CHAPTER X

ISLAM, PAST AND PRESENT

Properly to appreciate Mohammed we must discard our religious and national prejudices and see in his work only what he has put in it, independently of the consequences which this work has entailed and which may more or less wound us even to-day. J. BARTHÉLEMY ST. HILAIRÉ.[227]

No one can travel through the Near East with an intelligent appreciation of the manners and customs of its people without an accurate knowledge of the religion professed by the majority of them and an adequate familiarity with the life and times of the one whom they revere as their Founder and Prophet. The reason is obvious. The inhabitants--Osmanlis, Arabs, Turkomans--of this part of the once great Ottoman Empire have so long lived under the theocracy established by Mohammed and his successors that every detail of their religion and civil life is regulated for them with a thoroughness that, outside of Islam, is quite unknown. The Sultan as well as the Mollah is both a religious and a civil functionary, and theocratic government prevails everywhere from the palace of the Padishah on the Bosphorus to the tent of the Bedouin in the Syrian and Arabian Deserts. What is not prescribed by the Koran is ordered by the Hadith, that body of legislative traditions which is based on the reputed sayings or acts of the Prophet of Mecca, and which, in the eyes of loyal adherents of Islam, has the force of prescriptions emanating directly or indirectly from Allah, and which are, consequently, immutable.

It is evident, therefore, that one who is ignorant of the history of Islam will not only seriously misunderstand the people of Moslem countries but will also be compelled, before he shall be long in their midst, greatly to revise his previous notions respecting them. For he will soon discover, as have many others before him, that while he knew all about their defects, he had little or no knowledge of their many and very great virtues.

As his sojourn among the Moslems is prolonged and he becomes better acquainted with them, he will find that most of his views concerning them were based on ungrounded prejudice or age-old stories that had no other basis than crass ignorance or un-Christian hatred. Not only this; he will gradually learn to admire those whom he had been taught to despise and, if he be of a deeply religious nature, he may find himself endorsing the statement of the late General Gordon: “I love the Moslems because they are not ashamed of God.”

To the student of history it seems incredible that so many and so egregious errors regarding Islam should have so long prevailed among men who are otherwise well informed and disposed to be fair in their judgments of all peoples, regardless of creed or color. For “although Islam has been described in so many books, there are yet educated people who,” in the words of the learned Padre Marracci,[228] “believe that Moslems are idolaters who adore Mohammed and the moon,”[229] and who, as the scholarly Sprenger writes, “have not gotten much further in the knowledge of Islam than that the Turks allow polygamy.”

If it were a question of the inhabitants of Central Africa, who were practically unknown until the explorations of Speke, Stanley, and Livingstone, we should not be surprised that even geographers should know next to nothing about them. But it seems difficult to explain the widespread ignorance which has everywhere obtained regarding a people who have played so important a rôle in history as the Moslems, and who during more than twelve centuries have been in constant relations with the Christian nations of Europe.

But, although the contact between the East and the West has been uninterrupted since the time Moslemism essayed

_To plant the Crescent o’er the Cross_,

the misrepresentations of Mohammed and his followers have continued without intermission from the days of the Crusaders to the present time. And the strangest thing is that the most extravagant tales about Mohammedans and their religion were put in circulation when their originators must have known that they had no foundation in fact.

Many of the stories--as false as they were ridiculous--that were long current respecting the Arabian Prophet and the religion which he founded were due to the _Trouvères_ and the _Troubadours_. A great majority of the _Chansons de Geste_ exhibit a pitiful ignorance of the tenets of the Saracens, and not a few of them contributed to give vogue to the most revolting fables respecting Mohammed and Islam. Although neither Leo the Isaurian nor Oliver Cromwell, both the sworn enemies of images, were more opposed to idolatry or to the worship of images than Mohammed, nevertheless, in _La Chanson de Roland_,[230] the Franks are represented under the walls of Saragossa as avenging their defeat at Roncesvelles by mutilating and destroying the idols of their enemies.

In the _Chanson d’Antioche_--declared to be “a very beautiful _chanson_ which does not contain any fables but only the unadulterated truth”--the author, Richard le Pelerin, in the beginning of his poem, asks God to put to dire confusion the followers of Mohammed--especially those

_Qui croient et adorent la figure Mahom._

In the _Roman de Beaudouin de Sebourc_, the author goes to still greater lengths. By a strange aberration he makes the idol of Mohammed the emblem of Islam, as the Cross is the emblem of Christianity. For, in this _chanson_ the Comtesse de Porthieu is represented as wishing to abjure her faith before the Sultan Saladin and expressing her readiness to adore the effigy of the Prophet:

_Mahom voel aourer; aportez-le-moi-cha._

And Saladin, on his part, is pictured as ordering the idol to be brought for the adoration of the newly made convert to Mohammedanism:

_Qu’ on aportast Mahom, et celle l’aoura._

When it is remembered that Mohammed was all his life the relentless enemy of images of all kinds and that he absolutely proscribed the representation of animated creatures; when it is recalled that images of all kinds have been studiously excluded from every mosque in the world from the time of the Prophet until the present, one would think that such misrepresentations as those spread broadcast by the _trouvères_ would have found little acceptance, or have been as short-lived as they were false. Had the object of the _trouvères_ been to perpetuate animosity among Christians toward Moslems they could not have devised a more effective method of achieving their purpose.

