THE ANNALS OF ISLAM.*
TOWARDS the close of the sixth century Weatern Asia and the greater part of Europe were divided betWeen Rome and Persia. The Roman Empire, seated at Byzantium, had recently undergone the great revival of the earlier years of Justinian's reign, followed by the equally important but as yet unnoticed decadence that resulted from the Emperor's efforts to recapture the Western portions, of his dominions, whereby he brought the rich Eastern provinces to the verge of ruin. The Persian Empire, splendid as it still was to the Outward eye, had been rocked to its foundations by the Mazdakite schism, and had been obliged to stretch its mili- tary resources to the utmost in the effort to guard its northern frontiers against the white Huns. Moreover, Greeks and Persians alike were weakened by the disastrous internecine wars which they waged ceaselessly upon each other. Justinian died in 565, surviving by a few months only the most famous of his generals, Belisarius ; Narses, the other distinguished military leader of the reign, died in 567; Cbosroe Nushirwan, the last great figure in the annals of the Sassanian Emperors of Persia, in 579. It was as though Destiny had cleared the decks of the world for action, knowing that the time was ripe, for the Prophet of Islam was born at Mekka in the year 470. Tradition has been busy with the signs and portents that accompanied his birth and surrounded his early years, but of historic facts none have been preserved, not even his true name, that of Mohammed being probably.a cognomen. We know only that he was an orphan, a member of the merchant tribe of the Quraysh (though, indeed, critical examination shows the links in the chain of his lineage to be singularly untrustworthy), brought up in the house of his grandfather, and as little considered by the busy society of traders and pilgrims that surrounded him as he would have been in Byzantium or Ctesiphon, if the news of his existence could have reached those two,capitals of civilisation. He died at the age of sixty-two, having laid the foundations of a new Empire as wide-embracing as either of those which he found, and more durable than either.
It is the story of this achievement, together with the history of the Mohammedan Empire for nine hundred ,years, until the overthrow of the Mameluk Sultans of Egypt by the Turks in 1517, that Prince Teano has set himself to write,—a colossal task if it is to be accomplished with the same minute care that he has expended upon the first volume. He permits no aspect of his subject—social, moral, political, or religious—to escape him ; he intersperses his chronological record with critical notes which show great learning and sound judgment, and with long digressions in which he weighs cause and result and sums up the general bearing of the events which he relates. His toil is lightened by the fact that be can draw upon the labours of famous Orientalists who have, in the past fifty years, covered the ground with which he now deals; but he does not spare himself the trouble of examining anew the texts upon which their work was founded, and be brings to
*Annali dell' Islam. By Prince Teano. Vol. I. Milan: Ulrich Hoepli. rel 3.291
the study of his authorities, both ancient and modern, an agate criticism combined with the true historic sense. Such a book as this (the first volume rune to seven hundred and forty large , quarto pages, and we are promised eleven volumes more) may not be read consecutively by a wide audience ; . but the -con- clusions at which the author arrives will help to form the verdict of students upon one of the most astonishing phenomena in the world's history, the birth and power of Islam. It is a phenomenon which enters largely into our own problem! of government, and therefore the successive volumes of Prince Teano's book will be of great interest to us. By throwing the light of the past upon the difficulties of the present, he may clear the way to the solution of many doubtful points, and lay bare the origin and strength of many a force with which we still have to contend.
