The freethinking of Mohammed may be justly said to begin and end with his rejection of popular polytheism and his acceptance of the idea of a single God. That idea he ostensibly held as a kind of revelation, not as a result of any traceable process of reasoning; and he affirmed it from first to last as a fanatic. One of the noblest of fanatics he may be, but hardly more. Denouncing all idolatry, he anchored his creed to the Ka’aba, the sacred black stone of the remote past, which is to this day its most revered object.

That the monotheistic idea, in its most vivid form, reached him in middle age by way of a vision is part of the creed of his followers; and that it derived in some way from Jews, or Persians, or Christians, as the early unbelievers declared,2 is probable enough. But there is evidence that among his fellow-Arabs the idea had taken some slight root before his time, even in a rationalistic form, and it is clear that there were before his day many believers, though also many unbelievers, in a future state.3 There is no good ground for the oft-repeated formula about the special monotheistic and other religious proclivities of “the Semite”;4 Semites being subject to religious influences like other peoples, in terms of culture and environment. The Moslems themselves preserved a tradition that one Zaid, who died five years before the Prophet received his first inspiration, had of his own accord renounced idolatry without becoming either Jew or Christian; but on being told by a Jew to become a Hanyf,5 that is to say, of the religion of Abraham, who worshipped nothing but God, he at once agreed.6 In the oldest extant biography of Mohammed an address of Zaid’s has been preserved, of which six passages are reproduced in the Koran;7 and there are other proofs8 that the way had been partly made for Mohammedanism before Mohammed, especially at Medina, to which he withdrew (the Hej’ra) with his early followers when his fellow-tribesmen would not accept his message. He uses the term Hanyf repeatedly as standing for his own doctrine.9 In some of the Arab poetry of the generation before Mohammed, again, there is “a deep conviction of the unity of God, and of his elevation over all other beings,” as well as a clearly developed sense of moral responsibility.10 The doctrine of a Supreme God was indeed general;11 and Mohammed’s insistence on the rejection of the lesser deities or “companions of God” was but a preaching of unitarianism to half-professed monotheists who yet practised polytheism and idolatry. The Arabs at his time, in short, were on the same religious plane as the Christians, but with a good deal of unbelief; “Zendekism” or rationalistic deism (or atheism) being charged in particular on Mohammed’s tribe, the Koreish;12 and the Prophet used traditional ideas to bring them to his unitary creed. In one case he even temporarily accepted their polytheism.13 The several tribes were further to some extent monolatrous,14 somewhat as were the Semitic tribes of Palestine; and before Mohammed’s time a special worshipper of the star Sirius sought to persuade the Koreish to give up their idols and adore that star alone. Thus between their partially developed monotheism, their partial familiarity with Hanyf monotheism, and their common intercourse with the nominally monotheistic Jews and Christians, many Arabs were in a measure prepared for the Prophet’s doctrine; which, for the rest, embodied many of their own traditions and superstitions as well as many orally received from Christians and Jews.

The final triumph of the religion, however, was due neither to the elements of its Sacred Book nor to the moral or magnetic power of the Prophet. This power it was that won his first adherents, who were mostly his friends and relatives, or slaves to whom his religion was a species of enfranchisement.19 From that point forward his success was military—thanks, that is, to the valour of his followers—his fellow citizens never having been won in mass to his teaching.20 Such success as his might conceivably be gained by a mere military chief. Nor could the spread of Islam after his death have taken place save in virtue of the special opportunities for conquest lying before its adherents—opportunities already seen by Mohammed, either with the eye of statesmanship or with that of his great general, Omar.21 It is an error to assume, as is still commonly done, that it was the unifying and inspiring power of the religion that wrought the Saracen conquests. Warlike northern barbarians had overrun the Western Empire without any such stimulus; the prospect of booty and racial kinship sufficed them for the conquest of a decadent community; and the same conditions existed for the equally warlike Saracens,22 who also, before Mohammed, had learned something of the military art from the GrÆco-Romans.23 Their religious ardour would have availed them little against the pagan legions of the unbelieving CÆsar; and as a matter of fact they could never conquer, though they curtailed, the comparatively weak Byzantine Empire; its moderate economic resources and traditional organization sufficing to sustain it, despite intellectual decadence, till the age of Saracen greatness was over. Nor did their faith ever unify them save ostensibly for purposes of common warfare against the racial foe—a kind of union attained in all ages and with all varieties of religion. Fierce domestic strifes broke out as soon as the Prophet was dead. It would be as true to say that the common racial and military interest against the GrÆco-Roman and Persian States unified the Moslem parties, as that Islam unified the Arab tribes and factions. Apart from the inner circle of converts, indeed, the first conquerors were in mass not at all deeply devout, and many of them maintained to the end of their generation, and after his death, the unbelief which from the first met the Prophet at Mecca.24 Against the creed of Mohammed “the conservative and material instincts of the people of the desert rose in revolt; and although they became Moslems en masse, the majority of them neither believed in Islam nor knew what it meant. Often their motives were frankly utilitarian: they expected that Islam would bring them luck.... If things went ill, they blamed Islam and turned their backs on it.”25 It is told of a Moslem chief of the early days that he said: “If there were a God, I would swear by his name that I did not believe in him.”26 A general fanaticism grew up later. But had there been no Islam, enterprising Arabs would probably have overrun Syria and Persia and Africa and Spain all the same.27 Attila went further, and he is not known to have been a monotheist or a believer in Paradise. Nor were Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane indebted to religious faith for their conquests.

