He Particularly Excels In The Cervantic Art, The Spirit
Of Which, Says Sterne, Is To Clothe Low Subjects In Sublime Language.
In Mohammed’S Life We Find That He By No Means Disdained A Joke,
Sometimes A Little Hasarde, As In The Case Of The Paradise-Coveting Old
Woman.
The redeeming qualities of the Meccan are his courage, his
bonhommie, his manly suavity of manners, his fiery sense of honour, his
strong family affections, his near approach to what we call patriotism,
and his general knowledge:
The reproach of extreme ignorance which
Burckhardt directs against the Holy City has long ago sped to the Limbo
of things that were. The dark half of the picture is formed by pride,
bigotry, irreligion, greed of gain, immorality, and prodigal
ostentation. Of the pilgrimage ceremonies I cannot speak harshly. It
may be true that “the rites of the Ka’abah, emasculated of every idolatrous
tendency, still hang a strange unmeaning shroud around the living
theism of Islam.” But what nation, either in the West or in the East, has
been able to cast out from its ceremonies every suspicion of its old
idolatry? What are the English mistletoe, the Irish wake, the Pardon of
Brittany, the Carnival, and the Worship at Iserna? Better far to
consider the Meccan pilgrimage rites in the light of Evil-worship
turned into lessons of Good than to philosophize about their
strangeness, and to blunder in asserting them to be insignificant. Even
the Badawi circumambulating the Ka’abah fortifies his wild belief by the
fond thought that he treads the path of “Allah’s friend.”
At Arafat the good Moslem worships in imitation of
[p.238] the “Pure of Allah[FN#15]”; and when hurling stones and curses at
three senseless little buttresses which commemorate the appearance of
the fiend, the materialism of the action gives to its sentiment all the
strength and endurance of reality.
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