RENEWAL OF MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH MOHAMMED BROWN AND SOME REFLECTIONS ON MATRIMONY

NOW the first thing to do was to look up my former servant, Mohammed el-Asmar, now a dragoman known as Mohammed Brown, the surname being the English interpretation of Asmar. I have described him fully in Below the Cataracts, a previous book I have written when Egypt was much newer to me than at present.

I went to that haunt of the dragomans, the pavement outside the terrace of Shepheard’s hotel, late enough to have allowed for the post-prandial nap. I found one or two hanging about on the chance of some tourist who might be taking Cairo on his way home from yet hotter climates.

They had not seen Mohammed lately and did not know to what part of Cairo he had moved; but one of them knew a relation of his and promised that he should be made to know that I was in Cairo.

That same evening Mohammed was awaiting me in the hall of the hotel.

After the first greetings I remarked on what a swell he had become, and asked him why he should have an English covert-coat over his becoming oriental dress, on so hot an evening as it was. Instead of the old red slippers,12 he wore European tanned-leather boots, and the turban was replaced by the hideous tarbouch. He had forgotten my dislike for this half-and-half get-up, and he told me it was now quite ‘the thing’ amongst the better-class dragomans.

I was glad, however, to find that the seven seasons during which he had been preying on the tourists had not, apart from these changes in his garments, altered him much for the worse.

‘Well, how is the baby?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, he is getting a big boy now.’ ‘And the wife?’ I ventured this time. A rather crestfallen look prepared me that something was wrong. ‘Which wife, sir, do you mean?’ ‘You must be doing uncommonly well if you can afford two wives,’ I said; ‘most of us who have to earn our living in England find one as much as we can manage; besides, Mohammed, you used to agree with me that it was a very foolish thing for any one to have more than one.’ He certainly seemed to agree with me now, for it was evident that trouble began when number two made her appearance.

‘It came about like this,’ he went on. ‘You remember I told you that my first wife, the mother of our Hassan, was very pretty, and that I loved her very much.’ ‘Yes, I remember she was very pretty, for you know I caught sight of her that day my wife and I dined at your house.’ He smiled, but shook his head, as much as to say that he, a Moslem, ought not to have allowed his wife to be seen unveiled. As I, however, was not a Moslem myself, he tried to console himself that he had not transgressed Mohammedan law.

13 ‘A pretty face, sir, she still has, but her tongue gets worse and worse.’

I asked the foolish young man if he expected to improve her tongue by introducing her to a second wife. ‘I have been a great fool,’ was his mournful reply; and after a pause, ‘I think I shall have to divorce her; but I love her very much in spite of her temper.’

‘Well, now, about number two?’ I asked. ‘It came about like this,’ he began again. ‘You must remember Ahmed Abd-er-Rahman, the old dragoman that used to come here.’ ‘I don’t remember him, but no matter.’ ‘Well, I asked his advice about curing a wife’s temper, but got little encouragement from him. The few remedies he suggested, and which I tried, only made matters worse.

‘One day he said to me: “Mohammed, I have always loved you as if you were a son of mine, and as I have still an unmarried daughter, it would add to my happiness as well as to yours if you became my son-in-law. I shall only ask a small dowry of you, whereas if I were to marry her to the one-eyed Mustapha, he could and would give a much larger one. She is young and beautiful, and has the sweetest disposition; and while I kept you waiting in the h?sh the other day, it was but to give her an opportunity of gazing on you through the mushrbiyeh. You can divorce your Rasheeda and live happily with my Fatimah.”

‘This sounded very well, and I tried to get the old man to fix the sum I should have to pay as the dowry. He kept telling me of the price one-eyed Mustapha was prepared to pay; but I wanted to know nothing about14 Mustapha, and have since found out that this was all lies. After many days he agreed to content himself with ten pounds, and I paid him half that sum, the other half, as you know, to be paid when the marriage had taken place.

‘I had done well that season, and spent much of my earnings on the wedding; when I left my friends below to go to the hareem, I gave my bride a handsome present as “the price of the uncovering of the face,” and when I threw back the shawl, and saw her for the first time, I nearly fainted.’

It was as much as I could do not to laugh, but the poor fellow seemed so overcome in recalling his bad bargain that I tried to look sympathetic.

‘I thought of divorcing her there and then,’ he went on, ‘but I had not the heart to pronounce those terrible words on the day of the poor creature’s wedding. She was ugly and old—at least thirty—and had as brown a face as I have.’

