Aspects of Islam

PREFACE The present volume contains the Hartford- Lamson Lectures for 1909. To the eight lectures actually delivered in accordance with the require- ments of that foundation two have here been added, the present eighth and ninth, in order somewhat to round out these aspects of Islam and to make them a more complete introduction for the young missionary to his new and strange world. For this is a book for beginners rather than scholars; it deals in broad outlines and statements and not in details and qualifications. Yet I would not suggest that I have made asser- tions more sweeping than can be defended. Nothing is set down in these pages that I am not prepared to maintain with proof at length, al- though I am well aware that there are some statements here which some Arabists will regard dubiously. I would entreat such to believe that they are not due to careless rhetoric but have sprung from long consideration and express set- tled convictions. It has seemed best also to re- vu Vlll PREFACE tain the somewhat colloquial tone due in the first instance to delivery before an intimate audience and in a small room. If any stray student of Romance runs through these pages and comes across my reference to the author of Aucassin et Nicolete in the eighth lec- ture, I trust that he will not think that I have too lightly essayed to settle a serious problem in a field not my own. The fact is that there is a class of popular Arabic romances which exhibit exactly the movement of the cante-fahle, the story being told in alternate sections of prose and verse and in such a way that these, to a consider- able extent, cover the same matter. Of this the Romance of Bibars, lately printed in full at Cairo, is a good example. I hope to deal with this subject at greater length elsewhere. Again it is a pleasant duty to thank my col- league Professor Gillett for much generous assistance both in talking over points in meta- physics and in reading the whole book in MS. In my wife's debt I am more deeply than ever before for, in truth, her assistance in this book has fallen little short of formal collaboration. The personal experiences in the East of which I

have made use were in great part hers as well as mine, and in describing them a plural pronoun migj^t often more fitly have been employed. We have discussed, too, these experiences and the situations which we observed to such an extent that it is impossible now, even if we desired so to do, to separate out the ideas and explanations which we have each contributed. I can now only take the general responsibility and acknow- ledge a large indebtedness. DUNCAN B. MACDONALD Hartford, Conn.» U. S. A. October^ 1910

The Hartford-Lamson Lectures on "The Religions of the World" are delivered at Hart- ford Theological Seminary in connection with the Lamson Fund, which was established by a group of friends in honour of the late Charles M. Lamson, D. D., sometime President of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to assist in preparing students for the foreign missionary field. The Lectures are designed primarily to give to such students a good knowledge of the religious history, beliefs and customs of the peoples among whom they expect to labour. As they are delivered by scholars of the first rank, who are authorities in their respective fields, it is expected that in published form they will prove to be of value to studeAts generally. XI CONTENTS Page Introduction i

The Muslim East as it presents itself i6

The Person and Life of Muhammad 46

The Qur'an; the present Muslim attitude towards Muhammad 77

Muslim Theology and Metaphysics 115

The Mystical Life and the Darwish Fraternities 145

The Mystical Life and the Darwish Fraterni- ties continued 176

The Attitude of Islam to the Scriptures and to the Person of Christ 210

The Missionary Activity of Muslims 250

Muslim Ideas on Education 288

The Inner Side of Muslim Life — Popular Literature — a Missionary's Reading 323 Index 363 THE HARTFORD-LAMSON LECTURES ON COMPARATIVE RELIGION ASPECTS OF ISLAM

In the following lectures I have endeavored to avoid direct suggestion as to the training and methods of the missionary to Muslims, except in such broad and humane aspects as sympathy, courtesy and patience. Let him combine these with the fullest knowledge possible to him and he cannot go far astray. On the side of training, the foundations must ever be broad, unbiassed and uncontroversial knowledge, and, on the side of methods, nothing can take the place of instinct and experience. But it is true also that some details on training, whatever their value, and some ideas as to methods, whatever their validity, may legitimately be expected from the writer of one of the hand- books in this series. With diffidence, then, but frankness, I put in this introduction what has come to me on a vast and tangled question. The peculiar characteristic of the Muslim field, and, in consequence, the ruling considera- tion in the training of missionaries for it, is that X I 2 ASPECTS OF ISLAM we have to consider Muslims as being very near to ourselves in point of theology. What is needed, therefore, is a power of fine discrimina- tion, combined with sympathy and an apprecia- tion of points of agreement. The missionary to them must emphatically be a large, all-round man of personality and, if possible, of mystical tendency. He must be able to realize that when Muslims accept Christianity they will have to make it over for themselves; they will have to construct their own theology; and it is his busi- ness to supply them with general ideas, with con- ceptions of character and conduct, and to help them discreetly in the development of their own system. By no means should he attempt to force any system upon them or be surprised at any deviations which they may develop. He should also be of breadth enough not to tend, as so many do, to exaggerate the evils of his own field. If he is the right man, he will have fallen in love with it and will feel that the people are his people, to have and to hold, even though their God may hardly be his God. Liking is a necessity, and the right man, while he is hammering at them himself, will be slow to de- INTRODUCTION 3 fame and publicly reproach them. When he is met by strange or repellent theological doctrines in Islam, it will be for him to consider in how many uncouth ways the doctrines of Christianity are often presented, and also that in Islam, as in every religion, very many different views may be held of a single doctrine. He must take ac- count of all. Secondly, when he meets with grave social difficulties and diseases in the struc- ture of Islam, he must be a man of mind enough to remember the classes with which he peculiarly comes in contact ; that they, on the one hand, arc what we would call the slum classes, and, on the other hand, belong to what is parallel to our social Four Hundred. We would not regard either of those classes as typical of our civiliza- tion. I venture especially to think that the pastorate of a slum district with us is a very close and suggestive parallel for many Muslim mission fields. As is the case with such a pastor, the missionary, whether man or woman, will be compelled to make himself thoroughly acquainted with very repellent conditions of life, and also to estimate these at their true value. In this con- nection I trust that my last lecture will be read 4 ASPECTS OF ISLAM sympathetically and broadly. It will be, I doubt not, a hard doctrine for many ; but the kernel of the matter is there. Upon the missionary, just as upon the home pastor, there lies the heavy necessity that he must know and yet keep his mind and heart clean; that he must realize and yet must hope. If he does not know, he cannot help; if he does not realize, he cannot see. The woman missionary in Egypt, to take a single point, who does not know about the Zar, cannot have really known the women of her district, does not intimatelv touch their lives and cannot fully help them. The missionary must, further, from the nature of the field, be capable of, and even have a relish for, scholastic metaphysics and philosophical dis- cussion. He must himself be able to enter into and carry on such discussions. It will always be possible that native converts may know more Arabic metaphysics than he does ; but it is always true also that the native convert cannot handle people, especially large assemblies of people, as a missionary can. He should, therefore, train himself to suit the methods and ways of these people. He should INTRODUCTION 5 try to be quiet, slow even, and democratic in attitude. He must not forget that the Muslim peoples theoretically, and to a great extent prac- tically, are the most democratic in the world, al- though this is modified always by their respect for learning, provided it is the kind of learning that appeals to them. He should, therefore, cultivate the habit of reading their literature very widely. He should especially read the more modern books that are the literature of the masses. He should beware of limiting his reading to translations of Chris- tian literature into the language of his field or to modern Christian literature written in that lan- guage. Such reading may give him language; but, being essentially foreign, it will never give him the native atmosphere and ideas. He need not pay any especial attention to their classical literature, except so far as may be required to retain the respect of the learned. Let him con- sider, here, the parallel of a Muslim missionary coming to a Christian country. Such a mission- ary, if he went to work really to try to under- stand his people, would require to read upon two sides. He would require to understand Chris- 6 ASPECTS OF ISLAM tian theology, and for that he would need to go to the more technical books. If he trusted en- tirely to what he might hear in sermons or pick up in conversation, he would be seriously misled with regard to the whole basis of our faith. But, on the other hand, to understand the people he would need to go to the current literature. He would need to go to the newspapers, the maga- zines, the popular books that they would read. I pass now to the education of the missionary in a more precise sense, and in what follows I am considering the case of a man who is to stand independently upon his own feet and not be part simply of some scholastic machinery. In a word, I am thinking of the missionary who must meet the situation of his field as a whole, alone. Now in accordance with what I have said above, it is plain that he must be primarily a good theologian, of a solid, well-schooled type. Even the mysticism of Islam is metaphysical and has a definite system under it as a basis. He must not be of a sentimental, revivalistic type; but should have a clear, well-worked reason for his faith. Independent even of any Biblical basis, he should, so far as possible, be able to work his INTRODUCTION 7 doctrine back to metaphysical ideas. But, sec- ondly, he must know Muslim theology thoroughly. He must have studied the books of the Muslim theologians themselves. Simply to read the Qur'an is not sufficient. That might give him the Islam of Muhammad. It would not give him the Islam of today. But besides that, he should study to know Muslim life, the attitudes of Muslims, their governing ideas. The more of this he has before he goes out to his field, the better, and for the following reasons. First, it will guard him against being led into essential error at the start. Almost certainly, when he enters first upon his field, he will meet with what I have described in my first lecture as a conspiracy of misinforma- tion, and unless he has a solid knowledge of what he has to expect and has also, from his previous study, learned how to test the things told to him, he may receive ideas that will bias him towards error for all the rest of his career. Second, on no Muslim field is it possible, at present at least, to get thoroughly good teaching. The native teachers of language may know their languages well, but it is very rarely that they have any ideas 8 ASPECTS OF ISLAM of teaching them. And it is still more difficult to read theology and philosophy with them. They know their systems after a fashion; they cannot state them in any clear way. And as for the missionaries on the field, their time is far too much taken up for them to be able to do anything else than give the merest suggestions to other men. Third, a good library is seldom accessible to any mission field. Fourth, whenever a mis- sionary arrives, he is liable to be swallowed up at once by the work of the station. It is true that he is supposed to have a certain time for prepara- tion, but as a matter of practice that rarely holds. What I have now said applies to the classical language of the field but not to the vernacular. No attempt should be made to study the vernac- ular before the missionary goes out. But if he has the beginnings at least of a thorough grasp of the classical language, and in this case it is Arabic, he is in possession of an enormously im- portant tool for his work anywhere. First, it goes without saying that in Arabic-speaking lands a knowledge of classical or literary Arabic will be a help of primary importance to the acqui- sition of the vernacular. Such a knowledge will INTRODUCTION 9 also prevent him from falling into the too preva- lent blunder of confusing the literary language and the vernacular. Second, the languages of Persia, Turkey and India are largely permeated by Arabic vocabulary. It may be said that all the scientific terms in Persian, Turkish and Hindi are of Arabic origin. Third, Arabic can be called most exactly the Latin of all Mus- lim countries. Without a knowledge of it, Muslim theology, philosophy and the literature of thought in general are either inaccessiWe or incomprehensible. I would finally throw out the suggestion that it might be of advantage for a missionary, after he has received such training as is sketched above and before he goes to his own field, to spend some months in some other Muslim country, in order personally to study the people, their ideas and customs, without the handicap of a profes- sional environment. It is very difficult for a professed missionary to secure intimate access to Muslims. It can undoubtedly be done, has been done; but it is certainly difficult. On the other hand, a man who knows Arabic, has read Arabic theology and is interested in those things, will 10 ASPECTS OF ISLAM find that they are in themselves a passport with Muslims. They will talk with him and open their ideas to him, it being always understood that they do not regard him as a missionary. I be- lieve, therefore, that six months of such contact, apart from missionary associations, would be of inestimable value at the beginning of any mis- sionary's career. In this I write from my own experience. On methods I must speak with still greater diffidence. A missionary's work I take to con- sist of two things, a planting of germinal ideas and an upbuilding of character. For both the slow way round is best. With regard to ideas especially, spiritual and moral, the missionary will probably discover that the East has quite as many as he has himself, and can propound them much more fluently and impressively. But are they germinal? Do they strike roots down into the being and branch upwards into life, producing the fruits of good works ? The East has suffered for centuries from creeds without relation to con- duct and mystical religion without contact with realities. So he will learn that these beautiful sentiments are an inheritance of words only and INTRODUCTION 1 1 i mean nothing. His ideas must be different and show their difference. They must be related to life, and he, in all his walk and conversation, must exemplify them and commend them. Again, in the past the missionary has of neces- sity been an educator and such he must still be. But his province is rapidly changing. Once, practically all training, both intellectual and moral, was in his hands ; now he is being gradu- ally driven aside by the pressure of the state schools. It is plain that there is going to be an abundance of intellectual education but little train- ing of character and drill in morals. And there lies the future problem of the missionary. As he goes back to his primary work of preaching and witnessing to Christ, how can he retain his influence upon education and upon the upbuilding of the character of the young? The solutions to this question are still in the darkness and will probably be different in different localities and under different conditions. The Christian col- leges will help; it will be long before there are Muslim schools which can compete with them. The Christian high-schools, too, handicapped as they will be for buildings, apparatus and teach- 12 ASPECTS OF ISLAM crs, will long hold their own by the weight of their moral training. Muslim parents will en- trust to them their children, and especially their daughters, rather than to teachers of their own faith. But everywhere the missionary, whatever happens, must learn to control by example or competition or stimulus or however it may be this upbuilding of character. But again, in what direction, under this pres- sure of education, is the Muslim world drifting and towards what end ? Unless all signs deceive, there lies before the Muslim peoples a terrible religious collapse. Islam as a religion is not holding its own against the unbelief that is flood- ing it from the European civilization. Young men are growing up into crass and material forms of atheism, forms that the best intellectual life of Europe has itself thrown off. And as education spreads and deepens, as history vindicates for Itself its place, as the moral feeling becomes more watchful and sensitive, so the legend of Muham- mad will crumble and his character be seen in its true light. And with Muhammad the entire fabric must go. It is then for the Christian schools and preachers to save these peoples, not INTRODUCTION I3 only for Christianity but for any religion at all ; to vindicate to them the claims upon their lives of religion in the broadest sense. So the missionary must learn to mix with the young, and especially with young men, in easy unconstrained intercourse. Qubs and associa- tions with lectures and informal conversation have a large future. As their own historical religion breaks before criticism and the stern test of the moral law, these young men must be led to see that all religion is not therefore false. The missionary will not be a controversialist, al- though he must know controversy and be able with dialectic to give a reason for the faith that is in him. Often he will find that it is not best to attack Muhammadanism directly, but to let the new ideas eat away its foundations. An attack, however valid and logical, arouses resistance ; but the conclusions which we have reached for our- selves from given and accepted premises are our own. And always it will be his endeavor to bring those with whom he is in contact to read the Bible for themselves with open and enquiring minds. Then the greater part of his labour is accomplished, for what our old divines called the 14 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Witness of Scripture to itself is a very striking reality, as every missionary to Islam knows. It needs no comment, requires no preaching, but does its own work. Of that I had myself, in my own experiences, ample evidence. Thus, face to face with the Bible, we can safely leave the Muslim. When he needs help he will seek it; it is for the missionary to see to it that so seeking he will find. And in that search of his, very much will depend upon the theological training of the missionary to whom he turns, for none but a schooled theologian can meet the needs of an educated Muslim. One such convert to Christianity, a thorough theologian in his old faith, told me that the only missionary from whom he had really got help in his time of con- fused search had been a Jesuit priest ; he had been systematically trained In a scholastic method akin to that of Muslims and could put his faith in logical form. But the missionary must also see to it that he does not by a stiff doctrine of inspi- ration and inerrancy lay up future dangers for his convert. It is true that the tendency of the Muslim enquirer will be to welcome such a stiff doctrine ; for him the stiffer it is, the better. But INTRODUCTION 1 5 our Biblical criticism is already penetrating the East^ and the time is near when faith built upon Old Testament proof-texts will not stand the test. That reconstruction of our attitude towards the Bible which we are all facing is of immediate and practical imminence in the Muslim field. The missionary there must have his opinion and doctrine ready to state and to teach. But, on another side, he has a help towards this and a comfort and strength in it which many of us now-a-days seem to lack. All his work brings in upon him the fact of the difference of the Bible, taken broadly, from other books, and of the reality of its unique influence upon men. Knowing that, he can go forward the more quietly with the working out in theological form of what it means. The thing itself is surely there.

In this series of the Hartford-Lamson Lectures, with the delivery of which I have been entrusted, I shall not endeavor to put before you a complete outline of the theology of Islam nor any descrip- tion in systematic form of its religious life and thought. I have already dealt with these in two books, and I have no desire to repeat what I have said there. Still less do I desire to give you in lecture form a little hand-book of Muslim con*- troversy or to describe the methods which the prudent missionary should adopt and the argu- ments which he should use. Such books exist; but I am very dubious, I confess, in the abstract, as to their value for the missionary or for any one else, and the individual volumes which I have examined have not tended to do away with my doubts.* *By far the best of thosie which I have seen is CrU' saders of the Twentieth Century, by W. A. Rice, M. A., London, 1910. It appeared after these lectures were writ- ten and could certainly be used with advantage after a broad historical and theological foundation had been laid. THE MUSLIM EAST I7 Let me give one example of the too frequent tactlessness and inaccuracy of these books, taken from a much used missionary hand-book. There is a chapter of the Qur'an which is called the Chapter of the Cow. It gains that name from the fact that there is mention in it of the Red Heifer of the Mosaic law. But it so happens that in another place the law of marriage and divorce is set forth. In this manual of contro- versy, then, the title of "The Cow" is used to illustrate and demonstrate the supposed Muslim attitude towards women — that they are regarded as cattle. Now, it would have been perfectly allowable to quote for that purpose verse 223, "Your women are a tillage of yours,'' always provided that the use of this metaphor was explained from the context; but the title of the chapter has nothing whatever to do with this subject. So there are here two very unfortunate things : one of them is the ignorance displayed ; the other of them is the attitude of mind which is exhibited. The determination is to make a point at all hazards, in this case the somewhat important hazard, or certainty, of alienating and repelling 1 8 ASPECTS OF ISLAM any intelligent Muslim to whom such an argu- ment may come. Nor, in general, need I empha- size to you the danger that lies in all knowledge gained in controversial form. No true knowl- edge can be reached in that fashion; and it is not, therefore, in controversial form or in such a way that it can be used at once in debate by the missionary that I wish to communicate any- thing in the course of these lectures. If the combative spirit is awake in the missionary, it will soon be aroused in the Muslim. For this reason I regret that in the recent renewal of inter^ est in Muslim missions there has been so much warlike denunciation and beating of the crusad- ing drum. The Muslim world knows of it and takes its attitude from it, and the young men who go out under its influence cannot easily return to the sanity, sympathy and charity which the spirit of their Master requires. But there is another danger in such a method as this, the very great danger that always lies in the belief that if you simply study how to do a thing, you will, forthwith, become able to do it. We see this again and again amongst our- selves with regard to such an ordinary, everyday THE MUSLIM EAST I9 thing as teaching. There are innumerable meth- ods of teaching; but it all depends in the end upon the teacher, and the man who depends upon his methods will never become a teacher. Again, there is still another danger, the danger of difference. It was said to me, for instance, by a missionary, about the same book froiji which I have culled the above argument, that inasmuch as it was constructed by a man who worked in another field from his own, he found it of no use. Being controversial, it dealt with details and not with simple elements, and details tend every- where to be different. But what I desire to put before you now is Islam as it will always present itself. As it has always presented itself, perhaps I should say; I know nothing about the future. But, at any rate, it will portray Islam in its broad outline; as you may see it in any Muslim land; in its spirit and not in its details. In a word, I would display and turn before you, if I may so put it, the many coloured globe of Muslim life and thought — for remember that there is life and there is thought there too— and show to you Islam in certain of its permanent and outstanding phases and aspects. 20 ASPECTS OF ISLAM But when I say Islam, what does that mean? I can best bring its meaning home by saying that Islam for the Muslim means formally and histor- ically the same thing that the word Christendom does for us. It is the broadest of all expressions for them; just as Christendom covers all our thought, all our life, all our history. It is a unity to them, a unity more absolute than the term Christendom covers for us ; but it is a unity of the same nature; and only as you look at it in that way — as a unity and not as a multitude of details— can you possibly get any idea of its real, essential character. What, then, I am now going to put before you is simply this Islam, and I desire to show you some of its phases and aspects, such as may be suggestive of the whole, such as may open up, and that especially for the missionary, what lies under that term Islam. It will, then, be for you who may be interested in the Muslim world and may be looking toward a missionary career to fol- low this up. I suggest to you a beginning and a search, and I put before you some examples. But, again, in these examples I fear that I must be personal in tone. What I have to say to THE MUSLIM EAST 21 you is not drawn only from what I have read; it IS drawn also from what I have seen; from the contact which I have had with Muslims. It would have been impossible for me, I am free to admit, to deliver this course of lectures in their present form a year ago ; and it was only by the permission and help of the Seminary, which enabled me to pass a year in Muslim lands, that the way was opened and that much of such insight as I have gained was made a possibility. I shall, therefore, have to draw very largely in the future upon my own personal experiences. I shall need to ask your indulgence for much introduction of myself in describing the people I have met and the things I have seen. And, with that, I must also beg of you to believe that when I put before you any anecdote, it is abso- lutely the fact as it came to me ; that in no way, in no degree, have I touched up my experiences in order to make them more telling. But above all, I would hear and throughout suggest and entreat sympathy. I would lay emphasis on the great facts of religious unity between us and the Muslim world, and not upon the points of controversy that may arise. It is 22 ASPECTS OF ISLAM my endeavor and desire, as you will see, to say here what may help the missionary to understand Islam, rather than what may be of direct advan- tage to him in order to convert Islam. After he understands, he may know how to deal with the problem ; but my first purpose is to help him — so far as is in my power — to understand; and an understanding can be reached only by thorough, entire sympathy, by sinking the points of differ- ence and holding the points of unity. For example, several times in my wanderings I was brought into contact — religious contact — with darwishes. Among them I met with as true hospitality, as fervent religious feeling as I have anywhere experienced. Their method of life and their ideas I will take up hereafter in detail. At this point, I would allude only to the sympathy and openness with which they spoke with me upon religious things — ^the broad religion of the spirit, be it always understood. I will admit that I was exceedingly careful not to speak of Muhammad as "The False Prophet" — as I have heard too many do — and when they spoke of my Father in Heaven as Rabbund, "Our Lord," I took their words according to the meaning. THE MUSLIM EAST 23 and together we were able to speak of Our Lord, meaning God Most High, and thus meet upon a common plane. Further, it is certainly true that many things in the world of Islam were a great deal more open to me, that much more was shown to me and said to me, coming as I did as a wandering scholar amongst them, a student of Arabic and of their religion, than if I had been recognized by them as a missionary. But, at the same time, I am persuaded that these things could be more open, more accessible to a great many missionaries than they are. It all lies in the attitude. Let me now take up some examples of such contact, such reaching and touching the Muslim world in what I would call a sympathetic way. For many people sympathy means weakness. I confess to having a weakness for saints. They make the romance of the religious life, and their biographies — try, for example, The Golden Legend — move in an air as remote from our tread- mill existence as The Arabian Nights, and yet are instinct with spiritual realities and vitalizing energies. For them the ancient world is ever fresh and young, and the Spirit of God still 24 ASPECTS OF ISLAM broods visibly over it. The milk of Paradise is on their lips and they hear the footsteps of the Almighty. There is nothing too wonderful to happen to them, and through everything that happens they look straight back to God. But of such absolute saints we, in these western lands and in our harder age, can know alive but few, and I, for my part, have had to fall back upon dead saints, and of these Islam has furnished me with an abundance. Before I went to the East at all, I had come to know a good deal about some of the more important saints of Islam ; I had read their books, had studied their lives and ideas and had come to respect and esteem a great many of them, in a very high degree. When I, then, found myself on Muslim soil, the possibility was opened to me of visiting the tombs of those saints whom I thus knew through books and whom I respected and reverenced. What was I to do? The course that I followed, a course which I believe was perfectly right under such circumstances, was to visit them frankly in reverence, and I found that the fact that I did so— that I behaved, as my Eastern friends would say, like a religious- THE MUSLIM EAST 2$ minded man and a gentleman — helped me indef- initely in my intercourse with Muslims. There is one usage, for example, that is of rule when visiting the tombs of Muslim saints. You advance to the railing that surrounds the tomb, you hold it in your right hand — in the East do everything public with the right hand — and you recite the Fdtiha, the first chapter of the Qur'an, which holds pretty much the place with the Muslim that the Lord's Prayer does with us. Now let me recite to you a translation of the Fdtiha. It runs thus: — In the name of Allah, the merciful Compassionator! Praise belongeth unto Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the King of the Day of Doom. Thee do we serve and of . Thee do we ask aid. Guide us in the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious, not of those with whom Thou art angered or of those who stray. Amen. I do not know how strict theologians would regard my action ; but I confess I found no diffi- culty at all when I had come to the tombs of these saints, in reciting the above prayer according to usage. Very frequently there would be an inscription on the door of the tomb asking, "O 26 ASPECTS OF ISLAM thou visitor to my tomb, forget me not with a pious petition, but lift up thy hands unto the Lord and recite the Fdtiha for me." I do not know whether the saints in question were much benefited by this. I do not know whether any one of those standing by were especially spiritu- ally benefited by it. I do know, however, that I was benefited by feeling the nearness of the spiritual kindred of all that call upon the Lord, and I know, too, that those Muslims who saw me do this or who knew that I did it, felt that here was a spiritual unity, that this man. Christian though he might be, reverenced their saint and knew what it meant to recognize holiness and the life hid in God. For example, in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, there is what is called the Mosque of the Ascension. It is a very curiously sacred place, because it is holy ground for both Muslims and Christians. Islam does not accept the crucifixion; it, therefore, does not accept the resurrection, but it does accept the ascension. It holds that Christ ascended into one of the heavens, which one is a matter of dispute, and is there even now, although it will not put it THE MUSLIM EAST 2/ in the form that He sat down at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Along the walls of the mosque there are altars for each one of the Christian sects, and upon Ascension Day their priests are admitted to the mosque and it is free to them to celebrate upon their own altars. When I went to that mosque and visited it as one of our sacred spots, I found that there was near it a darwish monastery — I have learned since that in former times it was an Augustinian Abbey — ^and, as I did almost always on such occasions, I visited the monastery also. I was received there in the most friendly manner. There was a young man sitting at the door of the monastery repeating or reciting the Qur'an, with the book spread open upon his knee, but reciting it, as they commonly do, from memory, and when I came to stand before him, with lifted hand I repeated the common prayer that would bring us both together. Again, on another occasion in the neighbor- hood of Cairo, at the tomb of the great mystical poet, *Umar ibn al-Farid, I found the same observance of the greatest possible value. I remember when I advanced in the fitting manner towards the grated window which looks in on the 28 ASPECTS OF ISLAM tomb of the saint, hearing whispers from the Muslim guardians of the tomb, "He knows what is the right thing to do. He has a sense of reverence." The same thing happened when I visited, in Cairo, the tomb-mosque of the great mystical saint, ash-Sha'rani ; I did it with as great reverence for the man, for his work and person- ality, as I have ever felt at any tomb to which my steps have been led. Of course, I might say that I was careful in all this to pick my saints. There are many saints in the Muslim calendar, as in that of Christendom, that I could not visit with any reverence at all. They may have had ' their redeeming qualities ; but these did not appeal to me. But there are many saints — and this is my point — with regard to whom I felt and feel that there is a perfect possibility for the most absolute Christian to visit their tombs and to feel that he is visiting the tombs of good men, and I am persuaded that my being able to do so suggested nothing to the Muslims that were with me, but simple unity and charity. It is per- fectly true that occasionally some may have thought that I was personally inclined towards Islam. If they did, I could not help it. But THE MUSLIM EAST 29 here is a curious illustration which shows how such a thing could arise only in the case of the ignorant I came to a saint's tomb at Tiberias. The tomb itself was nothing more than a rubbish heap, as the tombs, even of the saints, tend to become in the East; in fact I came upon it unawares. I had no knowledge that there was any saint's tomb there, until I heard my guide being abused by some one for permitting me to enter the sacred precincts. What did my guide say? Well, very nearly in part, the words of the elders about the centurion. "He loveth our people, and the Lord may open his heart to Islam." Such cases were rare; but the cases of mutual under- standing on the basis of differing faith were not rare. I am perfectly conscious, of course, that a missionary might hesitate to follow such a method as this in the country of his labours; but I can imagine also that a man of strong personality, and sympathetic genius, one of the giants of the mission field of whom we have known many, such a man might do it and still remain a mis- sionary and all the better a missionary for it. 30 ASPECTS OF ISLAM He would not fear all the time lest he should be misunderstood. The people around him would know well what kind of a man he was and why he did this thing. But now I must turn from these preliminaries. I have been endeavoring in them to give some clue as to the way in which I approach my subject. It is the sincere way of sympathy ; the broad way of unity ; the honest way of endeavoring to under- stand from within. What is the first thing — the first thing out- standing and to be reckoned with — that meets any one who studies Islam on the spot, whether he be a student or a missionary or simply a traveller? I think that it is what can only be described, most unhappily but truly, as a con- spiracy of misinformation. All seem to be leagued together to this end, to tell you the thing that is not. And this conspiracy of misinfor- mation is so fundamental, is so subtle, goes through so many phases of life, is so constant, that the student or the missionary will have to deal with it throughout his entire residence in the East. It is not a thing that you meet on the THE MUSLIM EAST 3I threshold and then pass beyond. It must always be reckoned with. Now, because it is so fundamental and con- stant, I must spend a little time over it. This is not a case, understand, of paying too much attention to the statements of the common drago- man; him even the rawest Cook's tourist, whom the native calls a "Cookee," has learned to dis- trust ; nor is it the case of the mercenary hanger- on upon missions, and so far as my experience goes I do not think there are so many of these as is commonly supposed; nor is it even in general a case of the Oriental desire to please. It goes a great deal farther and a great deal deeper. Even Europeans who have been long in the East are themselves dragged into it and come to be incon- ceivably reckless in their statements. Here is an example. In all the Muslim countries or towns that have been taken by force of arms from unbelievers it is a custom that the khaith, the preacher who delivers the Friday prayer-sermon, should carry in his hand a sword and should lean upon it in preaching as though it were a staff. That holds true only in such towns as have been taken by 33 ASPECTS OF islam; force of arms. When, then, I began to try to get some first-hand information about this, I immediately met with the most extraordinary nest of fabrications. One man, a man of high posi- tion in Cairo, a European who had spent there the greater part of his life, who had been in intimate contact with Muslims precisely on that side of things — ^mosques and religious observ- ances — ^and who, you would have imagined, should have known about this if any one did, this man assured me gravely that it was a Mus- lim custom to shake this sword to the four winds of heaven as a sign that Islam must conquer all the world. Now, there is absolutely not a word of truth in that. The sword is used as a staff and as a staff only. Of course, it is also a symbol of the historic conquest of that place where it Is used. Another bit of curious misinformation that I gathered with regard to this same thing was that the Muslims did not like Christians to see this sword. I was induced, for a time, rather to believe that there must be something in this sec- ond point because, when being shown different mosques and enquiring as to this thing and that, THE MUSLIM EAST 33 I experienced difficulty in obtaining a sight of the sword used by the khattb. And when the guard- ian of a mosque did finally show it to me — there it was of painted wood only — I thought I saw a somewhat suspicious smile upon his face. But that idea, again, I discovered in time was abso- lutely false. There is no such feeling regarding the khatlb's sword. Let me illustrate to show how false it was. In the course of my wanderings, I came to Nablus, the ancient Shechem, and tfiere I had peculiar opportunities of access to the mosques. Now Nablus has the reputation of being a very fanatical town, a town where Christians are in danger of being ill-used and will certainly not be received in a friendly fashion. I myself had no experience of the kind. For example, in the great mosque, when I began to speak — of course in Arabic — with the men whom I met there about the different parts of the building and their use, they showed me the sword — in this case a real sword — and made me tell them what the usage regarding it was, where it was used and where not. It was for them, evidently, a kind of examination in Muslim science, and when I had 34 ASPECTS OF ISLAM passed, they at once received me with open arms. I was an obvious kafir in an egfregious sun-helmet and with a Baedeker in my pocket, but I was not entirely uneducated. A teacher in the College or madrasa connected with the mosque led me into his private room and we had some interesting talk on theology and metaphysics; but as to the sword, there was not a trace of evidence that there was any secrecy about it. Again, when the caravan of pilgrims for Mecca sets out from Cairo, there accompanies it what is called the Mahmal. It is a small, square palanquin, mounted on the back of a camel; a kind of a camel-carriage in a very convention- alized form in which a woman might possibly travel. Few foreigners in Cairo seem to know what Is its purpose or meaning. I was told that in this palanquin, a thing of limited size and carried on the back of this one camel, there was packed the covering called the kiswa, or robe, which is spread over the Ka'ba at Mecca and which is renewed every year — a most obvious absurdity. One lady even assured me, and this IS an Illustration of how careful you must be in accepting information from what seems a cer- THE MUSLIM EAST 35 tain source, that she knew that such must be the use of it because she had been told so by the French tutor of one of the sons of the Khedive. She may have misunderstood him ; but if he did tell her that, then he was very ignorant or else he was lying. The fact about this palanquin is that it is simply a symbol of sovereignty. Historically it is a conventionalized reproduction of the palanquin in which the Mamluk queen Shajarat-ad-durr — ^the same who held St. Louis to ransom — ^made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It now takes the place of the Khedive himself going on pilgrimage to Mecca, and it is very much the same things, one might say, as when in old- fashioned England a man who could not go to a funeral sent his carriage by way of showing respect. When the Hajj caravan sets out from the great square under the citadel at Cairo, the Khedive solemnly gives over the halter of this camel into the hand of the Amir al-Hajj, the leader of the pilgrimage, and thus constitutes him his representative on the journey. Similarly, he receives back the halter when the Hajj returns. These are cases Ane to foreign ignorance ; but even the native scholar may supply misinforma- 36 ASPECTS OF ISLAM tion. It may be unintentionally. With one of my Cairo friends, a graduate of Azhar University. I had a great deal of trouble once in getting at a certain doctrine. He could not remember the point I was trying to develop or any passage bearing upon it. He had never seen it in any theological book. But that was only a curious example of what you might call the Oriental possibility of passing things over. I had, eventu- ally, to show him the doctrine in the IhyQ of al-Ghazzali, a regular authority at the Azhar. Again, another case, and this time intentional. When I was reading with a distinguished scholar a commentary upon the Qur'an, we came to the passage which I have already translated to you as "The Lord of the Worlds." Now, the univer- sally accepted interpretation of that phrase — accepted by all Islam — is that "the worlds" are the three classes of intelligent beings, mankind, the angels and the jinn, the genies of our old ^Arabian Nights. But my guide had no intention of saying anything in my presence that would expose to the ridicule of an unbeliever the super- stitions and weaknesses of the Muslims. I could get nothing more from him in interpretation of THE MUSLIM EAST 37 these words than that they meant "everjrthing." Kull shay he said again and again, and further than that he would not. This misinformation is so thorough, goes so deep, is given to you with such an air of cer- tainty, that I must confess that, though I had been reading Arabic and Muslim theology for some twenty-five years, I was staggered at several points before I discovered what were the possi- bilities in the case, and was for some weeks in doubt as to whether my Arabic authorities might not have misled me. But when it came to getting information upon questions of fact — not of theol- ogy or an3rthing of that kind but of historical events in the past and situations and attitudes in the present — I was driven, at last, to absolute agnosticism. How did the different officials stand with Lord Cromer? What of the Khedive's matrimonial experiments? I was told so many opposing things and that so dogmatically, that I had to give up trying to reach anything upon which I could depend as to such points. The thing is not simply untruthfulness, it is a strange carelessness as to fact. On one side, the Oriental and the Orientalized European has a 38 ASPECTS OF ISLAM feeling of, as you might say, "What does it mat- ter anyway?" It is the slackness of one for whom this world is only the fleeting show of a phantasmagoria. And he recognizes it himself. The phrase by which the Cairene is known and by which also he himself marks his typical repre- sentative like the Spanish, ''Quien sabe?" is Ma'alesh, "It doesn't matter." "What indeed." it is as though he asked, "does really matter in this world?" And, on another side, he has the creative imagination of a child. If the Oriental does not know what you ask him, he will create something for you, and he is so well pleased with his creation that it becomes solid and real in his eyes. This he does, apparently, with a good conscience because it fills a vacuum of knowledge, a thing which he, like nature, abhors. So far as I can remember, I met only one man who was prepared to say, "I do not know," and, most astounding of all, that was a donkey-boy. When questioned as to the names of mosques or tombs, he would pause and think, and at last, if need were, come to the point of admitted ignorance. But the dragoman, be it noted, always knows. THE MUSLIM EAST 39 Now, there follows this; and it is the moral. There is danger for the missionary of believing too much, and there is perhaps greater danger of his becoming cynical and believing nothing at all. The practical consequence is that the man who is prepared to believe anything on less than the word of a dozen witnesses should never go to the East. Nor should the man go who is inclined to hold that all men are liars, and to become soured in consequence. You have got to take things as you find them and keep an open mind. And let me add to this a still more practical suggestion. It is eminently desirable that mis- sionaries, before they reach the East and are plunged into its chaos of misinformation, should have learned at least enough of Islam to main- tain a cautious attitude. I have known cases where such errors, remaining inveterate, have biassed better knowledge for years. This, then, is one outstanding aspect of the East, and, I think, the first that will meet any one who begins to look at all into the subject. Another is the Oriental's assured feeling of religious superiority. It is a somewhat galling 40 ASPECTS OF ISLAM thing to us of the West to meet people who dare, calmly, unquestioningly, without imagining that there can be a shadow of doubt, to look down upon us and to say, "But you cannot know this; we know, we understand." Their certitude is as absolute as that of Browning's Abt Vogler, "Tis we musicians know." But such is, undoubt- edly, the fundamental attitude of the Muslim East towards Western religious life. Here are two illustrations. At the Congress of Orientalists held at Algiers in April, 1905, Prof. Karl Vollers read a paper on the origin of the Qur'an. His thesis was that the Qur'an, as we have it at present, in its precise wording and grammatical form, did not proceed from Muhammad ; that the language which Muhammad used had been of a colloquial type; and that it was later, at the hands of editors, that the Qur'an had been put into the careful grammatical form which it at present has. This thesis was, cer- tainly, new and strange, and European scholars are not yet, by any means, ready to accept it. But how was it received by Muslim scholars? For the first time, at Algiers, a large number of these were present at the Congress of Orien- THE MUSLIM EAST 4I talists. Professor VoUer's paper raised with them tremendous opposition. One thing was clear ; the world of scholars in Islam had not yet reached the point of objectively discussing any- thing looking towards religion, so that the remot- est approach to a Congress of Religions would be utterly impossible if Muslims were to form part of it. One Muslim, whom I afterwards met in Egypt, delivered a long and personal address against Professor VoUers, and finished with this, "In the matter of the Qur'an we will take nothing from a stranger." He was prepared — ^they are all prepared — to learn from Europe and America anything dealing with the material side of life. Such things of the world do not really matter, of course; but when it comes to religion, when it comes to the world of religious thought, there the Muslim must stand alone. He is superior to all Christians; knows it; feels it. No Christian can really feel the things of God as he does. Again, another example of the same. One of my Muslim friends with whom I came to be on a very pleasant personal footing, was in conver- sation with me in his house, and the talk drifted towards philosophy. He asked me, "What is the 42 ASPECTS OF ISLAM present tendency of philosophy in Europe?" That was rather a large question, especially as I had to answer it in Arabic, and I was afraid that I might use terms which would mislead him. I ventured, however, to tell him that I thought that the tendency in Europe was distinctly towards an idealistic position. But how was I to express "idealistic position"? I used the term Sufiism, but went on to guard myself by explaining that I did not use it in the Muslim sense but in the sense in which it might have been employed by Plato. Hfe nodded his head very approvingly, and said that he had no idea there was so much right philosophical feeling left in Europe. Evidently what I had said took more or less of a load from his mind. These people, he thought, are not so much left to themselves after all. So, at every turn, if you get into any real contact with the religious minded Muslim, you will meet with the feeling that religion is of Islam and not of the outside world. Let me take one other aspect of Islam. For it I ask you to go with me to Cairo, to the wind- swept, bird-haunted mosque of Ibn Tulun. That mosque, as it stands at present, is probably the THE MUSLIM EAST 43 oldest left in Egypt, and one of the oldest in the Muslim world. It is a great square courtyard surrounded by deep colonnades and has not, for many generations, been used for worship. Now, when you enter it, all that you find of signs of life are the foot-prints of birds marked in the soft, fine sand that covers all the courtyard and their cries as they hover and dart overhead. The roar of the city without dies away; within is silence. There it lies in the midst of Cairo, abandoned, full of crumbling memories, a monu- ment of the past to the grandeur of those who built it. In its prayer-niche, towards which dur- ing centuries millions of the faithful must have bowed in the worship of Allah, I found some Arabic verses which had been written in pencil in 1877, by a certain Darwish Mustafa. They are deeply significant for the attitude of Islam to the world and to Allah. They run as follows : Where are the kings and those who peopled the earth? They have left what they built in it and what they peopled. And have become a pledge of the grave for that which they wrought. They have turned to decayed bones in it, after they had been forgotten. Where are their armies which repelled not and availed not? 44 ASPECTS OF ISLAM And where is that which they gathered in the earth and that which they treasured? There came to them the command of the Lord of the Throne in haste, And there availed them from it neither wealth nor fortress.^ Such is the burden of all Muslim thought One generation cometh and another goeth; but Allah abideth for ever. Nothing else is sure; nothing else permanent. "Oh, where are kings and empires now?" is ever recurring on Muslim lips; but those other lines which mean so much to Christendom, "But, Lord, thy Church is pray- ing yet, To endless years the same," could be repeated by Muslims, if at all, only with grave differences of meaning. The conception of the Church Militant, a Church in travail, labouring, striving for an unaccomplished ideal, is foreign to all Islam. The Muslim world is the Muslim Church, not any encircling mass to be leavened and conquered by that Church, then to abide as a Church Triumphant. That world and Church, rather, are fleeting, evanescent, a mere shadow- show cast upon the screen of existence, while ^I do not know who was the author of these lines. They are quoted also in The Arabian Nights, I Bulaq Ed., Vol. ii. p. 45 ; see, too. Lane's Arabian Nights, Vol. iii, THE MUSLIM EAST 45 Allah is the only reality. God has not taber- nacled in human flesh for Muslims, nor does He as the Holy Ghost still dwell in men and thus make them partakers of the divine nature. They remain his creatures always, of a dependent exist- ence, to be swept, in the end, from the board of life. It came easily, therefore, to some Muslim sects to teach that at the last heaven and hell with their dwellers would be destroyed and Allah would remain enthroned alone, even as He had been in the beginning. Here, perhaps, we find the absolute, the essen- tial difference between Islam and Christianity.

