THE PROBLEMS OF MUHAMMADANISM 519 



movements and rendering intelligible events all these elements and 

 processes are still backward to a degree; and the last, it may safely 

 be said, has hardly yet begun. Dr. Goldziher, if he will permit me the 

 reference, has given us volumes full of the richest materials for such 

 a history, opening up and illuminating dark places and driving shafts 

 where none had gone before; if we understand the development of 

 Muslim jurisprudence, the system of Muslim tradition, and the 

 essential outlines of Muslim theological strife, it is due to him. But 

 we still look vainly to him for that great history of Muslim thought 

 and institutions which only he among living men can write. 



Permit me, then, as that book is not yet before us, to suggest some 

 few of the darknesses in which we still move. Thereafter, I will go on 

 to state what is for me the central problem of all Islam, a problem 

 absolutely unsolved and seldom fully stated. 



Of these minor obscurities, some of the thickest cluster round the 

 beginnings and pre-natal conditions of Islam. No one has yet made 

 plain to us the different ferments working then in heathen Arabia. 

 We know that Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and various 

 phases and degrees of idolatry were there. But to take Christ- 

 ianity we 'do not know with any precision what sects and forms 

 of Christian thought had occupied the desert, what hold they had 

 there taken; to what degree, if at all, they were genuinely Arabic 

 in language and not rather mere outliers of the great Syrian church. 

 To take Zoroastrianism, it is only of late that its hold upon southern 

 Arabia has become plain, and its influence on the thought of Muham- 

 mad and the vocabulary of the Qur'an a possible hypothesis. To take 

 primitive Arabia how far had it reached the conception of the 

 one, absolute Allah, the Ilah, God Most High? In a word, how far 

 was Muhammad's Allah pre-Muhammadan and Muhammad himself 

 an exhorter on things known but despised? And when we come thus 

 to Muhammad himself, the problems only thicken. Lives of him 

 have been written in abundance, greatly imaginative for the most 

 part, but it is hardly credible that we have not as yet any systematic 

 theology of the Qur'an, only investigations of specific points. Even 

 a modern commentary on the Qur'an is lacking, largely, perhaps, 

 because the labors of the Muslims themselves had been so great that 

 they are not yet digested. Its most multifarious vocabulary, too, has 

 been attacked at many points and with many theories, but an 

 adequate lexicon of it remains a task for some future scholar. It 

 will be for him to weigh the influence of Syriac, Greek, Ethiopic, and 

 Persian words and ideas on the language and thought of the desert 

 and the brain and imagination of Muhammad, ever greedy of the 

 strange. And later, too, when the early Muslim church was striving 

 with the contradictions and obscurities of that Qur'an knotted 

 and twisting as Muhammad's own mind and. there were develop- 



