Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

What were pharisaic prayings in the market place to the devotions of Mohammed? He called upon all with whom he came in contact to accept the one God, and Mohammed as his prophet, on pain of being exterminated, and he delivered up to the pleasure of the Mohammedan fighter as many female captives as any one could take, over and above the four wives whom he allowed to all. These captives were not the victims of angry passions in men maddened by a furious conflict, but the avowed and justified reward of those who might, if slain in battle, have been martyrs, but instead were victorious. The very worst corruption which we meet with in the idol worship and demon worship of Greeks and Romans was the shamelessness which pandered to all lusts of the flesh under cover of religion. But Mohammed added to this corruption. In virtue of his Koran the most infamous passions were allowed not in belief of false gods, themselves models of impurity, but in worshipping the one holy God. In all this the example as well as the word of the religious founder had gone before, and his people followed it from age to age.

Mohammed then at the time of his death was a successful robber in a country wherein the tribal life was in a state of great confusion and incessant changes, and the ancestral religion had degenerated into a rude and senseless idolatry. The race which occupied Arabia – the whole people which claimed Ishmael the son of Abraham for their ancestor – was devoid of order and of culture, of art or science, and had not affected the history of the world beyond its own boundaries. That the lord of Byzantium on the one hand or the lord of Ctesiphon on the other contemplated permanent danger to their realms from the incursions of such a race can as little be supposed as that Europe now is in fear of subjugation from a host of Caffres or Zulus, people, in personal bravery, resolution and bodily strength, equal probably to what the Saracens then were.

In Omar's chalifate he had sent an army of 30,000 men, under one of Mohammed's eldest companions, to compel the Persians on the Euphrates to become Mohammedans. They had placed themselves under the last heir of the royal race, the young and valiant Jezdejerd. When the embassy requiring them to accept Islam or tribute came, the heir of the great king said to them mockingly: “You came hither as traffickers and beggars. Your food was green lizards; your drink salt water; your dress rough camel's hair. Now you would force upon us a hateful religion. Hunger pushes you on; so I forgive you. Go back and I will load your camels with corn and dates. If you disdain a generous offer, punishment shall find you in Persia.” Then the old sheick Mughira answered undismayed: “What thou sayest of our misery is true. So great was our poverty that we fed on worms, snakes, and scorpions. The hair of our camels and our goats we worked into a covering for our nakedness. Our faith consisted in perpetual war and robbery. We put even our daughters to death to escape supporting them. Then God took pity on our miserable state, and sent us through His holy prophet the book of the true faith. It commands us to make war against the heathen, to change our poverty and our misery for riches and power. Take then our religion which binds you to no other burdens than all the faithful bear. Or pay the tribute of the heathen. Will you do neither, arm yourselves to fight.”

Such was the people among whom Mohammed arose. The spirit which he wakened speaks in the words of the poetess Chansa, with which she sent her four sons to battle. “By God, the only one, ye are the sons of a man as ye are the sons of a woman. I have not deceived your father; I have not brought your uncle to shame, nor stained your race. Ye know what rich reward God has promised to Moslim for war against the unbelieving. Bethink you that the eternal dwelling is better than this place of sojourn.” All her four sons fell in battle. Chansa cried: “Praise be to the Lord who has made me a name through the martyr-death of my sons”. The words of this mother breathe the whole spirit which made Islam a conquering power.

Mohammed had died without leaving any indication as to whom he wished for his successor. His chief adherents, Abu Bekr, father of his wife Aischa, in whose residence he had died, his sons-in-law Ali and Omar, with their several parties, met together. Omar put aside his own claims, and had influence sufficient to procure the election of Abu Bekr, and to frustrate that of Ali. Severe as the struggle to obtain the chalifate was, at the moment it brought with it greater burden than dignity. Mohammed had spread his belief more by bribery, deceit, and violence than by conviction. Many provinces of Arabia after his death were shaking it off. Aischa's own words were, “when the apostle of God died, the Arabs were deserting him; the Jews and Christians raised their head; the hypocrites no longer concealed their hypocrisy, and the Moslim were like an abandoned flock on a cold winter night”. Abu Bekr's prudence and Omar's energy put an end to the rivalry of pretending prophets and Bedouin reluctance of taxation. In March, 633, revolt in Arabia was overthrown, and the first chalif could execute the injunction of Mohammed to spread Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula.

