The Arabs and the Turks. Their origin and history, their religion, their imperial greatness in the past, and their condition at the present time, with chapters on the other non-Christian tribes of Western Asia

Front matter

THE ARABS AND THE TURKS. Their Origin and History, THEIR RELIGION, THEIR IMPERIAL GREATNESS IN THE PAST, AND THEIR CONDITION AT THE PRESENT TIME, WITH CHAPTERS ON THE OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN TRIBES OF WESTERN ASIA. By EDSON L. CLARK, MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY. BOSTON: CONGREGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY, BEACON STREET. IS76. COPYRIGHT. CONGREGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY. IS75. BOSTON : Stereotyped by c. J. Petees & son, 73 FEDERAL STREET. The present volume is the first part of a more ex tended work undertaken by the author, in the hope of placing before the Christian public the means to a better knowledge of our great missionary field in the Turkish Empire than can be obtained from sources now general ly accessible. Should this volume be favorably received, others may follow upon the Christian races and sects of European and Asiatic Turkey. North Branforo, Conn., Jan. 12, 187b. CONTENTS PAGE

Chapter I. Christian Rome

TO understand the place and part of Mohammedanism in history, we shall need first to trace the decay of that great Christian society which it in part supplanted. The great era in the world's history, which marks the beginning of the course of events we are now to consider, was the year 324 ; a year made memorable not only by the accession of Constantine to the un divided government of the Roman Empire, but by the founding of Constantinople, a city destined to remain, to the successors of Constantine, a seat of imperial power and splendor for eleven hundred years. Up to this time the Roman Empire had been a Pagan state. Every Emperor thus far had been a worshipper of the ancient gods of Rome ; and a vast majority of the people still adhered to the old religion. Gibbon concludes, seemingly with good reason, that, at the conversion of Constantine, not more than one-twentieth of the population of the Empire were avowedly Christian.

But it was true, nevertheless, that in this small minority lay the strength and life of the Empire. The old religion stood a majestic fabric, seemingly as strong as ever ; but it was a stately form from which life had departed, ready to crumble to dust at a single blow. The Christian Church, on the other hand, formed at this time a thoroughly organized body full of energy and health. Hitherto the Church had preserved, in a good degree, its purity and its sacred life. A small and unpopular party in the State, always subject to the salutary opposition, if not the hostility, of the government, there was little inducement to join its numbers, except to those moved by sincere conviction. The Church had thus always remained an honest and earnest body. As yet the degeneracy which was to work its ruin had made but little progress.

As a community, the Church of the third century presented, both morally and socially, a spectacle of excellence and well-being to which the previous history of man kind could furnish no parallel. The clergy, as a body, were able, pious, and faithful. The people were well instructed in the Scriptures, virtuous, and sincere. The Christians of that age lived in charity with one another and with all mankind. One of them travelling abroad needed only his certificate of church membership, to secure to him the generous hospitality and kindly offices of his brethren in all parts of the Empire. In times of deadly pestilence, when the heathen, in a selfish horror of the disease, were casting their dead and dying relatives into the streets, it was common to see the Christians, with a generous self devotion, not only caring for their own stricken friends, but burying the dead and nursing the neglected sick of their heathen - neighbors.

If, as often happened, some great calamity overtook the churches of some particular district, their call for help was sure to meet a generous response from their sister churches. In a word, the Christian community of that age was a true and living Church of Christ, a shining light in the midst of a heathen world. But, while this is true, it is also true that those cor ruptions, which were destined soon after to reach so great a development, were already creeping into the Church, the inevitable products of a decaying, sinking age. The whole fabric of the Roman Empire, both political and social, was organized upon false principles, which doomed it to destruction. Even Christian ity could not save it ; and it was a sad necessity, that, sinking itself, the Church should sink with it. Towards the close of the third century, two evil tendencies, the necessary results of the circumstances of the times, were becoming manifest in the Church ; one to ecclesiastical despotism, the other to asceticism and an undue trust in rites and forms.

