Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 6.djvu/82

ⅼⅹⅹⅵ . The real fault lies in the unelastic nature of the religion: in his desire to shield it from change and to prevent his followers from 'dividing into sects,' the founder has made it impossible for Islâm to throw off certain customs and restrictions which, however convenient and even necessary to the Arabs at the time, became grievous and unsuitable for other nations at distant periods and in distant lands. The institution of the ʿHagg pilgrimage, for example, was an admirable one for consolidating the Arab tribes, but it is burdensome and useless to the Muslim communities now that they extend over nearly half the civilized world.

That Mohammed had a due respect for the female sex, as far as was consistent with the prevailing state of education and opinion, is evident both from his own faithful affection to his first wife ʿHadîgah, and from the fact that 'believing women' are expressly included in the promises of a reward in the future life which the Qur′ân makes to all who acknowledge one God and do good works.

The language of the Qur′ân is universally acknowledged to be the most perfect form of Arab speech. The Qurâis, as the guardians of the national temple and the owners of the territory in which the great fairs and literary festivals of all Arabia were held, would naturally absorb into their own dialect many of the words and locutions of other tribes, and we should consequently expect their language to be more copious and elegant than that of their neighbours. At the same time we must not forget that the acknowledged claims of the Qur′ân to be the direct utterance of the divinity have made it impossible for any Muslim to criticise the work, and it became, on the contrary, the standard by which other literary compositions had to be judged. Grammarians, lexicographers, and rhetoricians started with the presumption that the Qur′ân could not be wrong, and other works therefore only approached excellence in proportion as they, more or less, successfully imitated its style. Regarding it, however, from a perfectly impartial and unbiassed standpoint, we find that it