But Mohammed and his followers had to be discredited and recourse was had to foul means as well as fair. Not satisfied with making them favor what they always consistently denounced, _trouvères_ and chroniclers invented a most cruel legend regarding the death of the Prophet. Notwithstanding the concordant and unquestioned verdict of history respecting the demise of Mohammed, the pilgrim Richard, author of the chanson _La Conquête de Jerusalem_, fabricates the odious fable that the founder of Islam was devoured by swine while helplessly inebriated.[231] And this, despite the well-known fact that Mohammed was during his entire reforming career as much opposed to the use of intoxicating drinks as he was to the use of images! Nevertheless this alleged disgraceful end of the Prophet is assigned by the pilgrim Richard and by Guibert de Nogent in his “_Dei Gesta per Francos_” as the reason why Mohammedans never eat pork![232]

I call special attention to the erroneous notions regarding Mohammed and Islam which pervade the pages of the _chansons de geste_, as they are samples of other errors equally preposterous regarding a people who should have been better understood, and as they help to explain the origin of many similar misconceptions which, notwithstanding all that has been said and written to the contrary, still persist, among large masses of people, in all their original force and crudeness.

Even long after the time of the _trouvères_ there were not wanting historians and divines who were willing to repeat the silly legends of the _chansons de geste_ whenever they thought they would thereby give point to their attacks on the Koran or the Prophet. Thus, among the leaders of the Reformation, the distinguished Orientalist, Bibliander, seriously institutes a comparison between Mohammed and the Devil. Melancthon declared him to be either Gog or Magog, if not both together.[233]

Voltaire, in writing of the Koran, of which he had as superficial an acquaintance as of many other things which engaged his flippant and caustic pen, declared it to be “_Ce livre unintelligible qui fait fremir le sens commun à chaque page_”--that unintelligible book which makes common sense shudder at every page. And, like many writers before and since his time, he was fully aware that his fictions were totally at variance with history. But, as has been well expressed by Hurgronje, “he wanted to put before the public an armed Tartuffe and thought he might lay the part upon Mohammed.”[234]

Others again, like many writers of our own day, had a political as well as a religious object in their attacks upon Islam. For, under pretense of waging war against the nefarious tenets and practices of Moslemism, they secretly had in view an assault on the Turkish Empire, or, as a noted Swiss Orientalist long ago declared, all their efforts were really directed _in oppugnationem Mahometanæ perfidiæ et Turcici regni_.[235]

From the days of the Crusaders until the present there has been no cessation of the campaign of vilification of everything Mohammedan as there has for long been no abatement in political hostility on the part of certain nations of Europe against everything Ottoman. Centuries ago the cry was “_Pestem hanc ferro et flamma ab orbe depellendam esse_”--the pest of Islam must be driven from the earth by fire and sword. To-day the war cry is in Gladstonian phrase, “The Turk must, bag and baggage, get out of Europe.” How much of truth and how much of falsehood there have been in the most recent outcries against the Moslems, especially against those living in the Ottoman Empire, will be determined only when the historian shall be free from the violent passions and the selfish interests and the age-long antipathies which blind the writers of the present as they have blinded those of the past.

In the preface to his monumental work on the Koran, the erudite Padre Lodovico Marracci laments the prevailing ignorance of his time regarding everything Mohammedan and the paucity of books of value respecting the religion and practices of so large a part of mankind as the adherents of Islam.

Although [he writes] some have written learnedly and solidly on these subjects, there is nevertheless no concealing the fact that others, through ignorance of things Saracen, often omit the truth and publish fictitious and fabulous things, which excite the laughter of the Mohammedans and cause them to become more obstinate in their error.[236]

But, notwithstanding Marracci’s eloquent plea for a more thorough study of Islam, his words fell, for the most part, on deaf ears.[237] It was not until our own epoch that a critical investigation of the Koran was begun and that a really impartial inquiry into the life of Mohammed was seriously undertaken. Men were still in doubt as to the true character of the Arabian reformer and were still undecided as to whether he was

_Hero, impostor, fanatic, priest or sage._

All, however, were forced to admit that he must have been a man of extraordinary power and influence to set in motion that mighty human current which only a little more than a century after his death had founded an empire which extended from the Tigris to the Gaudilquivir and from the burning sands of Yemen to the chilly steppes of Turkestan. Yet, although the scholarly works of Sprenger, Margoliouth, Prince Caetani, and Noldeke-Schwally have thrown a flood of light on many formerly obscure points in the life of the Prophet and elucidated many previously disputed passages of the Koran, there is still as much discussion as ever regarding the nature of Mohammed’s religious vocation. Some contend that it was the result of hallucination, others of epilepsy, others of psychopathic abnormality, others of auto-hypnosis, while, as a result of long researches, Aloys Sprenger is quite sure that the Prophet was a victim of muscular hysteria.[238]

But however much controversy there may be respecting the origin of Mohammed’s self-styled mission or the nature of the mental disease from which he is said to have suffered, there can be no doubt whatever about the essence of his teaching as incorporated in the Koran. For the creed of Islam is so simple that, as has been said, “it can be written on a fingernail.”

The five duties of Islam, which means resignation to the will of God, as declared by Mohammed, are as follows:

1. Bearing witness that there is but one God;

2. Reciting the daily prayers;

3. Giving the legal alms;

4. Observing the Ramazan or the month’s fast;

5. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime.

In view of the clearness and simplicity of this creed, it is difficult to understand how the Western World has so signally failed to comprehend the real nature of Mohammed’s teaching. It is equally difficult to conceive how the authors of the countless books on the Prophet and his religion could have been honest and sincere when they penned their diatribes against Mohammed or pronounced their bitter and ludicrous invectives against his followers and the religion to which they were so ardently attached. Had they been actuated by a spirit of fairness and Christian charity they could so easily have ascertained the truth about the doctrine which they so strangely misrepresented and the people whom they so pitilessly maligned. For there never was a time since the day Saladin entered the Holy City of Jerusalem accompanied by its bishop, who had gone out to greet the humane conqueror; never a time since the Poverello of Assisi went as a missionary to the Sultan of Egypt, when men of good will, seeking the truth and nothing but the truth, might not have had all the information desired both about the doctrines of Islam and the practices of the millions who looked upon Mohammed as directly commissioned by God to teach them the way to Heaven.