THE PERSON AI^D LIFE OF MUHAMMAD As in the case of any historical question, you must divide the consideration of the person and life of Muhammad under two aspects. First, what really was that life; what really was that person and that individuality? Secondly, what did people come in time to think of them, and what do they think of them now? Even Muslims, in their religious research, have realized the necessity of reaching again the histor- ical facts in the case. There was, for instance, a distinct tendency in one part of the Muslim Church — the reforming, or, in a sense, Puritanic part — to keep labouring to return to the faith of Muhammad himself, as distinguished from later theories and accretions. So far back, for in- stance, as the life and work of Ibn Taymiya, a theologian who died in A. D. 1328 (A. H. 726), we find this tendency appearing strongly, and he was simply a prominent carrier-on of the atti- tude of the Hanbalite, the irreconcilable school. PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 47 In the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, the same drift was represented by the Wahhabite movement, which threatened at one time to spread over and affect the whole Muslim world. At the present day, this tendency is not guided so much by the old Puritanic and Hanbalite principles as it is by the penetration of modern thought into some part, at least, of Muslim life. But to bring home to you the necessity of thus dividing our study of the life and person of Muhammad, and to show how intimately this tendency towards criticism of Islam as it devel- oped is working in some elements of the Muslim mind, let me describe to you a scene in Cairo at which I was present. It was the day of what is called, commonly but absurdly, the Procession of the Holy Carpet. It is really a procession in which the kiswa, that is "robe," the covering of the Ka'ba is carried from the place where it has been manufactured and embroidered, to the holiest mosque in Cairo, the mosque of the Hasanen, there to be sewed together and packed into the boxes in which it is to be conveyed to Mecca. The day of this procession is one of the 43 ASPECTS OF ISLAM great days of religious Cairo. I was privileged to see it from the balcony of a native school that looked out on the corner of two streets; in. one direction we looked down the street through which the procession came ; in the other down the street to that very sacred mosque of the Hasanen itself. The first thing that came to my ears was the strange though familiar skirl of the bagpipes, and I wondered for a moment if it were possible that the English control had found it advisable to guard the route with a detail from one of the Highland regiments. But that was only a deception of the moment. I soon saw that these were native Egyptian troops and that this was only another instance of the Western invasion of Eastern lands. The bagpipes of the Scottish clans have come to their own ; the East has fallen in love with them ; and they shriek at the head even of circumcision processions in the streets of Cairo. So the tune these bagpipes were play- ing was not "Lochaber No More" or even "The Barren Rocks of Aden," but some strange Egyptian melody. Down the street, then, came the kiswa, carried on wooden frames to show its embroidery of rich gold flashing in the sun^ PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 49 light, and with it and after it trooped a motley procession of darwishes of all the different frater- nities of Egypt, the Qadirites, the Rifa'ites, the Ahmadites, the Burhamites, the Sa'dites, all carrying banners of their own colours, beating little drums and chanting their distinctive litanies. As they went by, the air was charged with emo- tional electricity; all nerves were a-quiver and ready to leap to a signal. Here, as time and again thereafter at Muslim religious scenes, I felt the grip of the will of the crowd, and knew practically how slight a touch may turn and sweep a great concourse into a simultaneous brain-storm. But there was another and more immediately surrounding atmosphere of cool criticism and scepticism, and it was that, strangely enough, of the little Muslim group round me, on the balcony. It met me thus. I have always had a great deal of interest in the history and usages of the different fraternities of darwishes; for emotional religion in all its phases, eastern and western, has always attracted me. On this occa- sion, I am afraid, I scandalized my sober-minded, broad church Muslim friends by asking many so ASPECTS OF ISLAM things about these darwishes and their ways and the things they were doing. Especially did I scandalize them when I showed an interest in one man who was carrying a banner, and who — really or feignedly — ^was borne away by the force of his religious excitement and had fallen into a kind of fit. He was being carried along by some of his companions, jerking his limbs and rolling his head. At that my Muslim friends became very grave, and had I known no Arabic at all there was one phrase that I certainly would have learned in that forenoon, Laysa min ad-dln. I was told that again and again. It means, *lt is not part of the Faith." You see, then, the position held by the more intelligent and better educated Muslim who has had some contact with the outside world, and who feels the necessity of protecting his religion against false or one-sided criticism from non- Muslims. Those around me on the balcony were very much afraid, evidently, that I should gather a false opinion of the real Islam — as they under- stood it — from the scene going on in the street below. My attitude, of course, was quite differ- ent from theirs. I was not so much interested PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD $1 just then in reaching a conception of the essence of Islam, as I was in seeing what Islam had become as it had worked itself out, what were the actual facts of today in the Muslim masses. For of course you will remember that these darwishes, processioning and chanting below, were in great part drawn from the working classes of Cairo and represented the religious-minded uneducated people. It is, then, of the very first importance, as you may easily see, that the missionary should have a grasp of those different attitudes towards and understandings of Islam, those of the unedu- cated religious public and those of the educated few, who are trying to purify their faith from superstitious accretion; that he should always be able to realize what Muhammad must have been himself, as he lived among his fellows, first as a citizen of Mecca and thereafter as a ruler in Medina and what after ages have made him. Let us take up, first, the historical Muhammad. It is hard for Muslims, with all desire to rid Islam either of what they believe to be sprung of superstition or of what they feel to be elements exposing it to derision amongst non-Muslims — it is hard for them to develop and retain an 52 ASPECTS OF ISLAM historical sense. In spite of their iron industry, in spite of the elaborate, critical methods which they have built up, almost never do we find among them men with a genuine historical sense ; certainly such men could be counted upon one hand. Let me illustrate this. Suppose that there have come down to us a number of traditions with regard to any episode in the life of Muhanr- mad. We wish to get at the truth in the case. We know that the great majority of those tradi- tions are forged; the Muslim, too, is prepared to admit that a considerable proportion of them are forged. I think that, in all probability, what we would do, in such a case, would be to try to consider those traditions as a whole, and build up from them a picture. We would lay them side by side ; see which fitted together ; which agreed ; which seemed to adjust themselves to the picture of the whole; which could be explained as rising out of others; which seemed psycho- logically impossible; which could not have been invented later; which spoke clearly of later con- troversy. That is the method, I fancy, that would be followed by Western historians. PERSON AND UFE OF MUHAMMAD 53 But what does the Muslim? He examines very carefully what he calls the isndd, the chain of testimony that carries the tradition back to its original speaker. .With each tradition there comes the list of the men who have passed it along from lips to ear, lips to ear, straight down to the time when it was finally fixed in book form. He examines that list ; he considers whether those men were really in contact ; he considers also, and this is perhaps the one sound point in his pro- cedure, their relative reputation for veracity, and out of that process he comes to a conclusion which of the traditions should be accepted and whicH should not. Now, I need hardly say that by that method, considering the frequency and the ease with which the chains of traditions are forged, no real historical result can be reached, and yet, with precisely that external testimony, this is the way the Muslim historian goes to work. If our methods tend to subjectivity run wild, theirs tend to objectivity without a basis. With the materials gained in that way he thinks that he can get back to the historical fact. There is also a later, educated school which is trying to modernize Islam and make it a possible faith for 54 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the world of today. It does that by rejecting everything in tradition which it cannot ration- alize, and by explaining away the passages in the Qur'an which it cannot reject. We have known the same method applied to Qiristianity ; as applied to Islam it must in the end be equally unsatisfactory. Certainly it is quite unhistorical. \ Joined to this lack of historical sense as to what is really there, comes the lack of a compara- tive method. We are aided by comparison in a great many ways when we try to understand the beginnings of Islam. We have, for example, although this has not been applied so much as it might have been, the parallel or strongly similar development of prophetism in the Old Testament. But that, of course, except as it has reached them by strange, misleading paths, which I shall de- scribe in a later lecture, is absolutely sealed and unknown to the Muslims. We can also compare early Muslim religious words and phrases with their cognates and parallels in the other Semitic languages, and frequently in this way find their origins. We can tell what words and ideas Muhammad drew from Abvssinian Christianity, from South Arabia, Christian and PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 55 Zoroastrian, from the Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary of the Jewish tribes of Arabia. I remember one very interesting talk I had with a Muslim scholar in which I laid before him in the original characters and in Arabic transliteration the different cognates of the word Allah in all the Semitic languages I knew. It was all absolutely new to him ; he had never seen such things before, although he was a man of great learning, and he evidently found it curi- ous — interesting, perhaps, so far as the Muslim understands what interesting is; but instead of leading his mind to any historical comparisons, or raising problems of relationship, it brought from him only the thought that Allah is the same everywhere, that all peoples, in a sense, were called by His name — a significant and noble thought, but not an historical one. Again, there is another source which is open to us and which has, with one exception, I believe, been entirely neglected by Muslims. It is the study of the parallels which appear in the case of what we call now-a-days trance-mediums; the phenomena exhibited by those mediums who enter a trance, speak in that trance, and give signs in $6 ASPECTS OF ISLAM one way or another while in a hypnotic state. In such cases, I have no question, is really to be found the clue to Muhammad; but that method, except, as I have said, by one man, has been left unused by Muslims. In these ways, there- fore, it is possible for us to attack the problem of the real Muhammad in a way that is not possible for the Muslims themselves. But we begin by asking. What were the out- standing elements in the Arabia of Muhammad's own time, the elements that made him possible, the environment which conditioned him? One of them was that for about one hundred years before his time and for some little time after him, Arabia had been passing through what can be described only as a great literary renaissance. It was not only a great renaissance for Arabia, a great outburst of ideas and a great blossoming of Arabian poetry ; but it must be reckoned, when we consider the quality of the poetry produced and its eflfects upon after history, one of the great literary blossoming times of the world. Of course the poetry that came forth then was not of the character, perhaps, to appeal to us very closely; it is all of the tolerably uniform type; PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 57 the forms it assumes have a sameness ; the ideas that appear in it repeat themselves again and again; but, besides that and along with that, we have the fact that in the Arabia of a century before and half a century after Muhammad there did appear a long succession of great poets. Then, parallel with this — naturally connected with this, I presume — there was a growing sense of nationality. For long the Arab tribes, limited on one side by Byzantium and on the other by Persia, had been swept back and cooped up within their borders. Thus the distinction of Arab and non-Arab had been forcibly impressed upon them, and they had been driven to recognize that they were all Arabs; that they were really one people. From time to time, at long intervals, that has happened in Arabia. But it has never lasted any length of time. The Arabs have always fallen back again into their apparently natural state of inter-tribal warfare. Then, how- ever, and for a short time, such a condition was reached. Again, the population of Arabia had evidently been growing for a considerable time beyond its possibilities of support. The period was drawing 58 ASPECTS OF ISLAM near when Arabia must, in a sense, pour over its frontier; must throw part of its population on the adjacent lands. Its population lives nor- mally close to starvation point; but at intervals of some hundreds of years there come regularly periods when the population passes that starva- tion point and some relief must be found. One of those previous periods — ^perhaps the most important of all for the history of Arabia, cer- tainly for the history of the world — was that when the tribes of the Hebrews were thrown out in a similar fashion and compelled by the necessities of the case to occupy Canaan. It was evident about 'the birth of Muhammad that such a time was again coming. And again, and lastly, though perhaps most important of all, Arabia was passing through a period of religious unrest. What precisely had led to this we do not know. Whether there had really been an influence working from Chris- tianity upon the heathen tribes, or whether it came from within out of their own primitive religion itself, that is absolutely dark to us; but the fact is that the literary renaissance of which I have spoken was accompanied by a marked PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 59 revival of religious feeling, by a recognition that there is something more in life than simply the production of beautiful poems. Again and again in the thoughts of these poets there emerges, as it were, an echo from Ecclesiastes ; the feeling of the passing generations revolving with the stars and all going down into the one place, and that place what man knows? the absolute cer- tainty, too, that there must be some force, some personality, hidden behind the dark phenomena of life. Into such a world, then, Muhammaa was born. In these lectures it is not my intention to go into history in the usual sense, the history of dates and supposedly hard facts. I desire, rather, to gives attitudes and aspects, the atmosphere and point of departure for future study. So all that I will say here is that, probably, Muhammad was born about A. D. 570; that, possibly, he began his mission as a prophet in 610; that he was compelled to retire from Mecca to the neigh- boring city of Medina in 622, the date of the Hijra, the Muslim era; and that he died in the year of the Hijra 11. These are the main fixed points of the life of 6o ASPECTS OF ISLAM Muhammad; not all very irrevocably fixed. Bui what of Muhammad himself? Is it possible to express him in his essential personality and char- acter with certainty in a word? I think that it is. If there is one thing that is certain about him, his character, his personality, it is that he was essentially a pathological case. But for that fate, he, too, might have been one of the great poets of the Arabian renaissance. As it is, you might describe him as a poet manque. He was spoiled for poetry by his prophetship in much the same way— dare I say it before a New Eng- land audience? — that Emerson was spoiled for poetry by his philosophy. He was early left an orphan, and had to find his own way through the world. That way was evidently a hard one. It left in him a sense of wrong, a sense that the world is a cruel world for those who cannot protect or take care of themselves. This developed in two ways. It developed, on the one hand, into a strong sense of the evil of the world, and, on the other hand, into a strong feeling that in any religion great stress must be laid upon the helping of the poor, the oppressed, the orphan, the widow. This PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 6l sense of evil in the world is rather difficult to distinguish because it does not seem to have struck him so much in the form of a personal sense of sin — ^although traditions have come down that speak somewhat in those terms — but it is rather a sense of the world as a whole being wrong before God ; of the whole race of mankind needing help, needing grace, needing acceptance at the hand of God. It is very strange that with this feeling of his there has grown up in Islam absolutely no doctrine of what we would call original sin. The Muslim knows what we call the Fall, he knows about the Garden, and the eating from the tree and the expulsion. But the Fall, for him, so far as there was one, was a strictly literal fall from the Earthly Paradise on the top of a mountain. Of a fall in the sense of an entering into a sinful state the Muslim knows nothing. Of course, it is true that the Old Testa- ment knows nearly as little of anything of the kind. After the narrative in Genesis, the only reference to the story of the Fall is a very obscure one in Ecclesiastes. For the Old Testament in general man is sinful because he is a creature of flesh and therefore unclean. But the Pauline 62 ASPECTS OF ISLAM doctrine of the Fall had developed in the interval, yet had left no trace on Muhammad. Whatever Christian influence worked upon him had not conveyed it. For Muhammad, then, this sense of evil was overwhelming. The invisible world, the awful thing lying behind this world that we look out upon, which conditions it and works in and through it, was very dreadfully near. At every turn he felt what has been so well put as "a sense of the wrath to come." Now, two things seem especially to have stim- ulated and pointed this feeling and developed this side of his character. The one was what he saw and learned from the many Christian hermits whom he found scattered through the Syrian desert. It is a commonplace in the poetry of the time to find allusions to the life of the solitary hermit in the vast spaces of the desert, and evi- dently just as these hermits had left a picturesque impression upon the poets of the time, they had made a religious impression upon Muhammad. Their prayers, their night watchings, their fast- ings, their scourgings had touched his heart, even as their solitary lamps shining through the PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 63 darkness of the desert and the mountain solitudes had caught the imagination of the poets. Another thing that affected him, and that per- haps even more strongly, was the multitude of rock-hewn caves that lie along the caravan route which stretches up from Mecca and Medina into Syria proper. Now we know what those rock- caves are. They are the tombs of the Aramean and Nabatean trading-colonies which at one time held the route from Syria down the coast of the Red Sea to Yemen. But somehow Muhammad with his vivid imagination and morbid fancy saw in these all that was left of the dwellings of long bygone tribes who had done evil on earth and had been struck down for it by the hand of God. There their remains still lay, in their houses where the hand of God had touched them; and before that hand of God he trembled. Of course, in the time to come, these judgments of God developed for him into a definite Day of Judgment ; but so far, these ideas were simply working in his mind ; that was all the distance he had reached. As I have said before, the fundamental thing in him was that he was a pathological case. It is evident that, from comparatively early days, he 64 ASPECTS OF ISLAM had trances; fell into fits in which he saw and heard strange things. There came to him voices, either, apparently, in a trance condition or when he was awake. Driven by fear for his soul, he had got into the habit of retiring into desert recesses and there spending days in solitary prayer. So there the voices came to him ; there he even saw figures — vague, dim — ^and the fear fell upon him, "What are they? What is the matter with me? Is this of God? Or am I possessed by some spirit ?" Now, the conception of possession by a spirit was a high possibility. Indeed, Muhammad was thus explained, at first, by the people around him as possessed by one of the jinn, the genii of the Arabian Nights of our childhood. When a soothsayer was called upon to tell where some stolen or lost thing was ; where some stray beast had wandered; or what was going to be the outcome of some enterprise, it was one of the jinn that entered into the sooth- sayer, possessed him and spoke through him. The idea lay very near Muhammad, then, that he might be possessed in the same way by some spirit or other, probably evil. But we find that he gradually reached the PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 6$ belief that what was in him was not an evil spirit. How that came about is still obscure to us and I do not suppose that it will ever become per- fectly clear. But we do find him arrived at the point where he judges that, instead of being possessed by one of the jinn, he is — ^and this is the great fact — in the line of the inheritance of the Old Testament prophets. What is supposed to be, what traditionally, at least, is said to be the first revelation to him runs in almost the same words as the words of Isaiah: "The voice said, 'Cry !' and I said, 'What shall I cry ?' " So there came to Muhammad the angel messenger telling him "CryT* and he said, "I cannot cry!"* I cannot but believe that here we have a case of the re-appearance on the lips of Muhammad, in perfectly unconscious fashion, of some phrase which his sub-memory had picked up when he was in a Christian church, which he had heard read at a Christian service. There are many phrases in the Qur'an which suggest that he must have had some such experiences. At any *Qur. xcvi and Bukharl's Sahlh, Book of the Beginning of Revelation; Isaiah xl, 6 and compare Ixx and Vulgate readings. 66 ASPECTS OF ISLAM rate, to him there comes at last a certainty that it is not one of the jinn that has spoken to him ; but that he is a successor of the long line of prophets. Yet I do not mean by that that he had any very clear conception of what being an Old Testa- ment prophet meant. He knew that the Jews and Christians had their sacred books and that they looked back upon an ordered series of prophets, one following another. What his mind then did was this. These scattered fragments that he had picked up of the history of the Old Testament he proceeded to weave together into a whole. To these, too, he made additions. It Is evident that in his time there were traditions of prophets who had come to the Arabs them- selves. These he wove together with the stories of the Old Testament in strange, broken frag- ments and confused, anachronistic order, and made them into what has since become to the Muslim Church its canonical history of revelation. But there was another side. While he went thus to work, following blind ideas and broken recollections, with no real historical method, on another side he was truly in the succession of PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 67 the Old Testament prophets. He was certainly no advance upon them. No one could dream of comparing him personally or his religious and moral ideas with Amos, Hosea or Isaiah and their ideas. But he sprang, as they did, from the soil of Semitic prophetism. His origin went back, as their origins went back, to the soothsaying prophet that we know in the Old Testament, the prophet who tells where a stray beast is, or a stolen thing is, and who heals and helps in so many different ways. Such existed, we know, amongst the Hebrews ; they existed, too, amongst the Arabs of Muhammad's time. In regard to these soothsaying and very minor prophets and their methods, there has come down to us a very singular little group of traditions that throws a brilliant light upon the phenomena of Muhammad himself. During his later life in Medina he discovered that there was a Jewish boy of some thirteen or fourteen years of age who exhibited the same trance phenomena that he himself did, and who gave out utterances in trance in what Muhammad recognized were exactly the same ways, conditions, forms that he himself used. He found that there was even 68 ASPECTS OF ISLAM growing up a tale that this boy was a prophet to the Jews as opposed to him himself, the prophet to the Arabs. There was even danger that he might be used as a weapon against Muhammad. So it is an interesting story which the traditions tell of how Muhammad went to work to investi- gate this boy. In the records of the Society for Psychical Research we have many tales of the investigatioa and exposure of the methods of different medi- ums; but I believe it is somewhat rare to have one prophet investigating, strictly accord- ing to the methods of that society, another prophet. Yet that is precisely what we find here. Muhammad set to work, as you might say, to stalk this boy, to follow him about; he tried to catch him when he was in the process of trance and utterance. But he did not get much out of it. His conclusion was that the boy was harm- less and that he had better let him alone. The interesting thing is that he perfectly clearly recog- nized that the phenomena exhibited by that boy were the same as his own, and that he did not like the comparison. But to return, Muhammad, as I have said. PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 69 placed himself in the succession of the Old Testa- ment prophets. There come in the Qur'an very strange scraps drawn from the Old Testament, drawn from the New Testament, drawn also, so far as I can understand them, from different Christian liturgies. We have, for example, "Light of Light" ; God "The Light of the World" (Qur. xxiv, 35) ; "Which proceedeth from the Father" (Qur. xvii, 87). Even the longer salu- tation of Islam, "And upon thee be peace and the mercy and blessing of God" may be best derived from the solemn benediction of the Christian Church, as the constant recurrence of "The Peace" in Islam has almost certainly that origin. Muhammad's brain had for long been treasuring up such things; but treasuring them up with the most singular, most unparalleled inaccuracy; and then making them over with the utmost free- dom of imagination. Only in that way can we explain the conception which he worked out and expressed of the Old and New Testaments, and the form in which his memories of them were cast. So much, then, for Muhammad upon that side. But what were his doctrines; what the positions 70 ASPECTS OF ISLAM with which in the end he came out? One of them was, "There is absolutely in existence no God at all save Allah." That is to say: — ^The Arabs of his day, the Arab tribes in general, had reached what might be described as a modified monotheism with a one God in the background and a crowd of minor deities, the remains of tribal gods, coming in between and supposed to stand in some subsidiary position to the one God in the background. Muhammad's great stroke was to sweep out of existence as gods all those intermediate deities and to say to the Meccans, "There is no God at all save that one God whom you already know and recognize as Allah." The other gods became for him angels, or they fell back into the position of the jinn and the devils — all strictly created beings, essentially different in nature from Allah. Another of the doctrines with which Muham- mad, in the end, came out of the labyrinth, was that of the Last Day. You remember, in my first lecture when I recited to you the Fatiha, one curious phrase was, "The King of the Day of Doom." That conception always haunted Muhammad. That there was coming a Day of PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD ^l Doom when all must be judged, and that at that Day of Doom there would rule and judge — Allah. Few would be saved then; but Muham- mad's doctrine varied as to the conditions of salvation. At one time, apparently, he was pre- pared to admit that the followers of all non- idolatrous religions — ^Jews, Christians, Magians — would be among the saved. Later, he narrowed this down until those only who had accepted Islam and the Prophet of Islam would have a chance there, and not even all of them. Another doctrine, or rather a moral attitude which he practically exalted to the position of a religious dogma, was the duty of caring for the poor and the needy. You know, of course, how important a place in the system of Islam the Zakdt, the tithe for the poor, has held, and how honorably distinguished Muslims have been by their personal, direct charities. That goes back to Muhammad and Muhammad's own experi- ences when he was one of the poor ; he had been needy, oppressed and an orphan himself. And last, we must here include, if somewhat illogically, certain exercises of piety and devo- tion — ^the five daily prayers and the prayers of 72 ASPECTS OF ISLAM supererogation, the Fast, the Pilgrimage— differ- ent observances but all of the nature of submitting the soul to Allah, bringing man into the position of giving over his self and his all entirely into the guidance of Allah. These sprang in part from Muhammad's own devotional tendencies, for he was truly a devout soul, and in part from the necessity upon him of conciliating the Mec- cans by taking over certain elements from their former worship. Other aspects of the faith of Muhammad I shall take up in subsequent lectures; but these are what belong peculiarly and naturally to the doctrine of his own person and life. But what are we to think of him as he was in himself? Always trying, as it is my effort to do throughout these lectures, to feel and state these matters sympathetically from within, this is to be said: — Emphatically, Muhammad was not in his beginnings a self-seeking insincere impostor — of that we can be assured as a funda- mental fact. He was a pathological case. His revelations came to him in trance and, like all trance-mediums, he had strangely perverted ideas ; but an impostor he certainly was not The mere PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 73 fact of what he did ; the witness of the men whom he gathered about him; the impression that he made upon his people; that he was able to gain the sword of which we have heard so much; all these things are enough to show that the man was real. Browning says, "an unbelieving Pope will never do." I think we may echo that an unbelieving prophet is an unthinkable thing, and to my mind there can be no question that Muham- mad, however low he stood below the level of the Old Testament prophets, though he never entered into the air that they breathed, though his ideas were far from their ideas, still, having sprung from the same soil, was of their kind and might, under other conditions, have reached their height. Again, he was not, as so many have thought, a schemer, a politician, a man who set out to unite Arabia and to become its head, and who at every move knew exactly what he was doing and why he did it. He was not a schemer; he was very often the most unpolitic of men. As a politician, as a strategist, he made mistakes right and left. He was not even a g^eat general, a brilliant leader in war. The Muslim armies accomplished little indeed so long as they were 74 ASPECTS OF ISLAM led by him. He was not a clear-headed man, least of all as to himself. He certainly had a gift of judging character; but he had a still greater gift of attaching men to himself. This uncon- scious personal influence accomplished more than could any shrewdness. But do not think that I, in this, would slur over in any respect the last terrible ten years of Muhammad's life, when he ruled absolutely in Medina. I am speaking now of what he was in the beginning; what he was before temptation fell upon him and he fell before temptation ; what he was on one side of his character, even through those ten years. There can be no shadow of question that in those last years he forged the awful machinery of divine inspiration to serve his own ignoble and selfish purposes. How he passed over, at last, into that turpitude is a prob- lem again for those who have made a study of how the most honest trance-mediums may at any time begin to cheat. We know that as a fact; but the moral declension, the slope into the abyss of evil, down which Muhammad so calmly walked in those ten years, that can never be explained away. PERSON AND LIFE OF MUHAMMAD 75 If we look at him, further, on the side of philosophy, his case is equally strange, equally contradictory. Again we must go back to our clue, to the essentially pathological state of his mind. He was a dualist on one side and at one time when the reality of the world was strong upon him. There was Allah ; there was also the world, Allah's world, but separate. At another time, he seems to pass over and become an uncon- scious monist. The fleeting aspect of the world so impressed him that he came very close to say- ing that the time would come when all save Allah would have passed away. As it is, he does say, "Allah's are the East and the West; wherever ye turn, there is the Visage of Allah" (Qur. ii, 109), and once and again he speaks of Allah as the Reality (al-haqq). In truth he could never have framed a rounded system or held to it. As well ask a popular preacher to have a body of divinity behind his sermons. The emotions and needs of the moment were more to him than any dream of consistency. His mind, on one side, was of the crassest concreteness. He dealt in the most bizarre details of the heavens and the earth and the yS ASPECTS OF ISLAM abyss and all the creatures therein. Of the masses of tradition telling of his tales on these matters, much must be authentic. For instance, in the description of the Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence up into the heavens and even to the Farthest Lote Tree, the details of those traditions must, to a great extent, go back to Muhammad himself. His mind rejoiced in such concrete imaginations, odd and grotesque as they are to us now. But, on another side, Muhammad was a mystic; he was adrift on the mystic sea; he could not have compared, defined nor explained his wavering thoughts. These he had to express as they came, and so the two elements are in his Qur'an and in the records of his talk, and in the history of Islam all down through the generations these two elements continued. So, then, I take it that the essential and charac- teristic elements in the prophetship, in the creed, in the personality, in the philosophy of Muham- mad all lead us back to something unhealthy, un- unified ; but to something also in its earlier phases and through the greater part of its life and growth absolutely sincere — absolutely, entirely real.

