Chapter 8 — THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT
I. The Magi
Next to nothing is known of the Parthian phase of the religion of Iran. Under the Greek Seleucidae (312–64 b.c.) Alexander’s ideal of a marriage of East and West seemed generally to be prospering. However, the whole of the rising new Levant could not be held under one scepter. In c. 212 b.c. a Macedonian governor in Bactria, Euthydemus, had been able to establish an independent state.Note 1 Palestine, some four years later, revolted with the Maccabees. Then Rome began lopping off western provinces. And it was in those years that in Parthia (East Iran) the native dynasty arose that is known as the Parthian or Arsacid. Founded by an obscure tribal chief, Arsaces, c. 250 b.c., it was made firm by two brothers, Phraates I (r. c. 175–170) and Mithradates I (r. c. 170–138); and though continuously at war on every side — to the north and east against the Scythians, Bactrians, and Kushanas, and westward, first against the Seleucidae, then, for two centuries, against Rome — the rugged dynasty increased its hold and endured until 226 a.d., when it was displaced from within by another Persian house, the Sassanian, which remained until the conquest by Islam in 641.
In the Denkart, a late Sassanian work of the sixth century, it is recorded that in the first century a.d.
Valakhsh the Arsacid [Vologaeses I, r. 51–77 a.d.] commanded that a memorandum should be sent to all provinces, with instructions to preserve in whatever state they appeared as much of the Avesta and Zend as came to light and was genuine; also, any teachings derived from it: which, though scattered, owing to the chaos and confusion that Alexander had carried in his wake and the pillage and looting of the Macedonians in the kingdom of Iran, might have survived either in writing or in authoritative oral communication.Note 2
In the main, throughout the Parthian period a strong Hellenizing trend had prevailed. However, in this notice the beginning is registered of a Magian Zoroastrian revival, which in the period of Sassanian rule was strengthened and enforced. The founder of the new dynasty, Ardashir I (r. 226–241 a.d.), set about immediately to review the religious heritage of his empire, with the idea of establishing an orthodoxy through which its heterogeneous population should be amalgamated; and he selected to direct this task a member of the Zoroastrian clergy, Tansar, whose accomplishment is registered in the Denkart.
His Majesty the King of Kings Ardashir son of Papak, following Tansar as religious authority, commanded all those scattered teachings [formerly gathered by Valakhsh] to be brought to the court. Tansar set about his task, selected one version, excluded others from the canon, and issued this decree: “The interpretation of all the teachings from the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda is our responsibility; for now there is no lack of certain knowledge concerning them.”Note 3
Just as the Christian canon was taking shape, so too was an orthodox Zoroastrian. However, a challenge to this reconstruction of the Zoroastrian heritage under the Magian priest Tansar appeared in the teachings of the greatest sage and preacher of the age, the Babylonian prophet Mani (216?–276? a.d.), whose grandiose Manichaean synthesis of Zoroastrian with Buddhist and Christian-Gnostic ideas seemed for a time to promise to the King of Kings an even broader amalgamation of beliefs than a canon simply of Zoroastrian lore. Hence, the second monarch of the dynasty, Shapur I (r. 241–272), a man of widely ranging view, was impressed. As we read of him, continuing our text:
The King of Kings Shapur son of Ardashir further collected those writings of the Religion that were dispersed throughout India, the Byzantine Empire,* and other lands, and which treated of medicine, astronomy, movement, time, space, substance, creation, becoming, passing away, qualitative change, logic, and other arts and sciences. These he added to the Avesta and commanded that a fair copy of all of them be deposited in the Royal Treasury: and he examined the possibility of basing every form of academic discipline on the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda.Note 4
Mani, who began his mission in 242 a.d., was granted an interview with Shapur and given liberty to preach wherever he wished. Apparently the King of Kings himself dallied for a time in Manichaean doctrine. However, this liberal-minded monarch passed away in 272 a.d., and the prophet, in his thirtieth year of teaching, was turned over to the orthodox clergy by the second following king, Bahram I (r. 273–276): whereupon, in the capital, in true Levantine style, he was executed for teaching heresy — according to his legend, crucified, like Christ.
Following the death of Shapur, the Magian reaction to his broadly humanistic, Hellenistic point of view was enforced by his own high priest Karter — the inquisitor by whom Mani was condemned. “Under him,” states Professor R. C. Zaehner in his recent work, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism,
Zoroastrianism appears for the first time as a fanatical and persecuting religion. The list of the sects persecuted, however, shows how justified the early Sassanian kings were in seeking a unifying force that would weld their Empire together; for not only do we find Jews, Christians, Manichees, and Mandaeans mentioned, but also Buddhists and Brahmans; all these Karter claims to have chastised. … “Heretics and apostates,” Karter tells us, “who were within the Magian community, were spared for the religion of the worshipers of Mazda and the rites of the gods but not for the spread of propaganda: I chastised and upbraided them and improved them.”
Uniformity of belief [Professor Zaehner comments] was, then, certainly enforced, and the probability is that this unity was along strictly dualist and Mazdaean lines. Karter’s policy must then be seen as a reaction, under a series of weak kings, against the personal religious policy of Shapur.Note 5
Let me suggest that we formulate the sociological principle, formerly illustrated by the Maccabean and now by this Magian reaction to the force of Hellenism, in organic-chemical terms of “tolerance”: the constitutional capacity of a system to endure a food or drug that to a certain degree or for a certain time can be assimilated even profitably, but beyond that becomes intolerable and is spontaneously expelled.
Without arguing the point as to whether a state can survive without compelling its subjects to accept as Absolute Truth whatever system of belief the dominant elite may have decided to put forth as divine revelation, we shall observe only that in the history of the Levant this pseudo-religious form of sociology can be studied in variety and, so to say, in purest style. And where once allowed to prevail, it only grows in force and terror as the violated, coerced factors become increasingly intractable through the operation of a second natural law, namely, that gods suppressed become demons; which is to say, that psychological and sociological factors neither assimilated nor recognized by the consciously controlled system become autonomous and must ultimately break the approved system apart.
From the next statement of the Denkart we learn that during the reign of King Shapur II (310-379) — who was an exact contemporary of Constantine, Saint Augustine, and Theodosius the Great — the Persian reaction to what the orthodox mind calls heresy was in full career. And the great man of piety now was Aturpat, to whom, as Professor Zaehner states, “the Pahlavi books look back as to the very embodiment of orthodoxy. Aturpat submitted himself to the ordeal by molten metal and emerged from it victorious ‘during his controversy with all manner of sectarians and heretics.’ ”Note 6 According to the Denkart:
The King of Kings, Shapur, son of Ohrmazd [Shapur II], summoned men from all lands to examine and study all doctrines, so that all cause for dispute might be removed. After Aturpat had been vindicated by the consistency of his argument against all the other representatives of the different sects, doctrines, and schools, he issued a declaration to the following effect: “Now that we have seen the Religion upon earth, we shall leave no one to his false religion and we shall be exceeding zealous.” And so did he do.Note 7
However — and who should be surprised? — the danger to the empire of heresy, right and left, still was rampant two full centuries later, in the period of Chosroes I (r. 531–579), a contemporary of his Christian counterpart Justinian (r. 527–563), whose problems and solutions were approximately the same. We shall let his own text stand as our final exhibit from the Denkart, which was a work composed in his reign.
His present Majesty, the King of Kings, Khusraw, son of Kavat [Chosroes I], after he had put down irreligion and heresy with the greatest vindictiveness according to the revelation of the Religion in the matter of all heresy, greatly strengthened the system of the four castes and encouraged precise argumentation, and in a diet of the provinces he issued the following declaration:
“The truth of the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda has been recognized. Intelligent men can with confidence establish it in the world by discussion. But effective and progressive propaganda should be based not so much on discussion as on pure thoughts, words, and deeds, the inspiration of the Good Spirit, and the worship of God paid in absolute conformity to the Word. What the chief Magi of Ohrmazd [= Ahura Mazda] have proclaimed, do we proclaim; for among us they have been shown to possess spiritual insight. And we have asked and continue to ask of them the fullest exposition of doctrine both in the matter of spiritual insight and in its practical application on earth, and for this we give thanks to God.
“Fortunately for the good government of the country, the realm of Iran has gone forward relying on the doctrine of the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda, that is, the synthesis of the accumulated knowledge of those who have gone before us throughout the whole of this central clime. We have no dispute with those who have other convictions, for we ourselves possess so much both in the Avestan language through pure oral tradition and in written records, in books and memoranda, and in the vulgar idiom by way of exegesis — in short, the whole original wisdom of the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda. Whereas we have recognized that, in so far as all dubious doctrines foreign to the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda reach this place from all over the world, further examination and study prove that to absorb and publish knowledge foreign to the Religion of the Worshipers of Mazda does not contribute to the welfare and prosperity of our subjects as much as one religious leader, who has examined much and pondered much in his recital of the liturgy; with high intent and in concert with the perspicacious, most noble, most honorable, most good Magian men, we do hereby decree that the Avesta and Zend be studied zealously and ever afresh, so that what is acquired therefrom may worthily increase and fertilize the knowledge of our subjects.
“Those who tell our subjects either that it is not possible to acquire, or that it is possible to acquire in its entirety, knowledge of the Creator, the mystery of spiritual beings, and the nature of the Creator’s creation, are to be deemed men of insufficient intellect and freethinkers. Those who say that it is possible to understand reality through the revelation of the Religion and by analogy, are to be deemed researchers after truth. Those who expound this doctrine clearly are to be deemed wise and versed in the Religion. And since the root of all knowledge is the doctrine of the Religion, both in its spiritual power and through its manifestation here on earth, a man who speaks in this cause speaks wisely, even if he derives the doctrine from no Avestan revelation. So he should be esteemed as speaking in accordance with the Religion, the function of which is to give instruction to the sons of men.”Note 8
II. Byzantium
“While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another,” Spengler writes,
the Magian deity is the indefinite, enigmatic Power on high that pours out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual wills is simply meaningless, for “will” and “thought” in man are not prime, but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable root-feeling, which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered, by any conversions, illumination or subtilizing in the world, there emerges of necessity the idea of the Divine Mediator, of one who transforms this state from a torment into a bliss. All Magian religions are by this idea bound together, and separated from those of all other Cultures.Note 9
In the Zoroastrian sector of the Magian world the key question of mythology on which the various contending sects went apart was that of the relationship of Angra Mainyu to Ahura Mazda, the relationship of the power of darkness to the source and being of light; in other words, the origin and the ultimate nature of evil. For the Christian fold, on the other hand, the chief knot of discord was the problem of the Incarnation, the nature of the Mediator who entered the realm of time, matter, and sin, to save mankind. In the councils of the Church that followed Nicaea in rapid series, this was the issue on which all either held or went apart. We need not review the controversy in all of its exquisite convolutions. However, the force of sheerly political considerations in the determination of what was represented as a theological dispute, “not of this world,” warrants a few pages of thought. For it is in the history of these councils that the growth of Christian doctrine as a function of the usual Levantine requirement for a monolithic consensus of opinion (which then is to be taken for unarguable truth) comes best to view.
To the argument there were four leading parties: 1. the great Egyptian theological school of Alexandria (of which the young deacon Athanasius, of the Council of Nicaea and the Athanasian Creed, had been a product), where Christ’s divinity was stressed: in the present development of controversy this school was to be represented principally by two powerful bishops, Cyril and Dioscurus, of whom the first would be canonized and the second anathematized for holding essentially the same view; 2. the Cappadocian-Syrian school of Antioch, where Christ’s humanity was stressed: represented chiefly by the great heresiarch Nestorius, who would be condemned by Saint Cyril and destroyed; 3. the emperor on his throne in Constantinople, the New or Second Rome, whose high concern would be to keep the empire from disintegrating in argument; and 4. the pope on his throne in Rome itself, striving to assert the primacy of his see, on the claim of its establishment by Peter: as Peter had been made head of the apostles, so the pope should now be of all bishops. However, the vast majority of the bishops were Levantines, and Rome was no longer the seat of imperial rule.
