What Has Religion Done For Mankind?

CHAPTER XXII

Islam, Mohammed's Religion of Submission

JOHN the Third (A.D. 561-574) was pope of Rome when the founder of Islam was born. He was Kutam, the son of Abdallah, but before his call to religious reform he came to be named Mohammed, meaning "the Praised One". His system of religion (or, din) is generally called after this name, "Mohammedanism," but those who practice it prefer to call it "Islam", which means "resignation" or "entire submission", because it teaches man's entire duty is submission to God's will. Its adherents are called Moslems.

² The Mohammedan era dates from 622, the year of Mohammed's flight or hegíra from Mecca to Yathrib, which was then renamed in his honor Medinat al nabi, "city of the prophet," or, short, Medina. Mohammed was born at Mecca A.D. 570, or possibly 562 "the year of the elephant". He belonged to the family of Hashim, which claimed lineal descent from Ishmael, Abraham's son by Hagar, the Egyptian slave girl of Abraham's wife Sarah. Except that Mohammed was a caravan conductor, little is known of his early life until he married his employer, Khadijah, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior. By her he had seven children.

³ Disturbed by the idolatrous practices of the people about him who were infected with animism, tending to polytheism, Mohammed desired to bring them to a higher level of belief and practice. He periodically sought solitude for meditation. It was while he was in a cave outside of Mecca that he felt his call to be a prophet came to him. At once he began to preach that there was just one God, the Creator, Allah, and that there were rewards for believers in him in paradise and punishment for the wicked in the traditional "hell". The gist of his message was, "There is no god but Allah; and Mohammed is his prophet." His ideas he got largely from the impression which both Judaism and the apostate Christianity of the sixth century had made upon him. From stories he heard at the lips of Christian apostates he supposed that their trinity was made up of Jehovah, Mary and Jesus. It is doubtful if he read any of the Bible itself to get the truth.

⁴ Three years before he fled from Mecca to Medina his wife Khadijah died. He now acquired a number of wives, whether for political reasons or for sexual gratification. The wars he waged against the Jews in Medina and in other parts of Arabia were marked by great cruelty on his side, also the conflicts which he carried on against several Arabian tribes allied with the Meccans. In 630 he broke his treaty of peace with Mecca, and suddenly, without any formal declaration of war, he surprised that city at the head of 10,000 men. The city magistrates were obliged to submit

to him and they acknowledged him not only as the secular ruler but also as the plenipotentiary of the Deity.

⁵ Through this victory the religion of Mohammed was put in a secure position in Arabia. After this he went out and defeated the enemies who came against him. He sent his envoys to neighboring lands and commanded their submission. He did not win their sincere conversion to Islam, and his war with the Byzantines ended unfavorably. On June 8, 632, he died at Medina, in the lap of Ayesha, his favorite wife. As his religious writings he left behind him the Koran (meaning "Recitation"), which he claimed to be God's word transmitted to him through the angel Gabriel. However, what writings he left did not satisfy all the needs of his followers, and hence much Islamic teaching was built up after his death.

⁶ Mohammed's first successor (caliph) was his father-in-law Abu Bekr. All first four of the orthodox caliphs were friends of Mohammed, namely, Abu Bekr, Omar, Othman and Ali. The office,

dignity and dominion of a caliph was called a caliphate. In course of time rival caliphates were established by dissenters. Under Omar the spread of Mohammedanism by the literal sword was unbelievably swift. The Syrian capital Damascus fell in 635; Jerusalem in 636. Persia yielded the Euphrates region in 637, and Egypt yielded her submission in 640. Before Omar fell at an assassin's hand in 644 he had pushed the power of the Moslems to India's very borders.

⁷ Also westward the Mohammedan armies swept, and all northern Africa came into their hands, and even Spain. It was first in 732, a hundred years after Mohammed died, that they met a decisive defeat at Tours, France, by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne. But the Moslem power continued to threaten Christendom. In Spain the Western Caliphate of Cordoba lasted till 1301. In 1492 the last kingdom of the Mohammedan Moors, at Granada, was conquered by the Spanish King Ferdinand V. Eastward, the Mohammedan Turks besieged Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683.

