6 SOCIAL CULTURE 



A year ago or more there was published a letter written by an 

 Arab sheik of Bagdad to the editor of a Paris newspaper (La Revue, 

 for March, 1902), in which he expressed admiration for certain ex- 

 ternal characteristics of European civilization, but found no words 

 bitter enough for his detestation of the Christian religion professed 

 by all European nations. To him it was all a horrible blasphemy. 

 The pure One as preached in the Koran is sovereign and transcend- 

 ent, and to speak of it as divine-human, or as triune in the Christian 

 sense, is to the Mohammedan an act of unspeakable sacrilege. 

 Therefore, if our triumphs in science and art flow from our religion, 

 the worshiper of Islam must regard them as his mortal foe. 1 And 

 yet the Arab sheik is much nearer to the Christian view than is the 

 Buddhist or the Brahmin. The East Indian view holds a first 

 principle that repudiates or shuts out from its attributes conscious- 

 ness and will and feeling all the elements of personality. But 

 the Allah of the Koran is personal and in an important sense ethical, 

 having the attributes of righteousness and goodness borrowed from 

 the Old Testament by the Hanyf preachers of the Ebionitic sect of 

 Old Testament Christians who proselyted Mohammed, as shown by 

 Sprenger. 2 But Brahma is above the ethical distinctions of good 

 and evil, and goodness and righteousness are as naught to him and to 

 the Yogi who seeks by mortification to get rid of his selfhood. 



1 Le Dernier mot. de V Islam a V Europe, par le Sheikh Abdul Hagk de Bagdad, 

 Paris, La Revue, no. 5, March 1, 1902. Passage translated from the beginning: 



" Christian Peoples: The hatred of Islam against Europe is implacable. After 

 ages of effort to effect a reconciliation between us, the only result to-day is that we 

 detest you more than ever. This civilization of yours and its marvels of progress 

 which have rendered you so rich and so powerful, be it known to you, that we hate 

 them and we spurn them with our very souls. . . . The Mohammedan religion is 

 to-day in open hostility against your world of progress. . . . We explain how it is 

 that we spurn with horror not only your religious doctrines but all your science, 

 all your arts, and everything that comes from Christian Europe. ... I, the 

 humble Sheik Abdul Hagk, member of the holy Panislamistic league, come with a 

 special mission to explain clearly how this comes to be. ... Our creed is this: 

 There is in the universe one sole being, God, source of all power, of all light, of all 

 truth, of all justice, and of all goodness; He has not been generated; H^has not 

 generated any one. He is single, infinite, eternal; alone, He wished to be known ; 

 He made the universe, He created man. He surrounded man with the splendors 

 of creation and imposed on him the sacred duty of worshiping Him alone. To 

 worship continually this only God is man's only mission on earth. Man's soul is 

 immortal; his life on earth only a probation; . . . the supreme duty of man to 

 worship the only God and to sacrifice himself to Him without reserve; the sum of 

 all iniquity to renounce the only God and to worship a false God. . . . For us 

 Mussulmans there is a world containing only two kinds of human beings, believers 

 and infidels (mecreants) ; love, charity, brotherhood to the believers; contempt, 

 disgust, hatred, and war for the infidels. Among the infidels the most hated and 

 the most criminal are those who worship God but ascribe to Him earthly parents, 

 or fatherhood, or a human mother. Such monstrous blindness seems to us to 

 surpass all measure of iniquity ; the presence among us of infidels of this kind is 

 the plague of our life; their doctrine is a direct menace to the purity of our faith; 

 contact with them is defilement, and any relation with them whatever a torment 

 to our souls. ' ' 



2 Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammed, Berlin, 1869, chapter i, pp. 16-27, 

 37-47, 60, 69. 70-77, 101-107. 



