THE HAREM, SHOWING THE KA’BAH, AND THE OTHER SANCTUARIES WITHIN THE HAREM.

(From an old Indian Illustration.)

WITH THE PILGRIMS TO MECCA

THE GREAT PILGRIMAGE
OF A.H. 1319; A.D. 1902
BY HADJI KHAN, M.R.A.S.
(Special Correspondent of the “Morning Post”)
AND WILFRID SPARROY
(Author of “Persian Children of the Royal Family”)
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY PROFESSOR A. VAMBÉRY

LONDON AND NEW YORK
JOHN LANE, MDCCCCV

PRINTED BY W. H. WHITE AND SON
THE ABBEY PRESS, EDINBURGH

THE HONOURABLE OLIVER A. BORTHWICK

... Oh, never star

Was lost here but it rose afar!

Look East, where whole new thousands are!

The Authors take this opportunity of renewing their acknowledgments of all they owe to the Editor of The Morning Post, to whose friendly interest and encouragement the success of the serial publication, under the title of the “Great Pilgrimage,” was in a considerable measure due. In tendering to him their hearty thanks, they feel it would be scarcely fair to themselves were they to allow the reader to take this, the present fruit of their respective labours, to be a mere republication. It is something far more than that, one-fifth of the book, and that the most interesting part of all, being absolutely new; while the whole of the remainder has been not only carefully revised, but also recast, and, to some extent, rewritten. But the reader owes the new material to Mr. Dunn’s kindness in relinquishing his right to it in order that it might appear for the first time in the pages of “With the Pilgrims to Mecca.”

28th April 1904.

My own East!

How nearer God we were! He glows above

With scarce an intervention, presses close

And palpitatingly, His soul o’er ours;

We feel Him, nor by painful reason know!

The everlasting minute of creation

Is felt there.

Robert Browning.

INTRODUCTION

Amongst the varied and manifold impressions of my long and intimate connection with the Mohammedan world none is more lively and more interesting than my experiences with the Hajees, the dear, pious and good-natured companions on many of my wanderings in Moslem Asia. We in Europe can hardly have an idea of the zeal and delight which animate the pilgrim to the holy places of Arabia, not only during his sojourn in Mekka and Medina, not only whilst making the Tawaf (procession round the Kaaba), not only during the excursion to the valley of Mina, where the exclamation of “Lebeitk yá Allah” rends the air round the Arafat—but long before he has started on his arduous and formerly very dangerous journey to the birthplace of Islam. The Hadj, being one of the four fundamental commands of Islam, is looked upon by every true believer as a religious duty the fulfilment of which is always before his eyes, and if prevented by want of means or by infirmity he will strive to find a Wekil (representative), whom he provides with necessary funds to undertake the journey and to pray in his name at the Kaaba, and when the Wekil has returned he hands over the Ihram (a shirt-like dress in which the pilgrimage is performed) to his sender who will use it as his shroud, and appear before the Almighty in the garb used on the Hadj. The further the Moslem lives from Arabia the greater becomes the passion to visit the holy places of his religion, and if there was a country in which the desire to fulfil this holy command was most fervently cultivated and executed, it was decidedly Central Asia and Eastern Turkestan, where nearly two-thirds of the pilgrims formerly perished, partly in consequence of epidemics and inclemency of weather, partly also at the hands of robbers or through thirst in the desert. And yet these Turk or Tartar Hadjees often disregard all dangers and perils of a long journey, and begin to economise the money necessary for travelling expenses many years before they have set out, for a man destitute of means is not allowed to undertake the Hadj, the same prohibition exists also for a man who is not bodily strong enough, or who has to provide for a family left back at home. It is true, in accordance with the saying “Hem ziaret hem tidjaret” (Pilgrimage and Business together), there are people, who connect trade with religion, but their devotion is often criticised, whereas the pure religious intention meets everywhere with the greatest praise and veneration, and a successfully accomplished visit to the holy places of Arabia makes a Mohammedan respected not only in his community but also in the outlying districts of his country. On his return journey from Mekka and Medina the Hajee gets an official reception all along his route. He is met by young and old, by rich and poor, everybody tries to rub his eyes or his cheeks to the dress of the man, in order to catch an atom of the dust coming from the Kaaba or from the grave of the Prophet, and if the Hajee is the bearer of some Khaki-Mubarak (i.e., blessed earth from the grave of Mohammed), or if he is in possession of a small bottle of “Zemzem” (the holy fountain in the precinct of the Kaaba), there is no end and limit to the pressing throng around him. I have seen people kissing the footsteps of such a pilgrim, embracing and petting him, and what struck me most was the scene where Kirghis or Turkoman nomads cried like children on seeing one of these Hajees, and when they began to quarrel, nay, to fight, for the opportunity to bestow hospitality on a returning Hajee, be he even an Uzbeg or a Tajik, whom they otherwise dislike.

Yes, the Haj is a most wonderful institution in the interest of the strength, unity and spiritual power of Islam; it is a kind of religious Parliament and a gathering place for the followers of the prophet, where the sacred Hermandad is fostered despite all differences of race and colour, and whereas the temple in Jerusalem does often become the cockpit of different Christian sects, and the arena of bloody fights, which would fatally end without the intercession of the Moslem soldiers of the Padishah, we meet with perfect peace and concord in the court of the Kaaba, where the four sects have got their separate places without interfering with each other, and where Hanefites, Shafaites, Malekites and Hanbalites pay simultaneously their veneration to the founder of their religion. Even the Shiite Persian is not molested as long as he does not offend the believers by an ostentatious exhibition of his schismatic views, what he rarely does, for dissimulation is not prohibited according to the tenets of the Shiites.

The foregoing remarks about the Haj have been quoted here with the intention to realise the importance of this religious custom of Islam, and particularly to show how necessary it is to know and to appreciate duly the political, social and ethical qualities of this precept ordained by the prophet.

