exhorted to worship "the Lord of this house," that is, of the Ka'ba. Hence it is evident that Mahomet considered himself rather as a reformer than as a preacher of an altogether new religion. Similarly in dealing with ethical questions he often implies that the pagan notions of justice, honour, and propriety are to some extent valid. Thus, for instance, his repeated denunciations of avarice are quite in the spirit of the ancient Arabs, to whom the "miser" was an object of special abhorrence.
But in contradistinction to the ethical code of the heathen, which was mainly based upon tribal patriotism ('aṣabīya), Mahomet emphasises the universal obligations of morality, and above all the duty of forgiving injuries instead of avenging them. It is in his doctrine of the Judgment and the life to come that he departs most widely from the ordinary beliefs of the time. The heathen Arabs, like other primitive peoples, were familiar with the notion of a ghost, or wraith, which haunts, at least for a while, the resting-place of the dead body; but the idea of a future retribution was quite foreign to their habits of thought. The doctrine of the Resurrection, as it appears in the Koran, seems to be mainly derived from Christianity; that some details were borrowed from Judaism or Zoroastrianism is possible but can scarcely be proved. Mahomet, as we might have expected, conceives the Resurrection after the most crudely materialistic fashion; to him the reconstruction of the physical organism was an essential postulate of the future recompense. The descriptions of the Judgment itself and of the torments of the damned do not differ substantially from those which are found in popular Christian writings of medieval and modern times. On the other hand the delights of Paradise are often painted in colours to which neither Christianity nor Judaism affords any parallel.[1] But what especially characterises the older portions of the Koran is the constant emphasis laid on the nearness of the Resurrection and the Day of Judgment. Although Mahomet nowhere specifies any definite time, and when questioned on this point by his opponents always professed ignorance, it is clear that he lived in daily expectation of the great events which formed the main subject of his preaching. Nor is this at all inconsistent with the fact that some passages of the Koran seem to announce a special calamity which was to befall the Meccans for their unbelief, rather than a world-wide catastrophe. Similarly, it will be remembered, among the early Christians the expectation of the judgment
- ↑ It is remarkable that passages of this sort are almost entirely confined to the earlier chapters, which date from a time when the very notion of rewards and punishments after death was treated by the Meccans with derision, as the Prophet frequently complains. To suppose, with many European writers, that the early converts to Islām were attracted chiefly by the prospect of a material Paradise is therefore altogether unreasonable, since only those who had on other grounds accepted Mahomet as a prophet could believe in any Paradise whatsoever.
