Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/626

Rh 598 MOHAMMEDANISM [KORAN. revela tion. a prayer for men and some few passages where Moham med (vi. 104, 114; xxvii. 93; xlii. 8), or the angels (xix. 65 ; xxxvii. 164 sqq.), speak in the first person without the intervention of the usual imperative &quot; say &quot; (sing, or pi.), the speaker throughout is God, either in the first person singular, or more commonly the plural of majesty &quot;we.&quot; The same mode of address is familiar to us from the prophets of the Old Testament ; the human personality disappears, in the moment of inspiration, behind the God by whom it is filled. But all the greatest of the Hebrew prophets fall back speedily upon the unassuming human &quot;I&quot;; while in the Koran the divine &quot; I &quot; is the stereotyped Moham- form of address. Mohammed, however, really felt him- med s self to be the instrument of God ; this consciousness was view of no doubt brighter at his first appearance than it afterwards became, but it never entirely forsook him. We might therefore readily pardon him for giving out, not only the results of imaginative and emotional excitement, but also many expositions or decrees which were the outcome of cool calculation, as the word of God, if he had only attained the pure moral altitude which in an Isaiah or a Jeremiah fills us with admiration after the lapse of ages. The rationale of revelation is explained in the Koran itself as follows : In heaven is the original text (&quot;the mother of the book,&quot; xliii. 3 ; &quot;a concealed book,&quot; Iv. 77 ; &quot;a well- guarded tablet,&quot; Ixxxv. 22). By a process of &quot;sending down &quot; (tanzil), one piece after another was communicated to the Prophet. The mediator was an angel, who is called sometimes the &quot;Spirit&quot; (xxvi. 193), sometimes the &quot;holy Spirit&quot; (xvi. 104), and at a later time &quot;Gabriel&quot; (ii. 91). This angel dictates the revelation to the Prophet, who repeats it after him, and afterwards proclaims it to the world (Ixxxvii. 6, etc.). It is plain thatwe have here a some what crude attempt of the Prophet to represent to himself the more or less unconscious process by which his ideas arose and gradually took shape in his mind. It is no wonder if in such confused imagery the details are not always self-consistent. When, for example, this heavenly archetype is said to be in the hands of an exalted &quot; scribe &quot; (Ixxx. 13 sqq. this seems a transition to a quite different set of ideas, namely, the books of fate, or the record of all human actions conceptions which are actually found in the Koran. It is to be observed, at all events, that Mohammed s transcendental idea of God, as a Being exalted altogether above the world, excludes the thought of direct intercourse between the Prophet and God. Compon- It is an explicit statement of the Koran that the sacred ent parts book was revealed (&quot; sent down &quot;) by God, not all at once, k u f. pi ecemea i and gradually (xxv. 34). This is evident from the actual composition of the book, and is confirmed by Moslem tradition. That is to say, Mohammed issued his revelations in fly-leaves of greater or less extent. A single piece of this kind was called either, like the entire collection, ko rdn, i.e. &quot; recitation &quot; or &quot; reading ; &quot; or kitdb, &quot;writing;&quot; or sura, which is the late-Hebrew shard, and means literally &quot;series.&quot; The last became, in the lifetime of Mohammed, the regular designation of the individual sections as distinguished from the whole col lection ; and accordingly it is the name given to the sepa rate chapters of the existing Koran. These chapters are of very unequal length. Since many of the shorter ones are undoubtedly complete in themselves, it is natural to assume that the longer, which are sometimes very compre hensive, have arisen from the amalgamation of various originally distinct revelations. This supposition is favoured by the numerous traditions which give us the circumstances under which this or that short piece, now incorporated in a larger section, was revealed ; and also by the fact that the connection of thought in the present suras often seems to be interrupted. And in reality many pieces of the long if the Koran. siiras have to be severed out as originally independent ; even in the short ones parts are often found which cannot have been there at first. At the same time we must beware of carrying this sifting operation too far,- as Noldeke now believes himself to have done in his earlier works, and as Sprenger also sometimes seems to do. That some suras were of considerable length from the first is seen, for example, from xii., which contains a short introduction, then the history of Joseph, and then a few concluding observations, and is therefore per fectly homogeneous. In like manner, xx., which is mainly occupied with the history of Moses, forms a complete whole. The same is true of xviii., which at first sight seems to fall into several pieces ; the history of the seven sleepers, the grotesque narrative about Moses, and that about Alexander &quot; the Horned,&quot; are all connected together, and the same rhyme runs through the whole sura. Even in the separate narrations we may observe how readily the Koran passes from one subject to another, how little care is taken to express all the transitions of thought, and how frequently clauses are omitted, which are almost indispens able. We are not at liberty, therefore, in every case where the connection in the Koran is obscure, to say that it is really broken, and set it down as the clumsy patchwork of a later hand. Even in the old Arabic poetry such abrupt transitions are of very frequent occurrence. It is not uncommon for the Koran, after a new subject has been entered on, to return gradually or suddenly to the former theme, a proof that there at least separation is not to be thought of. In short, however imperfectly the Koran may have been redacted, in the majority of cases the present suras are identical with the originals. How these revelations actually arose in Mohammed s mind is a question which it is almost as idle to discuss as it would be to analyse the workings of the mind of a poet. In his early career, sometimes perhaps in its later stages also, many revelations must have burst from him in uncon trollable excitement, so that he could not possibly regard them otherwise than as divine inspirations. We must bear in mind that he was no cold systematic thinker, but an Oriental visionary, brought up in crass superstition, and without intellectual discipline ; a man whose nervous temperament had been powerfully worked on by ascetic austerities, and who was all the more irritated by the opposition he encountered, because he had little of the heroic in his nature. Filled with his religious ideas and visions, he might well fancy he heard the angel bidding him recite what was said to him. There may have been many a revelation of this kind which no one ever heard but himself, as he repeated it to himself in the silence of the night (Ixxiii. 4). Indeed the Koran itself admits that he forgot some revelations (Ixxxvii. 7). But by far the greatest part of the book is undoubtedly the result of deli beration, touched more or less with emotion, and animated by a certain rhetorical rather than poetical glow. Many passages are based upon purely intellectual reflection. It is said that Mohammed occasionally uttered such a passage im mediately after one of those epileptic fits which not only his followers, but (for a time at least) he himself also, regarded as tokens of intercourse with the higher powers. If that is the case, it is impossible to say whether the trick was in the utterance of the revelation or in the fit itself. How the various pieces of the Koran took literary form The is uncertain. Mohammed himself, so far as we can dis- Koran cover, never wrote down anything. The question whether wntten - he could read and Avrite has been much debated among Moslems, unfortunately more with dogmatic arguments and spurious traditions than authentic proofs. At present, one is inclined to say that he was not altogether ignorant of these arts, but that from want of practice he found it