Well, in order to gain full information on this subject, we have been in need of an account of the Haj written by a Mohammedan who is not attracted by curiosity, but by religious piety, who had free access to every place, who is not hampered by fear of being discovered as a Christian, and who is besides a shrewd observer. These essential qualities I find in Mr. Haji Khan, M.R.A.S., the pilgrim, who calls himself also “Haji Raz” (the mystery Haji). It may be well said that Christian travellers like Burkhard, Burton, Maltzan, and others, have exhausted the subject relating to the holy places of Islam, but a Mohammedan sees more and better than any foreigner, and I do not go too far when I say that Mr. Haji Khan, with his thorough English education, would have been more fitted to describe, unaided, the life and the manners of the Haj, than was his Turkish fellow-believer, Emin Effemdi, author of a Turkish account of the same topic.

I daresay it will be the case with many other subjects relating to the actual and past features of the Eastern life, if natives will be only educated to describe the peculiarities of their own nations and creeds, and for this reason it is desirable that the number of scholars like Mr. Haji Khan should increase, and that this present book, written in collaboration with Mr. Wilfrid Sparroy, should meet with a well-deserved reception.

Great credit is due to Mr. Wilfrid Sparroy, to whose high qualities as a writer, this joint production owes so much. Both Mr. Haji Khan and Mr. Wilfrid Sparroy are to be congratulated on the results of their labours: they have succeeded in bringing the East nearer to the West.

A. VAMBÉRY.

PART I

A PERSIAN PILGRIM IN THE MAKING—

		PAGE
1.	The Message of the Prophet	[21]
2.	Conditions of Pilgrimage	[31]
3.	Forbidden Viands	[32]
4.	The Work of Purification	[33]
5.	Prayers	[35]
6.	Aspects of Social Islám	[37]
7.	Stories of the Muslim Moons	[47]
8.	Persian Súfíism—Persian Shiahism in its Relation to the Persian Passion-Drama	[62]

PART II

THE STORY OF THE PILGRIMAGE—

Chap. I.	London to Jiddah	[81]
Chap. II.	From Jiddah to Mecca	[102]
Chap. III.	Within the Harem—Some Remarks on the Orthodox Sects of Islám	[111]
Chap. IV.	Compassing of the Ka’bah	[126]
Chap. V.	The Course of Perseverance	[140]
Chap. VI.	Scene in an Eating-House—Visit to the Ka’bah	[153]
Chap. VII.	On the Road to Arafat	[173]
Chap. VIII.	On the Road to Arafat (concluded)	[193]
Chap. IX.	Arafat Day: Night	[212]
Chap. X.	Arafat Day: Daybreak	[223]
Chap. XI.	Arafat Day: Forenoon and Afternoon	[234]
Chap. XII.	The Day of Victims: From Sundown to Sunset. The Days of Drying Flesh	[245]

PART III

MECCAN SCENES AND SKETCHES—

Chap. I.	The Meccan Bazaars	[255]
Chap. II.	The Talisman-Monger	[266]
Chap. III.	Seyyid ’Alí’s Story of his Redemption	[280]
Chap. IV.	Healing by Faith	[289]
Appendix.	Some Reflections on the Existence of a Slave Market in Mecca	[299]
Index.		[309]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

	PAGE
The Harem, showing the Ka’bah, and the other Sanctuaries within the Harem	[Frontispiece]
Copies of the Kurán worn en bandoulière by Muslims when Travelling or on Pilgrimage	[39]
A Persian Sufí of the Order of the late Sephi ’Alí Sháh	[65]
A Group of Mixed Pilgrims	[85]
A Pilgrim “at Sea”—Suez Railway Station	[85]
Preparing to Embark at Suez	[91]
Pilgrims Embarking at Suez	[99]
Before Weighing Anchor at Suez	[99]
A Moorish Gentleman in Moorish Dress	[121]
The Poorer Side of Egyptian Muslims	[143]
Putting on Ihrám at Jiddah	[155]
Mussah Street at Mecca	[155]
An Egyptian Coffee-house Frequented by the Poor	[161]
An Egyptian Donkey and its Driver	[183]
The Musician Camel Cavalcade	[201]
Water-carriers of Mecca	[207]
(a) The Pasha of Hejaz; (b) The Aminus-Surreh	[207]
The Sheríf of Mecca in his Uniform	[215]
A Learned Mussulman of India	[229]
Persian Pilgrims from Tabriz, having Tea on Board the Steamer	[239]
Disembarking at Jiddah	[249]
Pilgrims at Jiddah	[249]
An Egyptian Grocer	[267]
A Persian Professor of Theology	[291]
An Arab Sheykh of the Town	[297]

ERRATA

[Page 22], line 34,	For Jellalu’d-dín’s “Al Beidáwí,” read Al-Beidáwí’s commentary.
[Page 31], line 10,	For “Hájí Ráz,” read Hadji Khan.
[Page 31], line 11,	For Chapter V., Part III., read Appendix.
[Page 32], line 12,	For formerly, read formally.
{ [Page 57], line 1,	For 1320, read 1319.
{ [Page 245], line 19,	For 1320, read 1319.
[Page 69], line 7,	For uncle, read father-in-law.
[Page 69], lines 29-30,	For too rash and too indiscreet, read too forbearing and too magnanimous.
{ [Page 72], line 12,	For daughter Fatima, read sister Zainab.
{ [Page 76], line 13,	For daughter Fatima, read sister Zainab.
[Page 93], line 21,	For Yásuf, read Yûsuf.
[Page 93], lines 22-23,	For Al Beyyid, read Al Beidáwí.
{ [Page 115], line 1,	For Tomb of Abraham, read Station of Abraham.
{ [Page 130], line 28,	For Tomb of Abraham, read Station of Abraham.
[Page 117], line 9,	For Merú, read Merve.
[Page 134], line 8,	For ordnance, read ordinance.
[Page 166], line 32,	For mosque, read temple.
[Page 199], line 19,	For Tabbál, read Tabl.
[Page 237], line 12,	For Kharnum, read Khanum.
[Page 237], line 12,	For Mrs. Zobeideh, read Lady Zobeideh.
[Page 251], line 4,	Omit the Merciful and Compassionate.
[Page 266], line 20,	For God is just, read God is Great.

