However that may be, and whatever may be the judgment which posterity will declare as to the greater or lesser authenticity of the Koran, it is quite certain that the arrangement of this book and its division into suras or chapters is entirely arbitrary. And it could not be otherwise; an arrangement according to subject was quite impossible, for Mohammed often spoke in the same revelation of totally different things. Still less could a chronological order be followed: first, because Mohammed himself, in many places, added new revelations to more ancient ones; next, because in those times there was no one still living who knew the exact moment when each verse had been revealed. It was with perfect justice that, at this period, a man who was asked if the fragments of the Koran were arranged in chronological order, replied: “Even if all men and all jinns (demons) attempted it, they could not succeed.” So the length of the suras was taken as a rule of the order to be followed, without keeping too strictly to it; the longest came first, then the one which was nearest in length, and so on; so that the last sura is at the same time the shortest. The consequence is that revelations dating from very different epochs are now mixed without order, so that a similar confusion is found in no other book; and this, above all else, makes the reading of the Koran so difficult and so tedious.
For believing Moslems the Koran, that is to say God’s Word which has not been created, is the most perfect book which exists, both in matter and form, and this opinion is what it should be in the natural order of things; but it is somewhat strange that the prejudice of the Moslems should have had more influence on us than would have been expected. The pompous rhetoric and the so frequently foolish accumulation of metaphors which are to be found in the Meccan suras have been taken seriously for poetry and admired in consequence; the style of the whole book has been considered a model of purity of language. It is difficult to argue on the question of taste; every man has his private opinion on this matter, and he can seldom be persuaded to change it. But if we must give our own, we must confess that, among the more famous of ancient Arab books, we know none so wanting in taste and originality, so exceedingly prolix and wearisome as the Koran.
Mohammed was not able to compose in verse, an art of which nearly all were masters at that time; so he did not speak in verse, and he even had a marked aversion for poetry. His taste was extremely peculiar; he preferred very mediocre poets who could express pious thoughts in bombastic verse, to the greatest Arab poets who were still living or who had only lately died. Generally speaking he was opposed to poetry, and very naturally; for it was the true expression of the former joyous life of paganism. He was therefore forced to employ rhymed prose for his revelations, which consists in using short sentences, two or more of which rhyme together. In the oldest suras Mohammed closely followed the rules of this style of writing so that they resemble the oracles of the old Arab soothsayers; later on however he neglected them more and more, made sentences longer than they should have been, and took many licences with the rhyme which, far from being attractive, are real blemishes. If they were found in any other book than the Word of God, they would have been severely criticised.
Moreover, he was not master of the language, which partly explains the frequent repetitions to be found in the Koran. Mohammed had much trouble in composing; he seldom found at once the right word to express his thought; so he tried all methods, and hence it is that in the Koran the same ideas recur continually and only the expression changes. The Koran is crowded with degenerate words, borrowed from the Jewish, the Syrian, and the Ethiopian languages; the Arab commentators, who knew no other language than their own, wearied their brains in trying to explain them, without succeeding, however, in finding the true meaning. Moreover the Koran contains more than one infraction of the rules of grammar; and if these are less noticeable, it is because Arab grammarians, wishing to justify them, made these errors into rules or exceptions to the rules.
The Koran had, moreover, very little influence on Mohammed’s contemporaries. The Arabs had reached a very high degree of civilisation and of development—I refer to intellectual and not to material civilisation; while Mohammed was a mere enthusiast, like many others elsewhere—a fanatic, who was surpassed in understanding, science, intelligence, and even in morality by more than one of his fellow-citizens. The greater number of his contemporaries were indifferent to his pious effusions. And, in short, to find the Koran fine and sublime, faith must first have stifled common sense. The majority of the nation had not yet reached that stage. So the conversions one reads of which are attributed to certain passages of the Koran belong chiefly to the domain of pious legend and not to history; history, in fact, teaches that the multitude knew little or nothing of the Koran, and that they were moreover not at all anxious to know it.
DOCTRINE OF ISLAMISM
There is no religion less original than Islamism. It has as base Hanifitism and Mosaism as it was developed under the influence of Parseeism, together with facts borrowed from the ancient Arabic religion and Christianity, with the additional dogma that Mohammed is the greatest and the last prophet of God. That was the sum of the system preached by the Meccan prophet.
The Koran contains no deep thoughts, no poetic theories depicted in sublime and moving language. It does not try to resolve great problems by clothing them in a borrowed symbolic form. Islamism is certainly the most prosaic and monotonous of religions, and at the same time the least susceptible of modification and development. How explain this phenomenon? By the very character of the Arab people, who, in effect, hold specially to the positive. They seek even poetry in the form rather than the substance; and, everything taken into consideration, they rather resemble a developed and reasoning people of the nineteenth century than an ancient nation, still animated by the poetry of youth which other religions have produced.
Again, Mohammed counts for much. He was not a profound thinker, but an enthusiast of mediocre talent. Far from aspiring to originality, his great glory was to avoid it, since he never ceased repeating that the doctrine he preached had been announced from all time by prophets of old. There is a third reason still which must not be lost sight of: In other countries religion developed gradually—it was not the founder who wrote, but his disciples; thus each author imprinted more or less his individuality on his book, and this circumstance, which naturally excludes uniformity, imposed on future ages the duty of not keeping to the letter but entering into the very spirit of the text. There was nothing of this kind in Arabia. There, a single man regulated everything—faith, customs, even the law. The Koran is a book made by one man who exposes the immutable will of God. Islamism has thus a great fixity. One knows not how to contest it; but, far from being a cause of satisfaction, this must be deplored; for continual progress is a task imposed on humanity.
The laws of the Koran still flourish and will do so as long as Islamism exists. That they were good for those times, and then constituted real progress, may be admitted without difficulty. But the laws of Charlemagne were just as excellent for their epoch; yet where would now be all the people over whom he reigned, had they been condemned always to preserve and follow these laws? Would not progress have been impossible for western Europe? The legislation of the Koran hardly enters into the scope of our subject, and we will keep to its doctrines. It has been so often analysed, and moreover presents so little originality, that we shall make a very rapid survey of it.