Those who always exhibited such readiness to defame Islam and its followers should have recalled the words of St. Augustine when he declares that “there is no false doctrine which does not contain something of truth.”[239] They should have given heed to the counsels of the learned and zealous Father Marracci, who, guided by the experiences among the Mohammedans of his brothers in religion, taught them how they might bring the followers of Islam to a knowledge of the Gospel and to a love of the Crucified. Had they done so there would not be that inveterate hatred that now exists between the Cross and the Crescent, and there would not be that separation into two hostile camps of so many hundred millions of people who normally should be in the same fold and under the same Shepherd.

For, contrary to what has been so often said and written during the last thousand years and more, there is much, very much good in Islam. No less an authority than the illustrious Cardinal Hergenrœther declares:

Islamism ought to prepare for civilization the peoples most advanced in barbarism, notably those of Africa. Those peoples whom it is necessary to lead from fetishism to monotheism are in their low degree of culture and brutal sensualism materially aided by such a stepping-stone in their transition to Christianity.[240]

When Mohammed began his marvelous career of religious reform his countrymen in Arabia were, in many respects, as deeply sunk in vice as the most debased tribes of Central Africa. They were idolaters who were addicted to the grossest and most absurd fetishism. Trees, stones, shapeless masses of dough and the most trivial things in nature were objects of adoration. There was a special divinity for each of the countless tribes of the peninsula. In Beit-Alia--House of God--in Mecca, there was a different idol for each day of the year. Here also was the most jealously guarded object of worship--a black stone that was reputed to have fallen from heaven in the days of Adam--a stone which, it was averred, was originally of immaculate whiteness, but which was subsequently blackened by the myriad osculations of its sinful worshipers.

Nor was this all. Not only were the Arabians noted for their loathsome idolatry but also for their inhuman practice of disposing of female children at their birth by burying them alive. And so great was their superstition that it was not an infrequent occurrence for a father to sacrifice his child to appease the fancied anger of an offended deity. Besides this, blood feuds, sensuality of the vilest kind, drunkenness, and utter disregard of even the natural rights of women were as rampant as their general results were widespread and fatal.

When Mohammed set out to preach monotheism to these people who were so steeped in every vice--people who had heard the Gospel but had long abandoned its sublime teachings for the abominable practices of idolatry, he encountered the strongest opposition from all quarters. So relentless was the hostility displayed by friend and foe that his projected reform seemed foredoomed. But, notwithstanding the jeers which greeted him on every side and the persecutions which he endured for years, he was eventually successful beyond his most sanguine expectations.

Here we have the spectacle of a man that could neither read nor write who, after twenty years of incessant struggle, had succeeded in extirpating a system of idolatry which, by fostering morals the most depraved and practices the most hideous, had for centuries made the fairest parts of Arabia reeking sinks of iniquity. In place of a blighting and debasing fetishism he substituted the worship of one God, the Greater of heaven and earth--a God who is eternal, omnipotent, merciful; who presides over the destinies of all His creatures; who sees all their actions, even the most secret; who punishes the wicked in another world and rewards the good, and who never abandons them for a single instant either in this life or in the one to come. He preaches submission, the most humble and the most confiding submission, to the holy will of Him who is not only the Author of their existence but also their unfailing support and their just and omniscient judge. And the sole worship which the Mussulman is required to give to this one God is prayer at stated periods of the day and an annual fast during the month of Ramadan--a fast which is designed to direct his thoughts to Him who has created him, who sustains him during life and who, for weal or for woe, will be his Sovereign Lord after death.

Such essentially is Islam in all its simplicity as preached to the Arabian world by the unlettered camel driver of Mecca; such the doctrine which was destined to be adopted by many races and nations in every clime. There is nothing new in it. Mohammed never pretended to introduce anything new. He simply proclaimed to his benighted countrymen not a new revelation, but, as he always insisted, the long-forgotten faith of Abraham and Moses and Christ, as he understood it.

With the exception, therefore, of Christianity, based on the Old and New Testaments, with all its marvelous and beneficent consequences, there is no religion in the world which can justly be compared with Islam or which even remotely deserves to be placed in the same category.[241]

And, with the exception of Christianity and Judaism, it is the only religion in the world which has recognized and consecrated monotheism. It is, therefore, far superior to the debasing paganism of Greece and Rome. It is loftier and nobler than the repugnant dualism of Zoroaster and the selfish and materialistic utilitarianism of Confucius. It is incomparably more elevating than the fantastic metempsychosis and the atheistic Nirvana of Gautama Buddha, which, with Confucianism, holds in spiritual bondage a great majority of the teeming millions of Central and Eastern Asia.

The eminent doctor of the Church, St. John of Damascus, shows how near he considers Islam to Christianity when, in his account of the creed of Mohammed, he treats it as a heresy analogous to Arianism.[242] Peter the Venerable, the illustrious Abbot of Cluny, the first one to have a translation made of the Koran, was of a similar opinion, as is evinced in his work against Mohammedanism--a work which treats not of the paganism but of the heresy of the Saracens, as its title--_Adversus Nefandam Hæresim sive Sectam Saracenorum_--conclusively indicates.[243] In like manner Dante, who was almost as distinguished as a theologian as he was as a poet, places Mohammed in hell not as a heathen but as a sower of “scandal and schism.”[244]

Arius, by denying the divinity of Christ, had prepared the way for Islam, which saw in the Son of God only a prophet who, as Moslems subsequently claimed, was but the precursor of Mohammed. St. Jerome, in his memorable words--_Igemuit totus orbis et Arianum se esse miratus est_--the world uttered a sigh and was astonished to find itself Arian--expressed the one-time prevalence of the errors of the Alexandrine heresiarch. The grave dissensions in the churches of Asia and Africa that followed close upon dissemination of the heresy of Arius immensely assisted Islam in its lightning career of conquest. For the divided and degenerate Christians of these two continents were easily persuaded that Moslemism was but one of the various Christian sects and not a new religion.

