B OOKS.
THE LIFE OF MAHOMMED.3 To say that these volumes complete the best life of Mahommed ex- tant in English, is, perhaps, but feeble praise. England has supplied her fair quota of students to Oriental literature, but the ablest of them have directed their attention almost exclusively to points having, some connexion with Biblical history or Indian antiquities. They have written less about Mecca than Nineveh, and studied the Arab traditions far less deeply than Chinese records. The general reader in England still trusts for his idea of Mahommedanism to the few chap- ters in which Gibbon summed up all that Frenchmen knew of Ma- bommed, and the four volumes of mellifluous trash which Washington Irving called the history of hIaliommed's successors. Dr. Sprenger's work, though based on a learning such as few Europeans can hope to possess, a learning which for two years made him the most wel- come of guests in a Mahommedan mosque in Damascus, has never been popularly diffused, and is, indeed, rather a guide to the sources from which the history of Mahommed ought to be extracted, than the completed work itself. Of the earlier English writers on the subject, it is difficult to decide which is the most hopelessly bad. Most of them, besides their want of power to comprehend the higher races of Asia—a want always conspicuous among Englishmen—are infected by a feeling of almost personal hate to the Arabian prophet. They seem to have inherited the quaint idea of the Crusaders, that Mahom- medanism was not a faith but an arch heresy, not to be mentionedby Christian men without the apology of execration. To men of such temper Mahommed was necessarily only an evil figure, a sort of Pan whose actions might be described but whose motives were unintelli- gible, and -whose partially human character was visible only through the -vapour of crime. Dr. Sprenger again, though wholly free from this feeling, suffers a little from the effect of a mental recoil against it. He will consider Mahommed simply as a man, ignoring his func- tion too much as a leader of men, and unconsciously suppressing the effect of external circumstances in moulding his character and direct- ing his efforts. He writes as a man would write who thought that Napoleon had mapped out his own career beforehand, and who, under that theory, would be sure to suppress the political situations which, if they did not actually make a Napoleon possible, still gave him his scope and his moving force. Mr. Muir has in great part avoided both these errors. He relates every fact and occurrence which aided Mahommed in his career with a care as complete as if Mahommed had been simply a marvellous politician instead of the founder of a creed, without once diverting the reader's attention from the true point of the narrative, the character of its grand cen- tral figure. He describes, for example, all the successive steps by which Mahommed rose to unquestioned supremacy, so as to leave the true impression that they were achieved by a man who, except in a very general way, had not framed his plan of life at all, but who ad- vanced, as other able men do, from point to point. Never forgetting that the mental development of Mahommed is the most important part of his personal history, he still lets us see how that development was affected by the continuous stream of events which affects a real life. He tells us, for example, that Mahommed gradually leaned farther and farther away from the Jews, and then adds, just what other writers forget, the political reasons which made their alliance of little or no value to him. Above all, he dispels the popular illusion that Ma- hommed arrived at power, after his first sufferings, at a bound, and brings before us visibly the chiefs of the clans who for years stoodby his side contesting openly or in secret his supremacy. This, the po- litical side of Mahommed's career, is also the one -which is least studied in Europe, and to which, perhaps for that reason, Mr. Muir has devoted his most careful attention. Master of a clear though somewhat monotonous style, he has contrived to invest the intrigues of Medina and the rivalries of the tribes with something of the dramatic force they must once have possessed. The reader really cares to see how Maliornmed averted a collision between the Mon- tagus and Capulets of Medina, the Beni Aus and the Beni Khajraj.
With respect to the character of the prophet, Mr. Muir is perhaps not quite so serenely impartial. He judges him, it is true, not, with Poeocke, as a heresiarch, nor, with Carlyle, as a hero, but as a man invested, by his own genius and circumstances, with a power which was only unusual- because it eventually moulded the minds, as well as the politics, of the races it slowly sub- dued. Though not, we should imagine, free from sectarian bias, Mr. Muir has contrived to keep it entirely down, and though his judgment on Mahommed is on the whole unfavourable, it is still as leader of men, and not as a false prophet, that he condemns hum He denounces him for assassinations and not for heresy, and while pointing out the fatal effect his appetites produced on the creed of his followers, still brings out in full relief that gentle grandeur of character which was the support, if not the source, of his personal ascendancy. Mahommed was no Mokanna—no veiled and terrible presence ; but a grave and gentle leader, fall of warm friendships and kindly sympathy for all who fullowed his fortunes. The extract is long, but the deliberate judgment of a great scholar on the favour- able side of a character so much discussed is a feature in literary his- to ry.
