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

Mr. W. S. Blunt divides 175 millions as follows:—Turkey, Syria, and ʿIrāq, 22 millions; Egypt, 5 millions; North Africa, 18 millions; Arabia, 11½ millions; Central Africa, 11½ millions; Persia, 8 millions; India, 40 millions; Malays (Java), 30 millions; China, 15 millions; Central Asia, 11 millions; Afghanistan, 3 millions. No census having been taken of any of these countries, except India, the numbers are merely an approximation. Out of this supposed population of Islām, 93,250 pilgrims were present at Makkah in the year 1880. (Blunt’s Future of Islam, p. 10.)

In some parts of the world—in Africa for example—Muḥammadanism is spreading; and even in Borneo, and in other islands of the Indian Archipelago, we are told that it has supplanted Hinduism. In Central Asia, within the last twenty years, numerous villages of Shiaposh Kafirs have been forcibly converted to Islām, and in Santalia and other parts of India, the converts to Islām from the aboriginal tribes are not inconsiderable.

But, although Muḥammadanism has, perhaps, gained in numerical strength within the last few years, no candid Muslim will deny that it has lost, and is still losing, its vital power. Indeed, “this want of faith and decline in vitality” are regarded as the signs of the last days by many a devout Muslim.

In no Muḥammadan state is Muslim law administered in its strict integrity, and even in the Sultan’s own dominion, some of the most sacred principles of the Prophet’s religion are set at naught by the civil power; and, as far as we can ascertain (and we speak after a good deal of personal research), the prevalence of downright infidelity amongst educated Muslims is unmistakable. “No intelligent man believes in the teaching of the Muslim divines,” said a highly educated Muḥammadan Egyptian not long ago; “for our religion is not in keeping with the progress of thought.” The truth is, the Arabian Prophet over-legislated, and, as we now see in Turkey, it is impossible for civilised Muḥammadans to be tied hand and foot by laws and social customs which were intended for Arabian society as it existed 1,200 years ago; whilst, on the contrary, Christianity legislates in spirit, and can therefore be adapted to the spiritual and social necessities of mankind in the various stages of human thought and civilisation.

“Islam is in its essence stationary, and was framed thus to remain. Sterile like its God, lifeless like its first principle and supreme original in all that constitutes true life—for life is love, participation, and progress, and of these, the Coranic Deity has none—it justly repudiates all change, all advance, all development. To borrow the forcible words of Lord Houghton, the ‘written book’ is there, the ‘dead man’s hand,’ stiff and motionless; whatever savours of vitality is by that alone convicted of heresy and defection.

“But Christianity with its living and loving God, Begetter and Begotten, Spirit and Movement, nay more, a Creator made creature, the Maker and the made existing in One, a Divinity communicating itself by uninterrupted gradation and degree, from the most intimate union far off to the faintest irradiation, through all that it has made for love and governs in love; One who calls His creatures not slaves, not servants, but friends, nay sons, nay gods—to sum up, a religion in whose seal and secret ‘God in man is one with man in God,’ must also be necessarily a religion of vitality, of progress, of advancement. The contrast between it and Islam is that of movement with fixedness, of participation with sterility, of development with barrenness, of life with petrifaction. The first vital principle and the animating spirit of its birth must indeed abide ever the same, but the outer form must change with the changing days, and new offshoots of fresh sap and greenness be continually thrown out as witnesses to the vitality within, else were the vine withered and the branches dead.

“I have no intention here—it would be extremely out of place—of entering on the maze of controversy, or discussing whether any dogmatic attempt to reproduce the religious phase of a former age is likely to succeed. I only say that life supposes movement and growth, and both imply change; that to censure a living thing for growing and changing is absurd; and that to attempt to hinder it from so doing, by pinning it down on a written label, or nailing it to a Procrustean framework, is tantamount to killing it altogether.

“Now Christianity is living, and because living must grow, must advance, must change, and was meant to do so; onwards and forwards is a condition of its very existence; and I cannot but think that those who do not recognize this, show themselves so far ignorant of its true nature and essence. On the other hand, Islam is lifeless, and because lifeless cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot change, and was never intended so to do; ‘Stand still’ is its motto and its most essential condition.” (Central and Eastern Arabia, vol. i. p. 372.)

