SIR W. MUIR ON THE ARAB CALIPHS.
SIR W. MTJIR, the author of the only solid. history of Mahommed as yet written by an Englishman, contem-
plates, we are rejoiced to hear, the completion of his work by a detailed. history of the early Caliphate. Next to Mahommed's personality, the causes of the `development of his successors' dominion must interest mankind. Much of his task, we believe, has been already accomplished ; and he recently read before the University of Cambridge a lecture—the Rede Lecture for the year—which earns up, or to speak more exactly, indexes the conclusions at which he has arrived, and. which he will in his future book endeavour to place beyond cavil or criticism. Some of them, one more especially, are so remarkable, and so opposed to the popular beliefs, that we shall, we believe, do a service to such of our readers as care about history at all by placing them before them in the briefest form in which we can make them clear.
The first problem which interests the student of Mahommed- anism is its success. The Arab followers of that creed, within ten years of their Prophet's death, conquered, and still retain, all Arabia, which, be it remembered, after Mahommed's decease rose in universal and determined revolt ; all Persia, including much of modern Turkey inAsia ; all Egypt, and all Syria ; and they maintained. successful war for a period. of two hundred and fifty years, during which they subdued nearly the whole e the Asiatic part of the Roman Empire, all northern Africa, together with southern Spain, and very nearly conquered France. Con- sidering that Constantinople was, in the first years of this enor- moils war, the centre of civilisation and military knowledge, that the Arab tribes had, to defeat not only the Roman legion- aries who had conquered the world, 'but the brave Barbarians who bad conquered them ; that they had no superiority in weapons, and that their campaigns involved marches from which modern Prussians would recoil, and arrangements for commissariat such as an Indian Government would. fail in Making, this was a tremendous feat. It has usually been explained by the assertion that Mahommedanisin, which offers; Heaven to the soldier who dies for the Faith, naturally attracted. warriors, that the existing races of the East were hopelessly effete, and that the privilege of conversion gave the Caliphs allies everywhere, just as the Barbarians found allies among the slaves in every Roman city ; and
all those assertions are true. They do not, however, all taken together, explain the whole of that marvellous history, for the warrior converts were not .prominent in the Army till a late period ; the " effete " races fought stubbornly and desperately, and. perished most of them on the battle-field.; and the conversions, of which so much is made, followed, but did. not precede victory in war. Indeed, it is a cardinal, though forgotten, point of Mahommedan history that the Arabs did.
not convert the populations they conquered.; that wherever they were not strong enough to exterminate, as in North
Africa, or to affect the very blood of the people, as in Egypt, they left the majority of the population Christians or Pagans, as they found. them. The rayah everywhere is a Christian yet. Moreover, no faith--not even Mahornmedanism—can make undisciplined Asiatics do the work of trained soldiers, or hurl forward non-existent armies, or give to hordes of believers all at once discipline, mobility, and commissariat. These Arabs destroyed nations of warriors like the Vandals, hosts of soldiers like the Persian Army, and even in their decadence, when the forward movement was expiring, held, their own against Charles Martel and his mail-clad. Germans. To maintain such a career of conquest, the Arabs must have become soldiers as well as Mahommedans, must have been held together by a strict organisation, and must, for the only time in their history, have been compelled to fight in enormous organised masses. And this, in Sir William Muir's judgment, was really the case. After Abubeker had for the second time subdued Arabia, the Arab tribes appear to have become finally convinced that Mahommede anism was true, and the accidental conquest of Syria, which was invaded in self-defence, revealed. to Omar, the second.
Caliph, the tremendous potency of the weapon in his hand. The character of this great Caliph is still a problem—for there are some events in his life which indicate that he was not a thorough fanatic—but it is beyond doubt that he possessed a capacity for organisation such as has belonged. to few con- querors, however successful. He had seen in Syria what the Arabs could do in a popular war, and by a series of decrees issued. as Vicegerent of God he placed. the entire Arab nation under arms. He absolutely forbade all civil employ, even agriculture, which he left to slaves and women, declared every living Arab a soldier, enfranchised all slaves of Arab blood, and. organised a system of payment for the en- tire nation. The Arab tribes, formed into regiments, re- ceived a definite and. large share of the lands they conquered, they divided all plunder on a strictly regulated system, and they were regularly paid in cash, at the rate of 200 dinars a head. per campaign, or, as campaigns were annual, fifteen dinars for the lunar month. This is Sir W. Muir's spirit-stirring description of this vast organisation :—
"It is worth our white, now for a moment, to glance at the con-
stitution of the force which thus suddenly sprang into the theatre of the world, and in so brief a space achieved this unparalleled success.