On the other hand, when a Khalifate was anywhere established by military force, the faith would indeed serve as a nucleus of administration, and further as a means of resisting the insidious propaganda of the rival faith, which might have been a source of political danger. It was their Sacred Book and Prophet that saved the Arabs from accepting the religion of the states they conquered as did the Goths and Franks. The faith thus so far preserved their military polity when that was once set up; but it was not the faith that made the polity possible, or gave the power of conquest, as is conventionally held. At most, it partly facilitated their conquests by detaching a certain amount of purely superstitious support from the other side. And it never availed to unify the race, or the Islamic peoples. On the fall of Othman “the ensuing civil wars rent the unity of Islam from top to bottom, and the wound has never healed.”28 The feud between Northern and Southern Arabs “rapidly developed and extended into a permanent racial enmity.”29 And when, after the Ommayade dynasty had totally failed to unify Semite and Aryan in Persia, the task was partially accomplished by the Abassides, it was not through any greater stress of piety, but by way of accepting the inevitable, after generations of division and revolt.30

It may perhaps be more truly claimed for the Koran that it was the basis of Arab scholarship; since it was in order to elucidate its text that the first Arab grammars and dictionaries and literary collections were made.31 Here again, however, the reflection arises that some such development would have occurred in any case, on the basis of the abundant pre-Islamic poetry, given but the material conquests. The first conquerors were illiterate, and had to resort to the services and the organization of the conquered32 for all purposes of administrative writings, using for a time even the Greek and Persian languages. There was nothing in the Koran itself to encourage literature; and the first conquerors either despised or feared that of the conquered.33

When the facts are inductively considered, it appears that the Koran was from the first rather a force of intellectual fixation than one of stimulus. As we have seen, there was a measure of rationalism as well as of monotheism among the Arabs before Mohammed; and the Prophet set his face violently against all unbelief. The word “unbeliever” or “infidel” in the Koran normally signifies merely “rejector of Mohammed”; but a number of passages34 show that there were specific unbelievers in the doctrine of a future state as well as in miracles; and his opponents put to him challenges which showed that they rationally disbelieved his claim to inspiration.35 Hence, clearly, the scarcity of miracles in his early legend, on the Arab side. On a people thus partly “refined, skeptical, incredulous,”36 much of whose poetry showed no trace of religion,37 the triumph of Islam gradually imposed a tyrannous dogma, entailing abundance of primitive superstition under the Ægis of monotheistic doctrine. Some moral service it did compass, and for this the credit seems to be substantially due to Mohammed; though here again he was not an innovator. Like previous reformers,38 he vehemently denounced the horrible practice of burying alive girl children; and when the Koran became law his command took effect. His limitation of polygamy too may have counted for something, despite the unlimited practice of his latter years. For the rest, he prescribes, in the traditional eastern fashion, liberal almsgiving; this, with normal integrity and patience, and belief in “God and the Last Day, and the Angels, and the Scriptures, and the Prophets,”39 is the gist of his ethical and religious code, with much stress on hell-fire and the joys of Paradise, and at the same time on predestination, and with no reasoning on any issue.

The history of Saracen culture is the history of the attainment of saner ideas and a higher plane of thought. Within a century of the Hej’ra40 there had arisen some rational skepticism in the Moslem schools, as apart from the chronic schisms and strifes of the faithful. A school of theology had been founded by Hasan-al-Basri at Bassorah; and one of his disciples, Wasil ibn AttÂ, following some previous heretics—Mabad al Jhoni, Ghailan of Damascus, and Jonas al Aswari41—rejected the predestination doctrine of the Koran as inconsistent with the future judgment; arguing for freewill and at the same time for the humane provision of a purgatory. From this beginning dates the Motazileh or class of Motazilites (or Mu`tazilites),42 the philosophic reformers and moderate freethinkers of Islam. Other sects of a semi-political character had arisen even during the last illness of the Prophet, and others soon after his death.43 One party sought to impose on the faithful the “Sunna” or “traditions,” which really represented the old Arabian ideas of law, but were pretended to be unwritten sayings of Mohammed.44 To this the party of Ali (the Prophet’s cousin) objected; whence began the long dispute between the Shiah or ShÎites (the anti-traditionists), and the Sunnites; the conquered and oppressed Persians tending to stand with the former, and generally, in virtue of their own thought, to supply the heterodox element under the later Khalifates.45 Thus ShÎites were apt to be Motazilites.46 On Ali’s side, again, there broke away a great body of Kharejites or Separatists, who claimed that the Imaum or head of the Faith should be chosen by election, while the ShÎites stood for succession by divine right.47 All this had occurred before any schools of theology existed.

The Motazilites, once started, divided gradually into a score of sects,48 all more or less given to rationalizing within the limits of monotheism.49 The first stock were named Kadarites, because insisting on man’s power (kadar) over his acts.50 Against them were promptly ranged the Jabarites, who affirmed that man’s will was wholly under divine constraint (jabar).51 Yet another sect, the Sifatites, opposed both of the others, some of them52 standing for a literal interpretation of the Koran, which is in part predestinationist, and in parts assumes freewill; while the main body of orthodox, following the text, professed to respect as insoluble mystery the contradictions they found in it.53 The history of Islam in this matter is strikingly analogous to that of Christianity from the rise of the Pelagian heresy.

It is to be noted that, while the heretics in time came under Greek and other foreign influences, their criticism of the Koran was at the outset their own.54 The ShÎites, becoming broadly the party of the Persians, admitted in time Persian, Jewish, Gnostic, ManichÆan, and other dualistic doctrines, and generally tended to interpret the Koran allegorically.55 A particular school of allegorists, the Bathenians, even tended to purify the idea of deity in an agnostic direction.56 All of these would appear to have ranked genetically as Motazilites; and the manifold play of heretical thought gradually forced a certain habit of reasoning on the orthodox,57 who as usual found their advantage in the dissidences of the dissenters. On the other hand, the Motazilites found new resources in the study and translation of Greek works, scientific and philosophical.58 They were thus the prime factors, on the Arab side, in the culture-evolution which went on under the earlier of the Abasside Khalifs (750–1258). Greek literature reached them mainly through the Syrian Christians, in whose hands it had been put by the Nestorians, driven out of their scientific school at Edessa and exiled by Leo the Isaurian (716–741);59 possibly also in part through the philosophers who, on being exiled from Athens by Justinian, settled for a time in Persia.60 The total result was that already in the ninth century, within two hundred years of the beginning of Mohammed’s preaching, the Saracens in Persia had reached not only a remarkable height of material civilization, their wealth exceeding that of Byzantium, but a considerable though quasi-secret measure of scientific knowledge and rational thought,61 including even some measure of pure atheism. All forms of rationalism alike were called zendekism by the orthodox, the name having the epithetic force of the Christian terms “infidelity” and “atheism”.62