“Islám is unfortunately a social system as well as a religion; and herein lies the great difficulty of fairly estimating its good and its bad influence on the world. It is but in the nature of things that the teacher who lays down the law of the relation of man to God should also endeavour to appoint the proper relation between man and his neighbour.

“Moḥammad not only promulgated a religion; he laid down a complete social system, containing minute regulations for a man’s conduct in all circumstances of life, with due rewards or penalties according to his fulfilment of these rules. As a religion, Islám is great: it has taught men to worship one God with a pure worship who formerly worshipped many gods impurely. As a social system, Islám is a complete failure: it has misunderstood the relations of the sexes, upon which the whole character of a nation’s life hangs, and, by degrading women, has degraded each successive generation of their children down an increasing scale of infamy and corruption, until it seems almost impossible to reach a lower level of vice.”

“In the first place, then, it must be observed that the enthusiasm by which Mahometanism conquered the world, was mainly a military enthusiasm. Men were drawn to it at once, and without conditions, by the splendour of the achievements of its disciples, and it declared an absolute war against all the religions it encountered. Its history, therefore, exhibits nothing of the process of gradual absorption, persuasion, compromise, and assimilation, that are exhibited in the dealings of Christianity with the barbarians. In the next place, one of the great characteristics of the Koran is the extreme care and skill with which it labours to assist men in realising the unseen. Descriptions, the most minutely detailed, and at the same time the most vivid, are mingled with powerful appeals to those sensual passions by which the imagination in all countries, but especially in those in which Mahometanism has taken root, is most forcibly influenced. In no other religion that prohibits idols is the strain upon the imagination so slight.” (History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism, vol. i. p. 223.)

“This great religion, which so long rivalled the influence of Christianity, had indeed spread the deepest and most justifiable panic through Christendom. Without any of those aids to the imagination which pictures and images can furnish, without any elaborate sacerdotal organization, preaching the purest Monotheism among ignorant and barbarous men, and inculcating, on the whole, an extremely high and noble system of morals, it spread with a rapidity, and it acquired a hold over the minds of its votaries, which it is probable that no other religion has altogether equalled. It borrowed from Christianity that doctrine of salvation by belief, which is perhaps the most powerful impulse that can be applied to the characters of masses of men, and it elaborated so minutely the charms of its sensual heavens and the terrors of its material hell, as to cause the alternative to appeal with unrivalled force to the gross imaginations of the people. It possessed a book which, however inferior to that of the opposing religion, has nevertheless been the consolation and the support of millions in many ages. It taught a fatalism which, in its first age, nerved its adherents with a matchless military courage, and which, though in later days it has often paralysed their active energies, has also rarely failed to support them under the pressure of inevitable calamity. But, above all, it discovered the great though fatal secret, of uniting indissolubly the passion of the soldier with the passion of the devotee.

Making the conquest of the infidel the first of duties, and proposing heaven as the certain reward of the valiant soldier, it created a blended enthusiasm that soon overpowered the divided counsels and the voluptuous governments of the East, and within a century of the death of Muḥammad, his followers had almost extirpated Christianity from its original home, founded great monarchies in Asia and Africa, planted a noble, though transient and exotic, civilisation in Spain, menaced the capital of the Eastern empire, and but for the issue of a single battle, they would probably have extended their sceptre over the energetic and progressive races of Central Europe. The wave was broken by Charles Martel, at the battle of Poictiers, and it is now useless to speculate what might have been the consequences, had Muḥammadanism unfurled its triumphant banner among those Teutonic tribes, who have so often changed their creed, and on whom the course of civilisation has so largely depended.” (Hist. of European Morals, vol. ii. p. 266.)

“The influence of Catholicism was seconded by Muḥammadanism, which on this (suicide), as on many other points, borrowed its teaching from the Christian Church, and even intensified it; for suicide, which is never expressly condemned in the Bible, is more than once forbidden in the Qurʾān, and the Christian duty of resignation was exaggerated by the Moslem into a complete fatalism. Under the empire of Catholicism and Muḥammadanism, suicide, during many centuries, almost absolutely ceased in all the civilised, active and progressive part of mankind. When we recollect how warmly it was applauded, or how faintly it was condemned in the civilisations of Greece and Rome, when we remember, too, that there was scarcely a barbarous tribe from Denmark to Spain who did not habitually practise it, we may realise the complete revolution which was effected in this sphere by the influence of Christianity.” (Hist. of European Morals, vol. ii. p. 56.)