The followers of Mohammed were formerly the victims of calumny on account of their alleged beliefs and practices. Now it is the organization of Islam and the character of its religious services that seem to give rise to the most misunderstandings.

Thus, according to many modern writers, the Sultan of Turkey is to Islam what the Pope is to Christendom. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. That the caliphate, whether of the Ottoman, Ommiad, or Abbassid dynasties, is in no way comparable with the Papacy is clearly evidenced by the fact that Islam has never in all its history regarded the Caliph as its spiritual head.[245]

Again the same writers, as well as many modern travelers, constantly refer to the priests and the clergy of Mohammedanism. The fact is that Islam has not and never has had anything like a clerical body as it is understood in the Christian world. There is no ordination, no priesthood with powers to bind and loose, no confessional, no baptismal font, no altar, no sacrifice, no mediator between man and God. There is in fact no one possessing any special powers through ordination to perform any act that any adherent of Islam could not as rightfully perform. For, Islam, as has been well said, is and has always been “the lay religion _par excellence_.” There are, it is true, the Khatib--preacher--and the imam--leader in prayer--but neither the one nor the other possesses anything whatever of the sacerdotal character of the Christian priesthood or of the hereditary Levites of ancient Judaism.[246] They are usually selected on account of their grave deportment and their knowledge of the Koran and of the traditions of Islam, but otherwise they might be replaced by a mufti or kadi whose occupations are analogous to our lawyer or judge. The chief purpose of the imam, whose function closely resembles that of a precentor, is to preserve order in public worship. But whether the religious functions of the Moslems be performed by imams, khatibs, mollas, or any of that large class of functionaries known as ulema, there are no gradational distinctions among the worshipers themselves. The ulema may act like priests and may sometimes be considered as priests by uninformed people, but the ulema themselves, who ought to know, strongly and consistently insist on their non-priestly character. So alien, indeed, is all classification to Moslemism, so abhorrent to Islam is the very idea of an ecclesiastical organization as distinct from the laity, that Palgrave, whose long and intimate intercourse with the Mohammedans made him thoroughly familiar with all the details of their creed, did not hesitate when referring to their religious organization, to declare, “‘Each one for himself and God for us all’ is an almost literal translation of what the Koran sums up and a hundred traditions confirm.”[247]

The erroneous notions that so generally prevail respecting the real object of mosques are as numerous as those respecting its khatibs and imams. The primary use of a mosque is to indicate the direction of Mecca. Originally it was a simple platform with a wall at the end facing Mecca. In facing this wall the worshiper looked towards what was to him the holiest city in the world. In southern climates this primitive type of mosque[248] sufficiently answered the chief purpose contemplated. But the more rigorous climates of the north required roofed places of worship, which eventually developed into the magnificent structures which one now finds in Brusa, and Constantinople, as well as in cities much farther south, such as Damascus and Cairo and Jerusalem.

But the reverence which a Mussulman entertains for his mosque and that which a Roman Catholic feels for his church are entirely different in character. There is, in the eyes of a Catholic, a sanctity attaching to a church that does not and cannot attach to a mosque. This is shown by the names given to the two places of worship. A common name for mosque is _Jami_, which means a meeting house, while the word church, derived from the Greek, signifies the house of God--Τὸ κνριακὸν. In a Moslem’s view God is present in the _jami_ or mosque, but only as he is present everywhere else--in the field, on the mountain. But in the church, according to Catholic teaching, God is really and truly present under the veil of the Blessed Sacrament. Hence all the pomp and ceremony of the Catholic ritual, all the gorgeousness of decoration which so distinguishes the Catholic house of God from the Mussulman meeting house. Because of the Sacramental Presence every Catholic church is called the house of God. But among Mohammedans there is only one specifically recognized _Beith Allah_--house of God. This is the Kaaba at Mecca, which contains the Black Stone which was for ages an object of idolatrous worship and which is even to-day the chiefest object of Mohammedan veneration, if not also of downright superstition. It is because of the presence of this old pagan fetish in the Kaaba,[249] as well as on account of the fantastic legends which are associated with the Kaaba itself, that the Moslem, when praying, always turns toward Mecca. It is this Kebla--the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca--that is carefully indicated by the niche or mihrab in the interior wall of every mosque. For a time the Kebla was changed from Mecca to the rock in Jerusalem, on which Solomon’s temple was erected, but, whether from policy or atavism, Mohammed changed it back again to its original location. By so doing he virtually reduced Islam to a national religion--the religion of Arabia--instead of making it, as he had dreamed, the religion of the world.

Again, the mosque, unlike the church, is never the center of that kind of religious organization which we know as a parish. There is no congregation comprising those who worship in a particular mosque. Nor have the imams and khatibs any jurisdiction, like that of a Catholic pastor, over those who assemble in the mosque for prayer. Worship in the mosque may be called congregational only in so far as certain individuals, who happen to gather there, unite in prayer to Allah under the direction of the imam, but it is nevertheless individual, as no Moslem has closer affiliations with one mosque than with another. Wherever he happens to be when the muezzin calls for prayer, there is his mosque and there he joins with his fellows in worship.

In the Ottoman Empire the imam, so far as he is charged with special functions, is no more than a paid servant. Outside of acting as precentor, or fugleman, at prayer his chief duties are to officiate at marriages and funerals. There is none of that spiritual relationship which exists between the Catholic priest and his parishioners; none of that love of a father for his children, and none of that affection of children for their father, which exists in every Catholic parish; no one who is in any sense the shepherd of his flock--to assist the weak, to direct the erring, to admonish the remiss, to upbraid the sinner, and lead those aspiring to holiness to higher degrees of perfection in the spiritual life. Far from feeling the need of such a guide and superior, the Moslem prides himself on his ability to dispense with such aids which he would regard as curtailing his religious liberty and circumscribing his independence of action. He prefers to lead his own life, without let or hindrance, without monitors or directors, and to be free, if so disposed, to follow those votaries of pleasure in other parts of the world, who

_Compound for sins that they’re inclined to_ _By damning those they have no mind to._

But one cannot fully understand the religious spirit of the Mussulman without knowing something of the prayers which he is wont to address to the Deity. No class of men, probably, have the name of God--Allah--more frequently on their lips than the Moslems. This is particularly true of those devotees--and their number is legion--known as dervishes.

