Religions of Man; 10; Mohammed and His Message

This is National Educational Television, a program distributed by the Educational Television and Radio Center. University College of Washington University and KETC, the St. Louis Educational Television Station, present a course for television. The Religions of Man. With Dr. Houston Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Washington University. We have now passed the halfway mark in this series of talks on the Religions of Man.

And this seems to me to be a good time to pause for just a moment and get our bearings. As far we've been talking about the Religions of the East. I hope that you feel a little bit more at home with these Religions than you did when we started. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. But I don't think any of us would deny that the scenery has been different. But one thing we've been introduced to a lot of very strange terms. Brahmann, Nirvana, Karma, Yoga, Zen, Tao. These terms have taken explaining.

And even after we've finished our explanation, I think we've often had a feeling that the explanations weren't enough to really carry us over into what these words really meant. But tonight, as we turn to Islam, we begin to move into home territory. Tonight we start talking about such things as creation, revelation, chosen people, the Word of God, heaven and hell, the destiny of my immortal soul. And it's all going to sound terribly familiar. Or rather, I think I should say to be accurate that the concepts, the frame of reference, the presuppositions and the worldview will be familiar. Though how these concepts are used in Islam will have some interesting perks of its own. Let me try an example.

If two people speak the same language, this common language will enable them to understand one another far more than if they didn't share this language in common. But at the same time, it will also make it possible for them to disagree more sharply than if their thoughts were simply to pass one another like ships in the night. I think the comparison is appropriate when we talk about our relation as Jews and Christians to Islam. We share their basic frame of reference and the meaning of their concepts, but with regard to some of the specific use they make of these concepts, we find ourselves very much at odds with them. Let me just take an example. In the Quran, the Bible of Islam, as we shall be seeing at this evening, I pick it up and I flip through and I find chapters titled Noah and Abraham and Joseph and Jesus. And this sounds very familiar. The cast is, to a very large extent, the same cast as we find in our Bible.

But the plot takes them very interesting and different turns. For example, in the Quran, we find that the Jews fall hopelessly away from monotheism and turn into idolaters. And as for Jesus, well, in the Quran, he doesn't die on the cross. He merely seems to, but actually with someone else. And so Jesus does not meet his death in that fashion according to the Quran. This perhaps illustrates my point that the basic meaning of the terms will be very familiar. But on the level of specifics, there will be plenty of things that we shall have to stretch in order to come to any sort of an insight into their meaning for other peoples because they will be very different from our own perspectives. But before we stand in judgment upon the accuracy or errors of the religion, let's try to understand.

Now, this is a religion which is often called Mohammedanism. You probably hear it turned by the name of the founder more than by its accurate name. Actually, this is inaccurate and really offensive to the Muslim. They say, Christians, well, you can call your religion after the name of your founder because you believe that Christ was God, so therefore he deserves to have the focus of the religion. But we do not believe Mohammed never claimed to be divine and we do not believe that he is divine and therefore to center the religion in a man who was a prophet, the greatest of the prophets, they would say, but still purely human is to divert it from its true emphasis. And therefore we don't like to have our religion called Mohammedanism. The true name is Islam.

Now, the etymology of this word is not altogether clear. Some say that it means striving after righteousness, but the most accepted meaning of this word etymologically is submission. And in a derivative sense also, peace. So gathering up these meanings, we can say that the literal meaning of Islam is the peace which comes from submitting one's life to God. Now, if this be the name of the religion, how did this religion come into being? Now, if we follow the general Western approach to this question, why we would begin by noting the economic and political cross-currence of Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries when Mohammed lived and out of these environmental factors build up a picture of the circumstances, which brought this religion into being? But if we look at it through Muslim eyes, the eyes of a believer in Islam, the question of origin takes on a very different cast.

Let's try that other way of looking at it, trying to see it from the standpoint of their approach. And if we ask the question from that point of view, how did Islam come into being, we go back to the very beginning. We go back to God. In the beginning, God, they would agree, 100%. Only they have a somewhat different name. Allah is the name for God in Islam. It's combined by joining the definite article, which means the to Allah, God, and so the literal meaning is the God. Note, not a God, because there is only one God, the God.

