The Moslem World/Volume 11/Number 1/Der Islam Einst und Jetzt
Der Islam Einst und Jetzt. By Traugott Mann. pp. 150. Gilt top, profusely illustrated, 5 colored maps. Verlag von Velhagen und Klasing. Bielefeld und Leipzig, 1914. Price, 5 marks.
Published on the eve of the War, "Islam Past and Present" is among the last offerings of the scholarship of Germany before she put down the pen of the savant to wield the sword of the Turk. To students of the Islamic world the book is a gift which need provoke no "Timeo Danaos." It is the latest issue of the well-known series of elegant historical treatises, Monographien zur JVeltgeschichte, appearing in Leipzig under the editorship of Professor Eduard Heyck, in collaboration with a corps of German specialists. It is uniform and closely related with the editor's own vivid chronicle of Palestine and the Crusades, {Die Kreuzzilge und das Heilige Land.) The author. Dr. Traugott Mann, has produced a work at once learned and lucid, fresh and fascinating, brief and brilliant—a marvel of condensation. He has done in succinct manner for the average German reader today, what August Miiller did for the critical student of Islam thirty-five years ago in his comprehensive survey of Moslem expansion, Der Islam im Morgenund Abendland. Indeed, the present monograph may be suggestively described as an emended miniature of Miiller's ample, still classical, though at some points superseded, volumes. Yet, severely compacted as it is. Dr. Mann's production is no mere compendium or secondhand epitome. It is a series of clear-cut cameos, aglow with original verve.
There are five chapters dealing successively with Pre-Islamic Arabia, Mohammed, The Koran, Religious and Political Development, Islam in Modern Times. The range and sequence of subjects is strikingly similar to that of the Dutch Professor Hurgronje's American Lectures} but the treatment is somewhat less popular, and is richer in historical detail. Less discursive as to topics than Professor Margoliouth's excellent little handbook,' so widely circulated in England and America, the German work has a clearer perspective and a statelier stride.
Dr. Mann has striven, for the most part successfully, to write as an impartial historian. On points of scholarly debate his judgments partake of the middle way between extreme deductions. For example, on the question of pre-Mohammedan Arabian culture, he will not concede to the archaeologists that the rise of Islam was simply a phase of the final "up-flaring" {Aufflackern) of a high preceding civilization threatened with extinction. Neither will he approve the picture of the Wektel-Jahiliya, or "Time of Barbarism'" in pagan Arabia so blackly painted by Moslem writers, who would exalt Mohammed into "the prodigious author of a new creation out of pre-existent nothing"—(^der iibergewaltige Schopfer eines Neuen aus dem vorherigen Nichts.) (p. 3) The Founder of Islam, our author opines, inherited not only survivals of indigenous cultures which flourished in various strains in certain sections of the Peninsula (whose religious and political development 1 Mohammedanism: Its Origin, Religious and Political Growth, and Present State. By C. Snouck Hurgronje. Putnam's. ' Mohammedanism. By D. S. Margoliouth. Williams and Norgate. (Home University Library).
- Cf. Goldziher: Muhammedanische Studien, Vol. I, p. 220 et. seq. was by no means uniform), but also the indubitable impress of contemporary rabbinic Judaism and distorted Christianity. Regarding the details of the Christian contact Dr. Mann is much more hesitant than most other writers. He rules out of court the stories of the Prophet's visits to Syrian monks, and dismisses as unproven the sui;>posed influence from the Gnostic Elkesites of Syria and East Jordan. Candor inhibits him from setting down any reliably attested facts about the Prophet's personal relations with the Christians of Yemen or Abyssinia, or Mecca, or even with the surviving northern communities of the former Christian states of Hira and Palmyra. Dr. Mann has a keen scent for legend and pious story. To suspect is to eliminate. There is no mention of Mary, the Christian Coptic maid. But the numerous Christian references and parallels {sic) in the Koran and in the Hadith are acknowledged as convincing evidence that the Prophet's acquaintance with Christians and with Christian traditions must have been extensive (p. 28).
