Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/574

Rh 546 Youth of Mohammed s father, Abdallah b. Abdalmottalib, did the Pro- not live to see the son s birth, and his mother Amina phet. ^jg^ w hii e h e was still a child. Mohammed was then cared for first by his grandfather, Abdalmottalib, and after his death by his oldest paternal uncle, Abu Talib b. Abdalmottalib. He was kindly treated, but shared the hardships of a numerous and very poor family; he herded sheep and gathered wild berries in the desert. This is all that we know of his youth (sur. xciii. 6), all else is legend, containing at most an occasional fragment of truth. 1 It was, we are told, in his twenty-fifth year that Mohammed, on the recommendation of his uncle, entered the house and business of a wealthy widow named Khadija. For her he made commercial journeys, thus learning to know part of Palestine and Syria, and perhaps receiving impressions which fructified in his soul. 2 By and by he married the -widow, who was much his senior ; he was a shrewd man, with prepossessing countenance, fair of skin, and black-haired. The marriage was happy, and blessed with several children. The two sons, however, died young; from the elder the father received the surname Abu J l- Kasim. The most famous of the daughters was Fatima, who married her father s cousin, All b. Abi Talib. Arabian During his married life with Khadija, Mohammed came in religion. con tact with a religious movement which had laid hold on some thoughtful minds in Medina, Mecca, and Taif. In Mecca, as elsewhere, Arabian heathenism was a traditional form of worship, chiefly concentrated in great feasts at the holy places ; it was clung to because it had come down from the fathers. The gods were many ; their importance was not due to the attributes ascribed to them, but to their connection with special circles in which they were worshipped. They were the patrons of septs 3 and tribes, and symbolized, so to speak, the holy unity which united the present and past members of these. Above them all stood Allah, the highest and universal God. 4 By him the holiest oaths were sworn; in his name (Bismika Alldhummd] treaties and covenants Avere sealed ; the lower gods were not fit to be invoked in such cases, as they belonged to one party instead of standing over both. The enemy was re minded of Allah to deter him from inhuman outrage ; enemy of Allah ( aduw Allah, $eocry?/s) was the name of opprobrium for a villain. But, since Allah ruled over all 1 The tradition relates that as an infant Mohammed was entrusted to a Bedouin foster-mother, Halima, who brouglit him up among her people, the Banii Sa d b. Laitli. Sprenger (i. 162 sq.) will have it that this precise statement is also a fiction ; but he is probably wrong. It can hardly be disputed that Bedouin women were accustomed to suckle the children of townsfolk for wages, and Mohammed s &quot; milk-kinship &quot; with the Bauu Sa d b. Laith is confirmed by what happened at and after the battle of Honain. A nephew of Mohammed was also brought up among the Sa d. Comp. Vakidi, ut supra, pp. 364, 377 sq., 431, note 1. 2 He saw the mute witnesses of divine judgment, the rock-dwellings of Hijr and the Dead Sea ; perhaps, too, he was impressed by the figure of some venerable monk (Bahira legends). Comp. Ibfx Hisham, p. 115 sq. ; Sprenger, i. p. 178 sqq. 3 Vakidi, p. 350 : Idols were found in every house, and homage was paid to them when men went out or in to gain their blessing. Abu Bajrat made and sold them ; there was a lively trade in idols with the Bedouins. 4 The particular gods are said to have been regarded as children of Allah (DWX ^33). From sur. liii. 21, xxxvii. 149, it appears that the Meecans called their goddesses daughters of Allah ; perhaps it was their disputes with Mohammed that forced them to this view. At first, certainly, al-Lat and al- Ozza were names of the wife of the supreme god ; sexual dualism dominated in the oldest Arab idea of the godhead. It was Mohammed who first reduced the gods to Jinns i.e. to subordinate demons and kobolds as he did not deny their existence, but only stripped off their divinity. To say that the oldest Arabs worshipped Jinns is as unreasonable as to say that they worshipped the devil ; for Islam degraded the gods to Shaitans as well as to Jiuns. Superstition certainly played its part among the Arabs, but superstition is not religion. [MOHAMMED. and imposed duties on all, it was not thought that one could enter into special relations with him. In worship he had the last place, those gods being preferred who represented the interests of a specific circle, and fulfilled the private desires of their worshippers. 