The figure of Mohammed is like a touchstone upon which to.test the insight of historians. Some have seen in him nothing but a vulgar impostor ; some, like Muir, have been reduced to the puerile expedient of a suggestion of Satanic inspiration, or to the almost equally baseless figment of epileptic seizures, to account for his success and his fervour ; some (we have had a recent example in an English scholar) reckon him to be only a superlatively able politician with an engaging personality, seizing his opportunities without regard for any other consideration than the expediency of the moment. None of these views are sufficiently comprehensive. If Mohammed did not find a martyr's end, it was not because the spirit to meet such a solution was lacking. There can be no doubt of his sincerity during the early years of his mission; the chapters of the Quran revealed at Mekka before the Flight are good and sufficient evidence. With an ardent eloquence and an admirable simplicity, he preached during these years of obscurity and struggle the religion of the one true God. He was not occupied with the position of His rasul, His prophet ; it was a role that it had not occurred to him to assume. Nor was he concerned with kingdoms of this world; conquest by arms was an idea that had not entered his mind. He was but the mouthpiece of the Divine Spirit, calling upon his own tribe, and upon any other Arab tribe whom he could induce to listen, to relinquish the worship of stocks and stones and lift their eyes to that which was eternal. Prince Teano rejects the story of his momentary surrender to the two goddesses of the polytheists, as he rejects, no doubt with reason, all the vast accumulation of legend which the traditionists have heaped about the years at Mekka. From what source Mohammed drew his conception of divine unity is a question of the deepest significance. Jews and Christians were both to be found at Mekka ; from them, and particularly from the Jews, he must have learnt. That he should have made a most astounding confusion of the stories repeated to him from the Old and New Testaments was of no importance. He had grasped the main idea of both faiths, monotheism, and that was enough. Perhaps, as Prince Teano points out, if the Quraysh had listened to him he would have been content to go no further ; it was their obstinate refusal that forced him into the wider field, and turned Islam into a world-religion. His life was not in danger at Mekka ; accord- ing to Arab custom, he was under the protection of powerful members of his own family, and his murder would have brought the perils of a blood-feud about the ears of those who had laid hands on him. But he and his small band of followers were exposed to constant annoyance, and the faith made no progress. It was at this moment that the intolerable confusion that reigned at Medina induced the inhabitants of that city to look round for some means of restoring order. During their pilgrimages to the shrine at Mekka they heard. Mohammed's preaching, they observed the organisation and the spirit of obedience that ruled among his converts, they selected him as a political leader, and adopted, in large numbers, his religion.
Prince Teano gives ns in this volume the history of the first six years at Medina. We see Mohammed, by force of circum- stance, changed into a statesman, a lawgiver, a leader of armies, courting favour, courting success by every means known to statecraft, his personal authority growing day by day, and with it his estimation of himself, until we find him no longer preaching the religion of God, but that of Mohammed, the Prophet of God. He met with opposi- tion in plenty,—from the rich Jewish colony, whom he tried at first to mollify, and then turned upon in a very passion
of pitiless revenge from-the' Mediliese converts, who re: sented his claims on their obedience; from the Quraysh,
who led strong and sometimes successful armies into the field against him. But there was no real union between the forces of his enemies. The Jews hated the Arabs, and the Arabs bated each other, as they do to this day, and one by one the Prophet triumphed over them all. The story of his success is not pleasant reading. Mohammed was an Arab of the seventh century ; the customs of the race and of the age do not appeal to the sympathies of Europeans of to-day. His political life is a record of broken faith and unjust dealing ; his private life, of which no detail was left undescribed by perfervid chroniclers, while many a detail was richly embroidered, is best left undescribed by us. It is wise to remember, when wading through this farrago of political expedience and crime, that the Prophet's hold upon the personal devotion of his followers never weakened, and wiser still to bear in mind Prince Teano's profound reflection that it is easier to die a saint at the stake than upon a throne. "The figure of Mohammed," says he, "loses in beauty, but it gains in strength ; all the process of evolu- tion which his spirit traversed has a quite peculiar interest, for possibly no man before or after him had a life like his. He began his career when he had already reached the age of forty as an honest and a sincere preacher, fighting in the name of a great truth, not for his own material interests, but for the moral interests of the society in which he lived. He died the absolute and supreme head of a theocratic Empire, founder of a militant religion which laid claim to the dominion of the world ; both these results were direct products of his moral and intellectual vigour."
Mohammed, then, was much more than the prophet of a new creed; he was the creator of a social entity of which his
countrymen had had no conception. He welded the Arab tribes into a ,nation,—a nation of warriors who subdued half Asia, a nation of rulers who founded capitals in Mesopotamia and in Spain where the torch of learning burnt through the darkness of the early Middle Ages. It may be that Prince Teano is right when he says that to the Arabs the political aspect of Islam was more important than the religious, and that it was the subject-peoples, ref t of all hope of worldly supremacy and by. nature inclined to metaphysical specula- tion, who developed. the doctrinal side of Mohammed's teaching. His empire, which be had first conceived as being one of the spirit, passed after his death through all the phases of mundane greatness and decline, and has ended as a powerful moral force, governing the thoughts and acts of men very different from one another in race but united by the bond of the faith. How strong that union ie, and whether it could again be given the vital spark of a common Political purpose, are questions that present themselves continually, in these days of Pan-Islamism, for our practical consideration.
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