Secrecy was long imposed on the Motazilites by the orthodoxy of the Khalifs,63 who as a rule atoned for many crimes and abundant breaches of the law of the Koran by a devout profession of faith. Freethinking, however, had its periods of political prosperity. Even under the Ommayade dynasty, the Khalif Al Walid Ibn Yazid (the eleventh of the race) was reputed to be of no religion, but seems to have been rather a ruffian than a rationalist.64 Under the Abassides culture made much more progress. The Khalif Al Mansour, though he played a very orthodox part,65 favoured the Motazilites (754–775), being generally a patron of the sciences; and under him were made the first translations from the Greek.66 Despite his orthodoxy he encouraged science; and it was as insurgents and not as unbelievers that he destroyed the sect of Rewandites (a branch of the anti-Moslem Ismailites), who are said to have believed in metempsychosis.67 Partly on political but partly also on religious grounds his successor Al Mahdi made war on the Ismailites, whom he regarded as atheists, and who appear to have been connected with the Motazilite “Brethren of Purity,”68 destroying their books and causing others to be written against them.69 They were anti-Koranites; hardly atheists; but a kind of informal rationalism approaching to atheism, and involving unbelief in the Koran and the Prophet, seems to have spread considerably, despite the slaughter of many unbelievers by Al Mahdi. Its source seems to have been Persian aversion to the alien creed.70 The great philosophic influence, again, was that of Aristotle; and though his abstract God-idea was nominally adhered to, the scientific movement promoted above all things the conception of a reign of law.71 Al Hadi, the successor of Al Mahdi, persecuted much and killed many heretics; and Haroun Al Raschid (Aaron the Orthodox) menaced with death those who held the moderately rational tenet that “the Koran was created,”72 as against the orthodox dogma (on all fours with the Brahmanic doctrine concerning the Veda) that it was eternal in the heavens and uncreated. One of the rationalists, Al Mozdar, accused the orthodox party of infidelity, as asserting two eternal things; and there was current among the Motazilites of his day the saying that, “had God left men to their natural liberty, the Arabians could have composed something not only equal but superior to the Koran in eloquence, method, and purity of language.”73

Haroun’s crimes, however, consisted little in acts of persecution. The Persian Barmekides (the family of his first Vizier, surnamed Barmek) were regarded as protectors of Motazilites;74 and one of the sons, Jaafer, was even suspected of atheism, all three indeed being charged with it.75 Their destruction, on other grounds, does not seem to have altered the conditions for the thinkers; but Haroun’s incompetent son Emin was a devotee and persecutor. His abler brother and conqueror Al Mamoun (813–833), on the other hand, directly favoured the Motazilites, partly on political grounds, to strengthen himself with the Persian party, but also on the ground of conviction.76 He even imprisoned some of the orthodox theologians who maintained that the Koran was not a created thing, though, like certain persecutors of other faiths, he had expressly declared himself in favour of persuasion as against coercion.77 In one case, following usage, he inflicted a cruel torture. “His fatal error,” says a recent scholar, “was that he invoked the authority of the State in matters of the intellectual and religious life.”78 Compared with others, certainly, he did not carry his coercion far, though, on being once publicly addressed as “Ameer of the Unbelievers,” he caused the fanatic who said it to be put to death.79 In private he was wont to conduct meetings for discussion, attended by believers and unbelievers of every shade, at which the only restriction was that the appeal must be to reason, and never to the Koran.80 Concerning his personal bias, it is related that he had received from Kabul a book in old Persian, The Eternal Reason, which taught that reason is the only basis for religion, and that revelation cannot serve as a standing ground.81 The story is interesting, but enigmatic, the origin of the book being untraceable. Whatever were his views, his coercive policy against the orthodox extremists had the usual effect of stimulating reaction on that side, and preparing the ultimate triumph of orthodoxy.82 The fact remains, however, that Mamoun was of all the Khalifs the greatest promoter of science83 and culture; the chief encourager of the study and translation of Greek literature;84 and, despite his coercion of the theologians on the dogma of the eternity of the Koran, tolerant enough to put a Christian at the head of a college at Damascus, declaring that he chose him not for his religion but for his science. In the same spirit he permitted the free circulation of the apologetic treatise of the Armenian Christian Al Kindy, in which Islam and the Koran are freely criticized. As a ruler, too, he ranks among the best of his race for clemency, justice, and decency of life, although orthodox imputations were cast on his subordinates. His successors Motasim and Wathek were of the same cast of opinion, the latter being, however, fanatical on behalf of his rationalistic view of the Koran as a created thing.85

