Stanley Lane-Poole

“ The scenes of the desert—the terrors of the nightly ride through the hill-girdled valley where the Ghools and the Jinn have their haunts; the gloom of the barren plain, where the wolf, ‘like a ruined gamester,’ roams ululating; the weariness of the journey under the noonday sun; the stifling of the sand-storm, the delusions of the mirage; or again, the solace of the palm-tree’s shade, and the delights of the cool well;—such are the pictures of the Arab poet. The people’s life is another frequent theme: the daily doings of the herdsman, the quiet pastoral life, on the one hand ”

“ To say that Moḥammad, or any other Arab, was sensual in a higher degree than an ordinary European is simply to enounce a well-worn axiom: the passions of the men of the sunland are not as those of the chill north. But to say that Moḥammad was a voluptuary is false. The simple austerity of his daily life, to the very last, his hard mat for sleeping on, his plain food, his self-imposed menial work, point him out as an ascetic rather than a voluptuary in most senses of the word. ”

“ Verily I am God: there is no Deity except Me; therefore worship Me, and perform prayer in remembrance of Me. Verily the hour is coming: I will manifest it unto mankind, and its nearness shall appear unto them by its signs, that every soul may be recompensed therein for its good and evil work: therefore let not him who believeth not in it, and followeth his lust, hinder thee from believing in it, lest thou perish. And what is that in thy right hand, O Moses?—He answered, It is my rod, whereon I lean and wherewith I beat down leaves for my sheep that they may eat them ”

“ As a social system Islám is a complete failure: it has misunderstood the relations of the sexes, upon which the whole character of a nation’s life hangs, and, by degrading women, has degraded each successive generation of their children down an increasing scale of infamy and corruption, until it seems almost impossible to reach a lower level of vice.
The fatal spot in Islám is the degradation of women. The true test of a nation’s place in the ranks of civilisation is the position of its women. ”

“ And Aboo-Bekr came and said, ‘Ye people! he that hath worshipped Moḥammad, let him know that Moḥammad is dead; but he that hath worshipped God,—that the Lord liveth, and doth not die.’
Many have sought to answer the questions—Why was the triumph of Islám so speedy and so complete? Why have so many millions embraced the religion of Moḥammad, and scarcely a hundred ever recanted? Why do a thousand Christians become Muslims to one Muslim who adopts Christianity? Why do a hundred and fifty millions of human beings still cling to the faith of Islám? ”

“ As the men of Medina come to know Moḥammad, they too will devote themselves to him body and soul; and the enthusiasm will catch fire and spread among the tribes till all Arabia is at the feet of the Prophet of the One God. ‘No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of His own clouting.’ He had the gift of influencing men, and he had the nobility only to influence them for good.
We have now to see Moḥammad as king. Though he came as a fugitive, rejected as an impostor by his own citizens, yet it was not long before his word was supreme in his adopted city. ”

“ One above another, the hills rise from the coast, leaving here and there between them a green valley, where you may see an Arab settlement or a group of Bedawees watering their flocks. Rivers there are none; and the streams that gather from the rainfall are scarcely formed but they sink into the parched earth. Yet beneath the dried-up torrent-beds a rivulet trickles at times, and straightway there spreads a rich oasis dearly prized by the wanderers of the desert. All else is bare and desolate. ”

“ Between Egypt and Assyria, jostled by both, yielding to neither, lay a strange country, unknown save at its marches even to its neighbours, dwelt-in by a people that held itself aloof from all the earth—a people whom the great empires of the ancient world in vain essayed to conquer, against whom the power of Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium was proven impotence, and at whose hands even the superb Alexander, had he lived to test his dream, might for once have learnt the lesson of defeat. ”

“ His whole life is one long argument for his loyalty to truth. He had but one answer for his worshippers, ‘I am no more than a man, I am only human.’ ‘Do none enter Paradise save by the mercy of God?’ asked ́Áïsheh. ‘None, none, none,’ he answered. ‘Not even thou by thy own merits?’ ‘Neither shall I enter Paradise unless God cover me with His mercy.’ He was a man like unto his brethren in all things save one, and that one difference served only to increase his humbleness, and render him the more sensitive to his shortcomings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A woman’s voice replied, ‘I am such a one, thy neighbour. My children have nothing to eat, and are howling like young wolves, and I have come to beg help of thee.’ ‘Bring them here,’ said Ḥátim. His wife asked him what he would do, for if he could not feed his own children, how should he find food for this woman’s? ‘Do not disturb thyself,’ he answered. Now Ḥátim had a horse renowned far and wide for the purity of his stock and the fleetness and beauty of his paces. He would not kill his favourite for himself nor even for his own children ”

“ O ye who have believed, make not your alms of no effect by reproach and harm, like him who expendeth his wealth to make a vain show unto men, and believeth not in God and the Last Day. For his likeness is as the likeness of a smooth stone upon which was earth, and a violent rain hath fallen upon it, and left it smooth and hard. ”

“ Thus far we have seen a gentle, thoughtful boy tending the sheep round Mekka;—a young man of little note, of whom the people only knew that he was pure and upright and true;—then a man of forty whose solitary communion with his soul has pressed him to the last terrible questions that each man, if he will think at all, must some time ask himself—What is life? ”

