The Speeches & Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad, Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah [speed reading book TXT] 📗

Korān, ch. lxxiv.

These are the first two revelations that came to Mohammad. That he believed he heard them spoken by an angel from heaven is beyond doubt. His temperament was nervous and excitable from a child up. It is said he was subject to cataleptic fits, like Swedenborg; and at least it is certain that his constitution was more delicately and highly strung than most men’s. If it is any satisfaction to the incredulous to find evidence of a special tendency towards hallucinations, the proofs are at hand. But whether the “revelations” were subjective or not makes no difference to the result. Whencesoever they came, they were real and potent revelations to the man and to his people.

After this beginning of converse with the supernatural, or whatever we prefer to term it, the course of Mohammad’s revelations—the speeches which make up the Korān—flowed unbroken for twenty years and more. They fall naturally into two great divisions—the period of struggle at Mekka, and the period of triumph at Medina; and the characteristics of the two are diverse as the circumstances which called them forth. For whatever Mohammad himself thought of his revelations, to modern criticism they are speeches or sermons strictly connected with the religious and political circumstances of the speaker’s time. In the first period we see a man possessed of a strong religious idea, an idea dominating his life, and his one aim is to impress that idea on his people, the inhabitants of Mekka. He preached to them in season and out of season;[Pg xxxiii] whenever the spirit moved him he poured forth his burning eloquence into the ears of a suspicious and incredulous audience. Three years of unwearied effort produced the pitiful result of a score or so of converts, mainly from the poorest classes. In the fifth year even these were compelled by the persecutions of the Koreysh to take refuge in Abyssinia—“a land of righteousness, wherein no man is wronged.” Mohammad had by this time advanced from a mere inculcation of the doctrine of one all-powerful God to a plain attack upon the idolatry of the Mekkans; and the Koreysh, as guardians of the Kaaba and receivers of the pilgrims’ tolls, were keenly alive to the consequences which the overthrow of the sacred temple would entail upon its keepers. The result of Mohammad’s bold denunciations was a cruel persecution of his humbler followers, and their consequent flight to Abyssinia; he himself was too nearly allied to powerful chiefs to be lightly injured in a land where the blood-revenge held sway. Presently the devotion of the prophet, his manly bearing under obloquy and reproach, and above all, the winged words of his eloquence, brought several men of influence and wealth into his faith, and in the sixth year of his mission Mohammad found himself surrounded no longer by a crowd of slaves and beggars, but by tried swordsmen, chiefs of great families, leaders in the councils of Mekka; and the new sect performed their rites no more in secret, but publicly at the Kaaba, in the face of the whole city. The Koreysh resolved on stronger measures. After trying vainly to isolate him from his family—the true Arab spirit of kindred was not so easily shaken—they put the whole clan under a ban, and swore they would not marry with them, nor buy nor sell with them, nor hold with them any intercourse soever. To the credit of Mohammad and of his clan, only one man of them refused to share his fate, though most of them did not hold with his doctrines. Sooner than give up their kinsman, they went, every man of them, save that one, into their own quarter of the city, and there abode in banishment for two years. Starvation was busy with the incarcerated family, when the Koreysh grew ashamed of their work, and five chiefs arose and put on their armour and went to the ravine where the banished people were shut up, and bade them come forth.

The time of inaction was followed by a time of sorrow. Mohammad lost his wife and the aged chief, his uncle, who had hitherto been his protector. All Mekka was against him, and in despair of heart he journeyed to Taif, seventy miles away, and told his message to another folk: but they stoned him for three miles from the town. The time, however, was coming when a distant city would hold out welcoming hands to the prophet whom Mekka and Taif had rejected. As he dwelt-on disconsolately at Mekka, pilgrims from Yethrib (soon to be known as Medina or Medīnet-en-Neby, “the Prophet’s City”) hearkened to the new doctrine, and carried it home to their own folk. Jews had prepared the way for Islām at Medina; the new religion did not seem preposterous to those who had long heard of One God; and presently the Faithful began to leave Mekka in small companies, and take refuge in the hospitable city where their prophet was honoured. At length Mohammad, when like the captain of a sinking ship he had seen his followers safely away, accompanied by one faithful friend eluded the vigilance of the Koreysh, and safely arrived at Medina in the early summer of 622. This is the Hijra or “Flight” of Mohammad, from which the Muslims date their history.

During these years of struggle and persecution at Mekka 90 out of the 114 chapters or speeches which compose the Korān were revealed, amounting to about two-thirds of the whole book. All these speeches are inspired with but one great design, and are in strong contrast with the complicated character of the later chapters issued at Medina. In the Mekka chapters Mohammad appears in the unalloyed character of a prophet: he has not yet assumed the functions of a statesman and lawgiver. His object is not to give men a code or a constitution, but to call them to the worship of the One God. There is hardly a word of other doctrines, scarcely anything of ritual, or social or penal regulations. Every speech is directed simply to the grand design of the Prophet’s life, to convince men of the unutterable majesty of the One God, who brooks no rivals. Mohammad appeals to the people to credit the evidence of their own eyes; he calls to witness the wonders of nature, the stars in their courses, the sun and the moon, the dawn cleaving asunder the dark veil of night, the life-giving rain, the fruits of the earth, life and death, change and decay—all are “signs of God’s power, if only ye would understand.” Or he tells the people how it fared with older generations, when prophets came to them and exhorted them to believe in One God and do righteousness, and they rejected them; how there fell upon the unbelieving nation grievous woe. How was it with the people of Noah? he asks:—they were drowned in the flood because they would not[Pg xxxvii] hearken to his words. And the people of the Cities of the Plain? And Pharaoh and his host? And the old tribes of the Arabs who would not hear the warnings of their prophets? One answer follows each—there came upon them a great calamity. “These are the true stories,” he cries, “and there is only One God! and yet ye turn aside.” Eloquent appeals to the signs of nature, threats of a day of reckoning to come, warnings drawn from the legends of the prophets, arguments for the truth and reality of the revelation, make up the substance of this first division of the Korān.

In the earliest group of speeches delivered at Mekka, forty-eight in number, belonging to what is called the First Period, extending over the first four years of Mohammad’s mission, we feel the poetry of the man. Mohammad had not lived among the sheep-folds in vain, and spent long solitary nights gazing at the silent heaven and watching the dawn break over the mountains. This earliest portion of the Korān is one long blazonry of nature’s beauty. How can you believe in aught but the One omnipotent God when you see this glorious world around you and this wondrous tent of heaven above you? is Mohammad’s frequent question to his countrymen. “All things in heaven and earth supplicate Him; then which[Pg xxxviii] of the bounties