Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete
failures upon earth, if the true test of a system's success be the
gradual progress and amelioration of the human beings who are under its
influence? First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy. I do not
judge Mohammed for having allowed it. He found it one of the ancestral
and immemorial customs of his nation. He found it throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures. He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as
he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race. It seemed to
him that what was right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab.
God shall judge him, not I. Moreover, the Christians of the East,
divided into either monks or profligates; and with far lower and more
brutal notions of the married state than were to be found in Arab poetry
and legend, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal
and divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not
only proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated woman from her
old slavery to the stronger sex. And I believe, from his chivalrous
faithfulness to his good wife Kadijah, as long as she lived, that
Mohammed was a man who could have accepted that great truth in all its
fulness, had he but been taught it.
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