Now, when we go back to that point, God in the beginning created the word. This too, they would say, just as would we in our tradition. And after creating the world, the next thing is to create man. So he creates a first man. And the name of this first man, well, it's Adam. This is sounding very much like a Sunday school lesson, isn't it? But the interesting thing is to see how parallel these religions move for a considerable time. Adam, the first man, and then tracing it down from his descendants to Noah, and the son of Noah was Shen. Shen is the word from which Semite comes. So Semite literally is the son of Shen. And so they agree that they trace their ancestry back to Shen also. And then Shen and his descendants are traced down to Abraham, and still we're in the same tradition. Abraham marries Sarah.

Now, Sarah has no son, and Abraham wanting to continue his line. Abraham takes Hagar, because wife, and Hagar bears a son for him named Ishmael. And then Sarah has a son Isaac, and when Sarah has her son, jealousy arises with Ishmael and Hagar, and Ishmael is banished out of the tribe. Now, here we get our first split as far as this line of distance is concerned. See, all these happenings are taking place up here around Canaan. But when Ishmael is banished, according to the Islamic account, he goes down here into Arabia to a place which is now Mecca. And there he settles and grows up, and these then are the ancestors of the Muslims, whereas the ancestors of the descendants of Isaac become the Jews.

And this is the matter of the origin. Now, when we continue down with the line here from Ishmael, we come next to Muhammad. And now we've skipped many, many centuries from about 2000 or so of BC down to the 7th to 6th century AD when Muhammad lived. Now, his life is really quite uneventful, not dramatic in the least. His parents died when he was quite young. And he became a caravan trader managing the camels of Khadija, a wealthy widow as they would win their way up the coastal region in trade. Khadija, the wealthy widow, was 15 years his senior, but she was very much impressed by his personal and his abilities, and so she marries.

Well, things go along in a very uneventful way until the revelation comes to Muhammad. It was his habit to leave the haunts of men periodically and to retire to the mountain caves in order to give himself up completely to prayer and meditation. One night when he was asleep, the angel Gabriel came to him with a piece of silk brocade on which there was writing and said to him, recite. The command was repeated three times and culminates in the order recite in the name of thy Lord who created man from blood coagulated. The Lord is wondrous kind, who, by the pen, has taught mankind things they knew not being blind. Muhammad awaits from his sleep and is in despair. He's afraid that he's possessed by an evil spirit and he rushes out in order to throw himself over a precipice because he couldn't stand being in this situation. But on his way, he hears a voice from heaven summoning him to be an apostle, a prophet, and when he lifts up his eyes, he finds a figure standing astride of the horizon which turns him from his purpose and he stays rooted there until long after the messengers his wives sent have gone after him.

Well, thereafter he felt inspired time after time and always the situation was very much the same. There would be this building up of inward physical pressure in him and he would go into a state of trance of ecstasy and the words would flow out in a gush and a torn. The Arabs are noted for their memory. They had very little writing devices at that time and so they would remember what he said and copy this down on leaves, on bark, on old bones and it is in this way that the prophetic utterances of Muhammad are captured and preserved. They're gathered together in the Quran, which is the basic book of the Islamic religion. According to the Muslim account, the Quran actually was written in heaven and is contained on stone tablets there.

It was transmitted to Muhammad by direct revelation and every word according to the Orthodox view, every word of the Quran is sacred and eternally valid. It's composed of 114 chapters which vary in length and there's a rather odd mode of arrangement in ordering this. We don't find them arranged chronologically but rather they are arranged by length. After the first surah or chapter, which is the brief one and is embodied in the daily prayers, then it begins entirely by arrangement of length with the longest chapters first and then the chapters get shorter and shorter as you go towards the end. You can imagine the kind of order we would get out of our Bible if it had been compiled in that way simply in terms of the length of the chapters.

All these utterances then came from Muhammad when he was in the state of France and I think we ought to pause there to consider an argument which is frequently raised against Islam on this account. It has been conjectured that for this reason, Muhammad might have been an epileptic because he was given to these seizures. This, I must say, seems to me to be a gratuitous assumption and due to anti-Muslim prejudice rather than anything else. Prophets, it's true, are not normal people but this doesn't mean that we must describe their unnormal behavior to any morbid condition. If Muhammad had ever collapsed under stress or faded away when strong action of battle or controversy, when strong action was needed, there might be some justice to this claim but he never did.