THE QUR'AN ; PRESENT MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD In my last lecture I tried to put before you a sketch of the personality of Muhammad, with his diseased genius, his trances and the visions and the voices that came to him in those trances. From it you will see that the question, What is the Qur'an? is practically answered. The Qur'an is simply a collection of fragments gathered up from those trance utterances of Muhammad. When we look at it, as it is in itself, we find that it is an absolute chaos, yet a chaos, curiously enough, with a mechanical arrangement. In that respect it is very like indeed to the Book of Amos ; in fact, the nearest parallel, I think, that can be found for it is that book. There you have a collection of fragmen- tary utterances from Amos, gathered up after his time, perhaps by one of his disciples, and arranged by the collector according to purely mechanical principles. So it was with the Qur'an. 78 ASPECTS OF ISLAM But when we take those fragments; when we try to work back from them to Muhammad himself — ^to the speaker of them — what do we find? Perhaps the most startling characteristic IS an external one, an enormous difference in their length and form. We find a great many of them couched in short, broken, jerky language, and we find a great many others couched in long, winding sentences, clumsy and lumbering to the last degree. Now, what does that mean? This problem the Muslims saw quite clearly, and their answer is equally clear and to the point. They laid down the distinction that the short-sentenced utterances belong to Muhammad's earliest period, while the long-sentenced utterances belong to his later time. And their criticism of them, external as it was, is perfectly sound. But there go other distinctions along with that. I do not see, as I said to you in the last lecture, that there can be the slightest shadow of doubt that Muhammad, In his earlier times, fell really into such trances; heard really such voices; that these to him seemed to come from the outside. .When he decided finally that they MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 79 were divine revelations, he may have been draw- ing a wrong conclusion; but he had his basis to go upon. He felt that they did not come from himself; so much for his earliest period, I feel, is certain. Then it was natural that these earlier revelations should fall into such short, jerky utterances. They were pressed out of him, as it were — out of his sub-conscious self, or what- ever you choose to call it — ^and naturally they were short and broken ; they were scattered ; they came in jerks. But later, when he came — ^and I am afraid we cannot possibly escape this as a fact — ^when he came consciously to manipulate these utterances, we find their characteristics strangely applied. In the first place, these utterances continue, in a sense, to agree in form; they all rhyme together in the same fashion as did the earlier ones ; but now the rhyme often comes in with the most grotesque, lumbering effect. It is the length of the sentences that makes all the differ- ence, and the length of the sentences is conditioned by the subject-matter and the source from which it is evidently derived. You cannot possibly imagine, in the case of long periods dealing with 80 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the law of inheritance, or with the usages of mar- riage, with the quarrels of his own followers, or emphasizing the position and dignity of the prophet himself — ^you cannot possibly imagine that these things rose to him from his sub- consciousness ; that he did not know very well what he was saying and had not his own distinct objects in the way in which he expressed himself. Such conclusions we can draw perfectly defi- nitely with regard to the external form of the Qur'an. At first, we have only those trance- Utterances of Muhammad. But in his later life, especially during his life in Medina, I presume that these revelations can best be compared to sermons, or, as one man has very exactly said, to leading articles or editorials in newspapers. Their objects, frequently, were exactly those of such leading articles or editorials in the organ of a party. Then, further, and now on the side of thought and its implications, another point which strikes us in the Qur'an is that all of it is couched in the direct words of Allah. Allah is supposed to be the speaker from first to last. He is addressing the prophet, and these are the words which he uses. This, as you will see, has MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 8l its bearings on these later revelations which Muhammad forged for his own advantage. He could not equivocate; all had to be, as it were, prefaced with a "Thus saith the Lord." To later Hebrew writers of religious tracts "the word of the Lord came" similarly ; but with how different a moral burden! Finally, all is in exactly the form of language that was used in heathen Arabia by the sooth- sayers of whom I have spoken. The jerky utter- ances are theirs; the rhymes are theirs; all is stamped with their stamp throughout. So it becomes perfectly intelligible to us how it came about that the heathen Meccans said of Muhammad, "Why, he is nothing but one of the soothsayers." It was only too true. He spoke the language of the soothsayers; in every respect his external appearance was that of the sooth- sayers. And what he had become when the spirit worked upon him and swept him away in his earlier days, he was compelled by the principle of unity to carry out in the later days, when he knew very well indeed every word he was bring- ing forth. Again, another strange point is that though 82 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Muhammad gave out these as being the direct words of Allah to himself, he does not seem to have taken any pains at all about the preservation of them. Yet he speaks, again and again, of a Book as being revealed through him, although he seems to have given no care to build up such a book out of what came to him. It is conceiv- able that in his early visions and contact with the revealing Spirit he may have seen such a book and heard his revelations read from it. He would thus have a fixed idea that what came to him was extracted from that book, and that, as it existed in the heavens, God would see to its preservation on earth. At any rate, we have no record whatever that he gave care to have the words of Allah reduced to writing. If his fol- lowers chose to gather them up, to imprint them upon their memories, to use passages in their devotions, that was their affair. He does not seem to have urged anything of the kind, except as to using certain portions in public prayer. It was due only to those tenacious memories of his followers and to scattered scraps of writing that they had jotted down, that it was possible, after the death of Muhammad, to gather up MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 83 fragments — ^some portion, at least— of what had been his utterances and to preserve them for future ages. And stranger still beyond even that, the Muslims themselves at first do not seem to have felt this necessity. It was only after the early battles of Islam had threatened the loss of much of the Qur'an — so much had already been lost which had been held only in the mem- ories of the fallen in those battles — only then does It seem to have struck some of them that it might be well to gather up from memories and writings all that still survived of what the prophet had left to them. They gathered them up then; they put together, as well as they could, the bits that seemed to refer to the same subjects. In that way they compiled a number of chapters, varying in length, and then they simply arranged these according to thear length. The longest was put first, and thence they tapered down to the last which contains some six verses. At the beginning they put that Fatiha which I have already recited to you, and the Qur'an was complete. Now, as it happened, what this resulted in was, first, that in each chapter of the Qur'an there 84 ASPECTS OF ISLAM may be fragments derived from entirely different periods, and, secondly, that you must — if you want to get anything in even rough chronological arrangement — begin your reading at the end of the book. The confusions within the chapters and the questions of how to date each element in them were early recognized by the Muslim scholars themselves. In this they contrast hap- pily with the scholars both of the Synagogue and of the Church. When these saw, for example, at the beginning of a psalm the title "Of David," they regarded that title as being entirely sacred and not to be touched, and if any one sug- gested that the psalm might not be by David, that that was only a title, they felt sure that there was something wrong with that person. In Islam I am not aware of any trace of such objec- tion to higher criticism. And the parallel is very close and striking. The early compilers of the Qur'an put at the head of each chapter the place where they thought it had been revealed, whether it was at Mecca or at Medina. The later criti- cism — ^yet not so much later, for the criticism began comparatively early — never had the slight- est hesitation, never seems to have run risk of MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 85 rebuke in any way for indicating that those head- ings were not correct ; that passages in the chapter were probably revealed somewhere else and that the chapter itself was probably a conglomerate. This is one point of clear-sightedness and of true scientific attitude that is to be put to the credit of Islam. Of course, as I have said, the criticism began very early and the chapter heading had not time to become so integral a part of the text as did the titles of the Psalms. But now that we have this book, this Qur'an, before us, which has been called, and called very well "The Mind of Muhammad," how are we to read it? How are we to find our way through its labyrinths? The Muslim scholars, it is true, have gone before us. But we cannot always consent to follow in their steps; their results are not always such as to appeal to us. Yet, admit- ting their prepossessions and prejudices, one way or the other, we must admit that a great part of the critical work upon the Qur'an was done before we approached it. I do not believe that any book, with the exception of the Christian Scriptures — ^and then only, if we take in the work on them in the last century — has been ana- 86 ASPECTS OF ISLAM lyzed, studied and commented upon so mmutely and scrupulously as has been the Qur'an. These studies are of certain tolerably definite descrip- tions. There is quite a library, for example, dealing with the critical analysis of the text; where and when each portion was revealed, and which portions have abrogated others by coming after them and correcting them. There is a large library connected with what we would call Introduction to the Qur'an, the necessary sciences for him who would study it; and there are commentaries of all kinds. There are com- mentaries, for example, which have as their object simply to guard or to gather together all the traditions of the first generation as to the interpretation of the different passages. There are other commentaries that take the text as it stands, and try by grammatical analysis to reach what precisely, on the face of the text, is its meaning. Then, of course, there are other commentaries, the objects of which are theo- logical, and which develop at great length, with great ingenuity, and, at least so it seems to us, hair splitting minuteness, the doctrines that are to be deduced from this and that. But, in this MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 8/ connection, we must always remember that the Muslim exegetical and theological method has always been that of scholastic analysis. It is impossible, then, to exaggerate, really to over-state, the amount of work that has been put by Islam into the understanding of the Qur'an, and yet, as I suggested in my last lecture, at the best there is much left for us to do— for us of the Western world who come with, I think, on the whole, clearer eyes, fewer prejudices and a really wider knowledge of the external sur- roundings of Muhammad. We often hear it said that the great thing which any one must do who desires to understand Islam is to study the Qur'an; "You must read the Qur'an" is how it is frequently put. But when you talk about reading the Qur'an, you talk about an exceedingly difficult thing. If you read it to understand it; trying to put yourself back into the environment of Muhammad ; trying to think what, precisely, these phrases meant for him there in Mecca, or there in Medina, with such and such surroundings; if you try to do that it becomes a different matter from simply reading a bit of Arabic, and therefore I would 88 ASPECTS OF ISLAM throw out this warning to you : — ^Just as in the case of the Old Testament there is no translation at present in existence that can be called even approximately adequate, so in the case of the Qur'an there is no translation that you can trust. * That work is still to be done. It does not matter whether you regard it as simply the work of translating the Qur'an as it is understood by the native Muslim scholars, following one of their grammatical commentaries and basing your trans- lation upon that; or whether you take up the broader and, in time to come, certainly unavoid- able task of translating the Qur'an from your own knowledge of the language, the environ- ment, the religious situation. Whichever view you take, the translation of the Qur'an is still to come. But even though there is no adequate trans- lation of the Qur'an in existence, do not think that it is not very fairly understood by the Muslims. ^I notice that Palmer's translation is much used and quoted by missionaries. Palmer was a wonderful linguist and an admirable scholar in many ways, but his translation has some most extraordinary blunders, many of which must have been due to haste. Rodwell's translation is a careful piece of work but hardly represents the tone of the original. Sale's can now be neglected. MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 89 It is often represented to us that Muslims take the Qur'an mechanically. In a way that is possibly true. I am afraid that we similarly sometimes take the Bible and the prayer book mechanically. But never think that at the bot- tom of it all they take it mechanically. When you see a Muslim sitting somewhere in the corner of a mosque, reciting to himself passages from the book — reciting always from mem- ory, although the book may lie open upon his knee — these are cadences which have become familiar but which also mean much for him in his devotional life. And do not be misled to think that such reciting is an)rthing like the mechanical operation of a Buddhist prayer-wheel, where the turning means everything. That is not so. The feeling of the educated Muslim for the meaning of the Qur'an is quite as precise ; his endeavor to reach it, to feel it, is quite as close and living as anything we have with regard to our Scriptures. I have now put before you very shortly what seems to me to be the true historical position with regard to the person of Muhammad and with regard to the Qur'an, its origin and its nature. 90 ASPECTS OF ISLAM So much should be known for the sacred truth of history. It should also be known for our estimate of the man Muhammad, for charity and right feeling towards him. But, of course, for the missionary who is living amongst Mus- lims, who has to work with them, who has to affect them, a far more important thing than that is the question. What does Muhammad mean for present-day Muhammadans ? Similarly what does the Qur'an mean for its Muslim reader now ? What does he think, believe of it and of its utterer ? What are his attitudes to them ? These questions I must now approach. In the first place, you must not think that Islam holds one thought only on these matters. The truth is that Islam is more broken into sects than even Christendom. Let me illustrate this by perhaps the most remarkable experience I had in my Eastern wanderings. I suppose every child has at some time wished that he could have had part in the procession of the prophets coming down the hill to meet Saul, "prophesying" with pipe, timbrel and harp before them, and then sweeping Saul up, he, too, "prophesying," now in their midst. I suppose MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 9I that he has also wished that he might have wit- nessed that scene at Mount Carmel — the priests of Baal crying aloud to their god and leaping about the altars, cutting themselves with knives. It was my privilege — rather a rare one — ^to take part in what was practically the same as that scene, a procession of darwishes marching ddwn and "prophesying" as they came; and it was also made possible for me, on the same occasion, to see what is probably the nearest parallel to that other scene on Mount Carmel with the priests of Baal that still survives amongst people that can, in any respect, be called civilized. I am bound to confess that the spirit did not fall upon me and make me "prophesy," as it did Saul ; but I was sufficiently affected to make very real to me the pull upon the nerves which such scenes must exercise. It fell in this wise : — On the tenth day of the month of Muharram, the first month of the Mus- lim year, on the night of that day, the Shi'ite sect of Muslims has a great mourning ceremony for the slaughter of the grandson of the Prophet, al-Husayn, and of many of his family at Kerbela near Baghdad, who fell there in battle against 92 ASPECTS OF ISLAM fearful odds. If there is a thing that stirs Persian Islam to utter frenzy, a frenzy of grief, a frenzy of hate, a frenzy of love, it is the memory of this — the great tragedy of Islam, and every year when the day comes round it is celebrated at ICerbela by what can be called, in a sense, a Pas- sion Play in which the whole tale, as traditicm tells it, is reproduced in scenes. In other import- ant centres of Islam where any sufficient number of Shi'ites are gathered, it takes the form of a great procession at night followed by a speech, reciting the wrongs, the sorrows and the death of al-Husayn and his family. It was my very great privilege, then, while in Cairo, to have part in that procession and to hear that speech. The procession itself let me describe to you. It passed through the principal streets of the native part of Cairo, the Medina, or City in the strict sense, starting from the Gamaliya, passing the mosque of the Hasanen proceeding down the New Street and finally through by-ways reaching the house in the Hamzawiya, the use of which for these ceremonies during the first ten days of Muharram was bequeathed by a pious Shi'ite. Had it not been that the MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 93 men composing the first three or four ranks in the procession wore black fezzes, instead of tall hats, they might, so far as their appearance was concerned, have been the kirk session or elders of some Presbyterian church. These maintained a decent and composed solemnity of visage. But behind them came the bands of darwishes, stripped to the waist and prophesying after their fashion. The prophesying consisted of loud wail- ings, ejaculations, groans ; of striking their breasts with their fists and slapping their shoulders with their open hands; of beating their backs with heavy iron chains ; or of cutting their fore- heads with swords. The only light came from great iron cressets filled with burning wood, carried in the midst and showering fiery frag- ments everywhere, and from two rows of candles in tall candle glasses, carried by boys down each side of the procession and a little ahead of it and moving as it moved. Otherwise we walked through darkness with the black houses rising on either hand and sudden flashes of the eager faces of spectators along them. There was no music, for this was a procession of mourners, and tumultuous, violent, orgiastic as they were. 94 ASPECTS OF ISLAM theirs seemed to me to be very genuine mourning. They had prepared, I knew, for the cutting of their foreheads by shaving clean the forward part of the scalp; but that did not prevent the blood and wounds from being very real. All in all, it was the strangest, the most striking, the most individual scene I have ever witnessed in my life. So down the street in the front rank between the Persian consul-general and his secretary I marched. To have been farther back in the midst of the chaos behind would certainly have been more interesting; but that could not be. Yet I do not think that there would have been any danger there, even if I had been discovered not to be a Muslim. An element in the Kerbela legend is that a Christian ambassador exerted himself to save al-Husayn and he is often made part of the drama. My dress was the frock coat suit which I am wearing at present, except that then I had on a fez. At last the procession reached the court-yard of the house of which I have spoken, and in that court-yard came out still more plainly the analogy, or rather the exact similarity, that such scenes bear to those of which MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 95 we read in the Old Testament, especially to the tumultuous shrieking, leaping and crying aloud upon their god of the priests of Baal and the cutting themselves with knives. It was all per- fectly genuine; the blood was real blood; the blows were hard, real blows ; and with regard to the great masses — that is, with the exception of some of the upper classes who were distinctly per- functory in their breast-thumpings — ^there could be no question at all of sincerity. This was mourning, then, for the grandson of the Prophet, and reverence for the family of the Prophet is a universally accepted duty in Islam. When by any chance, I alluded in the presence of one of my Muslim friends to the mosque of the Hasanen, as it is commonly called, he always took occasion, a moment afterwards, to speak of it as the mosque of Sayyidna Husen, "Our Lord Husen." But yet I am in grave doubt— or rather in no doubt whatever — how my Sunnite friends would have regarded my thus taking part in a Shi*ite procession. How would an Orangeman regard a friend who was seen celebrating Saint Pat- rick's Day? One of my Cairene friends, who 96 ASPECTS OF ISLAM had been a Sunnite Muslim but who had become a Christian, had taken over with him his hatred of Shi'ites, and could not find enough to say to their discredit. It is curious, also, to notice that in Lane's monumental and nearly exhaustive work on the modern Egyptians, there is almost no mention of the Shi'ites. I have told this to illustrate the enormous gulf that has entered Islam at this point. It affects even our precise subject — the doctrine of Islam as to the person of Muhammad — ^because, by a hardly intelligible development, the descendants of Muhammad have come to be of more import- ance for Shi'ites than Muhammad himself. But into the ramifications of the Shi'ite position I cannot now enter. Some of them involve a prac- tical deifying of *Ali and his descendants ; all tend to what may be called a more High Church doctrine than that of the Sunnites. Practically, this comes to two systems of theology and law, Sunnite and Shi'ite, with, inside of each of these, further endless subdivisions. Crossings and mix- ings take place also, to some extent, and the old pre-Muslim faith of each geographical district has coloured its special variety of heresy. Each MUSUM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD CfJ missionary will need, while holding fast as a clue the broad outlines of what may be called "book-Islam," to study for himself the particular phases of his own field. But returning to our other broad difference, the difference, I mean, between the attitude of the historian towards the Qur'an and Muhammad and the present-day attitude towards them, how does that stand ? Here there has come into play one of the most striking characteristics of Islam. It is a readiness to pick up odds and ends of doctrine from the outside, non-Muslim world. These are then adapted, made over more or less into Muslim form, yet still leaving it perfectly plain that they have been thus promiscuously gathered up. This is the only explanation possible of the strange development that has taken place in the doctrine of the person of Muhammad. For example, there is in circulation a tradition, and it is generally accepted in Islam — I do not believe that it is doubted by any orthodox Muslim — that puts into the mouth of Allah the following : — "Had it not been for thee (Muhammad) I had not created the worlds." That is, Muhammad 98 ASPECTS OF ISLAM or the determination to create Muhammad had been there from the beginning and the worlds were created and exist only for his sake. Again, there is a statement put into the mouth of Muhammad himself which tradition univer- sally accepts: — "I was a prophet when Adam was still between clay and water," that is, when Adam was not yet formed. You see that the prophetship of Muhammad is thus moved back before the creation of the human race. Yet this may be taken as a development of another tradi- tion by which Islam has endeavored to construct for Allah a legal claim on the worship of man- kind. When Adam was created, Allah drew forth from him all his seed to be, like millions on millions of swarming ants, and asked them, *'Am I not your Lord ?" To which they replied, "Yea, verily!" This was the primal covenant in Islam, and is alluded to in Muslim theological systems as "The Day of *Am I not?'" Then there is another that calls Muhammad "The first created and the last to rise in the resurrection." Another still stranger series of tra- ditions, complicated and contradictory in many ways, speaks of a certain mysterious Light of MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 99 Muhammad. This Hght is supposed to have been a peculiar radiance that shone in the faces of Muhammad's ancestry in the direct line back- ward. That is to say, the idea is that he was being passed down through that ancestry, in a peculiarly personal way, and that his presence in each link of the genealogy was indicated by this peculiar radiance. In other traditions this has taken a still more extravagant form. You will meet with such sayings as this: "Allah created in the beginning of all things the Light of Muhammad. From a portion of it He then cre- ated His throne; from another portion of it He created the lower worlds; from another portion of it He created the tablet on which the decrees of destiny are written, and lastly from another portion, preserved for the purpose, came the Prophet himself." You see, then, that there grew up under partly Christian, partly Neo-PIatonic, partly Persian influences what can be described as almost precisely the Arian doctrine of Christ The Uncreated Word of Christian doctrine, the dy- namic emanations of Neo-Platonism, the Kareno, or Royal Splendour of the Persian Kings have lOO ASPECTS OF ISLAM all been absorbed after a fashion, but by no means assimilated. To this there have been curious consequences. If Muhammad was this peculiar first-created of all creatures, a Light from Allah Himself — ^Light of Light, you might say — ^if he was that, what of his moral nature? Islam has been driven to laying down the position that he was morally perfect, is — Muslim theologians would put it — the one morally perfect creature that has ever been. That, of course, is directly in the teeth of statements in the Qur'an (e. g. xlviii: i, 2); but the logic that is derived from the aspirations of religion does not care anything for such con- tradictions, and so Islam holds, at the present time, a fixed doctrine of the sinlessness of its. Prophet. But, further, if he was this sinless being, and if a peculiar radiance could be traced down the line of his descent, what of the faith and conduct of his parents and ancestors? Upon that subject the first generations of Islam had no question. There are traditions still in existence which assert that both the father and the mother of Muham- mad must of necessity be in the Fire. Before MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD lOI the coming of Muhammad* ii^v^ was no true guidance ; there was no one to • foHow. He entered upon his mission as a prophet aft^r Ihey were dead. Their fate, logically, was settle3%. Hypothetically they might have been saved a§-':-' .; holders of the doctrine taught by Jesus, the last prophet; but Islam always takes it for granted that none so believing was left, that all had fallen away to the Christian perversion of the teaching of Jesus. What, then, was to be done with the clash between these traditions, this theological position, and the doctrine of the Light of Muham- mad? It was easy to hold that their conduct was immaculate, especially that they must all have been born in wedlock, lawful even accord- ing to strict Muslim law. But what of their faith? As to that, a great many devices were tried, and one of them, for long, held the field, T do not know how the Muslims of the present day regard it. One doctrine grew up that after Muhammad had appeared as a prophet, he asked Allah what had been the fate of his parents, and was told that as they had not followed one of the prophets — ^had not been able to, but still had not — ^that they, of necessity, would be in the lOa ASPECTS' -Of -ISLAM Fire. Upon tbajt he'^prayed Allah that such might not be the. f^te "of his father and mother, and the heart c^i.Xllah was touched, and he raised up froni'-th'e dead the father and mother of Muham- ^ ^;\iriad, and they there and then professed their faith in their son and returned unto their dust. So the situation was saved. I do not know that the same thing was applied to Muhammad's ancestry any further back. That might have been a more complicated and difficult situation. But, further, from this doctrine of the per- son of Muhammad, as it grew up, there came an immense strengthening of another attitude towards Muhammad which had existed practi- cally from the beginning. The Semiteis have always been a moralizing race; they have liked to have things put before them in sententious sentences. The Book of Proverbs, in its differ- ent parts, exactly represents different phases of this tendency. They have liked, especially, to have concrete examples put before them, and they have felt that if they only followed those examples, did as this man did who was notori- ously a wise man, or followed the counsel of this other man who was certainly a very pious man. MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD IO3 that then they would be safe and successful for this world and the next. To follow the custom of the fathers and to keep in the old paths has been the tendency of all the Semites and especially the tendency of the desert. To that came Muhammad, and upon his one example early Islam learned to lean. It is the desire of every pious Muslim to model his life in every possible particular upon that of the Prophet And, after a fashion, it has been pos- sible to do so. We hear a great deal nowadays from time to time about the doing as Jesus did ; the thinking of what He would do; the model- ling of our life upon His ; and some one, recently, greatly daring, said that such an attitude had always led to unhealthy results. It was, perhaps, rather a broad statement; but I think we can understand what he meant. At any rate, we must distinguish two sides of this imitation: one, the following in the inner life ; and another, the copying of the external actions of life. But in Islam, the close following of Muhammad as a guide in life means the second of these only. Yet it is of the deepest and most wide- reaching importance. For example, I do not 104 ASPECTS OF ISLAM think that there can be any question that the position of women in Islam is practically due to the attitude of Muhammad himself. This is pretty well admitted in the attempts which have been made — and this is the common explan- ation and defense of the present day — to show that Muhammad's position was peculiar; that he did these things bearing upon women as a prophet; as a politician; as a political leader; for one reason or another. But to put the case in a word, I cannot conceive of anything that would have made such an enormous difference in the position of woman in Islam as if Muham- mad, after the death of his first wife, had remained a monogamist, for one point; and, if, for another point, he had encouraged his wife to go with unveiled face as was the custom and IS the custom to this day, for that matter, for the free women of the desert. That would have been enough ; the woman question in Islam would hardly now exist. Every Muslim would have followed in that, as in everything else, the example of his prophet. Monogamy would be the rule in Islam, while the veil would never have existed except for the insane jealousy of Muhammad. MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD 10$ Further, it is a very curious criticism upon this doctrine of the imitation of the Prophet that when Muslims of the present time — that is, educated Muslims — speak about the veil, they in- variably explain that the veil is not binding upon all women; that it was binding only upon the wives of the Prophet. By that means an attempt is now being made to get rid of the obligation of wearing it. There is no prophet at present alive with wives over whom to be jealous. So much, then, broadly, for the doctrine of the person of Muhammad. What of the doctrine of the nature of the Qur'an? Here, again, the tendency of Islam to assimilate doctrines from without early asserted itself, and there can be no question that the development of the doctrine of the Qur'an was very early affected by the doctrine of the Word of God that became flesh and dwelt among men, especially as that was formulated by the Greek Church. The view which we find crystallizing may be put thus : — The Qur'an is to be regarded as uncreated. That is. It has existed from all the ages with Allah. It is not that it was the first of all created things, as was Muhammad, rather, it is I06 ASPECTS OF ISLABd absolutely uncreated and existent, from all eter- nity, in the essence of Allah. Now in what sense is that said? I think I can illustrate its meaning by a parallel with the Christian doctrine of the Logos that was from all eternity in the bosom of the Father by whom all things were made, and the Word as it became incarnate in Jesus and moved amongst us. That is precisely the distinction — of course, with slightly changed language — that is made by the Muslim theologian, when he defines the doctrine that the Qur'an is uncreated. He says, "From all eternity there was a quality existent in the essence of Allah, a quality not written in letters ; not pronounced in sounds; but simply a quality called Speech." With that eternal essential qual- ity Allah created all things. We have that, then, on the one hand, this quality from all eternity. On the other hand, we have a manifestation of that quality of Speech so existent in the essence of Allah, a manifestation here upon earth which is written with letters, which is pronounced In sounds, and which is called the Qur*an. The term "Qur'an" and the term "Word of God" may be used of either of these. MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD IO7 The parallel, in all this, with the Christian Logos is so close that I make no question that the Muslim view is dependent upon it. Yet it should be noticed that while the Christian Logos involves the two ideas of ratio and oratio, the Muslim has that of oratio, "speech" only. Muslim theo- logians seem to shrink from connecting "reason" with Allah. But it will be asked, What is the real relationship between Allah's quality called Speech and the Qur'an? What do we mean when we say that Speech is manifested here in written form? The answer is put thus: What is understood from the words of the Qur'an equals what would be understood from Allah's quality of Speech if the veil were withdrawn from our minds, and we could enter into direct contact with that divine quality. The theologians are careful to add that the one is not the other ; that would be to confuse created and uncreated; but what is understood from the one is the equivalent of what would be understood from the other if we could reach it, as we, in this tabernacle of flesh, cannot Now, of course, that is a statement which only pushes the matter a little further back and which I08 ASPECTS OF ISLAM leads to other questions. It led, for instance, to the question, To whom are we to ascribe the words, the phrasing, in which this eternal, uncre- ated word of Allah is couched in the Qur'an, and through which it is manifested to man? In answer, some held that the phrasing is due to the revealing spirit, Gabriel; others even tried to hold that it was Muhammad himself who sup- plied the words; but, in general, the position reached by Islam has been that the phrasing also goes back to the writing of the revelation upon the Preserved Tablet by the Pen moved by the creative Will of Allah Himself, and has thus no human element. There, I think, the theologians have tried to be more precise than they logically could. But, at any rate, these questions have been asked; and that is the final answer that has been reached by the strictly orthodox school. It would have meant much for Islam if the con- ception of a human element in its sacred book could have gained a secure footing; as it is, the standing of that conception has wavered between that of damnable unbelief and that of a more or less heretical innovation. In this sense, then, the Qur'an is called the MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD lOQ Word of Allah and is said to be uncreated. But, of course, this position which I have put before you is only the general one; others have been held in the Muslim world. So there have been extremists, and there still are, who attempt to take up the position that it is not what is understood from the words that is uncreated; the words themselves are the Word of Allah. They have even felt themselves driven by the logic of the situation to say that when any one repeated the Qur'an, the words that came from him, his very utterance itself, must be spoken of as eternal in their nature. Such, then, broadly, have been the positions upon Muhammad and upon the Qur'an reached by the Church of Islam. But what are the tendencies at the present day, the tendencies, I mean, among the more educated Muslims who are beginning to face the outside world and are trying to bring their theology into some accordance therewith? A very pronounced one is. Go back to Muhammad ; throw away everything and try to reach what he said, what he thought ; take his positions as a starting point and not the reasonings of the theologians about him; sweep away systematic no ASPECTS OF ISLAM theology and go back simply to the words of the Prophet himself and begin again. Now, that, undoubtedly, is a possible course to follow; but when they do get back to Muhammad they will be driven to take him upon a historical basis. They will have to say to themselves, We are going back to Muhammad; who, really, was Muhammad, and what kind of a man was he? When they do that, an era for Islam will have drawn near. We can safely say, Go back to Christ. Whatever may happen with the Gospels, whatever criticism may apply to them, we feel and believe — ^historically and critically, we are justified in believing — ^that that person, that figure will remain untouched. But no one at all who has studied the life of Muhammad can have any dream of such an Immunity and safety foi' him. It is only when his figure is seen through the mist of tradition, surrounded by the awe and reverence of the unexamining, the uncritical and the morally undeveloped, that there can be any thought of taking him as a religious guide and as a pattern for life. As the moral standard of the masses of Islam is raised and the facts of the life of Muhammad become more

widely known, a tremendous overturning will be inevitable. But another tendency is, Go back to the Qur'an; drop away all traditions; drop away all the subtleties of the schoolmen and take the word of the Qur'an as it stands; it is the Word of Allah, the unerring guide which He has given to man. That, too, is a very possible course. But when we do go back to the Qur'an, it will simply mean going back to the question of the historical Muhammad; the question will really be the same. It is possible for the educated Muslim of the present day to use these as his methods; to try to seek safety and salvation for his faith in these ways; only because he has not yet traced them out to the end. The end will come, and when that end comes will Islam escape, and if so, how? Is there any possibility of guessing at the drift of the reconstruction that will follow? Many, I know, will say that there can be no reconstruction; that Islam will be ended. But religions are never ended; they develop into new forms, absorb new life and go on again. By no such easy method will Chris- tianity conquer. As for Islam, I think that the 112 ASPECTS OF ISLAM line of escape for it will be, first, through its mystical position, with which I have already dealt briefly. That position, upon which I shall have to enter hereafter in more detail, will hold its own, even after the feeling has been reached that it is unsafe to study Muhammad any further ; that things come up in that study which are not possible in a religious leader for this century. But secondly, even then there will remain loyalty to the abstraction, Islam, to its history and all that there has been in it of religious fervour and life. And, thirdly, there will come into play and will make practical appli- cation of the mystical attitude and of the loyalty to Islam, a great formative principle, the prin- ciple of life and development in Islam, which IS called the Agreement of the Muslim people. Tradition from Muhammad lays down, "My people will never agree upon an error," and, going upon that, Islam has felt that whenever the general body of the Muslim people has reached a con- clusion upon a doctrine or a point of law, such a conclusion is to be accepted, because it is the voice of the people. This agreement has overridden, again and MUSLIM ATTITUDE TOWARD MUHAMMAD II3 again, direct commands in the Qur'an. It has overridden absolutely certain and accepted tradi- tions from the Prophet. The mere fact that the people of Muhammad agreed that this must be the position to be held, has been enough. The other has quietly dropped out of sight and survives in history only. You will see that this is like the principle of a dogma-forming power inherent in the Christian Church, and like the principle, too, of Vincent of Lerins: What always ; what everywhere ; what by everybody has been held to be Christian verity, that is Chris- tian verity. Using, then, this principle of Agreement, loyalty to Islam and the mystical attitude, Muslims may escape from the supposed cul-de-sac of the life of Muhammad, and it seems perfectly fair to say that at the present day all thinking and devout Muslims are mystics. That, at least, was my experience. Of course, there is a residuum that you cannot call sincere; another that you cannot call devout; but when you take the man in Islam who really does think and is sincerely religious, you may be perfectly sure that his attitude is mystical. Certainly there is still a considerable element in 114 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Islam who may be said to think in a way, and to whom the mechanical formulae of the scho- lastic theology and philosophy bring satisfaction; when the scholastic theology and philosophy go, they will go with it. There is also a large element whose faith is based upon the faith of a former generation and is cultivated with inherited religious phrases. But taking the spiritually alive in Islam, so far as my experience goes, so far as I was able to learn at any point, their conceptions are those of the mystical life.

At the close of my last lecture I was beginning to open up slightly the present subject, that is, the religious attitudes, views, ideas, re-construc- tions current amongst the different classes of Muslims. I divided these roughly into three. Practically all thinking men who are also religious-minded are mystics. This class I must leave over for the next lecture. But that leaves, second, the masses of the people who are emi- nently religious-minded but of whom we cannot say exactly that they are thinkers; and, third, the great body of scholastic theologians. First, then, with regard to the masses of the people, their religion is to a great extent a religion of phrases. I do not say this in any contemptuous sense; the religion of all masses of people, our own included, tends to crystallize itself in religious phrases. For example, I have here in my hand the rosary of Islam. In this, its largest form, it consists of ninety-nine beads, Il6 ASPECTS OF ISLAM in three divisions of thirty-three each. The smaller form consists of thirty-three beads only ; but what I have here is the more regular form in use today. There are still larger forms but these are used by darwishes or other religious. Each of these beads is dedicated to one of what are called the ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names of God. These go back to Muhammad, follow- ing Arabic usage. All Arabic poetry tends to use descriptive epithets. It was, therefore, per- fectly natural that Muhammad should express his ideas about Allah by such names describing His qualities. There are very many of these in the Qur'an and in the Traditions, or derivable from verbs used in the Qur'an, and, out of these, ninety-nine have been taken and have become stereotyped for use in private devotion. So the Muslim, as he walks, uses his rosary, slipping it through his fingers, until he has gone through the ninety-nine Names, and if he does not choose to trouble himself to remember all the names in exact order, he will simply turn It over, running it through his hand, and murmur under his breath, "Allah, Allah, Allah." I do not know exactly how much feeling there goes MUSLIM THEOLOGY II7 With that. Certainly, from the generality of the habit and its fixity, he cannot be thinking about things very different from those of the ordinary circle of religious thought; he cannot be indulg- ing in religious speculation of any freedom; at any rate that is the habit, normal, regular. But religious usages go further than such simple phrases as these. I suppose that for us to have some one read the New Testament over aloud in our presence at a family festivity would not be regarded as exactly an exhilarating amusement. In Islam it is different. The reading of the Qur'an in that way by a professional reader is listened to very gravely by a circle who find it quite enter- taining. It will make part of a holiday for them, and when they wish anything more wildly excit- ing than that there will take place a performance which can be best compared to the Christmas Cantata with us. It is carried out by a principal singer with an assistant chorus of four voices and perhaps one or two musical instruments of the legally permissible kind, and they go over in a series of songs and choruses an account of the traditional history of the birth of the Prophet. Il8 ASPECTS OF ISLAM That very frequently takes place on the occasion of a marriage. A great tent is erected in the street, outside of the bridegroom's house, and there the singer and his chorus are seated, and all are welcome to come and listen ; the family joy being expressed in this way. I was present at one of these song-recitations, and, having been introduced to the singer, he, out of the courtesy of his heart, sent and asked whether I would like him to somewhat expurgate the contents of this cantata, as there were references in it to the end of the world and the state of things in the world to come for the unbeliever. He thought I might take it personally, and would rather have such things cut out. Of course I assured him that what I came for was the delight of hearing his voice and, having that, did not mind in the least what words he might use. These are simply illustrations of the religious tendencies of the masses of the people and of the ways in which such tendencies show themselves. I use these rather than the five legal daily prayers and the Friday sermon because they have developed themselves more spontaneously and are more characteristic of the natural drift. But it MUSUM THEOLOGY II9 would be a mistake to think that the masses of Islam have not also some definite theological basis for themselves of a precise, almost a philosophical kind. Here I have, for instance, a little booklet, very widely read and costing some fraction of a cent. It contains at the beginning those ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names of Allah, and then it goes on to give a series of suitable prayers, religious ejaculations, moral reflections, extracts from the Qur'an, etc. But no one could go over it without picking out from it quite a little of what you might call philosophical theology. Different phrases such as "From all eternity," "unifying," "if ambiguity have entered into my knowledge of Thee," etc., are scattered through it, and the ordinary user of this little book is bound to pick up and to understand in that way a certain amount of the definite scholastic theology. To that definite scholastic theology, then, I now turn. I have chosen a system to put before you, in part at least — I cannot give you it all — that is very thorough and definite indeed. This, for me, is the only sound course, if you desire to imderstand any theology at all. If, for example, 120 ASPECTS OF ISLAM you want to understand the Christian theology, I do not see any escape for it from taking up some one definite system — that of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or of Calvin, it may be — of as thorough a character as possible, and working that out and getting to understand it. There- after, you can study and understand the different modifications of it and easily master the general field of theology. But for a basis you are bound to take some system that is thoroughgoing, master it and then build up your knowledge of theology round it and its modifications. For that purpose, then, I pick a quite thoroughgoing system with a metaphysical basis of a kind. But before going on to actual theology we must first make sure of our preliminary training. That the Muslim takes very seriously, and he has no opinion at all of the metaphysical train- ing of the Westerner. Whenever, for example, I began at any time to discuss theology with a Muslim, the first thing he did was to put me through my paces as to whether I was really intellectually fitted and had the necessary prepa- ration to approach this subject. There was a kind of metaphysical pons asinorutn that had to MUSLIM THEOLOGY 121 be passed before we could proceed further. Let me now put that bridge before you. They always began by saying that there are three essen- tial things to be understood and distinguished. Unless you can understand these, you need not go on any further with your study of theology. You must understand what is meant by the neces- sary; what is meant by the possible; and what is meant by the impossible. My interlocutor would either make me explain these, or else he would go on to expound them himself as fol- lows: — ^The necessary, its non-existence cannot be thought; there is only one necessary — that is Allah. The possible; that is you and I — any- thing — the things of the world. They may be^ or may not be. They are betwixt and between. I still remember with pride, how pleased one theologian was when I applied a literal Arabic translation of this colloquialism. I had invented a new terminus technicus! — But when we came to the impossible, we got into deep water. Its existence cannot be thought. A thing cannot be and not be at the same time. Starting with that, then, it was possible to go on and further develop the theological 122 ASPECTS OF ISLAM scheme. But let me, first, throw in another point. In what follows you will be struck, I am per- fectly certain, with the mechanical and concrete nature of all the argumentation. The Muslim reasoner deals with ideas as if they were blocks of wood, solid things in your possession, as to which there was no question what they were ; you could handle them as you pleased and move them this way and that. Recognition that an idea is essentially indefinable in its exactness, and that there is a biological aspect to all things which makes them incalculable is still far before them. They are still at the stage where when you have got an idea you know exactly what it is, and you can play with it in any way you please. That, I think, is best illustrated by the system of controversy— or better, the system of ascer- taining truths — that was built up by the great and the very successful missionary to the Mus- lims, Ramon Lull. His system is worthy of careful notice because it was really successful in its way. He had worked out a method of developing all the possible relationships between different ideas in which substances, attributes, categories were arranged on concentric circles MUSUM THEOLOGY I23 of card-board. You turned those circles round and made various combinations from card to card and thus got your result — ^an infallible result Everything was down upon the cards; you had simply to turn the wheel, and the result came out. This is a somewhat crude account of Lull's idea of a logic-machine; but it gives the point of interest to us now. And the remarkable thing is that Lull was one of the few successful missionaries to Muslims; that seems certain. His method corresponded exactly with their mental workings, with their way of approaching and thinking about things.^ Starting with these three conceptions, the necessary, the possible, and the impossible, the next point in Muslim theology is that about nine- tenths of the space is taken up with the discussion of the nature of the Person of Allah. For instance, if there are fifty articles of belief in an Arabic theological treatise, you may be perfectly sure that more than forty deal with the Person ^It is only fair to draw attention also to Ramon Lull's eminence as a creative literary artist, with especial ability in illustrative apologues. See, on this side, a long and excellent account of him by Menendez y Pelayo, in his Origenes de la Novela, Vol. I, pp. Ixxii ff. 124 ASPECTS OF ISLAM of Allah, while less than ten will be left for other things such as the nature of prophecy, etc. One origin, undoubtedly, of this singular onesidedness was the overwhelming importance for Muhammad of the idea of Allah, and the form which it took was conditioned by the tendency in Muhammad's mind to characterize Allah by those names of which I have spoken. That was the form in which the doctrine of the Person of Allah expressed itself for him, and naturally his attitude and method continued them- selves in the succeeding development. But, further, it is, I think, a perfectly fixed historical fact, that the development of Muslim theology was most largely conditioned and affected — absolutely conditioned and affected — ^by the theology of the Greek Church and especially by that theology as formulated by John of Damascus. In it the doctrine of the Person of God is given a far more primary position and greater space than in the theologies of the Latin Church, not to speak of the theologies of the Reformation. Thus the second influence worked to the same purpose as the first. The theologian, in conse- quence, has to give by far the greater amount of MUSLIM THEOLCXSY I25 his Space to statement and proof of the qualities of Allah. Of these, the first quality is, of course, exist- ence. But what is existence? Remember that this is long prior to Kant, and yet one Muslim school has come within a very measurable dis- tance of him in its idea of the meaning of existence. On that point there are two views. One is that existence is a state belonging to the essence of an entity and necessary to that essence as long as the entity shall last. It is a personal quality, you may say, without which the entity is unthinkable, and it has no cause, except, of course, Allah. That means that John's being strong, for example, springs from John's strength ; but there is nothing in John from which his existence springs. In this view the point is that existence is a state or quality ; not the entity itself, or its essence; inseparable from the entity. But the other view holds that existence is the self of the essence of the entity; is that through and in which it is, and not an addition to it externally. Both of these views have been and are held in Islam. But how can we prove that this quality, namely 126 ASPECTS OF ISLAM existence, belongs to Allah; that Allah exists? The proof, in a word, is the world itself. "Look out upon the world," says the Muslim theologian, "you will see that it consists of bodies and acci- dents." — He might go farther back and speak of substances in the philosophical sense, and some treatises do so; but the great majority of theo- logical books begin with the concrete things of the world, bodies. — Regard then the world. It consists of bodies and accidents. Now, the accidents are very evidently originated ; they have had an origin; they will have an end. This book, for example, which I am holding is now at rest; possesses the quality or accident "at rest." Now, again, it is in motion. It has come to possess another quality, "motion." Now, again it is at rest. Each of these accidents, then, had evidently an origin. So we must regard acci- dents in this world as being things originated. But they are always joined to bodies. They do not occur separately; and, further, bodies are inseparable from accidents. Every body has accidents : it is in motion or at rest ; it is hot or it is cold ; it is light or it is heavy. But what is inseparable from originated things must itself be MUSUM THEOLOGY I27 originated. Therefore, the world as a whol bodies and accidents — is originated; had an origin. But what, further, does that teach us ? If the world did not exist from all eternity, there must have been an originator. That is to say, there must have been some being who is the originator of this world. Observe that this reasoning goes no further. That this Originator of the world is to be called Allah or given any of the Most Beautiful Names we can learn from the prophets only. There Revelation must step in. But tak- ing it for granted that this Originator may be called Allah, then the second quality that we are compelled to assign to him is Priority. That means that whatever we may think of the things of the world, of the existing entities as we know them, Allah must be thought of as being prior to them. He is prior to everything else than himself. You must think of him as before every- thing. But why have we to ascribe this further quality to Allah ? The answer lies in the finding of the cause for the world. What is the nature of the cause to be? Is it to be an absolute cause — that is to say, prior to everjrthing else? 128 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Or can we take up any other possible position as to its nature? In answer, the Muslim theo- logfians say — and this they borrow from Aristotle — "You must have an absolute cause — 2l first cause/' But some have asked, "Can you not have an infinite, regressive series of contingent causes, dependent causes ?" Can we not say, "Let A be the cause of the world ; B, the cause of A ; C, the cause of B; and so on backwards ad infinitum ?^^ Or, again, is it possible to go round in a circle with regard to those causes ? A is the cause of the world; B is the cause of A; A is the cause of B. Those were the questions which the Muslim theologians had to face. Those three possibilities were before them; but, generally speaking, in their treatises, they say simply that the endless chain and the circle — as they call the two — are impossible, and that, therefore, it IS only left that there must be an absolute cause. But when they do face the question of the endless chain, let us see how it is proved impos- sible. This series itself of contingent, dependent causes, going back indefinitely, must in itself as a series be either necessary or contingent. But it cannot be necessary because it consists of a MUSLIM THEOLOGY I29 series of contingent causes only, causes dependent upon something else. That would be to make the necessary to exist through contingents, which, they hold, would be absurd. Yet I con- fess that, for myself, I cannot see why an endless series backwards of contingents may not very fairly represent an absolute. The series itself, then, being contingent, must depend for its existence on a cause, must have its cause in something else. As to that some- thing else, there are four possibilities. It may be internal to the series, or it may be external to it; it may be necessary itself, or it may be only a contingent, dependent upon something else. Combining these you get four possibilities. Let us exhaust them. Internal in the series and necessary — ^but we have seen already that all that is in the series is the possible, contingent, only. Internal in the series and contingent — then it is the cause of the series ; therefore of the elements of the series ; therefore the absolute cause of itself. External to the series and contingent — ^but all the contingent causes are supposed to be in the series ex hypoth- est. So, as you see, this series, if it is to be I30 ASPECTS OF ISLAM a possible explanation, must depend on, go back to, something that is external to itself and neces- sary of existence in itself — ^that is to say, it must go back to our First Cause, and so you may as well do without the series and go back to the First Cause at once. Similar reasoning does away with the circle. Inasmuch, then, as it is proven that it is unthink- able to condition things by this indefinite chain of possibilities or by circular reasoning, we are driven to say that the cause, the Originator of the world, must also be Prior to everything else — must be a primary first cause, necessary in its own existence. The third quality is that of Continuance. It follows, of course, necessarily. If there could be a time, away in the future, at which Allah hypothetically did not exist, then the existence of Allah would be only possible, that is, he would be originated. But we have already seen that he IS prior to everything, the originator of every- thing. We have, therefore, to consider that this being that, so far, we have called Allah, is prior to everjrthing, continuing indefinitely. But the fourth quality is the most character- MUSLIM THEOLOGY I3I istic element in the whole Muslim scheme. This being, whom we are defining, step by step, must possess also the quality of Difference. That is, he must be different from all other beings. If he could be described in terms of other beings, which means in terms of originated things — for all beings except himself are originated — he would be an originated thing. Therefore, it must be impossible to use of him the terms and descriptions that can be used of originated beings. That is a fundamental theological position. Yet 'it threatens, in a sense, to cut away the possibility of any theology. What, especially, is the Mus- lim to do with the descriptions of Allah in the Qur'an ? What with the ninety-nine Most Beauti- ful Names? That problem has been approached in different ways and different solutions have been found. Some held that we must take these expressions literally, as they stand, and swallow the theological difficulty that they thus raise. These were frank anthropomorphists. Others said that these expressions could not be taken in the first, material sense; that the words were to be explained differently. These were on the way to recognize the existence of anthropomorphisms. 132 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Others held them to be mysteries; you are bound to use those names and descriptions and expressions in speaking of Allah; but you must not attach any meaning to them such as could be attached to them when used of men. One technical phrase arose very early in the development of Muslim theology and maintained itself very long. It is this: Without enquiring how and without comparison. For example, the Qur'an in seven different places (vii, 52; x, 3; xiii, 2; XX, 2; XXV, 60; xxxii, 3; Ivii, 4) says that Allah settled himself firmly upon his throne. The phrase used is exactly the phrase used of a man when he adjusts himself carefully upon his camel-saddle (e. g. in Qur. xliii, 12). What does that mean when used of Allah? The anthropomorphic exegetes said quite frankly, "It means that Allah did take his seat upon his throne in exactly that way. That is the word of the Qur'an." Some theologians even wrote above the door of their mosques the seven texts in the Qur'an, given above, describing how Allah settled himself upon his throne. It was their challenge to the world, "We believe that what these verses say of Allah is literally true/* Another MUSUM THEOLOGY I33 used defiantly to rise up and sit down and say, *Thus did Allah settle himself upon his throne." Another school of exegetes held that these expressions were to be explained as metaphors of different kinds. One theologian, for example, when he read in the Qur'an about the foot or the hand or the face of Allah, hunted in his diction- ary until he found some possible secondary mean- ing of these Arabic words which could be taken non-materially, and said that that must have been what was meant. But the normal position which Islam has reached is expressed in the phrase. Without enquiring how and without comparison. The meaning of these expressions is not to be asked. How Allah can be and do such things you must leave alone, and, above all, you must not make any comparison between Allah and men. You must not think that an3rthing which Allah does is really measurable in terms of our thought. That is where the doctrine of the Difference of Allah essentially comes in. And so here is the end of the matter. When, for example, the Qur'an says that Allah is the Most Merciful of those that show mercy (Qur. 134 ASPECTS OF ISLAM vii, 150; xii, 64, 92; XXI, 83), you must not by any chance imagine that that involves in him the quality of mercy as we understand it That the theologians prove in a very direct, inhumanly direct, manner. Look around you in the world. Does It strike you, that the world is being gov- erned by the Most Merciful of those who show mercy? — Muslim theology, you will observe, is thoroughgoing. Here it is certainly taking Providence by the throat with a vengeance. — Consider the case of innocent children. They are afflicted with all kinds of diseases. How could that be if "the Most Merciful of those that show mercy" meant that Allah possessed the quality of mercy as we understand it ? Evidently it can not. Allah has simply given that phrase in the Qur'an as one of his names, and what he meant by it we do not know. We may call him by that name ; we may not draw any conclusion from it. The same argument has been used, I believe, by some Christian theologians. Further, the fifth quality that must be in Allah is Self-subsistence. We cannot think of him as being in any need of a locus or subject, in which to exist; nor can we think of him as being in MUSLIM THEOLOGV 135 need of a specifier, some one who will specify him, define him in this way and not in any other. That would mean either that he is a quality, if he stood in need of a locus or subject; or that he is originated, if he stood in need of a specifier. Then, sixthly, there comes another curious and very significant quality. We are compelled to believe that this being whom we have called Allah is the Originator of the world; the Prior, the Continuing, the Different, the Self-subsisting. Now we must learn that this being is also One; that he possesses the quality Unity. But there are two kinds of unity: there is internal unity, unity within the being; and there is external unity, «. e. there is no other being like this being. Further, there is another, a three-fold division: there is unity in essence ; unity in qualities ; unity in acts; the first two of these divide also into internal and external. First, to take the unity necessary in qualities. That means, internally, that there are not two qualities called Priority, say, in Allah. That, I think, you will probably admit. Externally, it means that no one possesses a quality like any quality of Allah. Next, the unity in essence. 136 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Take the internal unity first : I shall return to the external. Is it necessary to believe that the essence of Allah must possess internal unity? Now, I am bound to say that in the ordinary theo- logical treatises at least, this is not really made out The other things are simple enough — the unity in qualities ; the unity in acts ; the external unity. But so far as I have gone, I do not find a really satisfactory proof in Muslim theology that the essence of Allah must be an internal unity. I do not see, that is to say, that they have logically disproven the possibility in Allah of the Christian Trinity, even if we regard that as meaning a division in essence. However, let us turn now to the unity in acts. That does not mean — and the theologians are always careful to make this clear — that does not mean that no created being possesses an act like Allah. It means — and this is where the sweeping nature of it comes in — ^that no other being than Allah possesses any act at all — any act at all. From Allah and of Allah are all acts. In no sense can it be said when, for example, I lift this book, that that act belongs to me. How, then, does the Muslim theologian MUSLIM THEOLOGY I37 of this thoroughgoing school regard the matter? He regards the world and all the events in the world as a perpetual miracle — a miracle always and constantly going on. It is not only that, by a creative miracle, the world was brought into existence; it is not only that, by an overseeing Providence, the world is maintained in existence; but all through the existence of the world — from moment to moment — there is this miraculous creation going on. What happens, from this point of view, when, for example, I lift this book ? It is quite a complicated thing that happens, an involved process. There are a great many crea- tions by Allah during that process. First of all, the book is lying there. From moment to moment as it lies it is being recreated, or, at least, retained in existence by the direct, personal working of Allah. When I lift it, as I do now, what happens? Allah has created in me the will to lift it. He has created in me the move- ment of my hand, and he has created in the book — you cannot say a movement but, rather, a series of books, as it goes up on its way until it lands here. You see, we have in this scheme not only an atomic system of matter; 138 ASPECTS OF ISLAM we have also, and this is the most curious device of the Muslim metaphysicians, an atomic system for time. Let me illustrate this last idea. Listen to the tick of a clock with a very short pendulum, and imagine that for each tick there is a new creation of ever)rthing. So we perceive changes and action in the constant flux of these creations. Or it is very much like the movement, in a sense, of a cinematograph which contains so many pictures, and these are flitting past so rapidly that we are given the impression of a thing happening. Allah, in the same way, cre- ates everything in such a rapid, unending series, and he creates it in each new condition, situation, fashion, required by the changes of this world. So the movement of my hand to take hold of this book, its movement up with the book, the movement of the book itself upwards, all involve a series — ^rapid of course — invisible — of miracu- lous creations directly by Allah. But you may ask what would happen if Allah were to remove his ever re-creating hand. On that Islam had two hypotheses. One was that the world would stop, frozen in the attitude and state of a moment, and so remain until Allah MUSLIM THEOLOGY I39 grasped it again. The other, and to my mind the more logical, was that it would at once drop out of existence into nothingness. With other details — for example, the size of an atom of time, are such atoms in contact ? and the like — I cannot now deal. You see at once the consequences that follow from this. There can, of course, be no such thing as nature. When fire burns or when a knife cuts, that is not by any nature in the fire or quality in the knife. The cutting and the being cut, the burning and the being burned are all by Allah. The burning and its direct effects are the direct creation of Allah.* And further, here is one point which I omitted. According to the Ash'arites, the dominant school of Muslim theologians, Allah also creates in my mind, when I do anything, an acceptance by myself of the doing of it. Of this doctrine of "acceptance** the theologians of other schools ^ There is a confession and exposition of much the same view in Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Chap. IV, "The Ethics of Elfland.'' And the links of descent are clear. They are two and go back through Thomas Aquinas and Pascal to the Pugio Fidei pf Ramon Marti, a student of al-Ghazzali. Mr. Chesterton, like a great many other ex* cellent people, is an unwitting Ghazzalian. I40 ASPECTS OF ISLAM have made a great deal of solemn fun. But what did al-Ash'ari mean by it? As far as I can see, it is really an attempt by him to explain why we think we are free. God has created in our minds, along with the purpose and along with the action, the feeling that we are doing it ourselves. But what of the external unity in essence? Is it unthinkable that there might exist some other being like Allah in essence and equal to him? Why must we think that the being that we have built up in this fashion must be One, externally? The answer to this is that if there were two beings, they would either agree or they would disagree in what they wanted to do. If they disagreed, to take that first, then, either they would counterbalance each other, being equally strong, and nothing would be done ; or one would be weaker and would practically push aside the other. That would mean that he was more than equal to the other, and they were, ex hypothesi, to be equal. But suppose they agreed. Then the Muslim theologian lays it down that two things cannot make an impression, one impress- ion, at the same time. You stamp a piece of MUSLIM THEOLOGY I4I wax with a seal. You cannot make, at the same time, the same impression upon the same bit of wax with two seals. So, even if the two beings did agree, their working together would be impos- sible. In this way, then, it is proven that Allah must be a Unity. But, again, let me say that, so far as I know, it is still possible for the Christian controver- sialist to maintain that it is not yet proven that the essence of Allah must be an internal unity. Also the question might be raised whether we are not compelled to go on and ascribe to Allah internal unity in acts also. That would be that Allah possesses only one act, and comes perilously close to the philosophical position that Allah knows universals only. I have now put before you six of those neces- sary qualities in Allah. There are other four- teen necessary and then twenty impossible; but I will not inflict these upon you. And beyond these is the great possibility, in the case of Allah, that every logically possible thing is open to him, while nothing is incumbent upon him. This is the great possibility for man as well, for it means that every slightest element in the life of man 142 ASPECTS OF ISLAM is absolutely in the hand of Allah. When com- bined with the doctrine of Allah's Difference, it reaches religious nihilism, or rather anarchy. There is no unity in the world, moral or physical or , metaphysical ; all hangs from the individual will of Allah. Of course, this is the doctrine of philosophizing theologians ; the people of Islam have always, if unconsciously, known better. This curious, concrete, mechanical attitude in theological reasoning must now be tolerably clear to you. But, of course, behind this, which is the system of the scholastic theologians, there lies, as I have already indicated, a real metaphys- ical system. The metaphysics do not become prominent except when you come to the Unity of Allah. But throughout there is thought behind the theology. You may say that in Arabic there are two systems of philosophy. One of them is a very curious compound of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism. The compound was rendered possible by one of the most epoch-making of pseudographs, a quite overwhelming bit of liter- ary mischief. Sometime or other in the ninth century, A. D., a Syrian Christian of Emessa took parts of the "Enneads" of Plotinus, trans- MUSLIM THEOLOGY I43 lated them into Arabic and called them "The Theology of Aristotle." The Muslims took this audacity quite solemnly. Here there was a solu- tion at last of the century-old problem. The labour of reconciling Aristotle and Plato, on which the great Greeks themselves had spent so many generations, was accomplished by the stroke of an oriental pen. If this was the theology of Aristotle, the final, absolute basis of his system, why then he and Plato practically came together, and came together in a Neo-Pla- tonic form. In consequence it is a very hard thing now to tell with regard to any Arabic writer upon philosophy whether he is more an Aristotelian or a Platonist. But, of course, the Muslim theologians who wanted to get a bottom to their faith could not accept any position of that kind. It led them too directly to pantheism. It is true that they, though they knew it not, were bound for the same goal from another side. Their absolute, per- sonified Will, from which all things depend, was leading them to a monism in which nothing but that very personal Will had any real existence and of which the material world was a mere 144 ASPECTS OF ISLAM passing dream. But to that their eyes were holden. So they worked out the system that I have already put before you, that strange development of the atomic philosophy, in which you have not only the atoms of matter but have also the atoms of time passing like the tick of a clock — change, change, change — ^and behind it all, creating it all, conditioning it all, the Will of Allah. They did not need to introduce the Lucretian conception of some mysterious deflec- tion of atoms raining through the void, and making possible their coming together into forms. They did not need any pre-established harmony nor self -developing monads of Leibnitz. The Will of Allah continually produced those atoms, continually reproduced them, continually combined them into forms, and so the world kept rising, shifting, changing. This is the true metaphysic of Islam. The original contribution of the Mus- lim people to philosophy was not in their taking up and passing on Aristotle and Plato, In that they were but blundering pupils and unfaithful transmitters. 'It lay really in this grotesque, it may be, but still tremendously thorough concep- tion and application of the atomic scheme.