WITH THE PILGRIMS TO MECCA

Part I
A PERSIAN PILGRIM IN THE MAKING

I.—Message of the Prophet.

The day before I left England for Persia some seven years ago, I went to see my uncle, the author of the “Siege of Metz.” On saying good-bye he made me a present of the Kurán. “Here,” said he, “is the thing to be read. It will be the best introduction to the new life awaiting you in the East. If you can lay hold of the spirit of this book you will not be alone out there, but among men and brothers, for the Kurán is a sincere revelation of much that is eternally true.” I never saw George Robinson again: in less than a week—before I had left Paris—his spirit had passed to the bourne whence all revelations come, and where truth, in its completeness, will be revealed.

Now, it should be the critic’s aim, in dealing with all true books, to place himself on the same plane as the author, and to look in the same direction, fixing the same end. This is more especially true of what his attitude should be towards a message that has been held sacred by countless millions for more than thirteen hundred years. The merits of the Kurán and the far-reaching reforms of the Prophet of Islám can be appreciated worthily only by such men as have taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the idolatrous superstitions of the Arabians in the time of Ignorance, and with the empty logical jangling of the rival Syrian Christian sects at the close of the Sixth Century. And the critic having grasped the lifelessness of religious practice before the coming of Muhammad, would be wise to reveal, first of all, what there is of truth, and to spread what light there is in the written word of the great reformer, abandoning to the bigot and the purblind the less fruitful occupation of stirring in the cauldron of religious controversy. To that end, indeed, it were not amiss that he should cultivate his imagination, for the imaginative have turned the corner of their narrower selves, and theirs is an ever-widening vision. To those who, living by the word of Christ, diffuse darkness, Muhammad will ever be either a charlatan or an unscrupulous man of the sword. Well, the Prophet’s followers must take heart of grace. History itself as well as the Kurán has proclaimed the charges to be false.

The keynote to Muhammad’s character is sincerity. Sincerity rings out clear enough in every word of his book. He was a man in whom the fire-thought of the desert burned so fiercely that he could not help being sincere. He was so truly sincere, indeed, as to be wholly unconscious of his sincerity. Now, of all the stories related of him none affords a more convincing proof of his thorough honesty than the one which shows him to have been, at least once in practice, a backslider from the high ideal of conduct that he preached. This story, from Al-Beidáwí’s commentary, is thus related by Sale:

“A certain blind man named Abdallah Ebn Omm Mactúm came and interrupted Muhammad while he was engaged in earnest discourse with some of the principal Kuraish, of whose conversion he had hopes; but, the Prophet taking no notice of him, the blind man, not knowing that Muhammad was otherwise busied, raised his voice, and said, ‘O apostle of God, teach me some part of what God hath taught thee’; but Muhammad, vexed at this interruption, frowned, and turned away from him,” for which he was reprehended afterwards by his conscience. This episode was the source of the revelation entitled “He Frowned.” “The Prophet frowned, and turned aside,” so runs Chapter lxxx. of the Kurán, “because the blind man came unto him; and how dost thou know whether he shall peradventure be cleansed from his sins; or whether he shall be admonished, and the admonition shall profit him? The man who is wealthy thou receivest with respect; but him who cometh unto thee earnestly seeking his salvation, and who fearest God, dost thou neglect. By no means shouldst thou act thus.” We are also told that the Prophet, whenever he saw Ebn Omm Mactúm after this, showed him marked respect, saying, “The man is welcome on whose account my Lord hath reprimanded me,” and that he made him twice Governor of Medina. And yet many still persist in calling Muhammad a charlatan. Surely a prophet who, in reproving others, spared not himself, has won the right to be respected as an honest man. For my part I believe him to have been one whose word was his bond, and whose hand it had been good to grasp.

As for his having been a mere victorious soldier, he was in the beginning “precisely in a minority of one.” Your Napoleon finds in patriotism his most successful recruiting sergeant. But the call of patriotism had summoned to Muhammad’s standard not a single recruit, because he was despised by the patriotic (if the Kuraish, the predominant tribe in Arabia, and the keepers of the Ka’bah, deserved to be so called) and was rejected by them. Assuredly Muhammad drew the sword; he was driven to draw it in the end. But how did he get the sword, and to what purpose did he put it when he had it? Muhammad’s sword was forged in the furnace of that passionate, human soul of his, was tempered in the flame of divine compassion, and gave to every Arab an Empire and a creed. Islám was the sword! The blade of steel achieved no miracle, it merely drew blood—sufficiently corrupt. It was the sword of Muhammad’s word which freed the Arab heart from its vices and fired it with a wider patriotism and a purer faith. His battle-cry was the declaration of God’s unity; his sword was the faith; his battlefield the human heart and soul; and his enemy idolatry and corruption. “Yá Alláh!” and “Yá Muhammad!” carried the Arabian conquest from Mecca to Granada, and from Arabia to Delhi. The conquering hosts fought rather with their hearts and with their souls than with their swords and their strong right hands; inculcating in the conquered no earthly vanities, as do modern Muhammadan rulers, but the principles of liberty, solidarity, unity, equality, and compassion.