PHASE ONE (c. 370-431)
The first capital phase of the great conflict was opened when the vigorously anti-Arian Bishop Apollinarius of Laodicea (a city just south of Antioch) proposed, about 370 a.d., to answer a certain troublesome argument, which was that, if all men are sinners and Christ was not a sinner, then Christ cannot have been truly man. The good Bishop Apollinarius’s reply was that in Christ the place of the human soul was taken by the Logos, the Word made Flesh, but since the human spirit was created in the image of the Logos (Genesis 1:28), Christ was not the less, but the more, human for the difference. The Logos and man were not alien beings, but joined in their inmost nature, and, in a sense, each was incomplete without the other.Note 10
It was an adroit reply. However, instead of quelling, it only exacerbated argument; and it placed Apollinarius himself, moreover, almost on the side of those Gnostics who argued for the illusionary appearance of the Savior. He was condemned at the Second Ecumenical Council, at Constantinople in 381, and died nine years later. But his argument revived in the year 428, when Nestorius became the bishop of Constantinople. Trained at Antioch, where the doctrine of the reality of Christ’s human nature was argued, the new bishop of the Second Rome proposed that Mary had not been the mother of God (θεοτόκος), but only the mother of Christ’s human nature. “I cannot speak of God as being two or three months old,” he is reported to have said; and again: “Well, anyhow, don’t make the Virgin a goddess!”
At which point the great bishop Cyril of Alexandria broke into the controversy with a volley of letters to the court of Constantinople — to the Emperor Theodosius II (r. 408–450), whom he addressed as “the image of God on earth,” and to his sisters, “the most pious princesses,” notably the eldest, Pulcheria, who had superintended Theodosius’s education as a child, ruled as regent during his minority, chosen for him a consort who would not challenge her own authority, and vowed both herself and her sisters to perpetual virginity — with a view not only to a lofty place in heaven but also to unchallenged authority in the palace of the empire. The ladies spent their innocence placing flowers before altars, spinning, and exchanging counsels with the clergy and eunuchs of high station.
Cyril of Alexandria, writing to these and their brother, justified the term θεοτόκος with quotations from numerous authorities, and in letters to Nestorius charged him with having failed to understand the Nicene Creed. Letters passed also between Cyril and the pope in Rome, who at that time was Celestine I (422–432): whereupon there was called in Rome a synod at which Nestorius was condemned, and at another synod, in Alexandria, again he was condemned. But he issued counter-anathemas from his own high see of Constantinople: and at this point the emperor stepped in.
Theodosius II summoned a council in the year 431 at Ephesus, which happened to be the city in Asia Minor that, for millenniums before the Christian era, had been the chief temple site of the great Asian goddess Artemis, mother of the world and of the ever-dying resurrected god. We can reasonably assume that her lingering influence, no less than that of the virginal matriarchs of the palace, worked upon the counsels of the bishops there assembled. For it was there that the Virgin Mother was declared to be θεοτόκος, the Mother of God — five days before the delegates from Antioch arrived. Nestorius had refused to attend. He was condemned and deprived of his see. Together with the Antioch group, however, he held a council of his own, condemning Cyril, but in the end was forced to acquiesce. And in exile, in the desert of Egypt, he finally was slain, by the hand, apparently, of a great and well-known desert monk, Senuti.Note 11
Yet his doctrine had a life course of its own. It split off eastward, away from the church of Rome and Constantinople, to flourish through Persia and as far as to Madras and to Peking. Marco Polo (1254–1323) found Nestorian churches along the caravan routes, where the Mahāyāna Buddhist monks also had their sanctuaries. And if anyone desires to enter a field of study as yet hardly explored, he will find a rich, though difficult, gain in those Asian marts of exchange, where the iconographic currencies of Buddhist and Brahmanical, Taoist and Confucian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and Zoroastrian stamp were all accepted and passed along as tender.
PHASE TWO (448–553)
The second capital phase of the argument over the nature of the Incarnation opened in the year 448. Bishop Cyril had died four years before — to be canonized — and the incumbent of his Alexandrian see was Dioscurus. The controversy resumed when a certain aged abbot named Eutyches, who from his cloister near Constantinople had been volubly opposed to Nestorius, was accused of disseminating errors of the opposite kind. Brought before a council in the capital, he stated his rather clumsy belief that Christ had been of two natures (God and Man) before their union in the Incarnation but of one nature thereafter; whereupon he was condemned and degraded. He appealed, however, to the emperor, to Pope Leo the Great (440-461), and to the monks of Constantinople. Theodosius called a second council to revise the findings of the first, and Dioscurus of Alexandria was invited to preside. Pope Leo was the one who now began writing, however, to the emperor, to Pulcheria, and to numerous other high personages, stating: 1. that Eutyches was in error, 2. that if there was to be a council at all, the place for it was Rome, and 3. that it was he, as successor of Peter, who was to compose the authoritative statement, or Tome, of the points of controversy to be discussed. The council was summoned in 449 — by the emperor: not at Rome, but at Ephesus; and not Leo, but Dioscuorus, the bishop of Alexandria, presided. Leo dispatched three delegates, a bishop, a priest, and a deacon; but his Tome was not even read. Those who had condemned Eutyches were themselves condemned, and by the signatures of 115 bishops the old abbot was declared orthodox and reinstated. The sole protest — Contradicitur — was pronounced by Hilarius, the pope’s delegated deacon, who escaped for his life and carried the news of the catastrophe to Rome, where Leo bestowed on the council the name by which it still is known, the Robber Council.
When Theodosius II fell from his horse into the river Lycus, broke his back, and died, in July 450, Pulcheria was proclaimed Empress, “and the Romans, for the first time,” writes Gibbon, “submitted to a female reign.”Note 12 She married a prudent senator, Marcian, who respected her virginity and, as emperor, supported with her Pope Leo’s demand for another council — which he summoned, however, not in Rome, as expected, but in Chalcedon, near Constantinople. The pope’s Tome prevailed this time, and Dioscurus, anathematized, was banished from his see: but with the disconcerting result that, before the decade had elapsed, the Alexandrian church had in large part split away from Constantinople and was seating bishops of its own in defiance of imperial appointments.
Thus arose the independent Coptic Monophysite (One Nature) branch of the rapidly separating Living Body of Christ. Of tremendous influence in its shaping were the multitudes of hermits who, since the period of Saint Anthony (251–356??), had infested the various Egyptian deserts, practicing the most bizarre austerities. Some, for instance, the so-called Stylites and Dendrites, like certain yogis of India,Note 13 condemned themselves to perpetual immobility, the former sitting atop columns left among the ruins of old temples, the latter perched on the branches of trees. Others, known as Browsers, fed like animals on grass. More chained themselves to rocks. Some bore on their shoulders heavy yokes. Yet multitudes were available for mob scenes, shouting slogans such as “One Nature! One Nature!” when Alexandrian theologians required conspicuous support.
In a zone of its own, after the schism of Chalcedon, the Coptic Monophysite Church developed outside the pale of European concern, linked to a little-studied civilization that arose in the lands around the Arabian Sea: Abyssinia and Somaliland, Hadramaut, Bombay and Malabar. Who, for example, has written of the life and times of the forty-odd monolithic churches of Ethiopian Lalibela, and of their relationship to the cave-temples of Ajanta?Note 14 And what of the legendary serpent king of nearby Axum, from whose slayer the present Nahas or Negus (compare Sanskrit nagas, “serpent, serpent king”), Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, is descended?Note 15 Or who has searched the background of the legends of Issa (Jesus) and of the kings of Persia and Rome that Leo Frobenius traced through the Sudan as far west as to the Niger?Note 16 It is all, as far as the modern science of mythology, as well as the Catholic Church, is concerned, a lost world.
But the virtual loss of Africa was not the only calamity of the Council of Chalcedon; for a split began to appear, as well, between Byzantium and Rome. The see of Peter had previously played almost no role in the church councils, all of which had been summoned by emperors, held in Levantine cities, and attended by literally hundreds of bishops of the Orient with scarcely half a dozen from the West. The pope’s high claim to the dignity of Peter had been simply disregarded. Whereas now Leo the Great, a man of stature and character, standing amid the ruins of his city, who, as shepherd of his flock, was in the year 451 to outface the Hun Attila at the gate of Rome and by outfacing him — somehow, with some power unexplained — actually cause him to retreat: this Leo was not the man to leave the papal claim unasserted. And the Orient, aware of his stature, replied at Chalcedon with the following challenge, known as Canon XXVII. Commencing with a reaffirmation of the findings of the council of Theodosius, the bishops proceeded to their point:
Following in all things [they declared] the decisions of the holy Fathers and acknowledging the canon, which has just been read, of the One Hundred and Fifty Bishops beloved-of-God (who assembled in the Imperial city of Constantinople, which is New Rome, in the time of the Emperor Theodosius of happy memory), we also do enact and decree the same things concerning the privileges of the most holy Church of Constantinople, which is New Rome. For the Fathers rightly granted privileges to the throne of Old Rome, because it was the imperial city. And the One Hundred and Fifty most religious Bishops, actuated by the same consideration, gave equal privileges to the most holy throne of New Rome, justly judging that the city which is honored with the Sovereignty and the Senate, and enjoys equal privileges with the old imperial Rome, should in ecclesiastical matters also be magnified as she is, and rank next after her; so that [and here comes the catch] in the Pontic, the Asian, and the Thracian Dioceses, the metropolitans only, and such bishops also of the Dioceses aforesaid as are among the barbarians, should be ordained by the aforesaid most holy throne of the most holy church of Constantinople; every metropolitan of the aforesaid Dioceses, together with the bishops of his province, ordaining his own provincial bishops, as has been declared by the divine canons; but that, as has been above said, the metropolitans of the aforesaid Dioceses should be ordained by the archbishop of Constantinople, after the proper elections have been held according to custom and have been reported to him.Note 17
The Byzantine ideal of the Kingdom of God on Earth, like the Old Testament ideal of Israel, was political, material, and concrete. As Moses to Aaron, so the emperor to the priesthood, in a state that was itself conceived as the sole vehicle of God’s law in the history of the world. “The pivotal point of the [Byzantine] structure,” as Professor Adda B. Bozeman writes in her masterful survey of the interplay of Politics and Culture in International History, “was the concept of the centralized state, and this concept was realized by many separate but interlocking institutions of government. Each of these institutions had its own frame of reference because it was designed to serve a particular aspect of the state. But all, including those concerned with ecclesiastical affairs, proceeded from the premise that the ultimate success of all government is dependent upon the proper management of human susceptibilities rather than upon the faithful obeisance to preconceived theories and images.Note 18
Furthermore: “Since the state was generally regarded as the paramount expression of society it was taken for granted that all human activities and values were to be brought into a direct relationship to it. This meant that knowledge was not to be pursued for its own sake alone but also as a service to the state. It meant, in fact, that learning had an official political value, just as faith did.”Note 19 And not only faith, we must add, but the mythology of faith, the awe of faith, and the will to serve.
