Theodor Nöldeke

“ As the Semite can hardly be induced, voluntarily, to submit to a strict discipline, he does not, on the whole, make a good soldier. Skirmishes and little surprises are what the Arab finds inspiriting; of the adventures of his heroes and robbers he tells stories, as the Hebrews before him did about Samson. Like all vigorous nations with an exuberant vitality, the Arabs delight in narratives of battle and victory, especially if these are properly exaggerated and flatter their pride of family or race. The Old Testament speaks less of heroes than of saints, but then it is a religious book ”

“ To all appearance it was an affair of absolutely no consequence; but the way in which men regard a matter is often more important than the matter itself. Even contemporaries were deeply impressed to see the grandson of the Prophet put to death by the satellites of the profane Caliph, and his bloody head set up to open show after the common fashion of the East. Husain, the thoughtless rebel, was in the eyes of pious Moslems metamorphosed into a martyr, and his glory grew with time. ”

“ The Karmatians carried off the black stone, the palladium of Islam, and for years made impossible the pilgrimage, one of the most important expressions of Mohammedan life. The heathen Mongols destroyed the caliphate, and long ruled over half of the lands of Islam. Instead of being able to carry on the holy war against the unbeliever, one Moslem State after another is in these days either directly or indirectly falling under infidel control. But the faith that there is no God but Alláh, and that Mohammed is His Prophet, and all that is involved in this faith, remain unshattered. ”

“ The nature of the ground was highly favourable to a rising of the kind. Indeed, some forty years before this, in the marshes between Wásit and Basra, the Gypsies (Zutt) settled there had, augmented by offscourings of humanity brought together from all quarters, lived the life, first of robbers, and afterwards of declared rebels, and were only after the greatest exertion compelled to capitulate; yet these were people who neither in courage nor in numbers could be compared to the East Africans, and that, too, at a time when the caliphate was still in reality a world-empire. ”

“ Islam in its original form as a whole ranks far below primitive Christianity. In many respects it is not to be compared even with such Christianity as prevailed, and still prevails, in the East; but in other points, again, the new faith, simple, robust, in the vigour of its youth, far surpassed the religion of the Syrian and Egyptian Christians, which was in a stagnating condition, and steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism. Above all things, Islam gave, and gives, to those who profess it a feeling of confidence such as is imparted by hardly any other faith. ”

“ At this meeting-place of all restless spirits, where the power of the central government was never able to assert itself so firmly as in the lands of ancient civilisation, some embittered enemy of the dynasty might easily one day gain the upper hand, in which case it was not inconceivable that he might disinter and insult the body of its most powerful and most hated member, as Mansúr’s own uncle Abdalláh had done with the bodies of the Omayyads. ”

“ In this matter, indeed, Islam has gradually effected a mighty change. At his first appearance Mohammed gave offence to the upper-class Meccans by admitting to the number of his followers slaves, freedmen, and other people of no family or account. The might of the religious idea triumphed over old prejudices. In presence of the almighty extra-mundane God all mortals are on an absolute equality; whosoever went over to Islam received the same rights, and undertook the same duties as the highest and the meanest believer. ”

“ No overturn at once so great and so rapid is recorded in history.
The founder of this new religion, Mohammed, son of Abdalláh, was no martial hero. It was under the pressure of circumstances, and by the necessities of thoughts which carried him much farther than he could possibly have divined, that he became a prince and a conqueror. The hysterical enthusiast, conscious of a vocation to make known the Oneness of God, was forced into a career of battle by the opposition of his kinsfolk and neighbours. ”

“ Preference for kinsmen is deeply seated in the blood of every genuine Arab, and the Prophet himself was not free from it. Omar, who in many respects was a more consistent exponent of Islam than Mohammed, never laid himself open to the smallest charge of nepotism, but Othmán was a weak man; he showed exorbitant favour to his relatives, and in a short time a number of the most important and profitable posts were in the hands of Omayyads—able men for the most part, but of an intensely worldly disposition. ”