Forty thousand Arabs, under their famous leader, Sád Vaghás, having defeated five hundred thousand Persians and overthrown the mighty Persian Empire, in the battle of Khadasieh, on the plain of Nahavend, deeply rooted their faith in the heart of the alien race, and then left her to be ruled by her own people, in accordance with the precepts of the new revelation. Omar, perhaps the greatest Caliph, is said to have lived throughout his life on a loaf of barley bread and a cup of sour milk a day. And Alí’ the Prophet’s son-in-law, whom the Persians revere as his true successor, lived for no other purpose than to help the poor and to succour the weak. He was, as Carlyle assures us, a man worthy of Christian knighthood. So also was his son, Huseyn, whose glorious martyrdom has endeared him to the hearts of the Persian people.

In the East men are ruled and guided by religious laws and not by positive ones, so Muhammad’s aim was to make the Arabians free and united by lessening the sufferings of the poor and by establishing equality among the people. That these aims and aspirations cannot be consummated through positive laws alone must be abundantly clear to every man in the civilised West who has watched the gradual rise among us of Socialism and the deadly growth of Anarchy. We Western peoples merely pray that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Whereas Muhammad, being, as he was, a practical reformer, made it incumbent on his followers to contribute to the consummation of the Divine Law by bestowing on the poor a fair share of the things that they loved.

The very core of the Muhammadan faith lies, as I conceive, in three broad principles. First, in the declaration of God’s unity. “Say, God is one God; the eternal God: He begetteth not, neither is He begotten: and there is not one like unto Him.” This short chapter, as is well known, is held in particular veneration by the Muhammadans, and declared, by a tradition of the Prophet, to be equal in value to a third part of the whole Kurán. It is said to have been revealed in answer to the Kuraish, who had asked Muhammad concerning the distinguishing attributes of the God he invited them to worship. For Muhammad held that all the prophets from the creation of the world have been Unitarians; that as Moses was a Unitarian so also was Christ; that Christianity, as practised in Syria, was a break in God’s revelation of Himself as One, and that he, Muhammad, had been specially chosen by God to re-admonish mankind of this fundamental truth.

As this ground idea satisfies the Oriental’s reason, so the second, Islám, that is, resignation from man to God, responds to the inner voice of his soul, and seems to lead his heart warmly to embrace the third principle of the Muhammadan faith, which, in the golden age of the Muhammadan Era, was the means of establishing equality among the people—I mean the principle of charity, of alms-giving, of compassion from man to man. Unswerving obedience to the spirit and the letter of these three laws carried with it the obligation of unswerving loyalty to the Prophet. When we pray, we Christians, we say “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Muhammadans, under penalty of everlasting torment, are obliged to sacrifice, to the poor and needy, a due proportion of the things that they love—not merely of their superfluity—with the result that each man among them, by that fact alone, constitutes himself, as it were, a willing instrument of God’s will that His Kingdom of Heaven shall reign on earth. Another fact that proves Muhammad to have been something far more than a man of the sword is that to this day Muhammadans hail one another on meeting with the word “Salám” (have peace). Indeed, peace being an essential condition of undertaking the sacramental Pilgrimage to Mecca, it is unlawful to wage war during the three months’ journeying of the Muslim lunar year, namely, in Shavvál, Zú-’l-ka’dah, and Zú-’l-hijjah.

“Contribute out of your subsistence towards the defence of the religion of God,” says Muhammad, “and throw not yourself with your own hands into perdition [that is, be not accessory to your own destruction by neglecting your contributions towards the wars against infidels, and thereby suffering them to gather strength], and do good, for God loveth those who do good. Perform the Pilgrimage of Mecca, and the visitation of God; and if ye be besieged send that offering which shall be the easiest, and shave not your heads until your offering reacheth the place of sacrifice. But whoever among you is sick, or is troubled with any distemper of the head, must redeem the shaving of the head by fasting, by alms, or by some offering [either by fasting three days, by feeding six poor people, or by sacrificing a sheep]. But he who findeth not anything to offer shall fast three days in the Pilgrimage, and seven when he be returned: these shall be ten days complete. This is incumbent on him whose family shall not be present at the Holy Temple.”

“The Pilgrimage must be performed in the known months (i.e., Shavvál, Zú-’l-ka’dah, and Zú-’l-hijjah); whosoever therefore purposeth to go on Pilgrimage therein, let him not know a woman, nor transgress, nor quarrel in the Pilgrimage. The good which ye do, God knoweth it. Make provision for your journey, but the best provision is piety, and fear me, O ye of understanding. It shall be no crime in you if ye seek an increase from your Lord by trading during the Pilgrimage. And when ye go in procession from Arafat i.e., the Ka’bah, which the Muhammadans pretend was the first edifice built and appointed for the worship of God]. This let them do. And whoever shall regard the sacred ordinances of God: this will be better for him in the sight of his Lord. All sorts of cattle are allowed you to eat, except what hath been read unto you, in former passages of the Kurán, to be forbidden. But depart from the abomination of idols, and avoid speaking that which is false: being orthodox in respect to God, associating no other god with him; for whosoever associateth any other with God is like that which falleth from heaven, and which the birds snatch away, or the wind bloweth to a far distant place. This is so....”

One of the benefits of this Pilgrimage, and, perhaps, the greatest of all, if we regard the sacrament either from the political and social or from the religious standpoint, was, and is, the gathering together in Mecca of Muhammadans of every race and of every sect. There, and in the city of Medina, they first saw the dawn of their religious faith and their political power; there their hearts were drawn together in unity and strength; and there, in the early days of the Caliphs, they discussed their latest achievements, the glory of their future conquests, and studied the wants and needs of their co-religionists. Within the walls of the Holy of Holies they wept and prayed that God might renew within them a cleaner spirit through faith; and there, too, they strove with all earnestness to raise themselves to the full height of the Prophet’s conception of manhood, which encouraged such virtues as hospitality, generosity, compassion, heroism, courage, parental love, filial respect, and passive obedience to the will of God. Thus Mecca, in the days of Pilgrimage, might be looked upon as an immense club or a university where Muhammadans, from every quarter of the globe, meet and discuss their political and social problems, and prostrate themselves in prayer to the one and only Divinity.