The choice of a chalif not in the family of Mohammed to carry on his newly made realm and religion with armed hand was of the utmost moment to both. In idea realm and religion were one and the same thing. And the choice indicated that force was the power which ruled both. Abu Bekr had not only been chosen by the influence of Omar, but during his short chalifate of two years had that most resolute of all Mohammed's companions behind him to support, inspire, and perhaps control him. When the companions met upon his death in 634 Omar's star was in the ascendant; and in the ten years of his chalifate he won in the opinion of his people the highest name which any Mohammedan ruler has attained. In truth, he made the empire. At the first choice of Abu Bekr for chalif it was but a horde of robbers in a province hitherto without name in history; when twelve years later Omar died by the hand of an assassin, it already rivalled the greatest empires of the world. To feel the profound contrast between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of Mohammed, we need but to consider the course of the first twelve years from the death of each founder. When the sword of Herod fell upon St. James, the son of thunder, the first of the apostles who was to seal his faith with his blood, and so fulfil his acceptance of his Lord's chalice, the kingdom of Christ had been preached among labours and trials innumerable. No one had yielded submission to it but in obedience to the inward dictate of conscience, and every one who so accepted it had suffered loss so far as this world is concerned. It was from imminent peril of death that when St. James, probably then the second in rank and influence of the apostolic band, was put to death, the first of all escaped from prison under angelic guard and went into another place to found the Roman Church. A martyrdom undergone by one apostle and a martyrdom postponed by another marked the setting up of St. Peter's pastoral staff in the capital of the Cæsars. The Christian people were everywhere then a poor, distressed, and praying people; hardly distinguished by the imperial Roman from the provincials of Judea, whom among all his subjects he most disliked. When Omar died, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria had fallen beneath his arms; the sepulchre of Christ was in his power; the patriarch of the holy city trembled lest the chalif of Mohammed should desecrate it to be a mosque by praying in it. Every Mohammedan convert received honour and wealth; everyone not converted to Mohammedanism risked honour and life, wife and child. The Christian martyr shed his blood on the scaffold; the Mohammedan martyr died in the heat of battle, and his companions received for the danger which they had risked and overcome the persons and goods of the conquered. Omar's empire stretched for thousands of miles over Africa and Asia; his authority was that of the prophet, who wielded civil power as an appendage of the spiritual, because, as he held, there could not be two swords in one sheath. The chief apostle exercised one of the greatest of his acts – that of choosing the capital of the Christian faith – when he was flying from a tyrant put in Jerusalem by the caprice of a Roman emperor. The arms were spiritual in one kingdom and material in the other; exercised with the long suffering of an apostle in one, with the unquestioned despotism in the other of a ruler who triumphed over souls by destroying bodies. The fundamental opposition which marks the two kingdoms is seen in strongest evidence during the first twelve years in each.

