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

The principles of Islām were first enunciated in portions of the Qurʾān, as they were revealed piecemeal by Muḥammad, together with such verbal explanations as were given by him to his followers; but when the final recension of the Qurʾān was produced by the K͟halīfah ʿUs̤mān, about twenty-two years after Muḥammad’s death, the Muslims possessed a complete book, which they regarded as the inspired and infallible word of God. [QURʾAN.] But as an interpretation of its precepts, and as a supplement to its teachings, there also existed, side by side with the Qurʾān, the sayings, and practice of Muḥammad, called the Aḥādīs̤ and Sunnah. These traditions of what the Prophet “did and said,” gradually laid the foundations of what is now called Islām. For whilst it is a canon in Islām that nothing can be received or taught which is contrary to the literal injunctions of the Qurʾān, it is to the Traditions rather than to the Qurʾān that we must refer for Muḥammadan law on the subject of faith, knowledge, purification, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, marriage, barter, inheritance, punishments, fate, duties of magistrates, religious warfare, lawful food, death, Day of Judgment, &c., and each collection of traditions has sections devoted to these subjects; so that it is upon these traditional sayings, quite as much as upon the Qurʾān itself, that the religious and civil law of the Muslims is based, both Shīʿah and Sunnī appealing alike to Tradition in support of their views.

When the Prophet was alive, men could go direct to him with their doubts and difficulties; and an infallible authority was always present to give “inspired” directions. But after the deaths of all those who knew Muḥammad personally, it became absolutely necessary to systematise the great mass of traditional sayings then afloat amongst Muslims, and thus various schools of jurisprudence were formed; the concurrent opinion of those learned regarding matters of dispute in Muslim law being called Ijmāʿ [IJMAʿ]. Upon this naturally followed the system of analogical reasoning called Qiyās [QIYAS]; thus constituting the four “pillars” or foundations of Islām, known as the Qurʾān, Ḥadīs̤, Ijmāʿ, and Qiyās.

Islām, whether it be Shīʿah, Sunnī, or Wahhābī, is founded upon these four authorities, and it is not true, as is so frequently asserted, that the Shīʿahs reject the Traditions. They merely accept different collections of Aḥādīs̤ to those received by the Sunnīs and Wahhābīs. Nor do the Wahhābīs reject Ijmāʿ and Qiyās, but they assert that Ijmāʿ was only possible in the earliest stages of Islām.

A study of the present work will show what an elaborate system of dogma Muḥammadanism is. This system of dogma, together with the liturgical form of worship, has been formulated from the traditional sayings of Muḥammad rather than from the Qurʾān itself. For example, the daily ritual, with its purifications, which are such a prominent feature in Islām, is entirely founded on the Traditions. [PRAYER.] Circumcision is not once mentioned in the Qurʾān.

A belief in these six articles of faith, and the observance of these five practical duties, constitute Islām. He who thus believes and acts is called a Muʾmin, or “believer”; but he who rejects any article of faith or practice is a Kāfir, or “infidel.”

Muḥammadanism is, therefore, a system which affords a large field for patient study and research, and much of its present energy and vitality is to be attributed to the fact that, in all parts of Islām, there are in the various mosques students who devote their whole lives to the study of Muslim divinity.

“The faith,” says Gibbon, “which he (Muḥammad) preached to his family and nation, is compounded of an eternal truth and a necessary fiction: That there is only one God, and that Muḥammad is the Apostle of God.” (Roman Empire, vol. vi. p. 222.)