With these guarded admissions of Islam's debt to religious influences antecedent and extant. Dr. Mann hastens to affirm Mohammed's originality. The epoch-making power of the Prophet's mission, he declares, lay not in its syncretistic absorption but in its antithesis to the past (p. 3). .
In estimating the personality of Mohammed, the author is equally determined to beat his own path between the diverging highways of enthusiasts. He will walk with neither the detractors nor the panegyrists. He has, it is intimated, severely analysed the results of the latest researches, has sifted fact from fantasy, and has divested himself of those occidental presuppositions which, he thinks, have lead astray other Western biographers in their attempts to interpret the "differently fashioned Oriental." With this preparation he will limn for us the real maker of the new religion which, in the 7th century A. D., set all the East aflame.
According to Dr. Mann, Mohammed was neither the highly idealized "God-impacted mediator" {Gott-ergriffener Griibler) of Lamartine, nor the sordid monstrosity of the Crusaders. He is not to be dismissed as an hallucinated epileptic (as, e. g., by Sprenger), or an idle dreamer; on the other hand, his "revelations" are no more to be dogmatically spurned than is Paul's vision on the Damascus road. Dr. Mann defends the Prophet from gross sensuality, hails him as a herald of righteousness, but straightway pulls him down from the pedestal of Carlyle. A hero he will certainly not allow him to be, much less a saint. Neither was he a conscious falsifier (bewuszter Liigner), nor a self-deluded impostor; yet his compromises are undenied. Against Sir William Muir, it is held, he was sincere from first to last. A man of many faults, conceiving himself to be the chosen of Allah, "a mighty devotee of God and eternity," he confounded the human and the divine by unconsciously yielding to the temptation which Christ withstood with the words, "My kingdom is not of this world." He is finally summed up as "the powerfully stirred man of God who became a politician, or, rather, a genuine Arabian robber-prince"—{ein echt arabischer Raubfiirst)—himself unaware of his spiritual decline (pp. 44-47). So, in the end, Dr. Mann gives us quite as paradoxical and mysterious a Mohammed as does the Koran itself; in the words of the Oxford historian, "the strangest of moral enigmas."* But the portrayal is interesting, since it stirs up anew the whole question of the Prophet's character.
♦C. W. C. Oman: The Byzantine Empire, p. 159. Chapter III is a masterly summary of the history and doctrines of the Koran, and is followed in Chapter IV by a vivid sketch of the development and diffusion, both political and religious, of Islam among the nations.
Not its style alone, but the beauty of its form causes the book to smack of Miiller's embellished masterpiece and to stand out in unrivalled distinction among recent introductory manuals. Bound in fine linen, white and marine-blue, chastely entitled and decorated with gold, its enamelled pages gleam with the most exquisite craftsmanship of printer and engraver. It would seem that the most reluctant reader would be tempted by the aesthetic glamor with which the subject is invested. Here is Mohammedanism decked in its most artistic and alluring attire.
The wealth of illustrations, enclosed in so small a compass, is amazing. Mosques, museums and monuments, all the way from Turkestan to Spain, from Hadramaut to Holland, bring tribute to the author's attempt to spread before the untraveled reader the most picturesque symbols of Moslem achievement within its vast arena. There are 166 illustrations in all. They range from the crude Sabasan tablets, Aramaic steles, Nabatjean ruins and Cufic inscriptions of pre-Islamic Arabia, to the clustered pilgrim-shrines of Medina and of Mecca; from the Bedouin tents and rock-hewn dwellings of the Arabian desert, to the architectural splendors of Cairo, Konia and Constantinople; from the ivory bas-reliefs of Baghdad, to the domes and minarets of Damascus; from Timur's tomb in Samarkand, to Sheikh Safi's faience-windowed mosque in Ardebil; from the frescoes of the "forty-pillared hall" of Abbas the Great at Ispahan, to the sumptuous sanctuary of Selim II at Adrianople; from the glittering towers of mediaeval Jerusalem to the glorious screens and stalactite arches of the Alhambra. Portraits are given of important historical leaders, Mohammed the Prophet, the sceptered Tamerlane, Suleiman the Magnificent and his consort Roxelane, Mohammed II—conqueror of Constantinople, Bayazet—"the thunderbolt of the Bosphorus," the black-bearded Boabdil of Granada, with his bespangled tunic and his jewelled sword; also, other beturbaned sultans, and even as modern a personage as the heir-apparent to the throne of Bahrein. Particularly fine are the nineteen prints of typical Arab buildings, landscapes and inhabitants, from the collection of the German traveler, Hermann Burkhardt, whom death overtook in Yemen in 1909. The colored plates include gorgeous title-pages and elaborately chased covers of de luxe Turkish editions of the Koran, brilliant Persian manuscripts, prayer-carpets and wall-tapestries of scarlet, old rose, green and gold; and, richest of all, the frontispiece, an illuminated Persian miniature of the 16th century, representing Mohammed's ascent to Heaven. The five colored maps show the bygone kingdoms of the Caliphate, the shifting boundaries of the Othman dominion from 1359 to 1913, and the parts of the world now religiously occupied by Islam.