In the political world, despotic power now reigned with an authority as absolute as it was universal. So complete was the enslavement of the human mind at this time, that no man, whether Pagan or Christian, seems to have dreamed that it was possible to organize and gbvern the State on any other principle than that of unqual ified despotism. But among a people living thus, without either the possession or the idea of civil freedom, religious liberty could not long exist. That absolute authority to which in the State they were accustomed to yield so unquestioning an obedience, they -would naturally and willingly suffer to be estab lished over them in the Church. This great change in the constitution of the Church had been to a great extent actually accomplished by the end of the third century.

The simple pastors and teachers of the early Church had grown into lordly bishops, claiming and exercising the right to govern the Church, in all things spiritual, with unlimited authority. Yet, in the circumstances of the case, this re-organization of the Church upon the monarchical principle was evidently so overruled by a divine Providence that good came out of the evil. There were times coming when this concentrated, well-established power of the bishops would prove to the people a strong defence against overwhelming evils, the best refuge not only of the Church, but of society itself. Let us now turn to consider the tendency, already manifest in the Church, to asceticism and superstition. One of the saddest results of the degeneracy of the age was the gradual obscuring of the light of knowledge.

The human intellect was becoming darkened. Among the followers of the old religion, great thinkers and writers no longer appeared. Not only was nothing new produced : men were losing the power to see clearly and hold firmly what they already possessed. Their intellectual life had become sterile. This growing weakness of a decaying age affected the Christian part of the Roman people, as well as their heathen neighbors, though to a less degree. It could not be but that the intellect of the Church should feel to some extent the heavy, deadening pressure of the times. We accordingly find, that, in the latter part of the third century, the Church was beginning to lose, in some measure, its clear apprehension of the simple truths of the gospel. Faith in Christ was beginning to give place to a trust in rites and forms.

Baptism was coming to be regarded as a saving ordinance, by its own inherent efficacy washing away all sin. Monas ticism did not yet exist ; but throughout the Church there was a strong and growing tendency to asceticism. Fasts were multiplied, both public and private ; and Christians generally were learning to regard voluntary penances, and mortifications of the flesh, as most valuable means to the sanctification of the soul. These were the seeds out of which, in the next century, the monastic life was to spring up with a sudden and wonderful growth. Such were the circumstances of the Christian Church, when that great revolution took place which raised it at once from comparative weakness and poverty, to boundless wealth and imperial dominion. For a long time the sovereignty of the Empire had been in the hands of soldiers.

Every ambitious and successful general aspired to the imperial purple ; and often several would-be Emperors were struggling at once for the mighty prize, rending by their conflicts the very vitals of the Empire. In the year 308, six Emperors disputed among themselves the dominion of the Roman world. One of these was Con stantine, a man destined to revolutionize not the religion alone, but the whole political structure, of the Empire. The father of Constantine was Con stantius Chlorus, an able and virtuous general, who, with the title of Cæsar, had been invested with a share of imperial authority over the distant prov inces of the West. Dying in the year 306, at York in Britain, his army at once hailed his son Constantine as their sovereign. With perhaps some sincere convictions of the truth of Christianity, Constantine had the sagacity to see that the real strength of the Empire lay with the Christian party.

Availing himself of this fact, he raised the standard of the cross, and proclaimed him self the champion of Christianity. Then followed a long and bloody struggle, but one sad instance of the many which fill the melancholy annals of those times, which resulted at last in raising Constantine to supreme dominion. To the Christians of that age, this event naturally seemed glorious indeed, and fraught with the promise of untold blessings for the future. The world was to see for the first time a Christian state. Now it would appear what Christianity could do for society when elevated to supreme control. Not unnaturally the Christians imagined that the virtues which had hitherto adorned the Church would thenceforward char acterize their government, and bless and beautify the whole structure of society.

