Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/343

Rh religion of a political society, the need of positive enactments made itself felt. Hence those parts of the Koran which were produced after the Emigration — amounting to rather more than one-third of the whole book — consist largely of prescriptions as to the details of practice both in religious and secular matters. Systematic legislation was, of course, a thing of which Mahomet could form no idea; he provided for each case as it occurred, not striving after theoretical consistency but freely modifying previous commands in order to suit altered circumstances. That all these contradictory directions were given out as the word of God caused scarcely any embarrassment at the time, for it was assumed that the Deity, like any other despot, may revoke His orders whenever He chooses; but it is needless to say that later generations, who had no trustworthy information as to the dates of the various passages, sometimes found it hard to decide which commands were revoked and which were still in force. In a few cases we are informed by early Muslim authorities that passages of the Koran were not only "revoked" but actually suppressed.

The institutions which assumed a definite form during the years subsequent to the Emigration may be classed under the following heads: — (1) Religious ceremonial, (2) Fiscal and military regulations, (3) Civil and criminal laws.

To the first class belong the five obligatory daily prayers, the public service held every Friday, the duty of fasting from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramaḍān, and the annual Pilgrimage (of which more will be said later). To these may be added the rules of ceremonial purity, the distinctions between lawful and unlawful food (which were largely borrowed from Judaism), and the prohibition of wine-drinking. The rite of circumcision — performed on boys, not, as among the Jews, on infants — prevailed everywhere in heathen Arabia and was retained by the followers of Mahomet; but it is never mentioned in the Koran and does not properly form part of the religion of Islām.

The second class includes the payment of "alms," that is, a kind of income-tax levied on all Muslims, originally for the relief of the poor, but in later times for the maintenance of the State. Moreover all Muslims capable of bearing arms might, under certain circumstances, be required to serve as soldiers.

The civil and criminal laws laid down in the Koran are partly based on old Arabian usages and are partly of foreign origin. Slavery and polygamy having existed in Arabia from time immemorial, we may assume, as a matter of course, that Mahomet never thought of abolishing either the one or the other, but he introduced certain restrictions whereby the condition both of slaves and of women was somewhat