“Moḥammad’s conception of God,” says Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, “has, I think, been misunderstood, and its effect upon the people consequently under-estimated. The God of Islám is commonly represented as a pitiless tyrant, who plays with humanity as on a chessboard, and works out his game without regard to the sacrifice of the pieces; and there is a certain truth in the figure. There is more in Islám of the potter who shapes the clay than of the father pitying his children. Moḥammad conceived of God as the Semitic mind has always preferred to think of Him: his God is the All-Mighty, the All-Knowing, the All-Just. Irresistible Power is the first attribute he thinks of: the Lord of the Worlds, the Author of the Heavens and the Earth, who hath created Life and Death, in whose hand is Dominion, who maketh the Dawn to appear and causeth the Night to cover the Day, the Great, All-Powerful Lord of the Glorious Throne; the thunder proclaimeth His perfection, the whole earth is His handful, and the heavens shall be folded together in His right hand. And with the Power He conceives the Knowledge that directs it to right ends. God is the Wise, the Just, the True, the Swift in reckoning, who knoweth every ant’s weight of good and of ill that each man hath done, and who suffereth not the reward of the faithful to perish.

“ ‘God! There is no God but He, the Ever-Living, the Ever-Subsisting. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him belongeth whatsoever is in the Heavens and whatsoever is in the Earth. Who is he that shall intercede with Him, save by his permission? He knoweth the things that have gone before and the things that follow after, and men shall not compass aught of His knowledge, save what He willeth. His throne comprehendeth the Heavens and the Earth, and the care of them burdeneth Him not. And He is the High, the Great.’—Ḳur-án, ii. 256.

“But with this Power there is also the gentleness that belongs only to great strength. God is the Guardian over His servants, the Shelterer of the orphan, the Guider of the erring, the Deliverer from every affliction; in His hand is Good, and He is the Generous Lord, the Gracious, the Hearer, the Near-at-Hand. Every soorah of the Ḳur-án begins with the words, ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and Moḥammad was never tired of telling the people how God was Very-Forgiving, that His love for man was more tender than the mother-bird for her young.

“It is too often forgotten how much there is in the Ḳur-án of the loving-kindness of God, but it must be allowed that these are not the main thoughts in Moḥammad’s teaching. It is the doctrine of the Might of God that most held his imagination, and that has impressed itself most strongly upon Muslims of all ages. The fear rather than the love of God is the spur of Islám. There can be no question which is the higher incentive to good; but it is nearly certain that the love of God is an idea absolutely foreign to most of the races that have accepted Islám, and to preach such a doctrine would have been to mistake the leaning of the Semitic mind.

“The leading doctrine of Moḥammad, then, is the belief in One All-Powerful God. Islám is the self-surrender of every man to the will of God. Its danger lies in the stress laid on the power of God, which has brought about the stifling effects of fatalism. Moḥammad taught the foreknowledge of God, but he did not lay down precisely the doctrine of Predestination. He found it, as all have found it, a stumbling-block in the way of man’s progress. It perplexed him, and he spoke of it, but often contradicted himself; and he would become angry if the subject were mooted in his presence: ‘Sit not with a disputer about fate,’ he said, ‘nor begin a conversation with him.’ Moḥammad vaguely recognised that little margin of Free Will which makes life not wholly mechanical.

“This doctrine of one Supreme God, to whose will it is the duty of every man to surrender himself, is the kernel of Islám, the truth for which Moḥammad lived and suffered and triumphed. But it was no new teaching, as he himself was constantly saying. His was only the last of revelations. Many prophets—Abraham, Moses, and Christ—had taught the same faith before; but people had hearkened little to their words. So Moḥammad was sent, not different from them, only a messenger, yet the last and greatest of them, the ‘seal of prophecy,’ the ‘most excellent of the creation of God.’ This is the second dogma of Islám: Moḥammad is the Apostle of God. It is well worthy of notice that it is not said, ‘Moḥammad is the only apostle of God.’ Islám is more tolerant in this matter than other religions. Its prophet is not the sole commissioner of the Most High, nor is his teaching the only true teaching the world has ever received. Many other messengers had been sent by God to guide men to the right, and these taught the same religion that was in the mouth of the preacher of Islám. Hence Muslims reverence Moses and Christ only next to Moḥammad. All they claim for their founder is that he was the last and best of the messengers of the one God.” (Introduction to Lane’s Selections, 2nd ed., p. lxxix. et seqq.)

