Mohammedanism is the religion which is everywhere in evidence in the East to-day. From the smart Turkish officer who drops in to smoke a cigarette with you in the tent after dinner, and discusses European politics in excellent French, down to the beggar who beseeches you in the name of Allah for a pipeful of tobacco or the end of your cigar, your acquaintance in Syria is Moslem. From the consecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Moslem capture of Jerusalem was exactly three hundred years. When, in 637, Jerusalem fell, Damascus had already fallen, and Antioch was to follow next year—all within sixteen years of the beginning of the Mohammedan era. The conquest was inevitable. First Persia and then the scattered tribes of pagan Arabs had proved too much for the Byzantine empire in Syria. Then the man appeared who understood his opportunity. The Eastern world was in confusion. Heathens constituted the ruling race, the Jews were scattered in their dispersion, and the Christians torn into many fragmentary heretical{138} sects. It was the moment for a great union of scattered forces. The Arabs were united by the new faith in God, for which they abandoned their paganism with a marvellous willingness. The bond of union with Christians and Jews was the common ancestry in Abraham by which Mohammed hoped to rally and unite the Syrian world. One sharp battle at the Yarmuk threw Syria open to his advance, and the crisis of the faith was past.
Mohammed has been declared an impostor, who from first to last won his way by cleverness without faith; he has been idealised as a hero and prince of heroes in the religious world. Dean Milman, perhaps, is wisest when he says, “To the question whether Mohammed was hero, sage, impostor, or fanatic ... the best reply is the reverential phrase of Islam: ‘God knows.’” One thing is certain, viz., that he founded a religion which proved itself capable of wakening response from the Semitic East with a swiftness and a completeness never elsewhere known. It would be a matter of rather serious consequences to affirm that such sweeping success is possible without any vestige of honest faith on the part of its own prophet.
Arabia found Islam a religion after her own heart. The conquest of the Arabian mind, and that sudden transference of religious and political loyalties which changed it from chaos into cosmos, is little short of miraculous. In the words of one of the severest critics of Islam: “In A.D. 570, Abdullah, the son of Abd el Muttalib, a Mecca merchant,{139} went on a trading trip from Mecca to Medina and died there; the same year his wife, Amina, gave birth to a boy, named Mohammed, at Mecca. One hundred years later the name of this Arab lad, joined to that of the Almighty, was called out from ten thousand mosques five times daily, from Muscat to Morocco, and his new religion was sweeping everything before it in three continents.”[24] In many ways the new religion was congenial to Arabia. “Although it made a most vigorous effort to conquer the world, it is, after all, a religion of the desert, of the tent, and the caravan, and is confined to nomad and savage or half-civilised nations, chiefly Arabs, Persians, and Turks. It never made an impression on Europe except by brute force; it is only encamped, not really domesticated, in Constantinople, and when it must withdraw from Europe it will leave no trace behind.”[25] It gave the heathen Arabs, in exchange for their precarious dependence on incalculable and wayward gods, the sublime conception of “Islam,” the absolute surrender to the One God, whom it declared to be Almighty, All-Wise, and All-Merciful. For the rest, its secret was simplicity. It drove straight for its object, sacrificing art, appetite, the purity of home life, the spirituality of religious imagination, and some of the accepted moralities of conscience. What was left was a creed and standard, somewhat impoverished truly, but workable and uncompromising. A thousand difficult questions were avoided, and one of those forces set in{140} play before whose rough simplicity finer and more delicate things are swept away.
Mohammedanism meets the traveller at every turn in Syria. Now and then a dervish is encountered—the extremest sort of Moslem. It would seem difficult to develop a mystic school within the pale of so clear-cut a faith as Mohammedanism; yet it has been done. But the Mohammedan dervishes escape from this despised material world by the vulgar process of hypnotising themselves by the repetition of the word “Allah” or “Hu,” or by whirling in circles until they are stupefied. This they call the ecstatic state, and when they have reached it they are said to perform many violent tricks, stabbing their flesh or eating broken glass, without appearing to feel pain. In Syria they are by no means impressive in appearance. Here and there you meet one, with hair crimped in long thin pointed wisps, and sticking out in a wiry fashion from his head in all directions. The dazed and rather weak look in the eyes is suggestive of a strayed reveller rather than a holy man, but the people hold them in great reverence.
