Islâm
9781465677358
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In the history of human development probably no subject is more interesting than the gradual evolution of spiritual ideals, or the endeavour to regulate man’s conduct in the ordinary relations of life by determinate ethical standards. Of all the great systems that aim at the elevation of mankind by an appeal to their religious consciousness, the latest-born is the religion preached by the Prophet of Arabia. The fundamental principles of right and wrong are common to all moral creeds; it is in their vitalising force, the life they infuse into humanity and the direction they give to human energies, that we must seek for elements of differentiation. Some have taken centuries to expand beyond their original circles, others have had to absorb foreign conceptions time after time until their primitive form became entirely changed before they could influence large masses of people. The religion of Mohammed, unaided by any extraneous help, under the impulse of a great and dominating Idea, within the space of eighty years from its birth, had spread from the Indus to the Tagus, from the Volga to the Arabian Sea. No Darius, Asoka, or Constantine came to its assistance with royal mandates and imperial homage. Under its influence a congeries of warring tribes consolidated into a nation carried aloft for centuries the torch of knowledge. With the fall of their empire, they ceased to be the preceptors of mankind. The younger nations who succeeded to their heritage continued some of their glory in arms, but less in arts and literature. They too declined in power and influence, and now the greatest of them is but a shadow of its former self. And yet, as an active living Faith Islâm has lost none of its pristine force nor the magic hold it possesses over its followers. In certain parts of the world it is spreading with greater rapidity than any other creed, and its acceptance among the less advanced races has invariably tended to raise them in the moral scale. ‘Had the Arabs,’ says an able writer, ‘propagated Islâm only, had they only known that single period of marvellous expansion wherein they assimilated to their creed, speech, and even physical type, more aliens than any stock before or since, not excepting the Hellenic, the Roman, the Anglo-Saxon, or the Russian, even so the Arabs would still make a paramount claim on the Western mind.’ But the interest becomes deeper ‘when we remember that, not only as the head and fount of pure Semitism they originated Judaism and largely determined both its character and that of Christianity, but also the expansion of the Arabian conception of the relations of man to God and man to man (the Arabian social system, in a word) is still proceeding faster and further than any other propagandism.’