In beginning such a lecture as this, I am com- pelled by the situation itself to ask first, What is mysticism? In spite of a fair unity of thought on the subject, the expression "mysticism" is still used in some very curious and divergent ways. But Islam, for its part, in its use of the different Arabic terms which apply to our present subject, has always been exceedingly precise as to what it meant thereby, as to what lay behind those terms for its thought. I presume that we shall all agree that the basis for religion, viewed broadly, is three-fold. There is tradition — ^what we have learned from our fathers; what has been taught us under a great many different forms and in a great many differ- ent ways. There is reason — ^by which we reach truth for ourselves under guidance of our own intellects. And there is also — ^though Christian- ity has not always recognized this basis very 146 ASPECTS OF ISLAM fully and clearly — ^there is also what Quakers have called the Inner Light, a spiritual insight which does not come from without, which you cannot ascribe to the operations of reason but which comes immediately, of itself apparently, into the soul or into the mind, whichever term you choose to employ. Now, Islam recognizes all three of these bases. It recognizes tradition as a trustworthy source; that a doctrine has been handed down from the fathers is in itself enough to gain recognition for it and that to a degree which, I suppose, for us is passing away. We feel constantly the necessity of working out our ideas for ourselves in one way or another; the doctrine must com- mend itself to us. Islam does not feel that but is prepared to give full weight to what it has been taught. A pedigree legitimates a doctrine. That, of course, Is part of the general Semitic inheritance. But Islam always recognizes, also, the value, in reaching or in defining religious truths, that lies in reason, although with very curious limitations. In the earlier generations of Islam reason had a hard fight for its existence, at that time against THE MYSTICAL LIFE I47 tradition. In the later generations of Islam, when reason had been admitted, after a fashion, as a trustworthy source of religious knowledge by what you might call the orthodox or syste- matic theological party, it had to enter upon another fight and again for its existence. It had to fight against what was agnosticism of the most absolute, if not scepticism in the precise sense. In my last lecture I put before you a part, at least, of the creed of the dogmatic theologian in Islam, and you will have noticed how carefully it was reasoned from point to point; with what infallible linking of proof to proof it moved. But I am bound now to tell you that these argumenta- tions have been recognized by other Muslim thinkers as distinctly fallacious. They have not hesitated to find breaks in the chain of reasoning, to show that such reasonings can never be an absolutely trustworthy foundation for religion. I do not purpose now to go into the different breaks that have been found in the links of the dogmatic chain. One only is worth putting be- fore you. This critical, reasoning party in the Muslim Church recognized that even what seems so primary a necessity of our thought as a prin- 148 ASPECTS OF ISLAM ciple of causation, could not be relied upon, was not really given in the facts before us. They saidj "When you think that you see causation, all that you really see is one thing and then another thing. How do you know that the one is the cause of the other? Can you really see the one producing the other? Are you not imposing an imaginary explanation upon what you see?" — And the dogmatic theologians had themselves be- gun this cutting of the nexus of causation by their explanation of every event as an immediate working of the divine will. — With that and with other such criticisms, a party in the Muslim Church cut clear away the foundations of dog- matic theology as based upon reason. What use, then, did they find for reason? Its use, they found, was to demonstrate that it was not of any use. They went through exactly the process that Hamilton, followed by Mansel, went through in our fathers* times. They proved most satisfactorily that the finite, the limited, the conditioned can tiever deal with the infinite, the unlimited, the unconditioned; can really know nothing about it. They cut away the possibility of dealing with religion by means of reason; but THE MYSTtCAL- LIFE I49 then they did not do as our generation tends to do, fall back from this position into one absolutely agnostic with regard to religion. They did not say, "So it follows that you do not and cannot know anything about religion." They fell back partly upon tradition, but still more upon the third basis, the Inner Light. Their minds were so constructed that they could not stop at the point of ignorance. They could not say, "Rea- son can only prove negatives and therefore we can know nothing." They used reason to cut away the possibility of philosophizing about the world and about life, and, then, having driven philosophy off the field and any possibilities on that side, they fell back upon what their fathers had told them and upon what came to them in their own religious experience. That last, then, has come to be really the ultimate, the final basis for all thoughtful religion in Islam. With us what is called the Inner Light has appeared here and there, in one form and another, at one time and another; but it has never, for the general body of Christendom, been the dominant element in the basis of the faith. In Islam that position has been reached.

So much, then, for mysticism in its meaning for the Muslim. It is the knowledge of religious things that comes directly, immediately, to the individual soul, apart from any tradition, apart from any reasoning. It comes, they say them- selves, as the light comes. It falls upon the sur- face of the soul as the rays of the sun fall upon a wall, and there it is received. Next as to the exponents of this mystical atti- tude. The vehicles of the religious life asso- ciated with the mystical attitude are to be found in what are called the darwish fraternities ; prac- tically amongst them, that is ; although, of course, also, more widely amongst men who are not especially associated with darwishes and who might, perhaps, hesitate to become darwishes, but who are still mystics. But, in the broad fact, the darwish fraternites carry on this religiously important phase of life in Islam. It was as a consequence of this, I suppose, that during my wanderings in the East I found that by far the most accessible people — ^accessible without needing to become formally acquainted — were the Franciscans and the darwishes. Mem- bers of both of those bodies received me at once. THE MYSTICAL LIFE IS! They needed no introduction; they simply began to talk about religious things and to enter into some kind of communication. Especially, per- haps I might say, did this hold true of the dar- wishes. This was not an isolated experience; I met it again and again; and I have heard the same fact commented upon with some surprise by missionaries; they were astonished that they found it so possible, nay so easy, to get along with the darwishes in their own districts. If they had considered that the fundamental thing in the religious life of the darwishes was simply this, the mystical attitude, and that this mystical atti- tude is common to all mankind, they would have found the solution of what, I know, has puzzled a good many. But in spite of all that, with this unity of the mystical life as their basis, they are also divided into separate bodies which, curiously enough, are very shy of one another. I have met with warn- ings by one body of darwishes, or by men who were not darwishes, against having too much to do with another body. There was one instance which puzzles me to this day. When I was approaching the monastery of the Qadirites near 152 ASPECTS OB* ISLAM: the Qasr al-*aini hospital on the banks of the Nik, a man shouted out to me, **He"— meaning my companion, a humble lay brother — *'is a darwish," and this was evidently spoken in a tone of warn- ing. My companion looked very sheepish at that, and I confess I have not been able to puzzle out what was meant. On another occasion, when I intended to visit a Mawlawite monastery in the heart of Cairo, a very respectable old man stopped me and began to remonstrate with me seriously, saying that these were not good people, that I would find a monastery of good darwishes further down the street, which meant that the first had no connec- tion with the fraternity of darwishes of which he approved. There is one fraternity of darwishes, the Bektashites, that is represented by a single monastery only in the whole of Egypt. It lies at the entrance to a very curious cave, penetrating deep into the Muqattam hills, and is perched there high up among the rocks. The cave is cer- tainly an old quarry, but in local belief it was the work of the jinn who were compelled to cut it out by a certain saint. His object was to pro- vide a tunnel to Mecca; but he died when only tUE MYSTICAL LIFE 153 SO much was accomplished. At present it is used partly as a cemetery by the brethren. They, I think, are all Turks and Albanians with no Egyptians or Syrians. I found in time that they were regarded by the other fraternities in Cairo with the gravest suspicion ; they were not of their kind. But I am bound to say that in the case of all of these I was received with the greatest hospital- ity. They were all prepared to talk on religious matters. The point of difficulty between them is really this. The different fraternities are of varying degrees of orthodoxy and moral strict- ness. The Qadirites, for example, are ordinary Sunnite Muslims, as is almost the whole popula- tion of Egypt. They are thus upon the same basis of faith and religious observance as the rest of Egypt. The Mawlawites, on the other hand, are supposed to be tinged with pantheism and antinomianism and other kinds of isms that plain Muslims find objectionable; they are, therefore, more or less under a ban in Egypt. But in Turkey, where they are much more at home and where is the great majority of their fraternity houses, they iare not under a ban at all ; they are 154 ASPECTS OF ISLAIC regarded with favour; they belong to the coun- try. As for the Bektashites, they are viewed with suspicion everywhere, both of their creed and of their conduct and, while I do not believe at all in the stories told of their immoral orgies — much like those told of the early Christians and of which the East is full — ^yet it is probable that they are Muslims in name only. The differences, then, which I found, seemed to be mainly in the degree of orthodoxy; but under them all there lies the mystical basis, the spiritual life guided by the Inner Light. I have spoken of this Inner Light as being the one thing that is absolutely common to the re- ligious life of all mankind. You may ask, "Is its bond of community strong enough for it to be possible for Christians to become members of any of these darwish fraternities; or is the separatist element of Islam still so strong in them as to render that impossible?" I must confess that when I tried to find out the facts in regard to this point, I got only the most contradictory re- sults. Of course, if you take what is laid down in theological books, it would be plainly impos- sible for any one not a Muslim to become a mem- THE MYSTICAL LIFE 15$ ber of any of these fraternities. But when you begin to ask individuals about the actual usage of the particular fraternities themselves, your results become difficult and mixed. For example, one man, a Syrian Christian and the editor of one of the most important newspapers in Cairo, told me that there was a certain fraternity, the Mirghan- ite, the predominant one in the Sudan, which was quite prepared to accept Christians; that they would put no bar in their way; and that there was nothing in their ritual to prevent a Christian from using it. The French scholars in Algeria have been told the same thing about fraternities there. But, on the other hand, when I put the question to the Shaykh al-Bekri in Cairo, who is the legal head of all the darwish fraternities in Egypt, he had no hesitation in replying at once that it was impossible for any one not a Muslim to enter into any relationship with these frater- nities. But, again, when I reached Constanti- nople and began to ask particularly about the attitude of the Bektashites, supposed to be about the broadest sect of all there, I was told by one of them that there was not the slightest trouble about any Christian becoming a member of their 156 ASPECTS OF ISLAM fraternity; that the requirements of membership would not put any difficulty at all in his way. I am sorry that my stay in Constantinople extended to only ten days and that thus I had not the time to experiment in this direction. It would have given me a great deal of pleasure to have returned as a member of a darwish fraternity. Since my return to this country I have been told by Mr. Ananikian, our Sub-Librarian, that he had known a member of the Gregorian Church who was called "the Bektashite" and who was under- stood to have become a member of that fraternity and to have taken part in its religious services. I am afraid I can only put these contradictory statements before you; I have not been able so to arrange them or to correct them as to eliminate the contradictions. r may say, further, that the more I have had to do with the investigation of religious matters, the less I feel is it possible to be dogmatic in al- most any way as to the usages or as to the beliefs which you may chance to find. In Islam, for example, there is the broad faith that is laid down in the theological texts. It is quite easy to fix and to understand that; but when you be- THE MYSTICAL LIFE I57 gin to move about in Muslim countries, you find everywhere little bits of observance, usage, creed, tradition, that are, often, in quite distinct con- tradiction to the opinions laid down in books. In consequence, it is the most hazardous thing pos- sible, when you are told anything about a par- ticular district — ^that such and such is what the people there believe or do — it is the most hazard- ous thing to say that it is impossible; that they cannot so do or believe. On the other side, how- ever, there is one thing which must be said. Al- though there is this possibility of divergence, even of flat contradiction, always present in the local conditions, these local conditions are never really intelligible unless you have the basis of a thorough knowledge of the theological system as it is generally accepted, believed and applied. When you have attained to that, you can trace out these varying local opinions and usages ; but, until you have so much of fixed knowledge, you have really no starting point from which to investigate. But what part do these fraternities of darwlshes play in the normal life of Islam? How do they make themselves felt? How are they the chan- 158 ASPECTS OF ISLAM nels of the religious life? Broadly, there are two kinds of darwishes. There is what you might call the professional darwish, the monk or friar who has taken absolute vows; he is separ- ated entirely from the world and lives in a mon- astery or wanders as an ascetic begging his way. He need not necessarily be unmarried; Islam, under all conditions, commends and honours the married state. These now are by far in the minority. Some centuries ago there must have been a much larger proportion of such monks or friars, as you may choose to call them, because you see everywhere in Muslim lands the ruins or the neglected remains of monasteries that must once have been inhabited by large communities of darwishes. Of them there are now hardly any left, and the buildings have come to be simply rest houses where pilgrims are put up. The "son of the road" can find help and shelter here. The other class of darwishes constitutes by far the larger proportion. Its members are exactly parallel to the Tertiaries of the Dominican and Franciscan orders. That is, they live in the world in every respect ; but they have taken vows which require them daily or weekly, as the case THE MYSTICAL LIFE 159 may be, to go through certain religious cere- monies ; they carry a certain badge with them and regard themselves as under a certain obligation to the general body and as standing in a certain affiliation with it. A very large percentage of the population of Cairo, especially of the masses of the people, be- longs in one way or another to the darwish fra- ternities as such Tertiaries. They do not live in the monasteries ; they go there only occasionally from time to time, but they have their relationship to them, and, when there is any great occasion, they will turn out in the procession of the fra- ternity. They attend what you might call, as nearly as could be, prayer-meetings in the mon- asteries, and regard themselves each as part of his fraternity. You see, then, that with these great numbers of Tertiaries, as I have called them, the life of the darwish fraternities extends far beyond the limits of the few full members, and practically goes out through the mass of the people. It is in this width of lay memberships that the great importance of the fraternities consists. Let me put before you a description of one of l60 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the services that I was privileged to attend. It is exceedingly difficult, now, in Egypt to get ad- mission to any of their religious services. At one time, as you know, these were crowded with tourists. That led to scandal. The darwishes were accused of making money out of the unbe- lievers; and the tourists certainly did not add to the religious value of the services which they attended. I was told a good deal about the evils on both sides. At last the government stepped in, acting through the Shaykh al-Bekri as the head of all the fraternities, and these services were closed to all except Muslims. So far as the Shaykh al-Bekri was concerned, he would have preferred to stop the services entirely, but that was impossible. However, through a friend it was made pos- sible for me to attend one of them. Of course, I had to wear a fez, and the Shaykh in charge of the ceremony knew that I was not a Muslim, though no one else there did. It would be exceed- ingly difficult to describe the service exactly, and I must content myself with a general and impres- sionistic picture of it and its emotional effects on the worshippiers and on myself. This zikr, as it THE MYSTICAL LIFE l6l IS called, or "remembering" of Allah, took place in a long shaped room. On both sides benches were arranged. In the middle was a carpeted space with a railing round it in the form of a horseshoe. The Shaykh took his place at the open end of the horseshoe with his back towards the wall. The darwishes, evidently men who had simply come in from the street, stood round about inside the railing in this horseshoe form. The service began by the Shaykh kneeling, sit- ting back on his heels, and repeating the Fatiha. Then they began to recite, rapidly and in cadence, certain religious formulae. I could not catch all that they were saying, but it was generally of a very simple character; the confession of faith; some ascriptions of praise to the Prophet, etc. They accompanied these, however, with certain motions and gestures of the head and body and by great care, evidently, with regard to breaH:hing. For example, one of the most frequently re^ curring elements was the Muslim confession of faith, L5 ilQha ilia lldh, "Thete is no God save Allah," and it had evidently to be performed in a certain way. At L& ildha, "There is no God," the head of each went down in front of one zz l62 ASPECTS OF ISLAM shoulder; this is the phrase of denial; the noth- ingness of all things is to be felt. Then, at illorMh, "except Allah," the head went down in front of the other shoulder. This second phrase is assertion, and the absoluteness of Allah's existence must be felt. This movement also di- rected and controlled the breathing. The recita- tion and movement gradually grew faster and faster, heads going from side to side in perfect time; head down at the one point; down at the other point. There is a reason for this. It is part of a great discovery, as you might call it, that has been made by both Indian and Muslim mystics, in regard to breathing in connection with religious effects. If the breathing is regu- lated In a certain way in the utterance of such formulae as these, the emotional effect is increased. I suppose it has some influence on the heart action, and that that reacts in turn. I presume, also, that with ourselves something of the same kind takes place in the singing of hymns ; but the historical fact is that oriental mystics have ob- served this, and that they apply it systematically and normally to the stimulation of religious emotion. THE MYSTICAL LIFE 163 But it was perfectly evident that the young men who were taking part were intensely inter- ested in it all. While I watched them my ques- tion at first was, Why do they do this ? Does it amuse them? It was not in itself, apparently, an amusing thing; but it was certainly a thing into which they threw themselves with zest. I felt that there must be something distinct which they got out of it, and I think they got out of it at first a certain heightening of religious emotion, a throwing off, in a sense, of the physical veil, and also that they got out of it a certain effect of auto-hypnosis. They produced in themselves a pleasant dreaminess. Watching them for a long time, these were the only definite results I could obtain. But, later, there were other and more violent motions; the phrases, too, were varied. After a time they introduced darwishes who played upon drums, some of which were very sharp in pitch, and some very dull and brooding. These were kept going at the same time with the reciting of these formulae. The speed gradually increased, up, and up, and up, until the tension upon the nerves was something indescribable. It was perfectly clear to me now 164 ASPECTS OF ISLAM how such effects were produced as those of which I had often read. And it was perfectly clear to me at last how it was that those young men went night after night to do this kind of thing. The attraction evidently lay in a very curious mixture of esthetic pleasure — derived from the nerve ten- sion and the lightly hypnotic, or hypnoidal, state into which they were cast — and undoubtedly religious exaltation. The latter element was cer- tainly there. Now, as I have already said several times, in all my dealings with Muslims I have tried to approach them in a sympathetic spirit so that I might feel with them as they felt and thus, as much as possible, reach Islam on the inside, if I may use that phrase. In this case I did my best to let the swinging chant work upon me, and more than once it came over me that I should like to go down and join the circle there ; to take my part in this thing and discover more precisely how it all felt from within. I suppose I should be somewhat ashamed to confess, further, that the only thing that really deterred me was that I knew that I would have a great deal of difficulty in getting oflf my boots, and still more difficulty THE MYSTICAL LIFE 165 in getting them on again. If any one wishes to investigate religious conditions in the East, he must be careful to wear a pair of shoes which will slip easily off and on. But I do not want you to think that the effect of this scene upon me was not, and that in a pre- cise sense, religious in character. I wish to say as emphatically as possible that I did feel religious reality in it; did feel that behind all this there was a real devotional spirit; and that certain, at least, of those young men were getting something out of It that perhaps they could not have got otherwise. There was this, at any rate, to be said for it, that there was in it none of the irregulated transports, outbreaks, shriekings, which so often appear in what we call times of revival. The whole performance was kept carefully in hand. It was plain to me that throughout it all the Shaykh who was presiding, or his assistant — ^as it lasted a long time he was once or twice relieved by an assistant — one or other had his hand upon this great machine, was keeping in touch with it, holding it in and down. Exactly as a conductor will regulate and keep hold of his orchestra; so he played upon them; so he kept them within l66 ASPECTS OF ISLAM bounds. There was nothing there oi the nature of an outbreak ; nothing of the disgraceful scenes — if I may say it — which have appeared at revi- vals. This was normal, regular; their religious life week by week. It was not any working of themselves up for a particular occasion. I saw special public sikrs on one or two other occasions ; but nothing in any way, in any degree, so impress- ive as this plain prayer-meeting — for a Muslim prayer-meeting it really was — ^which I have described to you. On the birthday of the Prophet, for example, there is a great festival in Cairo, and on the plain, outside of the city to the north, tents are erected in which the different darwish fraternities hold exhibitions. For this reason, inasmuch as they are perfectly open to the public and inasmuch as the public passes along from one to another, tak- ing up stall after stall, the solemnity and religious reality were greatly impaired. It was evident to me what must have been the effect on those zikrs when tourists were freely admitted. Still more mechanical and perfunctory was the performance held at the exhibition of the sacred covering of the Ka'ba, before it was sent off to THE MYSTICAL LIFE 167 Mecca. There the performers were evidently hired professionals who took no interest in what they were doing. In the very middle of it, for instance, when they were supposed to be quite overcome with religious emotion, I noticed one taking out his watch and looking at it. So abso- lutely different was the spirit of this comedy from that scene of religious sincerity which I have attempted to describe in detail. But, to return, what was the relation of those young men to this monastery? That is not very easy to define, but as far as I could see, it seemed to be for them a kind of combination of club- house and church. They did not go there simply to perform such religious exercises as these. They evidently went there to meet one another, to sit round and talk ; and only a certain number of them joined the circle. I noticed, for example, one or two that strolled from the ante-room into the room where it was held. They were asked to join the zikr but shook their heads. They did not feel like it that night, evidently. But it was clear that they all had some relationship or other with this building, with this Shaykh and with one another, and I think I can describe that relation- I l68 ASPECTS OF ISLAM ship most exactly as being a combination of club membership and church membership. What, finally, are the religious and moral effects of such performances as I have just described? In answering that question we must distinguish, for undoubtedly some of the effects are good, and some are equally distinctly bad. I suppose it depends upon the individual and upon his way of taking it. It was my very good fortune in Cairo to become tolerably well acquainted with one convert from Islam to Christianity who had been well educated and had also been a darwish. He was a grad- uate of the Azhar University, one of the *Ulama, the learned in theology and canon law, and if he had remained in Islam he would have become a college or university professor. He had also reached a tolerably advanced grade in the Khal- wati fraternity of darwishes. What spoke most to me for his sincerity and his religious reality, both as Muslim and as Christian, was the fact that still, even though he was known and accepted as being a Christian, he was welcome at the Azhar and was also on good terms with his dar- wish friends and teachers in his old fraternity. THE MYStlCAL LIFE 169 It threw a good deal of light, I confess, for me upon what I have heard so much, at one time and another, of the difficulty of the position of the convert. That depends very largely upon the convert himself. This man, by the solidity of his character, by the respect in which he had been held before he became a Christian, by his own tact and careful- ness after he had become a Christian, managed to remain upon perfectly good terms with his friends. But my point here is as to his darwish connection. I asked him one time, "Supposing the specifically Muslim references in the religious ejaculations and prayers that are used at those darwish circles were expunged, especially, of course, the references to Muhammad, and there were left only what was acceptable, possible, both to Christian and Muslim — nor would it be a very difficult thing to do that — supposing that were done, could you now, with your present religious insight and attitude, take part in one of those zikrs to your spiritual advantage?" This was, evidently, a rather new idea, for he thought a moment ; but then he answered quite emphatically and certainly that he could. 170 ASPECTS OF ISLAM He began then to explain to me the ideas that went with each one of those motions of the body ; that when the head was bowed on this side, there was a certain feeling that you were to have ; when the head was bowed on the other side there was another feeling that you ought to have, each regularly, mechanically, along with the bowing. And he was perfectly certain that it would still be to his spiritual advantage, help, growth, to have part in such things if that were otherwise possible. In fact, I thought I could sometimes trace in him a little pathos in looking back upon the times of that emotional religious life, a cer- tain regret that now it should not be possible. It had been for him, you could see, when he was a Muslim, all in all ; and now it was cut off. At one time he had as a darwish developed rather remarkable telepathic gifts, that is, the ability under certain favorable spiritual condi- tions to know what might be doing at a distance, to hear words spoken at a distance, and things of that kind. He, evidently, had not the slightest doubt in his own mind that such things really took place; Islam registers them among the regular minor miracles of saints, and he accepted THE MYSTICAL LIFE I7I the facts, whatever he had come to think of Islam. It IS probable — let me here throw in — ^that the general underestimating among us of the religious meaning and value of the life of darwishes is due to those minor miracles. They are often excel- lently attested but we have decided that all such things are impossible. So Lane even in his Modern Egyptians treats the darwishes in a chap- ter on Superstitions. But to return to my f rtend, he knew of a great many such occurrences and told me much about them ; he was perfectly pre- pared to admit that for Orientals such occurrences must be commoner and easier — ^more natural and normal — ^than they could be for Occidentals. I told him that of late years we had been investi- gating those things ourselves here in the West, trying to bring them under rule by scientific method, and that we knew a great deal more about them now than we had done not a great many years ago. Then he told me some of the things that had happened to himself as a darwish, and especially he told me this, with a plainly re- gretful if also humorous tone in his voice: "At one time my Shaykh, when he knew of some of those things, said to me, 'Thou art a saint'" 172 ASPECTS OF ISLAM (He evidently regarded this promising disciple as one marked by Allah as a saint through those gifts of miracle) "Then I was a saint ; but now I am a Christian/' my friend added. But I think that he also recognized that in Christendom it was not as easy to be a saint as in Islam. I may add that his telepathic gifts did not cease when he became a Christian, but they had no recognized place in his new scheme of religion. In general, however, my point is this: this man, certainly, although he never put it in so many words to me, missed that side of his religious life, and was per- fectly sure that, in the past, he had got spiritual advantage and edification out of it. So much for the good. What of the bad? I never knew in my own experience any such cases; but I heard stories from time to time, about effects of such stkrs upon some of those taking part in them which suggested possible elements of evil. It may be rather a startling thing to suggest that the first downward steps of a young man had been his going too much to prayer-meetings, but in Islam that actually does take place. I was told, for example, by one of my friends THE MYSTICAL LIFE I73 in Cairo that he had been compelled to discharge two of the compositors in his printing office be- cause they had become quite useless, in a business sense, from too much dar wishing, if I may coin a verb. As he described it, they would go to these sikrs several times a week, and the conse- quence was that all through the day, when they sat at the composing bench, they were droning over to themselves religious phrases, scraps of hymns as it were, while they were doing their work, and their work necessarily suffered. Now, I think the fact was simply that they had learned the knack of putting themselves into a h)rpnoidal or dreamy condition that was enjoyable in itself but was just as bad, just as destructive of all activity, as indulgence in opium. They had acquired this knack and they kept themselves in that state all through the day, under a continuous auto-hypnosis. The '•^onsequence was perfectly simple and inevitable. Of course, they became useless for ordinary life. That, broadly, is the evil that may come of such things. They have to be kept in hand in the most careful, rigorous fashion, or they may pass out of control. And this moral, I need 174 ASPECTS OF ISLAM hardly say, applies to much so-called religious fervour amongst ourselves, although, from the nature of the Western temperament, it remains epidemic or even individual only. In the East it is fairly endemic. In connection with this it should be said that in the East, in general, there is far more use made of hypnotism than with us. For the Oriental, it is a normal and ordinary thing. What we, from time to time, have come to dis- cover, again and again anew, and each time find very wonderful, they accept and use and under- stand after a fashion all the time. For example, I was told in Jerusalem by an observer of absolute veracity and keenness of observation, and who happened also to have a good working knowledge of hypnotism, that she had seen, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on one of the great festivals, the officer in charge of the Turkish guard, when some of his men were beginning to droop under the heat and excite- ment of it all, go up to them and go through what were evidently the motions of hypnotism, stiffening them again to keep the positions they were in. THE MYSTICAL LIFE 1 75 That is only one ijlustration of the way in which this thing which we often think so very wonderful and on the border-line of the super- natural, enters into the ordinary working usage of the life of the Muslim East. They know it there, but they have no theories about it, and they do not study it as our psychologists do. They simply use it for practical purposes in their own rule of thumb fashion. It is not at all super- natural for them, except so far as everything is supernatural.

