Arthur Glyn Leonard

“ Let Europe—Christendom rather—confess and acknowledge her fault. Let her proclaim aloud to her own ignorant masses, and to the world at large, the ingratitude she has displayed, and the eternal debt she owes to the Islam she no longer despises. Open confession is good for the soul, and only a confession such as this can wipe off the black stain which has for so long besmirched her fair fame. Let Christendom once and for all recognize that the greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none—that acknowledging a fault is saying, only in other words, we are wiser to-day than we were yesterday. ”

“ In the desert, however, and to the earnest thinker whose centre of gravity is God, night is something more than a mere spectacle—a something greater, grander and more terrifying than a simple impression—a feeling deeper and sublimer even than a conviction: a revelation of the Unseen Unknown which is all the time behind that which he sees and knows.
Full as night is of phantoms, shades, sounds and silence, it is no illusive mirage, no mere empty simulacrum. But in every way it is a reality and a substance which is tangible, that touches one not only on the spot, on the raw, but everywhere ”

“ Because in place of sympathy it is in reality antipathetic. Yet while professing toleration, Christendom does not hesitate to despise and condemn Islam. To Christendom, Islam is a mere creed and abstraction—a creed beyond and outside its cold and autocratic pale. A creed belonging to another world and heaven than its own. A creed of colour and of sombre shades, nay even of gloom and darkness, blood, fire and sword, when the crescent and green flag of the Jihad is hoisted; a creed which is not to be thought of in the same breath as the snow-white fabric of the transcendent cross. ”

“ But Islam without the halo of time-honoured sanctity that attaches to the name of Mohammed, would sound as but a hollow brass or a tinkling cymbal. Just, in fact, as the man himself was sincere and faithful, there is, and there will continue to be, a magic in his name—more so even than that of Christ has for the Christian—drawing men to God, as he in person drew them not alone by sheer force of will and character, but by a force which was even stronger, the force of sincerity and truth. ”

“ With experience and facts such as these before me, I for one find it impossible to forget, and only natural to acknowledge with candour, the great and magnificent part that Islam has occupied in the history of the world. In the intellectual strife of heroes who have wrestled and fought for the truth and who for many centuries led the world, in the arena of battle and of conquest where warriors have led the van, the sons of Islam stand on a pedestal of their own making, that as the world grows older and more enlightened, will stand out in all the greater prominence. ”

“ Just as by the deep and rolling sea whose very roar is music, there is a society where none intrudes, so with the desert. Right in the very core and centre of its silence and solitude, the man whose ears and eyes are open to receive impressions, finds himself in the presence of that invisible but omniscient power of Nature. The power that, while it causes the earnest thinker to pause and reflect, makes the average human being yearn for the companionship of his own kind. But it was not so with Mohammed. ”

“ It was this compressed one-ness—the most sublime triumph of individual concentration in the world’s history—that carried Islam into the uttermost parts of the earth. It was this centralization of moral or religious gravity that swelled the belief of one man—a modest camel-driving trader only—into the perfervid belief of hundreds of millions. “For given a sincere man, you have given a thing worth attending to. Since sincerity, what is it but a divorce from earth and earthly feelings?” ”

“ It was thus that Christianity and Islam came into being. It was thus out of the primeval sacrifices, the shadows and silence of death and darkness, that all creeds have crept into and out of the minds of men. Tortuous human ant-heaps bored and tunnelled through and through by human ideas, human hopes, and human aspirations; worlds in the low-lying limbo of the fœtus stage, fecundating in all directions into beliefs, faiths, creeds, sects, denominations, quackeries, dissimulations and charlatanism. ”

“ Hidden in the depths of the soul, they there throw out deep roots. The more you cut off the branches which imprudently appear, the more powerful and inextirpable become the roots below.
“An idea is a young giant which must be watched night and day; for the idea which yesterday crawled at your feet, to-morrow will dispose of your head. An idea is a spark falling upon straw.” ... “For the mind of man is no inert receptacle of knowledge, but absorbs and incorporates into its own constitution the ideas which it receives.” Thus it was with Mohammed. ”

“ It is the true spirit of human sympathy and fellowship that has moved me—the sympathy and fellowship that would draw together, or at least nearer to each other, the worlds of Christendom and Islam.
The better to achieve my object, I have consulted no works on either Mohammed or Islam, but have gone straight to the source or fountain head—to Mohammed himself, the Koran, and to Moslems of various nationalities with whom I have been brought into close and personal touch during a wide and a varied experience. It is here in the man and his work that the true soul of Islam is to be found. ”

“ The power and the splendour of the one creative God—who lived and moved and had His being throughout the universe, overshadowed, or, rather, had absorbed, them all. In the grim silence of the desert, in the vastness of the heavens, in the great infinity of space, in the scintillation of the stars, in every fibre of his own consciousness, God was with him. To Mohammed God was not a personal being but the God and Maker of the universe and all mankind. ”

