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At the time when St. Gregory, still laboriously striving to protect his
people from the barbarian Lombards, was finding the great consolation
of his life in the first success of the mission in England, a new power
was preparing that was to show itself, within fifty years, the greatest
scourge the Church had yet known -- the religion of Mahomet, Islam. Not
for the next generation merely, but for the next thousand years it was
to be an ever present menace, a factor which would influence every
aspect of Catholic development and life.
The scene of the new world-religion's origin was the peninsula of
Arabia, a curiously neglected no-man's-land where the Roman and Persian
empires fought through tributary kingdoms and "spheres of influence."
The centre was desert and the bulk of its inhabitants warlike nomad
tribes, whose chief source of living was pillage of the caravans that
came and went, continually, from Egypt and the west to Persia and
India. Along the coast there were towns and a settled, traders'
civilisation; to the south an organised Arab state. The religion of
these tribes was polytheistic, and of all the sanctuaries the most
famous was at Mecca, the chief of the trading cities and the centre of
an annual religious festival to which Arabs came from the whole
peninsula. Here was worshipped, with bloody sacrifices, a smooth black
stone-the Kaaba. It was a brutal and degrading cult. It was not,
however, the only religion known to the Arabs. In all the cities there
were Jewish colonies, and the vassal states to the north had many
Christians among their subjects. The southern kingdom was for a hundred
and fifty years a battle ground between Jewish and Christian
influences, and the kings were now Jewish, now Christian, in belief.
Along the Persian Gulf there were five bishoprics. Few of these
Christians were, however, Catholics. They were mostly exiles, either by
compulsion or choice, from the Roman laws against heresy and religious
dissent, and they brought to Arabia the fundamentally impaired
Christianity of Nestorianism or Monophysitism, according to which
Christ Our Lori was not really divine or not really human.
A further source through which the Arabs had some knowledge of
Christian ideas was the professional story-teller who wandered from
place to place, charming his audience with, for example, picturesque
and detailed descriptions of Paradise and Hell. But, of the Christians
themselves, it was the solitary ascetics of the desert who most
influenced the Arabs -- the hermits, and the strange figures of the
column-dwelling saints of whom St. Simon Stylites may serve as the
type. There are many traces in Arab poetry of the admiration which
these feats of austerity and self-forgetfulness aroused -- admiration,
too, for the ideals and beliefs which formed such heroes.
The Arabia of Mahomet was the vast central region where the native
paganism dominated. It was strongly "nationalist", for it had never
known foreign domination. On the other hand it had never known unity,
for the tribes were continually at war, and in the cities the rivalry
of the clans brought about a like continual unrest.
Mahomet was born at Mecca, about 570-580, and educated by his uncle, a
wealthy trader and a personage of importance in the life of his clan.
The nephew followed the family career, and his business journeyings
took him to the West and to Christian Syria. He was already far removed
from the primitive Arab cult, when, about 610, he announced to his
family the vision that called him to be the herald of Allah -- the
supreme God of his native religion, too long overshadowed by the
goddesses worshipped conjointly with him. Mahomet was now one of the
many " Hanifs" -- Arabs, that is to say, who, in their search for a
purer religion, had evolved a belief that there is but one God; they
refused to worship the Kaaba, had a certain knowledge of the Jewish
Scriptures, and practised the beginnings of a religious morality. It
was Mahomet's first innovation that he was a Hanif who aimed at
converting others.
His first teaching was very simple. There is only one God, and Mahomet
is his prophet. God will one day judge all men, and according to their
conduct will reward or punish them everlastingly. A ritual of prayer
and ablutions is prescribed, honest dealing and almsgiving are
recommended. More significantly still, the wickedness of the clan which
dominates Mecca -- its commercial dishonesty, its oppression of the
poor -- is unsparingly denounced.
The first followers were the Prophet's own kinsfolk, and then a great
number of the down-and-outs and the slaves. The natural result
followed. There was a persecution of the sect and its members fled. A
second revelation to Mahomet now most opportunely made known that the
goddess whom his persecutors worshipped had great power with Allah. The
Prophet was revealing himself as a political genius too. Soon he was
back in Mecca and peace reigned once more. It did not endure for long,
and by 620 Mahomet was again an exile. Two years later he had found at
Medina not merely a refuge, but, thanks to the political circumstances
of the place and to his own genius, honour and acceptance as a civic
leader. The bitter rivalry of Jew and Arab, and of the Arabs among
themselves, was ended by a compromise which Mahomet proposed. All in
Medina were to have equal rights. There was but one enemy -- the
wealthy clan which had driven Mahomet from Mecca. They were Allah's
enemies too and to destroy them was a first religious duty.
Mahomet was now Medina's supreme judge, and the commander-in-chief of
its forces. He set himself to organise the temporary alliance and to
prepare it for the coming war. The religious reformer disappears for
the moment behind the statesman, the organiser, and the warrior. The
religious observance is modified. The almsgiving is directed to
replenish the war chest, food taboos of a Jewish character are
introduced, and Abraham, reverenced hitherto as the Father of all the
truly religious, of Mohammedan, Christian and Jew alike, is now
discovered to be the father of the Arab alone. He is Mahomet's
precursor, and Mahomet's mission is to purify Abraham's religion from
its Jewish and Christian accretions. More than ever is it necessary to
capture Mecca, for Mecca -- the one common centre for Arab life, with
its superstition and idolatry -- is Abraham's institution. The new
religion is now an exclusive, independent thing; and its immediate aim
is the capture of Mecca. This it achieves, in alliance with paganism,
by the Holy War -- in other words by treachery and massacre, with, in
addition to the necessary lure of pillage, the promise of eternal
felicity, since the Holy War is of all duties the one most pleasing to
Allah. By 630 Mahomet had succeeded. He was master of Mecca and of all
central Arabia, strong enough now to disembarrass himself of his
allies, pagans and Jews alike. Some he exiled, others he massacred. In
633-the year of the defeat of Edwin of York at Hatfield -- he died.