After a pause he went on. ‘Her father—may Allah blacken his face!—did not lie as regards her temper; but even the best of tempers could not withstand the jeering and scoffing to which Rasheeda used to treat her. My mother used to take her part, and we had more rows between Rasheeda and my mother. When I could stand it no longer, I went with two witnesses to the Kadi’s court and had her written a nashizeh, and she returned to her own people. Fatimah tried to mother our little Hassan, but she could not console him. He got ill, and I was afraid we might lose him. I then took a room near Saida Zenab, and fetched Rasheeda away from her people, and she and the15 child are now living there. My life has been more peaceful since then, but the cost of two households makes me a very poor man. I assure you, Mr. Tyndale, that though I did very well last season, I hardly know where to turn for a piastre.’

It would be two months or more before the next season would be in full swing, so we arranged that he would accompany me during that time, and would procure me some one else while he was engaged with the tourists. He promised to be in good time the next morning, and took his departure.

Probably nothing has tended more to separate the East from the West than their differing views as to the relation of the sexes. Such education as there is has until quite recently been entirely confined to the sons of the more well-to-do, and even at present the instances of a girl being taught to read or write are very rare. It therefore follows that as only one parent has had any mental training, the offspring has less mental capacity to inherit than where both parents will have had some form of schooling. The religious instruction which forms so large a part of a Moslem’s training is almost entirely withheld from the girls, which accounts no doubt for the erroneous idea held by Europeans that Mohammedans believe women to have no souls. Religious text-books give pages as to a child’s duty to its father, and they sum up in a couple of lines the duty to the mother. Educated Egyptians will often complain that their wives are no companions to them, but what can they expect when their womenkind are brought up in a manner so distinctly inferior?

16 Polygamy is less common than is generally supposed, but a man can divorce his wife so easily that he has not the necessity of keeping more than one at a time. It is true that a father will hesitate to give his daughter to a man who has often used the divorce court, and that he will also advise his son to keep to one wife if he possibly can.

A young doctor, who appeared to be happily married, told me of the advice his father gave him previous to the wedding. ‘Don’t be foolish enough, O my son, ever to take a second wife; for if you do, trouble is sure to begin. Should you tire of Zenab, get her another dress; women are all much the same, it is the clothes which make the difference.’ I asked if this plan had succeeded. ‘Yes, only too well,’ said my friend, ‘for she is continually encouraging me to get her a new dress.’ He also told me that previous to his wedding he had not even seen his wife veiled, though they were brought up in the same town. His sisters had described her so well to him that when he saw her for the first time, she was very much like what he had anticipated.
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AN ARAB WEDDING PROCESSION
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17 I have described more fully elsewhere a marriage to which my wife and I were invited as guests, and as such full details of the ceremonial are given in Lane’s Modern Egyptians I shall not dwell on it here. Lane’s argument to those who severely condemn Islamic marriage laws is this: ‘As Moses allowed God’s chosen people, for the hardness of their hearts, to put away their wives, and forbade neither polygamy nor concubinage, he who believes that Moses was divinely inspired to enact the best laws for his people, must hold the permission of these practices to be less injurious to morality than their prohibition, among a people similar to the ancient Jews.’ This sounds fairly plausible, but we must not forget that Mohammedans accept Christ as a prophet as well as Moses, and also avow that each prophet taught them something higher than the preceding one had done, and there is certainly no licence as to polygamy or concubinage allowed in the teaching of our Lord. Their last prophet, and according to them their greatest, Mohammed, had overlooked this, and probably only codified what had more or less become a common practice in his day.

As the modern Jews now hold to one wife just as do the people amongst whom they live, so it is possible that in time the Moslems may also modify their marriage customs. Supply and demand has already had its effect, for with the restrictions on slavery, concubinage has of necessity lessened and respect for the husband of one wife is increasing amongst the better educated classes.

I started on a subject on the following morning, of an old house built alongside and overhanging an entrance to a mosque. A little coffee-shop under an archway, on the opposite side of the street, made an excellent point of vantage from which I could do my work without attracting too much attention. Mohammed, who accompanied me, made arrangements with the owner of the stall for my accommodation, and sat on the high bench near me, so as to keep off the more inquisitive. An ideal post for him, for he could smoke a nárgeeleh, sip18 coffee, and chat with the other clients as much as he pleased. He would brush away the flies with one end of his whisp, and poke with the other end any small boy who ventured too near me. ‘If one comes it may not matter, but if one stays fifty others will come also,’ he would say, as the stick of the whisp and a boy’s head came in contact.