And so those who deny his mental and his psychic stability, I think, are ignoring the overwhelming evidence of his crude appraisal of people and the circumstances which were going on in his day. The charge of epilepsy then is as groundless I myself and completely convinced is as groundless as it is offensive to the Muslims in silence. Now, what does this book teach the Quran? What are the teachings contained there in it? If I were to summarize them in a phrase, I would suggest that this is the religion of the straight path. In the opening surah or chapter which is recited in their prayers five times a day, we find these words.

Its praise belongs to God, Lord of the world, the compassionate, the merciful, King of the Day of Judgment, his thee we worship and thee we ask for help. Guide us in the straight path. Why straight? Why the straight path? Well, one meaning is perfectly obvious. It means the way which is not devious, not corrupt, and not crooked. But I think there's a deeper, there's another meaning to this idea of the straight path. And that is that the teachings contained in the Quran are really very explicit when you compare them with the teachings and other religious literature. In Islam, therefore, you tend to know very much where you stand. You know who you are, you know who God is, you know what your relation to God should be, and if you do transgress the ways you know what you should do.

It's the opposite of a kind of Kafka-esque world, where man is separated from his destination, the castle, and he can't quite get through. The lines are jammed, and he doesn't know who he's talking to, who's inside the castle, and he knows he's done something wrong, but he's not quite sure just what it is. Islam, when we come into it, has a kind of precision and orderliness, which is the opposite of the shifting, the lost, the uncertain. This is embodied, I think the idea is embodied in the traditional notion in Islam of a four-fold revelation. According to Muslims, God's first great revelation was to Abraham, and to Abraham he taught the idea of one God. Then the second stage was to Moses when he taught the idea of the Ten Commandments, then to Christ when he added the idea of love of one's neighbor.

But with Mohammed, we enter into the four stages. What could Mohammed add to monotheism, the Ten Commandments, and the love of neighbor? And the Muslims answer, he added how to love thy neighbor? What was needed was a spelling out of what the love of neighbor implied, and this is what they believe is to be found in the Quran. Let me put it just one other way. If you ask yourself, are you a good Christian? How do you know? If you're honest, almost have to say, well, maybe I'm trying, doing the best I can. But in Islam, I understand that the people know very clearly in the main whether they can answer that question yes or no. As long as they are really living up to the five pillars of Islam, the practices which we should be looking at next week, then they're qualified to answer it with a clear conscience.

Yes, I am a good Muslim. What are the elements of the straight path? Well, we'll be going into some of the details next week. But here, let me just list five to begin to get our orientation. Islam believes in God, one God, immaterial, omnipotent in his power, merciful, loving, the creator of all things. Second, Islam believes in charity to man and charity between. It believes in the third place in the subjugation of our passions. It gives leeway to the sexual impulse, to the inquisitive impulse, but these must be checked and not be allowed to get out of bounds. Fourth, it believes in a continual outpouring of man's heart in gratitude towards his creator who has made him and sustains him through the days of his years.

And finally, it believes in the accountability of man in the life after death. As they say, law without enforcement makes no sense, and therefore we must posit in the end the idea of a divine judgment. Now, how was this doctrine received? Well, at first it wasn't. People were very much indifferent to it, but it took ten years for Muhammad to get a handful of a dozen comers. But within a decade he had made his flight to Mecca, Medina, come back and conquered Mecca. Within a decade then he had conquered Mecca. Within a generation Islam had blanketed Arabia, and within two centuries it had spread throughout.

Northern Africa and up into Europe and had conquered almost all of Spain. Now, I like to close these talks, not with words of my own, but rather by letting the religion in question speak for itself. And so, tonight too, I would like to close by letting the Quran speak. But here we come into a problem. The scholars have found this to be the most difficult, perhaps, of all Bibles to translate into English. It's a book really which doesn't speak in English. More than any other, if one wants to get the flavor, the poetry, the passion of the Quran, one has to see the language, and one has to hear the language too.

And so, tonight, as we close with the words of the Quran, we shall do so also in the language of the Quran. I rely upon God to protect Me from evil. In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. By the morning hours and by the night when it is still us. My Lord has not forsaken thee, thy latter portion will be better than the Quran.

And barely thy Lord will give unto thee so that thou will be content. Praise the Lord. The word of Allah is true. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

Religions of man is produced by Washington University and KETC Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station and Production Center. The preceding program was distributed by the Educational Television and Radio Center. This is National Educational Television. Thank you.