MOHAMMED. MOHAMMEDANISM 547 " penitents ", men who strive to free themselves from sin. 1 They did not constitute a regular sect, and had in fact no fixed and organized views. They had, no doubt, inter course with one another, but were not a close society; they thought more of their own souls than of propaganda ; only in Medina they seem to have been more numerous. They rejected polytheism and acknowledged Allah, but not so much on intellectual grounds as on grounds of conscience. Faith in the one God was with them identical with pious resignation (Isldm) to his will ; their monotheism was most closely allied to the sense of responsibility and of a coming judgment ; it stood opposed to the worldly ideas of the idolaters, and was an impulse to upright and sin-avoiding walk. They were not theorists, but ascetics. It was the primitive ideas of Law and Gospel ("the religion of Abra ham") that lived again in them. They felt on the whole less attracted towards the developed forms of the religion of revelation ; they rather sought after some new form ; few of them attached themselves to existing religious communities. Mohammed, it would appear, came into connexion with these Hanifs through a cousin of his wife, Waraka b. Naufal, who was one of them. Their doctrines found a fruitful soil in his heart ; he was seized with a profound sense of dependence on the omnipresent and omnipotent Lord, and of responsibility towards him: Following the example of old Zaid b. Amr, he now frequently withdrew for considerable periods to the solitude of the bare and desolate Mount Hira, and meditated there with prayer and ascetic exercises. For years, perhaps, he went on in these purely individual exercises, without anything to dis tinguish him essentially from the others who held similar views. But in him the Haninte ideas lodged themselves in a natural temperament which had a sickly tendency to excitement and vision, and so produced a fermentation that ended in an explosion. 2 Thus he became a prophet ; he felt himself constrained to leave the silent circle of ascetics and make a propaganda for the truth. In this resolve he was unquestionably influenced by what he knew of the example of the Biblical prophets, perhaps also by the cir cumstance that a longing after a new founder of religion was diffused among the Hanifs, and found support in some dim acquaintance with the Messianic hopes of the Jews. Jewish That Mohammed did not independently produce his own ideas is indisputable ; nor is it to be doubted that he de- rived them from the Hanifs. But what was the ultimate source of these first motions towards Islam 1 In general they are ascribed to a Jewish source, Jews were very numerous in Hijaz and Yemen, and had perfectly free intercourse with the Arabs, to whom they undoubtedly imparted a quantity of Biblical and religious material. Mohammed HI particular was indebted to the Jews for almost all the stories and a great part of the laws of the Koran (laws of marriage, purity, etc.), and the theological language of Islam is full of Jewish words. But the ori ginal and productive forces of Islam did not spring from Judaism, least of all the ideas of the Judgment and of the inexorable demands set before the creature by his Creator, 1 Sprenger (p. 88 sq.) connects Hanif with 6)311, and expounds it per antiphrasin as lueus a non lucendo, on the ingenious fashion of A. Geiger. As tahannuth = tahannuf is the technical name of such solitary ascetic practices as Mohammed himself engaged in before his call, Hanif may be taken to mean a muta^annif by profession. The connexion between Aani/ and tahannufis certain, and it seems equally certain that tahannuf as an equivalent of tahannuth comes not from h/tnif but from hinth (for Am/), and means not to play the Hanif but to concern oneself with one s sin, to purge oneself of it. 2 It is disputed whether Mohammed was epileptic, cataleptic, hys teric, or what not ; Sprenger seems to think that the answer to this medical question is the key to the whole problem of Islam. It is certain that he had a tendency to see visions, and suffered from fits which threw him far a time into a swoon, without loss of inner con- nfluence. sciousness. which are so dominant in the older suras. A distinction must be drawn between the primitive impulses and the material added later ; Mohammed did not get his leaven from the Jews, they only supplied him afterwards with meal. Neither in truth can Christianity be viewed as the proper source of Islam Christianity, that is, in any of its great historical developments. The Arabs knew Greek, Syrian, and Abyssinian-Himyaritic churches ; manifold in fluences from these doubtless reached Islam, but in none of them did the idea of Judgment still stand as the central point of religion ; the living sense of divine reality ruling over the life was half extinguished by the developments of theology. But in the Syro- Baby Ionian desert, off the line of the church s main advance, primitive forms of Chris tianity, perhaps also of Essenism, still survived, which the course of church history had left untouched. To these belong on the one hand the Sabians (" Baptists," from jnv), on the other the numerous anchorets of these regions. The con nection of Islam with the Sabians appears from the fact that in Mecca and Taif its adherents were simply known as Sabians. 3 From them, however, were derived, it would seem, for the most part only externals, though the import ance of these must on no account be undervalued. The deepest influence exercised on the Hanifs, and through them on the Prophet, appears to have come from the an chorite ascetics. How popular they were with the Arabs, appears from the Bedouin poetry ; what power they exer cised over the minds even of the heathen, is proved by various episodes in the history of Ghassdn and Hira ; how well the Arabs knew the difference between them and the shaven clergy, is seen in the instructions of Abubekr to the commanders in the Syrian campaigns. It was not their doctrine that proved impressive, but the genuine earnests ness of their consecrated life, spent in preparation for the life to come, for the day of judgment, and forming the sharp est contrast to the profanity of heathenism. Ascesis and meditation were the chief points with the Hanifs also, and they are sometimes called by the same name with the Christian monks. 4 It can hardly be wrong to conclude that these nameless witnesses of the Gospel, unmentioned in church history, scattered the seed from which sprang the germ of Islam. The tradition gives a telling story of the way in which Moham- Mohammed at length came to proclaim openly what had med s long been living and working within him ; in other words, _ r how he became a prophet. Once, m the month of Rama dan, while he repeated his pious exercises and meditations on Mount Hira, the angel Gabriel came to him by night as he slept, held a silken scroll before him and compelled him, though he could not read, to recite what stood written on it. 5 This was the first descent of a passage of the heavenly book, the source of revelation from which Moses and Jesus and all prophets had drawn ; and so Mohammed was called to be a prophet The words with which Gabriel had summoned him to read, remained graven on his heart. They were the beginning of sur. xcvi.
- Ibn Hisham (p. 835) relates that the Banii Jadhima announced
their conversion to Islam to Khalid in the words, " We are become Sabians. " Renan, Etudes d histoire rel. (1863), p. 257, misunderstands this utterance. 4 Abu Amir is as often called Rahib as Hanif. All the accounts indicate that the Hanifs stood nearer to Christianity than to Judaism, not only in Taif but elsewhere. Interesting in the highest degree is a verse ascribed to Sakhr al-Ghay in the Hodhailian Poems, ed. Kose- garten 18, 11. A thundercloud is there described, the centre of which is an impenetrable mass ; only on the outer fringe a restless motion is discernible. "Its fringes on the mountain -ridge (al-Mala) are like Christians celebrating a banquet when they have found a Hanif (and so run to and fro in the restlessness of glad excitement)." 5 Of course any one can read in a vision. The question discussed even by Moslems, as to whether the Prophet could read or not, has at
least no place in this connexion.