" A remarkable feature was the urbanity and consideration with which Ya- homet treated even the most insignificant of his followers. Modesty and kind- ness, patience, self- denial, and generosity, pervaded his conduct, and riveted the affections of all around him. He disliked to say No; if unable to replya petitioner in the affirmative, he preferred to remain silent. He was mire • The life of Moho:net. Vols. III. and IV. By W. Muir. smith, Fidler, and Co. bashful,' says Ayesha, ' than a veiled virgin • and if anything displeased him, it was rather from his face, than by his words, that we discovered it; he never, smote any one but in the service of the Lord, not even a woman or a servant.'' He was not known ever to refuse an invitation to the house even of the meanest,, nor to decline a proffered present however small. When seated by a friend, ' he. did not haughtily advance his knees towards him.' He possessed the rare faculty of making each individual in a company think that he was the most favoured guest. When he met any one rejoicing, he would seize hint eagerly and cordially by the hand. With the bereaved and afflicted he sympathized ten- derly. Gentle and unbending towards little children, he would not disdain to accost a group of them at play with the salutation of peace. He shared his food, even in times of scarcity, with others; and was sedulously solicitous for the personal comfort of every one about him. A kindlyand benevolent diposition pervades all these illustrations of his character. 'Mehemet was also a faithful friend. He loved Abu Bakr with the romantic, affection of a brother; Ali, with the fond partiality of a father. Zeid, the Chris- tian slave of Khadlja, was so strongly attached by the kindness of Mehemet, who adopted him, that he preferred to remain at Mecca rather than return to his home with his own father: 'I will not leave thee,' said he, clinging to his patron, for thou bast been a father and a mother to me.' . . . . " In the exercise at home of a power absolutely dictatorial, Mehemet was just and temperate. Nor was he wanting in moderation towards his enemies, when once they had cheerfully submitted to his claims. The long and obstinate struggle against his pretensions maintained by the inhabitants of his native city, might have induced a haughty tyrant to mark his indignation in indelible traces of fire and blood. But Mahoinet, excepting a few criminals, granted an universal pardon ; and, nobly casting into oblivion the memory of the past, with all its mockings, its affronts, and persecutions, he treated even the foremost of his opponents with a gracious and even friendly consideration. Not less marked was the forbearance shown to Abdallah and the disaffected party at Medina, who for so many years persistently thwarted his schemes and resisted his authority ; nor the clemency with which he received the submissive advances of the most hostile tribes, even in the hour of victory."
The unfavourable side is given almost as strongly, but may be summed up in the charge of excessive incontinence, a contempt for truth, and a tendency to assassinate foes. The first two charges it is needless to discuss. No Asiatic is truthful, and, from Solomon to Mirabeau, women have been the temptation of that limited class of men in whom the highest mental powers have been asso- ciated with overflowing vitality. Mahommed was guilty on both counts, but as to the third, Mr. Muir, we think, loses a little of his usual fairness. Nothing is more clear than that Mahommed was usually a clement, and evensoft-natured man. Nothing, on the other hand, seems more clear than that he ordered or sanctioned several assassinations, and we believe the key to the contradiction to be this : Mahommed held himself to have mounted a throne. By the universal consent of the East, a consent which overrides every form of morality now received in Asia, the sentence of the prince is just, irrespective of the mode of its execution. The Sultans to this day claim the right to doom in secret, and a Mussulman who was told that to execute such a sentence was to commit a murder, would simply stare with surprise. The justice or injustice of the sentence itself he would discuss ably enough, though he would invariably declare a political foe of the Sultan a just object of capital punishment, but the publicity of the punishment would seem to him a matter of insignificant detail. And so, if we once grant, as Asiatics do grant, that the doom of the prince is an act for which he is responsible only to God, it undoubtedly is. We do not see an instance among the numbers Mr. Muir has recorded to which this principle will not apply, and though it cannot exonerate Mahom- med, it disposes of the charge of exceptional cruelty. On one point, and one only, must we take exception to the tone of Mr. Muir's biography. He has a greatleal too much contempt for the Arabs ; will never allow that a false philosophy may dim the per- ceptive as well as the reasoning faculties. He wonders why Mahommed's occasional cruelty did not convince his followers of the falsity of his claims. Simply because no Asiatic deems or can deem any command supposed to be coming from God cruel at all. The greater decrees of Mahommed were always represented as revelations, and, God having a clear right to the lives of his creatures, their slaughter no more created an impression of cruelty than a visitation of cholera now does. The truth of Mahommed's connexion with God being once received, his cruelties became expressions of the Divine wrath. Mr. Muir is never tired of observing how silly the Arabs were to accept as revelations commands so trivial or even so evil as those which some of the Suras convey. He forgets that with the Arab, as with almost every other Asiatic, there was but one source of good and evil—the command of the Deity: If God command slaughter, slaughter is virtue; if he sanction incontinence, it is in- stantly moral. The Sum, therefore, which justified the prophet in taking his slave-girl Mary, did not in Arab ideas justify a crime, but simply turned it into a virtue, the one solitary and all com- prehending virtue—obedience. Then as to the triviality of the order, of which Mr. Muir makes so much, it did not strike the Arabs as trivial at all, involving as it did the character of their prophet, and the fate of every slave girl in Arabia. All Oriental laws, without exception, are "trivial ; ' that is, they regulate not the principles by which human life should be guided, but the acts a matt should and should not do. Any law which does this must from its very nature either leave half of human life unregu- lated, or descend to details often "trivial," and sometimes what Northern men, who live habitually in full dress, think filthy; a fact just as patent in the cases of conscience submitted to Roman Catholic divines, as in the Koran. It is the special virtue of Christi- anity among the creeds of the world, that while it leaves very little unsettled, it builds up its law out of principles and not out of cases, and in so doing provides for every climate, and every fresh develop- ment alike of crime and of morality. We know that smuggling and slavery are crimes by applying Christian principles, though neither offence is mentioned by Christ as such. The special exemptions claimed by Mahommed—an utter disproof of his pretensions according to our line of thought—had to the Arab scarcely any significance. Crimes being in his philosophy not mala in se, but mala prohibiter, he easily realized the notion that his chief was so near to God that the prohibition had been withdrawn. Dervises of special sanctity are to this hour exempted by Asiatic opinion from the moral law, and it is for the same reason that abuse of the scoundrelly Hindoo gods falls dead on a native crowd. Apart from this single defect, and one or two of the same kind, Mr. Muir's book deserves the permanent repu- tation it will most assuredly obtain.
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