That Mahomet sincerely believed in his mission to destroy idolatry is
certain, and it is equally certain that his idealism declined in
proportion to his success. Success, indeed, revealed him as the prince
of opportunists, a spirit for whom morality had no meaning. Trickery,
pious trickery, theft and murder beyond what even the paganism of his
origin allowed -- all these were, when useful, lawful means. His
revelations and their teachings are contained in the Koran, a
collection made after his death by his secretary and officially
published in 660. There is also the sacred book of his sayings --
Hadith -- more than a million of them by the ninth century, very few of
which go back to the Prophet. The chief sources of the religion are the
Old Testament and the Talmud, and there are traces, too, of a
considerable knowledge of the apocryphal gospels. The leading doctrines
remain what they were originally -- that God is but one, that Mahomet
is his prophet, and that there is for all men judgement by Allah,
reward or retribution. There have been other messengers of Allah before
Mahomet, the greatest of whom is Jesus Christ, Who, for Mahomet, is
everything but God and second only to Mahomet himself. As Mahomet
expressly rejects the doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejects that of
the Redemption, giving the crucifixion a Docetist explanation. His
doctrine of the end of creation, of judgement, heaven and hell, is
derived from Christian sources, with every metaphorical expression now
given its most literal meaning. Heaven is a place of never-ceasing
pleasure, where every human desire, even the most lowly, finds
limitless opportunity for its fullest satisfaction. A prominent feature
of the believer's religious duty is the Holy War to destroy the
infidel. "Kill all pagans wherever found." It is not a war to convert,
or to impose the new religion on others, but, in the event, becomes a
simple canonisation of natural bloodthirstiness and the instinct for
pillage. It is the most meritorious of good works, death in battle is
better than martyrdom; and in this primitive religion where neither
asceticism nor mysticism find any encouragement, "The Holy War is
Islam's monasticism."
Within ten years of Mahomet's death, his invention had not only overrun
the whole of his own country but had conquered the Persian Empire and
robbed Rome of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Something must be said to
explain some of the circumstances which made it possible for a system
so lacking in any appeal but the most lowly to achieve so surprising a
success. Islam, to begin with, had made a nation of the scattered
mutually hostile Arab tribes. The strong clan spirit survived, but the
clan was now the nation and the aggressiveness directed outside Arabia.
All the traditional ideals of vengeance remained at its service, given
a higher value, even blessed as a virtue, in the new system. Outside
Arabia the prospects for a new military venture were more inviting than
for centuries. Rome and Persia, the two neighbours, before whose
alternate supremacy the middle east had been so long powerless, were,
each of them, at the time of Mahomet's death, exhausted from a long
thirty years' war. In the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire --
Egypt, Palestine and Syria -- the mass of the population had for nearly
two hundred years, ever since the General Council of Chalcedon in 451,
been waging an intermittent war on the government for religious
reasons. They had long since ceased to be loyal to the sovereigns who
stood to them chiefly as persecutors. Finally, in this moment of
Arabia's opportunity, when in Islam the East had at last produced its
reply to the Hellenism dominant since Alexander, there was given to the
Arabs a military leader of genius, Omar. Omar's adherence to Mahomet
had been one of the turning points of the prophet's later development.
He was the embodiment of the reforming spirit of Islam, a man who lived
hardly, and used himself hardly for the cause, the proverbial fighting
Puritan. On Mahomet's death he succeeded to his place.
Palestine and Persia were simultaneously invaded in 634. In each
country the Arabs advanced steadily from victory to victory. Persia was
conquered in two years, and in 636 the last Roman army in Syria
defeated too. After a thousand years of Hellenism and seven hundred
years of Roman rule Syria was again in the hands of the East. That same
year Damascus fell, in 638 Jerusalem, in 640 Cesarea, Ascalon and the
coast. To the Monophysite inhabitants -- who, despite all that they had
suffered, did not play the traitor -- the revolution was no tragedy. It
was simply " deliverance from the cruelty of the Romans." Egypt was
invaded in 639. In 640 Heliopolis was taken, to become, as Cairo, one
of the greatest centres of Islam. Here, too, the Monophysites went over
to the new rulers. Alexandria fell the next year and, to add to the
confusion, Heraclius died -- the emperor who, thirty years earlier, had
saved the State after a similar catastrophe. The succession was
disputed, and meanwhile in 642 the- Romans evacuated Egypt. With the
armies and the officials there went, too, the little that remained of
the country's Catholicism.
There, for a space, the movement halted, after annihilating the power
of Persia, and reducing the empire of Rome by a good two-thirds. In its
richest provinces there was now installed this new, aggressive, hostile
thing; and of the native population there were none who wished the
Romans back. If the movement halted, it was only because internal
troubles, and a civil war, had begun to occupy its leaders.
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