A violent orthodox reaction set in under the worthless and Turk-ruled Khalif Motawakkel86 (847–861), by whose time the Khalifate was in a state of political decadence, partly from the economic exhaustion following on its tyrannous and extortionate rule; partly from the divisive tendencies of its heterogeneous sections; partly from the corrupting tendency of all despotic power.87 Despite the official restoration of orthodoxy, the private cultivation of science and philosophy proceeded for a time; the study and translation of Greek books continued;88 and rationalism of a kind seems to have subsisted more or less secretly to the end. In the tenth century it is said to have reached even the unlearned; and though the Motazilites gradually drifted into a scholastic orthodoxy, downright unbelief came up alongside,89 albeit secretly. Faith in Mohammed’s mission and law began again to shake; and the learned disregarded its prescriptions. Mystics professed to find the way to God without the Koran. Many decided that religion was useful for regulating the people, but was not for the wise. On the other side, however, the orthodox condemned all science as leading to unbelief,90 and developed an elaborate and quasi-systematic theology. It was while the scientific encyclopedists of Bassorah were amassing the knowledge which, through the Moors, renewed thought in the West, that Al Ashari built up the KalÂm or scholastic theology which thenceforth reigned in the Mohammedan East;91 and the philosopher Al Gazzali (or Gazel), on his part, employed the ancient and modern device of turning a profession of philosophical scepticism to the account of orthodoxy.92

In the struggle between science and religion, in a politically decadent State, the latter inevitably secured the administrative power.93 Under the Khalifs Motamid (d. 892) and Motadhed (d. 902) all science and philosophy were proscribed, and booksellers were put upon their oath not to sell any but orthodox books.94 Thus, though philosophy and science had secretly survived, when the political end came the popular faith was in much the same state as it had been under Haroun Al Raschid. Under Islam as under all the faiths of the world, in the east as in the west, the mass of the people remained ignorant as well as poor; and the learning and skill of the scholars served only to pass on the saved treasure of Greek thought and science to the new civilization of Europe. The fact that the age of military and political decadence was that of the widest diffusion of rationalism is naturally fastened on as giving the explanation of the decline; but the inference is pure fallacy. The Bagdad Khalifate declined as the Christianized Roman Empire declined, from political and external causes; and the Turks who overthrew it proceeded to overthrow Christian Byzantium, where rationalism never reared its head.

It is in the later and nominally decadent ages of the Bagdad Khalifate, when science and culture and even industry relatively prospered by reason of the personal impotence of the Khalifs, that we meet with the most pronounced and the most perspicacious of the Freethinkers of Islam. In the years 973–1057 there dwelt in the little Syrian town of Marratun-Numan the blind poet Abu’l-ala-al-Ma’arri, who wrote a parody of the Koran,95 and in his verse derided all religions as alike absurd, and yet was for some reason never persecuted. He has been pronounced “incomparably greater” than Omar KhayyÁm “both as a poet and as an agnostic.”96 One of his sayings was that “The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.”97 He may have escaped on the strength of a character for general eccentricity, for he was an ardent vegetarian and an opponent of all parentage, declaring that to bring a child into the world was to add to the sum of suffering.98 The fact that he was latterly a man of wealth, yet in person an ascetic and a generous giver, may be the true explanation. Whatever be the explanation of his immunity, the frankness of his heterodoxy is memorable. Nourished perhaps by a temper of protest set up in him by the blindness which fell upon him in childhood after smallpox, the spirit of reason seems to have been effectually developed in him by a stay of a year and a-half at Bagdad, where, in the days of Al Mansour, “Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, Sabians and Sufis, materialists and rationalists,” met and communed.99 Before his visit, his poems are substantially orthodox; later, their burden changes. He denies a resurrection, and is “wholly incredulous of any divine revelation. Religion, as he conceives it, is a product of the human mind, in which men believe through force of habit and education, never stopping to consider whether it is true.” “His belief in God amounted, as it would seem, to little beyond a conviction that all things are governed by inexorable Fate.” Concerning creeds he sings in one stave:—

a summing-up not to be improved upon here.

A century later still, and in another region, we come upon the (now) most famous of all Eastern freethinkers, Omar KhayyÁm. He belonged to NaishÁpÚr in Khorassan, a province which had long been known for its rationalism,101 and which had been part of the nucleus of the great Asiatic kingdom created by Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni at the beginning of the eleventh century, soon after the rise of the Fatimite dynasty in Egypt. Under that Sultan flourished Ferdusi (Firdausi), one of the chief glories of Persian verse. After Mahmoud’s death, his realm and parts of the Khalifate in turn were overrun by the Seljuk Turks under Togrul Beg; under whose grandson Malik it was that Omar KhayyÁm, astronomer and poet, studied and sang in Khorassan. The Turk-descended Shah favoured science as strongly as any of the Abassides; and when he decided to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight experts he employed to do it. Thus was set up for the East the JalÁli calendar, which, as Gibbon has noted,102 “surpasses the Julian and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.” Omar was, in fact, one of the ablest mathematicians of his age.103

His name, Omar ibn Ibrahim al-KhayyÁmi, seems to point to Arab descent. “Al-KhayyÁmmi” means “the tent-maker”; but in no biographic account of him is there the slightest proof that he or his father ever belonged to that or any other handicraft.104 Always he figures as a scholar and a man of science. Since, therefore, the patronymic al-KhayyÁmi is fairly common now among Arabs, and also among the still nomadic tribes of Khuzistan and Luristan, the reasonable presumption is that it was in his case a patronymic also.105 His father being a man of some substance, he had a good schooling, and is even described in literary tradition as having become an expert Koran scholar, by the admission of the orthodox Al Gazzali, who, however, is represented in another record as looking with aversion on Omar’s scientific lore.106 The poet may have had his lead to freethought during his travels after graduating at Naishapur, when he visited Samarkhand, Bokhara, Ispahan, and Balk.107 He seems to have practised astrology for a living, even as did Kepler in Europe five hundred years later; and he perhaps dabbled somewhat in medicine.108 A hostile orthodox account of him, written in the thirteenth century, represents him as “versed in all the wisdom of the Greeks,” and as wont to insist on the necessity of studying science on Greek lines.109 Of his prose works, two, which were of standard authority, dealt respectively with precious stones and climatology.110

