DARK HEROINES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2425, 5 September 1900, Page 68

DARK HEROINES.

By Jessie Mackay.

III.— KHADIJAH OF ARABIA. (Concluded. )

The spiritual storm and darkness through which Mohammed passed after his first vision on Mount Hira is supposed to have lasted tAVO years, as Are have seen. At the end of that time he believed that th"c Angel Gabriel again appeared to him. In deep agitation he rushed' to Khadijah, crying,

" Wrap me up", wrap me up ! " an allusion to some customary preparation for his fits. The vision came fully upon him, and in this swoon the first part of the Koran — not the first as printed, however — Avas dictated to him by the angelic visitant. The disjointed and obscure nature oi that extraordinary volume is oAving partly to the manner in Avliich it thus Avas projected piece alter piece on the mind ot the Prophet, partiy to the haphazard Avay in which alter jiis cteath these fragments were gathered irom all manner oi unlikely places and throAvn into a book. Once fixed, Moslem superstition forbade any • transposing of the sabred text. Scholars aylio feared not the curse oi Islam," however, have studied the Koran, and have found that the purest and loitiest teaching in it belongs to^ these early _ visions ; the chapters belonging to a later period being more "dogmatic, fierce, and polemical. If these portions Avere not absolutely invented, as alleged by his enemies, they were certainly highly coloured by the Prophet's human conscicuisness.

This second vision assured Mohammed of the ceitainty of his call, and in this joyful consciousness Le began the stupendous work of converting Arabia. Need it be said that the first believer was the faithful Khadijah? Next followed the fiery young Ali, then but 16,— the cousin' and afterwards the son-in-law of Mohammed ; the same Ali whose house led the Persian mystics who nearly a generation later parted from Islam proper in the deadly schism of the SLiah revolt. Then Mohammed's freed slave, Seid, completed the trio who stood alone with the Prophet for months if not years. It was not Mohammed's wish to revolutionise Arabian religion, but to reform it, — to sweep away the cobwebs of idolatry and superstition that he conceived Jiad gathered since the primeval purity of Abraham's day. His teaching was not materially different from the beliefs current among the Hanifs ; tLe difference lay in the declaration of his own supreme authority as God's Prophet, and in his pushing these doctrines amid a stolid and 'scornful people. The Koraish, indeed, seemed far from the kernel of this new teaching, — that the one Creator watched unceasingly over man, and demanded his undivided worship. Like latter Athens in their 'light perfunctory jpolytheism and their innate scepticism, their tribal pride and love of gain were yet as strong as those of Diana's idol-merchants at 3iphesu&. The worship of the Kaaba and the Meccan goddesses Al-Lat, Al-Ozza, and Manat, was indeed a profitable thing to the bargainloving pilgrims and shrewd sacerdotalists of the Hijaz. Mohammed, the epileptic dreamer of Mount Hira, was a laughing stock ; Mohammed, the reformer, was a menace. And the Prophet had not learnt then that ready compromise which afterwards incorporated* the Kaaba, Zem Zem. and other sacred objects in the new religion, and ensured them thus an added veneration to this day. This period at Mecca between the Call and the Flight, ealculated/b"y some at 10 years, by others at 12, was the noblest part of the Prophet's life : and was a time to try the very mettle of a demigod. The jeering, the insutt, the increasing contumely from his townsmen as he slowly gained converts must have been worse than death to a man of Mohammed's tejnper. His noble birth alone saved himself from personal danger ; no fear of family reprisal protected his humbler disciples, whose lives were made so bitter that nearly all fled over the Red Sea to Aby&sinia, where the native Christian Church, fantastic and debased as it had already bscome, was much more merciful and congenial to the persecuted reformers than the fierce idolaters of Mecca. Mohammed remained at his post among the Koraish some time longer. When they found that threat and insult did not deter him from his mission, they came to his uncle, Abu Talib, the keeper of the Kaaba, who, though not a convert, had remained on friendly terms with his nephew. They demanded that he should declare his belief in Mohammed or restrain him from preaching. Abu Talib put the case before him, and implored him for both tLeir sakes to give up so headstrong and perilous a course. Mohammed was cut to the heart at the breach apparently impending bstween himself and the man who had been as a father to him ; but he stood firm, as Luther stood in a later day: —

"Though they gave me the sun in my right Land and the moon in my left, to bring me back from my undertaking, yet will I not pause till the Lord carry my cause to victory, or till I die for it." So saying, with a passionate burst of tears, he turned to leave his kln&man. But the noble old Arab called frim back with these words: — "Go in peace, &on of my brother, and say what them* wilt, for, bjGod, I will on no condition abandon thee."

