THE MOSLEM WORLD

NOBLER than paganism; cheaper than Christianity." So, last week, an Anglican bishop in a London speech, described the message of Islam.

London (and all Christendom) is newly aware of Islam. The shouts of Teheran mobs, the shot that killed King Abdullah, echo years, the world's chancelleries. As it has for 1,300 years, the riddle of Islam still confronts the West. It stands there, some 300 million strong, not giving an inch from Casablanca to the Sulu Sea.

Islam no longer presses upon the West with the all-conquering armies that swept east to India and west to North Africa's Atlas Mountains within 50 years of its founder's death in 632.

Long gone is its eminence in science, law, commerce. Islam is poor, a sad fate for the only great religion founded by a successful businessman. Islam is divided and headless, a painful fate for a religion founded by a first-rate practical politician.

Islam is militarily feeble, a disgrace to a religion that so eagerly took up the sword. Islam is intellectually stagnant, an ironic punishment for a religion which was founded upon an idea which at centuries carried the lamp of learning, and then, at the crisis of its history, deliberately turned its back upon reason as the enemy of faith.

Yet Islam in adversity is as great a marvel of impervious defense as it once was a marvel of invincible expansion. It survived three centuries of almost complete political and economic subjugation by alien powers. Generations of Christian mission aries beat upon it without making a dent. Year after year, the converts to Islam far outnumber the apostates from Islam.

Twelve of the world's nations have Moslem majorities. These lands may be the area of decision in the struggle between the West and Communism. If either of the great forces wins Islam as ally, the scale of power is tipped. To the West, opportunity beckons from one side of Islam -- its God, its acceptance of the moral code, its protection of private property. To the Kremlin, opportunity beckons from another side of Islam -- its poverty and corruption, its long acceptance of tyranny, its ingrained hatred of Christendom.

Much of the riddle of Islam -- what it is, what makes it strong, what makes it weak -- is derived from the personality and experience of its founder.

The Old Home Town

Mohammed and his birthplace owe a lot to each other. In his day -- the 7th Century A.D. -- Mecca was the main transfer point between southern Arabia and Syria. Mohammed, an or phan member of a major Meccan clan, entered the city's chief industry, cross-desert transport, and did well. He married his boss, Khadija, a widow some years older than he. He was devoted to her as long as she lived, and she was his first convert when he began going out into the desert and coming back with strange ideas about religion. The caravans to Mecca brought many tribes with many gods, and Mecca welcomed them all; the city contained the shrines of 360 deities. In addition to the regular business traffic, Mecca was host to pilgrims from all Arabia worshiping at these shrines. One of them was the Kaaba, a little building housing a stone which was venerated as a fetish sacred to Allah. To his fellow magnates of Mecca, Mohammed proposed nothing less than the sole worship of Allah and the abolition of all other gods.

In Mecca, this was a far more revolutionary proposal than it would have been elsewhere in the pagan world. Polytheism was at the heart of Mecca's economic and social life. If Mecca took a strong stand for a particular god, Mecca's pilgrim business would die. The practical choice for Mecca was polytheism or, if it elected monotheism, the political conquest of all Arabia and the imposition of its one-God religion. To a man, the Mec can leaders rejected Mohammed. But he persisted even after he gradually came to realize that his spiritual kingdom did not have a of of spreading unless it also achieved a kingdom of this world. The political crisis of Christianity had not come until the 4th Century with the conversion of Constantine; Islam's political crisis, confronting Mohammed at the start of his mission, colored all his teaching and all the subsequent his tory of Islam. Separation of God and Caesar, church and state, would always be alien and painful to Islam. Islam would always be as much a way of organizing society as it was a way of worshiping God.

A Practical Man

For 20 years Mohammed, with a handful of followers, struggled vainly in Mecca to convince the town leaders that there was no God but Allah. During these years he began to produce the Koran, which he said was not written by him but by God, and transmitted to him by the Angel Gabriel.

To 20th Century unbelievers the Koran seems a most uneven book; ethical and religious ideas of a high order sparkle amid dreary ruminations of a desert Dorothy Dix. Yet among Mo hammed's contemporaries (and among Arabs today) the style of the Koran was considered superb.

The main religious influences on Mohammed were Jewish and Christian. From time to time, God sent prophets to warn mankind against idolatry. Abraham and Christ were two of the greatest; Mohammed was the last, "the Seal of the Prophets." He considered his teaching very close to Christianity, completely missed Christianity's key point: the Divine Redeemer.