Beyond question the poet-astronomer was undevout; and his astronomy doubtless helped to make him so. One contemporary writes: “I did not observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions; nor have I seen or heard of any of the great (scientists) who had such belief.”111 The biographical sketch by Ibn al Kifti, before cited, declares that he “performed pilgrimages not from piety but from fear,” having reason to dread the hostility of contemporaries who knew or divined his unbelief; and there is a story of a treacherous pupil who sought to bring him into public odium.112 In point of fact he was not, any more than Abu’ l-Ala, a convinced atheist, but he had no sympathy with popular religion. “He gave his adherence to no religious sect. Agnosticism, not faith, is the keynote of his works.”113 Among the sects he saw everywhere strife and hatred in which he could have no part. His earlier English translators, reflecting the tone of the first half of the last century, have thought fit to moralize censoriously over his attitude to life; and the first, Prof. Cowell, has austerely decided that Omar’s gaiety is “but a risus sardonicus of despair.”114 Even the subtler Fitzgerald, who has so admirably rendered some of the audacities which Cowell thought “better left in the original Persian,” has the air of apologizing for them when he partly concurs in the same estimate. But despair is not the name for the humorous melancholy which Omar, like Abu’ l-Ala, weaves around his thoughts on the riddle of the universe. Like Abu’ l-Ala, again, he talks at times of God, but with small signs of faith. In epigrams which have seldom been surpassed for their echoing depth, he disposes of the theistic solution and the lure of immortality; whereafter, instead of offering another shibboleth, he sings of wine and roses, of the joys of life and of their speedy passage; not forgetting to add a stipulation for beneficence.115 It was his way of turning into music the undertone of all mortality; and that it is now preferable, for any refined intelligence, to the affectation of zest for a “hereafter” on which no one wants to enter, would seem to be proved by the remarkable vogue he has secured in modern England, chiefly through the incomparable version of Fitzgerald. Much of the attraction, certainly, is due to the canorous cadence and felicitous phrasing of those singularly fortunate stanzas; and a similar handling might have won as high a repute among us for Abu’ l-Ala, whom, as we have seen, some of our Orientalists set higher, and whose verse as recently rendered into English has an indubitable charm. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, has added much to Omar. But the thoughts of Omar remain the kernels of Fitzgerald’s verses; and whereas the counsel, “Gather ye roses while ye may,” is common enough, it must be the weightier bearing of his deeper and more daring ideas that gives the quatrains their main hold to-day. In the more exact rendering of those translators who closely reproduce the original he remains beyond question a freethinker,116 placing ethic above creed, though much given to the praise of wine. Never popular in the Moslem world,117 he has had in ours an unparalleled welcome; and it must be because from his scientific vantage ground in the East, in the period of the Norman Conquest, he had attained in some degree the vision and chimed with the mood of a later and larger age.

That Omar in his day and place was not alone in his mood lies on the face of his verse. Many quatrains ascribed to him, indeed, are admittedly assignable to other Persian poets; and one of his English editors notes that “the poetry of rebellion and revolt from orthodox opinion, which is supposed to be peculiar to him, may be traced in the works of his predecessor Avicenna, as well as in those of Afdal-i-KÁshÍ, and others of his successors.”118 The allusions to the tavern, a thing suspect and illicit for Islam, show that he was in a society more Persian than Arab, one in which was to be found nearly all of the free intellectual life possible in the Moslem East;119 and doubtless Persian thought, always leaning to heresy, and charged with germs of scientific speculation from immemorial antiquity, prepared his rationalism; though his monism excludes alike dualism and theism. “One for two I never did misread” is his summing up of his philosophy.120

But the same formula might serve for the philosophy of the sect of Sufis,121 who in all ages seem to have included unbelievers as well as devoutly mystical pantheists. Founded, it is said, by a woman, Rabia, in the first century of the Hej’ra,122 the sect really carries on a pre-Mohammedan mysticism, and may as well derive from Greece123 as from Asia. Its original doctrine of divine love, as a reaction against Moslem austerity, gave it a fixed hold in Persia, and became the starting point of innumerable heterodox doctrines.124 Under the Khalif Moktader, a Persian Sufi is recorded to have been tortured and executed for teaching that every man is God.125 In later ages, Sufiism became loosely associated with every species of independent thinking; and there is reason to suspect that the later poets Sadi (fl. thirteenth century) and Hafiz126 (fl. fourteenth century), as well as hundreds of lesser status, held under the name of Sufiism views of life not far removed from those of Omar KhayyÁm; who, however, had bantered the Sufis so unmercifully that they are said to have dreaded and hated him.127 In any case, Sufiism has included such divergent types as Al Gazzali,128 the skeptical defender of the faith; devout pantheistic poets such as JÂmi;129 and singers of love and wine such as Hafiz, whose extremely concrete imagery is certainly not as often allegorical as serious Sufis assert, though no doubt it is sometimes so.130 It even became nominally associated with the destructive IsmaÏlitism of the sect of the Assassins, whose founder, Hassan, had been the schoolfellow of Omar KhayyÁm.131

Of Sufiism as a whole it may be said that whether as inculcating quietism, or as widening the narrow theism of Islam into pantheism, or as sheltering an unaggressive rationalism, it has made for freedom and humanity in the Mohammedan world, lessening the evils of ignorance where it could not inspire progress.132 It long anticipated the semi-rationalism of those Christians who declare heaven and hell to be names for bodily or mental states in this life.133 On its more philosophic side too it connects with the long movement of speculation which, passing into European life through the Western Saracens, revived Greek philosophic thought in Christendom after the night of the Middle Ages, at the same time that Saracen science passed on the more precious seeds of real knowledge to the new civilization.

