Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/632

Rh 604 MOHAMMEDANISM [KORAN. scarcely take the trouble even to do that. They are no consolidated party, but to Mohammed they are all equally vexatious, because, as soon as danger has to be encountered, or a contribution is levied, they all alike fall away. There are frequent outbursts, ever increasing in bitterness, against the Jews, who were very numerous in Medina and its neighbourhood when Mohammed arrived. He has much less to say against the Christians, with whom he never came closely in contact ; and as for the idolaters, there was little occasion in Medina to have many words with them. A part of the Medina pieces consists of formal laws belong ing to the ceremonial, civil, and criminal codes ; or directions about certain temporary complications. The most objec tionable parts of the whole Koran are those which treat of Mohammed s relations with women. The laws and regula tions were generally very concise revelations, but most of them have been amalgamated with other pieces of similar or dissimilar import, and are now found in very long suras. Such is an imperfect sketch of the composition and the internal history of the Koran, but it is probably sufficient to show that the book is a very heterogeneous collection. If only those passages had been preserved which had a permanent value for the theology, the ethics, or the juris prudence of the Moslems, a few fragments would have been amply sufficient. Fortunately for knowledge, respect for the sacredness of the letter has led to the collection of all the revelations that could possibly be collected, the &quot; abro gating&quot; along with the &quot;abrogated,&quot; passages referring to passing circumstances as well as those of lasting importance. Every one who takes up the book in the proper religious frame of mind, like most of the Moslems, reads pieces directed against long-obsolete absurd customs of Mecca just as devoutly as the weightiest moral precepts, perhaps even more devoutly, because he does not understand them so well. Mysteri- At the head of twenty-nine of the suras stand certain initial ous letters, from which no clear sense can be obtained Thus, before letters, ii. iii. xxxi. xxxii. we find J) (Alif Ldm Mlm), before xl.-xlvi. ^. (Ifd Mlm). Noldeke at one time suggested that these initials did not belong to Mohammed s text, but might be the monograms of possessors of codices, which, through negligence on the part of the editors, were incorporated in the final form of the Koran ; he now deems it more probable that they are to be traced to the Prophet himself, as Sprenger, Loth, and others suppose. One can not indeed admit the truth of Loth s statement that in the proper opening words of these suras we may generally find an allusion to the accompanying initials ; but it can scarcely be accidental that the first verse of the great majority of them (in iii. it is the second verse) contains the word &quot; book,&quot; &quot; revelation,&quot; or some equivalent. They usually begin with: &quot;This is the book,&quot; or &quot;Revelation ( down sending ) of the book,&quot; or something similar. Of suras which commence in this way only a few (xviii. xxiv. xxv. xxxix.) want the initials, while only xxix. and xxx. have the initials and begin differently. These few exceptions may easily have proceeded from ancient corruptions ; at all events they cannot neutralize the evidence of the greater number. Mohammed seems to have meant these letters for a mystic reference to the archetypal text in heaven. To a man who regarded the art of writing, of which at the best he had but a slight knowledge, as something supernatural, and who lived amongst illiterate people, an A B C may well have seemed more sig nificant than to us who have been initiated into the mysteries of this art from our childhood. The Prophet himself can hardly have attached any particular meaning to these symbols : they served their purpose if they conveyed an impression of solemnity and enigmatical obscurity. In fact, the Koran admits that it contains many things which neither can be, nor were intended to be, understood (iii. 5). To regard these letters as ciphers is a precarious hypothesis, for the simple reason that cryptography is not to be looked for in the very infancy of Arabic writing. If they are actually ciphers, the multipli city of possible explanations at once precludes the hope of a plausible interpretation. None of the efforts in this direction, whether by Moslem scholars or by Europeans, have led to convincing results. This remark applies even to the ingenious conjecture of Sprenger, that the letters (J euuj,=a (Kdf He Ye Ain Sad) before xix. (which treats of John and Jesus, and, according to tradition, was sent to the Christian king of Abyssinia) stand for Jesus Nazarcnus Rex Judasorum. Sprenger arrives at this explanation by a very artificial method ; and besides, Mohammed was not so simple as the Moslem traditionalists, who imagined that the Abyssiniaiis could read a piece of the Arabic Koran. It need hardly be said that the Moslems have from of old applied themselves with great assiduity to the decipherment of these initials, and have sometimes found the deepest mysteries in them. Generally, however, they are content with the prudent conclusion, that God alone knows the meaning of these letters. When Mohammed died, the separate pieces of the Koran, Trans- notwithstanding their theoretical sacredness, existed only mission in scattered copies ; they were consequently in great danger 5 tlie of being partially or entirely destroyed. Many Moslems ora &quot; knew large portions by heart, but certainly no one knew the whole ; and a merely oral propagation would have left the door open to all kinds of deliberate and inadvertent alterations. Mohammed himself had never thought of an authentic collection of his revelations ; he was usually concerned only with the object of the moment, and the idea that the revelations would be destroyed unless he made pro vision for their safe preservation, did not enter his mind. A man destitute of literary culture has some difficulty in anticipating the fate of intellectual products. But now, after the death of the Prophet, most of the Arabs revolted against his successor, and had to be reduced to submission by force. Especially sanguinary was the contest against the prophet Maslama (Mubarrad, Kdmil 443, 5), an imi tator of Mohammed, commonly known by the derisive diminutive Mosailima. At that time (A.D. 633) many of the most devoted Moslems fell, the very men who knew most Koran pieces by heart. Omar then began to fear that the Koran might be entirely forgotten, and he induced the Caliph Abubekr to undertake the collection of all its parts. The Caliph laid the duty on Zaid, the son ofZaid s Thabit, a native of Medina, then about twenty-two years of fi j st age, who had often acted as amanuensis to the Prophet, Koran - in whose service he is even said to have learned the Jewish letters. The account of this collection of the Koran has reached us in several substantially identical forms, and goes back to Zaid himself. According to it, he collected the revelations from copies written on flat stones, pieces of leather, ribs of palm-leaves (not palm-leaves themselves), and such-like material, but chiefly &quot;from the breasts of men,&quot; i.e. from their memory. From these he wrote a fair copy, which he gave to Abubekr, from whom it came to his successor Omar, who again bequeathed it to his daughter Hafsa, one of the widows of the Prophet. This redaction, commonly called al-sohof (&quot;the leaves&quot;), had from the first no canonical authority ; and its internal arrangement can only be conjectured. The Moslems were as far as ever from possessing a uni form text of the Koran. The bravest of their warriors sometimes knew deplorably little about it; distinction on that field they cheerfully accorded to pious men like Ibn Mas ud. It was inevitable, however, that discrepancies should emerge between the texts of professed scholars, and as these men in their several localities were authorities on the reading of the Koran, quarrels began to break out between the levies from different districts about the true form of the sacred book. During a campaign in A.H. 30 (A.D. 650-1), Ho- dhaifa, the victor in the great and decisive battle of NehA- wand which was to the empire of the SasAnids what Gaugamela was to that of the Acha^menidse perceived that such disputes might become dangerous, and therefore urged on the Caliph OthmAn the necessity for a universally bind- oth- ing text. The matter was entrusted to Zaid, who had made man s the former collection, with three leading Koraishites. Konui - These brought together as many copies as they could lay their hands on, and prepared an edition which was to be canonical for all Moslems. To prevent any further dis putes, they burned all the other codices except that of