Such episodes as this, scattered through, this first and noblest decade of Islam, explain and justify the seemingly extraordinary admiration of the grim Puritan Carlyle for a man whose name lias been regarded as synonymous with political rancour and sensual indulgence. But, indeed, so far, there seems no possible ground for doubting the absolute sincerity of the Prophet ; the yielding to temptatior in once appeasing the Koraish by confessing their goddesses to be divine intercessors being atoned for by bitter repentance and a retraction that meant a hopeless breach with Mecca.

The giant intellect of Oarlyle, in seizing on the ego of the Prophet^ aparl fxom. tho

excrescences of an abnormal mentality and the later vagaries" of a humanity tempted pnd deceived by the assumption of semideity, seizes also., oh the, stronghold, of- his; endurance "in 'this time- of- storm and stress — namely, the unfailing faith and kindness of his wife. Too little at times did tLe Avise Western reck of living -women, their strength and their weakness ; but his pen lingers lovingly over the name of this grand dead Arabian — " the good Khadijah,'' as he calk her again and again. Not a word has he for Ayesha, the imperious beauty who usurped the title " Mother of the Faith," but he speaks truly of the crowning gift of Khadijah .to Mohammed, — the priceless unfeignable faith that has no ie?erve. There is a time in the history of every great soul when it must reneAV itself in such a faith from another human soul, be that other great or small, — a time Avhen home and name and love itself are as straAVs in comparison. And this did Khadijah offer to the reviled and ionely sear of God, fighting the forces -of darkness. One fancies that hers Avas no creative mind ; that no pregnant words of hers dropped in the Prophet's ear were the seeds of any doctrine ; rather one thinks of hfic 1 as the deAv from heaven that softly nourishes all seeds?. And her reward Avas sure ar.d fitting, — fhe reward of opportune death, ere yet the great soul in whom she trusted, fell away into. the .certain. condem T nation of aped divinity.. Some time about, her 65th year she died, the only aad'wellbeloved Avife o. tha Prophet. Blow tame on blow. The good Abu Talib, uncle of Ali, died not long after. The malice of the Meccan s Avas too heavy on the broken man ; he determined on flight to Medina, a rich city in the province of Nejd. In 622 A.n. the Flight of He<jira fixed the date from which Islam reckons to this day. Yet — such is the faith of men and prophets —two months after the death of Khadijah, Mohammed married a certain widow Sanda ; s-oon after that he married the lovely Ayesha, and others Avhose names aie forgotten.

It is no part of this record hoAV the cause of Islam prospered, at Medina, and spread like a blaze Gver the .aAvakened country, — Low Mohammed quarrelled bitterly with his former friends, the Jews and the Christians, — how his clannish Arab soul turned again to the reconciled Koraish. He entered Mecca again in triumph. — not the bright shreAvd honest shepherd youth of former days, — not the upright God-seek-ing Hanif of Mount Hira ; a far other Mohammed Avas this Avho came to sit in the place -of 'Abraham and of Moses. And this Mam, spreading fast at the point of the sword, was not the Islam of the Hanifs, those gentle eremites of the desert.

So long asto it was ; and yet one rejoices that Khadijah in her grave among the panel hills of Mecca, saw none of thess thing?. Yet she was not forgotten. When Ayesha in the insolence of her ycuth and beauty asked the Prophet if he did not love lier batter than the plain elderly wicloav, he replied, "No, by Allah! She believed in me Avhen none ehe would believe. In the Avhole Avorld I had but one friend, and she Avas that."