Chapter 2: The Nineteenth Century
The Scottish and Victorian historian, Thomas Carlyle, was a particularly well regarded writer who had produced an 1840 work on the French Revolution. Born in Ecclefechan in Dumfries shire, Scotland, he had an early history of being bullied at school, but went on to become a teacher of mathematics. Because he experienced a deep crisis of faith he wrote Sartor Resartus. ("The Tailor Retailored") that was published as a serial in 1833-34 in Fraser's Magazine. The novel sets out to be a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (meaning 'god-born devil-dung') the author of a non-fiction title, "Clothes: their Origin and Influence", but it was in reality a special type of metafiction where the story is about the process of creation.[77] It started to be a new kind of book at the same time fictional and factual, satirical and scholarly, historical and theoretical. One of its strange components was its discussion of its own formal structure, when making the reader face the issue of where 'truth' is to be discovered.
He began to write fiction and embarked on "Cruthers and Jonson", which was one of several false starts in the field of literary fiction. It did not become a satisfactory form of realistic novel and was abandoned. It was not until Carlyle wrote 'Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History,' that he comes to our attention. Yet, he claims that Islam was spread throughout the world by oppressive means. Many commentators on Islam have claimed that it was a religion spread by violence. This opinion is rejected by numerous authorities who claim that the spread of the Islamic religion was through trade routes into the North African littoral, into Asia via the silk and spice routes and down as far East as Malaysia and China. Evidence from the ‘hadith’, the reported sayings of the Prophet, does however confirm the theoretical justification for the spread of Islam by military might:
Fight in the name of Allah and for the sake of Allah. Fight those who disbelieve in Allah, fight but do not steal from the war booty (before it is shared out), betray, or mutilate. Do not kill children. If you meet your enemy of the mushrikeen, call them to three things, and whichever one of them they respond to, accept that from them and leave them alone. Then call them to Islam and if they respond, accept that from them and leave them alone. If they refuse but they pay the jizyah, then they have responded to you, so accept that from them and leave them alone. If they refuse then seek the help of Allah and fight them…[78]
Yet it might be argued that the Qur’an categorically forbids the spreading of the faith by the sword in Sura 2. 256 which warns: "There must be no coercion in matters of faith. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error".[79] It would not be necessary to resort to force or violence to promote the religion against oppressors and tyrants, however, because the Qur’an, as we have seen, prohibited Muslims from commencing hostilities: “Fight in the cause of God / Those who fight you / But do not transgress limits / For God loveth not transgressors”[80] as well as: “And Fight them on / Until there is no more / Tumult or oppression, / And there prevail Justice and faith in God.”[81] Those terrorists who promote violence with a Qur’anic agenda are therefore taking a line that is unbalanced on the reading of the Qur’an that specifies strict conditions for warfare, and are defying the historical context of sixth-century Arabia’s internecine struggles.
But, for Thomas Carlyle, in the fight one needed to get one’s sword first before he/she could promote the religion: It had to start with one man and spread from there
I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.
Sartor Resartus had brought Carlyle fame, but he begins to show an interest in the prophet of light:
The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only…
A silent great soul, one of that who cannot but be earnest. He was to kindle the world, the world’s Maker had ordered so.
Carlyle recognises the modesty and the humility, the piety and the unimperial attitude of Muhammad as heroic:
They call him a prophet, you say? Why, he stood there face to face with them, here, not enshrined in any mystery, visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes, fighting, counseling, ordering in the midst of them. They must have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called what ye like. No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three and twenty years of rough, actual trial, I find something of a veritable hero necessary for that of itself.
