The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

Koran for having

behaved unkindly to a beggar, and so immortalised his own offence. He

issued a text, “Use no violence in religion.”

 

But this text, with many others, he afterwards expunged. When he

arrived at Medina he found himself at the head of a small army, and he

began to publish his gospel of the sword. Henceforth we may admire the

statesman or the general; the prophet is no more. It will hence be inferred

that Mohammed was hypocritical, or at least inconstant. But he was

constant throughout his life to the one object which he had in view—the

spread of his religion. At Mecca it could best be spread by means of the

gentle virtues; he therefore ordered his disciples to abstain from violence

which would only do them harm. At Medina he saw that the Caaba

idolatry could not be destroyed except by force; he therefore felt it his

duty to make use of force. He obeyed his conscience both at Mecca and

Medina, for the conscience is merely an organ of the intellect, and is

altered, improved, or vitiated according to the education which it receives

and the incidents which act upon it.

 

And now Mohammed’s glory expanded, and at the same time his virtue

declined. He broke the Truce of God: he was not always true to his

plighted word. As Moses forbade the Israelites to marry with the pagans

and then took unto himself an Ethiopian wife, so Mohammed, broke his

own marriage laws, beginning the career of a voluptuary at fifty years of

age. His Koran sudras were now official manifestoes, legal regulations,

delivered in an extravagant and stilted style differing much from that of

his fervid oracles at Mecca. But whatever may have been his private

defects, when we regard him as a ruler and lawgiver we can only wonder

and admire. He established for the first time in history a united Arabia.

In the moral life of his countrymen he effected a remarkable reform. He

abolished drunkenness and gambling—vices to which the Arabs had been

specially addicted. He abolished the practice of infanticide, and also

succeeded in rendering its memory detestable. It is said that Omar, the

fierce apostle of Islam, shed but one tear in his life, and that was when he

remembered how in the days of darkness his child had beat the dust off

his beard with her little hand as he was laying her in the grave. Polygamy

and slavery he did not prohibit, but whatever laws he made respecting

women and slaves were made with the view of improving their condition.

He removed that facility of divorce by means of which an Arab could at

any time repudiate his wife: he enacted that no Moslem should be made a

slave, that the children of a slave girl by her master should be free.

Instead of repining that Mohammed did no more, we have reason to be

astonished that he did so much. His career is the best example that can be

given of the influence of the individual in human history. That single

man created the glory of his nation and spread his language over half the

earth. The words which he preached to jeering crowds twelve hundred

years ago are now being studied by scholars or by devotees in London

and Paris and Berlin; in Mecca, where he laboured, in Medina, where he

died; in Constantinople, in Cairo, in Fez, in Timbuktu, in Jerusalem, in

Damascus, in Basra, in Baghdad, in Bokhara, in Kabul, in Calcutta, in

Pekin; on the steppes of Central Asia, in the islands of the Indian

Archipelago, in lands which are as yet unmarked upon our maps, in the

oases of thirsty deserts, in obscure villages situated by unknown streams.

It was Mohammed who did all this, for he uttered the book which carried

the language, and he prepared the army which carried the book. His

disciples and successors were not mad fanatics but resolute and sagacious

men, who made shrewd friendship with the malcontent Christians among

the Greeks and with the persecuted Jews in Spain, and who in a few years

created an empire which extended from the Pyrenees to the Hindu Kush.

 

This empire, it is true, was soon divided, and soon became weak in all its

parts. The Arabs could conquer, but they could not govern. Separate

sovereignties or caliphates were established in Babylonia, Egypt, and

Spain, while provinces such as Morocco or Bokhara frequently obtained

independence by rebellion. It is needless to describe at length the history

of the Caliphs and their successors—it is only the twice-told tale of the

Euphrates and the Nile. The caliphs were at first Commanders of the

Faithful in reality, but they were soon degraded both in Cairo and

Baghdad to the position of the Roman Pope at the present time. The

government was seized by the Praetorian Guards, who in Baghdad were

descended from Turkish prisoners or negroes imported from Zanzibar,

and in Egypt from Mamelukes or European slaves, brought in their

boyhood from the wild countries surrounding the Black Sea, and trained

up from tender years to the practice of arms—the sons of Christian

parents, but branded with a cross on the soles of their feet that they might

never cease to tread upon the emblem of their native creed.

 

However, by means of the Arab conquest the East was united as it had

never been before. The Euphrates was no longer a line of partition

between two worlds. Arab traders established their factories on both

sides of the Indian Ocean and along the Asiatic shores of the Pacific.

Men from all countries met at Mecca once a year. The religion of the

Arabs conquered nations whom the Arabs themselves had never seen.

When the Mohammedan Turks of Central Asia took Constantinople and

reduced the caliphates to provinces, although the people of Mohammed

were driven back to their wilderness the strength and glory of his religion

was increased. In the same manner the conquest of Hindustan was an

achievement of Islam in which the Arabs bore no part, and in Africa also

we shall find that the Koran reigns over extensive regions which the

Arabs visit only as travellers and merchants.