Hitherto, in human history, there is one man and one man only, who has matched himself with the Son of God: and not only matched himself, but declared that he was the superior; that the commission given to the Son of Mary was subordinate to the commission given to the Son of Abd Allah: that the prophet Jesus led up to the prophet Mohammed. It is certain that in the Mohammedan religion its prophet occupies the place which in the Christian religion is occupied by our Lord. But when this is said, it must be said with the understanding that “Mohammed's religion is a Judaism built stiffly on an abstract unity of God, stripped of its Messianic character, and of all the deeper spiritual elements which belong to that character”. When it is said that Mohammed has matched himself with Christ, it must be added that he has first stripped Christ of the divine Sonship, and placed Him simply as a prophet in a series of prophets, the last and greatest of whom is Mohammed himself. He has denied the Blessed Trinity: he has termed the honour paid by Christians to the Son, idolatry; he ranks Christians as idolaters for offering it, as being incompatible with the unity of God. He denies the Incarnation on the Arian ground, that it is impossible for the one only Nature to generate or be generated. He has denied the fall of man, equally as he denies his restoration. He denies the passion of Christ, for unfallen man needs no such sacrifice as that of the Son of God offered upon the Cross. In the system set up by him there is no sacrifice. In that point of singular meaning it stands alone among the religions of the earth. Accordingly there is no priesthood. Mohammed claimed to exercise the prophetical and in it the regal power; but not the sacerdotal. There is none such in his religion. Such as it is, on an infinitely lower level than the Christian, Mohammed is the centre of it. From the Jewish and the Christian religions he took prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, likewise the doctrines of primary import, the unity of the godhead, the resurrection of man in body as well as spirit, to a final and eternal judgment of reward or punishment. That which came from himself is purely bad; a corruption affecting all the relations between the sexes, and reducing all those who live in his religion to a far worse condition, as respects those relations, than experienced by those who lived in Greek, or Roman, or German heathenism, at their worst. As the personal life of Mohammed, from the time of his claim to be the prophet of a new religion, was in this respect infamous, so is his religion. All that the Christian faith and Church, by the sufferings of unnumbered martyrs, and the wisdom of great pastors, who are the honour of human nature, had done in 600 years for the restoration of marriage, the creation of woman's worth and dignity, the whole fabric of the Christian home, the whole offspring of Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Calvary, Mohammed, by word and example, strove to overthrow. He embodied in his religion the revenge of Asia and Africa upon Christian purity: and the hand which established a pure Arian doctrine, as to the Godhead, destroyed the Christian wife and child, husband and father, so far as its malignant influence extended. So it was at the beginning: so it has been through the 1260 years: so it is now.

The whole movement of Mohammed was to establish a counter kingdom to that of Christ, of which he who lived as a sensualist from fifty to sixty years of age is the standard. His chalifs were its continuators. And while his instrument was conquest, the bait which keeps each successive generation, and defies the approach of the Christian faith, is the indulgence of those sensual enjoyments which marked the life of the founder from the time of the Flight, which has equally marked the conduct of the ruler and the rich during all the twelve centuries. The Mohammedan peasant may have a virtuous home, for the harem is beyond his means: he may be sparing, sober, and honest: but where is the Mohammedan ruler or rich man whose inner life will bear inspection? As Roman law stopped before entering the slave apartment, Mohammedan law stops before entering the women's apartment: while the mark of the chalifs supreme dignity is to have no wife, but concubines, in the very words of St. John Damascene, a thousand if he please. Has any false religion ever shown such a mark of imposture? or is any opposition to the Son of God so deep as this, so universal in its effect upon the whole character?

About a hundred years after the time of Mohammed there lived at the court of the chalif of Damascus the man who ranks as the last great Father of the eastern Church: who, indeed, anticipated in some degree in that Church the position afterwards held by St. Thomas Aquinas, in the West. His father, Sergius, though a fervent Christian, held high office in the Syrian court. He purchased and set free captive Christians, and among them was a Thalian monk, named Cosmas, learned in theology and philosophy. Cosmas became teacher of his benefactor's son, John: and gave him such an education, that upon the death of his father the chalif made him one of the chiefs of his council, while Peter, bishop of Damascus, charged him to defend by writings the Christian truth against unbelievers.

He must have known well the religion of the chalif, in whose court he was a high officer. He thus speaks of Mohammed. “Down to the time of Heraclius the Saracens were avowed idolaters. Afterwards a false prophet arose among them, named Mamed. He lighted upon the Old and New Testament, and as the result of confabulations with a certain Arian monk constructed a heresy of his own. He gained by the appearance of piety influence with his people, and pretended that a Scripture was brought down to him from heaven. Having put together in his book certain most absurd statements, he delivered to them a worship.