Although there was no chance of Carlyle or anybody else becoming a Muslim, he still saw the uniqueness of the prophet’s message and the need to see Islam in a clear and truthful light:
The spread of the Islamic religion by the sword is not clearly indicated, because W Montgomery Watt points to the number of remaining Christians and other minorities in the countries who would surely have been eliminated if it were the case that Islam was only an aggressive movement. He argues effectively that the evidence of lack of conversions by military might is:
…the remaining Christian communities in these countries. For the first few centuries after the Muslim conquest, the majority of the population of these areas remained Christian. Slowly, they began to take on Islam as their religion and Arabic as their language. Today, large percentages of Christians remain in Egypt (9%), Syria (10%), Lebanon (39%), and Iraq (3%). If those early Muslim conquests (or even later Muslim rulers) forced conversion on anyone, there would be no Christian communities in those countries. Their existence is proof of Islam not spreading by the sword in these areas.[82]
The Welsh writer D Miall Edwards (1873 - 1941) endorsed the views stated by Carlyle in his [Edwards’] book “Christianity and Other Religions” (1923) where he wrote copiously on Islam. His review of religions looks closely at that of Islam where he says that:
…it spread swiftly partly through lawful missionary efforts aided by hot – headed zeal, but to a degree greater than with other religion, by the power of the sword. It was not founded on the sword, as is sometimes said, but rather on the spoken word of the prophet Mohamet.[83]
To which he added:
To this wondrous temple come millions from over all the world. Once they arrive they feast their eyes upon it. They spend the days of their pilgrimage in it, they keep in it if they can, they feel every stone in it with hand and lip; the Black Stone has almost been kissed smooth. They swoon from fervor; they see visions; they lose themselves in trances; some dance; some are immovable. Wonderful is the grip which Mohammetanism has on the child of the desert, and on the many millions who have accepted this religion. [84]
This appears to be a recognition of the attitudes circulating in Wales about the glory of early Islam, its expansion throughout the world and its interest to Welsh people:
To these Arabs belonged a love of learning and invention. From them came governors like Harun al Raschid, the patron of science, and the learned Al Mamun. It was they who preserved the learning of Ancient Greece for the new world; it was they who were the teachers of the new dawn of science, mathematics and geometry.
It is an acknowledgment of the success of the development of Islamic science, which provided much of the activity during the early medieval period, especially in Andalusian Spain.
Muslim Spain gives us an excellent idea of an Islamic society. Its vibrant culture promoted thought and philosophy, encouraged discussion and dissent, science and innovation, motivated rationalism and secular thought, and celebrated music, fashion, style and food. Its rulers and elites sponsored and founded academies, libraries, public baths, concert halls and some of the greatest architecture of Muslimdom. lbn Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (1126-1198), the great Andalusian scholar, was a founding father of secular thought in Western Europe, rooted in the religious sciences, Maliki law and jurisprudence, where his school of philosophy is known as Averroism. Ibn Rushd was a master of philosophy, theology, law and jurisprudence, astronomy, geography, mathematics, medicine, [as mentioned in Chapter 1] physics and psychology.
In response to al-Ghazzali, the Muslim scholar, theologian and jurist, he produced his sarcasticaslly entitled work ’Tahafut al-Tahafut’ (‘Incoherence of the Incoherence’) positing that Allah knows everything from the creation of the world to a leaf of a tree or a tiny butterfly or insect. Al-Ghazzali had claimed in ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ that God has knowledge only of universals and not such specific detail. Ibn Rushd grumbled that Al-Ghazzali’s ‘’confusion and muddling’’ and his ‘’doubtful and perplexing arguments drove many people away from both philosophy and religion.’’[85] Ibn Rushd is an exemplar for modern times, and an emblem for open philosophical enquiry, but the period in which he lived was less harmonious than the present day because of its influence of Latin Christendom. He contributed to world civilisation with his commentaries on Aristotle, al Talkhis, his judgeship of Cordova in 1182, and his books on law and jurisprudence.[86]
Unfortunately, he was condemned as a heretic by his peers claiming that he possessed recent Jewish ancestry, and in 1194-5 he was charged with apostasy by the Caliph who declared that the study of Philosophy was characterised by Kufr - unbelief. He removed to Marrakesh where he continued to practise a Philosophy that was deeply critical of literalism and anthropomorphism in Islam, and specifically in the Qur’an.
