The Imam Malik, For Instance, Allows No Latrinae} Nearer To Al-Madinah Than Jabal Ayr, A Distance Of About Three Miles.

He also forbids slaying wild animals, but at the same time he specifies no punishment for the offence.

Some do not allow the felling of trees, alleging that the Prophet enjoined their preservation as an ornament to the city, and a pleasure to visitors. Al-Khattabi, on the contrary, permits people to cut wood, and this is certainly the general practice. All authors strenuously forbid within the boundaries slaying man (except invaders, infidels, and the sacrilegious), drinking spirits, and leading an immoral life. As regards the dignity of the sanctuary, there is but one opinion; a number of Hadis testify to its honour, praise its people, and threaten dreadful things to those who injure it or them. It is certain that on the last day, the Prophet will intercede for, and aid, all those who die, and are buried, at Al-Madinah. Therefore, the Imam Malik made but one pilgrimage to Meccah, fearing to leave his bones in any other cemetery but Al-Bakia. There is, however, much debate concerning the comparative sanctity of Al-Madinah and Meccah. Some say Mohammed preferred the former, blessing it as Abraham did Meccah. Moreover, as a tradition declares that every man's body is drawn from the dust of the ground in which he is buried, Al-Madinah, it is evident, had the honour of supplying materials for the Prophet's person. Others, like Omar, were uncertain in favour of which city to decide. Others openly assert the pre-eminence of Meccah; the general consensus of Al-Islam preferring Al-Madinah to Meccah, save only the Bayt Allah in the latter city. This last is a juste-milieu view, by no means in favour with the inhabitants of either place. In the meanwhile the Meccans claim unlimited superiority over the Madani; the Madani over the Meccans. [FN#7] These seven wells will be noticed in Chapter XIX., post. [FN#8] I translate Al-Zarka "azure," although Sir G. Wilkinson remarks, apropos of the Bahr al-Azrak, generally translated by us the "Blue Nile," that, "when the Arabs wish to say dark or jet black, they use the word ‘Azrak.'" It is true that Azrak is often applied to indeterminate dark hues, but "Aswad," not Azrak, is the opposite to Abyaz, "white." Moreover, Al-Zarka in the feminine is applied to women with light blue eyes; this would be no distinctive appellation if it signified black eyes, the almost universal colour. Zarka of Yamamah is the name of a celebrated heroine in Arab story, and the curious reader, who wishes to see how much the West is indebted to the East, even for the materials of legend, will do well to peruse her short history in Major Price's "Essay," or M.C. de Perceval's "Essai," &c., vol. i., p. 101. Both of these writers, however, assert that Zarka's eyes, when cut out, were found to contain fibres blackened by the use of Kohl, and they attribute to her the invention of this pigment. I have often heard the legend from the Arabs, who declare that she painted her eyes with "Ismid," a yellow metal, of what kind I have never been able to determine, although its name is everywhere known. [FN#9] Burckhardt confounds the Ayn al-Zarka with the Bir al-Khatim, or Kuba well, of whose produce the surplus only mixes with it, and he complains loudly of the "detestable water of Madinah." But he was ill at the time, otherwise he would not have condemned it so strongly after eulogising the salt-bitter produce of the Meccan Zemzem. [FN#10] The people of Nijd, as Wallin informs us, believe that the more the palms are watered, the more syrup will the fruit produce; they therefore inundate the ground, as often as possible. At Al-Jauf, where the date is peculiarly good, the trees are watered regularly every third or fourth day. [FN#11] Properly meaning the Yellow Wind or Air. The antiquity of the word and its origin are still disputed. [FN#12] Burckhardt (Travels in Arabia, vol. ii.) informs us, that in A.D. 1815, when Meccah, Yambu', and Jeddah suffered severely from the plague, Al-Madinah and the open country between the two seaports escaped. [FN#13] Conjecture, however, goes a little too far when it discovers small-pox in the Tayr Ababil, the "swallow birds," which, according to the Koran, destroyed the host of Abrahat al-Ashram. Major Price (Essay) may be right in making Ababil the plural of Abilah, a vesicle; but it appears to me that the former is an Arabic and the latter a Persian word, which have no connection whatever. M.C. de Perceval, quoting the Sirat al-Rasul, which says that at that time small-pox first appeared in Arabia, ascribes the destruction of the host of Al-Yaman to an epidemic and a violent tempest. The strangest part of the story is, that although it occurred at Meccah, about two months before Mohammed's birth, and, therefore, within the memory of many living at the time, the Prophet alludes to it in the Koran as a miracle. [FN#14] In Al-Yaman, we are told by Niebuhr, a rude form of inoculation-the mother pricking the child's arm with a thorn-has been known from time immemorial. My Madinah friend assured me that only during the last generation, this practice has been introduced amongst the Badawin of Al-Hijaz. [FN#15] Orientals divide their diseases, as they do remedies and articles of diet, into hot, cold, and temperate.

[FN#16] This grain is cheaper than rice on the banks of the Nile-a fact which enlightened England, now paying a hundred times its value for "Revalenta Arabica," apparently ignores. [FN#17] Herodotus (Euterpe) has two allusions to eye disease, which seems to have afflicted the Egyptians from the most ancient times. Sesostris the Great died stone-blind; his successor lost his sight for ten years, and the Hermaic books had reason to devote a whole volume to ophthalmic disease.

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