A practical businessman, Mohammed believed in success. He thought that he was defending the Christians against the Jews when he asserted that the Christians invented the story of the Crucifixion, which he regarded as a shameful end for a great prophet. Christ, he said, actually slipped away to heaven and another man was crucified in his place.

Judgment Day

The difference between monotheism and polytheism is not just a matter of arithmetic. Polytheism assumes several divine wills, divergent, possibly conflicting. The polytheist is not surprised the world seems capricious, illogical, anarchic. The man who says there is one God also says that there is one divine will and one truth. Nature, somehow, must make sense. Men are obliged to obey God's law.

In this way monotheism led Mohammed to ethics. Like the Jews, he interpreted the First Commandment so strictly that Moslems were forbidden to make any kind of picture or "image," and the ban holds today. He forbade the use of alcohol, and the majority of Moslems have obeyed this prohibition through the centuries. (Today, most well-to-do Moslems who have social contact with Westerners do drink.) Mohammed sternly forbade sexual promiscuity, but for males this was greatly modified by permitting men to have as many as four wives, to divorce them at will, and to keep concubines in addition. In practice, most Moslems have one wife, no concubine; divorce is far less common than in the U.S.

On the Last Day, the bodies of all men would rise from the dead to undergo a Last Judgment of a merciful God, the Compassionate One. Mohammed would be on hand to intercede for the faithful.

Monotheism and the Last Judgment are the only important Mohammedan doctrines. Beyond these, the theology of Islam is as bare of major furniture as the inside of a mosque. Mosques are often decorated with intricately patterned and endlessly repeated geometrical designs. Similarly, Moslem teaching runs on about the hours and posture for prayers, when and how to perform ablutions and other helpful hints on morals, ritual and etiquette.

Success Story

Mohammed's success began when the city of Medina, torn by strife between two tribes, asked him to come and rule it. In 622, sending his followers on ahead, he transferred to Medina. This point, the Hegira, is the beginning of the Moslem calendar.

Immediately, Mohammed put the Medinans to work, raiding caravans, converting pagans, blockading Mecca from the north. In 630, Mecca gave in. As the Meccan leaders had foreseen, Mohammed had to conquer all Arabia to make the conversion of Mecca stick. This he did -- brilliantly -- before his death in 632.

Before his death, he made Mecca, and especially the Kaaba, a center of veneration that was to draw a thousand times more pilgrims than had ever worshiped at Mecca's polytheist shrines.

One other act of Mohammed stands out as of permanent his torical importance. When he captured the Christian settlement of Aylah, he found that he did not have enough followers to work the land. He made no effort to force the conversion of the Christians or to interfere in their communal government. He merely exacted a tribute from them. This policy of toleration became one of the main keys to Islam's astounding success.

"Islam or the sword" was his policy toward pagans. That Islam offered this harsh choice to Jews or Christians ("People of the Book") is a canard of Christian propagandists.

The Years of Conquest

Mohammed neglected to set up a succession, and his oldest and closest associates chose as Caliph [successor] Abu Bakr, who immediately directed the Moslem breakout from the Arabian Peninsula. The Arabs' two great neighbors, the Persian and Byzantine empires, were exhausted by long wars.

The Moslems defeated both, swept forward so rapidly that they could not possibly stop to convert or even to govern the people they conquered. They applied the Aylah treatment: tribute and religious freedom. In some periods, the tribute from unbelievers poured in so fast that the Caliphs were not interested a conversion. The religious leaders of Islam formed a body called the Ulema, learned in the Koran and the Sharia [law]. They tended to be manuscript-eaters, verbal hair-splitters, not a type useful in missionary work. So far as the official religious leadership was concerned, the victories of Islam might have added up to no more than an ephemeral Arab conquest.

But Mohammed had been not only a businessman, but a businessman who saw visions. Thousands of his followers had the same mysticism, the same zeal.

As the centuries passed, these mystical Moslems became known as sufis (from their garb of suf, or undyed wool). They were loosely organized around leaders, or saints, who sought from the Koran not learning, but direct "experience" of God.

Sufism, loosely parallel to the monastic movement in Christen dom, provided the driving power of internal and external missionary work.

No sticklers for the letter of the law, the sufis met the un believer as near as they could to his own doctrinal ground. No doubt Islam suffered some theological dilution in this process, but its tribes increased wonderfully. Followers of sufism converted the animist Berbers of North Africa, and later the Turks, who broke out of Asia conquering the Arabs and great Constantinople as well. Sufism, carried largely by Moslem merchants, converted Sumatra, Java, Malaya, all without any military help from the centers of Islam.

