with a high hand. Assassinations at the suggestion or command of the prophet soon followed. It became extremely dangerous to oppose him. The progress of Islam [says Muir] begins to stand in unenviable contrast with that of early Christianity. Converts were gained to the faith of Jesus by witnessing the constancy with which its confessors suffered death; they were gained to Islam by the spectacle of the readiness with which its adherents inflicted death. In the one case, conversion often imperiled the believer's life; in the other, it was for the most part the only means of saving it.* It was not to be supposed that the Meccans would make no effort to retrieve the disaster of Bedr; that would have been the most contemptible cowardice. Accordingly, about a year after that defeat, the Meccans collected an army of three thousand warriors from various sources, marched to the vicinity of Medina, and encamped west of the Ohod mountain, which lies north-east of the city. Mohammed marched out of the city and engaged them. His army was defeated, and he himself was wounded in the mouth and reported to be dead. The Meccans thereupon left for home. The defeat was most damnaging to the prophet. His success at Bedr was claimed as a proof of his divine mission; then, by parity of reasoning, was not his defeat at Ohod subversive of his prophetic claims? In A. D. 625, expeditions were sent out by Mohammed in various directions, increasing his power. The Jewish tribe Bani Nadhir were driven into exile. About this time Mohammed married two more women,† who were widows. Being smitten with the wife of his adopted son, Zaid, her husband proposed to divorce her. Mohammed at first declined, but afterward accepted the offer; she was divorced, and they were married. As this marriage created scandal, the prophet got a pretended revelation from the Almighty justifying it. In A. D. 627, the Meccans, with various tribes of Bedawîn, amounting to ten thousand men, advanced to the siege of Medina. Mohammed, by the advice of a Persian, extended around the unprotected parts of the city a ditch, which was completed just in time to save the place. The Meccans and their allies, failing to capture the city, left one stormy night. *Sprenger's Life of Mohammed, p. 258. A few years before his death his wives numbered ten, besides two concubines. This siege is known in Mohammedan history as the Battle of the Ditch. Soon after this the Jewish tribe Beni Qurâidhah, near Medina, were taken by a siege, and the men, eight hundred in number, were beheaded. After this he had no further opposition in the region of Medina, and his power was continually growing. In the sixth year of the Hijrah he concluded a treaty of peace with the Meccans for ten years. In A. D. 628 he sent dispatches to the Emperor Heraclius, to Chosroes, king of Persia, and to the governor of Egypt. The latter alone made a courteous reply, while not admitting his claims. About this time he was poisoned by a Jewish maid who had lost relatives in the subjugation of the Jews of Kheibar. The effect of this poisoning he felt all his life. In A. D. 629 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the following year, with an army of eight or ten thousand men, he made a conquest of Mecca. About A. D. 631 his authority was extended into southern Arabia. In the March of the following year he made his last pilgrimage to Mecca and addressed a vast crowd of pilgrims near the city. In the last of May of the same year he was taken sick of a fever, and after an illness of about ten days he died in Medina on the 8th of June, A. D. 632, in the sixty-third year of his age. At his death his power extended over all, or nearly all, of the Arabian peninsula, although Dr. Sprenger thinks that not more than one thousand men really believed in him at that time. We must next consider the position of Mohammed toward the Old and the New Testament, and then discuss the doctrines of the Koran. On the first, we may observe that he always assumes the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures. He represents his revelations as confirming those already given: We gave Moses the Book* [that is, the Pentateuch]. But before it [the Koran] was the Book of Moses, a model and a mercy; and this is a book confirming it in Arabic language. Verily, we have revealed the law in which is guidance and light; the prophets who were resigned did judge thereby those who were Jews. ... And we follow up the footsteps of these [prophets] with Jesus the son of Mary, confirming that which was before him and the law, and we brought him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light. When God said, O Jesus, son of Mary, remember my favors toward thee and toward thy mother, when I aided thee * Chap. xli, 45. +Chap. xlvi, 11. with the Holy Ghost till thou didst speak to men in the cradle and when grown up. And when I taught thee the Book and wisdom and the law; when thou didst create of clay, as it were, the likeness of a bird, by my power, and didst blow thereon, it became a bird; and thou didst heal the blind from birth, and the leprous by my permission; and when thou didst bring forth the dead by my permission; and when I did ward off the children of Israel from thee when thou didst come to them with manifest signs, and those who disbelieved amongst them said, "This is naught but manifest magic."* Mohammed represents the Jews as saying: Verily, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, and the apostle of God. . . . But they did not kill him, and they did not crucify him, but a similitude was made for them.. They did not kill him, for sure! Nay, God raised him up unto himself; for God is mighty and wise! And there shall not be one of the people of the Book [Jews] but shall believe in him before his death; and on the day of judgment he shall be a witness against them.f Mohammed also refers to the miraculous conception of Christ, which he manifestly accepted. He also makes reference to the incidents connected with the birth of John the Baptist. But while Mohammed believed in the divine mission of Christ he rejected his divinity: The Jews, says he, say that Ezra is the son of God; and the Christians say that the Messiah is the Son of God; God fight them! how they lie! § Jesus, the son of Mary, is but the apostle of God and his word. . . and say not "Three." He is but a servant whom we have been gracious to.