There is the less need to deal at any length in these pages with the professed philosophy of the eastern Arabs, seeing that it was from first to last but little associated with any direct or practical repudiation of dogma and superstition.134 What freethought there was had only an unwritten currency, and is to be traced, as so often happens in later European history, through the protests of orthodox apologists. Thus the Persian Al Gazzali, in the preface to his work, The Destruction of the Philosophers, declares of the subjects of his attack that “the source of all their errors is the trust they have in the names of Sokrates, Hippokrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the admiration they profess for their genius and subtlety; and the belief, finally, that those great masters have been led by the profundity of their faculty to reject all religion, and to regard its precepts as the product of artifice and imposture.”135 This implies an abundant rationalism,136 but, as always, the unwritten unbelief lost ground, its non-publication being the proof that orthodoxy prevailed against it. Movements which were originally liberal, such as that of the MotecallemÎn, ran at length to mere dialectic defence of the faith against the philosophers. Fighting the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter, they sought to found a new theistic creationism on the atoms of Demokritos, making God the creator of the atoms, and negating the idea of natural law.137 Eastern Moslem philosophy in general followed some such line of reaction and petrifaction. The rationalistic Al Kindi (fl. 850) seems to have been led to philosophize by the Motazilite problems; but his successors mostly set them aside, developing an abstract logic and philosophy on Greek bases, or studying science for its own sake, though as a rule professing a devout acceptance of the Koran.138 Such was Avicenna (Ibn Sina: d. 1037), who taught that men should revere the faith in which they were educated; though in comparison with his predecessor Al Farabi, who leant to Platonic mysticism, he is a rationalistic Aristotelian,139 with a strong leaning to pantheism. Of him an Arabic historian writes that in his old age he attached himself to the court of the heretical Ala-ud-Dawla at Ispahan, in order that he might freely write his own heretical works.140 After Al Gazzali (d. 1111), who attacked both Avicenna141 and Al Farabi somewhat in the spirit of Cicero’s skeptical Cotta attacking the Stoics and the Epicureans,142 there seems to have been a further development of skepticism, the skeptical defence of the faith having the same unsettling tendency in his as in later hands. Ibn Khaldun seems to denounce in the name of faith his mixture of pietism and philosophy; and Makrisi speaks of his doctrines as working great harm to religion143 among the Moslems. But the socio-political conditions were too unpropitious to permit of any continuous advance on rational lines. Ere long an uncritical orthodoxy prevailed in the Eastern schools, and it is in Moorish Spain that we are to look for the last efforts of Arab philosophy.

The course of culture-evolution there broadly corresponds with that of the Saracen civilization in the East. In Spain the Moors came into contact with the Roman imperial polity, and at the same time with the different culture elements of Judaism and Christianity. To both of these faiths they gave complete toleration, thus strengthening their own in a way that no other policy could have availed to do. Whatever was left of GrÆco-Roman art, handicraft, and science, saving the arts of portraiture, they encouraged; and whatever of agricultural science remained from Carthaginian times they zealously adopted and improved. Like their fellow-Moslems in the East, they further learned all the science that the preserved literature of Greece could give them. The result was that under energetic and enlightened khalifs the Moorish civilization became the centre of light and knowledge as well as of material prosperity for medieval Europe. Whatever of science the world possessed was to be found in their schools; and thither in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries flocked students from the Christian States of western and northern Europe. It was in whole or in part from Saracen hands that the modern world received astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, botany, jurisprudence, and philosophy. They were, in fact, the revivers of civilization after the age of barbarian Christianity.144 And while the preservation of Greek science, lost from the hands of Christendom, would have been a notable service enough, the Arabs did much more. Alhazen (d. 1038) is said to have done the most original work in optics before Newton,145 and in the same century Arab medicine and chemistry made original advances.146

While the progressive period lasted, there was of course an abundance of practical freethought. But after a marvellously rapid rise, the Moorish civilization was arrested and paralysed by the internal and the external forces of anti-civilization—religious fanaticism within and Christian hostility without. Everywhere we have seen culture-progress depending more or less clearly on the failure to find solutions for political problems. The most fatal defect of all Arab civilization—a defect involved in its first departure by way of conquest, and in its fixedly hostile relation to the Christian States, which kept it constantly on a military basis—was the total failure to substitute any measure of constitutional rule for despotism. It was thus politically unprogressive, even while advancing in other respects. But in other respects also it soon reached the limits set by the conditions.

Whereas in Persia the Arabs overran an ancient civilization, containing many elements of rationalism which acted upon their own creed, the Moors in Spain found a population only slightly civilized, and predisposed by its recent culture, as well as by its natural conditions,147 to fanatical piety. Thus when, under their tolerant rule, Jews and Christians in large numbers embraced Islam, the new converts became the most fanatical of all.148 All rationalism existed in their despite, and, abounding as they did, they tended to gain power whenever the Khalif was weak, and to rebel furiously when he was hostile. When, accordingly, the growing pressure of the feudal Christian power in Northern Spain at length became a menacing danger to the Moorish States, weakened by endless intestine strife, the one resource was to call in a new force of Moslem fanaticism in the shape of the Almoravide149 Berbers, who, to the utmost of their power, put down everything scientific and rationalistic, and established a rigid Koranolatry. After a time they in turn, growing degenerate while remaining orthodox, were overrun by a new influx of conquering fanatics from Africa, the Almohades, who, failing to add political science to their faith, went down in the thirteenth century before the Christians in Spain, in a great battle in which their prince sat in their sight with the Koran in his hand.150 Here there could be no pretence that “unbelief” wrought the downfall. The Jonah of freethought, so to speak, had been thrown overboard; and the ship went down with the flag of faith flying at every masthead.151

It was in the last centuries of Moorish rule that there lived the philosophers whose names connect it with the history of European thought, retaining thus a somewhat factitious distinction as compared with the men of science, many of them nameless, who developed and transmitted the sciences. The pantheistic Avempace (Ibn Badja: d. 1138), who defended the reason against the theistic skepticism of Al Gazzali,152 was physician, astronomer, and mathematician, as well as metaphysician; as was Abubacer (Abu Bekr, also known as Ibn Tophail: d. 1185), who regarded religious systems as “only a necessary means of discipline for the multitude,”153 and as being merely symbols of the higher truth reached by the philosopher. Both men, however, tended rather to mysticism than to exact thought; and Abubacer’s treatise, The Self-taught Philosopher, which has been translated into Latin (by Pococke in 1671), English, Dutch, and German, has had the singular fortune of being adopted by the Quakers as a work of edification.154

