It Is An Action Denoting
Great Humility, And The Condescending Superior Who Is Not An Immediate
Master Returns The Compliment In The Same Way.
[FN#18] The Maghrabi Dialect Is Known To Be The Harshest And Most
Guttural Form Of Arabic.
It owes this unenviable superiority to its
frequency of "Sukun," or the quiescence of one or more
consonants;-"K'lab,
" For instance, for "Kilab," and "'Msik" for
"Amsik." Thus it is that vowels, the soft and liquid part of language,
disappear, leaving in their place a barbarous sounding mass of
consonants.
[FN#19] Burckhardt mentions the Arab legend that the spirits of the
drowned Egyptians may be seen moving at the bottom of the sea, and
Finati adds that they are ever busy recruiting their numbers with
shipwrecked mariners.
[FN#20] I thus called upon a celebrated Sufi or mystic, whom many
East-Indian Moslems reverence as the Arabs do their Prophet. In
Appendix I the curious reader will find Abd al-Kadir again mentioned.
[FN#21] Those people are descendants of Syrians and Greeks that fled
from Candia, Scios, the Ionian Islands, and Palestine to escape the
persecutions of the Turks. They now wear the Arab dress, and speak the
language of the country, but they are easily to be distinguished from
the Moslems by the expression of their countenances and sometimes by
their blue eyes and light hair. There are also a few families calling
themselves Jabaliyah, or mountaineers. Originally they were 100
households, sent by Justinian to serve the convent of St. Catherine,
and to defend it against the Berbers. Sultan Kansuh al-Ghori, called
by European writers Campson Gaury, the Mamluk King of Egypt, in A.D.
1501, admitted these people into the Moslem community on condition of
their continuing the menial service they had afforded to the monks.
[FN#22] Adam's forehead (says the Tarikh Tabari) brushed the skies, but
this height being inconvenient, the Lord abridged it to 100 cubits.
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