Prayer five times a day is the second of the five pillars of Islam. At dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, evening and night the Muezzin ascends the minaret and repeats in a loud voice:

God is great. I bear witness that there is no god but God. I bear witness that Mohammed is the apostle of God. Come to prayers! Come to salvation!

But prayer may be said only when the clothes and body of the worshiper as well as the place of prayer are free from all impurity. Moreover, the prayers, whether said privately or in common, must be recited according to a prescribed form and in specified postures from which there can be no deviation. There are constant repetitions of the words “God is great,” “I extol the holiness of my Lord, the Most High.”

_Holiness to Thee, O God!_ _And praise be to Thee!_ _Great is Thy name!_ _Great is Thy greatness!_ _There is no deity but Thee!_

A devout Mussulman will recite these and similar forms of prayer no less than seventy-five times a day. But these words, which admit of no variety or change, become, after ceaseless repetition, rather a mechanical than a mental act and are frequently more in the nature of lip service than the prayer of the Christian, which consists not only in acts of praise, as in the above words of the Moslem worshiper, but also in acts of impetration and thanksgiving. The Moslem’s nearest approach to a Christian prayer is the first sura of the Koran, called the Fatihah, which reads:

_Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds,_ _The compassionate, the merciful._ _King of the day of reckoning!_ _Thee only do we worship, and to Thee only do we cry for help._ _Guide thou us in the straight path,_ _The path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious,_ _With whom Thou art not angry,_ _And who go not astray, Amen._

But we have only to compare this prayer--which has been called “the quintessence of the whole Koran”--with the “Our Father” to see the vast difference between the prayer of the Christian and that of the Mohammedan. It is manifest in the very first word of the _Pater Noster_, which shows that there is no comparison between the Christian and the Moslem conception of God. Mohammed believed in God, feared and obeyed Him according to his light, but, not recognizing His Fatherhood, he did not and, from his view of the Deity, could not love Him. It is so with his followers. Their God is a God of fear, not a God of love, because not known as _God Our Father_. How different is this from the relationship--sonship--of the Christian to his Creator, who enjoys the blessed privilege of calling God _Abba_--Father.

Denying the Fathership of God, Moslem theologians maintain that it is impossible for men to love Him. Man and God, they contend, are of different natures, and where there is a difference of genus there can be no love. The nearest approach to love, they contend, is man’s perseverance in obedience to Allah.

Again, according to the same theologians, there can be no love of God for man, for love, say they, implies change, which, as God is infinitely perfect, is impossible. When God therefore is said to love man, all that is meant, according to Al-Gazali, one of the most eminent of Moslem theologians and philosophers, is that “God so affects man that man comes to God.”[250]

But in this case, as in so many others, the common sense--or shall we call it a special divine illumination?--of many in Islam has enabled them to arrive at a truer conception of God and of their relations to Him than was ever attained by Moslem philosophers and casuists and incomparably superior to anything found in the Koran or in the traditional teachings of Mohammed.

As a proof of this assertion, I need only adduce the beautiful prayer of the Persian imam, El Kachiri, who, discarding the cold and formal acts of praise prescribed in Moslem worship, pours forth his soul to God in these touching and heart-felt words:

Thou, O Lord, threatenest me, with a bitter separation which will forever deprive me of Thy presence! O Lord, do with me as Thou wilt, provided that I be not forever separated from Thee! There is no more bitter nor fatal poison than this separation. For what can a soul separated from God do except be in a state of inquietude and agitation which will be a continual torment? One would rather suffer a hundred thousand deaths; for, after all, they would not offer anything so terrible as the privation of the vision of Thy divine face. All the evils of the world, all the most acute and painful diseases joined together, seem to me incomparably easier to bear than this removal from Thee. It is this transitory removal which renders our lands sterile; which dries up and infects our waters. What would it be if it were eternal? Without it, the fire of hell would not burn; it is through it that it becomes so hot. In a word, it is only Thy presence which sustains us and showers upon us all kinds of good things and Thy absence, it is, which causes all the evils of hell.[251]

This prayer is fully in keeping with the teaching of many other Moslem mystics of non-Semitic origin, who, contrary to the vulgar notions so widely entertained respecting the Mohammedan paradise, explicitly declare that the infinite happiness of the elect in heaven consists in the enjoyment of the beatific vision. This ineffable happiness, they aver, so far transcends all the other joys of paradise that they completely disappear before it. “Paradise, O Lord,” exclaims the Sheik el Alem, “is desirable only because one there sees Thee; because, without the light of Thy beauty, it would pall on us.”[252]

These two quotations are remarkable but no less so than the words of a Mussulman poet of Persia who, in addressing himself to Isa--Arabic for Jesus--says:

The heart of the afflicted man draws all his consolation from Thy words. The soul resumes life and vigor simply by hearing Thy name pronounced. If the mind of man is ever able to raise itself to the contemplation of the mysteries of the Divinity, it is from Thee that it draws the light to know them and it is Thou that givest him the attraction by which he is penetrated.[253]

How like the language of a Christian speaking of the grace of our Saviour, Jesus Christ!