“He says there is one God, the Creator of all things, who is neither begotten nor begetting. He says that Christ is the Word and Spirit of God, a creature and a servant: and that He was born without a father from Mary, the sister of Moses and Aaron. For, says he, the Word and Spirit of God entered Mary, and she bore Jesus a prophet and servant of God. The Jews wickedly wished to crucify Him: they seized and crucified His shadow. But Christ Himself, he says, was not crucified, nor did He die. For God took Him to Himself into Heaven, for He loved Him. And this, he says, that when Christ ascended into Heaven, God asked Him: ‘Jesus, didst Thou say, I am the Son of God, and God?’ And he says, Jesus answered, ‘Lord, pardon me. Thou knowest that I never said it, nor am too proud to be Thy servant. But men that were transgressors wrote it, that I said this word, and they lied against Me, and are in error’. And God answered and said to Him: ‘I know that Thou didst not say this word’. Now he said many other portentous and ridiculous things in this Scripture of his, which he pretends to have been sent down to him from God. Now when we allege, who is the witness that God gave him a Scripture? Which of the prophets foretold that such a prophet was to arise? Moses received the law from God in the sight of all the people, when he appeared on Mount Sinai, in cloud, and fire, and darkness, and storm. And all the prophets from Moses onwards foretold the coming of Christ, and that Christ is God, and that the Son of God would come in the flesh, and would be crucified, and die, and rise again, and that He is the Judge of the living and the dead. And when we ask, why did not your prophet come so, others bearing witness to him. Why did not God, as He gave the law to Moses in the sight of the people on the smoking mountain, give the Scripture which you speak of to him in your presence, that you also may be assured. They answer, God does what He will. We reply, that we know well. But we ask how the Scripture came down to your prophet. And they answer, the Scripture came down upon him when he was sleeping.

“Again we ask, how is it, when in this Scripture of yours he enjoined to do nothing, and to receive nothing without witnesses, that you did not ask him, first show by witnesses that you are a prophet, and have come forth from God, and what Scripture bears witness to you? They are mute through shame. Since you may not marry without witnesses, nor market, nor possess, nor take an ass or beast of burden without witness. Wives, indeed, you have, and possessions, and asses, and all the rest through witnesses. Faith alone and Scripture you have without a witness. He who gave you this has no security whatever. No witness preceding him is known: but he received it asleep. They call us associators, because we bring in an associate to God, when we say that Christ is the Son of God, and God. We reply, prophets and Scripture have handed this down to us. You, as you assert, acknowledge prophets. If we are wrong in saying that Christ is Son of God, it is they who have taught it and delivered it to us.”

The objection here made in general, that Mohammed had no witness to his mission, and none to the assertion that his Scripture came from God, has received no answer. Indeed, not only is there no witness that the Koran was given by God, or by the agency of the prophet Gabriel, but the condition in which it was left by Mohammed at his death supplies the strongest internal evidence that the Scripture was an imposture. This is the account given by the historian of the present day, who has used thirty years of his life to study, and compare Mohammedan writers on their prophet.

“The Koran is the Arabic name for the Mohammedan Bible, or collection of discourses held by Mohammed in the name of God, in his quality as inspired prophet, which, as he asserts, were partly communicated through the angel Gabriel, partly revealed to him immediately by God through dreams or visions. But the Koran is not, like the Bible, a book drawn up in chronological order, or according to the variety of its contents, but a mixing up of hymns, prayers, dogmas, sermons, casual writings, narratives, legends, laws, and orders of the day, with many repetitions and contradictions. This comes because Mohammed himself made no collection of the revelations given singly to him during a course of twenty-three years. It is probable that it was not even his wish that all of them should be kept, since a great number of them had only a transitory meaning. Likewise he had undertaken so many alterations in his doctrines and laws that he had reason to shrink from handing them all down to posterity. In fine he certainly wished to retain up to his death free room for modifications and additions which might be necessary. But after his death all fragments of the revelation were thrown together, even when they had been repealed by others, or were already issued in different form. All portions of the Koran, scattered in different hands, inscribed on parchment, palm-leaves, bones, stones, or other rough materials for writing, were collected – or even such as lived only in the remembrance of his companions and disciples – and were divided, mostly without regard to their contents, or the time at which they had been revealed, into greater or smaller chapters, Suras; and thus the actual Koran, with all its defects, was made. It is only by an accurate knowledge of the circumstances of Mohammed's life, and the language of the Koran, in some degree possible to restore the chronological order of its several parts. By the help of Mohammed's Arabian biographers, some of whom go back so far as the second century of the Mohammedan era, it is possible to determine the date of such sections as relate to historical events. Where this is not the case, the character and form of the revelation serve to direct. Mohammed in his first time appears more as a reformer, later as the founder of a new religion, at last as prince and legislator. In the first period he was carried away by inward enthusiasm: his language has a rhythmical movement, with true poetic colouring. In the second period a calmer consideration takes the place of excited fancy; he is more rhetorician than poet: his words spring rather from an understanding wide awake, not sparkling, as before, with warmth of heart. In the third period the language sinks to sober prose, not only in ordaining laws, issuing injunctions, or narrating campaigns, but when he paints, as before, God's Almightiness, the wonders of creation, the terrors of the last judgment, or the joys of paradise.