5 Neither the fear of Allah, however, nor reverence for the gods had much influence. The chief practical consequence of the great feasts was the observance of a truce in the holy months, and this in course of time had become mainly an affair of pure practical convenience. In general, the disposition of the heathen Arabs, if it is at all truly reflected in their poetry, was profane in an unusual degree. Wine, the chase, gaming, and love on the one side ; vengeance, feuds, robbery, and glory on the other, occupy all the thoughts of the old poets. Their motives to noble deeds are honour and family feeling ; they hardly name the gods, much less feel any need of them. The man sets all his trust on himself : he rides alone through the desert, his sword helps him in danger, no God stands by him, he commends his soul to no saint. His reckless egoism may expand to noble self-sacrifice for the family and the tribe ; but in this heroism religious impulses have no part, there is nothing mystical in these hard, clear, and yet so passionate natures. The only vein of what can in any sense be called religious feeling appears when the volcano has burned itself out and the storm of life is over ; then, it may be, a wail is heard over the vanity of all the restless activity that is now spent. 6 It is very possible that religion meant more to the sedentary Arabs than to the nomads, to whom almost all the ancient poetry belongs ; but the difference cannot have been great. The ancient inhabitants of Mecca practised piety essentially as a trade, just as they do now ; their trade depended on the feast, and its fair on the inviolability of the Haram and on the truce of the holy months. 7 The religion of the Arabs before Mohammed was de- The crepit and effete. 8 Many anecdotes and verses prove that Hanifs. indifference and scoffing neglect of the gods was nothing uncommon. The need for a substitute for the lost religion was not very widely felt. But there were individuals who were not content with a negation, and sought a better re ligion. Such were Omayya b. Abi 1-Salt in Taif, Zaid b. Amr in Mecca, Abu Kais b. Abi Anas, and Abu Amir in Medina. 9 They were called Hanifs, probably meaning 6 Vakidi, pp. 368, note lj 370, note 1 ; Sprenger, iii. 457 sq., 512. Whether the feast at Mecca was celebrated in honour of Allah before Mohammed, is very doubtful. It would seem that Hobal was wor shipped in the Ka ba (Ibu Hisham, p. 97 sq.}, and Kozah in Mozdalifa (Vakidi, p. 428); it is possible, however, that Allah stood to Hobal among the Arabs as El to Jahwe among the Hebrews. Ritual sacri fices were generally presented to a god who had a proper name ; but the trace of a religious rite which still survived in the ordinary killing of beasts for food, possibly consisted even before Mohammed in the invocation of the name of Allah (Sprenger, ii. 47S, note 1; but comp. Vakidi, p. 160, note 1, p. 158). 6 &quot;We hasten towards an unknown goal, and forget it in eating and drinking. We are sparrows and flies and worms, but more daring than famishing wolves. . . . My roots reach down to the depths of the earth ; but this Death spoils me of my youth, and of my soul he spoils me and of my body, aijd right soon he lays me in the dust. I have urged my camel through every desert, wide-stretching and shimmering with mirage ; and I have ridden in the devouring host, reaching after the honours of greedy perils, and I joined in the fray under every sky till I longed for the home-coming instead of booty. But can 1, after Harith s death, and after the death of Ilojr, the noble host- can I hope for a softer lot from the change of time, which does not forgot the hard mountains ? I know that I must soon be transfixed by his talon and tooth as befell my father and my grandsire, not to forget him that was slain at Kolah.&quot; Amraalkais, ed. Slane, No. 10, p. 33; ed. Ahlwardt, No. 5. 7 See, on Arabian heathenism, Pococke, Specimen hist. Arabuin ; Krehl, Religion der vorislamischen Araber (Leip. 1863); Sprenger, i. 241 sq. 8 rakidi, p. 293, note 1. 9 See, for Omayya, Kit&b al-Ayfidni (Bulak ed.), iii. 186 sq. ; for Zaid, Ibn Hisham, p. 143 sq. ; for Abu Kais, id. 348 sq., 39 sq. ; and for Abu Amir, Vakidi, pp. 103, 161, 190, 419.