The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎110r] (224/244)

1892
NOTICEABLE
709
judgment in reading the Scripture. Mohammed himself exhausted the
powers of language in trying to induce the Arabs to reason for them
selves, to study creation and the law of nature, and draw the inevitable
deductions. The Koran itself was always held up by him as a plain
book, which he who runs may read; and he maintained that when a
•man could not find a clear direction in it for any special emergency,
he was bound to use his own judgment. Hence it is claimed that
Mohammed was the Apostle of Reason, and assuredly there are few
more reasonable books than the Koran, read by the light of common
sense. The religion it teaches is the simplest form of theism ; there
is nothing miraculous, nothing superstitious ; and its practical pre-
3epts are equally sensible.
Eigliteousness (said Moluirnriicd) is not turning your face to the east or the
"west; but he is righteous who believeth in God and the Last Day, and the
Angels, and the Scripture, and tlie Prophets, and giveth wealth, for the love
of God, to his kinsfolk and to orphans, and to the needy and the'son of the
road/ and to them that ask, and for the freeing of slaves; and who is instant in
prayer, and giveth alms; and those who fulfil their bond when tbey promise, and
the patient in adversity and affliction, and in time of violence,—these are they who
are true,—these are they who fear God (Kor. ii. 172).
Why, then, it will be asked, if Islam provides so reasonable a creed
and so wholesome a standard of conduct, are there so many objection
able features in the Mohammedanism that we see to-day ? Why is
there a certain amount of rank superstition, and why is there a vicious
social system ? Syed Ameer Ali's reply is that these are not in the
Koran ; they are the fruit of scholasticism, the corrupt glosses of
professional theologians and doctors of the law.
The present stagnation of the Musulman communities (he says) is principally
due to the notion whicb has fixed itself on the minds of the generality of Mos
lems, that the right to the exercise of private judgment ceased with the early
legists, that its exercise in modem times is sinful, and that a Moslem, in order to
be regarded as an orthodox follower of Mohammed, should belong to one or other
of the schools established by the schoolmen of Islam, and abandon his judgment
absolutely to the interpretations of men who lived in the ninth century and could
have no conception of the necessities of the nineteenth. . . . The lives and con
duct of a large number of Moslems at the present day are governed less by the
precepts and teaching of the Master, and more by the theories and opinions of the
muj tabids and imams who have tried, each according to his lights, to construe the
revelations vouchsafed to the Teacher. . . . They forgot that the Prophet, from
the pinnacle of his genius, had spoken to all humanity. They mixed up the tem
porary with the permanent, the universal with the particular. . . . Most of the
rules which now govern the conscience of so many professors of the faith are
hardly derived from any express and positive declaration of the Koran, but for the
most part from the lego-religious books.
This is perfectly true, ' Just as the Hebrews deposed their
Pentateuch in favour of the Talmud, so the Moslems have abolished
the Koran in favour of the traditions and decisions of the learned.'
V OL . XXXI—N O . 182 3 C