Their officers would be peace, and their exactors righteousness. War and dissension would cease in a Christian Empire. Vice and wickedness would be everywhere restrained ; virtue and piety would everywhere prevail. Such were the hopes inspired in his Christian subjects by the accession of Constantine, — hopes excited only to be bitterly disappointed. For three hundred years the Christian Church, poor and weak, always opposed and often persecuted by the civil power, had flourished in vigor and spiritual health. Now all was changed. She had ascended the throne of the Cæsars, and supreme dominion rested peacefully in her hands. But her triumph was her ruin. Three causes con spired to produce this result : — 1. The Church was completely overwhelmed by the sudden accession of that vast, dissolute, and worth less multitude which had hitherto adhered to the old religion, but now, following in the wake of wealth and power, assumed the garb without any thing of the spirit of Christianity.

Perhaps a twentieth part of the people were Christians by sincere conviction. But to this inconsiderable minority were now suddenly added probably three-fourths of the whole population. What wonder that the life of the Church should be swallowed up and lost in this vast deluge of nominal Christianity but real heathenism ? 2. After the accession of Constantine, the Chris tian bishops were suddenly elevated to positions of great dignity and power, becoming, in fact, the most influential men in the Empire. So far as the unhap py Church was concerned, this was in every respect a change for the worse. Not only did the bishops now fix their yoke more firmly than ever upon the necks of the prostrate churches, but they soon began to be stained with wickedness and crime. Syn ods and Councils were disgraced by shameless corruption and outrageous violence.

True, this degener acy of the episcopal order was by no means universal. Upon the roll of bishops, even at a much later date, are found many of the noblest and purest names which adorned the ancient Church. But, un happily, the worst men were often able to rise to the highest positions, to exert the most commanding power, were but too successful in filling the Church with their own spirit. This elevation and subsequent corruption of the episcopal order was the chief cause of the ruin of the Church. If the bishops of the fourth century, as a body, had been men of fervent apostolic piety, the religion of the Church might have proved a leaven strong enough to pervade and save the whole body of society. But this could not be. The unhappy circumstances of the times had made them bishops, had clothed them with great power, had subjected them to temptations greater than human nature has ever been able to bear.

The great episcopal offices came to be prizes eagerly striv en for by the most ambitious and unscrupulous men. It thus followed, that, as the power of the bishops grew constantly more absolute, their character became, in the same degree, more venal and corrupt. 3. The mischief of the ecclesiastical despotism of the bishops was sustained and made complete by the civil and political despotism of the Emperors. The obsequious servility of the times allowed the Emper ors to assume prerogatives and authority hardly less than divine. The Emperor was not only the sole repository of all political power, but the sovereign arbiter of all right and truth. His decree could fix or change the faith of the Church as well as the civil law.1 Thus, under the united despotisms of the bishops and the Emperor, the last vestige of freedom disappeared, as well from the Church as from society.

The religion of the Church came to be nothing more than an enforced assent to a set of dogmas fixed for every man by the iron hand of power, and from 1 The first Christian Emperors did not push their claims of ecclesiastical authority to this extent. They convened the Councils of the Church, and often sought to control both them and their decisions. Zeno, in the year 4S2, one hundred and fifty years after the accession of Constantine, was the first Emperor who presumed to fix, by an imperial decree, the faith of the Church ; but much earlier than this the Emperors had begun to assume the prerogative of settling by their own sovereign authority the controversies upon points of both administration and doctrine, which distracted the Church. In the year 41S an imperial rescript was issued by the Emperor Honorius, condemning the doctrines of Pelagius.

Other edicts of the same emperor regulated the elec tion of the bishops of Rome. — See Milman's Latin Christianity, New York edition, vol. i. pp. 183, 199, 323. which he must not presume to differ even by a hair's breadth. From these causes the decay of the Church, after the accession of ■ Constantine, became fearfully rapid. The most striking indication of that decay was seen in the springing-up, and the prodigious growth, of the monastic order. We have seen that, in the third cen tury, ascetic ideas and principles were already gaining a strong foothold in the Church. It was about the beginning of the fourth century, that the practice of those principles began to be carried to the extent of voluntary and entire seclusion from the world, and the attempted suppression of every desire of the flesh ; and so rapid was the movement, that, before the end of the century, it is said, half the population of Egypt had embraced the monastic life.