It was also in the interest of the owner of the coffee-shop,—as Mohammed was careful to explain to him,—to make things comfortable for me, as I should spend many mornings here if I were not molested in my work. Besides my subject, which was a very beautiful one in itself, this was a useful perch from which to make studies of the people and animals which passed. It was in the Nahasseen, one of the busiest thoroughfares of Cairo, and scarcely an hour would go by without hearing the zaghareet, the shrill cries of joy which told of the approach of a bridal procession, or the doleful chorus, ‘Lá iláha illa-lláh,’ would prepare one for the passing of a funeral.

It has happened that the zaghareet was not always the accompaniment of the more cheerful procession, for these shrill cries of joy replace those of lamentation when a welee, a person of great sanctity, is carried to his last resting-place. The idea conveyed is that the joys now awaiting him more than compensate those he has left behind for his loss. There is a curious superstition, or maybe some other cause which we cannot explain, that if these cries of joy cease for more than a minute the bearers of the corpse cannot proceed. It is also maintained that a welee is able to direct the steps of his19 bearers to a particular spot where he may wish to be buried. Lane tells the following anecdote, describing an ingenious mode of puzzling a dead saint of this kind. ‘Some men were lately bearing the corpse of a welee to a tomb prepared for it in the great cemetery on the north of the metropolis; but on arriving at the gate called Bab-en-Nasr, which leads to this cemetery, they found themselves unable to proceed further from the cause above-mentioned. “It seems,” said one of the bearers, “that the sheykh is determined not to be buried in the cemetery of Bab-en-Nasr; and what shall we do?” They were all much perplexed; but being as obstinate as the saint himself, they did not immediately yield to his caprice. Retreating a few paces, and then advancing with a quick step, they thought by such an impetus to force the corpse through the gateway; but their efforts were unsuccessful; and the same experiment they repeated in vain several times. They then placed the bier on the ground, to rest and consult; and one of them beckoning away his comrades to a distance, beyond the hearing of the dead saint, said to them, “Let us take up the bier again, and turn it round quickly several times till the sheykh becomes giddy; he then will not know in what direction we are going, and we may take him easily through the gate.” This they did; the saint was puzzled, as they expected, and quietly buried in the place he had striven to avoid.’

I witnessed a similar thing in Japan, a year or two ago; but in that case it was an idol which showed a similar obstinacy. It was at the ‘Gion Matsuri,’ which annually takes place at Ky?to, when the Shinto god20 Susa-no-o is carried to his O Tabisho—that is, his sojourn in the country with his goddess.

No sooner had the god been placed on his portable throne than the wildest excitement was manifested by his bearers; some wished to carry him one way and some another, while others seemed rooted to the ground. A Japanese gentleman, who was with me, explained that until all the bearers felt drawn to pull one way, it was not known by which route the god had decided to go.

It is singular that a similar superstition should obtain with people differing as much as the Egyptians do to the Japanese.

The constant funerals which passed between me and my subject seemed little heeded by Mohammed and the other frequenters of the café, except when the chorus mentioned the name of the prophet, some would murmur, ‘God bless and save him’—‘Salla-lláhu-’aleyhi wasellem.’

The bridal procession, on the contrary, seemed to have a very depressing effect on my man, and he would hardly cheer up till a distant wail suggested another funeral.

On one occasion I recognised the camels with the magnificent trappings used when the holy carpet is conveyed to Mecca; they were doing duty as a kind of vanguard to a bride who followed in a litter swung between two other camels. It was a most picturesque sight, and one to take as many notes of as possible for reference to in a future picture. Fortunately the progress of the procession is slow, the traffic of the street compelling it frequently to stop. This would21 enable me to get ahead of it and jot down some of the arrangements of colour. The heavy gold and crimson trappings of one camel, a combination of green and gold on a second, while the gold brocade of a third was in a purple setting; all this in a blaze of sunshine, yet subdued compared to the light caught by the brass kettle-drums. The background in some places, too cut up in violent patches of light and shade by the awnings over the shops or too intricate with the drawing of a saracenic mosque entrance, filled me with confusion as to how I could ever treat such a subject.

When the broad plain surfaces of Bark?k’s and Kala?n’s shrines made a setting to this gorgeous procession, I felt that my task had become more hopeful.

The number of facts I had to crowd into my memory in a half-hour or so, I found more exhausting than a long morning’s work on a subject such as the one I had left to pursue this one. To return to the little café where I had left Mohammed in charge of my painting materials, pack up my traps and go back to the hotel, was about as much as I was fit for during the rest of that morning.