The Environment That Moulded Mohammed (Peace be upon him) (1/3)

A true son of the desert, it is impossible to understand the powerful and complex personality of Mohammed, unless we can appreciate the peculiar character and genius of the desert. More so in some ways even than the seaman, the dweller or sojourner in the desert is distinct and unique in himself. Possessing the courage of the Fatalist, and as free as the roving winds of heaven, he is all the same of a shrinking and timorous nature, confronted as he often is by certain aspects and phenomena that imperil his life and strike down to the very roots of his moral consciousness.

In the desert there is, comparatively speaking, little life. Unlike the forest region, it is naked and almost destitute. There, as at sea, man is face to face not only with the great elements, but with the greater Infinite and Invisible. He is nearer to God and the immensity of Nature. There is nothing—or little at least—to distract his attention—nothing between him and the ever watchful Inscrutable. There is no shade from the sun by day, no protection from the moon and stars at night. They look down on him as from the pinnacle of the sublimest elevation. The fiercer glory of the sun by day burns into his very soul, consumes his very marrow. The milder effulgence of the moon by night throws its silvery glamour over all his senses. The lesser and more distant splendour of the stars—those watch-fires of angelic spirits—in their countless myriads awe and bewilder him. In the choking breath of the simoom he feels the potentialities of God, and his own helpless impotence. Struck all of a heap by its stifling blast, he is filled with fear and trembling in the presence of a Power invisible yet tangible and deadly. Whether he wills or not, the fear of God—of the Inexorable and Inevitable—enters into his heart and takes possession of his inmost soul. Call it the fear of God or not, it is practically one and the same feature—the mere human label makes no difference to this awful and unseen reality—the same fear of the Unknown, the Unexpected and the Inevitable: the Inevitable that is always with us, the agnostic and the sophist no less than with the theologian, yet unseen, incomprehensible and omnipotent. But more than anything, it is the awful and impenetrable silence that impresses and appeals the silent and dignified nomad of the desert.

To those who have never been outside the confines of civilization, it is not logically possible even to guess at the extraordinary influence—a fascination amounting to witchery—that the silence and solitude of the desert exercises over one. Yet if I were asked to define the essence and subtlety of this influence, I could but answer that it is indefinable; all the same a glamour that, like the force of gravity, is irresistible. Free and open like the sea (but fresh only at night), it is not the witchery of the soft blue sky, for the sky of the desert is hard and steely; it is not the fierce white heat of the fervid sun that melts into the very marrow of one’s bones; but rather is it the soothing magic of the moon at night, under the brilliant canopy of the heavens, when the earth, cooling rapidly, is lulled into eternal silence, that one falls under the magic spell of its wondrous influence. But even the glamour of the moon is out-glamoured by the darkness of the night under whose funereal pall even the great suns and planets hide their diminished heads. There is in the darkness and the silence of the night a mystery and a profundity that arouses the sluggish, even the stagnant consciousness of the dullard—that much more so attracts the quickening soul of the mystic and visionary, which springs to it with the same eager avidity that a lean and hungry trout leaps at the first fly which he sees after a long and enforced abstinence. It is in this darkness and silence of the night, rather than in the fierce glare of the midday sun, that the fear of the great Infinite comes to man. For if we but think of it, what a spectre-teeming spectacle is night. We hear strange, weird sounds. We know not whence they come or whither they go. Or it may be that all around us is as the silence of the grave—of eternal death. We see the evening star looming large like a great world on fire. The blue of the sky looms black. The stars seem to speak to us; the whole scene is impressive—a sight for the gods. In the desert, however, and to the earnest thinker whose centre of gravity is God, night is something more than a mere spectacle—a something greater, grander and more terrifying than a simple impression—a feeling deeper and sublimer even than a conviction: a revelation of the Unseen Unknown which is all the time behind that which he sees and knows.

Full as night is of phantoms, shades, sounds and silence, it is no illusive mirage, no mere empty simulacrum. But in every way it is a reality and a substance which is tangible, that touches one not only on the spot, on the raw, but everywhere; that fills one with vague fears, and brings even the proudest and the sternest to their knees before the power of the great Omnipotence. The very stars which hang out in the great firmament appear as God’s sign-posts—great all-seeing eyes that are ever upon us—or like eternal watch-fires which contrast the eternity of God with the momentary mortality of man; they enhance the blackness of the blue. Peering as they do into the awesome watcher’s inmost soul, they either drive him headlong into the blackness and terrors of evil, or lead him by their kindly light into the glory of the Almighty Presence. Unquestionably the night is either diabolical or sacred. Not only this, she is the brooder and breeder of all primitive doctrines, the conceiver and the mother of all human creeds. In her immense womb there is a latent light, a smouldering volcano full of ashes, cinders, and dead men’s bones; yet full also of fire-sparks that are capable of flashing into luminosity, even of bursting into hissing, leaping and devouring flames. It was thus that Christianity and Islam came into being. It was thus out of the primeval sacrifices, the shadows and silence of death and darkness, that all creeds have crept into and out of the minds of men. Tortuous human ant-heaps bored and tunnelled through and through by human ideas, human hopes, and human aspirations; worlds in the low-lying limbo of the fœtus stage, fecundating in all directions into beliefs, faiths, creeds, sects, denominations, quackeries, dissimulations and charlatanism. Labyrinthine, subterranean, and full of subtleties as all these creeds appear to be, they are easy enough to comprehend. They have all sprung from the same simple seed if we would but recognize it. If we but looked at this vista of the past as through a mental telescope, if we but grasped the substance and not the shadow, went straight to the simple root instead of to the theological and metaphysical subtleties of it all, we would find it absolutely simple. If we would but for a moment drop from our eyes the dense scales of dogma, bigotry and prejudice, there would be no difficulty in tracing back all these enigmatic ramifications and gloomy obscurities of pristine darkness and chaos to the one central germ idea, the one vitalizing spark that inspires and illumines them all.

It is obvious that Wordsworth, when he speaks of only “two voices,” the one “of the sea,” the other “of the mountains”—“each a mighty voice,” quite overlooked the bleakness and silence of the desert. This overpowering blackness that pervades the very soul, creeps through every vent into the bones and chills one to the very marrow. This sublime silence, that speaks to one as the still small voice of God spoke to Moses, and that fills the thinker with even greater awe and veneration than the crashing and rolling thunder. This silence which is of eternity, therefore golden, while speech is off to-day and only silvern, for as Carlyle reminds us: “After speech has done its best, silence has to include all that speech has forgotten or cannot express.”

(Continued)