“The Koran was first collected by the chalif Aim Bekr. This collection is said to have been occasioned by the death of many acquainted with the Koran in the war against the rival prophet, Moseilama, and the fear that there would soon no longer be men who had learnt it by heart and understood it. A certain Zeid who had served the prophet as secretary was charged to collect the revelations, and when he had completed his work, he gave it over to the chalif, from whose hand after his death it passed into that of his successor, Omar. Omar left it to his daughter Hafsah, widow of Mohammed. Zeid's work aimed merely at providing a copy of all the scattered fragments. No thought seems as yet to have been taken to arrange them in order or to divide them into chapters. This collection had as yet no public authority, for other fragments were in circulation, which varied from it more or less, so that there were often disputations about the true reading of particular passages. To meet this state of things, so dangerous to the unity of the faith and the law, Chalif Osman caused a new edition of the Koran to be prepared. The collection made by Abu Bekr formed the basis of this. Osman sent copies of this edition to the chief cities of the subject provinces, and caused all versions varying from it to be destroyed. The division of the Koran into 114 chapters dates from Osman. In this, however, as above remarked, neither subject nor order of time was sufficiently considered. The sequence was generally determined by the size of the chapters, the larger being put at the head, and the smaller at the close. The Koran of Osman now stood for the ground text of the divine revelation. If later further copies led to variations of the text, they spring from the incompleteness of the Kufish writing, which continued in use for several hundred years. In this not only were the vowel marks wanting, but the diacritic points which served to distinguish from each other several similar letters.

“The Koran contains subjects of highly mixed character. It embraces not only the whole doctrine and legislation of Mohammed, but likewise a considerable portion of his life, of his mental and material struggles, as well as the history of prophets preceding him, and the legends concerning them.”

Thus in the year 632 a robber who was compelling the whole Arabian people to submit to his authority had somewhat suddenly died. His companions, robbers like himself, met together after his death. They proclaimed the dead chieftain “to be supreme teacher of religion, and, in that capacity, law-giver over the whole extent of the social, civil, and political domain”. They elected one of themselves to continue this authority by the name of chalif, or successor. In this act I note four things. The successor is not taken out of Mohammed's family, but by free choice of the faithful. Secondly, he is chosen as a spiritual head: but this headship carries in itself the whole temporal power. Thirdly, the place of Mohammed among his own faithful, corresponds to the place of Christ in his Church, if we bear in mind all the differences which distinguish the two communities. Fourthly, the chalif in the Mohammedan community corresponds to the Pope in the Christian. He is the successor of Mohammed, God's Apostle, as the Pope is the successor of St. Peter. The chalif is the bearer of Mohammedanism, as Mohammed's vicegerent: the Pope is the bearer of Christendom, as the vicegerent of Christ, and the spiritual Peter. As Christ and Mohammed answer to each other in religions radically antagonistic to each other, so Pope answers to chalif, with the same requisite differences.