It was much the same in all parts of the Christian world. Every province of the Empire was soon filled with monasteries, or rather hermitages and monks. The cause of this great movement must have been something deeply seated in the circumstances of the age. It was twofold. It sprung primarily from that great change in the views of the Church, resulting from the gradual obscuring of the simple truth of the gospel, which was transferring the power of religion from the spirit to' the letter, — from faith in Christ to outward forms, and mortifications of the flesh. But this movement was also a despairing flight from the degenerate society of a sinking age. The times were out of joint. Society was hopelessly diseased : its very foundations seemed about to break up. The signs of approaching dissolution were visible on every hand.

Thoughtful men became oppressed with deep despondency ; and, despairing of a world which they could not save, they fled from its troubles and burdens, and thought only of preparing for another and a better. The results of this great development of the mo nastic life to society at large were very disastrous. Not only did it withdraw from the duties of active life, and from the healthful influence which they ought to have exerted in society, a great multitude of the best men of the age ; but in the immense numbers of illiterate, bigoted, and half-savage monks which swarmed throughout the Empire, every ambitious and unscrupulous bishop found ready to his hand a host of fanatical and devoted followers, upon whom he could depend in every emergency. Of this fact a striking illustration was given in those infamous " Robber Councils," through which Cyril and Dioscu rus of Alexandria secured the condemnation of their great rival Nestorius.

But by far the worst result of this movement was the almost entire separation which it effected between the practice of religion and the every-day activities and relations of life. To the popular mind, religion came to mean little else than the ascetic practices of monastic life. Hence it was something with which the common people had little to do ; and they would 2* naturally say, " We are not ascetics ; we are ignorant people ; and why should we be subjected to such rigorous demands ? " ' Men then began to talk, as the Roman Catholic Church still talks, of " leaving the world, and entering into religion," that is, into a monastic life. Religion became the business of the monks, the clergy, and the Church. The common people had nothing to do with it, beyond observing the rites and ordinances of the Church.

If a man was admonished to read the Scriptures, and lead a godly life, his reply would be, " I am not a clerk : I have a family to support." It was thus that this great and sudden development of the monastic life gave a new impulse to that downward tendency which had been its chief originating cause. Another evidence and result of the degeneracy of the Church was the speedy growing-up of a bigoted, persecuting spirit. Constantine and his sons extended some degree of toleration and protection to the heathenism which they had forsaken ; but after their death the bishops demanded, and the government conceded, the entire suppression of the old religion. The feeble Pagans were actuated by no martyr spirit, and offered no resistance to the fate decreed against them. The Pagan temples were everywhere destroyed ; and, before the close of the fourth century, the open exercise of the rites of the old religion had wholly ceased.

But two hundred years later it was found that those rites were still practised secretly, 1 Neander, vol. i. p.. 278. even by men standing high in the State and in the Church. Roused to a relentless fury by this dis covery, the clergy and the populace constrained the reluctant government to enter upon an exterminating persecution. Every person suspected of the taint of Paganism was dragged before the tribunals, thrown to the wild beasts, and afterwards burnt. Thus, about the year 580, were the last vestiges of the old religion trodden out in flames and blood.1 But, terrible as was this last spasmodic outbreak against the poor remains of a perished heathenism, the relentless fanaticism with which the various Christian sects sought to destroy each other was more terrible still. In the course of the fifth century, the doctrine was fully established that the civil government was bound to suppress all heresy, — all differ ing by so much as a hair's breadth from the precise statement of doctrine laid down by the authorities of the Church.

