'Turkish Arabia: Being an Account of an Official Tour in Babylonia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia, 1886-87' [‎back-i] (71/72)

4i
of religious pilgrimage and offering. The Sultan clings as tenaciously to those two little
desert towns as to his richest cities. Persia covets them as keenly as ever Christendom
did the holy sepulchre. England, as disposing perhaps almost as many Muhammadan sub-
j ects as Shah and Sultan put together, is bound to look on them as not outside the circle of her
protection. And, lastly, what was in its conception the most unequivocally monotheistic
faith perhaps the world ever saw is here loaded with superstition and given up to the dei
fication of dead men. To open so large a subject would involve a survey of the very begin
ning of Islamitic history, or rather of the essential features of Islamism itself out of which
that history grew. To pass it over altogether would be to ignore one of the objects with
which this tour was made.
However absolute and despotic the actual government in Muhammadan countries
may be, the political ideas of Islamism itself are, as is well known, essentially religious, and
in their original form democratic. And yet never did any religious system emerge from
the ideality of its beginnings more rapidly or notably than Islamism did. Even in the
lifetime of the Prophet-king all his commanding genius and prestige were needed * to
keep down a conflict between at least two antagonistic elements : on the one hand, the
enthusiastic and supernatural; on the other, the political and secular. Out of a book, there
grew an empire ; out of a preacher, the founder of a commonwealth; but while to the
hereditary aristocracy of Arabia Muhammad became more and more of an earthly, if
Heaven-directed, ruler, to the "true-blue" champions of theocracy, the idea was intolerable
that a mission such as his should eventuate merely in the setting up of another kingdom of
the common worldly type. The founder of it, as will be remembered, died sonless, all his
children except Fitima, wife of his cousin Ali, having predeceased him. Even had this
been otherwise, it is doubtful whether he would have regarded his son as necessarily his
successor ; while had he done so, the chances are the second Muhammad would have proved
as great a failure as the second Cromwell. Corroborating the view here taken is the fact
of his omitting to nominate any successor at all, or even indicate by whom the election
should be made. How, when his death occurred, to the bitter disappointment of his kins
man Ali, and all the tribe of Hashim, the elective principle prevailed equally over the legi
timist and the Messianic, and the Madina elders chose Abu Bakr first Caliph (more
correctly Khalifa, meaning successor^ partly from his pre-eminent services, and partly
because one day during his last illness Muhammad had made him lead the prayers of the
people; how two years afterwards he also died and was succeeded by the lion-hearted
Omar—the rock, next to the master himself, on which Islam was founded ; how after Omar
had been struck down by a disappointed suitor, and his successor Othman had in his turn
been foully murdered, the brave but unfortunate Ali was at last appointed Caliph ; all these
things belong to history.
If ever a party was badly handled, or a leader badly followed, that party was the
^ t { A1 . purely theocratic or l( high-flying " one in the early Islami
tic commonwealth, and that leader Ali. His accession to
the Caliphate, so far from crowning, greatly complicated his impossible task of trying to
build up in this imperfect world a kingdom fashioned after a heavenly model. The newly
formed Arab empire was far too good a thing, from the secular view point, to be left to
fanatics. Civil war broke out directly. When the sectaries and enthusiasts composing in
the main his following came to be pitted against the resources of the State, wielded by the
foremost man of the time Muawia. prefect of Syria and founder of the so-called Omayyad
dynasty of Damascus, the perilous stuff they were made of soon came out Considering
what a force religion is politically, it is fortunate for the world it cannot be pushed very
far in any one direction without its tendency to split into ever so many pieces showing
itself. Ali himself was no zealot. His eloquent Arab tongue was always ready with a
negotiation or a compromise. But this trait, while useless with Muawia's generals,
amounted in the eyes of the more thorough going of his own party to apostacy. In the
end half of his followers deserted him altogether, to form a separate schism, t very like
that of Balfour of Burley in the army of the Scottish Covenanters. After that the success
of his cause was impossible. Driven by reverse after reverse out of Syria, Egypt, and
Arabia he was Caliph only in name, with a footing nowhere save in the half-Persian Irak,
when one day in the great mosque at Cufa near Najaf the sword of a fanatic made of him
* Throughout these remarks Gibbon's hint is borne in mind: " Some reverence is surely due to the fame of
heroes, and the religion of nations." Similarly Carlyle in one of his essays: " The word this man spoke has been
the life-guidance now of a hundred and eighty millions of men these twelve hundred years."
f Known as the sect of the Khawdrij or Dissenters ; also Mutazila, a word expressing the same meaning.