Far less excusable than ignorance of Moslem doctrine and practices, is the disposition everywhere manifested in Europe and America to regard Islam not only as a disintegrating organization but also as a decaying power. Those who thus minimize the ever-growing strength of one of the largest religious bodies in the world exhibit the fatuity of the ostrich which imagines danger does not exist because it is unseen.

For generations past the western world has been periodically informed that Mohammedanism as a religion is moribund and that Christendom has nothing more to apprehend from it. It has been assured that the mosques are unfrequented and crumbling into ruins; that schools and colleges of Moslem law are neglected or languishing for lack of financial support; that the precepts of the Koran are generally disregarded and frequently openly flouted; and that Islam is under an eclipse which portends disaster and extinction.

But what are the facts? I can best answer them in the words of Palgrave whose sixteen years of investigations of Mohammedan conditions from the shores of the Euxine to the interior of Arabia makes his words on the question authoritative. Writing in 1872, he declares:

Were I to attempt the catalogue of mosques, colleges, schools, chapels and the like, repaired or wholly fresh--built within the circle of my own personal inspection alone--several pages would hardly suffice to contain it. Trebizond, Batoom, Samsoon, Sivas, Keysareeyah, Chorum, Amasia, and fifty other towns of names unknown, or barely known in Europe, each can boast its new and renovated places of Mahometan worship; new schools, some of law, others of grammar, others primary, have sprung up on every side; new works of charity and public bequest adorn the highways.... Meanwhile, year after year sees a steady increase in the number of pilgrims to the holy places of Islam; and, although the greater facilitation consequent on steam has undoubtedly contributed not a little to this result, much must also be put down to the growing eagerness manifested by all, high and low, to visit the sacred soil, the birthplace of their religion and Prophet; while the pride that each village takes in its “hajjees” is manifested in the all-engrossing sympathy that accompanies their departure, and the triumphant exultation of the entire populace that welcomes them home. It may not have been less a thousand years ago: it certainly could not have been more.[254]

Although it is nearly half a century since the noted author of the _Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia_ penned the paragraph just quoted, there is no evidence, so far as I have been able to gather in my travels in Asia and Africa, that the current of Moslem revival is running lower than it was fifty years ago, nor is the rejuvenescence of Islam less marked nor its power less resistant or less persistent.

Not only has Mohammedanism long been declared to be moribund but it has also, from time immemorial, been represented as changeless in doctrine as are the agricultural implements of the East--which are the same to-day as “when Proserpine went a-Maying through Enna”--and “the difficulty of bringing Islam and its ways into harmony with modern society as comparable to squaring the circle.”

Again, what are the facts? So far is Moslemism from being what it was when it came from the hands of the Prophet, or from what it is as exhibited in the Koran, that it has been constantly undergoing modification in religious doctrine and practice since the days of the first caliphs. Not to speak of the countless changes which have insensibly been effected by the quiet but continuous action of Christianity, innumerable others have been brought about by the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, by Roman law, Neo-Platonism, and other similar but persistent and irresistible influences. This is practically manifest in the hadith as modified and developed by canonists, dogmatists, and mystics to enable Islam “to shape religious ordinances of old customs” or “to adapt itself to the peculiar characteristics and stages of development of the people whose allegiance it wishes to win.”

For not only have law and custom, religious teachings and political doctrines clothed themselves in Hadith form [writes one of the most eminent authorities on Mohammedanism], but everything in Islam, both that which has worked itself out through its own strength, as well as that which has been appropriated from without. In this work foreign elements have been so assimilated that one has lost sight of their origin. Sentences from the Old and New Testaments, rabbinical sayings as well as those from the apochryphal gospels, the teaching of Greek philosophers, sayings of Persian and Indian wisdom have found room in this garb among the sayings of the prophet of Islam. Even the Lord’s prayer is not lacking in well confirmed Hadith-form.[255]

To say, then, that Islam has always been inflexibly opposed to the influence of foreign science, or law, or philosophy, or theology when these elements enabled it “to mould its intellectual heritage” and adjust itself to an alien spirit or a new environment is not in consonance with the facts of history. So far, indeed, is this from the truth that “it may safely be said that there is nothing more extraordinary in the whole history of Islam than the way in which the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Koran and the consequent stereotyped and unalterable nature of its precepts have, by ingenuity, by legal fictions, by the ‘Sunna,’ or traditional sayings of Mohammed or by _responsa prudentum_ been accommodated to the changing circumstances and the various degrees of civilization of the nations which profess it.”[256] Such being the case, one is not surprised in finding so distinguished a writer as Stanley Lane-Poole making the categorical assertion that “the faith of Islam has passed through more phases and experienced greater revolutions than perhaps any other of the religions of the world.”[257]

No less misleading and mischievous are the continuously repeated statements that the days of Mussulman missionary activity have long since passed; that Mussulman zeal for propagating the teachings of the Koran and the Prophet no longer exists; that Pan-Islamism, as a religious force with which Christianity must reckon, was long ago dealt its death blow in the Gulf of Lepanto by Don Juan of Austria and under the walls of Vienna by the immortal Sobieski.

But still, again, what are the facts? It is true that Moslem canon law still divides the world into _Dar al-Islam_--Abode of Islam--and _Dar al-harb_--Abode of war, according as these two parts are in the possession of Mohammedanism or are yet to be won to it by the sword, yet it is, nevertheless, equally true that this distinction is now practically a dead letter and that the Christian Powers of the world are now able to curtail Islam’s schemes of territorial expansion and render forever impossible all hopes of world conquest. But, although Islam as a political and military power is no longer to be apprehended--at least for the present--it is not true that she has discontinued her missionary activities or that her propaganda in behalf of the religion of the Prophet is less determined than it was in the days of Saladin or Solyman the Magnificent. We have only to scan the authentic tokens that come to us from every quarter of the globe to be convinced that Pan-Islamism is to-day a greater missionary force--peacefully aggressive but fanatically persistent--than it has perhaps ever been in any period of her history.[258]

Let us see. According to the most reliable statistics there are now about two hundred and fifty million Mohammedans in the world,[259] and this number, stupendous as it is, is rapidly increasing. The strongest agency in their phenomenal development is the annual _hadj_ or pilgrimage to Mecca which every free Mussulman is required to make at least once in his lifetime. During the period of the _hadj_, the Sacred City of Moslemism sees gathered around and within its walls a vast, surging throng of devotees, which ranges from two to three hundred thousand strong. They come from every part of Asia and Africa--from the snow-swept steppes of Siberia, from the coral-fringed islands of the Indian Archipelago, and from the tangled jungles of Senegambia and Abyssinia. Turks, Kurds, Persians, Tartars, Chinese, Malays, Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians--men of all colors and of countless tribes and tongues--they all foregather in the Sacred City of Arabia to get inspiration and strength to win proselytes to the creed of Mohammed.

