MOHAMMED and ISLAM, Sylvester Hassell “The seventh century,” says Milman, “beheld a new religious revolution, only inferior in the extent to its religious and social influence to Christianity itself. In an obscure district of a country esteemed by the civilized world as beyond its boundaries, a savage, desert and almost inaccessible region, suddenly arose an antagonistic religion (Mohammedanism) which was to reduce the followers of Zoroaster to a few scattered communities, to invade India, and tread under foot the ancient Brahminism, as well as the more wide-spread Buddhism, even beyond the Ganges; to wrest her most ancient and venerable provinces from (a corrupted nominal) Christianity; to subjugate by degrees the whole of her Eastern dominions, and Roman Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar; to assail Europe at its western extremity; to possess the greater part of Spain, and even to advance to the banks of the Loire; more than ever to make the elder Rome tremble for her security, and finally to establish itself in triumph within the new Rome of Constantine (Constantinople). Asiatic Christianity sank more and more into obscurity. It dragged on its existence within the Mohammedan empire as a contemptuously tolerated religion; in the Byzantine empire it had still strength to give birth to new controversies—that of Iconoclasm, and even still later that concerning the Divine light. Yet its aggressive vigor had entirely departed, and it was happy to be allowed inglorious repose, to take no part in that great war waged by the two powers, now the only two active, dominant powers, which contested the dominion of the world— Mohammedanism and Latin Christianity.” “From the ninth to the thirteenth century the Mohammedans may be said to have been the enlightened teachers of barbarous Europe; and then Mohammedanism sank back into its primeval barbarism.”
Mohammed was born at Mecca, Arabia, about the year 570 A.D.; began preaching his religion in 610; fled from Mecca to Medina in 622; and died in 632. He had effected the conquest of Arabia, and was about to send a powerful army in Syria, when he died. He was a descendent of Ishmael, and was related to the Korashites, the hereditary guardians of the irregular cubical building in Mecca called the Kaaba, which, long before Mohammed’s time, was the central shrine of Arabian idolatry. This building contained in its northeast corner, about five feet above the ground, a black stone, an irregular oval, seven inches in diameter, of volcanic basalt, sprinkled with colored crystals, (supposed to have been an aerolite, but) claimed to have been brought from Heaven by the angel Gabriel and given to Ishmael; said at first to have been white, but now blackened by the kisses of sinful mortals.
Pilgrimages to Mecca, and traveling around the Kaaba, and kissing the black stone, are among the most solemn duties enjoined by Mohammed upon his followers. Though claiming to be a monotheist, he thus accommodated his religion to the previous idolatry of Arabia.
He restricted ordinary Mohammedans to four wives; but allowed chieftains as many as they wished; and the estimate of the number of his own wives varies from thirteen to twenty-five. His first wife, Kadijah, was a wealthy widow; and his favorite wife, Ayesha, was a beautiful girl but nine years old when he married her, he being fifty-three years of age. He was subject to epileptic fits from his childhood, and was, in all probability, a partially insane religious fanatic, or monomaniac. He says that he never knew how to read or write. He pretended that his fits were interviews with the angel Gabriel; and the so-called revelations that he dictated were recorded and preserved by others after his death, gathered into a book called the Koran—the Mohammedan Bible.
Mohammed was a licentious, ambitious and vindictive man; and his religion was a strange compound of truth and error, of Judaism, Rabbinism, Christianity, heathenism and Fatalism. The most of the Arabs were heathens; but many Jews and professed Christians had gradually settled in Arabia. Mohammed’s first wife’s cousin, Waraka, originally a Jew, and subsequently a professor of Christianity, was the first man on record to translate parts of the Old and New Testaments into Arabic, and he gave Mohammed much information in regard to the Scriptures. Mohammed admitted that the Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired, but had become corrupted; that numerous prophets, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, had preceded him, and that Jesus was the greatest before him, but not the Son of God.
He claimed that he himself was the last and greatest of the prophets—the Paraclete, or Comforter, predicted by Jesus in John xiv. 16; pretending that the genuine word in that passage was, not parakletos, but periklutos, the praised or renowned, equivalent to Mohammed in Arabic. His leading doctrine was, “There in no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.”
