Ishmaelites

“ Ishmael became a bad man, the founder of the Ishmaelites, “whose hand was against every man.” Do you recall to memory a mother fallen in character? What has become of her children? Daughters fallen and sons worthless, often without an exception. ”

“ ISHMAELITES. The descendants of that Ishmael who, with his family, left his home in Jerusalem and accompanied Lehi on his journey to the promised land. After the death of Lehi they became absorbed in the Lamanite race and formed a part of that people. ”

“ Therefore I and Judah sold him to the Ishmaelites for thirty [2] pieces of gold, and ten of them we hid, and showed the twenty to our brethren: and so through my covetousness I was fully bent on his destruction. ”

“ They possess the Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, and Haggadah. Every Sabbath they expound the reasons for the commandments in the holy tongue, and the explanations are given in the Persian tongue.
The tribe of Ephraim and the half-tribe of Manasseh dwell there, in the mountains of Nejd, the city of Mecca, where is the idolatry of Ishmaelites. These are of abhorred soul and cruel heart; they possess horses, and attack wayfarers, and do not spare their enemies. They have nothing but booty to live upon. They are great warriors ”

“ The race of Ishmael is yet as vigorous and as peculiar, and as likely to perpetuate itself, as the race of Isaac and Jacob; and as God was near to the cries and needs of the wild mother of the race and her wild offspring, so, doubtless, he has heard the prayer that has gone up from many an Arab tent in the desert.
The besetting sin of a select people is the growth of a spirit of haughty self-sufficiency among them. In time the Jews came to look upon themselves as God's only favorites, and upon all other nations as outcasts. It is this spirit that is rebuked by the prophet Amos (ix.) ”

“ The thoughtful, patient, meditative Isaac is chosen; the wild, hot-blooded, impetuous Ishmael is rejected,—not as in themselves better or worse, but as in relation to their adaptation to a great purpose of future good to mankind. The ear of the All-Father is as near to the cry of the passionate, hot-tempered slave, and the moans of the wild, untamable boy, as to those of the patriarch. We are told that God was with Ishmael in his wild growth as a hunter in the desert,—his protector from harm, the guardian of his growing family, according to the promise made to Abraham. ”

“ Do you wish to drive the English out of Egypt, to establish Khedive or Sultan, to found kingdom or empire? Go home! This work is not for you! Only one enemy will you drive out, and that is the devil! Only one Sultan will you establish, and that is God!"
The mass of moving heads seemed to sway for a moment, and then, amid the deep breathing of the people, Ishmael said—
"You will take nothing with you on your way, neither purse nor scrip nor second coat. In the city or the village or the desert the Merciful will make your beds, the Compassionate will provide for you. ”

“ In that desert there were then no inhabitants, and though Ishmael’s192 succession was incompatible with God’s promise to Abraham and his son Isaac, yet neither Hagar nor he having sinned, justice required a reparation for the heritage which he had lost. God gave him that very wilderness which before was the property of no man, in which Ishmael was to erect a kingdom under the most improbable circumstances possible to be imagined. His 193hand was to be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. By his sword he was to live, and pitch his tent in the face of his brethren. ”

“ They have carved their name deeply upon the history and the faith of the world. But sensuousness and lawlessness are everywhere the stamp of the Ishmaelite. With high gifts and some generous qualities, such as attracted to his eldest boy the love of Abraham, their fierce animal passion has been the curse of the sons of Hagar. Mohammedanism is a bastard Judaism; it is the religion of Abraham sensualised. Ishmael stands forth as the type of the carnal man. On outward grounds of flesh and blood he seeks inheritance in the kingdom of God; and with fleshly weapons passionately fights its battles. ”

“ By this time the excitement of the people amounted to frenzy. "Allah! Allah!" they shouted as they followed Ishmael from group to group in an ever-increasing crowd that was like a boiling, surging, rushing river, flashing in fierce brilliance under the light of the lamps and torches.
"Brothers," said Ishmael again, "your homes are here, and your wives and children. I am going out into the desert and you cannot all follow me. But give me one hundred men and your enemies will afflict you no more. ”