⁸ Islam spread clear into China. In 1258 the Mongol Hulagu came and sacked Baghdad and wiped out the caliph and his family. Moving westward, he was checked by the Egyptian Mamelukes and forced to retire to Persia. But fifty years later the Mongols embraced Islam and made it the state religion. One of their descendants, Baber, founded a great Moslem empire in India, and today we have as one result the Moslem Republic of Pakistan. In the sixteenth century, after the conquest of Egypt, the sultans of Turkey assumed the title of Caliph. It continued in their line till March 2, 1924, when the new Turkish Republic abolished it. Moslem wars against the infidels or unbelievers were called jiháds, holy wars. The last jihád was called by the Ottoman Caliph of Turkey, in 1914, when that country joined the German Kaiser in World War I. It proved a complete failure, and Palestine was lost to Turkey. Still Mohammedanism predominates there today, and the Mosque of Omar still stands in Jerusalem where once the temple of Solomon stood. Mosque means a "house of prayer" for the Moslems.

⁹ When the Jews rejected Mohammed's fiery preaching, he substituted Mecca for Jerusalem as the holy city toward which Moslems turned to pray. This flattered the people of Mecca, which was already a city of pilgrimage for those who came there to worship the black meteorite stone in its Kaaba or cubical receptacle. Against the worship of this Kaaba stone Mohammed had once preached, but now, compromising, he made it a part of his religious system, so that one of the

duties laid on each Moslem was to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during his lifetime and do religious acts toward the stone, including kissing it seven times. Such pilgrimages had the effect of binding the Mohammedan world together.

¹⁰ Mohammed was exalted to be the seventh, the last and the greatest of Allah's prophets. Those preceding him were Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon and Jesus. Adam was said to have repented of his sin in Eden and to have obtained the forgiveness of Allah without the need of any propitiatory sacrifice and to have been made God's first prophet and then gone to heaven. Of the above prophets each one, with the exception of Solomon, was specially commissioned to proclaim new laws and a new dispensation, which did away with the preceding ones. Thus Mohammed did away with the dispensation inaugurated by Jesus Christ. He declared for the unity of God or Allah, and pronounced the trinity of Christendom, which made Jesus Christ the second person of a triune god, a blasphemous fiction of false priests. God was declared to have no offspring, and hence Jesus was not accepted as the Son of God. Of the need of a human sin offering to free mankind of the disability of inherited sin and death there is no mention in the Koran.

¹¹ The Koran or Mohammedan Bible is made up of 114 suras (chapters), each comprising a single revelation. It is a conglomeration of legends drawn from unscriptural Jewish traditions and from other sources, and of laws. Despite all its contradictions and its conflict with proved sci-

ence it is greatly reverenced by devout Moslems and is constantly read by them. But their sincere acceptance of it as the last word of God through Mohammed does not make it true or right. Before Mohammed Paul the Christian apostle had written: "Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, even as it is written [at Psalm 51:4]: That you might be vindicated in your words and might win when you are being judged.'" (Romans 3:4, NW) God cannot lie or contradict himself but speaks the eternal truth. Since he is accepted as having raised up Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus as prophets and hence to have spoken by them, he would not by a later prophet than them contradict what he had earlier said by them, even though his revelation by each of these successive prophets did introduce a new dispensation by each prophet. He would always harmonize with himself.

¹² In the garden of Eden while the sinner Adam was listening God foretold that he would raise up a Seed to his woman and that this Seed would be bruised at the heel by the Serpent but would, in turn, bruise the Serpent's head. Noah carried this divine Edenic prophecy across the Flood, and his great-grandson Abraham came to the knowledge of it. Then God disclosed to Abraham that the Promised Seed would be through him, saying: "In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed." (Genesis 3:15; 12:3) Abraham had first a son by Hagar, the Egyptian servant girl, and years later a son by his true wife Sarah. Hagar's son was named Ishmael, and Sarah's, Isaac. But God rejected the older Ishmael from being the son in

whose line of descent the Promised Seed was to come. He said to Abraham: "What will be called 'your seed' will be through Isaac." And at the time that Abraham proceeded to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice in obedience to God's command, God swore by himself and said to Abraham: "In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." —Genesis 21:12; 22:15-18; Hebrews 11:17,18, NW.