“When Islam penetrates to countries lower in the scale of humanity than were the Arabs of Muhammad’s day, it suffices to elevate them to that level. But it does so at a tremendous cost. It reproduces in its new converts the characteristics of its first—their impenetrable self-esteem, their unintelligent scorn, and blind hatred of all other creeds. And thus the capacity for all further advance is destroyed; the mind is obdurately shut to the entrance of any purer light. But it is a grievous error to confound that transient gleam of culture which illuminated Baghdad under the first Abbaside khalifs with the legitimate fruits of Islam. When the Arabs conquered Syria and Persia, they brought with them no new knowledge to take the place of that which had preceded them. Mere Bedouins of the desert, they found themselves all at once the masters of vast countries, with everything to learn. They were compelled to put themselves to school under the very people they had vanquished. Thus the Persians and Syrians, conquered though they were and tributary, from the ignorance of their masters, retained in their hands the control of the administrative machinery. The Abbaside khalifs were borne into power by means of a Persian revolution, headed by a Persian slave. Then began the endeavour to root the old Greek philosophy, and the deep and beautiful thoughts of Zoroaster, on the hard and barren soil of Muhammadanism. It was an impossible attempt to make a frail exotic flourish on uncongenial soil.

It has imparted, indeed, a deceptive lustre to this period of Muhammadan history; but the orthodox Muhammadans knew that their faith and the wisdom of the Greeks could not amalgamate, and they fought fiercely against the innovators. Successive storms of barbarians sweeping down from the north of Asia, tore up the fragile plant by the roots, and scattered its blossoms to the winds. The new comers embraced the creed of the Koran in its primitive simplicity; they hated and repudiated the refinements which the Persians would fain have engrafted on it. And they won the day. The present condition of Central Asia is the legitimate fruit of Islam; not the glories of Baghdad, which were but the afterglow of the thought and culture which sank with the fall of the Sassanides, and the expulsion of the Byzantine emperors. So also in Moorish Spain. The blossom and the fruitage which Muhammadanism seemed to put forth there were, in fact, due to influences alien to Islam—to the intimate contact, namely, with Jewish and Christian thought; for when the Moors were driven back into northern Africa, all that blossom and fruitage withered away, and Northern Africa sank into the intellectual darkness and political anarchy in which it lies at the present time. There are to be found in Muhammadan history all the elements of greatness—faith, courage, endurance, self-sacrifice; but, closed within the narrow walls of a rude theology and barbarous polity, from which the capacity to grow and the liberty to modify have been sternly cut off, they work no deliverance upon the earth.

They are strong only for destruction. When that work is over, they either prey upon each other, or beat themselves to death against the bars of their prison-house. No permanent dwelling-place can be erected on a foundation of sand; and no durable or humanising polity upon a foundation of fatalism, despotism, polygamy and slavery. When Muhammadan states cease to be racked by revolutions, they succumb to the poison diffused by a corrupt moral atmosphere. A Darwesh, ejaculating ‘Allah!’ and revolving in a series of rapid gyrations until he drops senseless, is an exact image of the course of their history.” (Islam under the Arabs, p. 93.)

“The Goth might ravage Italy, but the Goth came forth purified from the flames which he himself had kindled. The Saxon swept Britain, but the music of the Celtic heart softened his rough nature, and wooed him into less churlish habits. Visigoth and Frank, Heruli and Vandal, blotted out their voracity in the very light of the civilisation they had striven to extinguish. Even the Hun, wildest Tartar from the Scythian waste, was touched and softened in his wicker encampment amid Pannonian plains; but the Turk—wherever his scymitar reached—degraded, defiled, and defamed; blasting into eternal decay Greek, Roman and Latin civilisation, until, when all had gone, he sat down, satiated with savagery, to doze for two hundred years into hopeless decrepitude.” (Good Words for September 1880.)