THE PROPHET

                           THE PROPHET


be his last. Every detail of his actions on this occasion was carefully
noted and imitated by his disciples: the rites and ceremonies which
he had endorsed by his example and presence became standard
Muslim practice. He was now over sixty years of age, and his
health was failing. On his return to Medina, he fell ill and
requested Abu Bakr to lead the prayers in his place. On June 8,
632, he died in the house of A’isha, the best loved of his wives. The
faithful were stricken with grief and incredulity, and the violent and
impetuous Omar threatened to cut off the hands and feet of anyone
who dared assert that the Prophet was dead. This wild ranting was
rebuked by the calm good sense of Abu Bakr, who told the people:
If anyone worships Muhammad, Muhammad is dead, but if anyone
worships God, he is alive and dies not.’ As the Prophet left no son
or any obvious heir, the question at once arose: who was now to
lead his community? An attempt by the Ansar to elect one of their
number was forestalled: Omar seized the hand of Abu Bakr and
called on the people to obey the man whom the Prophet had
appointed to lead the prayers in his absence, and the venerable
friend of Muhammad, who had rarely left his side, was saluted as
the khalifa (caliph), vicar or successor of the Apostle of God.
To delineate the character of this extraordinary man is a task
of extreme difficulty. No contemporary descriptions have reached
us, and the oldest portraits which have survived are hagiographical
in tone. We are told that the Prophet had a stately and
commanding figure, with sad and piercing eyes, that his manner
was normally kind and gentle, that he loved children and animals,
that his habits were so simple that even in his last days in Medina,
when he governed Arabia, he mended his own clothes and cobbled
his own sandals. His piety was sincere and unaffected, and his
honest belief in the reality of his call can be denied only by those
who are prepared to assert that a conscious impostor endured for
ten or twelve years ridicule, abuse and privation, gained the
confidence and affection of upright and intelligent men, and has
since been revered by millions as the principal vehicle of God’s
revelation to man. He disclaimed all pretension to sinlessness and
miracle-working (when asked for a sign, he pointed to the Koran
as the greatest miracle), discouraged superstitious veneration for his
person, and insisted, insofar as was compatible with his claim to
be the Apostle of God, that he was but a man amongst men.
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THE PROPHET
Yet it would be idle to deny that the Arab prophet has never
been viewed with sympathy and favour by Christians whose ideal
has naturally been the milder and purer figure of Jesus. The losses
which Islam inflicted on Christendom and the propaganda
disseminated during the Crusades were not conducive to an
impartial judgment, and down almost to recent times Muhammad
has been portrayed in controversial literature as a lying deceiver
and a shameless lecher. Absurd stories were circulated and long
believed, such as that he trained a dove to pick seeds of corn from
his ear so as to persuade the people that he was receiving
communications from the Holy Ghost, and that his iron coffin at
Mecca (he was really buried at Medina) was suspended in midair
by the action of powerful loadstones! To the charges that he
‘induced’ revelations to suit his purposes, that he propagated his
creed by the sword, and that he used religion as a cloak for the
satisfaction of his sensual desires, reasonably convincing answers
may be returned. Our modern psychologists, who have explored
the dark recesses of the human mind or rather of the unconscious,
are slow to question the integrity of men of the type of
Muhammad. Notwithstanding his war with Mecca, which was in
the ancient tradition of Arab tribal conflict, he never countenanced
the forcible conversion of Christians or Jews, and laid it down as
a principle that ‘there is no compulsion in religion,’ in consequence
of which Islam has been, on the whole, one of the most tolerant
of creeds. The fiercest censure has been reserved for his sexual
conduct, but it may be observed that so long as Khadija lived, he
took no other wife, and that of the ten or twelve women he
subsequently married, the majority were widows whose husbands
had fallen in his cause and for whom he might feel obliged to
provide. The four lawful wives permitted to the Muslim believer
is, in fact, a restriction on the licence of pagan Arabia, which set
no legal limits of polygamy. Yet his love of women is not denied
by his biographers, and his personal preferences are artlessly
revealed in the Koranic picture of a paradise where the pious
faithful are refreshed with delicious fruits and caressed by huris,
black-eyed girls of eternal youth and beauty.
The religious system which he constructed was the purest and
most uncompromising monotheism. Islam rests upon ‘five pillars,’
the shahada, or profession of faith, ‘There is no god but God and
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THE PROPHET
Muhammad is his Apostle,’ the salat, or daily worship, ultimately
fixed at five prayers, the sawm, or fast of Ramadan, the zakat, or
alms, one-tenth of the believer’s income being payable to charitable
purposes and the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, to be undertaken
taken at least once in a lifetime. His God is an almighty Creator,
an arbitrary though merciful despot, who has revealed himself to
man successively through the Tawrat, or law of Moses, the Zabur,
or psalms of David, the Injil, gospel or evangel of Jesus, and finally
and completely through the Koran of Muhammad. Allah, the
embodiment of mighty will rather than of moral righteousness,
demands no sacrifice or atonement for sin; no mediator, redeemer
or saviour interposes between him and man, and Islam knows no
sacraments or priesthood. Jesus is venerated as a noble prophet,
miraculously conceived and endowed with the power of raising the
dead to life, but the crucifixion is a myth, a substitute having been
nailed to the cross in his place, and on the Day of Judgment he will
repudiate those who have perversely treated him as divine.
At Medina Muhammad was, like Moses, at once prophet, prince
and legislator. The distinction between civil and religious authority
was unknown in the Semitic East, and the Koran is both a body of
doctrine and a code of regulation. The life of the Muslim, like that
of the Jew, was guided by the Law (shari’a, or path), which being
divinely revealed, could never be repealed or modified, and the
reforms which the Prophet enacted in the name of Allah in seventhcentury
Arabia, are now, thirteen centuries later, a hindrance to the
progress of the Muslim nations. The withdrawal of liberty of divorce
from women and the use of the veil might be calculated in their day
to raise the level of public morality, but they have survived into a
different age, along with such ancient institutions as concubinage and
slavery, which also received the sanction of the Koran.
The inquirer who seeks an explanation of the great revolutions
of history is often driven to attach almost equal weight to the
personalities of the leading actors and the peculiar circumstances of
their time, which favoured the fullest deployment of their talents, and
he may well accept the conclusion, that vast changes are produced
neither by the operation of blind forces nor by the genius and will
of great men, but by a subtle and unpredictable combination of the
two. Without Muhammad, there would have been no Arab Empire;
yet in a different age and situation, the Prophet of Islam might have