184 THE MADINA PERIOD

the ancient ceremonies of the Pilgrimage.1 The Ka'ba, with all connected with it, was the object of universal reverence by the Arab people. The sentiment involved in this was the most obvious means of uniting the various Arab tribes, long disunited, into one vast confederation for one great purpose. But it has really proved a source of weakness since, for it has emphasized the fact that Islam started and was formed as a national religion, and that rules and laws adapted to the needs and requirements of the Arabs of the seventh century are binding on peoples the most diverse in the nineteenth. It helps to keep Islam stationary. 'The dead hand of the short-sighted author of the Qur'an is on the throat of every Muhammadan nation, and it is this claim which stultifies it in the view of any one who has studied other religions. It bears the marks of immaturity on every part of it. It proves itself to be a religion only for the childhood of a race by its minute prescriptions, its detailed
1 The universal reverence of the Arab for the Ka'ba was too favourable and obvious a means for uniting all the tribes into one confederation with one common purpose in view . . . Here, then, Muhammad found a shrine to which, as well as at which, devotion had been paid from time immemorial; it was the one thing which the scattered Arabian nation had in common—the one thing which gave them even the shadow of a national feeling; and to have dreamed of abolishing it, or even of diminishing the honours paid to it, would have been madness and ruin to his enterprise.' Palmer's Qur'an, Introduction, p. liii.
'It is therefore no matter of surprise, but a thing to be reasonably expected, that, in case a native of Mecca were to conceive the idea of establishing a power over the scattered tribes of Arabia, and of uniting them under one central government, he should avail himself of a means already in existence and with which he had been familiar from his youth. Muhammad, with great practical insight and shrewdness, seized on this advantage and retained the heathen shrine of his native city as the local centre of Islam.' Koelle. Mohammed and Mohammedanism, p. xix
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precepts, its observances, its appeals to fear.'1 The keystone of that creed is a black pebble in what was a heathen temple: a journey thither, and the performance of old pagan rites when there, are said to be the surest way to salvation. 'Chained to a black stone in a barren wilderness, the heart and reason of the Muhammadan world would seem to have taken the similitude of the objects they reverence; and the refreshing dews and general sunshine, which fertilize all else, seek in vain for anything to quicken there.' 2

All this is quite true of the obstacle the Pilgrimage places in the way of any enlightened reform, which can only take place when the Islamic institutions show that they are capable of modification, and this the continued obligation of the Hajj shows that they are not; 3 but, on the other hand, it must be admitted that the retention of the Hajj has tended to preserve Muslim orthodoxy, has renewed from time to time the faith of the believers, and has shown to countless millions of Muslims, in the centuries which have come and gone, how Islam has united into a great brotherhood races diverse in language, colour and character, and has produced in them a passionate devotion to the memory of their Prophet.4 'Mecca is to the Muslim what
1 Dods, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ, p. 124.
2 Osborn, Islam under the Arabs, p. 83.
3 The Hajj is a fard duty. Maulavi Rafi'u'd-Din Ahmad in the Nineteenth Century for October, 1897, says, 'The Hajj cleanses the hearts of men and makes them innocent like new-born babes.'
4 Freeman seems to have missed this point when he says 'Muhammad did not or could not rise above a local worship; he had therefore a holy place, a place of pilgrimage. Sprung from the blood of the hereditary guardians of the Ka'ba, it was the object of
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