The history of religious persecution forms one of the most gloomy and repulsive chapters in all the records of the past. Nor in this matter has any one religious body of earlier times great reason to boast itself over others. An intolerant, persecuting spirit has been but the too universal characteristic of the human mind. The Pagans persecuted the early Christians ; the Christians, in their turn, persecuted not only the Pagans, but their own dissenting sects. The Papal Church has persecuted Protestants ; and 1 See an article in "The North British Review" for August, 1S54, on " Syriac Church History, and John of Ephesus." Protestants have persecuted not only Romanists, but each other. The German Reformers fully believed and earnestly taught that it was the duty of the civil magistrate to maintain and defend the purity of the faith, even with the power of the sword.

The Church of England, during the first hundred and fifty years of its existence, vehemently persecuted both Catholics and dissenting Protestants. The Scotch Presby terians enacted, in 1560, that whoever should say mass, or be present while it was said, should suffer confiscation of goods for the first offence, banishment for the second, and death for the third. Nor were the skirts of the English Puritans clear in this matter. Studying attentively these painful facts, we may learn from them a very important truth. The great principle of toleration and religious freedom, — the principle that the civil power has no right to interfere, in any degree whatsoever, in matters of religious opinion and belief, — which we justly consider the most precious element in our birthright as American citizens, has been wrought out by no human wisdom, but by a divine Providence alone.

No considerable or influential body of Christians ever took its stand on this principle, or even saw its truth, until towards the close of the seventeenth century, when an over ruling Hand placed together upon the soil of England two parties of Protestant Christians so nearly equal in strength, that neither was able to suppress the other. These two parties, unwillingly, and protesting against the principle, were thus constrained to tolerate each other until, by an unexpected experience of its blessings, the truth of the principle was proved, and religious toleration was established. While, therefore, we hold this priceless possession at its true value, it behooves us not to judge severely those before us, who could not see the truth as we see it, and whose narrow and intolerant spirit was the necessary result of the darkness of their times.

After the death of Constantine, the old experience of rival Emperors and desolating civil wars was re newed in the decrepit Empire ; and to these evils, terrible enough in themselves, were soon added the greater horrors of destroying inroads from the wild regions of the North. These invasions by the German and Scythian tribes became with each succeeding generation more frequent, more extensive and irresist ible, more desolating and ruinous in their results. It was not long before the decaying fabric fell asunder, and became finally divided into two Empires, the East and the West. The brief and miserable history of the Western Empire may be traced in few words. One after another, the waves of barbarian invasion swept over its devoted territory, until, one hundred and forty years after the death of Constantine, or about the year 475, that Empire ceased to exist, and the darkness of universal barbarism settled clown over Western Europe.

All that was now left of the power and civilization of Rome was comprised within the limits of the Eastern Empire ; known in history as the Greek Em pire, because its language and literature were Greek, while it embraced within its limits the territory and colonies of ancient Greece. This Empire languished on for a thousand years, in a " tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity," with no religious life, no health ful and progressive intellectual activity, no promise of a better day to come ; awaiting the slow approach of inevitable doom.1 And so we come to the year 600, one of the great turning-points in the history of mankind. Mo hammed has now been born, has arrived at man's estate, and, away upon the far south-eastern frontiers of the Empire, is watching the course of events, and slowly evolving those great designs which are to affect so mightily the destinies of the world.

At this time the Greek Empire comprised almost the same territories, which, within the memory of persons still living, belonged to its great successor, the Empire of the Ottoman Turks. These were the regions now occupied by Greece and Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and the North of Africa, with Sicily and Southern Italy, — regions then, all of them, populous and wealthy,2 the fairest portion of the civilized world. It was a dominion splendid enough and ample enough, one would think, to satisfy the largest ambi- 1 See a vigorous description of the state of things in the Greek Empire, in Macaulay's article on History, in his Miscellaneous Essays. 2 Excepting the old dominions of Carthage in the North of Africa, which were already in the hands of the Vandals. tion of the human mind.

