Only
People With Tight-Fitting Clothes That Need No Attention Have Time For
That.
So we of the loose skirt and flowing trousers and slack slipper
make full and ample salutations to our
Friends, and redouble them toward
our ill-wishers, and if it be a question of purchase, the stuff must be
fingered and appraised with a proverb or so, and if it be a
fool-tourist who thinks that he cannot be cheated, O true believers!
draw near and witness how we shall loot him.
But I bought nothing. The city thrust more treasure upon me than I could
carry away. It came out of dark alleyways on tawny camels loaded with
pots; on pattering asses half buried under nets of cut clover; in the
exquisitely modelled hands of little children scurrying home from the
cookshop with the evening meal, chin pressed against the platter's edge
and eyes round with responsibility above the pile; in the broken lights
from jutting rooms overhead, where the women lie, chin between palms,
looking out of windows not a foot from the floor; in every glimpse into
every courtyard, where the men smoke by the tank; in the heaps of
rubbish and rotten bricks that flanked newly painted houses, waiting to
be built, some day, into houses once more; in the slap and slide or the
heelless red-and-yellow slippers all around, and, above all, in the
mixed delicious smells of frying butter, Mohammedan bread, kababs,
leather, cooking-smoke, assafetida, peppers, and turmeric. Devils cannot
abide the smell of burning turmeric, but the right-minded man loves it.
It stands for evening that brings all home, the evening meal, the
dipping of friendly hands in the dish, the one face, the dropped veil,
and the big, guttering pipe afterward.
Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures and for the Five
Advantages of Travel and for the glories of the Cities of the Earth!
Harun-al-Raschid, in roaring Bagdad of old, never delighted himself to
the limits of such a delight as was mine, that afternoon. It is true
that the call to prayer, the cadence of some of the street-cries, and
the cut of some of the garments differed a little from what I had been
brought up to; but for the rest, the shadow on the dial had turned back
twenty degrees for me, and I found myself saying, as perhaps the dead
say when they have recovered their wits, 'This is my real world again,'
Some men are Mohammedan by birth, some by training, and some by fate,
but I have never met an Englishman yet who hated Islam and its people as
I have met Englishmen who hated some other faiths. Musalmani awadani,
as the saying goes - where there are Mohammedans, there is a
comprehensible civilisation.
Then we came upon a deserted mosque of pitted brick colonnades round a
vast courtyard open to the pale sky. It was utterly empty except for its
own proper spirit, and that caught one by the throat as one entered.
Christian churches may compromise with images and side-chapels where the
unworthy or abashed can traffic with accessible saints. Islam has but
one pulpit and one stark affirmation - living or dying, one only - and
where men have repeated that in red-hot belief through centuries, the
air still shakes to it.
Some say now that Islam is dying and that nobody cares; others that, if
she withers in Europe and Asia, she will renew herself in Africa and
will return - terrible - after certain years, at the head of all the nine
sons of Ham; others dream that the English understand Islam as no one
else does, and, in years to be, Islam will admit this and the world will
be changed. If you go to the mosque Al Azhar - the thousand-year-old
University of Cairo - you will be able to decide for yourself. There is
nothing to see except many courts, cool in hot weather, surrounded by
cliff-like brick walls. Men come and go through dark doorways, giving on
to yet darker cloisters, as freely as though the place was a bazaar.
There are no aggressive educational appliances. The students sit on the
ground, and their teachers instruct them, mostly by word of mouth, in
grammar, syntax, logic; al-hisab, which is arithmetic; al-jab'r w'al
muqabalah, which is algebra; at-tafsir, commentaries on the Koran,
and last and most troublesome, al-ahadis, traditions, and yet more
commentaries on the law of Islam, which leads back, like everything, to
the Koran once again. (For it is written, 'Truly the Quran is none other
than a revelation.') It is a very comprehensive curriculum. No man can
master it entirely, but any can stay there as long as he pleases. The
university provides commons - twenty-five thousand loaves a day, I
believe, - and there is always a place to lie down in for such as do not
desire a shut room and a bed. Nothing could be more simple or, given
certain conditions, more effective. Close upon six hundred professors,
who represent officially or unofficially every school or thought, teach
ten or twelve thousand students, who draw from every Mohammedan
community, west and east between Manila and Morocco, north and south
between Kamchatka and the Malay mosque at Cape Town. These drift off to
become teachers of little schools, preachers at mosques, students of the
Law known to millions (but rarely to Europeans), dreamers, devotees, or
miracle-workers in all the ends of the earth. The man who interested me
most was a red-bearded, sunk-eyed mullah from the Indian frontier, not
likely to be last at any distribution of food, who stood up like a lean
wolfhound among collies in a little assembly at a doorway.
And there was another mosque, sumptuously carpeted and lighted (which
the Prophet does not approve of), where men prayed in the dull mutter
that, at times, mounts and increases under the domes like the boom of
drums or the surge of a hot hive before the swarm flings out.
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