“ It is characteristic of the Arabs that they reckon caligraphy among the fine arts; and certainly any one who has seen finished examples of the work of Arab penmen must acknowledge that there is in them something more than mere dexterity and elegance,—that these wonderfully free and pure forms are controlled by the same feeling for nobility of outline which appears in all branches of Arab decorative art. ”

“ CALIPH MANSÚR. The Arabs had established a vast empire with great rapidity, but to keep it together was hardly possible so long as its purely Arab character was retained. The reigning house of the Omayyads had to contend with very dangerous political and religious antipathies; and, perhaps a greater danger, the Arabs, who now controlled a world-empire, kept up without abatement the old untractableness and exaggerated zeal for the honour of family and tribe which they had developed in their desert life. ”

“ The clergy, who were extraordinarily numerous, were the only class who continued to flourish; in the never-ending warfare a church might be destroyed or a sanctuary desecrated here and there, but the old endowments were so rich, and the holders so skilful in working upon the superstitions of the people, that their interests never seriously suffered. They themselves were grossly superstitious, and for the most part little superior to the laity in culture. ”

“ Not many can have clearly seen how fundamentally opposed is the pantheistic conception of God in mysticism to the rigid monotheism of the Koran. The great mass of dervishes are, of course, much too unthinking and superficial to follow in the fanciful footsteps of the old masters. They dance and howl for the glory of God, as other men pray. The people regard the dervishes as the props of Islam, and in fact hostility against all unbelievers is fomented in a quite special way by some of these brotherhoods. ”

“ With all this the pilgrimage has been a chief pillar of Islam. In Mecca the most pious Moslems still meet from year to year out of regions so remote as Turkestan, British and Dutch India, the Turkish dominions, Morocco, and Nigritia, and exchange ideas and prejudices; a custom which naturally helps to maintain the unity of the faith. ”

“ When we read the Psalms and the Prophets, even without the customary idealising spectacles, we shall place them—and not from the merely æsthetic point of view only—far above the Koran. But the result of the religious development of the Old Testament—the religion of Ezra, of the Pharisees, and of the Rabbins—can hardly be said to stand higher than Islam.
The energy and simplicity of Semitic ideas in religion are not favourable to a complicated mythology. ”

“ The power of the Caliphs was now at an end; they became the mere playthings of their own savage warriors. The remoter, sometimes even the nearer, provinces were practically independent. The princes formally recognised the Caliph as their sovereign, stamped his name upon their coins, and gave it precedence in public prayer, but these were honours without any solid value. Some Caliphs, indeed, recovered a measure of real power, but only as rulers of a much diminished State. Theoretically the fiction of an undivided empire of Islam was maintained, but it had long ceased to be a reality. ”

“ The descendants of Alí, who, as blood-relations, in fact descendants, of the Prophet (through his daughter Fátima) , considered themselves to have the nearest right to the throne, alienated from the Omayyads the hearts of many of their subjects. There was an expectation that the house of Mohammed, should it once attain to the supreme authority, would fill the earth as full of righteousness as it was now full of iniquity. The pious professors and followers of the divine law had little liking for the rule of the reigning house, which, for all its forms of religion, was purely secular. ”

“ Yet one rock of offence was unremoved—the veneration of the old fetish—the black stone, a veneration to which some consistent Moslems could only reluctantly bring themselves, and which in later times is occasionally even scoffed at by less steadfast believers. In strictness it is the duty of every Moslem to take part in the yearly pilgrimage as often as he can ”

“ This artificial and ornate style inevitably degenerated into a mannerism, and finally issued in a meaningless jingle of words and the well-known oriental inflation which we find so intolerable, especially in Persian and Turkish imitations. The counterpart of this love for a striking and elegant manner of speech was, of course, a great sensibility to style on the part of hearers and readers. Eloquence was a highly-prized gift before Mohammed’s time. The pleasure which the Arabs took in beauty of language is one of the principal causes which led to their peculiar success in philology. ”