Very different was the part played by AverroËs (Ibn Roshd), the most famous of all Moslem thinkers, because the most far-reaching in his influence on European thought. For the Middle Ages he was pre-eminently the expounder of Aristotle, and it is as setting forth, in that capacity, the pantheistic doctrine which affirms the eternity of the material universe and makes the individual soul emanate from and return to the soul of all, that he becomes important alike in Moslem and Christian thought. Diverging from the asceticism and mysticism of Avempace and Abubacer, and strenuously opposing the anti-rationalism of Al Gazzali, against whose chief treatise he penned his own Destruction of the Destruction of the Philosophers, AverroËs is the least mystical and the most rational of the Arab thinkers.155 At nearly all vital points he oppugns the religious view of things, denying bodily resurrection, which he treats (here following all his predecessors in heretical Arab philosophy) as a vulgar fable;156 and making some approach to a scientific treatment of the problem of “Freewill” as against, on the one hand, the ethic-destroying doctrine of the MotecallemÎn, who made God’s will the sole standard of right, and affirmed predestination (Jabarism); and against, on the other hand, the anti-determinism of the Kadarites.157 Even in his politics he was original; and in his paraphrase of Plato’s Republic he has said a notable word for women, pointing out how small an opening is offered for their faculties in Moslem society.158 Of all tyrannies, he boldly declared, the worst is that of priests.

In time, however, a consciousness of the vital hostility of his doctrine to current creeds, and of the danger he consequently ran, made him, like so many of his later disciples, anxious to preserve priestly favour. As regards religion he was more complaisant than Abubacer, pronouncing Mohammedanism the most perfect of all popular systems,159 and preaching a patriotic conformity on that score to philosophic students.

From him derives the formula of a two-fold truth—one truth for science or philosophy, and another for religion—which played so large a part in the academic life of Christendom for centuries.160 In two of his treatises, On the harmony of religion with philosophy and On the demonstration of religious dogmas, he even takes up a conservative attitude, proclaiming that the wise man never utters a word against the established creed, and going so far as to say that the freethinker who attacks it, inasmuch as he undermines popular virtue, deserves death.161 Even in rebutting, as entirely absurd, the doctrine of the creation of the world, and ascribing its currency to the stupefying power of habit, he takes occasion to remark piously that those whose religion has no better basis than faith are frequently seen, on taking up scientific studies, to become utter zendeks.162 But he lived in an age of declining culture and reviving fanaticism; and all his conformities could not save him from proscription, at the hands of a Khalif who had long favoured him, for the offence of cultivating Greek antiquity to the prejudice of Islam. All study of Greek philosophy was proscribed at the same time, and all books found on the subject were destroyed.163 Disgraced and banished from court, AverroËs died at Morocco in 1198; other philosophers were similarly persecuted;164 and soon afterwards the Moorish rule in Spain came to an end in the odour of sanctity.165

So complete was now the defeat of the intellectual life in Western Islam that the ablest writer produced by the Arab race in the period of the Renaissance, Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332–1406), writes as a bigoted believer in revelation, though his writings on the science of history were the most philosophic since the classic period, being out of all comparison superior to those of the Christian chroniclers of his age.166 So rationalistic, indeed, is his method, relatively to his time, that it is permissible to suspect him of seeking to propitiate the bigots.167 But neither they nor his race in general could learn the sociological lessons he had it in him to teach. Their development was arrested for that period.

Of later freethought under Islam there is little to record as regards literary output, but the phenomenon has never disappeared. Buckle, in his haste, declared that he could write the history of Turkish civilization on the back of his hand;168 but even in Turkey, at a time of minimum friendly contact with other European life, there have been traces of a spirit of freethinking nearly as active as that astir in Christendom at the same period. Thus at the end of the seventeenth century we have circumstantial testimony to the vogue of a doctrine of atheistic Naturalism at Constantinople. The holders of this doctrine were called Muserin, a term said to mean “The true secret is with us.” They affirmed a creative and all-sustaining Nature, in which Man has his place like the plants and like the planets; and they were said to form a very large number, including Cadis and other learned as well as some renegade persons.169 But Turkish culture-conditions in the eighteenth century were not such as to permit of intellectual progress on native lines; and to this day rationalism in that as in other Moslem countries is mainly a matter of reflex action set up by the impact of European scientific knowledge, or social contact. There is no modern rationalistic literature.

Motazilism, so-called, is still heard of in Arabia itself.170 In the Ottoman Empire, indeed, it is little in evidence, standing now as it does for a species of broad-church liberalism, analogous to Christian Unitarianism;171 but in Persia the ancient leaning to rationalism is still common. The old-world pantheism which we have seen conserved in Omar KhayyÁm gave rise in later centuries to similar developments among the Parsees both in Persia and in India; and from the sixteenth century onwards there are clear traces among them of a number of rationalizing heresies, varying from pantheism and simple deism to atheism and materialism.172 In Persia to-day there are many thinkers of these casts of thought.173 About 1830 a British traveller estimated that, assuming there were between 200,000 and 300,000 Sufis in the country, those figures probably fell greatly short of the number “secretly inclined to infidelity.”174 Whatever be the value of the figures, the statement is substantially confirmed by later observers;175 missionaries reporting independently that in Persia “most of the higher class, of the nobility, and of the learned professions ... are at heart infidels or sceptics.”176 Persian freethought is of course, in large part, the freethought of ignorance, and seems to co-exist with astrological superstition;177 but there is obviously needed only science, culture, and material development to produce, on such a basis, a renascence as remarkable as that of modern Japan.

