THE INFLUENCE OF ANIMISM ON ISLAM

Judaism with its exaggerated nationalism. It claims at once to include and supersede all that which Jesus Christ was, did, and taught. It is a religion of compromise, of conservatism, and of conquest.

It is our purpose to show how strong the pagan element is in Mohammedanism, and how many doctrines and practices of popular Islam can only be explained as a survival of the animism of Ancient Arabia or as elements incorporated from many heathen sources as the faith spread—doctrines and practices that Islam was never able to eliminate or destroy. At the outset of our discussion, it should not surprise us that a belief in demons and old Arabian superstitions persisted in spite of Islam. Five times daily, the Muslim muezzin Muezzin: The official who proclaims the call to prayer. calls out from the mosque: "There is no god but Allah." The people repeat this and reiterate it more than a hundred times during the day in their quarrels, feasts, fasts, celebrations, and common conversation. But in my daily observations—and I have lived among them for more than twenty-five years—I find they have fetishes and superstitious customs that amount to as many gods as the heathen who bow down to wood and stone. In the use of the word "Animism," we refer to primitive pagan practices and not to other uses of the term. William McDougall writes in his "Body and Mind" (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 36 Essex St., W.C., p. viii of Preface): "Primitive Animism seems to have grown up by extension of this notion to the explanation of all the more striking phenomena of nature. And the Animism of civilized men, which has been and is the foundation of every religious system, except the more rigid Pantheism, is historically continuous with the primitive doctrine." [The rest of the note discusses the shift in modern science away from animism, which the author clarifies is not the focus of this book.]