A word must be said about the seductiveness of such a book. Overemphasis on the beautiful has its dangers even in historical writing. It is to be feared, an unsophisticated reader would get from Dr. Mann a far too roseate view of what Mohammedan civilization has been and is. From these fair pages one catches nothing of the stench of the bazaars, the poverty, illiteracy and social squalor of the masses in Moslem countries; nothing of the dirt and dilapidation, the stupor and stagnation of the average Mohammedan town; nothing of the stifling miasma of repression, monotony and deterioration—the moral paralysis—which characterizes even the classic lands of the Faith. In the story of Moslem conquest and expansion, stately language veils the brutal butcheries which, even down into recent times, have followed Mohammed's sanction of the sword. As calmly as if he were discussing American democracy does Dr. Mann sketch the political fortunes of the Ottomans. Not a hint is conveyed of the labyrinth of iniquity through which Turkey has tottered to its downfall. Abdul Hamid is politely dismissed as a political passe, but no mention is made of his massacres of Armenian Christians, which, even for two decades before the Great War, shocked the heart of decent humanity. There are no pictures of slave-markets or harems. There is not a paragraph in reprobation of Islam's age-long blight on womanhood. On the contrary, an apology (p. 77) is offered for the veil, the purdah and even for polygamy and concubinage! The camera presents no faces of the millions of disheveled, neglected, Moslem children, nor of the fierce semi-barbarians who, like the Kurds and Baluchis, mumble prayers toward Mecca and live by lance and plunder. The literary touch is so lightsome that one does not feel the dead weight of tradition and animism, which hangs on the Moslem mind.^ All this is another story, about which the author has chosen to be silent.
From the viewpoint of Christian missions it is in the conclusions and suggestions of the final chapter that the present book reveals its chief defect. Here the dispassionate historian loses his critical acumen to indulge in theoretical musings, dangerously akin to the ex-Kaiser's flattering compromise when, in 1898, that world-aspiring monarch consorted with the Sultan at Constantinople, linked Pan-Islamism with German propaganda, and, as "Hadji Wilhelm," at Damascus, decked the sepulcher of Saladin with flowers.
How does our author diagnose the disease of the modern Mohammedan world? All its present woes and problems he ascribes to that "catastrophe" which forever destroyed its political unity, viz., the Mongolian invasions of Western Asia, beginning in the 13th century with the "cataclysm of the Great Khans," ending with the death of Tamerlane in 1405 (pp. 110-112). This is a sad load to heap on the heads of Hulagu and the Terrible Tartar of Samarkand! The modern assassins may wash their hands in innocence! Islam's general ailment, according to Dr. Mann, is not one of corruption but only of ^disruption. The bones are broken but the blood is pure. Islam has not failed because of inherent incompetence or insufficiency to meet progressively the higher needs of man, but because, through no fault of its own, it lost its political solidarity and has been prevented from making "any essential progress for seven centuries" (p. Iio). Such is the argument. The responsibility is with those mediaeval Mongols! What boots it that the ferocious hordes of Timur, "the Scourge of God," were themselves disciples of the Prophet? Eo non exculpantur!