The verdict of VambÉry is noteworthy: “In all Asia, with the exception of China, there is no land and no people wherein there is so little of religious enthusiasm as in Persia; where freethinkers are so little persecuted, and can express their opinions with so little disturbance; and where, finally, as a natural consequence, the old religious structure can be so easily shattered by the outbreak of new enthusiasts. Whoever has read KhayyÁm’s blasphemies against God and the prophet, his jesting verses against the holiest ceremonies and commandments of Islam; and whoever knows the vogue of this book and other works directed against the current religion, will not wonder that BÂb with the weapon of the Word won so many hearts in so short a time.”178

The view that BÂbism affiliates to rationalism is to be understood in the sense that the atmosphere of the latter made possible the growth of the former, its adherents being apparently drawn rather from the former orthodox.179 The young founder of the sect, Mirza-Ali-Mohammed, declared himself “The BÂb,” i.e. “the Gate” (to the knowledge of God), as against the orthodox Moslem teachers who taught that “since the twelve ImÂms, the Gate of Knowledge is closed.” Hence the name of the sect. Mirza-Ali, who showed a strong tendency to intolerance, quickly created an aggressive movement, which was for a time put down by the killing of himself and many of his followers.

Since his execution the sect has greatly multiplied and its doctrines have much widened. For a time the founder’s intolerant teachings were upheld by EzÉl, the founder of one of the two divisions into which the party speedily fell; while his rival BÉha, who gave himself out as the true Prophet, of whom the BÂb was merely the precursor, developed a notably cosmopolitan and equalitarian doctrine, including a vague belief in immortality, without heaven, hell, or purgatory. EzÉl eventually abandoned his claims, and his followers now number less than two thousand; while the BÉhaÏtes number nearly three millions out of the seven millions of the Persian population, and some two millions in the adjacent countries. The son of BÉha, Abbas Effendi, who bears the title of “The Great Branch,” now rules the cult, which promises to be the future religion of Persia.180 One of the most notable phenomena of the earlier movement was the entrance of a young woman, daughter of a leading ulema, who for the first time in Moslem history threw off the regulation veil and preached the equality of the sexes.181 She was one of those first executed. Persecution, however, has long ceased, and as a result of her lead the position of woman in the cult is exceptionally good. Thus the last century has witnessed within the sphere of Islam, so commonly supposed to be impervious to change, one of the most rapid and radical religious changes recorded in history. There is therefore no ground for holding that in other Moslem countries progress is at an end.

Everything depends, broadly speaking, on the possibilities of culture-contact. The changes in Persia are traceable to the element of heretical habit which has persisted from pre-Moslem times; future and more scientific development will depend upon the assimilation of European knowledge. In Egypt, before the period of European intervention, freethinking was at a minimum; and though toleration was well developed as regarded Christians and Jews, freethinking Moslems dared not avow themselves.182 Latterly rationalism tends to spread in Egypt as in other Moslem countries; even under Mohammed Ali the ruling Turks had begun to exhibit a “remarkable indifference to religion,” and had “begun to undermine the foundations of El-Islam”; and so shrewd and dispassionate an observer as Lane expected that the common people would “soon assist in the work,” and that “the overthrow of the whole fabric may reasonably be expected to ensue at a period not very remote.”183 To evolve such a change there will be required a diffusion of culture which is not at all likely to be rapid under any Government; but in any case the ground that is being lost by Islam in Egypt is not being retaken by Christianity.

In the other British dominions, Mohammedans, though less ready than educated Hindus to accept new ideas, cannot escape the rationalizing influence of European culture. Nor was it left to the British to introduce the rationalistic spirit in Moslem India. At the end of the sixteenth century the eclectic Emperor Akbar,184 himself a devout worshipper of the Sun,185 is found tolerantly comparing all religions,186 depreciating Islam,187 and arriving at such general views on the equivalence of all creeds, and on the improbability of eternal punishment,188 as pass for liberal among Christians in our own day. If such views could be generated by a comparison of the creeds of pre-British India they must needs be encouraged now. The Mohammedan mass is of course still deeply fanatical, and habitually superstitious; but not any more immovably so than the early Saracens. In the eighteenth century arose the fanatical Wahabi sect, which aims at a puritanic restoration of primeval Islam, freed from the accretions of later belief, such as saint-worship; but the movement, though variously estimated, has had small success, and seems destined to extinction.189 Of the traditional seventy-three sects in Islam only four to-day count as orthodox.190

It may be worth while, in conclusion, to note that the comparative prosperity or progressiveness of Islam as a proselytizing and civilizing force in Africa—a phenomenon regarded even by some Christians with satisfaction, and by some with alarm191—is not strictly or purely a religious phenomenon. Moslem civilization suits with negro life in Africa in virtue not of the teaching of the Koran, but of the comparative nearness of the Arab to the barbaric life. He interbreeds with the natives, fraternizes with them (when not engaged in kidnapping them), and so stimulates their civilization; where the European colonist, looking down on them as an inferior species, isolates, depresses, and degrades them. It is thus conceivable that there is a future for Islam at the level of a low culture-stage; but the Arab and Turkish races out of Africa are rather the more likely to concur in the rationalistic movement of the higher civilization.

Even in Africa, however, a systematic observer notes, and predicts the extension of, “a strong tendency on the part of the Mohammedans towards an easy-going rationalism, such as is fast making way in Algeria, where the townspeople and the cultivators in the more settled districts, constantly coming in contact with Europeans, are becoming indifferent to the more inconvenient among their Mohammedan observances, and are content to live with little more religion than an observance of the laws, and a desire to get on well with their neighbours.”192 Thus at every culture-level we see the persistence of that force of intellectual variation which is the subject of our inquiry.