¶ In reference to the Deity, Mohammed says: Say, He is God alone! God the Eternal! He begets not and is not begotten! Nor is there like unto him any one.** Mohammed had but a slight acquaintance with the New Testament. We have no proof that there existed any translation of it in Arabic in his time. He makes but few references to the Gospel history, and in them he blends the stories of the Apocryphal gospels with the authentic statements of the evangelists. He never mentions any of the apostles of Christ by name. On the Christian doctrine of redemption he has nothing to say. * Chap. v. He declares, as we have already seen, that Chap. xix, 1-15. Chap. ix, 30 **Chap. cxii. Christ was not really crucified, but taken to heaven. He indeed pretends that his own appearance was predicted by Christ: And when Jesus, the son of Mary, said, . . . Verily I am the apostle of God to you, verifying the law that was before me, and giving you glad tidings of an apostle who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmed.* It is evident that Mohammed here refers to the TаpákληTOS (Paraclete, Advocate, Comforter), which Christ promised to send. John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26; xvi, 7. Ahmed (most praiseworthy) is about the same as Mohammed (greatly praised). Some Moslem who had been a Christian must have suggested to him this ingenious device by which apákλntos is converted into περικλυτός, renowned. Περικλυτός does not occur in the Greek Testament, nor can I find that the meaning renowned was ever given to Tарákλnтоç in any ancient version. Mohammed was a Unitarian in the strict sense of the word. He, no doubt, was disgusted with the idolatry of the Arabs, especially with the worship of the divinities, Lât, Manât, and Ozza, said to be daughters of God. Flying from this idolatry and the superstitious observances of the Christians of his time, and having no clear conception of the doctrine of the New Testament, he took refuge in absolute Monotheism. He seems to have thought that the Virgin Mary was one of the persons of the divine Trinity in the Christian system. Mohammed in his teaching and practice was far more a Jew than a Christian. We may, indeed, characterize his religion as bastard Judaism. On this point Dr. Sprenger remarks: He devoted more than two thirds of the Koran to biblical legends, most of which he has so well adapted to his own case that if we substitute the name of Mohammed for Moses and Abraham we have his own views, fate, and tendency. † The fundamental doctrine of the Koran is: "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the apostle of God." In proof of the divine existence, he repeatedly refers to the operations of nature, and often in eloquent language. But for the second part of his fundamental doctrine, his apostleship, he has no proof to offer but the Koran itself, the sublimity of which, as Gibbon confesses, is surpassed by the Book of Job. In the system of Mohammed the omnipotence of God and his exalta* Chap. Ixi, 6. +Sprenger's Life of Mohammed, p. 108. 3-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. V. tion above all created things, and the unmeasured distance between them and God, are strongly set forth: Almighty power was apprehended in this religion as unlimited arbitrary will; or if some occasional presentiment of the love and mercy of God gleamed out in the religious consciousness, yet it did not harmonize with the prevailing tone of the religion, but necessarily borrowed from the latter a certain tincture of particularism. Hence the predominant fatalism, and the total denial of moral liberty.* According to the Koran, God readily forgives sin. The resurrection of the dead, a day of judgment and subsequent rewards and punishments, are articles of faith in the teachings of Mohammed. The intermediate state between death and the resurrection is assumed in the Koran.t The rewards and punishments of the future life are of a sensuous nature. Paradise is described as having in it rivers of water without corruption, and rivers of milk, the taste whereof changes not, and rivers of wine delicious to those who drink; and rivers of honey clarified; and there shall they have all kinds of fruit and forgiveness from their Lord.‡ Further, the Moslems in Paradise are described as having a stated provision of fruits, and they shall be honored in the gardens of pleasure, upon couches facing each other. They shall be served all round with a cup from a spring, white and delicious to those who drink, wherein is no insidious spirit, nor shall they be drunk therewith; and with them damsels restraining their looks, large-eyed.§ The chief religious duties prescribed in the Koran are: 1) The performance of the stated prayers. 2) The bestowing of alms only upon "the poor and needy and those who work for them, and those whose hearts are reconciled (to Islam), and those in captivity, and those in debt, and those who are on God's path, and for the wayfarer." 3) The fast of the month Ramadân, during which the Moslem is neither to eat nor drink any thing from the morning twilight until sunset. The great crimes of murder and adultery are, of course, forbidden in the Koran. The former is punishable with death, but a ransom may be accepted in its place by the relatives of *Neander's Hist. of the Chris. Church, vol. iii, p. 85. Chap. xxiii, 100. Chap. xlvii, 15, et seq. S Chap. xxxvii, 40-45. |