In considering the preferred solution of the present status we must charitably remember that Dr. Mann wrote before the War. What is his remedy for the ills of the Near East, and of Islam as a whole? Not a superficial varnishing with European culture (oberflachliche Vberkleidung mit europaischem Kulturfimis), nor a puritanical revival of the primitive faith and practice after the manner of the Hanbalites and Wahhabitcs. So far, so good. Our author's panacea is wrapped up in two words, "Fortbildung" and "Kultur"—by which he means the further development of Islam within the limits and toward the goal of a strictly autochthonous {bodenstdndig) Mussulman 'Cf. Zwemer's The influence of Animism on Islam, Macmtllian, 1920. civilization, that shall take its place in the modern age. Apparently he is not discouraged by what thirteen centuries have actually brought forth in lands moulded by Koranic tradition; for, hidden and astir in the soil of Islam, he thinks, are the seeds of its own redemption. Islam has shown, he says, a far greater genius of adaptability than has Christianity; therefore, it has power of itself to become for the Orient a thoroughly up-to-date religion, competent to promote and to satisfy the highest demands of spiritual and social life, and to supply a firm foundation for free, progressive government.
This is an astounding thesis. One's faith is severely strained by such optimism, in view of what has transpired within the past fifteen years in the foremost Moslem state—the land of the Holy Caliphate itself. The attempt of the Young Turks, through the Revolution of 1908, to open the gates of a new dawn for the Ottoman Empire, issued in a night of terror. The ideal of a modern constitutional regime of freedom, enlightenment, justice and tolerance collapsed in a new reign of tyranny and horror unsurpassed in the blood-soaked annals of dethroned despotism. The Committee of Union and Progress was swept into the tides of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turanianism — slogans which register the supreme corporate aspirations of modern Islamic leadership, but at whose revealed content the world has stood aghast. The terrible reaction was perfectly true to Koranic form, and lies at the door of the Moslem creed. In the blaze of the World War Dr. Mann's idealism must have shriveled to ashes. Will fair blossoms of indigenous culture and progress spring from the newest paths of slaughter, lust and loot, which mark the latest Armenian atrocities, all the way from Trebizond to the Syrian Desert, from the Aegean to the Caspian Sea? In the orthodox and efficient barbarism which, with the name of Allah on its lips, has murdered a million people, regardless of age or sex, shall we find the germs of spontaneous redemption?
It is pertinent to inquire whether, in the more distant past, there is anything which reasonably nourishes the expectation that the Moslem ethos will yet produce and ensoul a self-evolved civilization, at once progressive and enduring, such as Dr. Mann conceives, to meet the awakening needs of the modern East. Looking backward the sober historian contemplates a series of quick and usually violent aggressions, brilliant up-soarings, and rapid assimilations, followed by equally rapid dissolutions and abysmal collapses. In no case has Islam demonstrated capacity either to originate or to uphold permanently a high type of progressive culture. In so far as it has been a constructive force, its role has been that of stimulator, borrower and transmitter rather than that of creator and sustainer. This is seen by a glance at the times and places of its highest ascendancy. By common consent its fairest fabric was the vast Arabian Empire which, a century after Mohammed's death, extended from the Indus to the Guadalquivir. The dazzling era of arts, sciences, letters and commerce which reached the zenith of its splendor under the Abbasside Caliphs at Baghdad, brought even Europe to the feet of Saracenic learning, and contributed to the West a precious heritage. But of the culture thus developed and communicated two facts are abundantly confirmed by the latest researches, viz: (i) the Arab conquerors derived and compounded their new civilization largely from the pre-Islamic cultures of India, Persia and Byzantium. (2) No sooner had it blossomed into the Golden Age of Mohammedan Literature (754-874 A. D.)—the period illustrated by Harun-al-Rashid—than, through the corruption of succeeding caliphs, social disintegration began—"a process of rapid decline into irremediable decay."^ The whole structure, with its pomp and learning, battered by the Seljulcs, finally broke under the hammer of the Mongols, and fell back into the desert.