“ This is true; but it does not therefore follow that there is nothing more to be done with "the children of the flesh" than to burn them up. To carry out the allegory, God has yet to make of the Ishmael-seed a great nation; for though Ishmael was an outcast and a wanderer in the wilderness, God promised that he should be great, and dwell in the presence of his brethren. ”

“ Then Ishmael's sermon took a new direction. For thirteen centuries the children of men, forgetting their prophets, Mohammed and Jesus and Moses, had been given over to idolatry. They had worshipped a god of their own fashioning. That god was gold. Its temples were great cities given up to material pursuits, and under them were the dead souls of millions of human beings. Its altars were vast armies which spilled the rivers of blood which had to be sacrificed to its lust. As men had become rich they had become barbarous, as nations had become great they had become pagan. ”

“ In the course of years a great body of Ishmael's "Sayings" have been gathered up. Some of them are authentic, but most of them are out of the wisdom of the ages, and not a few are directly borrowed from the Christian gospels which the Moslems, as a whole, do not know. Whatever their sources, they are deeply treasured. Women chant them to the children at their knees, and men lisp them, with their last breath and then die with brave faces. ”

“ When Ibrahim (Abraham) had sent away Hagar and her son, and Hagar was about to perish in the desert, the child Ishmael struck the earth with his foot, and from it sprang the fountain of Zamzam, close to Mecca. Amalekites, in search of their lost camels, found the spring, settled down beside it, and worshipped Ishmael as the lord of the spring. Then came tribes from the South, the Dshorhomites and Katura, to the fountain; and Ishmael married the daughter of the chief of the Dshorhomites and begot Nabit (the Nebajoth) and Kaidar (the Kedarites) . ”

“ Messala broke in upon him with a biting laugh.
“Oh, I understand you now. Ishmael, you say, is a usurper, yet to believe an Idumaean sooner than Ishmael is to sting like an adder. By the drunken son of Semele, what it is to be a Jew! All men and things, even heaven and earth, change; but a Jew never. To him there is no backward, no forward; he is what his ancestor was in the beginning. In this sand I draw you a circle—there! Now tell me what more a Jew’s life is? Round and round, Abraham here, Isaac and Jacob yonder, God in the middle. ”

“ He asks for him, therefore, a life from God in the highest sense. Else what does the circumcision of Ishmael mean? The sealing or ratifying of the covenant of God with Abraham through Isaac’s seed, embraces not only the seed of Isaac, but all those who in a wider sense are sharers of the covenant, Ishmael and his descendants. And however much the Arabs may have departed from the faith of Abraham they have for all these centuries remained faithful to the sign of the old covenant by the rite of circumcision. ”

“ More extraordinary still, it seems probable that a large and gorgeous mosque will be built in Ishmael's honour, and that he who loved best to worship in that temple of the open desert whereof the dome is the sky, he who cared so little about dogmatic theology that he never even wrote a line, may, by the wild irony of fate, become the founder of a sect in Islam which will teach everything he fought against and practise everything he condemned. ”

“ One cannot but feel an interest in Ishmael—figuring him to be a noble of nature—one of those heroes of the wilderness who lived on the produce of his bow, and whose spirit was nursed and exercised among the wild adventures of the life that he led. ”

“ Ishmael's first son was Nebaioth; then Kedar and Adbeel and Mibsam
14 And Mishma and Dumah and Massa,
15 Hadad and Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah:
16 These are the sons of Ishmael, and these are their names in their towns and their tent-circles; twelve chiefs with their peoples.
17 And the years of Ishmael's life were a hundred and thirty-seven: and he came to his end, and was put to rest with his people.
18 And their country was from Havilah to Shur which is east of Egypt: they took their place to the east of all their brothers. ”

“ To all such pleading Ishmael would show a brave face and say—
"Not yet! Wait! The clouds that darken your sky will lift. Be patient! The arm of our God is long! Never despair! Allah feeds the worm that lies between the stones. Will He not feed you also? ”

