Butler Alludes To It :—
“Th’ Apostles Of This Fierce Religion,
Like Mahomet’S, Were Ass And Widgeon;”
The Latter Word Being Probably A Clerical Error For Pigeon.
When
describing the Ka’abah, I shall have occasion to allude to the “blue-rocks”
of Meccah.
[FN#45]
No one would eat the pigeons of the Ka’abah; but in other places,
Al-Madinah, for instance, they are sometimes used as articles of food.
[FN#46] In the vulgar dialect, “Ant min ayn?”
[FN#47] I confess inability to explain these words: the printer has
probably done more than the author to make them unintelligible.
“Atamannik minalnabi,” in vulgar and rather corrupt Arabic, would mean “I beg
you (to aid me) for the sake of the Prophet.”
[FN#48] Ashrafi, ducats.
[FN#49] The Deccan.
[FN#50] Jeddah
[FN#51] A foist, foyst or buss, was a kind of felucca, partially decked.
[p.358]APPENDIX V.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF JOSEPH PITTS TO MECCAH AND AL-MADINAH.—A.D. 1680
OUR second pilgrim was Jos. Pitts, of Exon,[FN#1] a youth fifteen or
sixteen years old, when in A.D. 1678, his genius “leading him to be a
sailor and to see foreign countries,” caused him to be captured by an
Algerine pirate. After living in slavery for some years, he was taken
by his “patroon” to Meccah and Al-Madinah via Alexandria, Rosetta, Cairo,
and Suez. His description of these places is accurate in the main
points, and though tainted with prejudice and bigotry, he is free from
superstition and credulity. Conversant with Turkish and Arabic, he has
acquired more knowledge of the tenets and practice of Al-Islam than his
predecessor, and the term of his residence at Algier, fifteen years,
sufficed, despite the defects of his education, to give fulness and
finish to his observations. His chief patroon, captain of a troop of
[p.359] horse, was a profligate and debauched man in his time, and a
murderer, “who determined to proselyte a Christian slave as an atonement
for past impieties.” He began by large offers and failed; he succeeded by
dint of a great cudgel repeatedly applied to Joseph Pitts’ bare feet. “I
roared out,” says the relator, “to feel the pain of his cruel strokes, but
the more I cried, the more furiously he laid on, and to stop the noise
of my crying, would stamp with his feet on my mouth.” “At last,” through
terror, he “turned and spake the words (la ilaha, &c.), as usual holding
up the forefinger of the right hand”; he was then circumcised in due
form. Of course, such conversion was not a sincere one—“there was yet
swines-flesh in his teeth.” He boasts of saying his prayers in a state of
impurity, hates his fellow religionists, was truly pleased to hear
Mahomet called sabbatero, i.e., shoemaker, reads his bible, talks of
the horrid evil of apostacy, calls the Prophet a “bloody imposter,” eats
heartily in private of hog, and is very much concerned for one of his
countrymen who went home to his own country, but came again to Algier,
and voluntarily, without the least force used towards him, became a
Mahometan.
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