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SPRENGER'S CONCLUSIONS
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There is a depth of truth and reality underlying these sentiments. But it is
needful to guard them by two considerations. In the first place, however much
the nation was inclined to hand down only those traditions which symbolised
with the tendency to glorify Mahomet, and also glorify the reciters
themselves, and to throw the rest away,still there were, fortunately for
history, causes at work which to a certain degree counteracted the process.
For Mahometan society was, from the earliest period, riven into factions which
opposed each other with a mortal strife, and consequently were not indisposed
to perpetuate traditions which would aid their cause by depreciating their
adversaries; and partizanship has fortunately thus secured for us a large
amount of historical fact which would otherwise have sunk unnoticed. Moreover,
in the Biographers themselves we are bound to acknowledge the honest endeavour
to draw with faithfulness the lineaments of the Prophet's life, though
naturally in exaggerated outlines as seen through the medium of a supernatural
atmosphere.
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As regards tradition being "the voice of the people," Bunsen would
hardly have recognised the applicability of his dictum to a state of society
in which the range of thought was sternly circumscribed, and its results
dwarfed, by the pains and penalties of a system far more powerful than the
Inquisition,a system which proscribed the free exercise of thought and
discussion as incompatible with the profession of Islam. The result is not the
vox populi in any intelligible sense
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The plastic period, however, soon passed away, and left the material of
tradition in a form which, though it might be worked up into any of the
Theological systems, could not henceforward in its own substance be altered.
This is well stated by Sprenger in his concluding paragraph:
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" The time of creative activity, the gestation era
of Moslem
" knowledge, passed away. Hajjâj choked the young life in its
" own blood; and the Abbâside dynasty with kingly patriotism
" sold the dearly-bought conquests of the nation, first to the
" Persians, and then to Turkish slaves, with the view of procuring
" an imaginary security for their throne. And thus there arose
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