He taught the utter dependence of all creatures upon the one, almighty, eternal, infinite, spiritual Creator; but he did not teach the loving, fatherly relationship and communion of God with his creatures. Though professing to teach the doctrines of the absolute predestination of all things, he certainly, inconsistently taught the doctrine of salvation by outward works, such as formal prayers, fastings, alms, lustrations, festivals, pilgrimages, the subjugation of infidels and the extermination of idolaters; that prayer will carry a man half-way to God, and fasting will bring him to the door of his palace, and alms will gain him admittance.
He enjoined circumcision and the observance of Friday as the Sabbath. The fundamental feature of Christianity— man’s indispensable need of salvation by the mediation of a spotless and almighty redeemer—was entirely omitted from the teaching of Mohammed.
He taught that there are degrees of reward in heaven and of punishment in hell, according to the actions of each person in this world; that, at the last day, a mighty balance will be poised by the angel Gabriel, and each human being will separately be tried by it, his good deeds being put in one scale, and his bad deeds in the other, and an atom or grain of mustard seed will suffice to turn the balance and decide the destiny of the person.
Like other founders of false religions, Mohammed described, in the fullest and grossest manner, the horrors of hell and the joys of Heaven; and he placed, among the latter, each believer’s possession of seventy-two black-eyed maidens, of ravishing beauty and perpetual youth. “Under the shade of the scimitar,” said he, to encourage his deluded soldiers, “is the gate of paradise; hell is behind you if you flee, and paradise before you if you fall.”
The alternative of the Koran or death was offered to idolaters; but Jews and Christians might, by tribute, purchase a limited toleration.
Spiritous liquors, swine’s flesh, gambling and picture-making were strictly prohibited by Mohammed; and he copied into his system many of the moral precepts of the Bible. No religion was ever less original. Mohammed-anism is a cosmopolitan, Christless, perverted, bastard, unspiritual Judaism, and, in many respects, bears a striking resemblance to Papal Babylon and her daughters.
The Koran, says Gibbon, is an “endless rhapsody of fable and precept and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds. The Divine attributes exalt the fancy of the Arabian missionary; but his loftiest strains must yield to the sublime simplicity of the book of Job, composed in a remote age, in the same country, and in the same language.”
Mohammed suffered great pain in his last moments, and his last words were: “The Lord destroy the Jews and Christians! O God! Pardon my sins. Yes, I come among my fellow-citizens on high.”
Two hundred million human beings today, it is estimated, base their eternal salvation on the intercession of this vindictive, licentious and deluded sinner. Of this number about one hundred millions are found in southern and western Asia and in Turkey in Europe; and about a hundred millions are found in Africa, composing one-half of the estimated population of that Grand Division of the globe; so that Mohammedanism may be fitly called the religion of the Dark Continent.
Its chief training theological school is the University of Cairo, with its ten thousand missionary students from all parts of the Mohammedan world. “In winning the inferior races, and training them to a fervent worship of its own and a certain low level of culture, it has shown an aptness, skill and zeal quite in advance of any Christian missions. Its bleak monotheism, its lifeless morality, its somber fatalism, its intolerant fanaticism, its gorgeous luxury, and its extreme profligacy, have contributed to its missionary success. Science it treats with ignorant scorn. The arts of modern life it takes at second hand, choosing always those of mere luxury, or else mere destruction. And so it has no hold upon the future, only the memory of a bloody and stormy past. While it may be an advance on heathenism, it is an advance which seems almost to exclude the further advance of Christianity. In substituting Mohammed for Christ—a principle similar to that of all false religions—it is of course essentially antichristian. In thirteen distinct places in the Koran, Mohammed expressly disclaims the power of working miracles. He commanded his army in person in eight general engagements, and undertook, by himself or his lieutenants, fifty military enterprises. From the success of Mohammedanism no inference whatever can be justly drawn to the prejudice of Christianity. For what are we comparing? A Galilean peasant, accompanied by a few fishermen, without natural force, power or support, prevailing against the prejudices, learning, hierarchy, philosophy and authority of the Roman Empire in its most polished period—with a conquering chieftain, at the head of his army, bearing down opposition by military triumphs, in the darkest ages and countries of the world.”—Wm Paley.” (Hassell’s History ppg 413-417)