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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 115 of 138
Words from 59242 to 59757
of 71314