THE MYSTICAL LIFE AND THE DARWISH FRATERNITIES CONTINUED I CANNOT open this lecture without a tribute, however brief, to the beloved memory of my pupil and friend, Daniel Miner Rogers. He is the second of my pupils to give, in the most literal sense, his blood for the kingdom of God and His Christ in the Muslim world. With his name I would associate this course of lectures and to his memory I will, God willing, inscribe them as a book.* In my last lecture I was putting before you the value and importance that lie for the religious life of the Muslims in the darwish fraternities and in their meetings for worship. I suggested that it was in those fraternities, in their meeting- houses and in their acts of worship, that we might find the nearest parallels to our separate church * This lecture was delivered on April 20th, 1909, a day or two after the tidings of Mr. Rogers' murder had reached America. THE MYSTICAL LIFE 1 77 organizations and church buildings, and also to our stated worship. And here a very curious question confronts at once the investigator of Muslim religious life upon the spot. What do we find there which takes the place of our churches, of those religious organizations which are also with us fast becom- ing social ones and around which both our indi- vidual and our community lives are tending to crystallize so peculiarly ? That place is not taken — this becomes plain in a very short time to any open-eyed on-looker — that place is not taken by the mosques. The worship that goes on there is a very curious combination of congregational and individual worship. It is congregational inas- much as the individuals there join together in praise and prayer to Allah; but it is individual inasmuch as no one has a peculiar association with any particular mosque; nor has the organ- ization, have the officials of any mosque, any particular jurisdiction or relationship— religious or civil — with those who worship there. The most that has been reached is that in Turkey the imam of each mosque is more or less a paid serv- ant of the state and is responsible for such mat- 178 ASPECTS OF ISLAM ters as the issuing of passports and performing the rites of circumcision, marriage and burial. That is the nearest approach that the mosque organization has made to being a parish organ- ization, responsible and useful, in certain ways, for those living in its neighborhood. But it is a perfectly conceivable thing that those in the neighborhood of any mosque may not worship there. I discovered by particular enquiry that the Muslim had no feeling that the preacher of any mosque was peculiarly his preacher; that he stood in any spiritual relation- ship to him. He might go anywhere; he might have part in any worship ; wherever he was when the time of prayer came round, there was his mosque, there he might worship. I took pains at one time to enter into particular conversation on this subject with one of my Muslim friends and, in order to make plain to him what my point really was, I tried to put be- fore him the relationship which existed between the minister of a parish church and the congre- gation in his charge. His feeling about it was rather interesting. He evidently regarded it — I trust I gained a true impression — as an undue THE MYSTICAL LIFE 1 79 infringement of religious liberty. He evidently felt that he would not like to think that any indi- vidual ecclesiastic considered that he had any particular right to keep an eye upon him ; nor did he seem to feel in the slightest that there was need for him, in his spiritual life, of any such relationship; that he could draw any advantage from it ; that, in short, such a thing could be any good at all. I fear that I withdrew from that conference rather upset. I could not feel that I had succeeded in commending the Christian sys- tem of church membership, discipline and worship to this particular Muslim, and I confess that, from one point of view, there is a certain grandeur in such a feeling of spiritual freedom. There are the prayers five times a day, and the Muslim meets these times wherever he may be. If there is a mosque where he can go to join the worship- pers, he does so; if there is not, he prays by himself. So much then, on the point that the mosque does not represent any centre for common religious life. But the masses of the people — ^the religious- minded people — must have some sentiment and feeling for religious community and some way l80 ASPECTS OF ISLAM of fraternizing and expressing it. That is sup- plied to them by the darwish fraternities and their monasteries, the houses where take place the acts of worship which I put before you in my last lecture. This holds of the masses of the people. They do not mind the extreme emotionalism which characterizes these gatherings. There is nothing antipathetic to them in that ; but it is per- fectly true that there is a growing element in Islam to which — for better or for worse — such emotional exhibitions are becoming repellent. I came across that element again and again. I found that I had to pick with care the Muslim from whom I might ask information on matters connected with the darwishes. He might take it ill ; he might think that I could not possibly be in sympathy with those exhibitions, and that there- fore I could be asking about them only in order to ridicule them. An extreme sensitiveness is developing in the Muslim mind on that side. For example, I have spoken already of the Shaykh al-Bekri, a descendant of Abu Bekr the first Khalifa of the Prophet, who lives in Cairo and is the legal and accepted head of all the dar- wish fraternities in Egypt. They must all, so THE MYSTICAL LIFE l8l long as they are in Egypt, regard themselves as under his rule, his ultimate jurisdiction. This Shaykh al-Bekri is a very curious product — I think I can properly use that word. He was in France for a long time; his education, to a con- siderable extent, has been French. He is soaked in French philosophical ideas, and he is now back in Egypt and finds himself by heredity put into this quite anomalous position for a pupil of the Encyclopedie. Lord Cromer remarks, in his book on modern Egypt,* that when he first knew the Shaykh al-Bekri, that young man asked if he could give him any books on the philosophical principles lying behind the French revolution. Imagine, then, a man of that type at the head of all the darwish fraternities and supposed to be in charge, more or less, of those exhibitions of re- ligious emotion which I put before you in my last lecture. Perhaps it is fortunate that he did not and does not take anything very seriously, even the principles of the French revolution or the methods of the darwishes. But he, evidently, at one time did feel that he had to draw the line at some point or other and so, in a moment of un- ^ Modem Egypt, ii, 177. l82 ASPECTS OF ISLAM wonted energy, he got some of his assistants to compile a text-book for the use of the shaykhs in charge of the darwish fraternities. They were to use it as a manual of theology for the instruc- tion of their disciples. He gave me a copy of that manual of theology. I have not read it with any great care, but I have run through it ; and it is very interesting in one respect. It does not really deal at all with the emotional religious life. In reading it, you would never imagine that it was intended for the guidance of darwishes. You could never guess that it stood in connection with expressions of religious emotion. It is evi- dent that his ideal, so far as he had energy to have one, was to smooth out all those things, to bring the darwish fraternities down to what I suppose he would call "sane religion." I am tolerably sure that he will never reduce them to that plane, and I am quite sure, if he ever did succeed in doing it, he would take the real, the essential religious life out of Islam. But this attitude of his and of his like, for he does not stand alone, is, you must remember, a purely modern one. The old theologians and scholars of Islam had no such feeling of being THE MYSTICAL LIFE 183 half ashamed of religious emotion. Their atti- tude towards it was that it was either of God or of the devil. They either denounced it as a thing utterly false and to be abhorred and rejected and said that any one who had anything to do with it was to be cast forth ; or else they accepted this manifestation as one of the means of worship that God had appointed for men in this world. You will remember, perhaps, that Wellhausen, in dealing with the character of Samuel, lays great stress upon this ; that it would be quite im- possible for Samuel, the true prophet, the clear- sighted leader, to have anything at all to do with such a procession of very minor prophets that Saul met coming down the hill and to which he joined himself ; that there must be some historical confusion in that medley, that he could not have been those two things — ^a great theologian and religious leader, and also a darwish. Now, as a matter of fact, we find exactly that combination appearing everywhere in Islam. The greatest theologian of all, a man whose books I have to read constantly in my work on Islam, a man in whose books I have found the true key to Islam, a man who stands among the theologians l84 ASPECTS OF ISLAM of the world in the same rank, without doubt or scruple, as Augustine and Aquinas — that man had part in all the ecstacies and emotional exhibi- tions of the darwishes. That man passed eleven years of his life as a wandering ascetic darwish, learning in pain, solitude and hunger what the faith of God was. He stands out as a sign that there is no impossibility at all in the great theolo- gian knowing also what lies in the emotional i"eligious life. From that one example you will realize that this scrupulosity in the educated element of Islam at the present time is modern and modern only. So far, even yet, it covers only a certain limited section of the Muslim world. But now let me pass to the question of this mysticism as it shows itself historically in Islam. How did it arise? Like almost everything else in Islam the seeds were already in the mind of Muhammad. It is to me one of the most out- standing features of the greatness of Muhammad that Islam should have so developed the ideas that he cast into it. It has developed them sometimes very strangely and in a way that he himself would not have recognized, but you can, in look- THE MYSTICAL LIFE l8S ing back to the Qur'an, see there in "the mind of Muhammad" the possible beginning of ahnost all of them. Now, it is commonly supposed that the con- ception of the Person of God held by Muhammad was of a peculiarly materialistic, external char- acter; that Allah for him was withdrawn far from all his creation; was ruling it as though at arm's length. From him, of course, came all; but he was not in that all. That idea cah be justified by very many passages in the Qur'an. There is no question about its existence there; but there are also other passages which show that Muhammad was a true mystic, was afloat upon that shoreless sea, without guide, without ballast. Phrases come in here and there that stand in flat contradiction to the conception of the sepa- rateness of Allah. For example, he is never tired of coming back upon this — that Allah is the one, the only reality. Now, think of the questions which follow at once. Is he the only thing real? What is he, then, in relation to the world? What is the world in relation to him ? What is his place in or with the world ? l86 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Again, there is a phrase which, evidently, had caught the imagination of Muhammad and to which he returns again and again. It is that of "the Face of Allah." He uses it quite differently from the other anthropomorphisms in the Qur'an. Whence immediately he got the phrase I do not know; it comes ultimately, without doubt, from "the countenance of Yahwe" in the Old Testa- ment and means, of course, the self, the essence of Allah. But it is clear that Muhammad used it with a feeling that there was something more behind it and involved in it, and later Islam has taken it and developed it and found, in truth, all the mysteries of the emotional life in it, given in- directly with it. Thus Muhammad uses it : Men act "out of desire for the Face of Allah'* (Qur. li, 274; xiii, 22; xcii, 20) or else they simply "desire the Face of Allah*' (Qur. vi, 52; xviii, 2y\ XXX, 37, 38) ; they act "for the sake of the Face of Allah" (Qur. Ixxvii, 9). Then here are the great texts to which all the mystics of Islam always come back : "Allah's are the East and the West; wherever ye turn, there is the Face of Allah" (Qur. ii, 109). And again, "Everything goes to destruction — is going to destruction — THE MYSTICAL LIFE 187 except His Face" (Qur. xxviii, 88). Then again, "Whoever is upon the earth is fleeting — vanish- ing — and the Face of thy Lord abideth" (Qur. You can see, then, that something more lies in these phrases than the essence of Allah. Muham- mad was, in truth, no theologian. Contradictions come right and left in the Qur'an which show that. No one has succeeded yet in building up a system of Qur'anic theology, nor will it ever be possible. Muhammad was simply a God-in- toxicated poet. The feeling of Allah over- whelmed him, and that feeling he sought to express in all those different phrases. Single aspects only of a trjith came to him, and to each aspect he gave, for the time, the weight of the whole rounded truth. But there is another side to Muhammad's mysticism. As I have already pointed out, an idea dominant in him is the ascetic. The fear of the Fire was ever present with him, and the knowledge that God would bring all into judg- ment and that that judgment would be a very terrible ordeal. Therefore he, and Islam after him, have sought by ascetic exercises to remove 1 88 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the veil from their eyes, that they might see clearly the will of Allah, the faith which he has made incumbent upon mankind; that they might not be blinded by the vain shows of this world; that they might be able to go on seeking Allah, noth- ing but Allah, simply His Face. But for that insight is needed, and such insight can be gained on the part of the ascetic only by those exercises which take away the world from the soul and heart of man. But again, though Muhammad had a very exalted conception of his own office, yet, strange as it may seem, he did not limit divine inspi- ration to himself or to the prophets who had pre- ceded him, in the long line of whom he was the last. He freely admitted a certain minor inspi- ration belonging to the saints of Allah, the friends bi Allah, in the Arabic phrase, to whom Allah shows himself and his truth. Still more, every human being, at some time or other, comes in contact with the unseen world, and is taught directly by God in dreams. "Dreaming," said Muhammad in a tradition, "is one six-and-fortieth part of prophecy." Now, whether that exact proportion holds or not — the tradition itself as- THE MYSTICAL LIFE 189 sumes different arithmetical forms — there is no question that Muhammad himself believed that the divine world was reached in dreams, and that truth and guidance were given in dreams. He, therefore, did not keep the leading of Allah to himself and say to his followers, "Only with me and my words and my book is guidance to be found." He admitted freely that some form or other, in differing degrees, of minor inspiration was open to all men. Again, there are certain phrases occurring in the Qur'an which exjpress this same idea of an intercourse with God coming to the believer di- rectly, without intermediaries. It is said, for instance, (Qur. xiii, 28) that "remembering" God rests the heart. Later Islam has interpreted that "remembering" as a taking part in sucK devotional exercises of the darwishes as I have described to you. The word zikr (dhikr) means remembering, and the basal text for such devo- tional services is Qur. xxxiii, 41. But I have no question that for Muhammad the meaning was that any one who gave himself to the thought of God would receive from God rest, calm and strength. "Our hearts are restless until we rest 190 ASPECTS OF ISLAM in Thee," were the words, you see, both of Augus- tine and of Muhammad. Again, in the Qur'an (xviii, 64) Muhammad refers to a knowledge that comes from Allah himself (min ladunnd, "from Us Ourselves"). The expression has crystallized in later mystical language, but as it stands in the Qur'an it means simply knowledge from Allah that comes directly by religious intuition, as opposed to knowledge that comes by human teaching, or by tradition, or through any thinking out by reason. In these ways, then, it is plain that in the mind of Muhammad himself the mystical conception was alive, and it has been very easy for Islam to develop on the mystical path that I have already put before you. But that later development was affected very strangely from the outside. First, there came to bear upon it the influence of the Christian mystics. This seems to have worked peculiarly through an extreme development of the monophysite heresy. That heresy assigns one nature to Christ, and in certain forms practically means that a particular man was taken and made divine as a whole, in his whole nature which was one, and THE MYSTICAL LIFE I9I therefore holds out to mankind the possibility that all may be taken and made divine similarly. That conception undoubtedly worked upon the early Muslim mystics; they felt that it was possible to reach a semi-divinity within ourselves. Again, another influence which worked upon them was that of the Neoplatonic philosophy, or rather theology. It affected them indirectly through the Christian mystics and directly through Plotinus. The essential idea of it is that from God, the center, the one source, there are emissions of force; that these emissions pour out and gradually weaken as they pass down through the worlds to material things, but bring the divinity also with them, and that then, in the world of material things, the soul of man, so passed on, is trying to find its way back to God, the one, the origin of all. That conception worked also upon the Muslim mystic. Essen- tially it is the feeling concerning the soul that it is something projected from God and therefore something that naturally yearns back to God. And also, thirdly, at an earlier date than we would perhaps expect, there came to bear the in- fluence of Buddhism. The ascetic Buddhist con- 192 ASPECTS OF ISLAM ception appears side by side with the asceticism of the Christian hermits. There are, for example, certain of the early saints of Islam, the stories of whose lives make it plain that the influence of the legend of the life of the Buddha must have been working in them. Of course, as that influ- ence gradually worked its way through to the West, it became very much attenuated. It is to be found mostly, in the earlier days, among the Eastern saints ; but it is certainly there. It is one of the influences that acted as a favorable soil to hold the conceptions of Muhammad himself. Then there follow two developments. The one of them may be called ascetic ; the other was speculative and theological. The one drift or tendency limited itself very narrowly to the culti- vation of the ascetic life; to the removal of the screen of the body that the mind — in Semitic phrase, the heart — might see clearly ; and also to a peculiar reliance upon God alone. It resulted, and has continued to result, in spite of everything, in a depreciation of the formal religious services of Islam as opposed to free, individual devotion. Those who joined themselves to this drift had the feeling that there is not any particular time for THE MYSTICAL LIFE I93 prayer; that prayer should be exercised always; that the heart should always be in the attitude of prayer; and, finally, that the five canon- ically ordained prayers are not in place, are even useless for him who has reached the free position. Of course, Islam very speedily passed beyond this cruder nonconformity; but the result was that there were left, side by side with the regular prayer services in the mosque and otherwise, those free, individual services of the darwlsh fraternities. It was as though of the Methodist movement only the class-meetings had survived, while the Methodists themselves had been reas- similated to the National Church. The other, the speculative development, went very much farther. In its extreme form it prac- tically became that pantheism which recognizes God as the All; in which all individuality is lost in the unity of God ; in which no personality can survive. Personality is merely a speedily passing show upon the mirror of this world. Development in both those directions went on for long, an unorganized individual strug- gling, unrecognized by the Muslim Church as a whole. Some theologians rejected it; some 194 ASPECTS OF ISLAM accepted it; all more or less criticised it. The mystical life, for a time at least, was upon its trial in Islam. It was producing all the differ- ent forms and varying degrees of pantheism; all that lies in the conception of a God immanent in the world. At last there appeared the great constructive theologian to whom I have already referred. al-Ghazzali. He died in mi A. D. (A. H. 505), and it was his great work to reduce to an ortho- dox possibility those mystical conceptions, and to find a resting place for that possibility in the Church of Islam. Certain elements in those ideas undoubtedly could not form part of ortho- dox Muslim theology. But when he came to his work in that Church, he found that it was laid upon him to revive its religious life again. Scholastic theology had done its work only too well. It had built up a complete system, and that system had tended to press all the life out of the religion of the people. To that system, then, of scholastic theology, al-Ghazzali added the conception of the inner, or spiritual, light, now admitted in the body of the Church. He fixed how far this must be received, THE MYSTICAL LIFE I95 how much of such emotional life was absolutely necessary. His doctrine may be put thus : "There is," he said, "a certain spiritual something (his expression is very vague) in man by which he is different from all the rest of creation. All other created things are simply the external acts of Allah. But in man it is plain that there is something more. Hbw else does man know God? How can the individual feel God, unless there is some kinship, some connection there?" So he laid it down that man differed from the other creatures in that God had breathed into him of His spirit; but he is very careful indeed to avoid any definition of what is meant by the term "spirit." Fortunately, in the Qur'an (xvii, 87) Muhammad is directed to reply to his questioners who asked him about the spirit, "The spirit is the affair of thy Lord; not of thee." On this text al-Ghazzali was able to fall back. We must not ask what this spirit is; we cannot undei stand what it is ; we cannot really grasp how there is in man something of God. Man is not divine; yet this fact stands fast. Thus we read in the Qur'an (xv, 29; xxxviii, 72) that God breathed into man of His 196 ASPECTS OF ISLAM spirit, and in a tradition we hear that God created man in His own image. Now it is absurd, says al-Ghazzali, to believe that that can possibly mean that God has an image, an external appear- ance corresponding to that of man. Image, in this case, must mean nature, likeness. Man, then, out of all creation has been created in this likeness, with a nature corresponding to God's. In man, then, there is a something by which he can know God. The heart of man is his instru- ment for that knowledge. To illustrate this al-Ghazzali compares the heart to a great many different things, among them to a mirror that has to be polished, that is to be freed from the stains of sin or of the world ; or has to have a curtain taken away from it; or has to be turned in a different direction. He, with all Muslim mystics, is fond of the metaphor of the mirror in such cases. But what he means is this : There is this peculiar instrument in man, which he calls the heart but which we call the mind, and which stands in relation to the physical heart ; but is not it. By that instrument man can know directly God and the nature of God. Further, what is to be said of the life, practice. THE MYSTICAL LIFE IQ/ discipline of man during this process of learning to know Grod? Here the division between the dogmatic theology of the scholastics and this, the mystical theology, becomes very plain. The dog- matic theology of the scholastics was worked out on the basis of authority and reason. There were such and such things laid down in the Qur*an and in the traditions; these could be examined by man and built up by reasoning into a definite, hard and fast system. Part of that system I have put before you, and it, as a whole, al-Ghazzali seems to have accepted. He would say, * We cannot help ourselves ; that is what was given to us; what our fathers have taught us. We, of course, may interpret it in different ways." He, it is evident, at many points dis- approved of it. He was prepared to accept every word of the Qur'an and every word of provably sound tradition ; but he must have liberty to explain and combine these as he pleased. He, especially, did not think that the current scho- lastic system would hold water on the side of reasoning ; yet he was quite prepared to lay down that system in his books. To criticise and recon- struct it would be very hard, and would only 198 ASPECTS OF ISLAM shake the faith of the masses; and, besides, it was only the skeleton, or shell, whichever you prefer, of religion. But what of religion itself? For the basis of religion, al-Ghazzali went back to the experience of the individual man. First of all he cut away any hope of reaching reality by reasoning. That, his negative position, I have put before you al- ready. But when he had done that, he went back at once and said, "In the mind of man it- self there is the witness of God. If man will fol- low the path, he will attain unto the truth. For the foundation of the mystical theology, then, man must study himself; and as he follows the path, he will find certain psychological states appearing, one after another; some of them will be more permanent than others ; but none will be absolutely permanent ; rather, they will flit across this mirror of his mind by which he knows God. These states he must study; he must try to lead them steadily upwards, that he himself may be- come purer. If he succeeds, they will become continuously more intense and lasting until, it may be, if the stories are true that are told of the most eminent of the saints, he will be able THE MYSTICAL LIFE I99 to enter, even in this life, into the utmost, the absolute felicity of the direct vision of God." Such are the means and such is the foundation. Thus alone can religion be known. But even by these means al-Ghazzali and the mystics of Islam could not free themselves en- tirely from the handicap of that theological sys- tem which I have put in part before you. In one of his treatises, for instance, he deals with the question of the love of God, the love of man for God and of God for man. That there is such love is for him fundamental. It is part of the knowledge that comes through the heart of man, revealed in these changing states, the psycho- logical ladder of dead selves up which man must climb into the very presence of God. But what does it mean? Can man love God? It is evi- dent that many Muslim theologians had answered at once, *'No, he cannot. Man and God are of different natures. There can be no love where there is difference, or — in the curious scholastic language — where there is a difference of genus. The most that it can mean is perseverance in obedience to Allah. That is all that the love of man for Allah can be." In reply, al-Ghazzali 200 ASPECTS OF ISLAM admits this difficulty; but he adds at once that there is not this absolute difference between man and God ; and, coming back to the facts, he asks why it is that Muhammad in the Qur'an speaks again and again of Allah loving man, while the saints have spoken again and again of the saints loving God. And the Church of Islam has fol- lowed al-Ghazzali, and says that the love of man for God is possible and reasonable and real. But when we pass to the other side, the love emanating from God manward, there the problem becomes really difficult. Al-Ghazzali and a few, indeed, of the more orthodox mystics could not separate themselves from the idea that God must be above all change; for change is suffering. "When there is love," said al-Ghazzali, "there must be in the lover a sense of incompleteness; a recognition that the beloved is needed for com- plete realization of the self." That for al-Ghaz- zali, you see, is the essential in love. But that, of course, is impossible in the case of God; He is complete; H'e is perfect; man can do nothing in any way to assist Him to supply His need, for He has no need. What, then, does the love of God for man mean ? I am afraid that here there THE MYSTICAL LIFE 20I comes a very weak and impotent conclusion to the great vision. "The love of God means that He removes the veil from the heart of man ; that God wills and has willed, from all eternity, that man should know Him, and that God causes man to know Him. There is no reaching out on the part of God. He only affects man so that man turns and goes out to Him ; there can be no change in God; no development in Him; no sup- plying of a lack in Himself. He only affects man so that man comes to God." However, when al-Ghazzall had worked out this conception that there is an element in man derived from God, in what way did he save the personality and peculiar separateness of God? He said quite frankly that the one distinguishing thing in which God was separate from man, in which man could never come to be one with God, was that God exists through Himself only. He is the only being that exists through himself. All others have a dependent existence through something else. And this is the real meaning of the phrase in the Qur'an about the Face of Allah. The word "face" is somewhat ambiguous. It can mean "aspect" and also "direction," and the 202 ASPECTS OF I9^\M mystical developers of those texts chose to play upon these different nieanings. Everything has an aspect to itself and has also an aspect to Allah. In respect to its aspect to itself, it is really ncm- existent It is existent only in respect of its aspect to Allah, and the aspect of Allah is the only thing that survives; all else is fugitive — vanishing. That is to say, things exist only as they look towards Allah. But now, I must hasten to close this subject Let me do so with a very brief consideration of the development of the organizations of dar- wishes, those bearers of the tradition of the mys- tical conception. From a very early date in Islam, certainly from the second Muslim century, it came to be common for teachers and guides in the religious life to gather around them circles of personal disciples. Accompanied by these, they wandered through the country, supported by the alms of the faithful, and taught theology, practical and mystical. For centuries, and this is the curious point, these organizations fell to pieces at once with the death of the leader. They •were not self-subsisting corporations; they were only assemblages of disciples round a teacher. THE MYSTICAL LIFE 2O3 The teacher gone, they separated. Not until about fifty years, I think, after the death of al-Ghazzali was the situation, passed. Then we find one of these schools turning into a self-per- petuating corporation, taking the name of its founder and continuing to teach the rule of life, the monastic discipline and the exercises that he had taught. It is plain to my mind that such continuous corporations could not have come into existence until some time after the death of al-Ghazzali, because most certainly, if they had been in existence in his time, there would now be a fraternity of Ghazzalite darwishes. In his last years he had gathered round him such a school of immediate disciples. He taught them; they lived with him. But after his death, evidently, they broke away; divided; vanished. All the fraternities, I have no question, date from some teacher that lived after his day. But if you enquire of a darwish now as to the founder of his fraternity — who he was, he will almost certainly give you the name of some com- panion of Muhammad or of one of the great early theologians of the first centuries. In each of these bodies there has grown up a curious tradition 304 ASPECTS OF ISLAM carrying them farther back than their real his- torical origin and saying that the particular religious formulae and the particular religious observances that distinguish them, were appointed for them by so and so in the very first generations of Islam, when their fraternity was first instituted. This founder worked out the Path — such is the word they use — which they were to follow. But that, as I have indicated, is quite unhistorical. To another manifestation of this mystical life I can give only a very few minutes. It is what I might call the Hierarchy of Saints. Besides this great body of believers, organized in visible form in the darwish fraternities, the devout Mus- lim believes — Has not Allah said in his Book (x, 63), "Ho, the Friends of Allah! there is no fear upon them nor do they grieve"? — that there is also a great invisible organization of saints, a kind of spiritual board of administration, which, under Allah, is managing the affairs of the world. That board has a head who is called the Qutb, the Axis. He is supposed to be always the greatest saint of his time and he lives generally invisible. There are certain places in the Muslim world that he peculiarly haunts, and these places are THE MYSTICAL LIFE 20$ visited by those who would pray to him or ask his intercession. At one time of the day he is believed, for example, to be on the roof of the Ka'ba at Mecca, and I imagine that every Mus- lim of the lower class in Cairo is quite certain that at another time of the day he is seated be- hind the eastern leaf of the Bab az-Zuwela, one of the three surviving gates of the old City of Cairo. You practically never can pass that gate without seeing some one leaning up against it, evidently engaged in petition to this greatest of all living saints who, he supposes, may possibly be there at the time. Down from this invisible, absolute Qutb there stretches a widening hierarchy. He has four assistants who can, on occasion, take his place. If he dies, one of them will be chosen by Allah as his successor. Under this, again, there is an- other class of twelve, and so the great hierarchy goes downward, widening and widening, until it embraces all the saints, the Friends of Allah, who are alive. In this system and in the help to be derived from these men all the masses of Islam believe with perfect fixity. But there are other similar 206 ASPECTS OF ISLAM helpers and guides. There is, first, the most picturesque figure of all in the mythology of Islam, that saint who is called al-Khadir — the name is commonly interpreted as meaning the Green One, who is supposed to have drunk of the water of immortality and now to be wandering through the earth, carrying out the commands of God. In this he is different from the other saints of the hierarchy. He will live until the last day comes, then will be reduced to his dust and raised again with the rest of mankind. So the pious Muslim when he finds himself in difficulty, on his travels especially, will invoke the help of al-Khadir, and very many are the stories told of how he has appeared under such condi- tions and guided the fainting traveler back to the road and to safety. It is very hard to say what part truth or mis- take, and what part hallucination have played in such things. But the narratives of how the help has come are very many indeed. My friend in Cairo who had passed from Islam to Christianity told me that he in his Muslim days had once had a vision of al-Khadir. He viewed the thing rather differently now and thought that it was a THE MYSTICAL LIFE 2O7 case of expectation, suggestion, over-fasting and then hallucination ; but I think that still there was present in his mind a little question, a little wonder as to the possibilities which might lie behind those things. It was to me a strong testimony to the reality of such visions and experiences on the part of the darwishes and others that this man was very eager and desirous to discuss with me the modern theories of hallucination and suggestion in producing them. He did not feel that he could put them down as simply non- existent, but that he had to explain them in some way as realities. And besides this hierarchy and al-Khadir, who must be classed rather with the angels, there is also the multitude of dead saints. The Muslim saint, you remember, is not dead in our sense; he is there still within his tomb which has become his house, and his case differs from that of the ordinary Muslim in that he can leave his tomb. He can go away and journey and come back again. One Muslim theologian of the sixteenth century counted it as one of the peculiar graces that Allah had granted to him that when he came to the tomb he had always, by a kind of inspired 206 ASPECTS OF ISLAM insight, been able to know whether the saint was at home or not. Such is the complete reality of those things for Muslims. But do not imagine that they belong only to the sixteenth century; they exist at the present day. If you are wander- ing about in Cairo and come to a curious bend or break in the line of the street, you will find, built somewhere into the comer, a dome covering the tomb of a saint. He had elected to be buried there. Nor are the houses in the neighborhood handicapped in the least by that holy and perma- nent tenant. It is supposed to be a great privi- lege to have a house beside which stands the tomb of a saint; he will take care of you; he is there and a saint is always a good neighbor. In this, as you will perceive, is the difference be- tween the layout of the streets of a Muslim town and that of the streets of Boston ; these have been laid out by the saints. They put down their tombs, here and there, and when they are once down they are immovable; the street must go round them; must find some other way. All over Cairo you will find these curious turnings and jags in the streets where some saint had elected to be buried. When I was in Cairo the THE MYSTICAL LIFE 209 authorities of the Roman Catholic cathedral, then building, were having much trouble with a saint found buried within its precincts. Early Chris- tianity would quickly have discovered for him a legend and a date in the calendar, but a solution of such broad Catholicism is no longer possible. These, then, are the more mysterious, the more invisible sides of the mystical life in Islam — the hierarchy of living saints; the guardianship of al-Khadir, the undying saint, wandering through the lands of Allah and doing the will of Allah; and the presence everywhere, at every turn, of the deceased but still very active saint. The life of the devout Muslim is hedged around every- where by the Unseen.