He is seen as a founding father of secular thought in Western Europe, where the curiosity about Al-Andalus was at its highest. Al-Andalus gave a space for Christian heresies that were persecuted elsewhere. The Christians of Al-Andalus were also Arabic speakers, which allowed them to interface with Muslim theorists. It was a society of mixed marriages where Christians, Jews and Muslims interrelated secularly, and women interacted freely in public, allowing them to become poets, musicians and philosophers. The idea of a romanticised chivalry also emanated from Muslim Spain, and extended to English [and French] literature in the novels of Scott and Dumas, and later to the late-Victorian novels of masculine action.
Al Ghazzali, believed that the Muslim society of his days was badly affected with a social sickness or a kind of insanity, and that the only hope for a cure was by purging itself by religious sanctity and piety. He claimed in ‘The Jewels of the Qur’an’ that what he had written in ‘The Incoherence’ was mere dialecticism and the truth was to be discovered in another of his books titled, ‘What Is Concealed from the Unworthy’.
Under the Caliphate of Córdoba, al-Andalus was a fountain of learning, and the city of Córdoba, with its great mosque, was the leading economic and cultural centre in the Mediterranean area and in the Islamic world. It led the intellectual, philosophical, scientific, medical, astronomical, mathematical and culinary world for a period of four hundred years and was the shining light of the medieval, Islamic resurgence. The Muslims had ruled Andalusia for 800 years and has over the years produced all kinds of responses ‘’from disgust to delicious delusion’’.[87] It was a wonderful place, Christians and Jews co-existed with Muslims – perfection on earth. They fostered architecture, libraries with a million volumes, art, literature and culture, which contributed significantly, but of course, not entirely, to the European Renaissance.[88]
When finally the Muslim expulsion from Spain, known as the Morisco Expulsion and Diaspora, took place it broke the hearts of many true Muslims.[89] The poem beneath was written by al-Rundi after Seville was overtaken and captured by Ferdinand the Third of Castile:
Everything declines after reaching perfection…
The tap of the white ablution fount weeps in despair, like a passionate
lover weeping at the departure of the beloved.
Over dwellings emptied of Islam, vacated, whose inhabitants now live in
unbelief
Where the mosques have become churches in which only bells and crosses
are found ...
O who will redress the humiliation of a people who were once powerful, a
people whose condition injustice and tyrants have changed?
Yesterday they were kings in their own homes, but today they are slaves in the land of the infidel!
Were you to see them bewildered, with no one to guide them, wearing the cloth of shame
in its different shades,
And were you to behold their weeping when they are sold, it would strike
fear into your heart, and sorrow would seize you.
Alas, many a maiden as fair as the sun when it rises, as though she were
rubies and pearls, Is led off to abomination by a barbarian against her will, while her eye is in
tears and her heart is stunned.
The heart melts with sorrow at such sights, if there is any Islam or faith in
that heart!
It is clear that al-Rundi was responding to the atrocities committed after the expulsion of December 1248 which amounted to a genocide: homes were put to the flame and destroyed, mosques were deconsecrated, children were separated from their parents, merchants were robbed of their wealth, people were humiliated, and armed insurgents were driven into slavery. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain took place in 1492. By the seventeenth century, however, the remaining population was allowed to maintain their mosques and religious institutions, to retain the use of their language and to continue to live under their own laws and customs. But within seven years these terms had been broken.
In 1499 the Muslim religious leaders of Granada were forced to part with over five thousand valuable and irreplaceable books with ornamental bindings, which were then unceremoniously burned: book burning has a long history! Only a few books on medicine were spared. On 7 September, 1567, King Philip II of Spain issued a royal decree ordering the Moriscos of Granada to cease speaking or writing in Arabic and learn Castilian. The fate of the Muslims was sealed.