Robert Eisler, in his encyclopedic study of the symbolism of the kingly robes and thrones of Europe and the world, quotes the following description of the royal presence in Byzantium from the writings of a contemporary visitor:
By the imperial throne there stood a brazen, gilded tree, whose branches were filled with brazen, gilded birds of various kind, each of which, according to its kind, emitted the notes of a species of bird. And the emperor’s throne was itself so contrived that it might appear, now low, now higher, and now mightily exalted. It was guarded, as it were, by lions of prodigious size, whether of bronze or of wood I do not know, but covered all with gold, and these, with lashing tails, open jaws, and moving tongues, emitted roars. I was led before the emperor. But as, at my entry, the lions roared and birds sang, each according to its kind, I was shaken neither with fear nor with awe. When I had thrice prostrated myself in obeisance to the emperor, I raised my head, and the one whom I had seen seated at a moderate height from the floor I now beheld, clothed in different garments seated high up, near the ceiling; and how this had come to pass I could not imagine, if not, perhaps, by some such machine as those by which the boom is hoisted of a wine press.Note 20
Dr. Eisler observes that “since Chosroes I is supposed to have had a wonder throne of this kind — with moving stars beneath its canopy — we shall hardly go astray if we assume that the Roman emperor took over this venerable but finally very childish contraption, only in order not to fall behind his Persian rival.” The symbolism involved goes back to early Sumerian times, and in the Middle Ages it passed from Byzantium both to Western Europe and to Russia, largely as a result, we may assume, of its effect upon the emissaries from those barbarous regions to the great court. As Professor Norman H. Baynes suggests in a passage cited to this point by Adda Bozeman:
Picture for a moment the arrival of a barbarian chieftain from steppe or desert in this Byzantine Court. He has been royally entertained, under the vigilant care of imperial officials he has seen the wonders of the capital, and today he is to have audience with the Emperor. Through a dazzling maze of marble corridors, through chambers rich with mosaic and cloth of gold, through long lines of palace guards in white uniforms, amidst patricians, bishops, generals and senators, to the music of organs and church choirs he passes, supported by eunuchs, until at last oppressed with interminable splendor he falls prostrate in the presence of the silent, motionless, hieratic figure of the Lord of New Rome, the heir of Constantine, seated on the throne of the Caesars: before he can rise, Emperor and throne have been caught aloft, and with vestments changed since last he gazed the sovereign looks down upon him, surely as God regarding mortal men. Who is he, as he hears the roar of the golden lions that surround the throne or the song of the birds on the trees, who is he that he should decline the Emperor’s behests? He stays not to think of the mechanism which causes the lions to roar or the birds to sing: he can scarce answer the questions of the logothete speaking for his imperial master: his allegiance is won: he will fight for the Roman Christ and his Empire.Note 21
With this ridiculous scene in mind, we discover an unsuspected dimension in Saint Cyril’s flattery of such a royal clown as “the image of God on earth.”
God in heaven, however, is without a wife. The emperor had an empress. And while the mighty monarch Justinian, who assumed this playful throne in the year 527 a.d., was engaged in the delicate task of sealing mythologically, and thereby politically, the inherited breach with Rome, bis immensely powerful, adored spouse, Theodora, began offending Rome by favoring openly her personal friends and intimates, the Monophysites.
“Theodora the Great,” let us call her, was anything but a replica of Pulcheria. The daughter of one of the bear-keepers of the Constantinople hippodrome, she had already, through a lurid stage career, achieved something like world renown, when the bachelor prince Justinian, at about the age of thirty-seven, fell hopelessly in love with her beauty, intelligence, and wit. Many historians have suggested that she was a greater political talent than her husband, and that her recognition of the spiritual affinities of Byzantium with the Levant — while he was striving to heal an organic separation of two incompatible culture worlds — would have made the Second Rome a far stronger and more durable stronghold of Christendom than it became as a result of Justinian’s misguided course. In any case, the cosmic cloak-and-dagger novel that developed as a consequence of her Levantine talent for political theology was wonderful. Gibbon gives it all in his chapters. The only aspect of essential relevancy here, however, was its effect upon the credo of Pope Vigilius (537–555).
Justinian had assumed his throne at the age of forty-five, in the year 527, and was to reign for thirty-eight years, seven months, and thirteen days. Setting to work immediately to exterminate all remaining pagans, he closed the University of Athens in the second year of his reign, effected multitudes of conversions by imperial decree, and was restrained from a severe persecution of the Monophysites of Egypt only by the soft but fateful hand of his beautiful wife.
In the year 543, under advice from this audacious empress, Justinian issued an edict condemning as heretical the writings of three deceased theologians of the School of Antioch, which it was supposed would serve both to heal the breach with the Monophysites and to force Rome to accord; for the new pope, Vigilius, had been elevated to his station largely through Theodora’s influence and was expected to comply with her will. He delayed so long in fulfilling his given word to her to support her husband’s edict that Justinian had him kidnaped and brought to Constantinople, where he issued his Judicatum, Easter Eve, 548, under force. However, the clergy of the West reacted with such an uproar that Justinian, for the time being, allowed his victim to retract his statement.
Theodora, that year, died of cancer at about the age of forty, and the case rested, with the pope still captive, until at last, in the year 557, Justinian, to force die issue, called the Fifth Ecumenical Council, which Vigilius refused to attend. He produced, instead, his own unsatisfactory document known as the Constitution ad Imperatorem, in which he condemned only sixty passages of but one of the Antioch theologians and not the author himself, on the ground that it was not customary to condemn the dead. Nor would he condemn even the works of the other two, on the ground that they had both been declared free of heresy at the Council of Chalcedon. Justinian’s council, on the other hand, thereupon condemned not only the works and authors in question but also the captive pope; and, thoroughly undone, the poor man finally joined his name to theirs and, permitted to return to his see, died in Syracuse on the way.Note 22
PHASE THREE (630-680)
The last chapter of this tale of Shehrzad opened eight long decades later, in the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (r. 610-641), when the patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, offered a formula that he believed would finally resolve the entire mytho-political broil; namely, of a single “energy” in Christ behind his two “natures” and operating through each. Heraclius, the emperor, thought the idea promising, and when the Monophysites of Alexandria accepted it, in the year 633, an optimistic letter was sent to the pope — now Pope Honorius (625–638) — who accepted it as well, suggesting, however, the term “will” instead of “energy.” Thus everything seemed solved, with Byzantium, Rome, and Alexandria finally in accord, when, alas, a new county was heard from. The patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem took it upon himself to issue a vigorous synodical letter, declaring the single-“energy” theory to be tantamount to Monophysitism, and all went again into motion: Church, Empire, and all.
In 638 the emperor, through his patriarch Sergius, proclaimed the orthodoxy of the doctrine of a single “will,” prohibiting the use of the term “one energy” as well as the doctrine of “two wills.” In both East and West a hurricane of protests arose, and the following emperor, Constans II (r. 641–668), simply forbade discussion of the matter. However, a bold new pope, Martin (649–654), defiantly summoned a council in Rome and condemned both the “one will” doctrine of his predecessor and the prohibition of discussion by the emperor; for which diligence he was kidnaped, conveyed to Constantinople, exposed to public gaze, stripped all but naked, and, with a chain around his neck and a sword held in front of him, dragged over rough stones to a common prison to be beheaded. Reprieved, he was banished to the Crimea, where, as a result of the maltreatment, he expired.Note 23
The ultimate word then had to wait for the Sixth Ecumenical Council, of the year 680, when the doctrine of “two natures” was confirmed, and the entire cast of characters of the earlier “one will” compromise, along with all the great Monophysites, were condemned.Note 24
However, a new and much less complex theology had already been cried forth from Araby: La ilaha ilia ’llah; and one can readily understand that by now this simple cry, “There is no god but God,” would have had considerable appeal. The shout took away the entire Near East within two blazing decades and, flying the breadth of North Africa, overran Spain in 711. By 732 it was on the point of engulfing France, when there eventuated another of those moments — as of Marathon and the Maccabees — when the limit of an East-West-East-West-East pendulation was attained. For, as every such moment has shown, there is a point beyond which the character of an invaded major culture province cannot be contravened. And this arrived, this time, in Europe, at the Battle of Poitiers, when the Frankish king Charles the Hammer smote the criers of Islam back to the Pyrenees.
III. The Prophet of Islam
In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful,
Praise be to God, the cherisher and sustainer of the worlds: most gracious and most merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee do we worship and Thine aid do we seek. Show us the way that is straight, the way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy grace, whose portion is not wrath, and who go not astray.Note 25
We are reading the Holy Koran. The text continues with a version of the biblical creation myth and Fall.
Behold, the Lord said to the angels: “I will create a viceregent on earth.” They said: “Will you place therein one who will make mischief and shed blood, while we are celebrating your praises and glorifying your name?” He said: “I know what you do not know.”
He taught Adam the names of all things, then placed these before the angels; and he said: “Tell me the names of these, if you are knowing.” But they answered: “Glory be to Yourself! We have no knowledge but what you have taught us. Truly it is you who are both in knowledge and in wisdom perfect.” He said: “O Adam! Announce to them the names.” And when he had done so, God said: “Did I not declare to you that I know the secrets of the heavens and of earth, and know what you yourselves reveal and what you conceal?”
And behold, We said to the angels: “Bow down to Adam!” They bowed. Not so, however, Iblis, who refused. He was haughty. He was of those who reject the faith. We said: “O Adam, dwell — both you and your wife — in the Garden. Eat of the bounty therein as you will, but approach not to this tree, lest you approach darkness and transgression.” Satan then made them slip from it and caused their banishment from the place in which they were.*
We said: “Get you down! There shall be enmity between you. On earth shall be your dwelling place and your provision, for a certain time.” Adam learned from his Lord the words of prayer and his Lord turned to him; for he is oft-returning and most merciful. We said: “Get you down from here, all together. And if — as is certain — guidance comes to you from me, whosoever shall follow my guidance, on him shall be no fear, nor shall he grieve. But those who reject the Faith and regard our signs as false: these shall be companions of the fire, and in it they shall abide.”Note 26
It is obvious that in every syllable Islam is a continuation of the Zoroastrian-Jewish-Christian heritage, restored (as it is claimed) to its proper sense and carried (as it is further claimed) to its ultimate formulation. The whole legend of the patriarchs and the Exodus, golden calf, water from the rock, revelation on Mount Sinai, etc., is rehearsed with its lessons time and time again throughout the Koran, as are, also, certain portions of the Christian myth.
The basic Koranic origin legend is of a descent of both the Arabs and the Jews from the seed of Abraham, of whom it is told already in the Bible that he had two wives, Sarah and Hagar, of whom Hagar, an Egyptian slave woman, was the first to conceive: and she bore Ishmael to Abraham, who then was eighty-six years old. But when Abraham was ninety-nine years old, Sarah, his first wife, conceived and bore Isaac.
And the child grew [we read in the Book of Genesis] and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had born to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.” And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Be not displeased because of the lad and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your descendants be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.Note 27
According to the Koranic version of this ancient family history, Abraham and Ishmael built the Kaaba of the Great Mosque of Mecca some years before this separation took place. “And remember,” it is there stated,
Abraham and Ishmael raised the foundations of the House with this prayer: “O Lord! Accept from us this service; for Thou art the All-hearing, the All-knowing. O Lord! Make of us Moslems, bowing to Thy Will, and of our progeny a Moslem people, bowing to Thy Will. Show us our places for the celebration of due rites. And turn to us; for Thou art the oft-returning, most Merciful.”Note 28
Furthermore, not only Abraham and his sons, but also Jacob and his sons were Moslems. “Were you witness,” the text continues, “when Death appeared before Jacob? Behold, he said to his sons: ‘What will you worship after me?’ They said: ‘Your God we shall worship, and the God of your fathers, of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac: the One true God: to Him we bow in Islam.’ ”Note 29
The uninstructed reader will perhaps ask: “How then am I to believe this bit of news, which I never heard before?” And the answer will be such as every Jew or Christian surely will recognize; namely that the Book (here, however, the Koran) is revealed of God.
