have gone to ruin. Will not the end justify the means? ‘Here am I a faithful servant of God, eager only to enthrone Him in the hearts of men, and at the very goal and termination of my labours I am thwarted by this incapacity to work a miracle. It is true, as these infidels allege, that the older prophets did possess this power, and I, unless the very reason and purpose of my existence is to be made a blank, must also do something wonderful. But what kind of miracle?’ In his despair, Muḥammad declared that the Qurʾān itself was that constantly-recurring miracle they were seeking after. Had they ever heard these stories of Noah, Lot, Abraham, Joseph, Zacharias, Jesus, and others? No; neither had he. They were transcripts made from the ‘preserved Table,’ that stood before the throne of God. The archangel Gabriel had revealed them to Muḥammad, written in pure Arabic, for the spiritual edification of the Quraish. Thus in the twelfth Sūrah, where he details at great length an exceedingly ridiculous history of Joseph, he commences the narrative with these words, as spoken by God:—