A reflection of Damascus and Baghdad, at first, was the Moslem state in Spain, which, under the emirs of Cordova (711-1031), made the Arabian schoolmen the teachers of the Christian West, in an outburst of intellectual development that ultimately outshone the glories of the East. In education, wealth, and prosperity the Iberian Peninsula became in the tenth century the foremost country of Europe. But of this achievement of the Arab and Berber conquerors, the latest historian of Spain, on the authority of Altamira, says: "It was more largely through the efforts of others whom they imitated than through innovations of their own that they reached their high estate.'"'^ Fifty years after its most lustrous period (912-976) the mighty caliphate, which had embraced almost the whole Peninsula, split into warring units, and, soon after, dwindled into the kingdom of Granada. The descendants of the first fiery invaders, who hacked their way to victory in the name of Mohammed, were unable to withstand the counter oppression of Spanish Catholicism. With the expulsion of 500,000 Moriscos (1610) the Islamic faith and community were completely extirpated. The work of eight centuries, except the treasures of Arabic learning bequeathed to the Christians, disappeared in the hills of North Africa.
Persia had a second golden prime as an Islamic state, after the downfall of the foreign Mongol khans, with the rise in the 16th century of the native of Safavi shahs, who made the Shiah doctrine—Persia's peculiar modification of the Faith—the religion of the throne. Under the illustrious Abbas, "greatest of Persia's sovereigns since the Moslem conquest," the city of Meshed, enshrining the tombs of the Imam Ali Riza and of the great caliph, Harun-al-Rashid, became a goal of pilgrimage for all Central Asia, while the enamelled palaces of Ispahan made that new capital fairer than the Sasanian Ctesiphon. Art and literature, schools and commerce flourished under the stimulus of religious zeal. The tribes of Iran were united under a single rule as never since the days of Cyrus. But the bright imperial edifice of unity and prosperity no sooner began to attract the embassies of Europe than it sank into a decadence from which it has not revived.
Further examples of sanguinary subjugation, fanatical propaganda, violent syncretism and despotic dominion, issuing in cultural achievements soon to deteriorate, are Egypt, Morocco and the Khanates of Middle Asia. But one must look to India for Islam's greatest opportunity since the fall of Baghdad—and for its most signal failure. The Mugal Empire was, in some respects, the most resplendent pageant in the long history of Indian monarchies. Built on three centuries of the bloodiest invasions in Moslem annals, it arose in 1526 with Babur, the Tartar kinsman of Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane. Millions of Hindus were slain. Millions more were bribed and beaten into the Faith, although at times there was peaceful missionary penetration. Brahman priests were butchered by thousands and Hindu temples demolished to become foundations of Moslem palaces. In a brilliant efllorescence of arts, letters, philosophy, and a religious eclecticism in which Moslem doctrine was largely influenced by Aryan speculation, the Empire reached its 'Cf. Nicholson: A Literary History of the Arabs, p. 257. 'Chapman: A history of Spain. Macmillan, 1908. Cf. Rafael Altamira: Historia de ^spaiia y de la Civilizac16n Kspafiola. acme in the flourishing reigns of Akbar and Shahjehan. Yet, within little more than two centuries after its foundation, it withered—a fair plant with shallow roots—under the successors of Aurangzeb. It has left, to commemorate the departed glory of its capitals, such unrivalled creations as the Jama Musjid at Delhi, and at Agra, the loveliest mausoleum ever reared by man—the Taj Mahal.^
The Turkish Empire, of course, is the latest and most conspicuous product and patron of Moslem culture in modern times. It presents no departure from the common story. A horde of nomads settled in northern Anatolia in the thirteenth century. Their natural vigor kindled by fierce Islamic zeal, they hurled their barbaric might successfully against Mongol and Christian. Supplanting the waning Seljuks in the East, they swept westward into Europe, subduing and assimilating everything to the structure of their extending rule. The maximum came in the sixteenth century with Suleiman the Magnificent, whose dominion over 50,000,000 people of many races reached from Azov to Aden, from the Caspian to the Danube and the western Mediterranean. Constantinople was the crowning jewel of it all. Schools of Turkish literature and art arose, devoid of originality—inspired by Persia and Europe. But as Dr. Mann himself observes, "immediately from the highest pinnacle of success the downfall of the Empire ensued" (p. 119). From the death of Suleiman onward there was gradual degeneration into the Turkey of today.