¹³ Since Mohammed was a descendant of Abraham, not through Isaac, but through Ishmael, he could not be the prophet through whom all nations are to be blessed. Mohammed claimed that the writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures falsified the record about Jesus, but this claim is not borne out. We have papyrus manuscripts containing the writings of Christ's disciples that go back as far as the second century A.D., and these testify to the genuineness of the Christian Greek Scriptures as we have them today. The Christian apostle Peter definitely identified Jesus Christ as the Promised Seed of Abraham in whom all nations of the earth are to be blessed. And the apostle Paul, referring to God's promise to Abraham concerning the Seed writes: "Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. It says, not, 'And to seeds,' as in the case of many such, but as in the case of one, 'And to your seed,' who is Christ." (Acts 3:19-26; Galatians 3:16, NW) Since there is but the one promised Seed, and since Christ Jesus is that one Seed, there could not be another and a later seed, such as Mohammed, who, besides, is not descended from Abraham through Isaac.

¹⁴ Moses, who wrote the above records about Abraham and Isaac, is accepted as one of God's prophets. Certainly, then, he did not falsify. God revealed to Moses more of the depth of the meaning of his name Jehovah. That name occurs in the entire collection of the Hebrew Scriptures 6,823 times, but the Koran hides that holy name. Allah is not his name, for Allah means "the God". That is what he is. That is his title but is not the name he gives himself when speaking with Moses: "This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations." (Exodus 3:6-15, AS) Jehovah God has promised yet to sanctify his holy name before all nations, including the Mohammedan nations; and yet the Koran ignores that fact —Ezekiel 38:23; 39:7, AS.

¹⁵ At Mount Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were given, Jehovah told Moses, who was acting as mediator for the Israelites or Jews: "I will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him." (Deuteronomy 18:15-19, AS) The Moslems claim that this promised prophet was Mohammed. But how could that be? Mohammed was not a Jew, of Moses' brethren. He was of the nation of Ishmael whom Jehovah had rejected from having a part in the promise concerning Abraham's seed, and he did not speak in Jehovah's name. Centuries before Mohammed was born,

Peter spoke to Moses* brethren the Jews and applied God's prophecy concerning the Greater Moses to Jesus Christ and identified him as the promised Prophet. —Acts 3:20-23.

¹⁶ The Koran denies that this Jesus was impaled on a torture stake till dead, but the apostle Peter addressed the Jews who had demanded that Jesus be impaled and to them Peter said in their courtroom: "In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you impaled but whom God raised up from the dead, . . . there is no salvation in anyone else, for there is not another name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must get saved." (Acts 4:10-12, NW) So that excludes Mohammed's name, too.

¹⁷ The Koran rejects the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a ransom for mankind to gain life in the new world. In doing so it denies Jesus is Jehovah God's High Priest who sacrificed his human life for obedient mankind. It ignores, too, the new covenant which was put into force over Jesus' sacrificial blood, whereas the prophet Jeremiah had foretold that new covenant centuries previous. How, then, can the Koran take Moses as God's prophet and yet nullify the prophetic significance of the Law covenant which Moses mediated with Israel and which had animal sacrifices and a priesthood all foreshadowing the priesthood of Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice? The Koran is inconsistent in doing so and makes God deny himself. —Leviticus 16:1-34; Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 3:1; 9:1-28.

