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THE ORIGIN. OF THE QORAN.
261
JUNE, 1903.]
to another human being. If the concentration of exclusive rights and powers in the hands of a single individual, like Muhammad, guaranteed the successful issue of great political and marcial enterprises, all that he had won for himself was imperilled the moment the bearer of those extraordinary prerogatives was dead and baried. On dogmatic grounds it was beyond the authority of the Prophet to invest a successor with them, so that it was through no inadvertence of his that he failed to make the Qorán provide for his succession.
Hence the consternation into which the tidings of his death threw the believers is easily comprehensible. The most prominent of the companions acting in the interests of Islam, though on their own responsibility, presently assembled together and resolved to elect a provisional representative or Khalifa of the Prophet, without being themselves clear as to what extent it was possible to have, the latter represented at all. Their choice fell upon the modest Abu Beker, whose conception of his high office was only that of primus inter pares in the brotherhood. In his inauguratory sermon he said: "I have been made your superior, though I am not the best of you. If I act justly, support me, but if not, oppose me."42 Fate rendered his function easy for him in that he elected to continue the belligerent policy begun by Muhammad, whereby external events retarded the outbreak of internecine feuds. Abu Beker was succeeded by Omar whom he had recommended. His idea of the Khalifate was essentially different. He was the first to assume the title of "Prince of the Faithful," which signified not less an exalted dignity than it connoted a position of power. Both his successors, Othman and Ali, too, came to the Khalifate by popular suffrage. Bat soon their claims were repudiated, owing to the absence of a well-defined and acknowledged contral power. From the resultant civil wars of Islam sprang, on the one hand, a monarchy, and on the other a schism in the Church. In the eastern provinces of the Empire the wholly un-Qoranic doctrine of the transmissibility of the spiritual authority, gaining more and more ground, fostered the apparition of numerons Imams or leaders, who, on the most shadowy grounds, pretended to secular as well as religious hegemony. The west was for a time split into two halves. The first or Syria, following the example of Moawiya, their prince, saw in Islam a scourge of God for the contiguous kingdoms. The other half, which embraced the classic seats of Mecca and Medina and the first places of the birth and growth of Islam, Kufa and Basra, occupied itself diligently with the observance of the Qoranic canons and the collecting of the Prophet's oral traditions, aiming at the same time at political independence. The swords of Yezid and Abdel Malek once more united the two halves, calling into being a state governed by a hereditary and absolute potentate who was also the ecclesiastical pontiff. Subsequently the Islamic world rejoiced in such autocrats as Omar II. and Hisham devoted to the Qorán; but their free-thinking successors landed the house of the Omayyads, based on the might of arms, back into discredit. In the east the shibboleth of the Shias was, "The Khalifate must revert to the family of the Prophet." A revolutionary movement was set on foot. The wave of unrest passed over from one people to another till it swept the kingdom and the royal house of the Omayyads off the face of the earth. A descendant of the crafty uncle of Muhammad Abul Abbas, the Abbaside, was undeservedly elevated to the throne of the Khalifs. Now the Khalifate, in keeping with the spirit of Shiaism, laid claim at once to secular and religious suzerainty, and steadfastly maintained its hold on both, though political exigencies compelled the rulers to turn Sunni. But though this Khalifate was looked upon as a temporary institution, which was at no time upheld by a united Islam, the Abbasides wielded down to the time of their decline a spiritual authority which no member of the posterior dynasties, either of the east or the west, bedecked with the title of Khalif, had ever enjoyed.
While theological erudition toiled to define the term Khalifate, acknowledging to be the legitimate successor of the Prophet him alone who, being a scion of the Koreshite sept, combined the supreme virtues of knowledge and sense of justice with energy and bodily as well
42 Sayuli, History of the Khalifas, Cairo, 1305 A. H, p. 27.