Another effect of this Pilgrimage—an effect which has grown less marked with the increased facility and comfort of travelling—is that it kindled energy and courage in such people as would never have left the safe seclusion of their harems had it not been for the rewards which the undertaking is said to gain for them hereafter. For the Oriental nations, be it remembered, are not as a rule of a roving spirit; they are far more inclined by nature to a life of ease and security than to one of danger and privation. “Travel,” says an Arab proverb, “is a portion of hell-fire,” and so, perhaps, nothing save the hope of paradise or the dread of perdition would ever have induced the meditative Oriental to brave the trials and the hardships of the long road to Mecca.

In our hearts we believe the proof of the Divine Spirit using any religion is that it does not deteriorate. The chief objection to Welsh Calvinism, which, like Muhammadanism, is based on the theory of Predestination, is that it grows worse. It was once simply and sincerely religious: it is now mainly political spite. Has Muhammadanism deteriorated beyond recognition—say, in the eyes of the student of the Kurán, or does it still hold tight by “the cord of God”? Do the Sunnís hold themselves aloof from the Shi’ahs, or do they dwell together, within the Holy Temple, in brotherly love and concord? Their daily salutation of “Salám,” is it sunk to a mere empty form, or is it still the expression, as it once undoubtedly was, of a hearty wish to bring about the Prophet’s single aim? And of all the nationalities congregated yearly in the city of concourse—the Arabians, the Persians, the Afghans, the Egyptians, the Muhammadans of India and China—which among them all is the most worthy to be commended for its enlightenment and progress? All these questions, and many more on the social and religious life of the East, will be answered in the course of the second and third parts of this volume. And in the meanwhile, I cannot do better than gather into focus the preliminary notes of my literary partner, beginning with the customs incidental to the pilgrimage; for the main thing now is to leave nothing unsaid which would enable the reader to enter into the spirit and the form of the sacred journey. And henceforward, though I shall always express myself in my own words, the personal pronoun, whenever used, will apply, throughout this work, to my collaborator, Hadji Khan, with the exception of the contents of the Appendix.

A pious Persian Muslim, before wearing any new article of clothing, performs his ablutions and prostrates himself twice in prayer. A man of a less devout, but a more superstitious, trend of mind contents himself with consulting the taghvím or the estakhhareh[1] muttering to himself, ere he dons the garment, “In the name of God the Merciful and Clement!” His friends on seeing the new apparel cry out, “May it be auspicious!” The rewards of a man who says his prayers before putting on a new suit of clothes will be in proportion to the number of threads in the cloth. Hence it has come to be a practice to preserve the material from the blight of the Evil Eye by besprinkling it with pure water over which a prescribed passage of the Kurán has been read.

[1] For fuller particulars of the taghvím and the estakhhareh, see [page 289] “Healing by Faith.”

It is unlucky for a Muslim to sit down before taking off his shoes. When drawing them on it is equally unlucky for him to stand up. The custom, in the first instance, is to rise, doffing first the left shoe and then the right one. The procedure must be reversed in every particular when putting them on. The universal belief in omens is traditional, and extends, among other things, to precious stones. By far the luckiest of these is the flesh-coloured cornelian, which is a great favourite with the men. It owes its popularity to the fact that the Prophet himself is said to have worn a cornelian ring set in silver on the little finger of his right hand. It grew still more in favour at a later period, because Jafar, the famous Imám, declared that the desires of every man who wore it would be gratified. And thenceforward its property to bless has been regarded as axiomatic by the superstitious to whom I am referring.

COPIES OF THE KURÁN WORN EN BANDOULIÈRE BY MUSLIMS WHEN TRAVELLING OR ON PILGRIMAGE.

The Shiahs have the name of one of the twelve Imáms engraved on the stone; others make use of it as a seal bearing their own names. Hardly less lucky are the turquoise and the ruby, which are believed to have the effect of warding off poverty from those who are fortunate enough to possess them. This is why they are treasured by the fair sex, the ruby being, perhaps, the more dearly loved of the two.

Every bath has generally three courts. On entering each one of these the devout say the prayers prescribed for the occasion, but the generality of Muslims, unless they intend to perform the religious purifications, consider it sufficient to greet the people who are present with the word “Salám!” It is considered inauspicious to brush the teeth in the baths, but certain portions of hair must be removed by a composition of quicklime and arsenic, called nureh, and the nureh, though efficacious enough, no matter when it may be used, is said to add immeasurably to a man’s chance of salvation by being laid on either on a Wednesday or on a Friday.

The application of the juice of the marsh-mallow as an emollient for the hair is strongly recommended by the saints. Their object in bequeathing this advice to the consideration of their flock was not to inculcate vanity. They had a higher aim than that. Their desire was to stave off starvation from the fold, for that, in their opinion, would be the result of using the lotion on an ordinary day of the week; while rubbing the head vigorously with the precious juice on the Muslim Sabbath would be certain to preserve the skin from leprosy and the mind from madness. To the use of a decoction of the leaves of the lote-tree a divine relief is attributed, for the mere smell of it on the hair of the most unregenerate has on Satan an effect so disheartening that he will cease from leading them into temptation for no less than seventy days.

The pressure of the grave will be mitigated by a skilful and untiring application of the comb in this life. The blessing of the comb is said to have been revealed to Imám Jafar. Women are not excluded from the spiritual benefits derived from the comb. But, remember, the hair must not be done in a frivolous, much less in a perfunctory fashion. Far from it. On no account whatever must the hair be neglected, for Satan is attracted by dishevelled locks. They are, as it were, a net in which he catches the human soul. Therefore, since the priests and the merchants of Islám shave their heads in most parts of the Muslim world, special attention should be paid by them to their beards and eyebrows. A pocket-comb made of sandal-wood is often carried by the true Believers, who, it may be hoped, turn it to good account in moments of spiritual unwillingness on the part of the natural man.

