Through Force or Faith? — Page 19
Refutation of the Allegations Made Against Islam 19 victims was expiated by prayer, and fasting, and alms, the laudable or innocent arts of devotion; and his rewards and punishments of future life were painted by the images most congenial to an ignorant and carnal generation. Mahomet was, perhaps, incapable of dictating a moral and political system for the use of his countrymen: but he breathed among the faithful a spirit of charity and friend- ship: recommended the practice of the social virtues; and checked, by his laws and precepts, the thirst of revenge, and the oppression of widows and orphans. The hostile tribes were united in faith and obedience, and the valour which had been idly spent in domestic quarrels was vigor- ously directed against a foreign enemy. ( The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, vol. V, pp. 274–275, published in 1788, London) Then John Davenport writes: It is a monstrous error to suppose, as some have done, and others still do, that the faith taught by the Koran was prop- agated by the sword alone, for it will be readily admitted by all unprejudiced minds, that Mohammed’s religion,— by which prayers and alms were substituted for the blood of human victims, and which, instead of hostility and per- petual feuds, breathed a spirit of benevolence and of the social virtues, and must, therefore, have had an important influence upon civilization,—was a real blessing to the Eastern world, and consequently, could not have needed exclusively the sanguinary means so unsparingly and so