¹⁸ Moslems claim to accept what Jesus said concerning the "comforter" or "paraclete". But only in order to apply this to Mohammed. Says A. Yusuf Ali, in his footnote comment⁴¹⁶ on Sura III.81:

In the New Testament as it now exists, Muhammad is foretold in the Gospel of St. John 14:16; 15:26; and 16:7: The future Comforter cannot be the Holy Spirit as understood by Christians, because the Holy Spirit already was present, helping and guiding Jesus. The Greek word translated "Comforter" is "Paracletes", which is an easy corruption from "Periclytos", which is almost a literal translation of "Muhammad" or "Ahmad".

And in his footnote comment⁵⁴³⁸ on Sura LXI.6, he says:

"Ahmad", or "Muhammad", the Praised One, is almost a translation of the Greek word Periclytos. In the present Gospel of John 14:16; 15:26; and 16:7, the word "Comforter" in the English version is for the Greek word "Paracletes", which means "Advocate", "one called to the help of another, a kind friend", rather than "Comforter". Our doctors contend that Paracletes is a corrupt reading for Periclytos, and that in their original saying of Jesus there was a prophecy of our holy Prophet Ahmad by name. Even if we read Paraclete it would apply to the holy Prophet who is "a Mercy for all creatures" (xxi. 107) and "Most kind and merciful to the Believers."

¹⁹ This would locate the coming of the "comforter" or "helper" six centuries after Jesus gave the promise. But according to the above-cited verses of John Jesus promised to send the comforter to his apostles there with him, and not to

non-Christian Moslems centuries later. Jesus did not say it would be a person in flesh. He told them it was God's spirit, "the spirit of the truth," and that it would "bring back to your minds all the things I told you"; "the spirit of the truth which proceeds from the Father, that one will bear witness about me, and you, in turn, are to bear witness, because you have been with me from when I began." He later told them they would be baptized with it "not many days after this". (John 14:26; 15:26,27; 16:13-15 and Acts 1:4, 5, NW) So how could this mean Mohammed who lived centuries after these apostles?

²⁰ On the day of Pentecost, ten days after Jesus ascended back to heaven, he did pour out the holy spirit upon those apostles, and they began speaking with foreign tongues and performing miracles. And Peter, under inspiration by that spirit, declared that Jesus, at his Father's right hand in heaven, had poured it out on them. (Acts 2:32-36) Certainly Mohammed did not bring back to their minds all the things Jesus had told them, for Mohammed denies the most vital things Jesus said. Mohammed is not found to be a personification of the "spirit of the truth" but is found denying the truth of Jehovah God as spoken through his prophets Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon and Jesus. And the apostle Paul said that if, later, even an angel from heaven should bring a message different from what he preached to them, let him be accursed. This allows for no angel Gabriel to send Mohammed later and nullify that message.  —Galatians 1:8,9.

²¹ Among the fundamental things which prove

that Mohammed did not express the "spirit of the truth" is his teaching of the immortality of the human soul. That is a Babylonish false doctrine, the foundation of which was laid by Satan the Devil when deceiving Eve in the garden of Eden. Yet it was on the basis of this false doctrine that Mohammed framed his teachings concerning the hell of seven stories where human souls are tormented after death, as well as his doctrine that Adam is in heaven, the lowest of the heavens. But Jesus said: "No man has ascended into heaven but he that descended from heaven, the Son of man." And at Pentecost Peter said that not even faithful King David was up there, but was sleeping in his tomb awaiting the resurrection of the dead. (John 3:13, NW; Acts 2:25-35) God does not fiendishly torment souls in hell. He destroys the wicked and resurrects those asleep in death.

²² Mohammed's religion has not prevailed over all religion, as predicted, even though it has such an appeal because it is an easy or light religion that makes concessions to human weakness. It claims one-ninth of the world's population, or 250 million adherents. But it is divided into 72 sects or denominations, and today it is threatened like Christendom by the world menace of international communism. In this the final crisis of this old world Islam has no message to offer distressed humanity regarding God's kingdom of the Seed of his woman for the blessing of all who turn to the one living and true God, Jehovah. Let Moslems as well as people of Christendom take heed to Jehovah's words at Isaiah 8:20, AS. Let them study His Word in the Holy Bible and thus enjoy the morning light of the new world.