A Mullá’s beard is an object of veneration to his flock. He may trim it lest it should grow as wild as a Jew’s, but he is forbidden by tradition to shave it. Even the scissors must be plied sparingly and to the accompaniment of prayer. Perhaps the orthodox length of this almost divine appendage of the true Muslim is the length of the wearer’s hand from the point of the chin downwards. This is known as a ghabzeh or handful. A priest may be allowed to add the length of the first joint of his little finger, otherwise his power to awe might grow lax. The soul is in danger every time he forgets to cut his sharib, that is, the tip of his moustache, which should be reduced to bristles once a week. Once on a time a faithful follower of the Prophet asked one of the Imáms what he should do to increase his livelihood. The Imám answered unhesitatingly: “Cut your nails and your sharib on a Friday as long as you live!”

Again, according to a Shi’ah traditionist, if a Muslim gaze into a looking-glass, before saying his prayers, he will be guilty of worshipping his own likeness, however unsightly it may appear in his eyes. The hand must be drawn across the forehead, ere the hair or the beard be adjusted, or else the mirror will reflect a mind given over to vanity, which is a grievous, if universal sin. The new moon must be seen “on the face” of a friend, on a copy of the Kurán, or on a turquoise stone. Unless one of these conditions be observed, there is no telling what evil might not happen.

The devout who are most anxious to vindicate tradition perform two prostrations on beholding the new moon, and sacrifice a sheep for the poor as an additional safeguard against her baneful rays. The Evil Eye more often than not has its seat in the socket of an unbeliever. Therefore, the Muslim who, on being brought face to face with a heretic, should not say the prayer by law ordained must look to his charms or suffer the inevitable blight. A cat may look at a king; a king may shoot a ferocious animal; and a thief may run away with the spoil. But a true Believer must guard his faith against aggression every time he sees a thief, a ferocious animal, or a king. For very different reasons, he must recite a prescribed formula of prayer on the passing of a funeral procession, and also on his seeing the first-fruits of the season and its flowers. The dead, it is said, will hear his voice if, on crossing a cemetery, he cry aloud: “O ye people of the grave, may peace be with you, of both sexes of the Faithful!”

As the sense of sight gives rise to devotional exercises, so also does the sense of hearing. The holy Muslim should lend a prayerful ear to the cries of the muezzin during the first two sentences of the summons, and when the call to prayer is over he should rub his eyes with his fingers, in order to produce the signs of weeping—a mark of contrition and of emotional recrudescence in the matter of piety. The true Believer, whenever he hears the Sureh Sújdeh read in the Kurán, should prostrate himself and repeat the words after the reader. If he hear a Muslim sneeze he should say, “May peace be with thee!” and if the sneeze be repeated, “Mayest thou be cured!” But, if a Kafir sneeze, the response must be expressed in the wish to see him tread “the straight path.”

Every child of Islám, before going to bed, should perform his ablutions and say his prayers. If he wish to be delivered from nightmare and all its terrors let him say to Allah: “I take refuge in Thee from the evil of Satan,” and if he is afraid of being bitten by a scorpion let him appeal to Noah, saying, “May peace be with thee, O Noah!” One day Eshagh-ben-Ammar asked Imám Jafar how he could protect himself against the attack of that malignant arachnidan. The Imám replied: “Look at the constellation of the Bear; therein you will find a small star, the lowest of all, which the Arabs call Sohail. Fix your eyes in the direction of that star, and say three times, ‘May peace be with Muhammad and with his people: O Sohail, protect me from scorpions,’ and you will be protected from them.” Eshagh-ben-Ammar goes on to relate that he read the formula every evening before going to bed, and that it proved successful; but one evening he forgot to repeat it, and, as a consequence, was bitten by a black scorpion.

Prayers are also said against mosquitoes and other insects. This cleanses the conscience of the irate Muslim, if it fail in preserving his skin. The Eastern peoples in general and the Muhammadans in particular are early risers. Sleep after morning prayers, which are said before sunrise, is sure to cause folly; sleep in the middle of the day is believed to be necessary and suitable to work; while sleep before evening prayers has precisely the same effect as after the devotions of the early morning. A traditionist says that the prophets slept on their backs, so as to be able to converse with the angels at any hour of the night; that the faithful must sleep on their right sides, and the Kafirs on their left; and that the deves take their rest on their stomachs.

Usury, though interest on money was strictly prohibited by the Prophet, is among the Muslims of the present day a common practice. They evade the letter of the law by putting what the Persians call “a legal cap over the head” of the usurious transaction. The money-lender picks up a handful of barley and says to the borrower, “Give me the rate of interest as the cost of this grain, which I now offer to sell to you at that price;” and the borrower replies that he accepts the bargain. Also, a merchant must know all the laws appertaining to buying and selling. Imám ’Ali is said to have made a daily round of the bazaars of Kufa crying out the while, “O ye merchants and traders, deal honestly and in accordance with the laws of your Prophet. Swear not, neither tell lies, and cheat not your customers. Beware of using false weights, and walk ye in the paths of righteousness.”

A high priest in Mecca assured me that to enjoy a derham of interest is as bad as taking the blood of seventy virgins. The admonitions of ’Alí the Just, though sometimes read, are less often followed. On leaving his house a merchant must say “Bismillah,” and then blow to his left and his right and also in front of him, so as to clear the way to good business.

The pious recite, on entering the bazaar, a prayer ordained for the occasion. When the bargain is clinched the seller should cry out, “God is great! God is great!” But there should be no dishonest bargaining over the purchasing of these four things: the winding sheets for the dead, the commodities to be distributed in charity, the expenses on the journey to Mecca, and the price of a slave’s ransom. In all these transactions the buyer and seller must act according to the dictates of fair play. The man who buys a slave should lay hold of him by a hair of his head and say the prescribed prayer; after which, if guided by Imám Jafar, he must change the name of his purchase. Slaves are treated with every consideration, so much so indeed that in the household of Eastern potentates, whose treatment of their dependents is extremely arbitrary, the slaves lord it over the servants.