Another occasional freak of Mohammedanism is the religious procession, which is conducted on the principle of a rival show to the Christian fêtes. It starts on Good Friday from Jerusalem to visit the tomb of Moses—a late fiction, somewhat daring in its contradiction to the old belief that the tomb of Moses was known to no man. It is amusingly described by witnesses, but appears to be rather a poor affair on the whole.{141}
These extravagances apart, one is never out of sight of Mohammedan religion for an hour of travel in Syria. The worship, like old idolatry, seems to have claimed every high hill and every green tree for its own. It has settled itself, in the very seat of old Judaism, on the sacred area of the temple. Almost every one of the prominent hills of Palestine is crowned with a little building, domed and whitewashed, opening in a porch in front, and containing a single empty chamber. This is the weli (i.e. monument, not necessarily tomb) of a Mohammedan saint. What the terms of canonisation may be, it is perhaps best not to inquire too minutely. Many of these departed saints are said to have been prophets, but the discoverer of coffee has his monument in Mocha, to which great processions come, and there is more than one weli in Palestine commemorative of a dead robber chief. Not the less sacred are they to the Mohammedans. In various parts of the country we were puzzled by little piles of stones, gathered and arranged in considerable numbers on the tops of long ascents or passes, and bearing a curious resemblance to the cairns which in certain districts of the west of Scotland mark the spots at which funeral processions have halted to change the coffin-bearers. The explanation of these little piles is very simple. When a Mohammedan comes to the hill-top, and looking around him sees a weli shining in the distance, he offers up a prayer, and drops a stone there, to call the attention of the next comer, that he also may look and pray. Very {142}picturesque and quaint these little holy houses are; serving, like the hermit’s tower of old in Western lands, for landmarks as well as for shrines—the white light-houses of the inland.
It is not at the white tombs only that the Moslem prays. Five times a day, at the call from the mosque, he is summoned to his devotions. Often, indeed, it is inconvenient to worship at some of these hours, and it is permissible to say the prayer five times in succession in the evening, when there is most leisure. Sometimes he carries with him his rosary, to help his memory with the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah, and in railway trains or steamers wealthy gentlemen are to be seen cherishing a string of amber beads which appear more like the property of young girls than of grown men. To perform his devotions the Syrian goes to a fountain, when that is possible, as it is part of the ritual to wash the hands before praying; but the Arab, spreading his carpet in the shade of his camel, far away upon the desert, where no water is to be had but the precious drops in his leathern bottle, is permitted to wash his hands and lips with sand instead. That which impresses every spectator is the extraordinary faculty for abstraction which is manifested. The Moslem seems to have at command the power of annihilating the world around him, and entering the unseen. His eyes are open, but you may pass within a yard of them and they will not seem to see you. They are fixed on the far distance, as if, over the Southern edge of the world, the man saw the Holy City towards which he bows, with its Kaaba and its black stone. He might be crystal-gazing, or watching the horizon for a sail at sea.{143} People may be dancing and singing by his side, but he does not see them nor hear. Bathing once in the waters of Elisha’s fountain at Jericho we had a memorable instance of this. We found the pool empty and the walls undergoing repair. A lad who had charge of the place was persuaded in the usual fashion to let down the door of a sluice and so allow the pool to fill, greatly to the detriment of the newly mortared wall. When we had stripped, the owner of the place appeared, and we rose to the surface from a dive to hear a controversy going on, with violent gesture and apoplectic fury, which marks a high point in our register of vituperation. The water seemed on the whole to be the safest place, and we kept to it until suddenly we perceived that a great silence had fallen on the landscape. Looking anxiously to see what had happened, we found the owner on his knees, praying by his own spring. We dressed without delay, and had to pass in front of him to reach the tents, but he never seemed to know that we had passed.