“Or do you say,” we read, “that Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the Tribes were Jews or Christians? Say: Do you know better than God? Ah, who is more unjust than those who conceal the testimony they have received from God? But God is not unmindful of what they do!”Note 30
“The People of the Book,” as the Jews are termed in the Koran, are declared to have closed their eyes to the confirmation of their own heritage when they rejected the message of Islam; and the Christians, with their trinitarian doctrines, added gods unto God, misreading the words of their own prophet Jesus, which are to be understood directly in the line of Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and Mohammed.
“O Children of Israel!” God now calls to the Jews. “Call to mind the special favor that I bestowed on you, and fulfill your Covenant with me as I fulfill mine with you. Fear none but me. And believe what I now reveal, confirming the revelation that is with you: and be not the first to reject faith therein. Neither sell my signs for a small price. Fear me, and me alone!”Note 31
We gave Moses the Book and followed him with a succession of messengers. We gave to Jesus, son of Mary, clear signs of his mission and strengthened him with the holy spirit. Is it, then, that whenever a messenger comes to you with what you yourselves do not desire, you puff yourselves up with pride? Some you called impostors; others you kill! — They say: “Our hearts are the wrappings that preserve God’s Word: we need no more.” Nay, God has cursed them for their blasphemy: little is it they believe.Note 32
It is not exactly known how the Koran was received from heaven and written down. In fact, the greater part of Mohammed’s life is a matter of conjecture. The basic biography, by a certain Mohammed ibn Ishaq, was written for the Caliph Mansur (r. 754–775) more than a century after the Prophet’s death; and this work itself is known only as preserved in two still later writings, the Compendium of Ibn Hisham (d. 840 a.d.) and the Chronicle of Tabiri (d. 932 a.d.). In brief, the biography, as reconstructed, falls naturally into four main periods.Note 33
1. CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, MARRIAGE, AND FIRST CALL: C. 570-610 a.d.
Born at Mecca to a family of the powerful Kuraish tribe, the child was bereaved of its father shortly after birth and of its mother but a few years later. Reared by relatives of little means but with numerous children, the youth, when about twenty-four, entered the service of a wealthy woman named Khadija, older than himself, twice married and with several children, who sent him to Syria on a commercial mission, from which he returned to become her husband. She bore him two sons, both of whom died in infancy, and several daughters.
In his fortieth year Mohammed began receiving revelations, of which the first is said to have been that of Sura 96: “Proclaim! In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, who created, created man from a clot of blood: Proclaim! For thy Lord is most bountiful, who has taught man the use of the pen — taught man what he knew not before!”Note 34
The accepted Moslem legend tells that this revelation came to Mohammed in a cave in the side of Mount Hira, three miles north of Mecca, to which he used to retire for peaceful contemplation — often alone, but sometimes with Khadija. As we read in one retelling, he was there pondering the mystery of man of corruptible flesh when a dazzling vision of beauty and light overpowered his soul and senses, and he heard the word, “Proclaim!” He was confused and terrified; but the cry rang clear, three times, until the first overpowering confusion yielded to a collected realization of his mission. Its author was God; its subject, man, God’s creature; and its instrument, the pen, the sanctified Book, which men were to read, study, recite, and treasure in their souls.
His soul was filled with divine ecstasy; but when this passed he returned to the world of time and circumstance, which now seemed dark tenfold. His limbs were seized with a violent trembling and he turned straightway to the one who shared his life, Khadija, who understood, rejoiced, gave comfort to his shaken nerves, and knew it had been no mere illusion. She consulted her cousin, Waraka ibn Naufal, who was a worshiper of God in the faith of Christ; and when he heard, he rejoiced as well, and Khadija returned to her husband.
“O Chosen One,” she said, “may you be blessed! Do we not see your inner life, true and pure? Do not all see your outer life: kind and gentle, loyal to kin, hospitable to strangers? No thought of ill or malice ever has stained your mind; no word that was not true and did not quiet the passions of narrower men has ever passed your lips. Ever ready in the service of God, you are he of whom I bear witness: There is no god but God, and you are his Chosen Apostle.”Note 35
2. THE FIRST CIRCLE OF FRIENDS: C. 610-613 a.d.
For three years Mohammed and Khadija engaged in private propaganda, first in the family and among friends, then among neighbors. Mecca, their city, was a prosperous trading station in a barren valley, some fifty miles inland from the Red Sea. In its center stood a perfectly rectangular stone hut, known as the Kaaba, the “Cube,” containing an image of the patron god, Hubal, as well as some other sacred objects, besides the black stone, possibly of meteoric origin, that is today the central object of the entire Islamic world. This stone is now said to have been given by Gabriel to Abraham; and its hut, to have been the house that Abraham constructed with the aid of Ishmael. And in fact, even before Mohammed’s time the whole region around Mecca was regarded as a place of sanctity. An annual festival took place there, to which crowds streamed from all quarters; and many of those who came paid visits to the Kaaba.
One of the literary problems of the Koran is the source of the biblical lore that abounds in it, derived largely from the Christian side, and of a distinctly Nestorian cast; for tradition holds that the Prophet was unable to read. However, certainly from childhood he must have been made aware of many types of religion: principally, of course, the tribal and regional cults of the Arabs, but also Christianity, Judaism, and perhaps Zoroastrianism as well. Some two hundred miles to the north, in Medina, was a large community of Jews. Directly across the Red Sea, in Ethiopia, was a Coptic Christian kingdom. His wife’s cousin, Waraka, was a Christian, probably of Monophysite persuasion. And the great trading routes from north to south, down the Red Sea and across to India, had for centuries been bearing philosophers, missionaries, and other men of learning, as well as merchants, back and forth.
One need only suppose a boyhood and youth of alert interest in the oral lore and religious life round about: a little pitcher with big ears; and then a youth of high intelligence, ardent religious sensibilities, and an extraordinary capacity for extended periods of auditory trance: a youth of great physical strength and persuasive presence, furthermore, as the later episodes of his biography prove. And as a rock loosed from a snowy peak, gathering snow in descent, may grow into an avalanche, so the enterprise of Mohammed and Khadija. Among their first converts were Mohammed’s young cousin, Ali, who would later become his son-in-law; an older, sturdy friend (though a member of another clan), the wealthy Abu Bakr; and a faithful servant of Khadija’s house, Zaid.
As the legend tells:
Khadija believed, above all women exalted in faith. Ali the well beloved, then a child of but ten, yet lion-hearted, plighted faith and became from that instant the right hand of Islam. Then Abu Bakr, sincere and true-hearted, a man of wealth and influence, who used both without stint for the cause, joined as sober counselor and inseparable friend. And Zaid, the freedman of Mohammed, counted freedom as naught com pared with the service of God. These were the first fruits of the mission: a woman, a child, a man of wealth, and a freedman, banded in equality in Islam.Note 36
3. THE GATHERING COMMUNITY IN MECCA: C. 613–622 a.d.
O thou, folded in garments! Stand to prayer by night, but not all night — half, or a little less, or a little more: and in slow, measured, rhythmic tones, say forth the Koran. For soon We shall send down to thee a weighty message.Note 37
These imposing lines of Sura 73 are supposed to represent the second recorded revelation given to Mohammed, which is believed to have come only some time after the first — perhaps two years, perhaps six months — and again, as it is supposed, in the cave.
The term “folded in garments” (muzzamil), which is one of the titles of the Prophet, is to be understood in several senses. Literally, it refers to the physical state of the Prophet in his arduous moments of trance-ecstasy, when, according to tradition, he would lie or sit, wrapped in a blanket, uttering divine verses while copiously perspiring. A second meaning, however, is referred to every Moslem at prayer. Like the Prophet of pure heart, each is to be “properly dressed for prayer: folded in a mantle, as one renouncing the vanities of this world.” And finally, on the mystic plane, by the mantle we may understand the outward wrappings of phenomenality, which are essential to existence, but are presently to be outgrown, whereupon one’s inner nature is to proclaim itself with all boldness.Note 38 In the next Sura this image is continued:
O thou, wrapped in a mantle! Arise, and deliver thy warning! Do thou magnify thy Lord. Keep thy garments free from stain and shun abominations! Nor expect, when giving, any increase to thyself, but, for the Lord’s cause, be patient and be constant! That will be — that Day — a Day of Distress, far from easy for those without faith.Note 39
The old apocalyptic sense of the coming Day of Judgment filled the message of the Prophet with the urgency of immediate event. We do not know what other prophetic movements may have been stirring in the Arab world of the time. Ecstatics of one type or another surely abounded, then, as now. And there were, besides, prophets of a type known as Hanifs, who represented, in various ways, the influence of a general monotheistic trend deriving from the Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian centers round about. Khadija’s relative, Waraka ibn Naufal, may have been one of these. Another was the Meccan Zaid ibn ’Amr, who appears to have died during Mohammed’s boyhood.Note 40 In any case, there were in Mecca people enough in Mohammed’s time prepared to respond to the call of a prophetic voice to constitute, within a few years, a typical Magian consensus, ready to make the world over in its own image.
The first large group to whom Mohammed’s message was addressed was the membership of his own large and influential tribe. The Kuraish were custodians of the Kaaba and a leading folk of the region. He called upon them to eliminate all pagan images from their sanctuary and to recognize their deity as the One God of Islam. An early Sura, dating from this period so adjures them:
In gratitude for the covenants of divine protection and security enjoyed by the Kuraish — their covenants covering journeys by winter and by summer — let them adore the Lord of this House [the Kaaba], who provides them with food against hunger and security against fear.Note 41
The fervor of the Prophet’s increasing group provoked, in time, reactions among those of the city for whom the old deities of their tribe and the prospects of trade were life concerns enough. And these presently became so strong that Islam could be thought of by its membership as a persecuted sect — with all the advantages to group solidarity and zeal that stem from such a circumstance. Mohammed, to protect his company, shipped them across the Red Sea to Axum, in Christian Abyssinia, where the king welcomed them with such sympathy that the population of Mecca began to have cause to fear that the nightmare of an earlier series of Abyssinian raids and devastations might be repeated. The Prophet himself, remaining in Mecca, was abused, reviled, and in deep trouble. And it was at about this time that he was joined — providentially — by a new and wonderful convert, the young and brilliant Omar (’Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭab), a youth who, up to that time, had been publicly opposed to the new faith, but was now — as a kind of Paul — to become its most effective leader.
However, a great and deep sorrow fell upon the already troubled Prophet when his beloved wife, Khadija, passed away: “the great, the noble lady,” as she had been termed in appropriate praise,
who had befriended him when he had been without resource, trusted him when his worth had been little known, encouraged and understood him in his spiritual struggles, and believed in him with trembling steps when he took up the Call. She withstood obloquy, persecution, insults, threats, and torment, till she was gathered to the saints in his fifty-first year: a perfect woman, she was the mother of those who believe.Note 42
Then came, marvelously, the miracle: the sounding, as it were, of the muezzin cry of planetary destiny, announcing the dawn of a new world age. For a summons came to Mohammed from the city of Medina, two hundred miles to the north, where strife between the two leading Arab tribes, the Aus and the Khazraj, had brought things to such a pass that a body of leading citizens begged Mohammed to come and exert his influence to restore peace. It was feared that the considerable Jewish community there, constituted largely of converted Arabs, might gain the ascendancy if the Arab feud went on. Mohammed, sensibly, sent his whole community ahead, and then, late in the epochal year of 622 a.d., made his own secret escape, together with Abu Bakr, from Mecca to Medina, hiding for some days, on the way, in his cave.
