The Environment That Moulded Mohammed (Peace be upon him) (3/3)

It is in its definition and conception of religion that humanity has gone astray. By general acceptation religion and creed have always been confounded. Natural religion is spoken of as a something different and widely apart from Christianity, as a religion revealed. This is not so. There is no difference between them. Christianity is but the development of natural religion on the lines and ideas of certain individuals. There is no such thing as revelation. Religion is an evolution. It is natural. It comes to us from Nature, i.e. from the God out of which Nature has evolved. Hence its constructive and destructive dualism. It is a living and vital force that is innate in man as being one with Nature. Obviously this veneration, this fear of the Unseen, the Unexpected and the Inevitable (which I have spoken of), is one of the root instincts out of which it unfolds itself. Most unquestionably it is the outward and visible expression of the inner consciousness or spirit that moves man to the adoration of veneration in the constructive direction, and of fear in the destructive. This varies in the individual. Thus on the one hand we have a Mohammed; on the other a Napoleon. From the very beginning of human existence right down until now this fear of God has predominated. It still exists. It will go on existing. Religion is as much a part of the human constitution as the primal instincts. Creed is acquired. It is environment and education that makes or forms creed. The child becomes what his teacher makes him, as he can neither distinguish, discriminate nor judge for himself. But to make him Jew, Gentile or Christian, the religion must be in him. Creed, in a word, is but the view that is taken of natural religion by the ego. But a matter so important as this, however, cannot here be entered into.

As it has been with all the great religious leaders of history, so too it was with Mohammed. Fearing, yet venerating, the might, the majesty and the goodness of God, the companionship that he most wanted was not human but divine. Communion with Him, through his own thought and through the great Infinity around him, was what his heart most desired. A town Arab by birth and breeding, a Bedawin by feeling and instinct, he was something more than a mere native of Arabia. Rather a son of men, an apostle chosen out specially from among men, that he might bear to them the message and truth of God.

“Men,” says Victor Hugo, “talk to themselves, speak to themselves, but the external silence is not interrupted. There is a grand tumult; everything speaks within us, excepting the mouth. The realities of the soul, for all they are not visible and palpable, are not the less realities.” The great reality, as I have shown, that obsessed Mohammed was God. Though invisible in person or even in spirit, God was none the less visible and palpable to him as much in the finest speck of sand as in the consuming glory of the sun. In the mocking spectres of the night, as well as in the shifting shadows of the morning, the might and majesty of Allah was supreme. In the dead silence of human solitude, the grand tumult within him was only grand and tumultuous because God talked to him and he to God in the suppressed sibilance of hushed and awesome whisperings. “Diamonds are only found in the darkness of the earth; truths are only found in the depths of the thought.” As it seemed to Father Madeline, the ex-convict Jean Valjean, so it appeared to Mohammed, “that after descending into these depths, after groping for some time in the densest of this darkness, he had found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, which he held in his hand, and which dazzled his eyes when he looked at it.” The brilliant which Mohammed searched for was the truth—the greatest brilliant of all! The truth that he found as it appeared to him was God. Thus he immolated his whole being to the will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone. Like Pascal, Mohammed believed that “one can be quite sure that there is a God without knowing what He is.” Or in the words of Hobbes: “Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no conception or image of the Deity, except only this, that there is a God.” This in sense if not in word was Mohammed’s idea of God as he tried to conceive Him. For him it was sufficient that God was the only God—the Creator and the Controller of the universe! “There are touching illusions which are perhaps sublime realities.” But to Mohammed, God was not even “the Great Illusion,” but a stern as well as a sublime reality! To him the desert and lone places were God’s dwelling-place—as far away from the busy hum and haunts of men as He could get. But only because of the delightful charm of golden silence and solitude—only because in the midst thereof, as in the heavenly paradise, God dwelt there. The one fair spirit that he dwelt and communed with—not in close proximity however, but with a great gulf fixed between—was the one and only God, who had at last constituted him His minister and apostle, because of his great love and devotion to Him. It was for this that Mohammed sought the desert. It was there under the stars—the flashing forget-me-nots of God’s great power—that alone with Nature and his own thoughts, he sought God. Who is there of us can say that he did or did not find Him? Can we, or can we not, by searching find God? Whether we can or no, however, is not the question—is not for us to decide! But one fact is certain—one fact is obvious. It was in the core and centre of the eternal silence and solitude of mountain fastnesses and desert expanses that the spirit of Islam had its origin. It was there, as it were under the myriad eyes of the great and infinite God, under the fiery blaze of the burning sun, under the cooler and more clinging glamour of the mellow moon, under the dimmer gloom and mystery of darkness, there with his face to the red-hot furnace blasts and suffocation of the simoom, that the message came to him. Alone with his thoughts:

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!”

No mere saint, but God Himself, “took pity on” his “soul in agony.” He was not alone, for God was with him. This self-communion of Mohammed with his thoughts, was to him none other than communion with God, because his thoughts were concentrated on Him with all the soul and strength he was humanly capable of.

The power of persuasion does not always lie in the flow and eloquence of speech. The strongest are often the most silent. God never speaks but in the still small voice of consciousness, that comes to every man in the dark watches of the night, when the hum and movement of life is hushed into the silence of sleep!

Solitude, too, that twin-sister of Silence, “though,” as De Quincey says, “it may be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man.” But if essential to the ordinary man, it is as the breath of life to men of God and prophets. Solitude, in fact, sinks deep into a pure and simple nature, and changes him in a great measure. Unconsciously it intensifies him to a superlative degree, and inspires him with an awe of itself that becomes sacred to him. Within himself the recluse feels weak, unstable and inconsistent. Without he is strong in the consciousness of the omnipotence and supremacy of the Infinite. “Solitude generates a certain amount of sublime exaltation. It is like the smoke arising from the burning bush. A mysterious lucidity of mind results, which converts the student into the seer, and the poet into a prophet.” In a word, there is an enthusiasm, an influence, and a power in solitude that the civilized man, or the man who has never been subjected to it, cannot form the slightest or faintest conception of. For the silence of solitude and the solitude of silence is a state (common to all primitive people) in which the being believes himself to be not only full of God, but that the God predominates. Hence the enthusiasm, the rapture, and the power to divine and speak in divers tongues.

Surely, if ever man was in deadly earnest, this faithful son of Arabia was. If ever man opened his heart and soul to the Father and Mother of all things, this Mohammed, the merchant, did. Truly if ever the great Author of our being responded to a soul in silent agony, i.e. in conflict, in a struggle for victory, it was to this great descendant of the bond-woman Hagar! For in Islam, and the soul of Islam, such as he inculcated, the victory was greater than any Marathon or Thermopylæ.