THE ATTITUDE OF ISLAM TO THE SCRIPTURES AND TO THE PERSON OF CHRIST If it were ever to fall to you to converse with Muslims upon the matter of their feeling towards the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, towards the Books as they would call them, you would at once find yourselves entangled in the most varied and discordant judgments.* Some would be polite; some would not; some would regard you and say to you, "You are People of the Book," meaning by that, inspired Scripture; "you have the guidance ; it is the one spirit." Others, I atn afraid, would indicate in one way or another that you were of those upon whom was the wrath of God or something similar, and that your books were forgeries. Between those two extremes *The subject of the present lecture has been so little studied that Goldziher's monograph in the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental Society (vol. xxxii, pp. 341-387) » although now more than thirty years old, still stands practically alone. I am much indebted to it, as also, but in less degree, to Schreiner's paper in the same Zeitschrift (vol. xlii, ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 211 you would find that the matter lies at the present time. I am bound to say, however, that in general you would find the Muslims exceedingly courte- ous in dealing with this question. They would not go to the point of telling you that the wrath of God was upon you, unless for some distinct reason. Generally, they would escape from the issue by some polite commonplaces about the| People of the Book. As a matter of fact, it is possible for the Mus- lim, without doing any injury to his conscience, to adopt the most varied positions with regard to the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians, and that possibility, like almost everything else in Islam, dates back to Muhammad himself, and to the development which immediately followed him and was conditioned by him. On this question, then, as practically on all questions connected with Islam, we must go back and ask what Muhammad himself thought about it. Now, through what I have already put be- fore you with regard to Muhammad's person- ality, you will have understood how absolute was his belief that God was wont to speak to him 212 ASPECTS OF ISLAM from time to time and that God had sent him as a messenger to mankind. For any understanding at all of Islam, and if the character of Muham- mad himself is to become in the least intelligible to us, we must take that as a fundamental position. Otherwise we shall be involved in a hopeless psychological problem. So, in this instance, only by taking such a position towards Muhammad and realizing that such was his attitude, can we understand how he felt towards the Scriptures of the older faiths. Muhammad, then, was certain — ^knew as absolutely as any man could know — that he was a messenger from God sent to man- kind, a guide appointed by God for mankind. But what, further, was the situation round him as seen by him? That situation, unfortunately, we can learn only from the Qur'an itself. If we attempt to gain any idea of it from the tradi- tions that have been handed down to us of what Muhammad said and did, we shall find that these cannot be trusted. We shall find that the real use of these traditions is to picture for us the later controversies rather than to give us the mind of Muhammad himself. And in the Qur'an, what do we find ? We ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 213 find that for Muhammad, l(X)king out on the world, there was one great division amongst mankind. He divides them into those whom he calls "the People of the Book" — meaning by that, as we have seen, the People of Scripture, whether one book or several — and into others whom he calls at one time "the straying people," at another time, "the rebellious people" — the people, that is to say, who had not a guidance from Allah, or the people who had risen against that guidance, and were rebellious against Allah. Further, what was his idea about those books of Scripture? He uses the phrase, "the People of the Book," which could mean also "of the Books." Whence were those books? Or he speaks of those people as "the people that are rightly guided," were rightly guided once, though now they have gone astray. What did this guidance mean? Who had been their guides ? But when we begin to look into this problem of what Muhammad understood behind those mysterious "books" and by this "guidance," we are at once convinced that he had really very little knowledge in any definite form. It is one 214 ASPECTS OF ISLAM of the most outstanding peculiarities of Muham- mad's mind that he could not, apparently, get any clear idea of a story on hearing it, and fsLr less could he rehearse a story in distinct, histor- ical form after he had once heard it The way that such things came to him seems to have been very much like this: He got a scn^ of history; he got an allusion; he got a telling phrase; he got a hint of a character. He carried that away, and then with that as a centre and with his Inroad idea of the story — generally a very inaccurate idea — ^as material, he built up for himself again what he had heard Or it may have been some scrap of the Scrip- tures which he had heard once or twice ; some bit which he had picked up from hearing the Psalms read; something he had heard at a Qiristian service of worship, a phrase, perhaps, from the chanting of the Magnificat; there were many fragments of that kind of which the words had caught his memory. It was only a very short phrase that he could hold in that memory of his ; 80 he would, then, piece and mend it into what seemed right to him in the nature of the case. Thus, he felt sure, it must have run. That was ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 21$ practically all that he had on which to go when he tried to reconstruct this hypothetical history of "the People of the Book," on the one hand and of the unbelievers, the strayers, the rebellious, on the other hand. Let me, now, take a special case of this quoting by Muhammad ; it will illustrate the curious diffi- culty of the problem that we have. In the Qur'an (vi, 156) Muhammad says that he is "written" in the former sacred books, evidently meaning that there is a prophecy or description of him in the Scriptures of the Christians and of the Jews. But in one passage (Qur. Ixi, 6) he is more precise and makes Jesus say, "I give you tidings of a Messenger who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad." That is a perfectly clear statement, and the allusion, up to a certain point, is clear also. It is clear that here we have an allusion — ^picked up in what way and in what blind form we cannot tell — ^to the promise of the Comforter (John's Gospel, xiv, 16, 26; XV, 26; xvi, 7). But why does he name that Messenger to come, Ahmad? That was not Muhammad's name. Apart from this pas- sage there is no tradition that that was ever his 2l6 ASPECTS OF ISLAM name. It is true that his original, heathen name is unknown, but it was not Ahmad. Muslims, certainly, have applied that name to him, but only because of this passage. Is it in any way pos- sible — ^this has been the conjecture — that in some Arabic translation of the Gospels, by a curious accident perhaps complicated by mis-hearing on the part of Muhammad himself, the word Ahmad, "the greatly praised," or the "greatly praising," could have been used for Paraclete? Some have even suggested that in the Greek text of John, ircpiicXvros may have been read instead of vopoKXi/ros ; irtpuckvros might be translated Ahmad. We cannot tell; there the case stands. This is the one, definite, clear statement that Muhammad himself made, referring to a prophecy of him- self in the former sacred books. But you see, even in itself, how vague, how grasped out of the clouds in a sense, it is. The case being thus, Muhammad was practi- cally cast back upon himself and his own ideas to work out a philosophy of the history of revela- tion, and that he did with great thoroughness. There, before him, were the Jews ; there were the Qiristians ; there was a people whom he called ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 21^^ the Sabians — we are in doubt as to whom he meant by these — and there were the Magians. He reckons in the Magians as a "People of Scripture," in one passage only (Qur. xxii, 17), and by them he apparently means the Zoroas- trians ; so, at least, the Muslims have understood the passage. In other places (Qur. liii, 37-38; Ixxxviii, 19) he speaks of the Leaves of Abra- ham. These are certain rolls or leaves, believed now to be lost but supposed to be the ultimate basis of the religious faith of the Sabians and Magians. In the case of the Jews and the Christians, he speaks of the Law, of the Psalms and of the Gospel. These were the record, all that was left in written form, of the revelations made to the world by a series of prophets who had come in succession, one after another, but sometimes with long gaps between, from the beginning of creation down to Muhammad's own time. God had never left Himself without a witness; either the witness of the personal guid- ance of one of those prophets, or the witness of the book which he had left behind him. Later Islam built up an elaborate doctrine of two kinds of prophets — those who brought a book and those 2l8 ASPECTS OF ISLAM who did not — ^and reckoned their numbers, and, so far as it could, their names. Muhammad had only told stories about individuals. Later Islam developed a doctrine of saints with a minor inspiration variously defined. With this Muham- mad would, undoubtedly, have been in full accord. And what had been sent by means of those prophets and messengers? It had been the one only true, unchangeable, undevelopable, inflexible faith. It had been Islam. At the beginning of creation, when Allah created Adam he appointed him his representative upon earth, communicated to him the faith of Islam, told him what was its law, what were its rites and ceremonies — ^the outward manifestations of that faith, and gave him command to teach these to mankind. After his death mankind lapsed and fell away from the truth. Then another prophet came who was commissioned by Allah to restore that primeval faith. After his death mankind lapsed again; then another prophet was sent, and so down through the long generations you have the con- tinual bringing back and restoration of the one, unchangeable faith. It is a scheme of the philosophy or the history of revelation that would ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 2ig bring joy to the heart of the most absolute tradi- tionalist. I do not imagine that any other great formative religious mind ever constructed so absolutely unchangeable, unreformable a faith as this. But still, that was the conception which Muhammad held. And what of his part in it? He was simply the last of the prophets; the renewer of the one primeval faith in this age of darkness; the restorer of the truth to mankind. Yet with this difference; never before had a prophet been sent to the Meccans; it was now come to be their turn ; they were to have the great privilege of being the People of Allah; of being the kindred of the Prophet of Allah. Now, with such a view as this — ^worked out, as you will notice, in the most absolute fashion, reminding one more than anything else of the scheme of history that lies behind the Book of Judges, where we have a string of Judges, each bringing back the rebellious Israel to the Lord, with the rebellious Israel thereafter breaking away again and being brought back by another Judge to the Lord — what, then, having such a view as this, must have been his feeling about the People of Scripture? These Jews, these 220 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Christians, whom he met, possessed, ex hypothesi, the sacred books that were left to them by Moses ; left to them by Jesus; left to them by David. Those sacred books must contain exactly the same things which he believed that Allah had revealed to him. In those sacred books must lie that same law of Islam; those same practices and rites; that same faith. He had only to turn to the Jews and Christians, tell them what he was, tell them what had been revealed to him, and they would say at once, "This is a prophet from God." Further, he had heard enough about prophecies in those Scriptures — each prophet fore- telling the coming of his successor — to feel sure that such books must contain prophecies describ- ing him himself. The Jews and the Christians must certainly admit that he was the prophet foretold. But, unfortunately, he found that they would not; that they did not recognize him; that they said, "That is not the true faith ; nor do we find in our sacred books any prophecy at all, any description at all of such a one as you are. We see no reason whatever to think that we should leave our ancient positions, the ways in which ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 221 our fathers walked, and come and follow you/' What, then, did Muhammad say? He came to the conclusion that they, personally, were exhibiting the most consummate hypocrisy. And, with regard to their books, what he said was, "Do not listen to the Jews and the Christians as to what they say of the faith; they 'twist their tongues in it' " — that was his phrase (Qur. iii, 72 ; iv, 48). That phrase makes it clear that he believed that they misrepresented what actually was in their sacred books. In their books was Islam and the prophecy of the coming of Muhammad, but they concealed these things and perverted the truth. And it is further plain that Muhammad reached this conclusion from a feeling of the necessity of the case. He did not go back to the books themselves; he could not; they were not accessible to him. It was the overwhelming sense of the reality of his mis- sion which drove him to this. But what was his final position, seeing that he had been received in this way by the holders of the old faiths ? It was simply, "Let them alone ; they will not hear; they have hardened their hearts; it is impossible to do any more with 222 ASPECTS OF ISLAM them; let them go." And to the Muslims he said, "You have no more need of them nor of their books; do not listen to them; do not hear what they have to say; there is no need of it. If they read to you what is written in their books, it is really the same as what I have told you; and if they do not read what is written in their books, then it is lies. You have the truth in what I have brought ; hold by that ; it is sure and safe for this world and for the world to come." This was, of course, a perfectly sufficient position during Muhammad's lifetime. So long as they had this infallible prophet to guide them and to tell them the truth, they need not go further. The problem was over for the time being. But when he died, they had no longer that absolutely infallible guide. When they wanted to hear what had been the story about this or that person in past generations ; when they wanted to know what was the exact bearing and force of this or that theological truth; they could not go to him any longer. They were driven back to the Qur'an; they were driven back to the memory of what he had said ; but they began also to fall back upon those same despised Jewish ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 223 and Qiristian Scriptures. And here came the nemesis, sprung partly from Muhammad's wild statements, partly from the attitude of mind which he had fostered in his followers. The Muslims, in consequence, had and have a certain bias or standing presupposition with regard to those Scriptures, and, however the Scriptures come to their knowledge, that has always made Itself felt. Now, there are four ways in which the Scriptures have come to Islam. They have come through proselytes ; they have come through controversy; they have come — this to a slight extent — through the studies of their own histo- rians; and they have come — ^perhaps to a still slighter extent — through the direct reading of the books themselves. Let me take up those four sources one by one; but remember, as I go over them, that they all, for the Muslim mind, became inextricably mixed up together; that a Muslim has, behind his feeling about the Scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, simply a great, con- fused jumble of discordant ideas derived in all these different ways; he has never applied criti- cism to that jumble; he has never tried to think the thing out; he may tell you one thing at one 224 ASPECTS OF ISLAM time and another thing at another time, just as he may pull out from that jumble now one thing and now another. First, then, with regard to proselytes. There especially was the nemesis felt. The Arabs had a curious, childlike trust in writing, in books. People who could read books, they thought, must know everything. But they knew that the Jews and Christians with whom they were in contact had books and could read them. In consequence they got into the way of appealing to the Jews and Christians, asking them about the histories of the past kings and generations ; about the long gone by times of the world with its prophets and sages; and those whom they asked told them very strange things indeed. You must remember that they were mostly proselytes, Jews and Chris- tians who had embraced Islam and who had a very definite feeling as to what it was safe and desirable for them to say. They were well aware of the general position held by the Muslims with regard to Islam and its truth and its place in the eternal scheme; anything that they told those Muslims must square with that. But, on another side, they discovered that the more marvelous ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 22$ were the tales that they told, provided they squared with that fundamental necessity, the better these tales would be received. Under that spirit and pressure, the tremendous growth of legend that immediately appeared is simply indescribable. For instance, at a very early date, we find stories which confuse the books of the Law (the Pentateuch) with the Tables of the Law (the Ten Commandments) and which describe how many thousands of the books of the Law there were, and how many camels it took to carry them. And, again, we are told, from information com- ing from those Jewish proselytes, that the Law consisted of one thousand parts, and that to carry it would take seventy camels, and that only four — Moses, Joshua, Ezra and Jesus — ^had ever read it through completely. And with this there went a calmness of assertion which must strike us with admiration. One would say, "I have read in the Torah," and then he would go on to give something very much like the above. Another said, — and this I will give you liter- ally — "I found in the Gospel that the keys of the treasury of Qarun [Qarun is the Biblical Korah ; IS 226 ASPECTS OF ISLAM evidently also Croesus who has suffered an orien- tal change] were a load for sixty mules; no key was larger than a finger, and each served for a separate treasury." Curiously enough, the only part of the Scriptures that seems to be given in a form in the least degree rational is the Wisdom Literature. From the Wisdom Litera- ture a certain number of tolerably recognizable quotations have come down to us over the lips of those proselytes. But, further, it was not only those proselytes who behaved in this way. The Arabs have always loved to hear stories. The Arabian Nights, for that matter, is only one book in a very large class, and as the earliest Muslims were Arabs, on the one hand, and loved to hear stories, but were Muslims, on the other hand, and were very pious, naturally the stories they loved to hear most were pious stories about the past prophets. Therefore a class of story-tellers arose who devoted themselves to developing and perfecting, in a sense, the materials that had been handed over by the proselytes. Of course, the more sober element in the Muslim Church protested against that; there was bitter war between the ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 227 professional traditionalists and the professional story-tellers; neither could stand the other. There is a story told of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Yahya ibn Mu'in, two of the greatest tradition- alists, probably better known by sight in Baghdad than the Caliph himself, and thorough scholars, that they were one day in the mosque and saw one of these story-tellers sitting with his back against a pillar and a circle round him. He was telling them a long tale of how, whenever any one pronounces the words Ld, ildha illa-lldh, Allah creates out of every word a bird with a beak of gold and wings of diamonds, and, what was worse, kept saying at every turn, "I heard these things direct from Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Yahya ibn Mu'in themselves." At last Yahya could not stand it any longer and walked up to him and said, "Oh brother, I have heard you saying this thing, that thing and the other thing, and you say that you derived them from Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Yahya ibn Mu'in. Now, I am Yahya and this is Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and we have never heard them in our lives before." Thereupon the story-teller looked upon him with a very severe and majestic countenance and said. 228 ASPECTS OF ISLAM **Oh thou, thy name may be Yahya ibn Mu'In and the name of this man may be Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Are ye the only men of these names among the people of Muhammad ? I have tradi- tions from seventeen men who are so called." Against competition of such courage and popu- larity the traditionalists with a conscience could do almost nothing, and, in consequence, the misinformation of the proselytes was a hundred- fold further bedevilled with the stories of those religious novelists. And the results of their labours abide to this day. They have infected the whole devotional literature of Islam and furnish the staple religious reading of the masses at present. Thus the earliest source is also the most persistent. For example, if we turn to al-Ghazzali, to whom I have referred again and again and who died in mi A. D. (A. H. 505), we find him saying very gravely, "Moses says in the Law, *Rend your hearts and not your garments'." Evidently it never occurred to him to verify his words ; and as for the stories here is one from al-Ghazzali himself almost as good as the story of the treas- ury of Qarun : — ^There was in the time of Moses ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 229 a certain negro saint, Barkh by name. When rain failed the children of Israel for seven years, Allah told Moses to entreat Barkh to pray for it. He did so in a prayer full of familiarity and daring, and rain came at once. To Moses Allah explained, "I always hear what Barkh says; he makes me laugh three times a day." But the demoralization that followed went farther. Take, for instance, the great theologian, ar-Razi, who died in 1209 A. D. (A. H. 606), a man in the rank only after al-Ghazzall himself. In his commentary on the Qur'an, he tells us very gravely in one place, that he knows and can repeat the Law and Gospel both by heart, and then, throughout his commentary, he gives us the most mysterious and wonderful things as being contained in that Law and in that Gospel. Now, what can such a phenomenon mean? Had the whole moral sense, all feeling for fact, been rotted away by lightness of belief? This man was a great theologian and yet he could play fast and loose in this fashion. Much later in the history of Islam other proselytes made other contributions to Muslim knowledge of the Scriptures. Upon these con- 230 ASPECTS OF ISLAM tributions I can only touch. While much more trustworthy in point of fact, they were intensely hostile in spirit. Their contributors were pros- elytes who passed over directly from Europe into Islam, and who carried with them the doubts and scepticism of the European renaissance. The best known and probably the most picturesque figure among them is a certain Frater Anselmo de Turmeda, a Franciscan friar, one of the founders and one of the most popular writers of the Catalan national literature, a man whose books, pointed with savage almost Swiftian satire, are still read in Spain. ^ He went over to Tunis early in the fifteenth century, became a Muslim there and wrote a book against Christianity and in criticism of the Gospels which shows what was the atti- tude towards Christianity in what one might call the educated, sceptical circles of his time. Another must have been the unknown author of the Gospel of Barnabas. Their books furnished most of the arguments still used by Muslim controversialists, who have taken them, just as they took the earlier stories, with entire faith. *The best reference for him is Menendez y Pelayo, Origenes de la Novela, Vol. I, pp. cv-cx. ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 23 1 From all these instances it is plain that Mus- lims in general did not, or could not, verify their references. And, secondly, we know that they were afraid to do so. They were prepared to accept those scraps and arguments which were given to them by proselytes to their own faith, but they themselves feared to risk their faith by reading those Scriptures. As medieval Chris- tendom believed that any one reading Hebrew would become a Jew, so the Muslims would not take any chances which might be involved in meddling with Law or Gospel. The second element was the knowledge that came through controversy. For its beginnings we must go back to the early times of Islam. When we take the writings of John of Damascus, the great Father of the Greek Church and the final formulator of its theology, who died some- where after 754 A. D., we find that the Muslims did not then ascribe any miracles to Muhammad and did not allege that there were any prophecies of Muhammad in the sacred books of Christen- dom. But as we go on, starting from that point of departure, it is clear that there was an immediate growth through controversy and 232 ASPECTS OF ISLAM especially through the necessity of meeting such claims on the part of Christians. On the one hand, it was a growth of what you might call the legend of Muhammad, and, on the other hand, it was a change of attitude towards the former sacred books. Muslims began, from that time on, to assert that miracles had been performed by Muhammad. It is true that he had never, himself, claimed that power. Again and again he had said, "I cannot work miracles. The old prophets came working miracles. Did the peo- ple believe in them any more on that account? I come with only this Book, given to me by Allah, which is ample evidence in itself. It should be enough." But it was not enough for later Islam. They soon discovered for him miracles in abundance, constructed, mostly, in imitation of the miracles of the Gospels. And they also changed their attitude towards the former sacred books. "You tell us that there are no prophecies," said they, "of Muhammad in these books. Then there must be something wrong with the books." They did not say any longer, as Muhammad had done, "The readers of the books deceive us when they read." They ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 233 carried their accusation to the books themselves. But as to what was wrong, they varied and divided into different schools. Some held that there were only omissions in the books; that the prophecies concerning Muhammad had been cut out. Others held that the books were actually corrupted. But this was a hard thing for the Muslims to believe. Was it conceivable that a sacred book sent down by Allah could ever suffer such a thing as that? For a great many it was inconceivable. "There can," they said, "only be omissions in them; perhaps there may also be additions; but no corruptions." You see, then, how many different attitudes of mind were, and are, possible amongst the Muslims towards those books. Some would hold, "The books are com- pletely corrupted ; have nothing to do .with them." Others would hold, "There are only some omis- sions," and others, "only omissions and addi- tions." All these different attitudes are mirrored for us in traditions which gave us supposed state- ments of Muhammad himself. Each thus can claim to have the Prophet behind it. But gradually Muslims began to find, even in those books themselves, as they read them or 234 ASPECTS OF ISLAM had them read to them, actual prophecies of Muhammad. This once begun, the hunt for such texts became an absorbing interest and went on until over fifty distinct prophecies had been found by Muslim theologians between the Old and the New Testaments. Of course, a great many of these are simply the result of corruption of the text. Others are very curious bits of exegesis, and still others are due to unblushing insertion of names and references, probably mostly by proselytes, and show how little fear they had that these statements would ever be verified. I select now a few to put before you, which were found satisfactory by al-Beruni* himself, who was, I think, quite certainly the clearest scientific mind alive in his day (about A. D. looo). These are no phantasies of theologians but accepted scientific facts of their time. The first of them is in Deut. i8, i8, where we read, "I will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee; and will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him." Now, ^Chronology, trans, by Sachau, pp. 22 £, ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 235 the method by which this was brought to bear upon Muhammad is interesting. You will notice that it says, "a prophet from among their brethren." Evidently this was not to be from among the children of Israel, because it could not be "from among their brethren" in that case. "Brethren" leaves only two possibilities, Ishmael and Esau. As for Esau, the only prophet of the line of Esau is Job, and Job had flourished before Muhammad himself. We are then left with the other possibility that this prophet must be from the sons of Ishmael, and there had been no man raised up, claiming to be a prophet, of the sons of Ishmael except Muhammad. Again, in Deut. 33, 2, "The Lord came forth from Sinai and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from Mount Paran, and he came with ten thousand of saints.*" Notice the sequence: From Sinai; from Seir; from Mount Paran. But it says, "The Lord came," and that is unthinkable. God does not come from one place to another. This must mean that certain manifestations, certain messengers, from him came from those three places. Now, who were the messengers, those manifestations of the Lord ? 236 ASPECTS OF ISLAM From Sinai, it is plain that the revelation of the Law to Moses is meant; Sa'ir is a mountain near Nazareth where the Gospel was revealed to Jesus (now Nebi Sa*in just north of Naz- areth) ; and every one knows about the mountain called Faran in the neighborhood of Mecca where Muhammad used to worship. There you have the three great revelations, and Muhammad's was the last. Again, in Isaiah, 21, 6-7, it reads, "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, *Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. And whenever he seeth a troop with horsemen by pairs, a troop of asses and a troop of camels, then let him hearken diligently with much heed'." So the Hebrew; but the Muslims took it otherwise and read, "a rider on an ass and a rider on a camel," para- phrasing and condensing the rest of the passage — a possible rendering. But who was this rider upon the ass; and who was this rider upon the camel? There can be no question; the rider upon the ass was Jesus ; the rider upon the camel was Muhammad. Such were the prophecies which al-Berum thought were sound evidence. They will remind ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 23/ you a good deal of our own old-fashioned, literal Messianic prophecies. They are of essentially the same type, except that the latter are a fossilizing of a spiritual and historical fact, while I hardly think that any one will feel that there is such a reality behind these Muslim crudities of exegesis. I will not take the time to give the other forty odd Muhammadan prophecies which I have met. They would show up much as do these, which will give you the generally accepted basis for the claim that Muhammad is foretold in the Old Testament. Then, thirdly, there came the knowledge of the Scriptures that was gained by historians, using scientific methods. Knowledge of that kind came into Islam within only a very limited period. From the latter part of the eighth to the latter part of the ninth century was the golden time of Muslim civilization. At that time the Muslim world, being under certain con- ditions of temporary stimulus and personal guid- ance, was really anxious to learn and to know things as they are. After that time the gates closed, and they simply held, in a confused, undigested fashion, so much as they had got 238 ASPECTS OF ISLAM During that time the historians with whom we meet show a real desire to get at the facts of the case in regard to the sacred books. But they were always pursued by the older stories that had come in through the proselytes — those strange, fabulous tales — and even the greatest and soberest historians felt compelled to put the two things down — the attempt at fact and the attempt at edifying amusement — one beside the other, and to leave it at that. Perhaps they thought that their readers would know what to choose and that truth would prevail. Islam has chosen edifying amusement every time. The result, then, of this element being added was simply to twice confound the chaos that already existed. But with the fourth element there came a change. In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries some Muslim theologians began to work out the problem for themselves and to refer for themselves to the sacred books. The greatest of these was Ibn Hazm who died in A. D. 1064 (A. H. 456). He was of what is called the Zahirite school, the literalizing school. He believed in interpreting the Qur'an according to the letter, exactly as it stood, and he went to ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 239 work at the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures and interpreted them in the same way. The Quran he accepted and interpreted as the ipsis- sima verba Dei, but towards our Scriptures his attitude was as nearly as could be that of Paine and Ingersoll. He had no historical imagination at all — very few Muslims have, although they have an indefinite amount of mythologizing fancy — but he had very great analytical ability and an especial keenness for chronological difficulties. Although he could not see how such stories could possibly be told of the holy patriarchs as were told in Genesis, yet he could see very well how, according to the chronology, Methuselah must have died in the ark and many things of the like kind. So in parts he finds the Scriptures full of obscenites, in parts of ridiculous anthro- pomorphisms, in parts of geographical and historical impossibilities. Some of the writers — he is speaking at this point of the Song of Solomon — did not seem even to know them- selves what they wanted to say; the changes of gender in the Song had puzzled him as they have many. You will understand how the saying got abroad even among the Muslims, "The sword 240 ASPECTS OP ISLAM of al-Hajjaj and the tongue of Ibn Hazm." To what conclusion, then, was he driven by this ? By no possibility, he held, could God have set down in these sacred books — ^lying and accursed, he calls them — ^anything that could even have been corrupted into such a form. They were clear forgeries from beginning to end. But he was met by a difficulty. It is stated explicitly in the Qur'an that Muhammad is "written" in the books of the Jews and the Christians. And he knew perfectly well that the books which the Jews and the Christians had possessed in the time of Muhammad were still the same books that they had in his time. How, then, as to those prophecies of Muhammad of which the Qur'an speaks and which he found himself in those books? Whence were they, if the books were forgeries? He was driven to a rather strange explanation. The original books had been withdrawn, taken back to heaven, and these books were of human composition. But, by miracle, God had caused the prophecies of Muhammad to survive in them. Just as God could give power to a rebellious people to kill one prophet and not to kill another, so He had ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 24I given power to the Jews and Christians to change part of their books, but not to change other parts. This was his only way out, and, \vith an unlimited command of miracle, it was a simple solution. We can now return to the present day attitude, or rather attitudes, of Muslims on these ques- tions. At the beginning of this lecture I said that you would find them varied. You have now seen how varied they may be. You will pos- sibly find some one who will be prepared to take up the position of Muhammad himself and to admit that these are really .the sacred books, fairly and fully the sacred books revealed to Moses, to David and to Jesus. And you will find almost certainly that the men who will do that, especially if they are sincere, are mystics. The mystic in Islam has come back to the feeling of the one spirit lying behind all literature, finding expression in all books ; the feeling that all scripture is given by inspiration. You will also find others who will be content to say, "These are the Scriptures ; but we know, of course, that they have been corrupted," or, "We know, of course, that there are serious omissions in them," or, "We know, of course, that there have been additions.** 242 ASPECTS OF ISLAM And you may find others, when the controversy waxes hot, who will say, "These are not the books at all; God has removed the sacred books from your hands and these are the books of ungodly men." With regard to our Gospels you will find that one definite and quite intelligible attitude has appeared. Muslims will say to you, "Those four books which you show to us cannot be that Gospel, that Injil, which was revealed to Jesus. Your books do not resemble in the slightest the form of the Qur'an. They are no Word of Allah addressed to Jesus directly, to be trans- mitted by him to mankind; they are only stories about the life of Jesus, about what he said and did, and what a great many other people said and did. Those four books which you show us and which you say are the Gospel, are, at the very best, only equivalent to our traditions of the life of the Prophet, the story of the sayings and doings of Muhammad. These can never repre- sent the Gospel itself, the divine Word sent down to Jesus." That, you will find, is their funda- mental position on the Gospels, and they will probably be disposed to go even farther and say, ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 243 "These are the equivalent, perhaps, of the tradi-i tions of Muhammad, but they do not rest on anything like the firm, historical basis on which our traditions rest." We can now take up the question which rises naturally from the consideration which I have just put before you, the question of the Muslim doctrine of the person of Christ and of their gen- eral attitude towards him. What has preceded must evidently produce and invoke a certain attitude. In the first place, then, Christ was simply one of that line of prophets of which I have spoken ; one of those sent to bring back erring men to the true faith; and the faith which he preached, the law, usages, ritual which he laid down and observed, must have been the same as that preached, laid down and observed by Muhammad himself. But, secondly, what distinguishes this Jesus from the other prophets — and it is remarkable how much there is that so separates him — ^what gives him a different position from the others in that goodly fellowship? Muhammad evidently re- garded him as standing quite apart from all other 244 ASPECTS OF ISLAM human beings. He was born of Mary but con- ceived without father directly from God through his messenger, the angel Gabriel. With his birth his activity began, and in the cradle he spoke words of wisdom. The miracles which he wrought were of a more varied and wonderful kind than those of any of the other prophets, and for him, especially, was reserved the miracle of raising the dead. This is the general con- sensus of Muslim opinion although some theo- logians have protested against it. When a Muslim religious writer has any peculiarly wise, telling, pious saying, joined to a story probably, to ascribe to a prophet of the past generations, the chances are that he will ascribe it to Jesus. That seems to be the association of mind with them. He was distinguished, also, from amongst the other prophets by purity. In Islam there Is no conception that he ever sinned. I think that can fairly be said. So at the Last Day when he excuses himself from attempting to intercede with Allah, it is not, as in the case of the other prophets, because of sin on his part but because his followers have worshipped him.* Therefore *See al-Ghazzilfs Durra al-fakhira (ed. Gauthier 1878), ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 245 he IS ashamed. Later Islam has striven to assert the same thing of Muhammad but both Qur'an and tradition are in the way. Islam admits that Jesus knew no sin. Further, the Qur'an calls him the spirit of Allah — ^but spirit for Muhammad meant an angel — the Word of Allah and a Word from Allah. Such a half-spiritual being is he, separate from mankind in birth, life and death; such a mark has been left by the Gospel story of his birth, of his miracles and parables and of his stainless life. He was not killed. That to Muhammad's mind was an impossible thought. He did not die upon the cross. God first caused him to die by his own touch; raised him to life again; and then, living in the body, took him to Heaven. From thence he will descend when the Last Day draws nigh and will rule for the last forty-five years before that Day, during the Muslim mil- lennium. But, on the other hand, he will not the late and quite artificial although now generally held doctrine that all prophets are guarded by Allah from sin. It is evolved from a theory and is in the teeth of the teach- ing of the greatest Muslim theologians. 246 ASPECTS OF ISLAM be the Judge on the Last Day, as I have seen asserted in some Western books. There is no idea of that kind in any Arabic writing. To Allah alone belongs the rule on that Day. Nor is he even technically the greatest of the prophets ; that rank is reserved for Muhammad. So much for the distinctions which separate him from all other prophets. As to the differences between Christendom and Islam, you will remember how I described the doctrine which has grown up in Islam that Muhammad is the greatest of all created beings, created long before the worlds; that for his sake the world was made. You will remember also the way in which the doctrine of the nature of the Qur'an was developed; that there was a Word with God by which he made all things, and that of that Word, the Qur'an as we have it is but the visible, earthly form. That being so, it is manifestly impossible for^.the person of Jesus to pass beyond that of a semi-angelic per- sonality; he cannot even be regarded as the first of created beings. The essential difficulty and difference for Muhammad lay not in the earthly, human Jesus, but in the heavenly element — the ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 247 Spirit from Allah, the Word of Allah; it was a creature, an 'abd, "a slave," in Muslim language. What were, let me ask finally and very shortly, the objections for Muhammad, in the Christian doctrine ? One of them lay, I think, in the word, "begotten?" If by any chance it had been pos- sible in the Creed to have expressed the fact that Jesus was not made but proceeded from the Father in any other way, by any other word, than that, it would have made the matter indefinitely easier for Muhammad. That word, that idea, with all that for him it connoted, he could not get over. And the idea was still further sexualized by the doctrine of the Trinity which had reached him. It was one sufficiently outre, for the Trinity, for him, consisted of the Father, the Mother and the Son. This explains, also, how the Holy Spirit had become a simple angel. For a long time we have been able only to guess from our knowledge of the early Christian sects at what may have been the source of Muhammad's Trinity. But within only the last few years the matter has been cleared up and in the most astonishing fashion. We have learned that in the Syrian Desert, not very far over beyond the Dead Sea, there are 248 ASPECTS OF ISLAM still tribes who call themselves Christians and who worship that form of Trinity. It is a remarkable survival of what must have been a very far out-lying Christian heresy. At any rate, we know now that Muhammad was not respon- sible for it.^ Lastly, he could not endure the Christian acceptance of the death upon the cross. That a prophet should be killed by those to whom he was sent he may have regarded as possible; but that a prophet should suffer in such a way was an unthinkable thing for him. His vehemence on this point is such as to suggest that he is polem- izing on behalf of the sect to which his Christian teacher belonged. The teacher must have been of one of the early sects which held that Jesus was spirited away from the Jews, and that another was changed into his likeness and suffered in his place. Such, certainly, was Muhammad's posi- tion (Qur. iv, 155-156), but the Qur'an makes no statement as to who the real sufferer was. The Muslim expansions vary on the same point; evidently there was no fixed tradition in Islam. One story says that it was one of the leaders of ' Musil, Arabia Petraea, Vol. Ill, p. 91. ISLAM AND THE SCRIPTURES 249 the Jews ; another, in dramatic justice, that it was Pilate himself; another that it was one of the soldiers sent to capture Jesus; yet another, and perhaps the commonest, that it was Judas. But if the conception of such self-sacrifice was impos- sible for Muhammad, it was not absolutely impossible for the Church of Muhammad after him. Let me close with a last story of this substitution. I have read in an Arabic book of the lives of the Prophets that Jesus just before the end, said to his followers, "Whoever has my likeness put upon him will be slain.'' Then arose a man from the people and said, "I, Lord !" And the likeness of Jesus was put upon him, and he was slain and crucified in his stead. The later Muslim Church thus rose higher in some of its members than had Muhammad himself.

We have now grown accustomed to hearing Buddhism, Islam and Christianity spoken of as the three missionary religions, it being meant thereby that these three, through their very nature, are impelled to go out and by persuasion and exhortation draw outsiders within their respective folds; that they are not limited by race, country or caste; but contain within them- selves, consciously or unconsciously, a world destiny. This classification is attractive and covers, undoubtedly, a large element of truth. But other religions have been missionary in their time— even the Jews once compassed sea and land to make one proselyte — ^and these three have not always been missionary, and, when they have, their con- verts have never been affected in the same way. Buddhism, to all appearance, makes the least change between those whom it takes in and their fellows who stay without ; it does not affect either MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 2$! the national or the social feeling. Christianity too often produces a pseudo-superior caste, parasitically attached to European and American Christendom. Islam always creates a state within a state. Again, Buddhism has had, appar- ently, long periods of exhaustion or repose in which the spreading instinct seems to have died down. In the history of the Christian Church one of the saddest chapters has been the apathy of its oriental branches — once the Nestorian wave of conquest was stayed — ^towards the peoples lying around them. As for Islam, its missionary ideals, methods and results form the subject of the present lecture. We have, therefore, before us now what is a matter of history and what should be treated in historical order. But that necessary dulness may, perhaps, be lightened a little if we look first for a moment on the Islam of the present day as it confronts and ponders the non-Muslim world. For, undoubtedly, its attitude just now is far more conscious than it ever was before. It is no longer developing and advancing or slumbering and mouldering, at any rate follow- ing its nature in happy unconsciousness; but its 252 ASPECTS OF ISLAM back is at the wall, and it looks upon an order of things, hostile now not only militantly but, what is far more deadly, economically. This situation Islam has realized and is realizing more and more widely with every year that passes. It IS not only the young men in the cities who are facing a new future. In the villages and even in the recesses of the desert itself the consciousness is awakening that all is not well with the People of Muhammad. They all know how Arabi Pasha was crushed at Tell el-Kebir, how the Fulani Emirates went down and how, in these last days, the Mahdi and his rule have been swept from the Sudan. It has gone ill with militant Islam, and when Islam is not militant, it dreams away its life in slow decay. The pressure, too, and the drive of the modern world have at last come home to them. They are learning that Europe will use and exhaust them to the last drop of blood if they do not learn to use themselves. On Asia the great European fear now lies more blackly than ever since the time of Alexander and his successors. And always before when Islam yielded ground — in Spain, in Sicily, in Hungary, in the Balkans — it was conquered terri- MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OP MUSLIMS 253 tory, and no native soil that it gave up. Or, if it yielded, it took it again, as the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem rose and fell. But now the war of manufacture and commerce, with their swift, Stern blows of economic necessity, has struck to the very center of the Faith, and many Muslims see that, if they would save themselves, an educa- tion and training alien and antagonistic to Islam must be whole-heartedly accepted and used. Thus the Muslim peoples are slowly and uneasily becoming aware that the Faith which was their pride and strength — nay, the very essence of their being — is their handicap, and they do not yet see how to transform it. Militant and dominant Islam is gone. Can Islam be anything else? It may be said roughly, but with fair adequacy, that Muslims are facing this crisis in three dif- ferent ways. First, there is a tendency to flee in despair before the advance of Christendom and to take refuge in deserts supposedly inacces- sible, or at least unattractive, to the men of the new order of things. As mountains have ever been the last abodes of liberty, so for Islam the recesses of the desert. Thus the Senusites have gradually withdrawn deeper and deeper into the 254 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Sahara and seem anxious only to avoid all con- tact with the non-Muslim world. But, secondly, there are many who have adopted no such counsel of despair, who have faith in the future of Islam and who remain face to face with the enemy and still keep up the long fight. These militant spirits will have nothing to do with the new civilization, but also will not fly before it. If active warfare were possible, they would embrace it and die in the last ditch. As it is, they are praisers of the times past ; they study the old books and write new ones of the old kind. Of them, largely, are the 'Ulama of Egypt Many of them were in sympathy with the Mahdi of the Sudan ; many still are in communi- cation with the Senusite chiefs; they have for a time succeeded in preserving the medieval char- acter of the Azhar University. Round them, if the chance were but to come, the masses of the Muslim population would rally, and among them a section of the Egyptian Nationalist party is to be found. The rest of the Nationalists fall into the third division, which consists of those Muslims who are prepared to assimilate the civilization of MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 25$ Christendom, prepared to make the attempt, at least, to bring the Muslim peoples within the circle of modern life. But it is plain that in this division there must be two elements. One element is ready to go to all lengths to modern- ize Islam. For it the modernizing is the point; not any retaining of Islam. Many of those who think in this way must recognize that the modern world and Islam are incompatible. Among these, plainly, is the Young Turk Committee. They are going steadily forward with their trans- formation of the Turkish Empire and in so doing are respecting Muslim ideas as far as possible, even making some attempt at showing that the good Muslim should be a constitutionalist and should regard his Christian fellow subject as on the same level with himself. But when Islam stands in the way of the Young Turk program, it is Islam that must yield. Sharply contrasted with this element is another, best illustrated by the Egyptian Nationalists. It, too, is progres- sive; but always with the proviso that Islani be preserved. It will have nothing to do with a progress in which any of the essence of Islam evaporates. Many, doubtless, of this party 256 ASPECTS OF ISLAM believe that this program is possible. But as the situation works itself out, there cannot be much question that they will be driven either into the party of militant conservatism or into the party whose will is to modernize, let come to Islam what may. And the division will fall according to their attitude towards their non- Muslim fellow citizens. But you may perhaps ask, What has this to do with missions ? It has everything to do with missions, if you look at missions broadly enough. What, humanly, are missions but an attempt to assimilate the ideas and ideals of all the peoples of the earth to those of the missionary, to unify the earth? And this great unifying is going on, swiftly and steadily. The only question is round what ideal it shall center. For us, can we make it the Christian faith; for Muslims can they save Islam in the great levelling. Or are the wheels of progress to crush out all ideals, and is the future civilization of the world to be woven of philosophic doubt, of common-sense attitudes and of material luxury? There is a curious side-development of Islam which looks in that direction, and which sees in the narrowed, MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 257 Utilitarian aims, in the acceptance of the lower facts of life, in the easy ideals which characterize that religion, the promise that its will be the future in the common-sense world to come, and holds that, even as the world is, Islam must be the religion of all sensible men. Here, as you see, I am dealing with ideas, for ideas in the end rule. Islam may be adding its millions in India and Africa ; but these will weigh little in the process of the centuries. Where, rather, are the germinant ideas, where the plans of life and thought which hold the future? No one, looking at essential Islam, can believe that they are there. The great curves of progress touch but seldom its surfaces. But let me turn from Islam facing that puzzling future, and look at it in the light of history, as it spread, conquered, absorbed. For the missions of Islam were all the means by which outside peoples and individuals were brought into its fold. Again we must begin with Muhammad and ask the question, In what sense, in what ways, was he a missionary? We have seen how far he could be called a prophet, and what was his 258 ASPECTS OF ISLAM kinship with the different types of prophets which were found among the Hebrews. And it was in virtue of his prophetship, or his claim to prophetship, that he was a missionary, - and his characteristics as a missionary were determined by his character as a prophet. He came forward as a Messenger of Allah to men, as the Represen- tative of Allah with men. It was not the con- tent of his teaching that was the principal thing; it was the fact that he was there to teach. From this point of view his position was: Accept me and obey me ; not, Hear the word of Allah which he has spoken to me. The result of his mission was to provide an autocratic chief, acting as representative of Allah in a theocratic state. This, you will observe, is a personality and a method very different from those of the Hebrew prophets, denouncing wickedness, exhorting to righteousness and teaching the true nature and will of Jehovah ; but remaining themselves scrupu- lously in the background and leaving to the proper authorities the carrying out of that will. And here, exactly, the door was opened wide to personal ambition and aggrandizement. The Hebrew prophets had kept apart the prophetic MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 259 and the executive offices; it had not been for the advantage of religion in Israel when by any- chance they had joined. But Muhammad was a religious politician, and grasped eageWy at secular power to enforce and carry out his theo- logical ideas. There have been many of his kind since, and they have not helped either religion or government. This was the side of Muhammad's claim which led to his first rejection by the Meccans and to their long war against him in his little state at Medina. They saw very clearly that his success would make him a king over them and destroy their genuinely Arab aristocratic rule. They thought also that it would lead to the doing away of the worship and ritual of the Ka'ba at Mecca and to the wealth which they drew there- from. The latter result should logically have followed, only in Muhammad's later life the politician overcame the theologian, and he had the skill to attach to his iconoclastic puritanism almost the whole ritual of Mecca. But his headship of both church and state stood fast. He could say most absolutely, VStat (fest mot, and it is due to him that church and state 260 ASPECTS OF ISLAM in Islam are still one and the same, indivisible. Yet, from this political cleverness, it would not, I think, be fair to conclude that he was with definite consciousness setting aside his ideals and follow- ing his ambitions. He had an entire belief in himself, and his ideals centered round himself. How the streams of deception and self-deception crossed and tangled in his brain we cannot determine. The fixed and certain thing is that his prophetship had such affinities, and that his preaching was a proclaiming of himself. So he fulfilled what he regarded as his mission to the Arabs. The content of his preaching I have already put before you. Here our interest is the relationship of that preaching to the preacher. With this resolves itself, too, the whole question of force in Islam, of Muhammad's use of the sword, as it is commonly put, and of how he gained the sword which he used. At first he could use no sword as he had none ; he could only preach himself as prophet and messenger of Allah to the Arabs. But the consciousness of Arab national unity swelled and rose in his day. He headed it, moulded it, directed it, and the sword was in his hand. MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 261 This is significantly shown by the rapid growth of his adherents and by the ways in which they joined themselves to him after his open appear- ance as a political leader and ruler at Medina. Many, doubtless, came as before, attracted as individuals, by the Faith which he preached and by his personality; but it was not long before the tribes came in to him as tribes, recognizing that in so doing they were joining the great Arab confederacy and becoming part of the Arab nation which was in the throes of birth. It is true that they had been Arabs before, but before that, again, they had been tribesmen of their several tribes, at most, parts of an ever-shifting conglomerate of groups split and rent by inter- tribal feud and conflict. Now they were begin- ning, under the hammering of Byzantium and Persia, to feel themselves Arabs against the world, and it was only by the genius of Muham- mad who furnished them with a crystallizing point that they passed from that to being Mus- lims against the world. Without Muhammad this national movement would probably have amounted to little ; the rope of desert sand would quickly have again fallen apart. Even with him 262 ASPECTS OF ISLAM and his influence Arabia as a nation did not long exist. At his death the tribes scattered to their tents; were won back with mighty efforts by his immediate successors; were for a ^hort time the conquering sword wielded by Islam — • that new thing, half faith, half nation, which had arisen and which was directed from Medina, the seat of a half monkish empire— and then finally broke asunder, to be a nation never again. And as thus in its infant days with the Arabs, so later, Islam knew how to form and use the Turks as a sword, to form and use the Sudanese as a sword. Islam remained; the peoples which it flung on the world changed and passed. But what is Islam? As well ask what Christen- dom is. It is an idea; first in the brain of Muhammad; passed on to his Church; existent and fostered there; having for a time its being in that little group of theologian-statesmen who immediately succeeded Muhammad at Medina; thereafter diffused in the body of believers. But to return. This new, short-lived Arab nation was Muhammad's personal weapon. He called himself emphatically and peculiarly the prophet of the Arabs. The former prophets had MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 263 been sent, each to a people as their own. Now the turn of the Arabs was at last come, and he was with them. And remember that for him the prophetic ideal was Moses and not Amos or Hosea. It was his to tell them the will of Allah ; but it was his also to use them against the unbelieving world as the sword of Allah. He was a prophet, not only inward, to his own people, but outward also, from his own people to the world. And so we find him in the seventh year after his migration to Medina sending letters to all the kings and governors of whom he had knowledge — to Byzantium, to Persia, to Egypt, to Abyssinia — calling upon them to submit them- selves and to accept the prophet whom Allah had sent. With these letters Arabia and its prophet claimed as a right the obedience of the world, and their rejection was an ample basis for war. The prophet had appeared, had made his public claim, had been rejected; upon the rejectors lay their own blood. Arabia was ready to overflow its bounds; it was to do so as the sword of Islam. In the last years much ink has been spilt discussing the question whether or not the Qur'an 264 ASPECTS OF ISLAM justifies unprovoked war by a Muslim state upon a state which is not Muslim. The question is purely academic, and I do not desire to enter upon it here. For Muhammad it did not exist, and nothing bearing upon it appears in the Qur'an. It arose later when Muslim states found them- selves compelled by situations of fact to live on terms of treaty, or at least understanding, with states which were not Muslim. Of such a con- tingency Muhammad never dreamt. He was there as the prophet of Allah. A part of the world hady so far, accepted him; a part had not yet It was his right to demand the obedience of all and to proceed against them if they rejected him. At the time of his death he was so proceeding. That is the historic fact, and that was his way of acting as a missionary. But with the death of Muhammad in the year eleven of the Hijra a change entered into this, as into all the aspects of Muslim development. The prophet was no longer there to guide the enforcement of his own claims and to dictate the treatment of those who obstinately opposed the truth, whether as individuals or as states. So his successors had to develop a theory on the MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 26$ subject and to work out, in practice, a set of regulations. And first, and for long, it was the relation to individual non-Muslims which had to be regulated. The great automatic wave of con- quest — in part, as we have seen, the half-conscious overflow of the surplus population of Arabia and in part the avenging advance of the armies of Allah and his prophet — had to go on until the world was subdued to the new faith. There was, therefore, a state of war with all non-Muslim countries. But within the conquered countries individual non-Muslims were bound to be left, and that, too, in great numbers. To a state the alternative offered at that time was of the Qur'an or the sword — ^join the Muslim confederacy or fight. But to an individual the alternative was the Qur'an or tribute — ^become a Muslim citizen or, by payment of certain taxes, become a pro- tected resident non-citizen. Those who thus saved their religion and their lives had no rights per se as citizens ; they had only a certain protec- tion guaranteed to them by treaty ; their property and lives were assured on the payment of certain taxes. But the names given to these taxes were sufficiently suggestive of their status. There was 266 ASPECTS OF ISLAM a poll-tax called jizya, which means "ransom," and a property tax called kharaj, which meant the revenue which a master drew from the labour of a slave. The non-Muslims thus ransomed their lives and paid to the Muslim treasury, as slaves did to their masters, a certain proportion of their property and labour. This system was a very simple development from the situation as I have already sketched it The Arab Muslims were limited in numbers and so had to be retained as an army to fight in the Path of Allah. They must not be allowed to acquire estates and to settle in the conquered lands. The original inhabitants, therefore, had to retain their landed property, but under con- dition of paying large taxes to the state, which, in its turn, supported the Muslim army. That army, when outside of Arabia, was thus to be a military, non-landed, non-productive caste sup- ported by the non-Muslim population. Within Arabia no non-Muslim might live. It was the country of the people whom Allah had honoured by sending from their midst the latent and great- est of the prophets. Further, when a non-Muslim embraced Islam, he no longer paid the poll-tax. MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 26/ his land was taken and distributed among his former fellows, who had to cultivate it and pay the tax on it, and he himself, as a member now of the dominant caste, was supported from the Muslim treasury. It is significant for the weight of the land-tax, that so many abandoned their property and embraced Islam as to lead, in time, to the breakdown of this system. What survived of it was that only Muslims could be citizens and have full civil rights, while non-Muslims, not being citizens, were under a certain protection for which they were taxed in different ways. The various non-Muslim ecclesiastical organi- zations were also, because of this fact of non-citi- zenship, given autonomy among themselves, and jurisdiction over their own people. The head of each such organization — Patriarch, Bishop, Chief Rabbi, etc., was the means of communication between the community and the Muslim state. There gradually grew up, also, a variety of ordinances limiting the liberty of action of non- Muslims as to public appearance and action, dress, worship, ecclesiastical buildings, etc. Similar regulations held throughout medieval Europe with regard to Jews, and the present (1910) 268 ASPECTS OF ISLAM conflict between the Spanish government and the Vatican is over a like denial of the right to puUic exercise of religion. In Islam the rigour with which these ordinances were enforced varied greatly irom time to time. No Muslim govem- ment has ever long been able to carry on its affairs without the assistance of Christian or Jewish officials, and these have sometimes risen to the highest positions under the state. Naturally, then, oppressive regulations upon their fellow believers would not be enforced These would show themselves prominently in public, exhibit wealth and pride, and arouse the wrath of the Muslim mob. Then there would be riots, perse- cutions, bloodshed and wholesale conversions to Islam, or sharp suppression by the government, according to the strength of the government of ' the time. Thus ruled at one time by the need of Christians to carry on the government and at another time by the jealousy of the mob, the regu- lations used to swing to and fro between sharp enforcement and harmless desuetude. But with all this friction and while the formal situation between Muslims and non-Muslims stood thus, it must not be supposed that there MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 269 were no missionary efforts in the exact sense to spread the faith of Islam. It is true that, like medieval Europe, Islam has never had mission- aries who were missionaries only. But it is probably true also that the masses of Islam have more generally, both geographically and as to periods of time, been inclined towards missionary work, towards the spread of their faith by one means or another. This goes with the other probable fact that religion, of one kind or another, and the zeal for religion, manifested in one way or another, have always, or generally, bulked more largely as elements in the life of the Muslim peoples than in that in Christendom. Of course, there have been dead periods in Islam when the feeling ruled that the matter was in the hands of Allah and should be left to him, and there have been dead districts where the intellectual energy of a whole country died down for a time. In Christendom, too, there have been periods and centres of fervent religious activity when religion was accepted by practically the mass of the people as the one thing worth while in life. But, broadly, the situation holds, I think, as I have stated it, and the impulse in Islam to spread and 2/0 ASPECTS OF ISLAM propagate itself has manifested itself through direct movements of the people and not through the efforts of a class especially set apart thereto. Naturally we find this outstandingly on the part of theologians and men professionally in religion. Wandering saints, ascetics and dar- wishes would probably come nearest to our professional missionaries. But even with them it was not the object of their lives but simply a by-product of their religious energy. In Mus- lim religious biography we meet again and again with stories of how fervent a preacher of Islam the subject of the biography had been and of how thousands had been converted by him, of Christians or Jews, as the case might be. These tales are sometimes rather suggestive of mob- violence, as when we read that ten to twenty thousand were converted on the occasion of the funeral of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, a great canonist who died in A. H. 241 (A. D. 855), or when we find that such conversions en masse followed the fall by violence of some Christian or Jewish vizier. But besides these, we find in Islam merchants, tradesmen, travellers, all sorts and conditions, taking a hand — direct and some- MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 27I times heavy — in the spread of their faith. Of controversy, too, there are many traces and remains. J have already referred to the influence on Muslim theology exercised by John of Damascus, the great Father of the Greek Church. That influence was probably, to a con- siderable extent, through controversy, as we find one of his tractates arranged as a manual for that purpose. It falls into sections beginning, "When the Saracen says such and such to you, you must answer so and so." Evidently at that time Muslims entered into argument with Christians. Again, at the court of al-Ma'mun, the *Abbasid Khalifa who died in A. H. 218 (A. D. 833), and who was a rationalistic Muslim believing firmly in himself and in his own pontifical right to rule the Faith, there took place a very interesting written controversy between two of his courtiers, one, who was of the family of the Prophet, and another, al-Kindi by name, who was a learned Christian. The invita- tion by the former to embrace Islam directed to al-Kindi may not have come down to us complete, as the book, having been early put under Muslim ban, has reached us only in Christian copies; but 272 ASPECTS OF ISLAM that of al-Kindi is certainly complete and is a very remarkable document, especially significant for the freedom of utterance permitted by al-Ma'mun. After his time no Christian could express himself so bitingly in public, and it is probable that al-Ma'mun, for himself, had an indifferent attitude towards all religions, though as head of Islam he meant to see to it that those of his subjects who were Muslims should hold a faith adapted more or less to his own ideas. But when we look broadly at the attitude of Muslims in general towards Christians in general, we are confronted by at least three questions. What, we must ask, did Muslims know about Christians ? What amount of knowledge of Chris- tendom outside and of the Christians amongst them had really reached them ? Second, what did they think about them? How did they represent to themselves those unknown external powers and those strange s^mi-foreign person- alities in their midst? And, third, how did they feel towards them? What were their attitudes and the impulses working upon them in those relationships? Again, we might classify our problems in another way, and ask what the MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 2/3 knowledge, ideas, attitudes of Muslim rulers, of the Muslim state, qua state, were; what those of Muslim theologians and learned men generally, and what those of the Muslim masses. It is plain that the question which here confronts us is very complex and has many sides. All that I can do now is to illumine some of these in order that the great tangle may become more vivid and real, and that some of its essential aspects may be brought out. The knowledge, ideas and attitudes of the theo- logians have already been made tolerably plain in the last lecture. To the picture of confusion and ignorance which is there given, I will add only one detail which goes far to explain the whole. The Muslim is warned in a tradition from the Prophet, which all, I believe, accept as genuine, not to be on terms of intimate friendship with any unbeliever. This has been received by religious Muslims as meaning that, while non-Muslims are to be treated with courtesy, intercourse, even, with them should not be cultivated, friendship with them cannot exist. Ash-Sha'rani, a Cairene mystic of the sixteenth century and, otherwise, a very keen, pure and i8 274 ASPECTS OF ISLAM broad-minded man, in one of his booRS in which he recites the duties which the Prophet has laid upon all believers, reckons the observance of this tradition among them. In present day Egypt, also, I have known it cited in warning by one Muslim to another. The remembrance of the existence of this tradition used to follow me in my relations with Muslims in the East and affected, to an extent which was perhaps unwar- ranted, my sense of the reality of the intimacies which I seemed to have gained. But you will easily see how impossible, with such a point of departure, all real sympathy and understanding must be. The man who is occupied, in any way, in holding others at arm's length, can gain no real knowledge of them. Nor ^^^ the man who always looks down on others from a height of superiority, as do the theologians of Islam and indeed all Muslims. On both these points It is for our missionaries to take admonition. The attitude of the Muslim state as a state must also be tolerably clear. On one side it inherited the tradition that Islam was a conquer- ing force, the object of which was to subdue the world to the true faith of Allah ; only when that MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF iilUSLIMS 275 was accomplished could there be peace. Signifi- cantly, in this connection, canon law divides the whole world into two, Dar al-Islam, "Abode of Islam,'' and Dar al harb, "Abode of War"— where Islam was not there was war. And this attitude of mind, it must always be remembered, belongs permanently to a Muslim state; it is fundamental to Islam. But on another side, Muslim states, ever since the first century or two of free, unthinking conquest, have been com- pelled to live on some terms or other with Christian states. And they could not very well say to these Christian states, "We are, you must understand, strictly at war with one another ; we are deadly enemies and must be until we have utterly subdued you ; we do not recognize you in any way as independent states and princes; you are simply rebels to Allah and to us; but on account of trade and the peaceful side of life generally, we are compelled to have understand- ings if not treaties with one another. Therefore we . . ." Yet that is really what diplomacy down to the eighteenth century between Muslims and Christians meant; what it means to this day for very many Muslims. Here is an example of 276 ASPECTS OF ISLAM a detail. When the rulers of Morocco in the eighteenth century had of necessity to enter into intercourse by letter with the French government, they dropped the use of all titles for themselves to avoid having to give titles to the French king. It was simply Muhammad ibn Abdallah to Louis XVI. This was after an attempt to soothe their conscience by giving as a title instead of malik or sultdn, the word tdghiya which means a "usurper" or the "head of a rebellious sect"^ More recently other subterfuges have been dis- covered. The canon lawyers, urged by necessity, have ruled that a country in which the peculiar usages of Islam are protected and its injunctions, even in part, followed, must be reckoned as an Abode of Islam. This covers all Europe except, perhaps, Spain ; there the ashes are still hot. But this, at least for the masses of the people, is strictly a temporary subterfuge. Lift the neces- sity — as at present in the Central Arabian states — and the old claim would reappear ; that is, except for those who were farsighted enough to see its permanent impossibility. And the same change has come to the Muslim *De Sacy, Chrestomathie arabe. III, pp. 332 ff. MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 277 States in their attitude towards the Christians within their borders. From being a class toler- ated and protected in a fashion, because it was impossible to convert them all or kill them all, Christian subjects of Muslim powers have come, through pressure and protection from without, to have an existence in some respects preferable to that of the Muslims themselves. The mysteri- ous charm protecting the European has come, in part, to cover the Christian native, though always there hangs upon the horizon the black cloud of possible massacre. The Muslim mob is ever there, and occasionally there appears a Muslim ruler, like 'Abd al-Hamid, who nourishes great schemes of a united and dominant Islam. But, finally, all that I have just said is apart from the experiment at present being tried in the new Turkey. There the Young Turk party is attempting to modernize Islam without destroy- ing it. They may succeed in the modernizing, but it will be Islam no longer. Nor, probably, will the Young Turks be greatly distressed at the loss. They are thinking of Turkey and not of Islam. The Egyptian nationalists, on the other hand, are thinking more of Islam 278 ASPECTS OF ISLAM than of Egypt. And therein is their weakness. So much for Muslim states as states. What of the educated ruling classes generally? How have they felt towards Christians? That has depended enormously upon the Christians whom they met. The cultured, educated Muslim meet- ing the average native Christian could hardly be favourably impressed. He would see there, if he looked at all, the virtues and vices, strength and weakness of a subject race. Christianity, to make an impression, would need to be Chris- tianity from without. But, until the last half- century, the Christianity that came to Islam did not come in very peaceful and attractive forms. It is a curious fact that the intercourse between Islam and Christendom in the medieval period was more intimate and close than it has ever been since. There was intercourse then, to and fro, almost as much as now, and the peoples on both sides were far closer to one another in ideas and fundamental civilization. Certainly Chaucer's Wife of Bath may have pilgrimaged three times to Jerusalem and had no more to do with the people there than a Cook's tourist does now. But Chaucer's Knight could hardly have MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 279 been a free lance in Morocco and Asia Minor without making his own impression on his Saracen comrades, and the "old captive" who, in his latter days, wrote Aucassin et Nicolete and brought back from Tunis to Europe his recollections of the public story-teller, with his rdbab and intercalated scraps of chanted verse, the artistic form of the "Cante-fable,** must have given his fellows among the Paynims some strange ideas of Christian ways. Fortunately we have in the autobiography of Usama ibn Munqidh, a Muslim gentleman who died in A. D. 1188, a year after the capture of Jerusalem, a record of how the Christians there impressed him. Those who had been longest in the country he liked best; they had become more civilized, that is had taken on oriental manners. He got on especially well with the Templars; they even gave him a corner of their church m which he could say his Muslim prayers. In general he gives the impression that very little separated them from the Muslims and thus throws a good deal of light upon the accusations against them, under which their order finally perished. But his especial wonder, as it is the 280 ASPECTS OF ISLAM wonder still of every Muslim, was the easy inter- course between the sexes and the lack of jealousy on the part of the men. His attitude of mind seems to have been much like that of Jaques in As you like it, '"Here comes a pair of very strange beasts." Of serious religious converse, I do not remember any trace. But that, if his conversations were mostly with the Templars, need not surprise us. His contemporary, Saladin, knew Christendom only under shield and had the old attitudes. There is an interesting passage in the biography of him by his close companion and friend, Baha ad-Din, which tells how he stood once, looking out over the Syrian sea and described, as though talking to himself, his hope, when the crusaders were finally driven out, of taking ship and subduing them in their own lands. That such should have been his thoughts was natural enough. The latter part of his life had been spent fighting in the Path of Allah; he was an amateur theologian, too, in a way, and that would effectually close his mind to new ideas; we have no record, I think, that he ever met any Christian who could have commended Christianity to him. MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 28I As for the masses of the Muslim people, of all times down to this day, their mind on this subject is easily reached. Take the degree of knowledge of Islam in medieval Europe and its feelings and attitudes towards Muslims, all as reflected in popular romances, prose and metrical, and you have exactly that of Islam with regard to Christendom. We learn, too, the same thing directly, if we take the trouble to read a few of the innumerable popular romances in Arabic deal- ing with the defense and spread of the Faith. Some of them have found their way even into the Arabian Nights and have thus become gener- ally accessible. Many of these tell stories of the crusades; but from the other side. Others tell of love between Muslim and Christian and of triumphant flight to the lands of Islam. Others, again, of conversions to the true faith, wrought through divine revelation and miracle. Prac- tically all the motifs of our popular medieval literature occur also in Arabic. Of course there are differences of treatment. One is a markedly greater inclination towards theological discussion. The audience that can be amused by a solemn recitation of the Qur'an is still more amused 282 ASPECTS OF ISLAM when the Muslim champion pierces his adversary with logic before over-throwing him with the lance. One tale, copied and printed again and again and spread from Spain to Persia, is nothing but a recital by a slave-girl of her theological, legal and quasi-scientific knowledge, in which she overcomes all the scholars and sages brought against her. For another difference, I do not know anywhere in Arabic a scene of the brutality of that in the metrical romance where Richard Lion-Heart has cooked and served before him the head of a Saracen and eats part of it. The mar- vels, too, in the Muslim stories are more numerous and luxuriant. And the circle of ideas portrayed is that of the crowds in present day Cairo, Damascus and Stamboul. There these tales are still heard with eagerness and zest. But given this interest in the artistic portrayal of scenes in the spread of the Faith by conquest or by persuasion, what characteristics do we find in Muslims when actually engaged in these things? How do they meet the reality when thus rejoicing in the romance? Again, medieval Europe is our clue. As there and then so now for the oriental reality and romance are still one. MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 283 These stories which he delights to hear are for him realistic and historical. He can imagine himself at any time being caught up in the action of one of them ; they might, so far as he knows, have befallen his next door neighbor or a man in the next lane. The theological discussions are his. Even the incidents might be his. The zeal and hope and trust are his. If it came to him to go out and wander in heathen and half- heathen lands, what happens in these tales he feels sure might happen to him. And they do go out and thus wander. As I have already said, the nearest approach that Islam has produced to the professional missionary is the wandering darwish-saint. The border- lands of Islam are full of them. It is they through whose labours Africa has so nearly become a Muslim continent. Into the recesses of Asia they have gone with their teaching. Theirs is the religious romance and the reality as well of the spread of Islam. And these men have the status of saints. They are wonder- workers; at the least, Allah hears and answers their prayers. But when we call them saints, we must not think of men occupied with nothing 284 ASPECTS OF ISLAM else but things of the other world, for whom this world does not exist. There are many such saints in Islam ; but not of those are the mission- ary saints whose names are written in the history of its spread. These were statesmen-saints, who went out into the border-lands, drew round them little circles of devoted disciples by their preach- ing and then, when strong enough, founded states to be nuclei of further Muslim conquest. In this way the history of Muhammad has reproduced itself again and again among his followers. The truth is that there lies in the essence of Islam a necessity to dominate and an inability to distinguish Church and State. It is not only the Muslim missionary who founds a state; the same fate regularly befalls in Islam the suc- cessful religious reformer. It is as if Luther had added another to the innumerable German princi- palities, or Calvin had become actually as well as virtually the head of Geneva. And in such a saint-founded state in Islam, there follow for non-Muslims, always and most intelligibly, religious pressure and civil disabilities. These are saved, as in earlier times, only by economic necessities. If however they embrace Islam, MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 285 they enter the Muslim brotherhood and become full citizens. But given the case where Islam penetrates where the founding of a Muslim state is impos- sible, how does it meet this limitation upon its natural development? The situation of Islam in China illustrates this difficulty. There it has penetrated into the midst of the Chinese family- state, a state which has a strong feeling of loose but absolute unity; has spread there, and now exists with many million adherents. The con- sequence is that there Muslims form, so far as they can, a state within the state. They are recognized by the other Chinese as a great national danger. Again and again they have risen in revolt and have been crushed. How they will be affected by the opening of China and by the Pan-Islamic movement is still to be seen. It is certain that they cannot assimilate themselves to and join heartily In the general development of China. In India there was at one time similar unrest. The Wahhabite move- ment spread there and was checked with the greatest difficulty. How much of it still lies beneath the surface is unknown. The policy of 286 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the British government has been to give the freest liberty to all institutions of Islam in any way possible. And I have little question that Spain would have had a like problem if the Moors had not been expelled. Their expulsion was an economic misfortune but a political necessity. In contact, as they were, with the Muslim powers across the Straits, they could not, in the long run, have submitted to Christian rule. Only when China was absolutely closed to the world were the Chinese Muslims in any measure quiet. In all this, how, for better or for worse, does Christianity contrast? There is at least one outstanding point. Christianity, too, has gone out to uncivilized and semi-civilized races, and wherever it has gone, the race carrying it has come to rule. But this is, apparently, more a matter of race than of religion. The status of oriental Christians and their acceptance of that status contrast sharply with the attitude of Mus- lims who must dominate. Conversely, Europeans cannot be subject to non-Europeans, but orientals can. In Christianity, then, per se, this necessity of dominating does not enter. But in the combina- tion of the necessarily dominant European race MISSIONARY ACTIVITY OF MUSLIMS 28/ With Christianity lies the greatest problem of the Christian missionary. He himself has very seldom been a conqueror or a founder of a state or a ruler — the Jesuits in Paraguay and the Americans in Hawaii were outstanding exceptions — but his European fellows and companions have been all these things. In consequence, while Christian governments do not exercise religious pressure, but treat all faiths on the same level, a native Christian is still a native, with a gulf between himself and a Christian of the dominant race. In the modern world, at least, Christianity has never been able by its weight and breadth to obliterate the distinctions of race. To have done that with success is the glory and the danger of Islam.