For [as we read in the Koran] God did indeed help him, when the Unbelievers drove him out. He had no more than one companion. These two were in the Cave, and he said to his companion: “Have no fear, for God is with us.” God sent down his peace upon him, and strengthened him with forces that were invisible, and humbled to the depths the word of the Unbelievers. But the word of God is exalted to the heights. God is exalted in might and most wise.Note 43
4. MOHAMMED IN MEDINA: 622–632 a.d.
The “Emigration” or Hegira (Arabic, hijrah, “flight”) of the Prophet to Medina marks the opening of the year from which all Mohammedan dates are reckoned; for it represents the passage of the Law of Islam from the status of theory to practice and to manifestation in the field of history. At Medina, as Professor H. A. R. Gibb has pointed out, Mohammed sat astride Mecca’s vital trade route to the north, and for seven years made brilliant use of this advantage to break the resistance of the oligarchy of his city.Note 44 First, operating as a mere brigand, he captured caravans and enriched the new community under God with booty taken from its neighbors. Next, as a brilliant generalissimo, he met and defeated (often with angelic aid) * larger forces than his own, sent against him by the desperate merchants of his native place. And finally, having won to his side a number of the Bedouin tribes, he returned to Mecca unopposed, in the year 630, and with a grand symbolic sweep established the new order by destroying every idol in the city. One of the local goddesses, Na’ila, is said to have appeared at this time in the form of a black woman, and to have fled away shrieking.Note 45 But the black stone of the Kaaba remained — which was originally white, we are told; for it is one of the stones of Paradise, turned black by the kisses of sinful lips.Note 46
However, at the summit of victory, the Prophet, two years later, passed away — to his eternal home, as we may suppose, where the golden Koran of his vision shines forever. And thereon is written of God:
Not merely in idle sport did We create the heavens, earth, and all between, but for just ends. However, most do not understand. Verily, the Day of Sorting Out is the day appointed for them all, the day when no protector shall avail his client and no help shall any receive except such as receive God’s Mercy: for He is exalted in might, the Most Merciful.
Verily, the Tree of Hell, Zakkum it is called, will afford the food of the sinful. Like molten brass it will boil in their insides, like the boiling of scalding water. And a voice shall cry out, “Seize him! Drag him into the midst of the Blazing Fire, pour over his head the penalty of Boiling Water! Taste this! Mighty and full of honor you were! And, indeed, it was this you doubted!”
But as to the righteous, they shall be in a place of security, among gardens, among springs. Dressed in finest silk and in rich brocade, they will greet each other. So it shall be! And We will join to them Companions with beautiful, big, lustrous eyes. There can they call for every kind of fruit in security and peace. Nor shall they there taste death, except the first death. And We shall preserve them from the Blazing Fire. As a boon from your Lord, that will be the supreme achievement!
Moreover, We have made the Koran easy: in your own tongue, that all may heed. So watch and wait: for they are waiting too.Note 47
IV. The Garment of the Law
The mask of God named Allah is a product of the same desert from which the mask Yahweh had come centuries before. In fact, the word Yahweh, as Professor Meek has shown, is not of Hebrew but of Arabic source. Hence we are forced, to some extent, to agree with Mohammed’s startling claim that people of his own Semitic stock were the first worshipers of the God proclaimed in the Bible.
As a god of Semitic desert folk, Allah reveals, like Yahweh, the features of a typical Semitic tribal deity, the first and most important of which is that of not being immanent in nature but transcendent. Such gods are not to be known through any scrutiny of the natural order, whether external (as through science) or internal (through meditation); for nature, whether without or within, does not contain them. And the second trait is a function of the first. It is, namely, that for each Semitic tribe the chief god is the protector and lawgiver of the local group, and that alone. He is made known, not in the sun, the moon, the cosmic order, but in the local laws and customs — which differ, of course, from group to group. Hence, whereas among the Aryans, for whom the chief gods were those of nature, there was always and everywhere a tendency to recognize one’s own divinities in alien cults, a tendency toward syncretism, the tendency of Semites in the worship of their tribal gods has always been toward exclusivism, separatism, and intolerance.
On the primitive level there is no requirement, or even possibility, that a local tribal god should be regarded as lord of the entire world. Each group has simply its own lawgiver and patron; the rest of the world — if there is such a thing — can take care of itself, under its own gods; for each people is supposed to have a divine lawgiver and patron of its own. We call such thought monalatry (Compare, Hellenism: 331 b.c.–324 a.d.)And accordingly, during the first long and terrible phase of the Israelite occupation of Canaan, Yahweh was conceived simply as a tribal god more powerful than the rest.
The next epochal phase of the biblical development occurred when the god so regarded became identified with the god-creator of the universe. No nation of all those on earth but Israel could then claim to know and worship, or to be the concern of, this one true God of all.
Thus says the Lord: “Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them, for the customs of the peoples are false.” … There is none like thee, O Yahweh; thou art great, and thy name is great in might. Who would not fear thee, O King of the nations? For this is thy due; for among all the wise ones of the nations and in all their kingdoms there is none like thee. They are both stupid and foolish; the instruction of idols is but wood! … But Yahweh is the true God.Note 48
Ironically, the concept of this god of cosmic stature did not occur to the desert Habiru until they had entered the higher culture sphere of the settled civilizations, where writing had been known for millenniums and mathematical records kept of the movements not only of the general heavens but even of the planets amid them. The cosmic order as understood by the priests of those High Bronze Age civilizations had been of a marvelously mathematical regularity, ever revolving, ever rising into being and declining into chaos, according to fixed laws of which the priestly watchers of the stars were the first to know. And the ultimate ground of this rhythm of being had not been represented as a willful personality: such a god, for example, as Yahweh. On the contrary: personality, will, mercy, and wrath had in these systems been only secondary to an absolutely impersonal, ever-grinding order, of which the gods — all gods — were the mere agents.
In dramatic, unresolvable contrast to this view, the peoples of the Semitic desert complex held to their own tribal patrons when they entered the higher culture field; and, although accepting, roughly, the idea of a cosmic order, instead of submitting their own god to it they made him its originator and support — though in no sense its immanent being. For he was still, as ever, an entity apart: personal, anthropomorphic. And he was to be known, furthermore, even as in the tribal desert days, only through the social laws of his still solely favored group. Not the laws of nature, open to all eyes and minds with the wit to observe and to think, but uniquely the laws of this particular social molecule in the vast and teeming history of humanity, were to be known as rendering the one sole lesson of God. Hence the warning of Jeremiah not “to be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them, for the customs of the people are false,” and of Mohammed: “We see the turning of thy face for guidance to the heavens: now shall We turn thee to a qibla* that shall please thee. Turn then thy face toward the sacred Mosque. Wherever you are, turn your face in that direction.”Note 49 “If anyone desires a religion other than Islam, never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter he will be in the ranks of those who have lost.”Note 50
Certain differences obtain, however, between the biblical and Koranic concepts of the group favored of God and the character of God’s law, the first and most obvious of these being that whereas the Old Testament community was tribal, the Koran was addressed to mankind. Islam, like Buddhism and Christianity, was in concept a world religion, whereas Judaism, like Hinduism, remained in concept as well as in fact an ethnic form. For in Mohammed’s day the Alexandrian vision of humanity had reached even the peoples of the desert. “Aliens,” the Hebrew Isaiah had declared, “shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers; but you shall be called the priests of Yahweh, men shall speak of you as the ministers of our God; you shall eat the wealth of nations, and in their riches you shall glory.”Note 51 In clear contrast, there is no tribe or race triumphant in the Koran, but absolute equality in Islam. “Verily,” says the Book, “in this there is a message for any that has a heart and understanding, or gives ear and earnestly witnesses the truth.”Note 52 The desert concept of the one authentic social order under its god had become magnified to match the new knowledge of a larger world.
And yet, a certain difficulty followed. For the laws of God, as conceived under the earlier desert revelation of Yahweh, had been the mores of an actual society in being, whereas the laws of God as conceived in Islam were to be derived from a series of utterances emitted in a state of trance by a single individual in the course of but twenty-three years; and to enlarge these to a viable system for a living world community was to be a feat of unmatched temerity — which, mirabile dictu, was achieved.
In the invention of this Moslem legal order three controls were recognized, of which the first was, of course, the Koran itself. Where there were clearly stated commands and prohibitions in the Koran, these precluded argument and were to be unquestionably obeyed. There were contingencies not so covered, however, and for these the Moslem jurists had to establish other “roots.” Their second support, therefore, was a marginal body of tradition called the “statements” or hadīth. These were anecdotes about the Prophet, supposed to have been related by one or another of his immediate companions. A vast body of such “statements” came into being during the first two or three centuries of Islam, and the most trustworthy were collected in canonical editions — notably those of al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Moslem (d. 875) — which then, as Professor H. A. R. Gibb has shown, “rapidly acquired almost canonical authority.”Note 53
Yet, in practice, points of law still arose that were not covered by any clear statement either in Koran or in Hadith, and to deal with these, decisions were determined by “analogy” (qiyās), which is to say (to quote again Professor Gibb), “the application to a new problem of the principles underlying an existing decision on some other point which could be regarded as on all fours with the new problem.”
Professor Gibb continues:
On this apparently narrow and literalist basis the theologians and lawyers of the second and third centuries worked out not only the law, but also the rituals and the doctrines, which were to be the special property of the Islamic community, in distinction from other religions and social organizations. Yet the narrowness is more apparent in theory than in practice, for … a great deal became naturalized in Islam from outside sources through the medium of traditions claiming to emanate from the Prophet and in other ways.
But because the principles on which this logical structure was built up were immutable, so also the system itself, once formulated, was held to be immutable, and indeed to be as divinely inspired as the sources from which it was drawn. From that day to this, the Sharī’a or Shar’, as it is called, the “Highway” of divine command and guidance, has remained in essentials unchanged.Note 54
Spengler, comparing this approach to law with the Classical, states that
Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. … The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear. But it matters very considerably indeed in a man’s feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man’s will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges (Islām). The Oriental does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the praetor to the citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and tested in high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective and immanent in him and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law — the praetor to his edict, the cadi to the jurist’s texts — must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the praetor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words — even the letters — and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic relations in which they must stand toward the case before him. We know this relation of the “spirit” to the “letter” from the Gnosis, from the early Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neopythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor judicial practice of the Aramaean world. The conviction that the letters contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative expression in the fact that all religions of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own. in which the holy books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the respective “Nations” even after changes of language.Note 55
Both Gibb and Spengler, as well as everyone else who has ever written seriously of Islam, point out, furthermore, that the body of tradition (Sharī’a, the “highway”) that has been wrought through the interaction of the precepts of the Koran (kitāb, the “book”), the sayings of tradition (hadīth), and extensions by analogy (qiyās), is supposed to be an exact expression of the infallibilty of the group (ijmā’, “consensus”) in all matters touching faith and morals. “It is one of the boasts of Islam,” writes Professor Gibb,
that it does not countenance the existence of a clergy, who might claim to intervene between God and man. True as this is, however, Islam, as it became organized into a system, did in fact produce a clerical class, which acquired precisely the same kind of social and religious authority and prestige as the clergy in the Christian communities. This was the class of the Ulamā, the “learned” or the “doctors,” corresponding to the “scribes” in Judaism. Given the sanctity of Koran and Tradition and the necessity of a class of persons professionally occupied with their interpretation, the emergence of the Ulama was a natural and inevitable development, though the influence of the older religious communities may have assisted the rapid establishment of their social and religious authority.