“ Ishmael himself cried unto God, and his prayer and the merits of Abraham brought them help in their need, though the angels appeared against Ishmael before God. They said, "Wilt Thou cause a well of water to spring up for him whose descendants will let Thy children of Israel perish with thirst?" But God replied, and said, "What is Ishmael at this moment—righteous or wicked?" and when the angels called him righteous, God continued, "I treat man according to his deserts at each moment." ”

“ Ishmael represents Israel, glorying in their fleshly descent from Abraham, and boasting in the law; and Isaac, those of Israel and the Gentiles, who regard the flesh as profiting nothing, and who are the sons of Abraham by believing the promises made to him and to his seed. Hence, Ishmael and Isaac represent two seeds or classes of mankind, who shall not be heirs together of the promise. Indeed, their natures are so opposite that it would be impossible for them to fulfil in concert the destiny marked out for those who are to inherit the promises. The Ishmaelite-seed are wild men ”

“ He gallops on a horse in front of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan.
"Every day our numbers increase, and we go off from the greater towns to the beating of copper war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes to the cracking of rifles. ”

“ Adding, that Ishmael, when he first planted himself in Arabia, instructed the people in the same religion he had received from Abraham; but their posterity afterwards corrupted it into idolatry, which God had now sent him to destroy, and once again to restore the religion of Ishmael. Therefore, according to his own account, the Jews do not improperly call the religion of Mahomet by the name of Ishmaelism. ”

“ Now Ishmael was sick of a burning fever, and the water in the pitcher failed when Hagar forsook the God of Abraham. So she cast him under a thorn bush, and went from him the space of two thousand ells, that she might not hear his cries. But Ishmael prayed to the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, and said, "O Lord God of my father Abraham! thou canst send death in so many forms; take my life speedily or give me a drop of water, that I suffer this agony no longer." ”

“ Ishmael was born when Abraham was eighty-six years of age, [884] ; Isaac was born when he was one hundred years of age, [885] ; hence Ishmael was fourteen years old at the birth of Isaac. Add to this the age of Isaac when he was weaned, which, from [886] , (See note [887] ) was probably three, and we shall find that Ishmael was at the time of his leaving Abraham not less than seventeen years old; an age which, in those primitive times, a young man was able to gain his livelihood, either by his bow in the wilderness, or by keeping flocks as Jacob did. ”

“ And the names of his gods are Washington, Jefferson, Putnam, Marion, Hancock, Henry, and the lot! The History of the United States is his Bible, ma'am, and its warriors and statesmen are his saints and prophets. But by-and-by, when Ishmael grows older, ma'am, he will learn, when he does any great or good action, to give the glory to God, and not to those dead and gone old heroes who were only flesh and blood like himself," said the professor. ”

“ At this news the poor, unlettered people grew delirious in their excitement, each man interpreting Ishmael's message according to his own vision of the millennium. Some saw themselves turning the hated foreigner out of Egypt; others were already in imagination taking possession of Cairo and all the rich lands of the valley of the Nile; while a few, like Ishmael himself, were happy enough in the expectation of prostrating themselves at the feet of the divinely appointed guide who was to redeem the world from sorrow and sin. ”

“ Ishmael is here called the son of the Egyptian, because, as some think, the 400 years' affliction of the seed of Abraham by the Egyptians began now, and was to be dated from hence, ch. 15. 13. She saw him playing with Isaac, so the LXX. and, in play, mocking him. Ishmael was fourteen years older than Isaac; and when children are together, the elder should be careful and tender of the younger; but it argued a very base and sordid disposition in Ishmael, to be abusive to a child that was no way a match for him. ”

“ The mosque seemed to rock with the shouts which followed these words, and as soon as the cries of the people had subsided, the voice of Ishmael, now louder and more tremulous than before, rang through its vaults again.
"Deep in the heart of man, my brothers, is the expectation of a day when the Almighty will send His Messenger to purify and pacify the world and to banish intolerance and wrong. The Jews look for the Messiah, the Christians for the divine man of Judæa, and we that are Moslems for the Mahdi and the Christ. ”