Let me introduce you to this aspect of Islam by bringing together a number of my own experi- ences in Cairo and elsewhere. These experiences were of all kinds and will illustrate how the past is still the present in Muslim lands, even while the future is knocking at the door. At Cairo I had an interview with the Head of the Azhar University, still the principal intellect- ual center of the Islam of the old type. He was so good as to enquire about my Arabic studies, and especially whether I had read formal logic. I was fortunately able, with a good conscience, to say that I had read some logic in Arabic and to name the book, whereat he was rather surprised and greatly pleased. But his question was sig- nificant for all Muslim higher education. It stops at the tools. It trains the memory and the power of reasoning — ^always in formal methods — and then gives to neither any adequate material on which to work. The memory is burdened MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 289 with a verbatim knowledge of the Qur*an and some outlines of theology and law, and the reason is exhausted in elaborate argumentations there- from deduced. On the same occasion I was taken into the mosque of Abu Dawud, which is across the street from the Azhar mosque and is used as an annex to it. There some classes were going on, and one of them was quite largely attended by pupils of all ages from little boys to bearded men. It had a black-board, too, beside which the shaykh, an old man with a kindly, interested face, sat on a high chair. He was evidently an excellent teacher, for his whole class was following with lively attention while he worked out for them on the board the complicated processes of simple addition. The mystery of carrying over the tens was his subject of the moment, and it was fine to watch the verve and life with which he Ufted his class along. But why, you may well ask, should a university be teaching simple addition? The answer is that the teaching of even simple addition is a modern reform. At one time Muslim universities did not teach even that. They neglected all mathematical and physical X9 290 ASPECTS OF ISLAM science as outside of their province and to be given over to the crafts and trades as a part of their technical training. Of course, there were, from time to time, partial exceptions, but the broad position of Muslim universities stood thus. The most for which they needed arithmetic was to reckon out the calendar and the hours for prayer, and in these calculations they soon came to follow purely mechanical and traditional methods. The few mathematicians, astronomers and scientists of Islam, then, were independent scholars, at most extra-mural teachers. But the independent teacher has always had a place in Islam. Muslim education and instruc- tion began with them, and they have retained their rights. Once, in the mosque of al-Mu'ayyad, I came upon a scene which carried me back to the earliest days of Islam. An old man was seated in the great colonnade with his back to a pillar. Round him was a little circle of half a dozen students, each with book in hand, to whom he was reading and explaining a text. The lesson closed and they rose up, one by one, picked up their shoes and went away. But first they each kissed the hand of their old teacher. MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 2^1 and he was left sitting at his pillar and reading. So had the founders of Muslim science sat, before colleges or universities were dreamt of, when each scholar taught for himself, and his disciples went forth with his personal certificate and boasted of the learning of their master. I have already spoken of the primary position which the learning by heart of the Qur'an holds in Muslim education. If your ears are quick to catch the rhythm and chant of the sacred text, you will hear it wherever students are to be found. In S. Sophia, under the great dome, I heard a Turkish student being trained in the precise nuance of pronunciation of the Arabic, for him a foreign tongue. And at al-Bira, in Palestine, about ten miles north from Jerusalem, at a village school held in an old oven, out of which the scholars swarmed like rabbits, I learned how it was possible in Semitic for the same verbal root to mean "to cry out" and "to read." The dux of the school was put up to read to me from the Qur'an. At once his lips became the bell of a trumpet; his face was as bronze and his mouth and throat were as brass, and with the hoarse, metallic falsetto of a phonograph he rendered 292 ASPECTS OF ISLAM his piece. He had his book before him; but it was evident that he was reciting from memory with the precise tones and inflections into which he had been mechanically drilled. It would be hard to over-estimate the proportion of time and labor given to this accomplishment. It is a pretty custom in the Muhammadan East to combine public fountains and primary schools. You will find fountains without schools; but rarely a school without a fountain. Every tourist in Cairo will remember the exquisite little kuttdb, as the primary school is called in Egypt, of *Abd ar-Rahman on the Nahhasin. On the street level is the fountain-room, gay with blue and green faience tiles and bronze gratings, and above is the school-room with open arches on three sides, giving a magnificently distracting view down the ever-changing thoroughfare, and from which through school hours comes steadily the drone of childish voices. One afternoon I climbed the stone spiral-stair which leads to the school- room, and an attendant showed me the copy-books of the pupils. Again the unchanging East revealed itself. These boys and girls were copying admonitions on manners and minor morals and MUSUM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 293 especially on the respect with which they ought to behave towards their fathers, all exactly as I had read again and again in medieval Arabic text-books on ethics and the training of the young. Nay, the chain went farther back and there were sentences which might have dropped from the Book of Proverbs. If Islam has wasted much time in mechanical use of the memory, it has known also the value for conduct and habit of steady drill and admonition.* I said "boys and girls" above, for a certain number of girls attend the kuttobs, though the proportion of them is small. One of the prettiest scenes I saw in Cairo was a little mob of boys and girls, many-coloured and chattering, rushing out of the Azhar, and jumping into their shoes as they passed the sacred threshold. School was just over, for in the Azhar, as in some American universities, you can begin at the oriental equiv- alent to the kindergarten and go on, in the same institution, until you graduate as a learned theo- logian. But mixed education in Islam does not go beyond the kuttdb. In the older times the *I venture to refer in this connection to my lecture on The moral education of the young among Muslims, printed in the International Journal of Ethics, XV, pp. 286 ff. 294 ASPECTS OF ISLAM higher education of girls was carried on privately, and the same still holds in the untouched Muslim world. Even under the English control in Egypt, the school education of girls has not proceeded beyond the secondary stage. Yet it must not be thought that there have not been in Islam and are not now women-scholars and even professors. We find traces of them in literature, and one young Syrian, whom I met in Egypt, told me that his mother had received such a scholarly education. In that case, and I think that the explanation will hold of the others generally, her father had been a learned shaykh and had taught her all that he knew. Islam has had many families of scholars with the golden line of learning running on from one generation to another. So when it came to a single daughter, she would heir the tradition. But there is another side to education in the East, for us a picturesque side, although picturesque with ignorance and corruption. The kuttdbs may be said to be the basis of the educa- tional system, yet the teachers in them are a byword everywhere for sloth, immorality, greed and Ignorance. The scholar Islam has always MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 295 respected ; but upon the schoolmaster it has always looked down, as feeble of wits and low of conduct. If he were not so, the Muslim asks, why is he a schoolmaster, and how could he be otherwise, consorting always with boys? The idea that a scholar might profitably give his life to school education has never, so far as my knowledge goes, existed in Islam. University education and the training in the darwish fraternities are, of course, on another footing. In these genuine devotion to an ideal of service and discipleship to a master have always existed and still exist. Here is a story to illustrate the other side — the picturesque but unhealthy kuttdb and the fiql, or schoolmaster, who makes it so. It was told me by a former Egyptian Minister of Education. He was the best that Egypt has ^ ever seen, and he knew the necessity in the East of immediate control. So he would wander round, like Harun ar-Rashid, to see things for himself, and paid unexpected visits to his subordinates. On one such visit to a kuttdb, he was puzzled by the multi- tude of strips of paper with sentences on them, dangling from the ceiling. The -Rql was not com- municative as to what they were for; so he was 296 ASPECTS OF ISLAM admonished to clear them away and keep his place in better order. But what they could be doing there was the problem. A woman whom the explained. She was coming for a charm, and the Hqt would sell her one of those strips that suited her case. They bore sentences from the Holy Book, and hanging there, blown about by the breath of the innocent boys reciting the Holy Book, they acquired double virtue. They were, therefore, of sovereign efficacy, whether carried as amulets, or washed off into water which was then to be drunk. The Hql, in this case, wished to compromise on undertaking not to put up any new charms as his stock diminished, and urged that it would be impious to destroy those already there with the texts written upon them. He had eventually to be dismissed. No doubt he was a very much astonished man at being treated with such irreligious rigour. But in this case you will observe the magical value of the written word and the atmosphere in which the masses of Muslim youth must have grown up. I have no reason to suppose that he would have been in any way exceptionable among the MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 297 fiqis of a generation ago. The times were chang- ing and he was not changing with them. Let me now turn from these episodes, characteristic as they are, to a more systematic consideration of the whole question. There seems to have been no science of educa- tion, in the modern sense, amongst Muslims; at least, I can find no department of Arabic literature dealing specifically with pedagogy. The nearest approach to such a science is to be found in books on ethical and religious training, which are con- nected, though remotely, with the Greek treatises on ethics. These, however, tell mostly what a boy should be taught and only very occasionally how he may best be taught. It is true that valu- able remarks on this subject occur here and there, and that some exceptional men gave attention to it. With the systems of one or two of them I shall deal later. They made no impression on the general Muslim mind. Nor is this to be wondered at. Muslim practice was to repeat aloud until the thing was learned, learned, that is, by heart. They had observed, too, that no special thought was called for, only continued repetition. And, as a stimulus to the repetition, 298 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the Prophet had wisely remarked, "Verily the green rod is one of the trees of Paradise." Mus- lim theory, on the other hand, was that while the repetition was going on, Allah coordinately pro- duced knowledge in the heart. The two were separate things ; but mysteriously co-related. Let me illustrate this from the usage of the Arabic language itself. There are two verbs in Arabic meaning "to know," 'alima and 'arafa. 'Alima means simply "to know" ; you find the knowledge in your mind, and that is all there is about it. Of course, you know, too, that Allah put it there. But 'arafa means to observe a thing and therefore to know it. It is the German kennen, and the things which you thus know are ma'drif, Kennt- nisse. Now the whole educational vocabulary of Arabic is derived from the root 'alima and is related to this instinctive God-given knowledge. With this dependence on the direct working of Allah systems of pedagogy could hardly co-exist. It is the exact opposite of our theories of taking notice and paying attention. We may, for convenience and clarity, divide education in Islam under three heads: primary education ; technical education ; theological educa- MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 299 tion. The immense majority of Muslims would not have recognized technical education as per- taining to our subject, and, also, would have held that all education was and must be theological. But taking this division, which will, I think, justify itself in the sequel, the system of primary education is already to some extent before you. There seems to have been no control of iiqls by the state. A man might set up as one on a very slender store of knowledge. He had only to put on a large turban, open a school and trust to his luck. But a large proportion of the primary schools were, like the public fountains to which they were attached, supported by funds in waqf, or mortmain. In that case the schoolmaster would be appointed by some board of trustees. The education in these kuttdbs centred and centres round the Qur'an. After a boy has learned the alphabet he is taught to read from the Qur'an, and the immense bulk of his work thereafter is to learn the Qur'an by heart. It is rarely, of course, that he reaches the end of that book ; but to be a hdfis, a "holder" of the Qur'an in its entirety, is the goal set before the Muslim boy, and on that everything else must wait. Inciden- 300 ASPECTS OF ISLAM tally, along with the Qur'an, he may learn some plain writing ; he will have some religious instruc- tion and get by heart some prayers. But writing and, still more, arithmetic, are regarded as belong- ing to business and to be learned in business rather than at school. All the above, of course, belongs to unreformed Islam. Primary schools in Egypt and elsewhere are in a very confused state of transition. Theological education and university education may be regarded, for our present case, as inter- changeable terms. All Muslim science revolved round theology and what could not be brought into such dependence was gradually rejected. It began with the stating, developing and defense of the faith. The first scholars and teachers were theologians, and all their interests connected with the youthful growth of their theological system. Their jurisprudence was a system of church law — canon law in the precise sense — and as the state was essentially theocratic its theory was inextricably intertwined with theology. In all aspects of life the theological motive dominated; every path of thought led back to Allah. Then the Greek civilization broke in MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 3OI through the two doorways of Syriac and Persian upon this church-state. For a time, an impression seemed to be made. Al-Ma'mun (reg. A. H. 198-218 = A. D. 813-833) founded at Baghdad an academy of science, and the Fatimids long after (A. H. 396 = A. D. 1005), following their bent, founded at Cairo a Dar al-hikma, or Abode of Wisdom. But it was all of no avail. The Muslim mind had received its bias, and its university was to be a school of theology. In the development of this education three stages may roughly be traced. From the earliest times instruction was given by the learned in mosques. This instruction was on a private basis, and the mosque was used for convenience. It was the common meeting-place and was free to all for any lawful purpose. The pupils paid their teachers and received certificates from them individually for the courses which they had attended. The subjects, from the first, were tHe reading and interpreting of the Qur'an, the pass- ing on and the explanation of the traditions from Muhammad and of the whole corpus of canon law. Later were gradually added scho- lastic theology, grammar, lexicography, prosody 3Q2 ASPECTS OF ISLAM I and rhetoric of Arabic, including a great deal of what we would call belles lettres, logic and such elements of mathematics and astronomy as were needed for calendar calculations. A second stage was reached when these teachers were subsidized and organized by the state into teaching corporations. Private individuals, also, endowed similar corporations, and mosques were assigned to them or built for their use, according to the earlier custom of the individual teachers. These were then called madrasas. How early this change took place is quite uncertain. The final development, which we fihd first at Naisabur in Khurasan, in A. H. 459 (=A. D. 1066), was the equipment of these corporations with funds for the support of the students. So al-Ghazzali himself tells us that he and his brother became students at a madrasa when their own money was all gone. They thus got food for their need. But though the individual teachers had been thus gathered into continuous corporations, their personalities were in no way merged in these organizations. Nothing of the nature of our general graduation or degree appeared ; the thing MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 303 sought by the student was still the certificate of the individual teacher. And this had a further development, resembling, but far broader than, the wanderings of German students from one university to another. Whenever a teacher of mark appeared, students would flock from the remotest Muslim countries to learn from him and get his certificate. This was fostered, too, by the desire of Muslim students to gather together as many traditions handed down from the Prophet as possible, and these from the best and most immediate authorities. Almost incredible stories are told of the journeys made and the collections of traditions formed under the influence of this ambition. And along with the traditions, the teacher gave the student formal written permis- sion to pass them on to others. By this means the student was enabled to take a place in the long chain of traditionalists through whose ears and lips the sayings and doings of the Prophet had gone ; he obtained a humble part in what was, in a sense, an apostolic succession. In the Azhar at the present day general examinations have taken the place of the professor's personal certificate in all subjects except those traditions. There the 304 ASPECTS OF ISLAM unbroken past has maintained itself, and the student still receives the professor's permission to be a bearer of tradition. We are now left with all the arts and sciences which cannot be made ancillary to theology. These we may group, for convenience, under the, for us, familiar term of "technical education." It is true that the Muslim, on his side, would have refused to regard them as education at all, and that we, on our side, must perilously stretch the word "technical" if it is to cover our present subject. But the idea of technical education lies, undoubtedly, in the centre, and from it all the arts and sciences now to be considered can be reached. Philosophy may, perhaps, to us seem to lie farthest apart of all; but even philosophy is thought of by the Muslim as the special pur- suit of a class of men called philosophers, and not as the science of the sciences, the ultimate theory of all being. The philosophers them- selves may have had that view ; Islam has never yielded it to them. And the teaching, even, of the theorizings of the philosophers, was never a university subject. When a Muslim studied it, he did so individually and secretly with what MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 305 books he could find. Hostile descriptions of philosophy and attacks upon it were, of course, a normal part of scholastic theology as regularly taught. We have already seen how far mathematics and astronomy were admitted to the sacred circle. Further pursuit of them — after the early 'Abbasid period of culture had passed — was due to individ- ual eccentricity. The other physical sciences fell naturally into the training of the physician. That must have been affected by the great hos- pitals at Baghdad and elsewhere, the last heirs of the Persian school of medicine at Gondeshapur ; the pursuit of science under the Fatimids and the Assassins was so apart from the main orthodox current that no reckoning need be taken of it. But in general, the physician was trained by the physician, and the traditions of medicine tended to linger among Jews and Christians more than among Muslims. Again, the arts as opposed to the crafts did not exist in Islam ; the same words, san'a and sina^a, stood for both art and craft. There were no fine arts in our sense. The artist, rather, was an artisan, and the artisan was often an artist. 306 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Calligraphy, illuminating, miniature-painting were the work of craftsmen; to painting on the grand scale w t have only a handful of allusions ; at best it was decorative. It is as though the artists of the Renaissance had done nothing but adorn manuscripts or walls on a day's wage. Sculpture did not exist; but carving took its place and was a craft like painting. But the artisan in Islam was also an artist, in so far that he designed for himself as he went along. Of these artisan-artists we find little or no individual mention. Save when some outstanding work has to be mentioned, they vanish into the anonymity of the guild. There are no biographical diction- aries of calligraphers, painters, carvers — ^artists in general — while of poets there are very many. At the most their individual mention will come in books dealing with the history of the craft. Architecture, too, was in the hands of the builders, and there is no distinction possible in Arabic between architect and master-builder. In this respect, even medieval Europe had made a further development with its architect-monks. At the highest, the architect-builder was a mathe- matician and an engineer; his only touch with MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 307 pure theory was through mathematics. And down to the Turkish period it may be said broadly that these architect-builders were not Muslims. There was never any such thing as Arab architecture, and when we speak of Muslim architecture, all that can be meant under that phrase is the architecture developed for Muslim purposes in Muslim countries by non-Muslim builders on Byzantine, Roman or Persian models. The vehicles by which this knowledge was preserved, developed and taught were the trade guilds, which were and are highly organized in the East. These had a fixed apprentice system, and the master workman was called the mu'allim or "teacher." It is curious evidence of the pre- dominance of Christians in these organizations, that mu'allim came also to be an ordinary word for a Christian. He was a teacher, whatever else he might be. In the guild his instruction was genuine and thorough. By it the secrets of the craft were passed down and also tales of its foundation, like those of free-masonry, and of its first workmen. If any one wished, then, to acquire a craft or art, whether as amateur or as professional, his only way was to put him- 308 ASPECTS OF ISLAM self under one of these masters. The primary schools, for example, might possibly teach writing in a certain rude, elementary way — ^the scholar's or the business man's hand. To learn an elegant hand it was necessary to go to a calligrapher. Similarly, the ordinary operations of commercial arithmetic could be learned from a professional weigher in a bazaar/ Whatever knowledge, then, could not easily be passed on by one of these three channels tended to vanish. The instruction in the primary schools, under the public contempt of the schoolmaster, would naturally become worse and worse. That afforded by the guilds and by professional men generally would equally naturally crystallize into trade secrets, revivified only from time to time by the genius of some learner. The universities would afford the only continuous protection to culture and humane learning. But they were primarily theological schools, and every subject taught in them had to justify its existence by a theological test and to pay a theological tribute. It was natural, then, that these unattached, free, * On trade-guilds in present-day Damascus, see a pa- per by Elia Qudsl in the Proceedings of the Sixth Con- gress of Orientalists, ii., pp. 1-34. MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 309 useless — ^as it would seem — speculations, which are the food of the true intellectual life, should gradually be rejected, should dwindle, peak and pine. Then as now, when the subjects taught in a university have to justify their existence at the bar of usefulness, it is ill with the future of that university, and with the civilization which it represents/ But while these were the paths on which Islam moved and the ends which it reached, we must not think that no Muslim ever saw the problem of teaching more clearly or worked out more efficient plans of education. We find traces, from time to time, of such insurgents, and conspicuous among them is Ibn Khaldun, the Moorish histor- ian or, rather, philosopher on history, who died in A. H. 808 (A. D. 1405). In his Prolegomena he devotes to education a number of sections full of good sense, but which had no effect whatever on the practice of the Muhammadan peoples. Their usefulness for us is that they, while show- ing Ibn Khaldun's clear insight, show us also ^ I have dealt at greater length with the utilitarianism of Islam, religious and secular, in my Religious Attitude and Life of Islam, pp. 119, ff. It had vast consequences. 310 ASPECTS OF ISLAM many elements in the situation which he was combatting. Thus one is directed against the prevalent multiplication of minor treatises and commen- taries and "methods" of different kinds which the student was required to read and learn before he could fairly reach the subject itself. He gives two illustrations of this. One is the Malikite school of canon law, that chiefly followed in North Africa. The student could spend his whole life in reading treatise after treatise on this, commentary and super-commentary, and at the end have no more than he would have got from a single sound manual. They were all everlastingly reiterating in different words the same points. The other is Arabic philology, which no one, in Ibn Khaldun's opinion, could ever control in its entirety, certainly no one since the time of the early masters and founders of the science. He had heard of a certain contemporary grammarian in Egypt, Ibn Hisham, who had the reputation of having mastered it all ; but who could follow him! And Arabic philology was a strictly ancillary science, a mere tool for the study of others. There can be no question that MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 3II Ibn Khaldun has here laid his finger on one of the great weaknesses, not only of Muslim pedagogy, but of the whole Muslim civilization. The rage of commentary writing and the willingness to write commentaries that were simple compila- tions or re-hashings of the old, — "chewed by blind old scholiasts o'er and o'er*' — ^had sapped originality and independence out of the Muslim mind. They became afraid of the new and sought always to shelter themselves under the words of some departed master. Much of the responsibility^ for this attitude of mind must be laid to the doctrine of the imitation of the Prophet. The principle of unquestioning discipleship wiped out all free initiative. The next section deals with the reverse evil, yet one sprung from the same root of dependence on the wisdom of the past. Highly abbreviated text-books were much in use, as is the case to this day ; every Azhar student has his little bundle of mutun, as they are now called. The first task of a student when he approached a new subject was to learn such an abstract by heart ; after that he might go on to discover what it meant. Ibn Khaldun had many objections to this. For the 312 ASPECTS OF ISLAM sake of conciseness obscure words were used. The student's command of Arabic was injured by the compressed style. Having to learn it all by heart at once, he had no gradual introduction to the difficulties of the subject. He was over- whelmed by a mob of unexplained and novel ideas. Ibn Khaldun was emphatically of the school of pedagogy which lays stress on under- standing rather than memorizing. So he has his own method. Teaching should be gradual, step by step in the exact sense. A subject should, for the majority of students, be gone over thrice, though some minds, undoubt- edly, could take it faster. First, as a prelimin- ary training, a general outline of the subject should be presented. Secondly, the whole should be gone over again, and its particular elements, difficulties and contradictions explained. And, thirdly, it should be again revised, leaving no word nor detail untouched. But many teachers overwhelm their untrained pupils with all the details at once, thinking it a good training. They do not know what training really is. Taught in that way the pupil becomes perplexed ; he thinks the difficulty is in the subject, so he gives it up MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 3I3 and turns lazy. Really, it is only bad teaching. Further, the student should not be disturbed in the use of his text-books. Not until he has learned one thoroughly should he be given another. Further, when a subject has been begun it should be pursued steadily and without inter- ruption until it is finished. Two subjects should not be studied at once. Such are Ibn Khaldun*s ideas on teaching. To them he adds here a discussion of the value of logic and of the use of words which cuts to the very heart of the Muslim decadence. He begins by telling his reader that he is going to give him an invaluable bit of advice, a treasure for all time, which will lead him to brilliant suc- cess in his studies. Practically, it is this. Do not make use of formal logic ; use rather, directly, the intelligence which Allah has given you. • Regard the problem before you and turn to Allah for help, and he will illumine your mind. It is of the nature of the mind of man, especially when thus directed in faith to Allah, to go straight to the truth of a matter. And, second, always go back from words, whether spoken or written, to the ideas, and the things which they 314 ASPECTS OF ISLAM represent Deal with the realities and not with their symbols. For what is logic? It is simply a description of the workings of the mind. It is a science rather than an art, although it can occasionally be used as an art to clarify the opera- tions of thought. Great thinkers have always dispensed with it and have made use of the intuitions which Allah gave them. And what are words? They are really veils which conceal thought in clothing it. The student must pass beyond them. But alas for Islam! Few have been the Muslims who have taken Ibn Khaldun's advice. In his next section Ibn Khaldun evidently thought he was further developing this same idea, while, in reality, he was a prey to one of the deadliest superstitions of Islam. All sciences, he says, fall into one or other of two classes. They are either sought for their own sakes or they are sought only as tools, as means of access to the sciences which are valuable for themselves. The student must beware lest he forget this dis- tinction, and spend too much time over what is only a means to an end. Good examples of such ancillary sciences are logic and Arabic philology. MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 31$ This, especially as fortified by these two examples, seems to be admirably good sense. But behind it lies the whole utilitarian position. Elsewhere Ibn Khaldun expounds what are those sciences which are to be sought for their own sakes. They are those useful either for life in this world or in order to gain the world to come. Yet he him- self, to judge from his books, was as interested as Browning's Grammarian in unprofitable things. He next throws a flood of light upon the use in his day of the Qur'an in schools. It was universally admitted to be the basis and character- istic sign of Muslim education. Upon it all else was built. Thus the Faith was firmly planted in the heart in its impressionable time. But the different Muslim countries had different ways of combining the Qur'an with the other elements In education. The people of western North Africa (al-Maghrib) taught Qur'an and nothing else. They might fill in with questions of dif- ference in exegesis, but they taught with it no traditions or canon law or poetry or philosophy. In consequence, they knew the Qur'an and the Qur'an only; but they knew it better than any other Muslim people. The people of Spain, on 3l6 ASPECTS OF ISLAM the other hand, and by Spain (al-Andalus) he can mean only the Kingdom of Granada, made their education broadly literary. The basis cer- tainly was the Qur'an, but they did not stop there. They mixed with it the learning of poetry by heart, the art of letter writing, the rules of Arabic grammar and writing a good hand. In consequence their boys had received a primary education fitting them for the study of any science for which they could find a teacher. Many later sciences had not, apparently, found their way Into Spain. As for the people of Tunis, it was mostly the study of tradition which they added to that of the Qur'an. They paid great attention also to the readings of the Qur'an and to handwriting. On the eastern peoples of Islam (al-Mashriq) Ibn Khaldun had no certain information. Their principal care, he understood, was given to the Qur'an and science, meaning evidently theological science. Writing with them was an art and to be learned from a calligrapher. The primary schools paid no attention to it, and the tablets from which boys learned to read were written in an ordinary plain hand. These different systems of education had grave MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 317 consequences for command of language. Those who limited education to the Qur'an, like the peoples of western North Africa and Tunis had no richness or fluency of expression. The only type of language they really knew was the sacred dialect of the Qur'an, and Muslims are not permitted to imitate that. On this point the Tunisians were rather better off, as their studies had not been so purely Qur'anic. But the people of Spain, because of their literary training, had a peculiarly happy command of the Arabic tongue. They might be deficient in the theolog- ical sciences, but in belles lettres they were pre- eminent. Their system of primary education was ideally the best. Based upon it, a certain Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-'Arabi (d. A. D. 1148= A. H. 543) had devised a scheme of education. First, the boy should be trained in the knowledge of Arabic philology and poetry; the pressure of the corruption of the language called for that. Then he should be drilled in arithmetic. Then he should learn the Qur'an, which would be easy for him with such an introduction. After that would come the different branches of theological education, the fundamentals of the Faith, canon 3l8 ASPECTS OF ISLAM law, the art of argument, tradition, etc. This scheme Ibn Khaldun thought excellent; but cus- tom, he saw, would be too much for it, and, besides, there was something to be said for the early learning of the Qur'an. It was a great thing to have the Qur'an with its moral precepts and religious positions thoroughly implanted in the memory in early youth. The boy was then under governors and could be compelled to learn it. But if it were left for a later stage of education when maturity was approaching with all its temptations, had we any certainty that he would ever learn it at all? Ibn Khaldun feared that we had not, and we, in our day and with our experience of the Bible in colleges, must, I think, agree with him. His last positions are that over strictness and severity are hurtful to character and attainments, and that the common practice of more mature students of journeying from one madrasa to another for the sake of meeting personally as many teachers as possible was to be approved. What is learned by such conference, face to face, makes a far deeper impression than study from books. Having many teachers, too, enables the MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 319 Student to discern what is essential and what is formal. Each teacher has his own method; but by hearing one teacher after another the methods are eliminated while the knowledge remains. Ibn Khaldun marked high water in Muslim pedagogy, as almost everywhere in the broad range of Muslim science. But Islam did not hear him; only in these last years of awakening has it begun to listen to him. Of that awakening it is not my purpose to speak here at any length. The mission schools and colleges have worked therein as valiant pioneers, and they are begin- ning now to see of the fruit of their toil in the new government schools which are gradually and of necessity supplanting them. With these government schools now lies the problem of the future, and it is for them to retain and develop the new life from which they have sprung. The inherent and racial tendencies and dangers, against which they will constantly have to fight, are plain from what I have already said. Let me instance two only, of which I had personal experience in Egypt. The oriental school-boy must learn to play games and to play without cheating and without jealousy or bad feeling. 320 ASPECTS OF ISLAM On this, for its influence on the development of character, the English control in Egypt is rightly laying stress. But English masters there told me that while the foot-ball teams of their schools were quite equal to those of the English schools, they had not yet succeeded in bringing them to honourable play ; they would cheat if they got the chance. And one Egyptian school-boy told me that he preferred to exercise in the gym- nasium; playing games gave him bad feelings towards his comrades. Another necessity will be to teach in a language that the pupil can understand and to cease to veil education in a literary dialect which not one per cent of the people can follow. This holds especially of Arabic speaking countries where the difference between the Arabic spoken by all and the Arabic of literature is as great as that between modern and classical Greek. Thus in Egypt the hopeless attempt is being made to screw all education up to this pseudo-classical standard. How hopeless is this attempt a single instance will show. One day in Cairo I was shown most courteously by the Principal of what is called the Cadis College over his institution. MUSLIM IDEAS ON EDUCATION 321 This IS a professional school for the training of Qadis and legal officials generally on the native side, and it is hoped that its influence may in time lead to a reform of the Azhar from within. The Principal first described to me the curriculum of the college and told me that the language used throughout was literary Arabic. Nothing else was allowed in the class-rooms, and they expected in a year to be able to enforce the use of it among the students outside of the class-rooms. Then I was taken to hear parts of the lectures. One, on canon law, especially interested me. The lecturer knew his subject and was making it plain to his class. But suddenly there dropped from his lips a phrase of the purest colloquial. Mush kida? said he, "Isn't that so ?" He would have written, Laisa kadhdlikf, or something similar, but in speech, the language of the street was still too strong for him. And so it will always be. Dead languages can never be evoked to living use, however strong our spells or firm our purpose. They will only walk as ghosts among us and blast and thwart our labours. Hear, then, the last word on Muslim education. It must learn to bring forth character, and it 322 ASPECTS OF ISLAM must clothe itself in a speech understood of the people. In the past it has never taken thought for the people. It has trained the scholar and let the masses go. With a stiff intellectual snob- bishness it has never seen that the abiding victories of science are won in the primary school. And so, even now, it clings to a scholastic language which bars the gates of literature to ninety per cent of the people. That bar it must learn to lift

