faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is incident, and no more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian world was ripe proceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite or a Jew. For in the northern Arabian desert there were the Christian states of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and in the Sabæan South there were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. The Congress of Princes at Marib[1] was attended by hardly a single pagan, and shortly after this date South Arabia came under Persian — that is, Mazdaist — government. Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic that had long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions. The little of this paganism that filtered into the Koran was later explained away by the Commentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian intellect. At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one.[2] Actually, it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even now imagined) a "migration of peoples" proceeding from the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Irak who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front-rank comrade of to-morrow. Most of the "Arabs" who in 717 attacked Constantinople for the first time, had been born Christians. About 650 Byzantine literature[3] quite suddenly vanished, and the deeper meaning of the fact has so far never been noticed — it was just that the Arabian literature took up the tale. The soul of the Magian Culture found at last its true expression in Islam, and therewith became truly the "Arabian," free thenceforth from all bondage to the Pseudomorphosis. The Iconoclastic movement, led by Islam, but long prepared by Monophysites and Jews, advanced to and even beyond Byzantium, where the Syrian Leo III (717-41) raised this Puritan movement of Islamic-Christian sects — the Paulicians about 650 and the Bogomils later[4] — to predominance.
The great figures of Mohammed's entourage, such as Abu Bekr and Omar, are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English Revolution, and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before and about the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination the guarantee that they were God's
- ↑ 542. See p. 197.
- ↑ "Mahommedanism must be regarded as an eccentric heretical form of Eastern Christianity. This in fact was the ancient mode of regarding Mahommet. He was considered, not in the light of the founder of a new religion, but rather as one of the chief heresiarchs of the Church. Among them he is placed by Dante in the "Inferno." Dean Stanley, Eastern Church (1861), Lecture VIII. — Tr.
- ↑ Krumbacher, Byzant. Literaturgesch., p. 12.
- ↑ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., under these names. — Tr.