Islām does not profess to be a new religion, formulated by Muḥammad (nor indeed is it), but a continuation of the religious principles established by Adam, by Noah, by Abraham, by Moses, and by Jesus, as well as by other inspired teachers, for it is said that God sent not fewer than 313 apostles into the world to reclaim it from superstition and infidelity. The revelations of these great prophets are generally supposed to have been lost, but God, it is asserted, had retained all that is necessary for man’s guidance in the Qurʾān, although, as a matter of fact, a very large proportion of the ethical, devotional, and dogmatic teaching in Islām, comes from the traditional sayings of Muḥammad and not from the Qurʾān itself. [TRADITIONS.]

In reading the different articles in the present work, the reader cannot fail to be struck with the great indebtedness of Muḥammad to the Jewish religion for the chief elements of his system. Mr. Emanuel Deutsch has truly remarked “that Muḥammadanism owes more to Judaism than either to Heathenism or to Christianity. It is not merely parallelisms, reminiscences, allusions, technical terms, and the like of Judaism, its lore and dogma and ceremony, its Halacha, and its Haggadah, its Law and Legend, which we find in the Qurʾān; but we think Islām neither more nor less than Judaism—as adapted to Arabia—plus the Apostleship of Jesus and Muḥammad. Nay, we verily believe that a great deal of such Christianity as has found its way into the Qurʾān, has found it through Jewish channels.” (Literary Remains, p. 64.)

Its conception of God, its prophets, its seven heavens and seven hells, its law of marriage and divorce, its law of oaths, its purifications and ritual, its festivals, are all of marked Jewish origin, and prove that Talmudic Judaism forms the kernel of Muḥammadanism, which even according to the words of the founder, professed to be the “religion of Abraham.” See Sūrah iii. 60: “Abraham was neither a Jew nor Christian, but he was a Ḥanīf, a Muslim.” Nevertheless, Muḥammad, although he professed to take his legislation from Abraham, incorporated into his system a vast amount of the law of Moses.

The sects of Islām have become numerous; indeed, the Prophet is related to have predicted that his followers would be divided into seventy-three. They have far exceeded the limits of that prophecy, for, according to ʿAbdu ʾl-Qādir al-Jīlānī, there are at least 150. The chief sect is the Sunnī, which is divided into four schools of interpretation, known after their respective founders, Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī, Malakī, Ḥanbalī. The Shīʿahs, who separated from the so-called orthodox Sunnīs on the question of the K͟halīfate, maintaining that ʿAlī and not Abū Bakr was the rightful successor to Muḥammad, are divided also into numerous sects. [SHIʿAH.] The Wahhābīs are a comparatively modern sect, who are the Puritans of Islām, maintaining that Islām has very far departed from the original teaching of Muḥammad, as expressed in the Traditions. They consequently reject very many of the so-called Ijtihād of the Sunnīs, and take the literal meaning of the Traditional sayings of the Prophet as the best exposition of the Qurʾān.

The Shīʿah sect is almost entirely confined to Persia, although there are a few thousand in Lucknow and other parts of India. Of the Sunnīs, the Ḥanafīs are found chiefly in Turkey, Arabia, India, and Central Asia, the Shāfiʿīs in Egypt, and the Malakīs in Morocco and Tunis. The Ḥanbalī are a small sect found in Arabia. Wahhābīism, as will be seen upon reference to the article on the subject, is a principle of reform which has extended itself to all parts of Islām. It is scarcely to be called a sect, but a school of thought in Sunnī Islām.

One hundred and seventy millions of the human race are said to profess the religion of Muḥammad; and, according to the late Mr. Keith Johnstone’s computations, they are distributed as follows:—In Europe, 5,974,000; in Africa, 50,416,000; in Asia, 112,739,000.