“ Within himself the recluse feels weak, unstable and inconsistent. Without he is strong in the consciousness of the omnipotence and supremacy of the Infinite. “Solitude generates a certain amount of sublime exaltation. It is like the smoke arising from the burning bush. A mysterious lucidity of mind results, which converts the student into the seer, and the poet into a prophet.” In a word, there is an enthusiasm, an influence, and a power in solitude that the civilized man, or the man who has never been subjected to it, cannot form the slightest or faintest conception of. ”

“ Seeing is not always devouring. Curiosity is not necessarily gluttony, or “scepticism, that curse of the intellect,” as Victor Hugo calls it. Gluttony is unnatural, unwholesome, and bestial. It is not so much overdoing, as a flagrant abuse and outrage of a natural appetite. It is a kicking against the pricks—a flying in the face of Providence. But curiosity as an instinct direct from Nature is healthy, therefore the use of it as also wholesome stands in need of stimulus and encouragement. ”

“ There is in the darkness and the silence of the night a mystery and a profundity that arouses the sluggish, even the stagnant consciousness of the dullard—that much more so attracts the quickening soul of the mystic and visionary, which springs to it with the same eager avidity that a lean and hungry trout leaps at the first fly which he sees after a long and enforced abstinence. It is in this darkness and silence of the night, rather than in the fierce glare of the midday sun, that the fear of the great Infinite comes to man. ”

“ Is not this thing we call superstition—this belief in the super or rather outside natural as distinguished from the vague and merely vulgar absurdities that are so common—but the result of inherent instincts that humanity, as simply one form of natural development, derives direct from Nature? Is not this Naturism more or less developed in us all—more in the ignorant, less in the educated, and least of all in the scientist; the sceptic who knows most, because he has looked and searched more into the truth and reality of things ”

“ Free and open like the sea (but fresh only at night) , it is not the witchery of the soft blue sky, for the sky of the desert is hard and steely; it is not the fierce white heat of the fervid sun that melts into the very marrow of one’s bones; but rather is it the soothing magic of the moon at night, under the brilliant canopy of the heavens, when the earth, cooling rapidly, is lulled into eternal silence, that one falls under the magic spell of its wondrous influence. ”

“ To endeavour to force sympathy is to attempt the unnatural. The most that can be expected from such a cause is dissimulation. This certainly was Mohammed’s experience. Although ultimately he and his successors forced the word of God on these his inveterate enemies, he never succeeded in forcing his sympathies upon them. Death and Time alone accomplished what his own personality failed to do. Through the victory he gained by them, he now lives enshrined in the sanctified halo of a sympathy that, emanating from every Moslem heart, forms with his own the great and throbbing soul of Islam. ”

“ Call it the fear of God or not, it is practically one and the same feature—the mere human label makes no difference to this awful and unseen reality—the same fear of the Unknown, the Unexpected and the Inevitable: the Inevitable that is always with us, the agnostic and the sophist no less than with the theologian, yet unseen, incomprehensible and omnipotent. But more than anything, it is the awful and impenetrable silence that impresses and appals the silent and dignified nomad of the desert. ”

“ So, too, to denounce Islam, as Christian missionaries do in no unmeasured terms, in books, on platforms and in the pulpit, is surely unpardonable—surely a reflection on civilization. Christianity will never convert or supplant Islam. As long as the one lasts the other will endure. From the most catholic of standpoints, from a religious, a social, a political, and an economic sense, it would be sounder and more politic to leave Islam alone. ”

“ His centre of gravity was God. This gravity formed his character, gave him courage and endurance in all his trials and afflictions, counselled and guided him in his ordinary vocations. It was this gravity and concentration that commanded the respect and trust of all who knew him and came under his magnetic influence.
But Mohammed was not infallible. Dogma—everything human in fact—is open and liable to error. Even infallibility itself—as we speak of it—is fallible. As Draper so aptly remarks: “He who is infallible, must needs be immutable.” ”

“ Even admitting that Islam has receded from Mohammed’s moral and spiritual high water mark, this is all the more reason why the statesmen of Europe should stretch out a helping hand to assist in raising her to her former level. All the more reason why they should encourage and stimulate her to higher aims and endeavours. This assuredly would be a more dignified and statesmanlike proceeding than that which, if it does not sanction, at all events permits the good name and fame of Islam to be smirched with contumely, and to be held up before the world as a standing menace to civilization. ”

“ To those who have never been outside the confines of civilization, it is not logically possible even to guess at the extraordinary influence—a fascination amounting to witchery—that the silence and solitude of the desert exercises over one. Yet if I were asked to define the essence and subtlety of this influence, I could but answer that it is indefinable; all the same a glamour that, like the force of gravity, is irresistible. ”