As their authority became more firmly held and more generally conceded by the public opinion of the community the class of Ulama claimed (and were generally recognized) to represent the community in all matters relating to faith and law, more particularly against the authority of the State. At an early date — probably some time in the second century [of Islam] — the principle was secured that the “consensus of the community” (which in practice meant that of the Ulama) had binding force. Ijmā’ was thus brought into the armory of the theologians and jurists to fill up all the remaining gaps in their system. As the Tradition was the integration of the Koran, so the consensus of scholars became the integration of the Tradition.
Indeed, on a strict logical analysis, it is obvious that ijmā’ underlies the whole imposing structure and alone gives it final validity. For it is ijmā’ in the first place which guarantees the authenticity of the text of the Koran and of the Traditions. It is ijmā’ which determines how the words of their texts are to be pronounced and what they mean and in what direction they are to be applied. But ijmā’ goes much farther; it is erected into a theory of infallibility, a third channel of revelation. The spiritual prerogatives of the Prophet — the Muslim writers speak of them as the “light of Prophecy” — were inherited not by his successors in the temporal government of the community, the Caliphs, but by the community as a whole. …
When, therefore, a consensus of opinions had been attained by the scholars of the second and third centuries on any given point, the promulgation of new ideas on the exposition of the relevant texts of the Koran and Hadith was as good as forbidden. Their decisions were irrevocable. The right of individual interpretation (ijtihād) was in theory (and very largely in practice also) confined to the points on which no general agreement had yet been reached. As these were narrowed down from generation to generation, the scholars of later centuries were limited to commenting and explaining the treatises in which those decisions were recorded. The great majority of Muslim doctors held that the “gate of Ijtihād” was shut once and for all and that no scholar, however eminent, could henceforth qualify as a mujtahid, an authoritative interpreter of the law; although some few later theologians did from time to time claim for themselves the right of ijtihād.Note 56
Professor Gibb points out that there is a certain analogy between this settlement of doctrine by “consensus” in Islam and the councils of the Christian Church, in spite of the divergences of outer form, and that in certain respects the results, also, were very similar. “It was, for example,” as he states, “only after the general recognition of ijmā’ as a source of law and doctrine that a definite legal test of ‘heresy’ was possible and applied.”Note 57 Spengler, too, points out these analogies and, in line with his view of the historic form of the Magian-Levantine spiritual community, interprets them in general contrast to the properly European sense of the value of the individual.
We seek to find truth [he states] each for himself, by personal pondering, but the Arabian savant feels for and ascertains the general conviction of his associates, which cannot err because the mind of God and the mind of the community are the same. If consensus is found, truth is established. Ijmā’ is the key of all Early Christian, Jewish and Persian Councils, but it is the key, too, of the famous Law of Citations of Valentinian III (426), which … limits the number of great jurists whose texts were allowed to be cited to five, and thus set up a canon — in the same sense as the Old and New Testaments, both of which also were summations of texts which might be cited as canonical.Note 58
In a very interesting way one is reminded also of the councils, purges, manifestoes, and pretensions of the so-called people’s governments of the Iron Curtain culture province, where the precepts of the Prophet Marx, reinterpreted by an elite of Ulamas, are put forth as the ijmā of a purely mythical entity, the People. Remarkable too is the power of the symbols even of such a clown-parody of the City of God to work upon the nerves of free individuals outside of the geographical control of that consensus, but in whom the Magian system of sentiments still lives. Like the virtue of the Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, which are unaffected by the realities of the world, the fall of Christian empires, the personal lives of the clergy, or the total refutation through science of the mythology on which they rest, so, too, the garment of Islam — and now likewise of the People — is of a transcendental order untouched by the realities of time, or by the sins of those upon whose shoulders it descends. As we are warned by the recent prophecy of a London-tailored Indian Moslem poet and philosopher, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (d. 1938), which has been aptly cited in Adda Bozeman’s work:
Believe me, Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the way of man’s ethical achievement. The Muslim, on the other hand, is in possession of these ultimate ideas on the basis of a revelation, which, speaking from the inmost depths of life, internalizes its own apparent externality. With him the spiritual basis of life is a matter of conviction for which even the least enlightened man among us can easily lay down his life; and in view of the basic idea of Islam that there can be no further revelation binding on man, we ought to be spiritually one of the most emancipated peoples on earth. … Let the Muslim today appreciate his position, reconstruct his social life in the light of ultimate principles, and evolve, out of the hitherto partially revealed purposes of Islam, that spiritual democracy which is the ultimate aim of Islam.Note 59
One more remark concerning the contrast of the Jewish, Byzantine, Moslem, and Communist conceptions of the ungainsayable consensus: The first three of these four Magian churches obviously are distinguished from the last in as much as their ultimate appeal is to God, whereas the last takes particular pride in its Robert Ingersoll type of hard-skulled late-nineteenth-century atheism: its sacred object, the Worker, is a mythic being supposed to be incarnate in every factory of the world. But this transfer of the mystique of authority from heaven to a supposed social entity on earth simply adjusts to a modern, secular mode of symbolization the shared concept of an authentic law, known only to those of the faithful in whom orthodox knowledge resides, which is to break into full manifestation when the day of days arrives. Meanwhile, the so-called laws of the nations are but delusions, afflicting all in whose hearts the light has not yet dawned.
“But say, then,” as we read in the Koran,
what is the matter with them that they turn away from admonition? As if they were affrighted asses, fleeing from a lion! … For those Rejecters we have prepared chains, yokes and a blazing fire. But as to the Righteous: … Reclining in the Garden on raised thrones, they will see there neither the sun’s excessive heat nor the moon’s excessive cold; and the shades of the Garden will come low over them, and the bunches of fruit there will hang low in humility. And amongst them will be passed around vessels of silver and goblets of crystal, crystal-clear, made of silver: they will determine the measure thereof according to their wishes.Note 60
The contrast between the Jewish and the other three ideals of the Law, on the other hand, is that between a law derived, in some measure at least, organically from life, the actual experiences of an actual community, and laws spun out of an established text, to be impressed upon, or rendered through, an ideal community to come. The Jewish is an organic, pliant growth, the others, in contrast, being of a cerebrated, relatively brittle, and — for those standing outside of the system — unconvincing artificiality, or even incredible absurdity, to which their claims to universal application give a threatening turn of terror that far surpasses the merely fairytale threat of the Jewish-Apocalyptic Day of the Lord.
V. The Garment of the Mystic Way
God is not subject to the Law, but above it, not to be known or judged in its terms. Consequently, for those in whom a desire to know as well as to serve God burns, there must be a way beyond the Law, as God himself is beyond it, and as the Prophet, Mohammed, gazed beyond.
The term Sunna (sunnah) denotes the general, orthodox, conservative body of Islam, for whom the Garment of the Law, as announced and administered by and for the community, the consensus (ijmā’), suffices. Two other powerful movements have challenged, however, the absolute authority of this conservative Sunna. They are, first, the Shi’a, also called Shi’ites (Arabic shī’i, “a partisan” [of Ali]), whose politically formulated esotericism bears an aggressive anarchistic stamp, and second, the Sufis (Arabic sūfi, “man of wool,” i.e., wearing a woolen robe, an ascetic), in whose raptures all the normal themes and experiences of both ascetic and antinomian mysticism have come to roost, ironically, in Islam. We have all read Omar Khayyam (d. 1123? a.d.):
In Paradise, they tell us, Houris dwell,
And fountains run with wine and oxymal:
If these be lawful in the world to come,
Surely ’tis right to love them here as well. …
Heed not the Sunna, nor the law divine:
If to the poor his portion you assign
And never injure one, nor yet abuse,
I guarantee you heaven, and now some wine! …
In taverns better far commune with Thee,
Than pray in mosques, and fail Thy face to see!Note 61
More sternly and threateningly, a like attack was launched by Jalalu’ddin Rumi (1207–1273), the founder of a mystic Whirling Dervish order:
Many are they that do works of devotion and set their hearts on being approved and rewarded for the same. But ’tis in truth a lurking sin: what the pietist thinks pure is really foul. — As in the case of the deaf man who thought he had done a kindness, which, however, had had an opposite effect.
The deaf man sat down well pleased, saying, “I have paid my respects to my sick friend, I have performed what was due to my neighbor”; but he had only kindled a fire of resentment against himself in the invalid’s heart and burned himself. Beware, then, of the fire that you have kindled: in truth you have increased in sin. …
For the deaf man had said to himself, “Being hard of hearing, how shall I understand the words of the sick neighbor I am going to visit? — Well, when I see his lips moving, I shall, by analogy from myself, form a conjecture as to his meaning. When I ask, ‘How are you, O my suffering friend?’ he will of course reply, ‘I am fine,’ or ‘I am pretty well.’ I shall then say, ‘Thanks be to God! What have you had to drink?’ He will reply, ‘Some sherbet,’ or ‘A decoction of kidney beans.’ Then I shall say, ‘May you enjoy health! Who is the doctor attending you?’ He will answer, ‘So-and-so.’ And I shall remark, ‘He is one who brings great good fortune; since he has come, all will go well with you. I have myself experienced the benefit of his treatment: wherever he goes, the desired end is attained.”
The deaf man, having made ready these reasoned answers, went to visit his sick friend. “How are you?” he asked. “I am at the point of death,” the other said. “Thanks be to God!” said the deaf man — at which the patient became resentful and indignant, murmuring to himself, “What cause for thanksgiving is this? He has been my enemy.” The deaf man had made a reasonable conjecture, but, as now appears, it proved false. Next he asked what his friend had drunk. “Poison,” he said. “May it do you good and bring you health,” said the visitor; and the invalid’s wrath increased. Then he inquired, “What doctor is attending you?” He answered, “The Angel of Death! Get you gone!” Said the deaf man, “His arrival is a blessing. Rejoice!”
Thus, by analogical reasoning, a ten years’ friendship was annulled; and so, likewise, O Master, you must particularly eschew conclusions by analogy, drawn by the lower senses, in regard to Revelation — which is illimitable. Know that if your sensuous ear is tuned to the understanding of the letter of the Revelation, the ear that receives the occult meaning is deaf.Note 62
The Shi’a sect goes back for its origin to the period just after the passing of the Prophet, when the question of succession to the headship of Islam was settled by a series of murders.
For the first Companion to be hailed as caliph — largely through the influence of Omar — was the grand old Abu Bakr, who died, however, two years later (634 a.d.), after appointing Omar to succeed. Exception was strongly taken to this exchange by the partisans (shī’i) of Mohammed’s cousin Ali, who had married the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and fathered Mohammed’s two beloved grandsons, Hasan and Husain. Affairs at that time, however, were going exceedingly well for Omar and the cause. A threatening fermentation among the Arab tribes of the peninsula had been quelled by Islamic generals in a brilliant series of battles, after which bold marches against both Persia and the Second Rome brought Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, presently, all Iran under Moslem rule. The Byzantine army of Heraclius was shattered in the Yarmuk valley in 636 a.d. Damascus, Baalbek, Emesa, Aleppo, and Antioch were then invested easily; and though the more strongly Hellenized cities of Jerusalem and Caesarea held out longer, they fell, respectively, in 638 and 640. In 637 a Persian army had been routed on the Euphrates, and in 641 Mosul fell. Byzantine Egypt collapsed in 643. And at the height of his glory the Caliph Omar was murdered in 644 by a Persian slave.