The muezzin, or call to prayer from the minaret, is one of the most affecting of all Eastern sounds. Men are chosen for this office with singularly mellow and rich voices; they intone, with a very musical little cadence in a minor key, the first chapter of the Koran, and sometimes other prayers. At the great Mosque of Damascus, a solitary reciter calls from the slender minaret, and is answered from the balcony of the broader one across the court by twenty voices in unison. While the waves of rich sound float out over the city, and are caught and faintly echoed from{144} scores of other minarets, one remembers how that voice has rolled forth already over innumerable villages from Bengal westwards, and men have paused from their labour to pray according to their lights.
Islam is usually supposed to have been the “Ishmaelite in church history,” with hand against every man from the first. Really, when it was Arabian, as it remained for four centuries, it was very tolerant, and the Christian pilgrims, priests, and monks were little disturbed. But in 1086 the Seljuk chiefs of wandering Turkish tribes came into possession, and the days of suspicion and that heavy cruelty which is characteristic of the stupid began. There were massacres of monks on Carmel and elsewhere then, and such a state of general tyranny and oppression that the cry reached the West, and the Crusades began. The Crusades, as they dragged their slow length along, did not tend to better understandings; and after Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, we read that the walls and pavement of the Mosque of Omar had to be purified with copious showers of water distilled from the fragrant roses of Damascus. The relations between Moslem and Christian in the land to-day are happier, and the intercourse of increasing trade and travel is breaking down old partitions here as elsewhere. Yet little love is lost between the professors of the rival faiths even now. Dr. Andrew Thomson relates how, in recent years, “it had been observed that at a particular period of the day the shadow of the great Mosque of Omar fell upon a certain Christian burying-ground. Even the honour of
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THE TEMPLE AREA AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, FROM MOUNT ZION.
The dome on the right is that of the Mosque of El Aksa, and that on the left is the Mosque of Omar. Between these domes, and just below the principal group of cypresses, is the “Wailing Place.” The hills in the background are the Mount of Olives.
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blessing conveyed by so sacred a shadow was grudged. The public authorities in Jerusalem were strongly urged to have the Christian cemetery removed to some more distant place, and it required all the combined influence of the European consulates to prevent a scandalous order to this effect from being issued.” The Ordnance Survey party was on several occasions attacked, and even fired upon. In fanatical Moslem cities like Hebron and Nablus, travellers have to conduct themselves with the utmost discretion, and even then will probably be stoned with more or less effect according to the courage and the marksmanship of the thrower. The Christians return the animosity with a kind of impatient ridicule, which seems to indicate a lack of refined piety on their part. Our camp-waiters were Christians, and they used to give us very freely their opinions on the theological differences between them and the Mohammedans. There would be a reverent if somewhat startling account of the Holy Trinity, and then, in scornful contrast: “Mohammedans only One,—and Mohammed all the rest!” The scorn is hardly to be wondered at when one remembers the intellectual level of the powers that be. This is forced upon one’s notice by countless tales of the custom-house and censorship officials. A map of ancient Palestine was objected to because “there were no maps in those days!” An engineer, telegraphing about a pump, was arrested because the message read: “One hundred revolutions!” In certain Bibles the text was erased, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners”{146}; and it was directed that the word “Christians” should be substituted, as there were no sinners in the Turkish empire! After a certain amount of that regime, one would no doubt put new meaning into the prayer which invokes God’s mercy “upon all Turks,” as well as on infidels and heretics!
In spite of all this there is a good deal of interchange between the two faiths, or at least of borrowing on the part of Islam from Christian tradition. So many points have the two in common, that a theory has been broached on which Mohammed appears only as the Judaiser (as it were) of later days, who saw the difficulty that Christians had in working with general principles, and set himself to simplify the situation by reducing Christianity to a stereotyped system. Carlyle distinctly calls Islam “a kind of Christianity.” However this may be, there is no question as to the immense amount which Syrian Mohammedanism borrows from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Countless tombs and other monuments are dedicated to Joshua and other Old Testament worthies. This, of course, may be due to the fact that many Moslem saints have borne the old names, and as time went on their memories came to be confused with those of their more famous namesakes. Samson’s exploits especially have appealed to the Mohammedan imagination, and he appears under the incognito of “Isman Aly,&rdq............