THE INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE-POPULAR LITERATURE-A MISSIONARY'S READING When we use such a phrase as "the inner side of life" and apply it to the Muslim world, we are liable to commit the fundamental error of starting with a false idea, of taking hold of what, at the best, is a very tangled skein at the wrong end of the thread. Let me take a moment, then, with this phrase, that we may start clear of confusions and prepossessions. In the first place, there is, in our sense of the word, no inner side to Muslim life. When we use that phrase, I think that our idea is mostly that there are some things which are public, known, expected ; things about which people in general may and do talk freely; and that, besides, there are In life other things, aspects and subjects about which people do not generally talk freely. But for Muslims, among themselves, the phrase, taken in that sense, has no meaning, because that distinction, for Islam, does not exist. All the 324 ASPECTS OF ISLAM sides of life, for the unreconstructed Muslim, are equally discussable, may be talked out. There are no forbidden subjects for conversation; such as the subjects which with us can be handled only scientifically, if at all. Again, the distinction here is not that other possibility with us of the domestic side of life as opposed to the public side. The distinction is a very real one in Islam, although their divisions fall somewhat differently from ours. The domestic side of Muslim life is shut to us; but it IS shut to other Muslims also, if not of the same family. But what I mean by that phrase is rather the side of Muslim life which it is difficult for us to reach; that is on the inside so far as we are concerned; to which we cannot get with ease; although for the Muslim, it is just as open, just as regular, public, dis- cussable as any other side. The Muslims will enter upon those things among Muslims, his fel- lows, yet he will not do it with us. At least, he will shrink from it with us, because he has the idea that these are subjects which we— so he would say— do not really understand; we do not appreciate all that is involved in them ; do not INNER SroE OF MUSLIM LIFE 325 see them on all their sides as he does; and — if he is to be perfectly candid — we by some absurd convention do not speak of them with the same freedom as he does himself. As a matter of fact, he knows that there are subjects on which our ideas are different, and, therefore, like a child, or like a very wise person, he would rather not speak of them before us. If he ever comes to think that we share his opinions on such things, the difficulty vanishes at once, and the investigator will, if anything, be embarrassed by the directness of speech and the openness of discussion on which he will be launched. Of such aspects, such inward things, inacces- sible to us, one of the most important is the life in general of women and children. Examine, for example, Lane's monumental work on the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians; you find there almost nothing really dealing with the woman side of Muslim life or with the child side of Muslim life. Yet that book stands in the first rank as a study of a people. This means simply that Lane, when he wrote it, had not yet, through the accidents of his situation, reached those things. The difficulty in this case is com- 326 ASPECTS OF ISLAM plex. Partly it is what I have stated above; partly it is that Muslims do not think those things worth noticing or speaking of, certainly not worth studying; partly it is that they simply do not see. By familiarity their eyes are holden. And above, and embracing all these, the woman's- world and the man's world in the East are two separate things, each with its stream of tradition, usages and even language. The better the East is known, the more this difference appears. But when you pass beyond the barrier — ^by whatever means it may be, through friendship or marriage or otherwise — ^you discover that there is, on the other side, an enormous amount to be learned that is of high human interest and value ; the most startlingly curious parallels to life else- where appear, and they are just on that side of life; and yet it is an exceedingly hard thing for the outside world to reach them because of the limitations that are imposed upon social inter- course in Islam. Let me touch upon some of these. One of the most interesting of the things that have been discovered of late in Islam is the existence there of popular, folk-lore tales — INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 327 Mdrchen, that is; we have no exact word in English — ^that are precisely the same as those current in Europe and, in fact, throughout the world. We had long imagined that the stories that the Muslims had were all of the Arabian Nights type; but we have learned that there is this other side of their story-world, and that in it is precisely the kind of stories that you meet with in Grimm's or Hans Andersen's Mdrchen. And not only is the kind the same; the stories are the same. For example, in Cairo I discovered a very curious bit of that kind. You remember the story that appears in German and elsewhere* about the other children of Eve. The story, in outline, is that one time the Lord came upon Eve when she was washing and putting her chil- dren to rights, and she had a very great many children — somewhere in the hundreds. She had got the faces of only half of them washed; only half of them were presentable ; and so she hurried the rest of them aside, down into a cave, and showed only those whose faces were clean. The *No. 180 in Grimm's Kinder und Haus-Marchen; see, too, Grimm's notes and also Dahnhardt, Natursagen, Vol. I, pp. 246 ff. 328 ASPECTS OF islam: Lord said to her, "It was very wrong of you, Eve, to do that when I was coming. I know what you have done. Because of this your race will be in two separate parts. Those children will stay there; they will live and continue beneath the earth; the rest will live above the earth. From this time forth, you will have two races of descendents." And so there are still two races — we, the children who had the happiness to get our faces washed in time, and the other race — our sisters, our brothers — who still live and have their being down underneath the earth, and who know that they are akin to us, although we know nothing about them. That is the tale which you meet in European folk-lore. What astonished me was to find exactly the same story in Cairo, although there it is told only amongst women and children. I have never read it in Arabic; I do not believe it is in writing or in print in Arabic. It is some- thing that passes from mothers to their children and only in that way. Again, in the Island of Roda which lies in the Nile opposite to Old Masr and is the only one of the Nile islands that was there in old times. t INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 329 there stands a very large and old lotus tree. It is gnarled, bent, twisted, grown in all directions into a tangle of branches and is simply covered with little scraps of coloured cloth and with little flags. It looks, in fact, like a very disreputable wash hung out to dry. If you ask any one what that tree is, he will, if a man, first of all look embarrassed. He does not like to talk about 'it; but if you ask again, he will say, "Oh, that is the Lady Mandura." Notice, it is the tree that IS the lady. It is not that some saint has been buried there, or anything of that kind; it is the tree itself. You have a fragment of tree-worship, of the oldest, the most primitive superstition, and still surviving in vigorous life. The details of use connected with this tree a man will hardly tell you, or, if he does, he will do it in a very shame-faced way. But if you get the right source — a child by preference — you will learn that when a child is very sick, its mother will bring it to this tree, tie a bright coloured rag on the tree, and the child will put its hand on the tree. Others say that the old bandage from a hurt must be tied to the tree and two leaves from the tree must be bound into the new bandage which takes 330 ASPECTS OF ISLAM its place. The child is then taken away again and will surely get better. The Lady Mandura will take care of that. But within a year it must come back and pay its thanks to her, or else very soon she will send a scorpion to sting it. The Lady Mandura will take care of that also. Such is another scrap from the woman's world that you can pick up, if you only know how.* Again another example; and this one is a great deal more astonishing. Within only a com- paratively short period of years — quite easily within thirty years, I should say — we have come to know that practically all through the Muslim world there is spread an observance exactly like the Black Mass in Christendom. That is to say, it is a profane parody of a sacred service. Among the older travellers you will find no reference to this. Lane apparently knew nothing of it, nor did even Burton, in spite of his curious knowledge of the most out of the way and disrespectable *0n sacred trees in the Semitic world cf. S. I. Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, pp. 90 ff. and Gold- ziher's Muhammedanische Studien, II, 349 ff. For further details on this particular tree, see Madame Ruchdi Pacha's Harems et Musulmanes d'Egypte, pp. 331 ff., an admirable study of Egyptian life which should be read carefully. INNER SroE OF MUSLIM LIFE 33 1 Sides of Islam. What it travesties is the darwish sikr. I described to you at some length the method of holding a jsikr; how by reciting in rapid cadence and with physical movements and breathings, such religious phrases as the confes- sion of faith, doxologies, pious ejaculations, dar- wishes work themselves up into a steady religious frenzy, or else cast themselves into a hypnotic coma. Now, practically throughout all Islam there is a kind of parody of this, in which the beings whose intervention is sought are what we would broadly call devils. Yet when we speak of Mus- lim devils, we must always remember their non- descript character and that they are continually confused with the jinn, and so come to be on a dividing line between fairies, brownies, kobolds and true theological devils. Devil-worship, then, in Islam and in Christendom are two quite dif- ferent things. In Islam there is no precise feeling of rejection of Allah and of blasphemy against his name. It is, rather, akin to the old Arab "taking refuge with the jinn'* (Qur. Ixxii, 6), denounced, it is true, by Muhammad as a minor polytheism, but compatible with acceptance and 33^ ASPECTS OF ISLAM worship of Allah. Perhaps it might be described most exactly as a kind of perverted saint-worship. But its form is certainly a parody of the sikr, though with curious additions of bloody sacrifice, due to its African Voodoo origin. I do not mean by this to suggest that it is descended from the old Arab "taking refuge with the jinn." It was certainly introduced by negroes, and it is carried on under the direction and personal control of negro women. Yet it has spread all over the Muslim world. You meet it throughout North Africa, in Arabia and in Turkey itself. This observance and ritual is called ZQr, an Abyssinian word, used in Arabia for the names of the spirits whose aid is invoked. The word is very broad and obscure in its application, being, as I have said, of foreign origin and introduced with the thing itself by African female slaves. Thirty years ago nothing was known of it in Europe, and it is only within a comparatively short time that we have really come to any precise knowledge upon it. Of course, the reason is intelligible enough. This kind of devil-worship is carried on by women only. Men are never sup- posed to see it, and only by the rare chance and INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 333 possibility of an intelligent woman taking part in it could the knowledge of it come to us in the West. In this case the fullest description of it which I know is in the book of Madame Ruchdi Pacha to which I have already referred and to which I must again refer for details. But it, in short, is strictly a combination, on one side, of Voodoo worship, with its hysterics, posses- sions, incensings, incantations and bloody sacri- fices — all for the benefit and to amuse and turn aside the anger of a world of disease-causing spirits — and, on another side, of certain forms and phrases of more strictly Muslim religion and superstition. It has its regular professional practitioners whose destructive influence on family unity and health is much that of "Christian" and "Mental Science" operators with us. While in Cairo, I picked up by accident a tiny pamphlet of some eighty odd pages, dealing with the Zdr on this side. The greater part of it — it is in Arabic of course — is devoted to a little story of family life very simply told, describing the disruption of the family and finally the death of the mother through her blind devotion to a Kudiya, as the shaykha or priestess of Z5r is called. Then fol- 334 ASPECTS OF ISLAM lows a collection of incantations and prayers used in the Zdrs. But the story is the main thing and shows us a side of Muslim life that is especially hard for us to reach, yet one with which the woman missionary should, of all people, be familiar/ Another side, kindred but still distinct, is that which you might vaguely describe as superstitions. It is easier to reach Muslim superstitions than it is to reach the woman or the child side of life ; but still it is not very easy even at that. For example, it has been well known for a great many years — I believe that, in this case, it was Lane who first dealt with the matter in his book — that in Egypt there is a class of magi- cians who profess to be able to discover the truth as to past events, to tell what is happening at a distance, and to foretell the future, by the use of what is called the ink-mirror or the magic mirror. For this a boy about eight or nine years old is needed. The magician takes the boy's right hand, draws in ink upon the palm of it a * Further references for the ZSr are the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental Society, XLIV, 480 and 701 and XLV, 343; also Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka, II, 124 ff. INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 335 magic square of a very simple character — usually a square of nine divisions — and in the middle of it puts a globule of ink. The boy has, then, to gaze intently into it, while the magician keeps muttering Qur'anic passages and incantations and burns incense of different kinds. He then asks the boy if he sees anything. The boy almost always does see something and is thereupon put through a series of fixed questionings— does he see this and does he see that ? — until the boy sees pictures easily in the ink-globule and gradually comes to objectify in such pictures any ideas which may pass into his brain. The boy is led, that is, through the practice of a stereotyped string of questions until the thoughts in the minds of those in the company pass into his mind and are objecti- fied in the mirror of the drop of ink. Now we know as a matter of fact that telepathy or thought-transference is as well proven as any- thing, non-physical, can be, and also that the thought transferred may be objectified in a picture by the person to whom the thought is passed. In consequence, then, if any one in that circle round the boy knows the thing which the boy has to see, the idea will be transferred to the boy's mind 336 ASPECTS OF ISLAM and he will see it as a picture, whatever it is to be, figure, face, event; whatever is called for he will see in that little drop of ink. Such a scene Lane described very many years ago; such methods the magicians of Cairo used in his time. When I was in Cairo I made many attempts to find a magician; but I had absolutely no success and for a very curious reason. In Lane's time the method was a secret, the property of individuals who passed down traditionally the knowledge of how to carry it out. It had been discovered, I suppose, by some peculiar accident and had, then, fallen into the hands of profes- sional magicians. . But since Lane's time a great many books upon magic have been printed in Cairo, and the full descriptions of how to carry out these operations have appeared in those books ; consequently, the professional magician's chances are gone, and he himself has almost entirely vanished. For example, the head of the training college for teachers in Cairo, an Englishman, told me that one of his students had described to him how, when he was a boy in a village in the country, the governor of that district used him INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 337 for this purpose when anybody's cow had been stolen or when anything at all had gone amissing. It was a perfectly normal and regular way of identifying thieves. Later, in Jerusalem, I heard of a more recent case. Something was stolen from the house of an Englishman there, and there was a great deal of trouble made over it. The things were valu- able, and the owner was not content to let the matter rest in the easy oriental fashion. At last the governor of Jerusalem, a very high Turkish official, was stirred to action, went to the house, got hold of a boy, and put him through this process to find out who the thief could be. But the people of the house had a perfectly fixed idea as to who the thief was, and, sure enough, it was that face which appeared in thle mirror. Very shortly afterwards, however, it was discovered that it was quite impossible that that man could have been the thief. Scientifically, of course, it was only the fact that he was thoroughly believed to be the thief that made his form appear; the concerted thoughts of the crowd surrounding the boy passed into his brain and showed themselves to him in a picture. 338 ASPECTS OF ISLAM I give these as illustrations of how deeply this idea is rooted in the Muslim mind, and also of the difficulty, for us, of getting at it. When in Cairo I brought together quite a little library of books on magic, and if I had looked at these as carefully as I ought to have done, I would have found in more than one the name and address of a professional magician. But, though I asked right and left, and tried to find one by all the means in my power — wishing to get in touch with the living practice, as well as the literary tradition of the subject — I could never hear of any. It is only since I have been back here in Hartford that I have found these references that, on the spot, might have been so useful. Besides this there are certain other methods of discovering the future, about which the Mus- lims are willing to talk. One of my teachers in Cairo, for example, evidently himself believed quite firmly in a process by which you take the numerical values of letters, add them up, put them through different arithmetical combinations and get some result or other, and he rather liked to show me how this was done. He would say at the same time of course, "None knoweth the INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 339 truth save Allah," and shrug his shoulders. But it was plain that, for him, there was something in it. Of others I heard, men of high rank and supposed education, who spent their odds and ends of time making such computations. On one of these, a Pasha, I was taken to call but unfortu- nately missed him, and before I could call again, he died. "He knows all about it now," was the philosophical remark of our common friend. Such methods and ideas, then, you meet every- where; but beyond a certain simple stage it is hard to pass. The high magic is another thing from amateurism. Here is another illustration of the silence which generally lies over such things. I presume that eighty-five per cent at least of the native popula- tion of Cairo believes quite fixedly in the jinn, the genii of our Arabian Nights. Yet it is a very hard thing to get them to talk about these jinn. Only accidentally, almost inadvertently, can you learn what their ideas really are. For example, M. Maspero, the curator of the great museum at Giiro, told me how by long, patient handling he had brought some of his native, employees to talk freely with him on such matters 340 ASPECTS OF ISLAM and, especially, to tell their folk-tales before him. But once, unfortunately, a European lady in his company laughed and the spell was broken from that time on. The fear of ridicule immediately appeared, confidence was destroyed, and he got no more Mdrchen from them. But on another occasion, in the most casual way, one of their beliefs suddenly showed itself. In connection with the museum there was a small steam engine, and in time it had to be replaced by another. The same engineer was put in charge of the new engine that had been in charge of the first. But he was not satisfied with his success in dealing with it. In his own words, "I cannot get on with this new efrtf^ — one of the Arabic words for spirit, ghost, devil — "I cannot learn his ways and he does not seem to like me." And he went on to explain, "I have put into the furnace a package of the very best cigarettes ; but I do not seem to be able to get on good terms with him." It was perfectly plain that he had no question in his mind that the motive power of this engine was a spirit of some kind whom these Westerners by their spells had imprisoned within it and whose duty it was to do the work. His business. INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 34I on the other hand, was to make himself agreeable to this spirit in order to get the best work out of him ; and he had not succeeded. Again, in this same Egyptian museum there is about the largest collection of ghosts that exists anywhere in this world, and not one of the native staff will ever enter after nightfall on any account whatever. It is supposed to be haunted by the spirits of all the old Egyptian statues, figures, mummies, that have been brought In and put there. In part they are the spirits of the Egyptians whose mummies are there, and in part they are jinn who have taken up their abode in the statues. As for M. Maspero himself, he is a very powerful magi- cian, powerful enough to control them, and he keeps them shut tightly in the statues and mummy cases all day. But when night falls, it is a dif- ferent thing entirely, and, if by any chance, on account of visitors or anything of the kind, the museum is to be entered at night, those who enter are sure to see and hear mysterious things, and nothing can convince the natives that these sights and sounds are not produced by the jinn, scurry- ing back Into their shelters. To the endless subject of talismans I can make 342 ASPECTS OF ISLAM no more than an allusion. All in the East carry them, from donkey-boys — ^and their donkeys — ^to theologians, and they vary in complexity from a dirty, rolled up scrap of paper with some sacred names or Qur'an verses scrawled on it, to elabor- ately engraved gems. From Damascus I brought back a little oval silver plate, intended to be car- ried hanging around the neck but, of course, con- cealed under the clothes. On one side is a magic square made up of certain sacred but unintelligible letters which stand at the head of some chapters of the Qur'an, and on the other are the names of the Seven Sleepers and their dog, so written as to weave together into a seal of Solomon. The magic square, I may add, in forms of greater or less complexity plays a part in all Muslim magic. But I do not remember ever to have met with a magic cube, and in handling the magic square errors of calculation are of constant occurrence. It seems certain that it was derived by the Mus- lims from some more arithmetical people. By that its mystery and importance is only the more increased. It is needless to say that this side of the East could be developed at great length ; but the point INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 343 which I wish to make is that while to a certain extent it is comparatively easy to learn about such matters, there is a limit beyond which, from the fear they have that you may laugh at them and will not understand them, you cannot pass. This is the only explanation, the only excuse that I can find for the general ignorance of the West- erner, resident in the East, upon these things. When I went up from Egypt to Jerusalem, I had become interested in such investigations, and I tried to discover by enquiry whether in Syria there was as much magic as in Egypt, and whether the ideas upon it were of the same kind there. For a long time I could learn nothing. One missionary after another who had been years in the country would tell me, "No, we never hear of anything of the kind here; Egypt is the only place where they have such ideas ; in Syria there is no magic." But, shortly after I had been told this most positively by one missionary, on going down the street in Jerusalem which is absurdly called "the street of David," I saw a man sitting with his back against the wall and his little bit of cloth spread out, a patch of sand upon it, waiting for people to come to whom 344 ASPECTS OF ISLAM he could divine and foretell the future. This method of divination by making little strokes and dots in sand and with them building up figures each of which has then its own meaning, is one of the commonest, and ranges in complexity from a simple yes or no by odds and evens to elaborate astrological calculations. Again, shortly there- after, through another and a better informant, I heard the tale that I have already told' you about how the governor of Jerusalem tried by the magic mirror to discover a thief. I had been told before, again and again, that no such thing had ever been heard of in Palestine. The moral is that which I tried to emphasize in my first lecture, that you must believe nothing until you have tested it at the mouths of many and multifarious witnesses. Above all, go and see for yourself. Another side of Muslim life which is very hard to reach is what you might call that of religious feeling. I do not mean dogma; it is not by any means difficult to get them to talk theology in the strict sense. Nor do I mean rites and religious usages. But the thing that is dif- ficult to reach is what the Muslim feels in his INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 345 religious exercises. What does he, personally, get out of them ? The dominant feeling connected with the five daily prayers is probably that of a prescribed religious duty being duly performed. The theo- logians themselves are a good deal puzzled as to the meaning of their details. Indeed, one of them, and one of the greatest, takes up an abso- lutely agnostic position and teaches that in these details are certain secrets which we cannot know but which are a medicine for the soul, like the medicines for the body which physicians prescribe and which the patient must take blindly. The religious performances left, then, are the mkrs of darwishes and those cantatas of the birth of the Prophet, etc., rendered by professional musi- cians on occasions of rejoicing such as a marriage. As for the cantatas, I suspect that the effect upon the audience is mostly esthetic. Their subjects are religious only because everything in Islam is struck with religion in a sense and to a degree. The zikrs, which are more to our present pur- pose, I have already attempted to analyze. I repeat here my final conclusion that their attraction lies greatly in the pleasure of the dreamy semi- 34^ ASPECTS OF ISLAM hypnotic state and in the possibility of auto- hypnosis which they contain. As for general religious walk and conversation, the frequdtit ejaculation of Allah! may not necessarily mean anything more than the Dame! of the French, or our Good Lord! but, broadly, there can be no question that the Muslim lives in more constant consciousness of the unseen world than we do; a very thin shell, as I have elsewhere put it,* separates him from that world. This may not mean much for what we would call true religion and undefiled; it may run to nothing but an absolute lack of feeling for natural law and an inclination towards the crassest superstition. But it may also mean a continuous walk with God, even though with ideas of the will of God which are strangely perplexed and wrong. It is never easy to sound the depths of that most intimate religious feeling, and I have to confess that I am still, to this day, uncertain as to the way and the degree in which the religious feeling is moved in those people. We must always remem- ber that we ourselves are exceedingly chary of ^The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, pp. 8ff.; the whole book bears upon this question. INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 347 showing, at least to the unbeliever, this innermost side of all. I found that amongst darwishes such contact was most possible. They were more ready to talk about their emotional religious life. But, in general, it need hardly be said, any inves- tigator will need here to move with the greatest tact and sympathy. Another side on which it is easy to go a certain distance but very difficult to reach the real root of the matter is the feeling of Muslims about saints. It became perfectly clear to me when I was on the spot — ^had been clear, I might say, before I went to the East through my reading in Muslim hagiology — ^that there must be an enor- mous amount of hypnotism and telepathy con- nected with the miracles of the saints and with the strange things that happen to them. That prepared me to believe that there was a basis of truth in these marvels, but did not teach me how to learn the views and attitudes of the people themselves. These views might be very different from those of learned hagiologists. And there was on the threshold one especial difficulty. Mus- lims — ^in fact all Orientals — ^have made up their minds very thoroughly that we Westerners are 348 ASPECTS OF ISLAM SO entirely godless and so given over to material things that we have no mind for the things of the unseen world. We have not the aptitude nor even the inclination to understand such things, and therefore they will not talk about them to us. It was only by my very great fortune that I became acquainted with a thoroughly trustworthy convert to Christianity from Islam— I have already spoken of him in a former lecture — who had been a darwish and had passed through some very remarkable experiences of his own. Through him I was able to get into first hand touch with this strange world. He, now being a Christian, was prepared to tell me what had been his experiences as a darwish, and to develop for me the whole subject. In fact, I think he rather liked to enter upon it because it was a diffi- cult one for him himself. He had been a Muslim ; he had had strange spiritual experiences then; now he had become a Christian. What did this mean for the faith of Islam? Did it mean that there was truth in Islam? Did it mean that its saints, those darwishes who had reached saint- hood, were true saints? How was he to regard INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 349 those experiences which, for him, were evidently fixed facts? Of them he had no question. So he was rather glad, as it seemed to me, to talk them over with me, because I was able to bring out to him the fact that such things as these appeared everywhere in the world and belonged to all religions and were not essentially part of any one religion alone; that they might happen to any one whose mind was turned in such a direction under similar conditions. Another side of Muslim life that is hard to reach is a real understanding of their feeling towards history as opposed to mere stories. What, in a word, is their sense of historical fact ? Of course, it is well known that what the dragoman of the East tells you is not to be believed; but I dis- covered that, with discretion, one could get a great deal out of a donkey-boy. He is not so sophisticated. He does not in general make up things for your especial edification. The chances are that he will talk out just what he thinks. And so I found that I never really got behind the mind of the average Muslim with regard to the distinction, or rather the relation, between stories and history until, in riding over the Mukattam 350 ASPECTS OF ISLAM hills and in visiting mosques, I got my donkey-boy to tell me who built this mosque and who was buried in that, etc., upon which he told me the most extraordinary things. In part it was history, the names, at least, were derived from history; but directly it was derived from popular romances, the historical novels of the people. I knew and had read them as romances, mostly of crusading times, but for my donkey-boy and for the masses of Cairo the two are inextricably mixed, or rather, these romances are for them sober narrations of fact. "History" and "story" are not yet separated, and every tale is told as a thing which has happened. So far has the Semitic mind always been from the to- t op ^iy of Herodotus ! Only in this way, then, and by this means did I at last get a clear view of how the masses of Islam take history, and how it is that it IS so easy in Islam for history to become mixed with legend. But here the printing press is relieving us of the necessity of trusting the ideas and veracity of the donkey-boy. In Cairo there is being printed a great store of little booklets containing exactly those same things — stories, histories, legends, INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 35 1 popular poems, very many of them cast in the colloquial dialect and evidently intended to be read by the people and not by the student. By reading these you do get a little way back into corners of the Muslim mind and life otherwise pretty nearly inaccessible, for the Muslim is very fond of stories. Thus, I shall not forget how, in the great mosque of al-Mu'ayyad, one of the holiest jplaces in Cairo, I came upon a boy, a col- lege boy I afterwards discovered, a student at the Azhar, diligently occupied in reading the Arabian Nights, or, rather, one of the stories of the Nights in a separate little pamphlet. I went up to him and asked with some severity of countenance, "Is that the Holy Qur'an you are reading ?" Whereupon his companions rolled over in laughter. It was evidently a joke of the finest that an unbeliever should catch a believer occupied in that way in the mosque. Then, last, there is a side of the Muslim mind which is not so difficult to reach as to handle, but with which I must deal. It is too important to be left out. The best rubric under which to bring it, although it is a poor description, is to call it the erotic. But here, as ever in the East, 352 ASPECTS OF ISLAM we must distinguish. There is a calmness, a matter-of-factness, a directness about oriental eroticism which separates it entirely from that of at least modern Europe. The innuendo of the French pornographic novel is lacking, while there is present an exactitude and breadth of description and narrative that no European writer has ever attempted. This has to itself a department of literature in Arabic, one recognized in the native bibliographies. But on one side, these books should never be confused with the books in European literature which booksellers call "curi- ous," and, on another, they are only a special- ization or localization of what is scattered through all Arabic literature. It is to be found in books of law, theology and of the religious life; it appears in historians, biographers and geog- raphers; it IS especially prominent in books on magic and medicine; and is present in varying degrees in all forms of higher literature, from treatises on esthetics and bellettristic essays to farcical stories. It is thus an element in the East with which every student of the East must reckon. If he studies his subject carefully, he cannot escape it, nor should he seek to minimize or disre- INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 353 gard it. It is an essential part of the picture before him and cannot safely be left out, as can the similar element in Europe. But, as I have said, this phase of Eastern life and literature has also found expression in a special class of books. These might be described roughly as a compound of our books on domestic medicine — ^particularly their more domestic por- tions, books on cosmetics and the like, self and sex books even to the moralizings, essays in praise and blame of women, the smuttier jests of old- fashioned journalism and the more outrageous parts of the Arabian Nights. Mix these together, raise the essential characteristic to the w** power and you have this class of Muslim literature. Of course, the proportion of the elements varies in each. In one, the bellettristic and esthetic treat- ment may predominate ; in another, the medical ; one may furnish stories frankly labelled as aphro- disiac; another's expressed intention may be to warn against sexual perversions. But, all in all, these books and this tendency must be reckoned with, and I make no apology for this reference to them here. The missionary who does not., to some extent, know them does not know his people. 354 ASPECTS OF ISLAM But the Muslim himself will not speak to you of these things. He knows perfectly well that we do not speak of them; he knows that they lie outside of the possibilities with us; but with him they lie entirely within the possibilities. They are a normal part of literature, received, accepted by all. So that, then, is the difficulty. I have no shadow of doubt myself that for any one who would know the Muslim mind it is absolutely necessary that he should know some- thing of such books as these ; otherwise one large portion of that mind will be mysterious and inaccessible to him. He will not know how to understand his people as they are. And he will meet references which he cannot turn because he does not see clearly their point Yet he cannot discuss these things with the Muslims; that for him would be very much out of place. He should certainly do nothing to hinder the coming of the time when such con- versation will be as impossible in the East as with us. And that there is such a difference the East already very well knows. Even the Egyptian felldhln, although in time of inundation they will work together naked in the fields, men INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 355 and women, side by side, are plainly perturbed when they are observed at this by a European. They know it is not our way. But the missionary must know their ways and their ideas and he can easily know them now because of the spread of printing. All the things which were once for missionary and student so hard of access are now, for better or for worse, within reach of any. When Lane, for example, in the thirties of last century was in Cairo, all he could do was to talk with such of his friends as were willing to talk with him upon the things on which he desired information and pick up manuscripts here and there. But manuscripts are expensive and difficult to find. A man who limits his reading to them will not be able to cover the whole range of interest. Also, there is the difficulty of getting your friends to talk about things with you. Thus Lane himself tells us that his only method, on more difficult points of religion and usage, was to take one of the laxer of his Muslim friends', a man who evidently had not the same objection as the rest to discussing these matters with him, and to get from this man a certain knowledge of the subject He would, then, casu- 3S6 ASPECTS OF ISLAM ally enter into conversation with others, upon that subject, and show that he knew something about it. So they would slip into conversation upon it, and he would learn more and more. With a man who knew nothing of the subject they would not begin upon it; but, apparently, they thought, "If he knows so much already, we may as well make no further difficulties." Or they may have thought nothing at all about it; but talked with him as with one of themselves. Now all that difficulty has practically gone by. On all these subjects which I have been putting before you in this lecture — those inner subjects, difficult of access — ^there are great numbers of printed books which any one can read and so fol- low the currents of popular life and thought. Very many of them, too, are printed in colloquial Arabic and not in the literary Arabic of the edu- cated, for they are the reading of the masses of the people. And the reading of the masses is precisely what the missionary should read. Having mentioned this colloquial Arabic, permit me to diverge a moment and say that, for me, the great hope of the Arabic speaking races lies in the rise of an Arabic literature written in the INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 357 language really spoken by these peoples. At pres- ent their older literature is as remote for them as Latin to an Italian or Spaniard. And of such a neo- Arabic literature a beginning has been made, although so far it is mostly limited to stories, jests and satirical verses. More serious subjects still array themselves in the language of the schools. Yet the beginning has been made, and all that is needed now is the appearance of a man of genius, a Dante or a Chaucer, who will follow up that beginning and write books of weight and genius in this colloquial dialect. When he comes, with him will come the new Arabic literature — ^a renaissance as tremendous as that of Europe. With all these books it is, then, for the mis- sionary to follow the example of Lane. He must read them carefully and learn the beginnings from them. Then the people will fall in with him and go on and talk further with him, and he will be able by such means to work into the inner recesses of their minds. And so, finally, my last word in this course of lectures must be the word with which I began. What is needed by the missionary, needed by 358 ASPECTS OF ISLAM any one who wishes to understand this people and to affect them, is sympathy, knowledge, intel- ligence; courtesy, too, at every point. And let me say, though I have no desire to bring railing accusations and while I am not thinking now of one race more than another, yet I have seen in Cairo and in Syria cases of what to me was quite unintelligible discourtesy towards the natives by different nationalities and vocations — by officials and by missionaries, teachers and merchants, by French, by English, by Americans, by Germans. Sympathy, then, the being able to enter into their ideas; knowledge, the having soaked himself in those ideas; intelligence and courtesy to adapt himself to them and to their ways — these are among the first essentials for the missionary. And these it is certain that he cannot possibly have, unless he is genuinely in love with the people of his field; likes them and theirs; is in many respects one of them. If he finds them beginning to rasp upon him, he may know either that he is not the man for them, or, if the rasping is a new thing, that there is something wrong with his nerves, and that he ought to rest until he feels himself at peace again with his flock. I have INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 359 read books, for that matter, by missionaries describing their fields, which were nothing but a long exhibition of nerves. The paradox, in truth, of the missionary's life is that he must have a liking for his people and their queerest little ways even while he is trying to change them. In the case of one of the most successful mis- sionaries to the Orient that I have known, I have heard a considerable part of his success ascribed to the mere fact that he was somewhat slow ; he did not hurry; he was prepared to wait; he did not talk fast; he did not move fast; he had the oriental movements. He was in physical sym- pathy with his people, and this, though a special and somewhat concrete and instinctive case of the courtesy and intelligence that are always neces- sary, is still a very suggestive one. Above all, the missionary must not think of his people that their ideas, their ways — any of these things I have been putting before you tonight — ^are signs of childishness or are ridiculous. He must sweep out of his vocabulary such words as "childish" and "ridiculous*'; must, instead, think of their characteristics as interesting, and of the people as, at most, childlike. 360 ASPECTS OF ISLAM How, to illustrate, would we handle a child who had the ideas of a child about fairies or about Santa Claus, or who was somewhat weak- kneed on the subject of fact. We certainly would not talk to him about ridiculousness or childish- ness or use abusive forms of speech. We would take him as he was; make the best of him; and try to guide him, using those ideas of his as we might, and being sure that they would fade, as they must, into the light of too common day. That is essentially the problem of the missionary in dealing with the Muslim peoples. All these things are simply parts of that strange, childlike attitude towards life which you find in them, and they have to be handled with the same delicacy, with the same sympathy, which you would use with a child. The missionary must, then, have that sympathy, knowledge, intelligence, of which I have spoken, and, besides these, faith, hope and charity — faith that something is coming, must come, faith in his people and in its possibilities; hope, not to be cast down though the way is long and slow, and he cannot see far ahead; and an infinite charity for and with them in all senses of the word ; love, forbearance and S)mipathy. INNER SIDE OF MUSLIM LIFE 361 And especially at the present time there is need of that attitude towards the Muslim East, and that not only on the part of missionaries or of those who are resident there; but on the part of us all. In Turkey a great experiment is going on. The reform of Turkey is being attempted from within ; it is not to be a thing imposed from without, as in Egypt or India or Algeria, but one actually working out upon the people from withia That is a tremendous experiment and a thing to be helped in every way. But we may be sure that that experiment will be very slow; that the way before it is very hard; that only a small section of the Turkish population is really in thorough sympathy with it; and that the section which is will have to work hard, bitterly, fearfully, to be able to bring this experiment to a successful issue. It is for us, then, to have sympathy with them; to have knowledge of the situation; to show intelligence towards them ; it is for us to have faith in them ; and to bear with them if the full fruition is long in coming. It will be long; every one who knows the situation sees that it will be long ; but we must have patience. We must not think that they can hurry things; that they can turn 362 ASPECTS OF ISLAM Turkey at once into a modern state. We must not be surprised if the same things that happened in the past sometimes happen again; we must have patience. We must give them a chance to show what they can do— that is the last word, must be the last word of any one who speaks upon Islam and its possibilities. There is a long road lying ahead before anything is to be reached that will be worth reaching, but I believe that that road has now been entered.