The nineteenth century Scottish writer, William Muir, (27 April 1819 – 11 July 1905) the author of ‘Mahomet and Islam’ claimed that the origins of the Qur’an were threefold – legendary, traditional and historical. In terms of the ‘legendary’, he claimed that “it contains multitudes of “wild myths”, such as the "Light of Mahomet", and the “Cleansing of his Heart”. With reference to the traditional he wrote that “the main material of the story is oral recitation, not recorded until Islam had attained to a full growth” and in regard of the historical, he explained that “there are contemporary records of undoubted authenticity of the origin of Islam.[90]
With regard to the contention that the origins of the Qur’an were ‘legendary’, this is a falsehood, roundly condemned by scholars, since the book was delivered to the prophet directly from the Angel Gabriel, and was certainly not mythical. Clearly in the second case (the traditional) he is partly correct, since it is a central tenet of the faith that the record was maintained orally as well as the Surrahs [chapters] of the book being written down on scraps of bone, palm leaves and so on. As is confirmed by “both Abu Bakr (632-34) and Umar (634-44) [who] made efforts to gather together the scraps of revelation that had been written down by the faithful during the lifetime of the Prophet, on bones, on palm leaves, on potsherds, and whatever other materials were at hand, as well as being preserved in "the breasts of men””[91] With reference to the historical, where he explains that there are “contemporary records of undoubted authenticity” to which we can still refer, it was the third Caliph, Uthman ( 644-61), who first ordered a group of men at Medina to codify and standardise the text.”[92] It was set down and remains in a pristine state without alteration, and there were never more than seven readings or renditions of the oral tradition in use among the ‘Ummah’ – the faithful of Islam.[93]
Unfortunately, William Muir continued the old saw that Muhammad “had fallen under the influence of Satanic inspiration”. The historian E A Freeman had praised the book as “a great work", yet disputed its “conjectural methodology, particularly the "half timid suggestion" made by Muir that Muhammad had fallen under the influence of Satanic inspiration”.[94]
It is incumbent upon us to consider this question from a Christian point of view, and to ask whether the supernatural influence, which ... acted upon the soul of the Arabian prophet may not have proceeded from the Evil One ... Our belief in the power of the Evil One must lead us to consider this as at least one of the possible causes of the fall of Mahomet... into the meshes of deception ... May we conceive that a diabolical influence and inspiration was permitted to enslave the heart of him who had deliberately yielded to the compromise with evil.
It is recorded that Satan tempted the Prophet to utter the following lines after verses 19 and 20 of Sura An-Najm.
Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-Uzzá
and Manāt, the third, the other?
These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for.
Of course, these lines were later revoked and removed by Muhammad as having been interjected by Satan, and not by the Angel Gabriel, yet it is spurious to suggest that Muhammad had descended “into the meshes of deception”, when it involved a temporary aberration which was quickly revised by the prophet. Revelations came to Muhammad in the cave on Mount Hira, and it is not to be supposed that an earth shattering event such as a revelation from the spiritual world could have resulted in Muhammad wanting to obscure or rewrite them. The revelations were terrifying to Muhammad initially - he thought he was going mad - and were to be treated with the utmost respect and reverence.[95]
Reynold Nicholson (1868 – August 27, 1945), was a prominent English orientalist, a student of both Islamic mysticism and Islamic literature. He was reputed to be one of the best Rumi scholars and translators in the English language. Born inKeighley, Yorkshire, he died in 1945. He translated Jalal-ad Din Mohammad Rumi’s works in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish into the English language. His translations of Rumi's "Masnavi",were published in eight volumes between 1925 and 1940. Nicholson wrote two very influential books: ‘Literary History of the Arabs’ and ‘The Mystics of Islam’ that contributed to the literature about Islam. His student, Arthur Arberry translated the works of Rumi in the twentieth century and also translated the Qur’an. (See Chapter 4).
It is not until the late nineteenth century that a more even handed view of Muslimdom begins to take shape. Writers began to find elements of Islam worthwhile and interesting, and began to show a more Qur’an based world view leading people in the search for the light and a path to monotheism.