From Mecca where every one is thrilled by the peculiar half-pagan ceremonies which Mohammed incorporated into his religion, every hadji returns to his home, imbued with the surpassing greatness of Moslemism and exulting in the thought that his is the blessed privilege of being numbered among the followers of the Prophet. Each one is a zealous agent of Moslemism and is prepared, if need be, to give his life, in disseminating its principles and in contributing, so far as in him lies, towards the realization of the hopes of every true Mohammedan--the final world triumph of Pan-Islamism.

Such a determined army of missionaries, stirred to a frenzy of enthusiasm by their experience in what is to them the holiest spot on earth, has during the last few decades achieved results that are positively startling. Not in centuries has Islam so defiantly thrown the gauntlet down to Christendom. And never before was it so incumbent, as at present, on the followers of Christ to use every effort to counteract their well-directed campaign of Mohammedan proselytism.

No agency is overlooked by the Moslems that will contribute towards their success in their world-wide propaganda--traders, shepherds, soldiers, husbandmen, shop-keepers, mollahs, muftis, marabouts--all are engaged in the same ubiquitous, unceasing work of winning converts to the religion of Mohammed.

But more active and persistent--were that possible--than the proselytizers just mentioned, are the legions of zealots known as dervishes who now count nearly a hundred different orders and millions of members. Among them are all classes of people from the humblest hamal to the proudest shah and sultan. They count untold thousands of such ardent reformers as the Wahabis and Sanusiyahs who are undoubtedly the most powerful propagators of Islam that the world has yet known. The last named order has _zawivas_ or lodges with six million oath-bound members in northern Africa alone. These are all sworn to labor unceasingly for the extension of Pan-Islamism and for the propagation of the revelation of Allah as contained in the Koran. So unexampled has been their proselyting activity between Egypt and Cape Colony during the last few decades that millions have been brought under the banner of the prophet. Frequently in equatorial Africa whole tribes have, in a short period of time, been won to Moslemism by the unflagging zeal and resistless enthusiasm of its missionaries.

Every instrumentality that promises success is unhesitatingly brought into requisition. With the view of confirming the wavering in their own ranks and continuously increasing the number of converts, they have everywhere established schools, orphan asylums, and printing presses, and in Christian countries they have erected mosques. Only lately a great mosque was completed at Petrograd. Converts to Islam are found in Japan, Jamaica, British Guiana, and Brazil. The number of immigrant Moslems in the New World was recently estimated at more than one hundred and fifty thousand, most, if not all, of them fired with the same zeal for the propagation of Mohammedanism as their brethren in Asia and Africa. In the various parts of India, where according to the most available statistics, there are more than sixty million adherents of the Prophet, the annual number of converts to Moslemism is variously estimated from ten thousand to six hundred thousand.

These facts prove conclusively that Islam is very far from being either tottering or moribund. In the vigorous prosecution of the campaign which is to make Pan-Islamism not only a dominant religious power but a dominant political power as well, it exhibits all the pertinacious

## activity of its palmiest days. It is everywhere winning victories and

ceaselessly planning new and greater victories. It is the most vigorous and the most resolute anti-Christian force that confronts the Church to-day. Those who think that Islam is approaching dissolution or extinction should ponder the words of the Arab poet:

_Dead and buried had they seen me, so their ready tale they spread;_ _Yet I lived to see the tellers buried all themselves and dead._

In the preceding pages I have endeavored in the limited space available to give an honest statement regarding the actual tenets and status of Moslemism in the past as well as in the present. While, on the one hand, I have studiously eschewed everything like detraction, I have, on the other, as carefully avoided anything that could reasonably be construed as an apology either for Mohammed or for Mohammedanism. It has never entered my mind, God forbid! to compare Moslemism with Christianity as a means for attaining to a true knowledge of our Creator or for realizing the highest spiritual ideals of which our race is capable. No, Christianity, especially that form of it which has sanctified and crowned the lives of a St. Jerome, a St. Francis of Assisi, a St. Theresa, a Joan of Arc; which presided at the sublime meditations of an Augustine of Hippo, or a Thomas of Aquin, of a Dante Alighieri, of a Christopher Columbus; which has given to the world such matchless heroes and heroines of charity and self-sacrifice as a St. Vincent de Paul, a Father Damien, a Sister of Charity, or a Little Sister of the Poor; that for us is the truest, the holiest, the most beneficent of all religions; the one that contains in all its fullness the revealed word of God, the one which must be our guide to a world of happiness eternal in the life beyond the tomb.

Truth and justice, however, compel us to admit that there are many, very many, things in Islam to extort our admiration. Nor can there be any doubt that Mohammed achieved many things for the improvement of his idolatrous, drink-sodden, vice-steeped, feud-wrecked countrymen. The Koran, we must confess, contains many beautiful things regarding one’s duties towards God and one’s neighbor; but all of them are directly or indirectly derived from the New or the Old Testament, or from the doctrines of the early Church. Notwithstanding all this, however, the teachings of Islam are as far beneath the saving and incomparable truths of Christianity as is the gross and sensual Prophet of Mecca beneath the all-pure and all-perfect Son of God.