“ There were satires on rival tribes, panegyrics on chiefs, laments for the dead. This poetry is wholly objective, artless, childlike; it is the outcome of a people still in the freshness of youth, whom the mysteries and complications of life have not yet set a-thinking. ‘Just as his language knows but the present and the past, so the ancient Arab lived but in to-day and yesterday. The future is nought to him; he seizes the present with too thorough abandonment to have an emotion left for anything beyond. ”

“ But such an idea could never have occurred to him. We must always remember that we are dealing with a social system of the seventh century, not of the nineteenth. Moḥammad’s ideas about women were like those of the rest of his contemporaries. He looked upon them as charming snares to the believer, ornamental articles of furniture difficult to keep in order, pretty playthings; but that a woman should be the counsellor and companion of a man does not seem to have occurred to him. ”

“ Long months, years perhaps, we know not how long and weary, filled with the tortures of doubt and the despair of ever attaining to the truth, filled with the dreary thought of his aloneness in the relentless universe, and the longing to end it all, brought at last their fruits—sure conviction of the great secret of life, a firm belief in the Creator in whom all things live and move and have their being, whom to serve is man’s highest duty and privilege, the one thing to be done. ”

“ Studied thus, the Ḳur-án is no longer dull reading to one who cares to look upon the working of a passionate troubled human soul, and who can enter into its trials and share in the joy of its triumphs.
In the soorahs revealed at Mekka, Moḥammad has but one theme—God; and one object—to draw his people away from their idols and bring them to the feet of that God. He tells them of Him in glowing language, that comes from the heart’s white heat. He points to the glories of nature, and tells them these are God’s works. ”

“ A few would settle in villages, and engage in the trade which came through from India to the West; but such were held in poor repute by the true Bedawees, who preferred above all things else the free life of the desert. It is a relief to turn from the hurry and unrest of modern civilisation, from the never-ending strife for wealth, for ‘position,’ for pleasure, even for knowledge, and look for a moment on the careless life of the Bedawee. ”

“ Moḥammad himself said, according to tradition, ‘I am no more than a man: when I order you anything respecting religion, receive it; and when I order you about the affairs of the world, then I am nothing more than man.’ And he seemed to foresee that the time would come when his minor regulations would call for revision: ‘Ye are in an age,’ he said, ‘in which, if ye abandon one-tenth of what is ordered, ye will be ruined. ”

“ O my father, serve not the devil, by obeying him in serving idols; for the devil is very rebellious unto the Compassionate. O my father, verily I fear that a punishment will betide thee from the Compassionate, if thou repent not, and that thou wilt be unto the devil an aider, and a companion in hell-fire.—He replied, Art thou a rejector of my Gods, O Abraham, and dost thou revile them? ”

“ Perhaps the strongest reason—one of which it is impossible to over-estimate the force—that impelled Moḥammad to take wife after wife was his desire for male offspring. It was a natural wish that he should have a son who should follow in his steps and carry on his work; but the wish was never gratified, Moḥammad’s sons died young. After all, the overwhelming argument is his fidelity to his first wife. When he was little more than a boy he married Khadeejeh, who was fifteen years older than himself, with all the added age that women gain so quickly in the East. ”

“ Between Christianity and Islám it is enough to notice that there is apparently no country where the first is the prevailing religion in which woman is hindered by religion from obtaining a position almost, if not quite, on an equality with man, and similarly, no country where the second prevails where woman is not in a degraded position.... Under Christianity she is everywhere free. Under Islám she is everywhere a slave. The pious Mohammadan, like the pious Jew, thanks God that he has not been made a woman. ”

“ O ye who have believed, take not the Jews and Christians as friends. They are friends one to another; and whosoever of you taketh them as his friends, verily he is of the number of them.
O ye who have believed, take not as friends those who have made your religion a laughing-stock and a jest, of those who have received the Scripture before you, and the unbelievers: (But fear God if ye be believers:)
And those who when ye call to prayer make it a laughing-stock and a jest. This they do because they are a people who do not understand. ”

“ If he did not actually worship the local deities of the place, at least he made no public protest against the fetish worship of the Ḳureysh. Yet in the several phases of his life, in his contact with traders, in his association with Zeyd and other men, he had gained an insight into better things than idols and human sacrifices, divining-arrows and mountains and stars. He had heard a dim echo of some ‘religion of Abraham;’ he had listened to the stories of the Haggadah: he knew a very little about Jesus of Nazareth. He seems to have suffered long under the burden of doubt and self-distrust. ”

“ When they are held in reverence, when it is considered the most infamous of crimes to subject a woman to dishonour, and the highest distinction to protect her from wrong; when the family life is real and strong, of which the mother-wife is the heart; when each man’s pulse beats loyal to womanhood, then is a nation great. When women are treated as playthings, toys, drudges, worth anything only if they have beauty to be enjoyed or strength to labour; when sex is considered the chief thing in a woman, and heart and mind are forgotten ”

“ It is not so much in the matter of wives as in that of concubines that Moḥammad made an irretrievable mistake. The condition of the female slave in the East is indeed deplorable. She is at the entire mercy of her master, who can do what he pleases with her and her companions; for the Muslim is not restricted in the number of his concubines, as he is in that of his wives. The female white slave is kept solely for the master’s sensual gratification, and is sold when he is tired of her, and so she passes from master to master, a very wreck of womanhood. ”