The Rejection of the West

Simple theology, plural marriage, the promise and threat of mystics -- judgment, the these were all military part of a tradition, the beautifully toleration and balanced the sufi machine which made converts faster and more smoothly than Christianity ever did in its most blessed days. In most areas where Moslems conquered Christians, the bulk of the people eventually be came Moslem.* Where Christians conquered Moslems few of the people embraced Christianity.

By 732, the Moslems reached their high-water mark in the West when Charles Martel beat them at Tours, 135 miles south west of Paris. For centuries more they held Spain, Portugal, Sicily. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent was at the gates of Vienna.

Neither Mohammed nor any of his "Companions" had much contact with the world of Greek thought; there was no St. Paul among them. But many of the converts in Syria and North Africa were thoroughly Hellenized. At first, Islam allowed the Hellenists to apply reason to problems of law and ethics. Islam, -- indeed, especially renewed with Aristotle -- Christendom's and out contact of with this Greek renewal philosophy flowed Aquinas' philosophy and, later, the Renaissance. From the first the Ulema had been suspicious of all legal and ethical judgments based upon reason. The learned doctors held that the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet were the only sources of truth.

This issue between the Hellenists and the custodians of the sacred scripts was in doubt until the 12th Century. It was decided by al-Ghazali, a teacher of vast learning and restless piety. He became a sufi and wrote a book called The Decay of the Philosophers, in which he rejected philosophy, pointing out the numerous occasions on which one philosopher contradicted another. A hundred years later, Averraes, greatest of the Hellenized Moslem thinkers, answered al-Ghazali with a book called The Decay of the Decay, pointing out the numerous occasions on which al-Ghazali had contradicted himself. On points, Averraes won the argument -- but al-Ghazali won Islam.

This decision was the more important because Islam, with its lean and rigid theological structure, needed a systematic philosophy to help it to meet new situations. After Islam was de-Hellenized and thrown back upon the old texts, it tended to resist all change, because the inflexible scriptures were hard to apply.

This reactionary social outlook has a lot to do with what ails Islam today. The wretched fellahin of Egypt can thank al-Ghazali for part of their lot.

The Major Sects

Islam had other troubles. The identity of church and state meant that political fissures became religious schisms and, occasionally, vice versa. The first and greatest split came over the succession. Ali, the fourth Caliph, was the husband of Mohammed's daughter, Fatima. After a turbulent reign, Ali was assassinated and his partisans later claimed that he should have been the first Caliph and that the succession had to pass through the "seed of the Prophet." Followers of this doctrine (mostly non-Arabs) became known as Shiites; today they dominate Iran. Members of the main body of Orthodox Islam are called Sunnites.

Quarrels among the descendants of the Prophet, assassination and civil war have marked every century including the present. These family claims to spiritual leadership of Islam are history's best argument for the celibacy of the clergy -- or at least of major prophets.

Beard Stroking

The impetus which Christendom (thanks largely to Islam) received from its renewed contact with Greek thought pushed Europe into an era of political and economic expansion and Islam fell into the shadow of the European empires. In the 19th Century, some Moslem leaders began to preach a Pan-Islamic revival, but this movement was broken by the rise of nationalism among Moslem peoples. In World War I the Arabs broke away from Turkish domination. Prostrate Turkey was revived by Kemal Atatuerk, who achieved a separation of church and state, ended the Caliphate and banished religious leaders from public life.

Noting this and similar movements in the Moslem world, some observers thought that Islam was ready to go down beneath the tides of Western secularism. On the contrary, there is a new religious energy in Islam. In Turkey, the fez, banished by Atatuerk, appears again as the badge of the Moslem. Men let their beards grow because the Prophet said, "Trim your mustaches and grow your beards." Both Turkey's political parties play up to religious sentiment, a process known in Istanbul as "stroking the beards." Without rejecting Islam, the Turks are making rapid strides toward progressive, democratic nationalism. To the east, one of the newest Moslem states, Pakistan, tries hard to apply the teachings of the Prophet to life in the 20th Century. Pakistan's Premier, Liaquat Ali Khan, is probably the ablest Moslem political leader in office today.

Except for Pakistan and Turkey, there are few hopeful signs in Islam. Caught in the tragedy of its history, Islam is strong enough to hold its millions, perhaps not strong enough to adapt itself to the changes that must come.

* There are many exceptions: more than half of Lebanon and 20% of Syria is Christian.

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