A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihád'/Introduction/37

[Sidenote: Finality of the social reforms of Mohammad.]

[Sidenote: Positive precepts.]

[Sidenote: Ceremonial law.]

[Sidenote: Concrete morals of the Koran.]

[Sidenote: Want of adaptibility of the Koran to surrounding circumstances.]

37. It has been said with much stress regarding the teachings of Mohammad: (1) That although under the degraded condition of Arabia, they were a gift of great value, and succeeded in banishing those fierce vices which naturally accompany ignorance and barbarism, but an imperfect code of ethics has been made a permanent standard of good and evil, and a final and irrevocable law, which is an insuperable barrier to the regeneration and progress of a nation. It has been also urged that his reforms were good and useful for his own time and place, but that by making them final he has prevented further progress and consecrated half measures. What were restrictions to his Arabs would have been license to other men. (2) That Islam deals with positive precepts rather than with principles, and the danger of a precise system of positive precepts regulating the minute detail, the ceremonial worship, and the moral and social relations of life, is, that it should retain too tight a grip upon men when the circumstances which justified it have changed and vanished away, and therefore the imposition of a system good for barbarians upon people already possessing higher sort of civilization and the principles of a purer faith is not a blessing but a curse. Nay more, even the system which was good for people when they were in a barbarous state may become positively mischievous to those same people when they begin to emerge from their barbarism under its influence into a higher condition. (3) That the exact ritual and formal observations of Islam have carried with them their own Nemesis, and thus we find that in the worship of the faithful formalism and indifferences, pedantic scrupulosity and positive disbelief flourish side by side. The minutest change of posture in prayer, the displacement of a simple genuflexion, would call for much heavier censure than outward profligacy or absolute neglect. (4) That morality is viewed not in the abstract, but in the concrete. That the Koran deals much more with sin and virtue in fragmentary details than as a whole. It deals with acts more than principles, with outward practice more than inward motives, with precepts and commands more than exhortation. It does not hold up before man the hatefulness and ugliness of "all" sin as a whole. (5) "That Islam is stationary; swathed in the rigid bands of the Coran, it is powerless, like the Christian dispensation, to adapt itself to the varying circumstances of time and place, and to keep pace with, if not to lead and direct, the progress of society and the elevation of the race. In the body politic the spiritual and secular are hopelessly confounded, and we fail of perceiving any approach to free institutions or any germ whatever of popular government."