This set the whole problem of the caliphate in full play; for instead of designating a successor, Omar had appointed a committee to elect one, composed of Ali, Othman, and four others. Othman was selected. But he survived little more than a decade, to be slain while at prayer, June 17, 655, under circumstances that have led many to suppose connivance from the partisans of Ali.
Othman had been a member of the powerful Umayyad clan, which was an old Meccan family that for years had opposed the Prophet but after his victory had joined his camp and migrated to Medina. One of its distinguished members, Mu’awiya ibn Abu Sufyan, who had been appointed by Omar to be governor of Syria, now engaged in a complicated military and diplomatic battle (actually a family vendetta) for the caliphate against Ali and his sons. Ali claimed the office from his capital, Kufa, in Iraq. However, the Umayyad outmaneuvered him both in war and in devices and in July 660 proclaimed himself caliph in Jerusalem. Ali then was slain by a dagger, January 24, 661, after which his elder son, Hasan, conceded victory in return for a monetary allowance. Hasan died in 669 (said, perhaps falsely, to have been poisoned), and Husain, his brother, was slain in battle, October 10, 680, when he sought to unseat the second Umayyid caliph, Yazid — which date then became the Good Friday, so to say, of the Shi’a. “Revenge for Husain” is the watchword and cry that can still be heard wailed, long and loud, amidst din of ritual keen, throughout those provinces of Islam where the Shi’a lament his martyrdom to this day. The youth is honored almost above the Prophet himself, and his tomb, the Mashhad Husayn, at Kebala in Iraq, where he died, is for the Shi’a the most holy place on earth.
Briefly, the Shi’a position is that the reigning caliphs both of the Umayyad and of the subsequent Abbasid dynasties were usurpers and that, consequently, historic Islam is a falsification: the caliph is a pretender, the Sunna deluded, and the ijmā’ a false guide. Islam in the proper sense of the Koran resides in the knowledge, lost to the popular community, that passed from the Prophet to Ali and has come down only in the line of the true Imams.
The word imām means spiritual leader and is applied generally to leaders of the services of the mosque, and, more specifically, according to Sunna usage, to the founders of the four orthodox theological schools; but by the Shi’a it is applied only to the disinherited, true leaders of the line of Ali and the Prophet. Their known number is but twelve; for somewhere between the years 873 and 880 a.d. the Imam then alive, Mohammed al-Mahdi, disappeared. He is known as the Hidden Imam, is still in this world, and his second coming, as “The Guided One” (mahdī), to restore Islam, is awaited by the faithful. A variant view is that the seventh Imam was the one who disappeared; still another names the fifth. Numerous pretenders to the character have emerged, here and there, at various times, to precipitate political upheavals, “the Mad Mullah of Somaliland,” for instance, and “the Mahdi of the Sudan,” put down by British troops. Many Shi’a sects exist, in all of which esotericism and politics are explosively combined * — the cardinal tenet of all being that both spiritual authority and temporal power properly reside not in the consensus (ijmā’) of the Sunna, but in the person of the Hidden Imam, to whom absolute submission is demanded, and in whom alone God is made known. Indeed, in the most extreme of these sects, Ali and his descendant Imams are regarded as incarnations. By all they are held to have been sinless and infallible. And about them there has accumulated an esoteric mythology, shot through with Christian, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Neoplatonic thought, that is excellently illustrated in a myth of World Creation described by the late French master of this lore, Louis Massignon, drawn from a work by one of the early Shi’a leaders in Kufa, named Moghira (d. 736 a.d.).
“In a mythological guise that is only apparently naïve,” states Professor Massignon in discussion of this text,
Moghira presents a Gnostic doctrine that is already in a highly developed stage. God has a form of light and the appearance of a man whose limbs are composed of the letters of the alphabet; and this Light Man has a heart that is the Well of Truth. When he wished to create, he uttered his own supreme name, which flew forth and settled on his head as a crown. Then he wrote on the palms of his hands the deeds of men and was indignant at the sins they were to commit. His indignation broke forth as sweat and formed two oceans, one of salt, the other of sweet water; one dark, the other light. He beheld his own shadow in these, and tore out the shadow’s eyes, from which he made the sun and moon — that is to say, Mohammed and Ali. Whereupon he destroyed what remained of his shadow and created everyone else from the two oceans: Believers from the light, Unbelievers from the dark. These he created as shadows; for all of this took place before the creation of the physical world. — God proposed to men that they should recognize Ali as their ruler; but two there were who refused. These were the first Antagonists: Abu Bakr and Omar — unreal shadows of his two eyes on the dark sea.Note 63
Generally in Islam the spiritual character of women is rated very low. According to at least one Shi’a text, they were created from the sediment of the sins of demons, to serve as temptations to sinners. They are not admitted to initiations, and are of value only as vehicles for the entry into the world of spirits condemned temporarily to take on flesh in punishment for their sins; they themselves being, however, without soul.Note 64 And yet, in the mythology of these sects the person of Fatima, Ali’s bride, daughter of Mohammed and mother of Hasan and Husain, has been transformed into a being — a divine being — antecedent even to the being of her own father. In a recently found Persian Shi’a text of Gnostic affinities called the Omm-al-Kitāb, we find the following astonishing visionary narration:
When God concluded with men a covenant at the time of his creation of the material world, they prayed him to show them Paradise. He showed them, thereupon, a being ornamented with a million varicolored shimmering lights, who sat upon a throne, head crowned, rings in the ears, and a drawn sword at the girdle. The radiating rays illuminated the whole garden; and when the men then asked who this was, they were told it was the form of Fatima as she appears in Paradise: the crown was Mohammed; the earrings, Hasan and Husain; the sword was Ali; and her throne, the Seat of Dominion, was the resting place of God, the Most High.Note 65
Fatima is revered by the whole Mohammedan world; for she was the only daughter of the Prophet who bore sons to continue his heritage. She was his favorite and died only a few months after himself. But in certain Shi’a sects her veneration goes to such lengths that she is even termed the “Mother of her Father,” “Source of the Sun,” and given a masculine name, Fātir, signifying “Creator,” the numerical value of the letters of which — 290 — is the same as that of Maryam, Mary, the mother of Jesus. For, as daughter, wife, and mother, she personifies the center of the genealogical mystery; and at least one Shi’a poet has compared her to the Burning Bush of Moses; to the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, where the Prophet is supposed to have experienced his Heaven Journey; and to the Night of Power,Note 66 when the Angel of Destiny, Gabriel, descending to earth, brought forgiveness to mankind.Note 67
The Shi’a, finally, are dualists, and in their abjuration of the state of the world they approach the Gnostic-Docetic point of view. Persecuted frightfully by the various governments of Islam, they were faced early in their history with the enigma of an evil world in which every loyal lover of God is cruelly destroyed; and from this profound mystery, as Professor Massignon points out, two questions emerged:
1. Does the martyrdom of love entail any actual physical suffering, or is the suffering only apparent? and 2. What happens after death to the willing victim who permits himself, for love, to be condemned in the name of God?
The Koran states of the crucifixion of Jesus that another, and not he, was hung upon the cross. “They killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.”Note 68 The Christian Gnostics held the same view, as we have already seen. Likewise, according to the Shi’a, martyrs in the cause of Ali suffer only in appearance. Their true bodies are lifted to heaven, while in the hands of their executioners mere substitutes remain. The popular Passion Play of Husain, representing his betrayal and murder at the battle of Kerbala in the year 680, is enacted every year on the tenth day of the month of Moharram. The muezzin cries that morning from the summit of the minaret: “Oh Shi’a, this day is a day of sorrow: the body of Husain lies in the desert, naked.” But those of extreme Gnostic persuasion give praise that day with joy, since the martyred one could not possibly have suffered, but in his true body returned, that day, to heaven, while an unknown suffered death for him on the field.Note 69
Among the mystic Sufis, on the other hand, suffering is viewed as a reality, a blessed reality: the means itself to salvation. As in the words of the greatest of all Sufi martyrs and masters, al-Hallāj (858–922 a.d.):
The moth plays about the lamp till dawn, then returns to its companions, to recount to them in sweetest terms the tale of what occurred. Then again it flies to play about the trusted power of the flame, in the wish to attain complete bliss. … Not the light suffices, nor the warmth. It plunges into the light now entire. And its companions, meanwhile, await its return, for it to reveal to them its experience.
It did not trust the mere accounts of others, but now burns, goes up in smoke, remains without body in the flame, without name, without a sign. And with that — in what condition or to what end should it return to its companions, when it now is in full possession?
For since it is itself now He Who Has Seen and Knows, it has ceased listening to mere accounts. It is now one with what it saw: to what end should it still see?
Oh do not lock yourself away from me any longer! If you really believe, then you are able to say: “That am I!”Note 70
The roots of the Sufi movement do not rest in the Koran, where Mohammed comes out clearly against the monastic way of life, but in the Christian Monophysite and Nestorian monk communities of the desert and, beyond those, their Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain models farther east. For Islam, like Judaism, is oriented principally to the furtherance of a sanctified secular consensus, wherein marriage and begetting, by way of a circumcised — i.e. ritually dedicated — organ, is the first communal duty. “Marry!” it is said in the Koran; “O those among you who are single!”Note 71 However, in the second century of Islam, ascetics explicitly “in imitation of Jesus” were already donning undyed garments of wool (sūf) as a mark of personal penitence (Gibb in his Mohammedanism, p. 132, cites the protest of Ibn Sirin (d. 729), who declared, “I prefer to follow the example of the Prophet, who dressed in cotton.”), and at that time the first traces also appeared both of hermit retreats and of meetings for the rapturous recitation of the Koran, with constant repetition (dhikr) of the name of God and with spiritual song (samā), leading to ecstasis.
The earliest phase of this movement, according to Professor Gibb, was inspired not by the love but by the fear of God, and specifically his Wrath to Come, “the same fear that had inspired Muhammad.”Note 72 But in the eighth century a.d. a celebrated woman saint, Rabi’a al-Adawiya (d. 801), brought forward the idea of divine love as both the motive and the end of the mystic way. In her zeal for God all other interests (“gods”) were extinguished. She declared that she knew neither fear of hell nor desire for paradise, but only such an absorbing love for God that neither love nor hate for any other being — not the Prophet himself — remained in her heart.Note 73 Like Epictetus, she is said to have been a slave. Her parentage is unknown. But in her poetry we hear the song eternal again of the mystics of all time, whether of India, Spain, Japan, or Persia:
Two ways I love Thee: selfishly,
And next, as worthy is of Thee.
Tis selfish love, that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought
’Tis purest love, when Thou dost raise
The veil to my adoring gaze.
Not mine the praise, in that or this;
Thine is the praise in both, I wis.Note 74
It is a law of our subject, proven time and time again, that where the orthodoxies of the world go apart, the mystic way unites. The orthodoxies are concerned primarily with the maintenance of a certain social order, within the pale of which the individual is to function; in the interest of which a certain “system of sentiments” must be instilled into every member; and in defense of which all deviants are to be, one way or another, either reformed, deformed, or liquidated. The mystic way, on the other hand, plunges within, to those nerve centers that are in all members of the human race alike, and are at once the well springs and ultimate receptacles of life and all experiences of life.
