Chapter Chapter 26 · Mohammed

AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN

DESERT, AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD

FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF ALLAH, THE ONLY TRUE GOD

Since the days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said nothing of the

Semitic people. You will remember how they filled all the chapters

devoted to the story of the Ancient World. The Babylonians, the

Assyrians, the Phœnicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all

of them Semites, had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or

forty centuries. They had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians

who had come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who had come

from the west. A hundred years after the death of Alexander the Great,

Carthage, a colony of Semitic Phœnicians, had fought the Indo-European

Romans for the mastery of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated

and destroyed and for eight hundred years the Romans had been masters

of the world. In the seventh century, however, another Semitic tribe

appeared upon the scene and challenged the power of the west. They were

the Arabs, peaceful shepherds who had roamed through the desert since

the beginning of time without showing any signs of imperial ambitions.

Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and in less than

a century they had pushed to the heart of Europe and proclaimed the

glories of Allah, “the only God,” and Mohammed, “the prophet of the

only God,” to the frightened peasants of France.

The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah, (usually known

as Mohammed, or “he who will be praised,”) reads like a chapter in

the “Thousand and One Nights.” He was a camel-driver, born in Mecca.

He seems to have been an epileptic and he suffered from spells of

unconsciousness when he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of

the angel Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book

called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him all over

Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish merchants and with

Christian traders, and he came to see that the worship of a single God

was a very excellent thing. His own people, the Arabs, still revered

queer stones and trunks of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of

thousands of years before. In Mecca, their holy city, stood a little

square building, the Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends of

Hoo-doo worship.

[Illustration: THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED]

Mohammed decided to be the Moses of the Arab people. He could not well

be a prophet and a camel-driver at the same time. So he made himself

independent by marrying his employer, the rich widow Chadija. Then he

told his neighbours in Mecca that he was the long-expected prophet sent

by Allah to save the world. The neighbours laughed most heartily and

when Mohammed continued to annoy them with his speeches they decided to

kill him. They regarded him as a lunatic and a public bore who deserved

no mercy. Mohammed heard of the plot and in the dark of night he fled

to Medina together with Abu Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened in

the year 622. It is the most important date in Mohammedan history and

is known as the Hegira—the year of the Great Flight.

In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier to proclaim

himself a prophet than in his home city, where every one had known

him as a simple camel-driver. Soon he was surrounded by an increasing

number of followers, or Moslems, who accepted the Islam, “the

submission to the will of God,” which Mohammed praised as the highest

of all virtues. For seven years he preached to the people of Medina.

Then he believed himself strong enough to begin a campaign against his

former neighbours who had dared to sneer at him and his Holy Mission

in his old camel-driving days. At the head of an army of Medinese he

marched across the desert. His followers took Mecca without great

difficulty, and having slaughtered a number of the inhabitants, they

found it quite easy to convince the others that Mohammed was really a

great prophet.

From that time on until the year of his death, Mohammed was fortunate

in everything he undertook.

There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the first place,

the creed which Mohammed taught to his followers was very simple.

The disciples were told that they must love Allah, the Ruler of the

World, the Merciful and Compassionate. They must honour and obey their

parents. They were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their

neighbours and were admonished to be humble and charitable, to the

poor and to the sick. Finally they were ordered to abstain from strong

drink and to be very frugal in what they ate. That was all. There were

no priests, who acted as shepherds of their flocks and asked that they

be supported at the common expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques

were merely large stone halls without benches or pictures, where the

faithful could gather (if they felt so inclined) to read and discuss

chapters from the Koran, the Holy Book. But the average Mohammedan

carried his religion with him and never felt himself hemmed in by the

restrictions and regulations of an established church. Five times a

day he turned his face towards Mecca, the Holy City, and said a simple

prayer. For the rest of the time he let Allah rule the world as he saw

fit and accepted whatever fate brought him with patient resignation.

Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage the Faithful

to go forth and invent electrical machinery or bother about railroads

and steamship lines. But it gave every Mohammedan a certain amount of

contentment. It bade him be at peace with himself and with the world in

which he lived and that was a very good thing.

The second reason which explains the success of the Moslems in their

warfare upon the Christians, had to do with the conduct of those

Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do battle for the true faith.

The Prophet promised that those who fell, facing the enemy, would go

directly to Heaven. This made sudden death in the field preferable to

a long but dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans

an enormous advantage over the Crusaders who were in constant dread of

a dark hereafter, and who stuck to the good things of this world as

long as they possibly could. Incidentally it explains why even to-day

Moslem soldiers will charge into the fire of European machine guns

quite indifferent to the fate that awaits them and why they are such

dangerous and persistent enemies.

Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now began to enjoy

his power as the undisputed ruler of a large number of Arab tribes.

But success has been the undoing of a large number of men who were

great in the days of adversity. He tried to gain the good will of the

rich people by a number of regulations which could appeal to those of

wealth. He allowed the Faithful to have four wives. As one wife was a

costly investment in those olden days when brides were bought directly

from the parents, four wives became a positive luxury except to those

who possessed camels and dromedaries and date orchards beyond the

dreams of avarice. A religion which at first had been meant for the

hardy hunters of the high-skied desert was gradually transformed to

suit the needs of the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars of the

cities. It was a regrettable change from the original program and it

did very little good to the cause of Mohammedanism. As for the prophet

himself, he went on preaching the truth of Allah and proclaiming new

rules of conduct until he died, quite suddenly, of a fever on June the

seventh of the year 632.

His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was his

father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers of the

prophet’s life. Two years later, Abu-Bekr died and Omar ibn Al-Khattab

followed him. In less than ten years he conquered Egypt, Persia,

Phœnicia, Syria and Palestine and made Damascus the capital of the

first Mohammedan world empire.

Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima,

but a quarrel broke out upon a point of Moslem doctrine and Ali was

murdered. After his death, the caliphate was made hereditary and the

leaders of the faithful who had begun their career as the spiritual

head of a religious sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built

a new city on the shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of Babylon

and called it Bagdad, and organising the Arab horsemen into regiments

of cavalry, they set forth to bring the happiness of their Moslem faith

to all unbelievers. In the year 700 A.D. a Mohammedan general by the

name of Tarik crossed the old Gates of Hercules and reached the high

rock on the European side which he called the Gibel-al-tarik, the Hill

of Tarik or Gibraltar.

Eleven years later in the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, he defeated

the king of the Visigoths and then the Moslem army moved northward

and following the route of Hannibal, they crossed the passes of the

Pyrenees. They defeated the Duke of Aquitania, who tried to halt

them near Bordeaux, and marched upon Paris. But in the year 732 (one

hundred years after the death of the prophet,) they were beaten in a

battle between Tours and Poitiers. On that day, Charles Martel (Charles

the Hammer), the Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan

conquest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they maintained

themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the Caliphate of

Cordova, which became the greatest centre of science and art of

mediæval Europe.

[Illustration: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT]

This Moorish kingdom, so-called because the people came from Mauretania

in Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was only after the capture of

Granada, the last Moslem stronghold, in the year 1492, that Columbus

received the royal grant which allowed him to go upon a voyage of

discovery. The Mohammedans soon regained their strength in the new

conquests which they made in Asia and Africa and to-day there are as

many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ.