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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[OCTOBER, 1903.
Muhammad's olaim, therefore, to divine inspiration, viewed at in the light of his own generation, cannot be held something out of the common and astonishing. When, however, he voiced his call to prophecy with moral earnestness and impressed the circle of his first proselytes with a spirit of ethical rigidity, it was not due so much to his so-called inspiration as the singular nature of the contents of his previsionary outpourings. For, while the clairvoyance of the Kahins concerned itself with the conditions of private life and touching matters of secondary moment, while Maslama's gift of prognostication was occupied with homilies and rules for the conduct of life, while that of El-Aswad to a great extent subserved political interests, Muhammad evinced the aim and ultimate purpose of his afflatus in announcing in barning words, to those around him, the "meno-tekel" of an approaching doomsday. This doctrine of the Judgment Day, which starts with the resurrection of the dead and ends with the division of the human race, one part being assigned the region of eternal felicity, the other the seat of the flaming abyss of inferno - this doctrine of the last day Muhammad shared with the Jewish-Christian concept of the same. But with him it is invested with a certain originality in that he contemplates it through the vision of prescience and proclaims it in the poetic phraseology of the Kabine.
The inculcation of the doctrine of doomsday is the pivot on which turns the entire system of primitive Islam. It was calculated to strike terrifying awe into the minds of his audience, to permanently turn towards and fix their thoughts on God, and to purge their demeanour in practical life of the barbarous taint of beathenism. Those who acknowledged the Judge of creation must abandon all belief in the Arabian gods of old. The omnipotence of the Lord of mankind and the worlds had no point of contact with the circumscribed power of the beathen deities, male and female. The former ruled over the latter, who were merely his subordinate creatures, if not empty inanities.
The oldest components of the Qorán lay more stress, on moral obligations than on dogmatic verities, for therein resided the source of internal purification and preparation for the world to come. Prayers were such a source, good works in a higher degree so, but alms was reckoned the supreme fount of purification. Even this precept at the first blush appears to possess slender title to originality, since it was formulated by Judaism and Christianity prior to Muhammad's toaching. The Jews had the identical term sakat to connote," means of purification." But it does not, therefore, follow that the Prophet borrowed it from Judo-Christianity, and, se to say, translated it into Arabic. The preacher of Meoca knew so little about Christians and Jews that, long after his first apparition, he still assumec a sympathiser and supporter in every Jew and Christian and in consequence expected that the truth of his teaching would be corroborated and countenanced by both.16 Ner was it till after his entry on the Medina period that he came in personal intercourse with the followers of both these relegions and learnt of the principles of their faith which divided them from Islam. Accordingly, what is apparently of Judo-Christian origin in Muhammad's first evaogel he must doubtless have acquired in an indirect or roundabout way; and the intermediary must be sought in the circle of those men whom Moslem tradition designates Hanits, and further describes as settlers in diverse places of Central Arabia, Mecca, &c. They were inclined to eschew the immemorial Arabian idolatry and the sacrificial feasts, to worship instead the God of Abraham, to đenonnce social abuses like the burying alive of new-born infants, and lastly to devote themselves to an ascetic mode of life. It will be evident therefore that we have to look upon the Hanife of mid-Arabis as the exponents of a monotheistio community arison on the confines of Christianity and Judaism.
In Hanifism, however, Muhammad saw but a preliminary step towards the sanctuary of his new dogma. He did not style himself a Hanif, and confined the epithet almost exclusively to Abraham. The consciousness, probably, of himself being a Prophet raised him above the relatively insignificant status of Hanif, and he was actuated by the ambition to see the reverence paid to him by his disciples deepen and to bring that awful homage in line with the circumstances amid
19 SAra 10, 94; 26, 19; 28, 52.