I have discussed this matter in Primitive Mythology, and need not return to it here.Note 75 What is of special interest in the present context is the fact that even in such a straitjacket as the Garment of the Law of Islam men and women can awaken to a generally valid human experience — if they keep their counsel prudently to themselves. There are some words of Emerson, quoted on the motto page of the last published work of E. E. Cummings, that are worth repeating here. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … The base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.”Note 76 In Islam particularly, but also, in general, throughout the Levantine world of the consensus, the force of this terrible dichotomy is great. In India and the Far East the mystic way is accorded a recognized and even honored place in relation to the common social order; but in the orthodox Levant, where the notion prevails that the Way of God is exclusively that of the local, sanctified legal statutes (whether ethnic, as in Judaism, or, as in the Moslem world, algebraically developed from a given set of axioms) the individual is cut down to such an approximation of zero that an alien can only wonder whether the ministrations of a Sigmund Freud must not have been wanted in the whole province centuries ago.
The female mystic Rabi’a al-Adawiya of Basra seems to have been the first to employ in her writings the imagery of wine, as “divine love,” and the cup, as “the filled soul or heart,” which became subsequently a typical trope of the mystics of Islam. The Persian Abu Yazid (Bayazid) of Bistan (d. 874 a.d.) carried the image to an absolutely Indian conclusion when he sang: “I am the Wine-drinker, the Wine, and the Cupbearer!” “God speaks with my tongue and I have vanished.” “I came forth from Bayazidness, like a snake from its skin. Then I looked. And I saw that lover, beloved, and love are one; for in the world of unity all can be one.” “Glory to me!”
Compare the Indian Ashtavakra Samhita, of approximately the same date: “Wonderful am I! Adoration to myself! … I am that stainless Self in which, through ignorance, knowledge, knower, and the knowable appear!”Note 77
Such excitement was permissible, even normal, in India; in Islam, however, dangerous. And so it came to pass that when the next great mystic in this line, al-Hallaj, uttered what, anywhere else, would have been recognized as a mystic truism, “I am God. … I am the Real,” he was crucified. The model of the mystic life for Hallaj was Jesus, not Mohammed; and his concept of the way (as we have learned from his fable of the moth) was, through suffering, surrender. When he saw the cross prepared for him, and the nails — absolutely after the model of his Imitatio Jesu — he turned to those present and prayed, concluding with these words:
And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favor, forgive them, O Lord, and have mercy upon them; for verily, if Thou hadst revealed to them what Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done; and if Thou hadst hidden from me what Thou hast hidden from them, I should not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou wiliest!Note 78
The critical social problem of the mystic everywhere is to abide in God, either as a manifestation of God or as God’s devotee, and at the same time to abide in phenomenality, as a material, social phenomenon. For the dualist this remains difficult: God and World, for him, are apart. For the non-dualist, however, the difficulty exists only at a preliminary stage of the mystic way, antecedent to realization, since for him, finally, all is found to be in some manner God — as in the words of the Gnostic Thomas Gospel, previously cited, attributed to Jesus: “I am the All, the All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me. Cleave the wood and I am there; lift up the stone, you will find me there.”
In the writings of Bayazid two stages of the mystic way are distinguished: first, the “passing away of the self” (fanā), and second, the “unitive life in God” (baqā).Note 79 The first suggests a verse of the Koran: “All that is on earth will perish”; and the second, the next verse of the same Sura: “But forever abides the Face of the Lord, full of Majesty, Bounty, and Honor.”Note 80 Among the Sufis every nuance of the mystic attitude and experience is represented — with, however, as in India, stress going chiefly to the world-dissolving disciplines of fanā, rapture. The candidate for ecstasy submits in full surrender to a Master (Sanskrit guru; Arabic shaikh or pir), and passes by that door to the larger full surrender in God, or, beyond even that, the Void. But now, the orthodox Koranic aspiration, “There is no god but God,” can, by a change of emphasis, be read to mean, esoterically; “All is God. Every stick or stone, person or power, that has ever been revered as a god, is indeed God; for God is all.” And by other such dexterous readings, numerous Koranic passages have been turned to a mystic, non-dual sense; for example: “We are closer to man than his neck vein,”Note 81 or, “Wheresoever you turn, there is God’s Presence: the All-Pervading, All-Knowing.”Note 82
After the crucifixion of Hallaj — to which the mystic gave himself as the moth, rapturously, to the flame (and we may ask whether in the crucifixion of Jesus there may not have been a like moment) — a new strain of caution entered the Sufi movement, which is typified in the spiritual formula of the one who (as they say) “makes the Law his outer garment and the mystic Way his inner garment.” Here the observation of the Law itself is accepted as the crucifixion through which fana, the “passing away of the self,” is to be realized. In the works of the great culminating theologian of Islam, al-Ghazali (1058–1111) — who was an exact contemporary of Omar Khayyam — Sufism, by this formula, became acceptable as orthodox, and the high period of the primary saints of Islam came to an end, giving place to that of the mystic poets: Omar Khayyam, 10507–1123?, Nizami, 1140-1203, Sadi, 1184–1291 (sic!), Rumi, 1207–1273, Hafiz, 1325–1389, and Jami, 1414–1492.
The suffering of love, then, is itself, for the Sufis, the redemptive moment, in contrast to the Shi’a view of the suffering of the martyr as unreal. And an equally characteristic answer is proposed to the second question asked above, namely, as to what happens after death to the willing sacrifice who permits himself, for love, to be condemned in the name of God. Might such a one, for example, be condemned, according to the law of God, to eternal damnation for love?
The case of Satan is examined as an instance of the possibility, with a result that will cause the reader, I dare say, a certain catch of surprise. For, as we have read at the opening of the Koran, he was condemned for refusing to bow down with the other angels to Adam — which, of course, was correct, since none but God is to be worshiped. Satan has to be regarded, then, as the type of the true Mohammedan. Loving and worshiping God alone, he could not bring himself to bow before man, even though commanded, inconsistently, by his God, who, before, had commanded him to worship none but God. God — as in the Book of Job — is above justice, above consistency, above all law and order whatsoever. The lesson of the Book of Job, carried through properly, as it began, would have ended with this Sufi thought of the exile of Satan, the perfect devotee, in the pains everlasting of hell. And as the great Hallaj, in his consideration of this profound theme, proposed as a further depth of the mystery: Satan in the pit of hell maintained intact his love; for indeed, that precisely was what held him there, removed from his beloved object — the pain of that loss of God, itself, being the greatest torment of all. And if we ask by what he is there sustained, in loss and pain, through all time: it is the rapture of his heart in the memory of the sound of God’s beloved voice, when it pronounced his judgment: Depart!
Nor was Satan (or Job, for that matter) unjustly condemned after all. For he had himself already abandoned his beloved for the idea that he had formed of his beloved, which idea was an idol in the highest sense. That is to say: Satan’s (Job’s, Mohammed’s, Abraham’s) rigid monotheism was but another form of godlessness, and the worship of Adam by the angels was — correct.Note 83 For once again, as we read in the Koran: “God shall lead the wicked into error.”Note 84
VI. The Broken Spell
When the Umayyads were overthrown in 750 a.d. by the Abbasids, the capital of the now vast Islamic empire was moved to Baghdad, Arab domination of the culture gave place to an increasing Persian influence, and the puritanism of the desert yielded to the arts of a brilliant Levantine civilization. Baghdad, the capital, was pre-eminently a metropolis of pleasure, and the extent, as well as wealth, of the empire at the peak of its expansion in the period of Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) was enormous.
In Africa: Egypt, Fez, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were secure. In Europe: Spain had been taken, as well as nearly half of France, along with Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta. In Asia, beyond Arabia, Palestine, Syria, and parts of Anatolia, the realm extended through Armenia and Iraq, Persia, Turkestan, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and Sind, to the bounds of the flourishing Buddhist world of India and the Far East. And this, moreover, was the golden age of Asia. The arts and literatures, philosophies, divine sanctuaries of pilgrimage, and palaces of kings that have illuminated the fantasies of mankind through centuries since were then present actualities — where now are deserts and debris.
Caravans across the Mongolian wastes interlaced the empires of T’ang China, Rashtrakuta India, and the caliphate. Merchants sailed the seas in Arab, Chinese, and Pallava sailing craft of now forgotten make, boldly venturing to unknown isles that live in fable as bizarre domains of fairy: the wondrous Seven Isles of Wac Wac, beyond the Land of the Jinn, where a tree grows that bears fruit like human heads, which, when the sun sets or rises, cry: “Wac! Wac! Glory be to the Creating King!”Note 85 or those lands described in wonder tales of the shipwrecked merchant Sindbad: near India, for example, where a king’s young mares used to be tethered at the seashore, to be covered, each new moon, by magical stallions rising from the sea, whose colts, when sold, brought treasuries of gold; or again, that land where the marvelous bird Roc fed its young on elephants, where valleys were paved with scattered diamonds, and from the trees liquid camphor poured.
We have ourselves explored, even mapped, all those distant lands today, but their magic, somehow, has vanished. For the marvel of the Asian golden age was that everywhere reality, fierce and difficult though it was for all (as the records of history show), was translated, not only in fable but also in belief and experience, into wonder — which, of course, as our own physicists now show, is exactly what reality is. The chief lost art of antiquity might be said, therefore, to have been the art of living in realization of the sheer wonder of the world: passing readily back and forth between the plane of experience of its hard crust and the omnipresent depth of inexhaustible wonder within. The Persian poets wrote of this mystery in their figure of the cup and its wine; as in Omar Khayyam:
Man is a cup, his soul the wine therein,
Flesh is a pipe, spirit the voice within;
O Khayyam, have you fathomed what man is?
A magic lantern with a light therein.Note 86
“The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling,” as Spengler has well observed. “Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, and Philosopher’s Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up.”Note 87
In the great golden period of Islam, T’ang China, and the glory that was India, an infinitely beautiful and promising flowering of the arts, and, with the arts, of aristocratic sensibility and civilization, threw its spell across the world, from Cordova to Kyoto — and beyond, as it now appears, even to Yucatan and Peru. The Levantine sense of the magical body of the infallible consensus met and joined harmoniously with the Indian of Dharma and the Chinese of the Tao; for in all these there prevailed the idea of a superimposed order to which the individual had simply and humbly to bow, in submission and, where possible, in rapturous realization. For neither in the Far East nor in India was there any teaching in which the doctrine of free will played a fundamental part, while in all those “churches” of the Levant where the doctrine of free will did indeed play a part, its only virtue lay in submission to the consensus — which is to say, to whatever “Law of God” (or, as we now say, mores) constituted the local, socially maintained “system of sentiments.” “Disobedience,” the exercise of individual judgment and freedom of decision, was exactly Satan’s crime. The moral and spiritual adulthood of the Greek and Roman Classical masters had vanished from the earth with the Fall of Rome; and Europe, a regressed outland, lay apart from the broad field of higher civilization, in the condition of what today would be called an “undeveloped area.” Charlemagne, contemporary with Islam’s Harun al-Rashid, was a kind of high Congo-chieftain of the great northwestern forest, to whom the great caliph sent an elephant as a present, as today we are sending helicopters and yachts and in the nineteenth century sent beads. No one viewing the earth in that glorious day of the burgeoning Great Beliefs would have supposed that the seeds of thought and spirit of the millennium next to come were germinating in neither Baghdad, Ch’ang-an, nor Benares, but in the little palace school of Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, and his not yet Gothic basilica at Aix-la-Chapelle.
Something, however, occurred:
In the year 1258 a.d. Baghdad was put to the sword by the Mongol Hulagu and his golden horde, whose brothers, Mangu and Kublai Khan, were at the same time doing the same fell work upon China. India had already been disintegrated by the steamroller of Islam (commencing with Mahmud al-Ghazni, 1001 a.d.), and a century later would be entered and again treated to the sword by the Central Asian hordes of Tamerlane (1398). The radiant dream of divinity in civilization dissolved; and the mighty Orient, thenceforth, from Peking to Casablanca, became a culture field rather of second than of primary growth.