MUHAMMAD

In these reflections we take poetry as our point of departure or we come back to it, and so it will suit our purpose to state from the very outset with respect to the above-named extraordinary man that he vehemently asserts and protests that he is a prophet and not a poet; furthermore, that his Qur’an is to be regarded as divine law, not as a human book meant to instruct or to entertain. Were we to indicate the distinction between poets and prophets more closely, we might say that both are seized and fired by a god. But the poet squanders the gift accorded to him in pleasure in order to bring forth pleasure, to demand honour for what he has produced and, in any event, a pleasant life.24 He neglects all other goals while striving to be manifold, to reveal himself as boundless in both his nature and his self-manifestation. By contrast, the prophet considers only a single determined purpose and employs the simplest means to attain it. He means to proclaim some sort of teaching and to gather people around it as around a standard. To this end all that’s needed is that the world believe; and so he must be – and remain – monothematic. For the manifold is not something one believes in, it is something one acknowledges.

The entire content of the Qur’an, to put it briefly, may be found at the beginning of the second sura and runs as follows:

There is no doubt in this book. It is a direction for the pious, who believe in the mysteries of faith, who observe the appointed times of prayer, and distribute alms out of what we have bestowed on them; and who believe in that revelation, which hath been sent down unto thee, and that which hath been sent down unto the prophets before thee, and have firm assurance in the life to come: these are directed by their Lord, and they shall prosper. As for the unbelievers, it will be equal to them whether thou admonish them, or do not admonish them; they will not believe. God hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing; a dimness covereth their sight, and they shall suffer a grievous punishment.²⁵

Thus does the Qur’an repeat itself in sura after sura. Belief and unbelief are divided into higher and lower; heaven and hell are intended for believers and deniers, respectively. The close determination of the prescribed and the forbidden, fabulous tales taken from the Jewish and Christian religions, all sorts of amplifications, endless tautologies and repetitions compose the stuff of this sacred book which, whenever we turn to it, always freshly repels us but then once again draws us to it, arouses amazement and in the end demands reverence.

Still, to express what must remain of the utmost importance in this book for every student of history, we cite the words of an eminent man:

The principal aim of the Qur’an seems to have been to bring together the adherents of the three discrete religions prevailing at that time in populous Arabia, who for the most part lived and mingled with one another day by day and who roamed without either flocks or way-markers – the majority of whom were idol worshippers and the rest either Jews or Christians of exceedingly deviant and heretical beliefs – in acknowledgement and reverence for the one, eternal and invisible God through whose might all things were made, and which could not have been so made otherwise; the supreme ruler, the judge and the lord of lords, amid the confirmation of certain laws and the outward signs of certain ceremonies – some of older and some of newer provenance – and made vivid by the depiction of both temporal and eternal rewards and punishments; and in this way to bring them all to obedience to Muhammad as the Prophet and Emissary of God, who through continually repeated reminders, promises and threats from earlier times might at last through force of arms transmit and establish God’s true religion on earth, and so be acknowledged as high priest, bishop or pope in the things of the spirit, and also a lofty prince in the things of this world.26

With this in mind, it’s hard to be vexed by the Muslim when he terms the time before Muhammad as ‘the time of ignorance’, and is utterly convinced that both enlightenment and wisdom begin with the coming of Islam. The Qur’an’s style is on a par with its purpose and content: strong, great, frightening, in passages truly exalted; thus it drives a wedge and no one can really be surprised at the book’s huge effectiveness. For this reason it is also held by true believers to be uncreated and declared co-eternal with God. In disregard of this, however, there were some bright minds who acknowledged that a superior style of poetry and of writing belonged to the earlier period and they claimed that if it hadn’t pleased God to reveal his will and a definite legal system all at once through Muhammad, the Arabs would have gradually risen to such a stage, and an even higher one, on their own and would have developed yet purer concepts in a pristine language.

Others, more audacious, maintained that Muhammad had ruined their speech and their literature so that they could never again be recovered. But the boldest of all, a brilliant poet, was rash enough to assert that everything which Muhammad had expressed he himself would have expressed as well, and better, and he went so far as to collect a number of sectarians around him. As a result, he was given the mocking sobriquet Mutanabbi, the name under which we know him and which means ‘someone who likes to play the prophet’.²⁷

Whether or not Muslim criticism itself found doubtful matter in the Qur’an, inasmuch as passages which appeared earlier are no longer present, and others of a contradictory nature rescind one another,28 along with the unavoidable lacunae which occur in all scriptural transmissions, even so, this book will remain supremely effective for all time to come, in that it is utterly practical and composed in accord with the needs of a people which bases its renown on old traditions and holds fast to customary ways.

In his aversion to poetry Muhammad also seems highly consistent; he proscribes all tales. These games of frivolous imaginative power, which float back and forth from the real up to the downright impossible, and present the improbable as worthy of truth and beyond all doubt, were extremely suited to Oriental sensuality, to soft torpor and easy idleness. Such airy fancies wafting over marvellous ground had by the Sasanian period increased beyond measure. The Thousand and One Nights, strung on their loose thread, provide us with examples. Their true nature is that they lack any ethical purpose and so lead and transport people not back to themselves but outward, beyond themselves, into a free space without bounds. Muhammad meant to effect exactly the opposite. It is obvious that he knew just how to transform the traditions and reports of the Old Testament and the events in the families of the patriarchs – which of course rested on unconditional faith in God, undeviating obedience (hence, in the same way, on an ‘Islam’)²⁹ – into legends; that he understood increasingly how to articulate and to urge belief in God, trust and obedience, with shrewd command of detail; and in so doing he came to allow much that was fabulous though only if it served his purpose. In this respect he is admirable if one looks and considers the stories of Noah, Abraham and Joseph.