The victim of constant wars, and of a corrupt, rapacious, and imbecile government, the Empire was sinking steadily into hopeless decay. But great cities and splendid churches abounded throughout its provinces ; and a population in some degree industrious and prosperous, though degenerate and spiritless, still harvested the abundant crops of its fruitful and skilfully cultivated soil. From the Church, the last signs of spiritual life were fading away. The furious controversies of the two preceding centuries had divided it into various sects, some of them large and powerful, others small and weak, but all of them hating, excommunicating, fighting against, and to the utmost of their ability destroying, each other. No Pagan zealot ever poured out such torrents of human blood in the name of his dark and sanguinary gods as did those ecclesiastical persecutors in the name of the Prince of peace.1 " Give me, O Cæsar !

" said Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, to the Emperor Theodosius in a public discourse, " Give me, O Cæsar ! the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you the kingdom of heaven. Exterminate with me the heretics, and with you I will exterminate the Persians." These sects were becoming little else than the life less forms of a dead Christianity, fit only to be buried and forgotten. And in the strange providence of God they were buried ; and there, perfect in their tomb, they still remain. Just as we find the trees 1 See Neander, vol. ii. p. 447, and Gibbon, vol. iv. pp. 503, 528-531. and plants of former ages buried in the earth, and preserved perfect in every fibre for the instruction of future centuries ; so, as we penetrate the superincum bent body of Mohammedan society, do we find these ancient fossilized sects still existing, just as perfect and well defined as when the great eruption of the mighty Moslem volcano first swallowed them up.

Our missionaries, in carrying once more to those regions a true Christianity, are preaching to orthodox Greeks, Nestorians, Monophysites,1 and Monothe lites,2 the very sects which by their fierce dissen sions rent the Greek Empire eleven centuries ago. Every sect is there, still riding its little hobby, still clinging pertinaciously to the subtle distinction which separates it from all others, still hating and excommu nicating all who differ by a hair's breadth from its own dead belief. We thus see, that, at the beginning of the seventh century, what remained of the old dominion of Rome had become a worn-out field, which needed to be wholly broken up and laid fallow by some mighty and desolating ploughshare. Better a living, energetic faith in even a false religion than this dead Christianity.

Better a vigorous and earnest barbar ism, than this effete civilization. And so it was, that, as the Pagan Mohammed from the sands of Arabia cast his eyes thoughtfully over the still vast and magnificent dominions of the Empire, he surveyed a system of things which had waxed old, and was ready to vanish away. 1 Jacobites. 2 Maronites.

Chapter II. Ancient Arabia And The Arab Race

ARABIA, until quite recently, has always been regarded as a vast expanse of sandy deserts, inhabited almost entirely by wandering tribes. Recent explorations have for the first time made the interior of this immense peninsula known to the world, and have shown that this idea is quite incorrect. A great part of Arabia is occupied by a vast table-land, high and mountainous, but interspersed with beautiful and fruitful valleys, well watered by wells and running streams. This elevated interior has been occupied by a fixed population, has been carefully cultivated, and filled with towns and villages, from time immemorial. It is now estimated that two-thirds of Arabia is either cultivated, or capable of cultivation. The following passage from Palgrave's " Central Arabia " is an excellent description of the physical characteristics of the peninsula : — " The general type of Arabia is that of a central table-land, surrounded by a desert ring, sandy to the south, west, and east, stony to the north.

This outlying circle is in its turn girt by a line of mountains, low and sterile for the most, but attaining in 3 Yemen and Oman considerable height, breadth, and fertility ; while, beyond these, a narrow rim of coast is bordered by the sea. The surface of the midmost table-land equals somewhat less than one-half of the entire peninsula ; and its special demarcations are much affected, nay, often absolutely fixed, by the windings and inrunnings of the Nefoud (sandy desert). If to these central highlands, or Nejed, taking that word in its wider sense, we add whatever spots of fertility belong to the outer circles, we shall find that Arabia contains about two-thirds of cultivated, or at least of cultivable land, with a remaining third of irreclaimable desert, chiefly on the south." J The Arabian people sprang originally from two distinct races, the earlier of which had occupied the southern part of the peninsula for centuries before the other appeared upon the stage.