It is said, in the traditions, that a true Muslim should marry neither for money nor for beauty, but should be guided by the woman’s moral worth and spiritual endowments. His choice is referred to the arbitrament of the estakhhareh. “A chaste maiden will make a good wife; for she will be sweet-tempered to her husband, and mild but firm in the treatment of her children.” This saying is attributed to the Prophet. “A bad wife, a wicked animal, and a narrow house with unsociable neighbours, those are the possessions which try a man’s temper,” cried one of the Imáms, himself a saintly man. “The best woman is she who bears children frequently, who is beloved by her relatives, who shows herself obedient to her husband, who pleases him by wearing her best clothes, and who avoids the eyes of men who cannot lawfully see her.” These words were uttered by Muhammad, if we are to believe tradition.

The wedding must not take place when the moon is under an eclipse, nor when she is in the sign of Scorpio. The best time is between the 26th and the end of the lunar month. Muhammad recommended festivals to be celebrated on five occasions: on wedding and nuptial days, on the birth of a child, on the circumcision of a child, on taking up one’s abode in a newly-purchased house, and on returning from Mecca. Only persons of unblemished reputation should be invited to the marriage or the nuptial feasts.

To the man who brings him news of the birth of a male child the father should give a present. The nurse should lose no time in singing the first chapter of the prescribed prayer in the baby’s right ear, and what is called the standing prayer in its left one, and if the water of the Euphrates be procurable it should be sprinkled on the baby’s forehead.

On the seventh day after the child’s birth the ceremony of the Aghigheh is performed in Persia. This consists in killing a fatted sheep, in cooking it, and in distributing the flesh among the neighbours or among the poor who come to the door. In memory of the occasion a cornelian engraved with a Kurán text, and sometimes surrounded with precious stones, as in the cover-design to the present volume, is fastened to the baby’s arm by means of a silk band, and is worn perhaps to the end of its life. Not a single bone of the Aghigheh sheep should be broken; certain prayers should be read before the sheep is killed; and the parents should not take part in the feast.

The baby is not often weaned until it is two years old, Muhammad believing that the mother’s milk is the best and acts beneficially on the child’s future character and temperament.

VII.—Story of the Muslim Moons.

The twelve Muhammadan months are lunar, and number twenty-nine and thirty days alternately. Thus the whole year contains only three hundred and fifty-four days; but eleven times in the course of thirty years an intercalary day is added. Accordingly, thirty-two of our years are, roughly speaking, equal to thirty-three Muhammadan years. The Muhammadan Era dates from the morning after the Hegira, or the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, that is, on the 16th of July, A.D. 622. Every year begins earlier than the preceding one, so that a month beginning in summer in the present year will, sixteen years hence, fall in winter. The following are the names of the months, which do not correspond in any way with ours: 1, Muharram; 2, Safar; 3, Rabíu-’l-avval; 4, Rabíu-’s-sání or Rabíu-’l-ákhir; 5, Jumádáu-’l-úlá; 6, Jumádáu-’s-sání or Jumádáu-’l-ákhir; 7, Rajab; 8, Sha’bán; 9, Ramazán; 10, Shavvál; 11, Zú-’l-ka’dah, or Zí-ka’d; 12, Zú-’l-hijjah, or Zí-hajj. Many stories of these months were told to me by the priests and the pilgrims whom I met at Mecca, and it is therefore my intention to tell over again the stories of the most cherished months of the Muslim year. These are Rajab, Sha’bán, Ramazán, Shavvál, Zú-’l-ka’dah, Zú-’l-hijjah, and Muharram.

On the Day of Judgment, the Holy Muezzin, sitting on the Throne, will cry out, ere he pass judgment on the Faithful, saying: “O moons of Rajab, Sha’bán, and Ramazán, how stands it with the deeds of this humble slave of ours?” The three moons will then prostrate themselves before the Throne, and answer: “O Lord, we bear witness to the good deeds of this humble slave. When he was with us he kept on loading his caravans with provisions for the next world, beseeching Thee to grant him Thy divine favour, and expressing his perfect contentment with the fate that Thou hadst sent unto him.” After them their guardian-angels, meekly kneeling on their knees, will raise their voices in praise of the pious Muslim, crying: “O Lord God Almighty, we also bear witness to the good deeds of this humble slave of Thine. On earth his eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth, and his stomach were all obedient both to whatsoever Thou hast forbidden and also to whatsoever Thou hast made lawful. The days he passed in fasting, and the nights in sleepless supplication. Verily he is a good doer!” Then Allah will command his slave to be borne into Paradise on a steed of light, accompanied by angels, and by all the rewards of his piety on camels of light, and there he will be conducted to a palace whose foundation is laid in everlasting felicity, and whose inmates never grow old. The moon of Rajab is the month of Allah. It is said that there is a stream of that name in Paradise, whose water is white, and more wholesome than milk and sweeter than honey. The first to welcome the new arrival will be this stream, which will straightway wend its course round his palace. To Salim, one of his disciples, Muhammad is reported to have said: “If you keep fast for one day during the month of Rajab you will be free from the terror of death, and the agony of death, from the percussion of the grave, and the loneliness thereof. If you keep fast for two days the eight doors of Paradise will be opened unto you.”

The authoritative tradition goes that a crier will make himself heard from between the earth and the sky, summoning the pious who observed the prayers and the privations of the moon of Rajab: “Oh, ye Rajabians, come forth and present yourselves before your Creator.” Then the Rajabians, whose heads will be crowned with pearls and rubies, and whose faces will be bathed in the universal light, will arise and stand before the Throne. And each one among them will have a thousand angels on his right hand and a thousand on his left, and they will shout with one accord, saying: “O, ye Rajabians, may ye be deserving of all the holy favours ye are about to receive!” And last of all, Allah, in his mercy, will say to them: “O my male and female slaves, I swear by my own magnanimity, that I will give you lodgings in the most delightful nooks of my Paradise, namely, in the palaces around which flow the most refreshing streams of purest water.”