The general historical result in indigenous culture is inferior to that set forth by the author (ch. V). With Turkey now disgraced and dismembered, and Persia reduced to vassalage, not a single free, independent Moslem state remains, with any sign or promise of permanence or cultural resurgence, apart from some dynamic not of its own making. If we have spoken of church and state in a single breath, it is because the Moslem system makes them logically inseparable. Neither past nor present will sustain the vision of the future painted in this book.
Dr. Mann's confidence that Islam can fashion out of "its own spirit and foundations" a modernized culture of emancipation and progress—■ which shall be distinctively Oriental and still essentially Moslem, he rests chiefly on the reform movements with which Islam has bristled since almost its beginnings, and especially upon the newer movements now active in various countries. He fails to note that, with the exception of Wahhabiism, Sanussism, and some forms of Mahdiism, these "stirrings and strivings" of the Moslem heart are, not so much reforms of Islam, as revolts away from it. This is certainly true of sufiism. Dr. Mann does not seem to know that the present Baha'l movement, which he hails as the capital proof of his "development" thesis, has openly broken with Islam. Its mystical eclecticism and broad universal ism are utterly irreconcilable with the Koran. Nor can the Panjabic Ahmadiyya movement, whose founder announced himself at once Krishnaite Avatar, Moslem Mahdi and Christian Messiah, be claimed as a purely Islamic way-mark of indigenous culture, despite the anti-Christian declamations of Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. The Ahmadiyya, the politico-religious propaganda of the Aga Kahn and the Indian Ismailis, the newer movements in education, such as are centered in the Mohammedan College at Aligarh, and many other reforming circles, are directly traceable to Christian, or, at least, Western, impact. Lord Cromer says: "Reformed Islam is Islam no longer."
In Islam the most hopeful developments are away from the Koran and Mohammed. In Christianity progress lies in a closer following of the »Cf. Vincent A, Smith: Oxford History of India, pp. 217-468. New Testament teaching—a fuller conformity to Jesus, whom even the best Christians have never yet overtaken.
Finally, Dr. Mann does not favor Christian missions to Moslems. He regards them as both a failure and an impertinence, because, he thinks, they are purveyors of Western culture. Education, commerce, literature, travel, material exploitation from the West—these are legitimate as bringers of fertile stimulus to indigenous development, but the Gospel is the great hindrance because it is Western! He lauds the mission schools of Turkey, for their "superb and gigantic accomplishments in education," but is in desperate haste to have them superseded by national schools, ere they contaminate the land with Western civilization. Dr. Mann thinks of Christianity in terms of limitation. H« misses the glory of its universal mission, and the world-wide duty of Christians. He would bar the Gospel at the Bosphorus, except among Christian communities of the Near East. But where indeed does the West begin? Does Dr. Mann not observe that the whole East is astir with Occidental leaven? As to the forms of the future Oriental culture, no one wants them to be Western. But if the Moslem East should be reborn with a Christian soul, would that not be something far transcending the further culture of the obsolescent? Dr. Mann leaves us unconvinced that anything less than the spiritual regeneration which Christ alone can impart, will meet the present need of the Moslem world.
This manual will never serve as a mission study text-book on Islam. (That function, even in Germany, must continue to be discharged by the works of Dr. Zwemer, Canon Gairdner and Dr. Gottfried Simon). But German readers will find here a delightful possession. To Englishspeaking students wishing to acquire a reading-knowledge of German in order to acquaint themselves at first-hand with the standard authorities in that language the book is especially commended, as an introduction to the larger works of Wellhausen, Weil, Miiller, Goldziher, et al. It contains the whole vocabulary of the subject, in most attractive setting.
Mohammed's truth lay in a holy book,
Christ's in a sacred life.
So while the world rolls on from change to change
And realms of thought expand,
The letter stands without expanse or range,
Stiff as a dead man's hand.
While as the life-blood fills the glowing form,
The spirit Christ has shed,
Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm,
More full than heard or read.
College of Missions,
Indianapolis J Ind.