But, to recur again to the previously quoted opinion of Cardinal Hergenrœther, Islam can serve as a stepping-stone from fetishism to Christianity and as such is worthy of our sympathetic study and appreciation.

Among the countless amiable, honest, hospitable, deeply religious Mussulmans that every traveler finds in Moslem lands there is a large number who yearn for union with God and who would make any sacrifice to conform with His holy will were it but clearly and unmistakably made known to them. They are but awaiting the arrival of the Savior’s messenger and will receive the word of salvation with joy and thanksgiving. The spiritual unrest among Moslems; the ever-increasing attempts at social and doctrinal reform; even the very zeal which loyal Moslems exhibit in extending the creed of the Prophet--the only form of religion with which they are really acquainted--attest their eagerness in seeking the truth and explain their ardor in propagating what they deem to be the only revelation of the Most High.

Add to all this a widespread feeling among Mussulman leaders as well as among Christian missionaries that the time has finally come when a serious effort should be made towards effecting some kind of a _rapprochement_ between the Cross and the Crescent; when the vast organizations of Islam and Christianity should endeavor to arrive at a better understanding of one another’s doctrines and practices; when, rising superior to that age-long antipathy and that mischievous _odium theologicum_ which has so long kept them in a state of implacable hostility, they should strive to meet one another as brothers in one Lord and as children of the same Father.

More than sixty years ago Abd-el-Kader, the gifted Algerian ruler and patriot, wrote: “If the Mussulmans and Christians would give ear to me, I should cause their divergence to cease and they would become brothers.”[260]

The number of Moslems who entertain a view similar to that of the distinguished emir is daily increasing. They feel that the moral and religious ideas of the various races of mankind are not so irreconcilable as they are ordinarily supposed to be. The greatest barrier towards a nearer communion of sentiments between Christians and Mohammedans has been erected by ignorance and prejudice. Remove this barrier and the way, they contend, will be prepared for intellectual sympathy and, eventually, for religious union.

Notwithstanding the long centuries of wars between the Cross and the Crescent, Mohammedans are so far from regarding our Savior, as is commonly supposed, with the hatred and contempt which Christians have usually entertained for the Prophet of Mecca, that they have for Him a reverence which is inferior only to that with which He is regarded by Christians themselves. They believe that He will again return to earth and, having slain Antichrist, will establish a reign of peace and justice among men. They believe that truth will at last be triumphant and the sword will be sheathed forevermore. According to the Shiahs of India there will then be an amalgamation of Islam and Christianity and then, finally, will be realized in its truest and highest sense something of Tennyson’s dream of universal peace and charity

_In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world._

The spiritual agitation now existing among Moslems, the aspirations of so many of them for a purer and more elevating creed than that of Mohammed would seem to offer a peculiarly favorable opportunity for preaching to them the Gospel of the world’s Redeemer. But there are, unfortunately, almost insuperable difficulties in the way. There are, first and foremost, the selfish diplomacy and the unprincipled aggressions of the European Powers, which nullify in advance all projects of Christian propaganda. The frequent exhibitions of very questionable morality on the part of certain European diplomatists who have manifested a total disregard of the most solemn covenants; the ruthless conquests of Christian nations which have at times displayed an utter disregard of the most elementary rights of humanity and have often had recourse to the most cruel and barbarous methods of warfare--these things have not helped to commend to Moslems the religion of their conquerors. The recent campaigns of Italy in Tripoli, of England on the Gold Coast,[261] of Russia in the Transcaucasia have but intensified the bitterness of Islam toward Christendom and fanned the flame of fanaticism among millions who sullenly await an opportunity for making reprisal.

Then, too, there is among many the pessimistic feeling which is expressed in Kipling’s couplet:

_Oh, East is East, and West is West,_ _And never the twain shall meet_--

a feeling that has been engendered among them by a vague notion that there is an impassable chasm between the peoples of Asia and Europe and that any attempt to reconcile them will prove not only illusory but impossible. Starting with such an assumption they still cling to the detestable theory in politics of identifying power and right and of enforcing the inexorable demands of an iniquitous diplomacy by the satanic instrumentality of machine guns and trinitrotoluol.

_Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis_ _Tempus egit_....

Christian nations, if actuated by the altruism which they are constantly preaching, if guided by the same law of charity which is binding on individuals, need not such help or such defenders of their prestige or national honor.

No, what is now needed more than ever before is a complete change of attitude of the West towards the East. If we are to make the brotherhood of man anything more than an idle phrase; if we are to bring together in amity and comity the peoples of the Orient and the Occident; if we are to heal the wounds which the followers of Mohammed have suffered from centuries of cruel calumny and still crueler wars; if we are to lead Islam to a knowledge of Christianity and to an eventual acceptance of the Gospel of peace and love; we, the followers of the Crucified, cannot too soon abjure our accursed theory that might makes right nor can we too soon control that abiding lust of conquest which has plunged the weak and the innocent into such untold suffering and which has tended to perpetuate the deep hostility and the fatal misunderstandings which for long centuries have separated the God-created souls of the East from the God-created souls of the West.

The time has come for a new Crusade but a Crusade in which fire and sword shall, in the words of good old Padre Marracci, be replaced by _lingua et calamo_--by the voice of the evangelist and the pen of the expositor of Christian teaching. It must be a Crusade which shall be inspired by the ardent love of a Francis of Assisi; by the flaming intelligence of a Raymond Lully; by the wisely tempered zeal of a Peter the Venerable.[262] It must be a Crusade to win souls for Christ, our Savior, and to make all men children of the same heavenly Father. And that which in the Crusades of old was the war cry should, in the new Crusade, be the peace cry--_Deus lo volt_--God wills it.

##