“ But this man, who sometimes in anger or drunkenness, sometimes with the clear conscience of a ruler or judge sacrificing to the public weal or to the cause of righteousness, butchered thousands of people, and burned churches and cities to the ground—this very man played in the most genial way with little children, in his expeditions was scrupulously careful that the women and children, numbers of whom always accompany an Abyssinian army, should come to no harm, and was ready to assist personally the exhausted soldier who had fallen out of the ranks. ”

“ The Wollos have long been Mohammedans, and are proud of their faith, although they know but little of the doctrines of Islam, and have retained much that is of pagan origin. They are divided against themselves in genuine African fashion; tribe is at war with tribe, clan with clan, but they were all at one in their love of independence and in hatred of the Christian conqueror. ”

“ On the banks of the Tigris there flourished a civilisation more brilliant than under the best of the Sásánians. A fair measure of quiet prevailed in most of the provinces, and thus the enormous prodigality of the court did not press upon the subjects beyond endurance. Syria and the adjoining lands found themselves in better circumstances than they had for a long time experienced. True, the administration was very defective if judged according to modern ideas; but good government in the East must be measured by a very modest standard. The Christian population had gone over to Islam en masse. ”

“ But hardly had the Arabs heard of Mohammed’s death when they rebelled en masse. Many renounced Islam entirely; many attached themselves to new prophets who arose here and there after the pattern of the Prophet of Mecca; others were willing to retain Moslem prayer indeed, but not to pay taxes; in a word, Mohammed’s whole work was brought into question. Then it was that the strength of Islam, and of a firm will, was shown. Abú Bekr, assured as he was in his own faith, scorned, even in the hour of most pressing need, to make any concession whatever to the insurgents ”

“ The bold coppersmith thus figured in the eyes of all the world as a champion of the faith. But his embassy had, of course, very practical objects as well; it was to negotiate as to the lands the Caliph would assign as provinces to his faithful Yakúb. The clever regent Mowaffak for his part was anxious, on the one hand, to strengthen the praiseworthy zeal of Yakúb for conquest at the expense of heathens and of distant Moslems, and, on the other, to keep him well away from his own neighbourhood. ”

“ It may be doubted if the original teaching of any other founder of a new religion is known to us so exactly as Mohammed’s. For the sacred book of Mohammedanism, the Koran, consists entirely of his own revelations, given in the name of God; and among his spoken utterances which have been handed down by tradition there is, mixed up with a great deal that is spurious, so much of what is genuine, that by its aid we are able at many points to supplement the Koran. ”

“ The scholastic philosophers contrived for the most part to accommodate themselves outwardly to Islamite dogma, and often, we may be sure, in good faith; but the theologians nevertheless, and with reason, held them in deep suspicion; the old pagan Aristotle, on whom they leaned, fits in with Islam even less than with Christianity. All sorts of ideas—some of them very fantastic, of Persian and other foreign origin, and distinctly non-Islamite—also from time to time met with acceptance in the cultivated world. ”

“ Every one who takes up the book in the proper religious frame of mind, like most of the Moslems, reads pieces directed against long-obsolete absurd customs of Mecca just as devoutly as the weightiest moral precepts,—perhaps even more devoutly, because he does not understand them so well. ”

“ In the pieces of the first period the convulsive excitement of the Prophet often expresses itself with the utmost vehemence. He is so carried away by his emotion that he cannot choose his words; they seem rather to burst from him. Many of these pieces remind us of the oracles of the old heathen soothsayers, whose style is known to us from imitations, although we have perhaps not a single genuine specimen. Like those other oracles, the súras of this period, which are never very long, are composed of short sentences with tolerably pure but rapidly-changing rhymes. ”

“ Very many Arabs were already Christians. Their Christianity, it is true, sat but loosely on them; for the finest elements of that religion they had no organ. Moreover, there were in Arabia many Jews who here also occasionally, as in Abyssinia, made numerous proselytes; but the rigid and irksome ordinances of Judaism were suited to the nature of the proud and untamed inhabitants of the Arabian desert as little as were the mystical doctrines and the too ideal ethics of Christianity. ”