Islam, Her Moral And Spiritual Value: A Rational And Pyschological Study — John Shaqi
Islam, Her Moral And Spiritual Value: A Rational And Pyschological StudyLeonard, Arthur Glyn
Islamic
Islam, Her Moral And Spiritual Value: A Rational And Pyschological Study
Leonard, Arthur Glyn
Islam
child becomes what his teacher makes him, as he can neither distinguish,
discriminate nor judge for himself. But to make him Jew, Gentile or
Christian, the religion must be in him. Creed, in a word, is but the
view that is taken of natural religion by the ego. But a matter so
important as this, however, cannot here be entered into.
As it has been with all the great religious leaders of history, so too
it was with Mohammed. Fearing, yet venerating, the might, the majesty
and the goodness of God, the companionship that he most wanted was not
human but divine. Communion with Him, through his own thought and
through the great Infinity around him, was what his heart most desired.
A town Arab by birth and breeding, a Bedawin by feeling and instinct, he
was something more than a mere native of Arabia. Rather a son of men, an
apostle chosen out specially from among men, that he might bear to them
the message and truth of God.
“Men,” says Victor Hugo, “talk to themselves, speak to themselves, but
the external silence is not interrupted. There is a grand tumult;
everything speaks within us, excepting the mouth. The realities of the
soul, for all they are not visible and palpable, are not the less
realities.” The great reality, as I have shown, that obsessed Mohammed
was God. Though invisible in person or even in spirit, God was none the
less visible and palpable to him as much in the finest speck of sand as
in the consuming glory of the sun. In the mocking spectres of the night,
as well as in the shifting shadows of the morning, the might and majesty
of Allah was supreme. In the dead silence of human solitude, the grand
tumult within him was only grand and tumultuous because God talked to
him and he to God in the suppressed sibilance of hushed and awesome
whisperings. “Diamonds are only found in the darkness of the earth;
truths are only found in the depths of the thought.” As it seemed to
Father Madeline, the ex-convict Jean Valjean, so it appeared to
Mohammed, “that after descending into these depths, after groping for
some time in the densest of this darkness, he had found one of these
diamonds, one of these truths, which he held in his hand, and which
dazzled his eyes when he looked at it.” The brilliant which Mohammed
searched for was the truth--the greatest brilliant of all! The truth
that he found as it appeared to him was God. Thus he immolated his whole
being to the will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone.
Like Pascal, Mohammed believed that “one can be quite sure that there is
a God without knowing what He is.” Or in the words of Hobbes: “Forasmuch
as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no
conception or image of the Deity, except only this, that _there is a
God_.” This in sense if not in word was Mohammed’s idea of God as he
tried to conceive Him. For him it was sufficient that God was the only
God--the Creator and the Controller of the universe! “There are touching
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