It was the Arab race alone which did it. Lured by spoil and rapine, and fired by new-born zeal for the Faith, their first charge was irresistible ; and lest the warlike spirit should evaporate, it was Omar's task to give this mighty power a distinctive organisation ; and so to
keep it apart and prevent its mingling with the conquered races, that for two centuries and a half, its martial fire continued unabated. The whole nation—every man, -woman, and child of the Arab raw— was subsidised. In theory, the rights of all Believers are the same. 'Ye are one brotherhood,' said Mahomet, at the farewell pilgrimage, and he placed two fingers one upon the other, to enforce the absolute equality. But in point of fact, this equality was limited to the Arab nation. To them, as the warrior race belonged the conquered lands, and all the spoils of war. At first these were divided equally, bat ag wealth multiplied, and a secure revenue began to come io, Omar established his Dowan, or civil and military list. Every soul was rated at its worth, personal in view of service rendered, or in con- nection with the prophet. The widows of Mahomet, the Mothers of • the Faithful,' took the precedence with 10,000 pieces each ; then the Companions,' and converts according to priority in the faith. The famous Three Hundred of 13edr had each 5,000 pieces ; the warriors of CadeEla and Yermiik, 2,000; and Fin they graduated downwards to 200 pieces for the latest levies. Even slaves, strange to say, bad their portion. Wives, widows, and children, were all enrolled in the Bowan, with their proper stipends ; and there, too, every infant as soon as born was entitled to a place. The whole people was classified by tribes, according to descent; and, as a rule, by tribes they took their place as they marched into the field. Their occupation, too, was limited to arms. Omar stringently forbade that any Arab should engage in agriculture, or even acquire personal property in the soil. The nation was mobilised; became a great camp, a military body ready to march at a moment's call. Wheresoever they went they were the nobles and rulers of the land. The conquered races even if they embraced Islam, were of a lower caste ; and as clients' of some Arab tribe, courted its patronage and protection. Thus com- munism, so far as it was recognised by Islam, became communism in favour of the Arab race alone." In other and more usual phrases, Omar applied the law of the conscription to the whole of Arabia, regimented the entire' people, declared all labour save in war disgraceful, decreed that war .should support war, while forbidding individual plunder, and sent forth a race owning a continent as large as Europe west of the Vistula, all kinsmen by tradition, all holding one faith, and all speaking one language, though in many dialects, to the gradual conquest of the world. Sir W. Muir does not state the numbers, though we believe he will ; but the present' writer has been convinced by calculation that Arabia, in the time of Mahommed, had been getting over-full for its fertility —there is a curious piece of evidence on this point in the tribal laws against the destruction of food—that Omar's decrees were obeyed by a population certainly of fifteen millions, and probably of twenty millions, and that con- sequently, if all men between twenty and thirty became soldiers, he had a landsturm of from 1,400,000 to 2,000,000 strong men to expend in battle and as settlers. A force of that kind, commanded by picked Arabs like Kaled, men with a natural genius for war and the practice of a lifetime in it, regu- larly paid and provided, and relentlessly urged forward for two centuries, would conquer Asia now. There is no soldier out- side Europe like the Arab, and he then fought for years till he became a veteran, with the certain prospect of wealth in this life if he survived, and a Heaven such as he understood if he died upon the plain. This tremendous force, operating in a score of campaigns at once, still obeyed an undi- vided command, communicated all over its immense range of enterprise, and was expended with as little hesitation as if Omar could create more Arabs by fiat. The waste of life must have surpassed belief. Speed was a cardinal point with the Arab Generals, and speed in such regions means incessant dyings by the way. The commissariat barely supported life. Kalocl made one tremendous march through a desert by killing his camels, and using the, water in their stomachs for water rations to his soldiers ; the battles often lasted days, and ended in the destruction of whole nations, and men fought hand to hand ; there were no doctors, no hospitals, no medicines, no provision `whatever for the wounded, and for surgery the single idea and practic3 of the actual cautery. Still, the conquests were effected ; and from the Caliphs downward, Arabs ruled the Mussulman world, until after two hundred years, an Abbasside Caliph of the purest blood of the Koreish, moved, as Sir W. Muir thinks, by jealousy of the Arab soldiery—moved also, as we venture to think, by their decreasing numbers—resorted to the dangerous expedient of importing mercenaries, chiefly Turks, from the Tartar Desert, and the Arab conquests ceased;
It seems to us that this account, if Sir W. Muir can and will, work it out in detail, renders the early history of Mahommedan- ism, almost for the first time, clearly intelligible ; and he will, to judge from the lecture, contribute also an explanation of a second problem, and perhaps a third. We are not sure of the third, for we are not satisfied with the over-brief, and, indeed, scarcely intelligible explanation in this lecture of the rise of the Alyite or Sheeah heresy in Mahommedanism—why did some Arabs, and not all, care about the Prophet's descendants, to whom he had assigned no place, either in his creed or his system of government P—but the second is this. There is no puzzle in the history of this faith like the momentary and bril- liant career of its followers as civilisers, patrons of science, and even builders. Nothing is more unlike all we know of Mahommedaniam than that it should produce architects and chemists and mathematicians, yet they certainly were for a short period produced. Many of the chemists were certainly Jews, and many of .the mathematicians, builders, and anti- quarians may have been "converted" Greeks and Italians ; but the question remains how they became influential, and Sir W. Muir suggests a general explanation. He believes that for fifty years, from the accession of Al Maimun in A.H. 108, the Caliphs were more or less Free-thinkers, men holding a secret faith in great measure rationalistic ; that they had the keen interest in science common with that temperament ; and that it was the revival of orthodoxy, and not any decay, which killed out the golden age of Mussulman thought, never to revive, We believe that this is true, and trust that Sir William Muir will not only produce the existing evidence, which is fairly ample, but will apply his touchstone to Mussulman sovereigns of other times, Is there not reason to believe that nearly every "illustrious" Mussulman sovereign—illustrious, that is, for anything but conquest—was a secret sceptic, like so many of the great Persian Mahommedans, and like the greatest of the Moguls, Akbar P If he will only give us a chapter on the Free-thinking side of the Arab mind, he will contribute as much to our com- prehension of their intellectual triumphs, as his chapters on their organisation will to the intelligibility of their conquests.
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