 

Once upon a time Morocco and Spain were one country, and Europe

extended to the Atlas mountains, which stood upon the shores of a great

salt sea. Beyond that ocean, to the south, lay the Dark Continent,

surrounded on all sides by water except on the north-east, where it was

joined to Asia near Aden by an isthmus. A geological revolution

converted the African ocean into a sandy plain, and the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and Gibraltar were torn open by the retreating waves. But the

Sahara, though no longer under water, is still in reality a sea; the true

Africa begins on its southern coast, and is entirely distinct from the

European-like countries between the Mediterranean and the Atlas, and

from the strip of garden land which is cast down every year in the desert

by the Nile. The Black Africa or Sudan is a gigantic tableland; its sides

are built of granite mountains which surround it with a parapet or brim,

and which send down rivers on the outside towards the sea, on the inside

into the plateau. The outside rivers are brief and swift: the inside rivers

are long and sluggish in their course, winding in all directions, collecting

into enormous lakes, and sometimes flowing forth through gaps in the

parapet to the Sahara or the sea.

 

A tableland is seldom so uniform and smooth as the word denotes. The

African plateau is intersected by mountain ranges and ravines, juts into

volcanic isolated cones, and varies much in its climate, its aspect, its

productions, and its altitude above the sea. It may be divided into

platforms or river basins which are true geographical provinces, and each

of which should be labelled with the names of its explorers. There is the

platform of Abyssinai, which belongs to Bruce; the platform of the White

Nile, including the Lakes of Burton (Tanganyika), of Speke (Victoria

Nyanza), and of Baker (Albert Nyanza); the platform of the Zambezi,

with its lakes Nyasa and Ngami, discovered by Livingstone, the greatest

of African explorers; the platform of the Congo, including the regions of

Western Equatorial Africa, hitherto unexplored; the platform of South

Africa (below 20º S.), which enjoys an Australian climate, and also

Australian wealth in its treasure-filled mountains and its wool-abounding

plains; and lastly the platform of the Niger, which deserves a place, as

will be shown, in universal history. The discoverers of the Niger in its

upper are Park (who first saw the Niger), Caillie, and myself: in its

central and eastern parts Laing, who first reached Timbuktu; Caillie, who

first returned from it; Denham, Clapperton, Lander, and Barth.

 

The original inhabitants of Africa were the Hottentots or Bushmen, a

dwarfish race who have restless, rambling, ape-like eyes, a click in their

speech, and bodies which are the wonder of anatomists. They are now

found only on the South African platform, or perhaps here and there on

the platform of the Congo. They have been driven southward by the

negroes, as the Eskimos in America were driven north by the Red Indians

and the Finns in Europe by the Celtic tribes, while the negroes themselves

have yielded in some parts of Africa to Asiatic tribes, as the Celts in Gaul

and Britain yielded to the Germans.

 

These negroes are sometimes of so deep a brown that the skin appears to

be quite black; sometimes their skin is as light as a mulatto’s. The

average tint is a rich deep bronze. Their eyes are dark, though blue eyes

are occasionally seen; their hair is black, though sometimes of rusty red,

and is always of a woolly texture. To this rule there are no exceptions—it

is the one constant character, the one infallible sign by which the race

may be detected. Their lips are not invariably thick; their noses are

frequently well formed. In physical appearance they differ widely from

one another. The inhabitants of the swamps, the dark forests and the

mountains are flat-nosed, long armed, and thin-calved, with mouths like

mussles, broad splay feet, and projecting heels. It was for the most part

from this class that the American slave markets were supplied; the

negroes of the States and the West Indies represent the African in the

same manner as the people of the Pontine Marshes represent the

inhabitants of Italy. The negroes of South Africa stand at the opposite

extreme. Enjoying an excellent climate and a wholesome supply of food,

they are superior to most other people of their race. Yet it is certain that

they are negroes, for they have woolly hair, and they do not differ in

language or manners from the inhabitants of the other platforms. When

the Portuguese first traded on the African coasts they gave the name

Caffres (or pagans) to the negroes of Guinea, as well as to those of the

Cape and Mozambique. It is quite an accident that the name has been

retained for the latter tribes alone, yet such is the power of a name that the

Caffres and negroes are universally supposed to be distinct. It is

impossible, however, to draw any line between the two. Pure negroes are

born on the coast of Guinea and in the interior with complexions as light,

with limbs as symmetrical, and with features as near to the European

standard as can be found in all Caffraria. Between the hideous being of

the Nile and Niger deltas and the robust shepherds of the south, or the

aristocratic chieftains of the west, there is a wide difference, no doubt but

intermediate gradations exist.

 

There is also much variety among the negroes in respect to manners,

mental condition, political government, and mode of life. Some tribes

live only