A baby is to the Muslim a symbol of purity: and so a man who worships God in the month of Rajab will become like unto a new-born child, always provided that he repent of the sins which he has committed, and follow the law of the Prophet. Not until then will the pious Rajabian be in a fit state, in his character of new-born babe, to start life afresh. The Muhammadans, in so far as duty and obedience are concerned, put on pretty much the same footing the relation of the slave to his master, of the wife to her husband, of the child to its parent, and of the guest to his host. The parallel between the last-mentioned and the preceding is complete because the guest must acquiesce in his host’s will, which is supreme. In the matter of repentance, that of Nessouh is exemplary among the Muhammadans.

Now, this man Nessouh was in his face and his voice so like a woman that his wicked nature persuaded him to wear skirts that he might add to his experience of the opposite sex by mixing freely among its members. Soon, his curiosity growing in ratio with his acquired knowledge, we hear of him as an attendant in the hammam of the royal seraglio, where he might have pursued his studies in peace and in rapture had not one of the Royal Princesses, who had lost a ring, cast suspicion on every servant in turn. The seed of Nessouh’s repentance was sown when the decree went out that all the attendants of the baths were to be searched. The fear lest his sex should be discovered yielded so swiftly to repentance for having veiled it, that Almighty Allah despatched an angel from Paradise to discover the missing treasure before the decree took effect; and thenceforward Nessouh, out of the gratitude of his heart, renounced his studies of human nature in petticoats, and vied with the most rigid disciplinarians in prayer and in fasting. His virtues grew so conspicuous in male attire that his repentance has come to be accepted as worthy of imitation by every true Believer.

According to tradition it was on the first day of God’s moon that Noah, having taken his seat in the Ark, commanded all the men and jinns and beasts that were with him to keep fast from sunrise to sunset. On the evening of the same day, when the sun was going down, the Ark, riding over the flood, would have heeled over had not Allah sent seventy thousand of his angels to the rescue. It is interesting to note that the number of all the traditional rewards of virtue, as well as that of such of the heavenly hosts as lend their assistance in cases of distress, is always a multiple of seven. A Meccan priest added the following to my collection of “rewards”: God will build seventy thousand cities in Paradise, each city containing seventy thousand mansions, each mansion seventy thousand houris, each houri surrounded by seventy thousand beautiful serving women, for the pilgrim—mark this—who shall say his prayers with the best accent on the Hájj Day. The Mullá in question was himself a perfect Arabic scholar; his enunciation in reciting the forthcoming bliss was faultlessly correct; each syllable seemed to pay his lips the tribute of a kiss for the pleasure it had derived from listening to the mellifluous sound of its predecessors. This learned priest will be in his element on all scores should the Paradise of his invention be materialised.

As Rajab belongs to Allah so Sha’bán is held sacred to the Prophet. For we read in the history of Islám that Muhammad, who entered Medina on the first day of the gracious moon, commanded the muezzins to make it known to his people that the good actions which they might perform during the month would help both himself and them to gain salvation; whereas their evil actions would be committed against his apostleship, and would on that account be the more severely punished hereafter.

Once a year, on the approach of Ramazán, the precincts of Paradise, and all its gardens and palaces, are illuminated, festooned, and decorated, and a most tuneful wind, known in Arabic by the name of Meshireh, makes music in the trees. Now, no sooner do the houris hear this sound than they rush out from their seclusion, and cry aloud: “Is there any one to marry us through the desire to perform a good deed towards the creatures of God?” Then, turning to Rezvan, the guardian of Paradise, “What night is this?” they ask; and Rezvan answers, “O ye fair-faced houris, this is the eve of the holy moon of Ramazán. The gates of Paradise have I ordered to be opened unto the fast-keepers of the Faith of the Faithful.” Then Allah, addressing the angel who has the charge of Hell, says to him: “O Málik, I bid thee to close thy gates against the fast-keepers of the faith of my Apostle.” And next, summoning the Archangel of Revelations, He gives command, saying: “O Gabriel, go forth in the earth and put Satan in chains, and all his followers, that the path of my chosen people may be safe.” So, on the first day of Ramazán, Gabriel swoops down on the earth accompanied by hosts of angels. He has six hundred wings, and opens all of them except two. In his hands he bears four green banners, emblems of the Muslim creed. These he plants on the summit of Mount Sinai, and on the Prophet’s tomb at Medina, and in the Harem of Mecca. His army of angels bivouacs on the plains round about the Holy City and on the surrounding mountains. On the eve of the day of reward, which is called Ghadre, the angels are ordered to disperse throughout the Muslim world, and every true Believer seen praying during that night is embraced by one of them, and his prayer meets with an angelic Amen. At the dawn of Ghadre day a heavenly bugle recalls the angels to Mecca. When Gabriel returns to Heaven it is to say to Allah, “My Lord, all the true Believers have I forgiven in Thy name save those who have been constant wine-bibbers, or incurred the displeasure of their parents, or indulged in abusing their fellow Muslims.”

The various sects of the Muhammadans disagree a good deal as to the date of Ghadre day. Some say it is on the 19th, some on the 21st, and others on the 23rd of the Muslim Lent; but all agree in believing it to be the day on which the books of deeds, good and evil, are balanced, and on which the angels make known to Muhammad the predestination of his followers for whom he intercedes. All Shi’ahs who would win a reputation for piety must keep Ahia, that is, pass the three nights above-mentioned in fasting and holy devotions—a penance of untold severity in that every day of the month must be similarly spent from sunrise to sundown. Through most ardent prayers on the 21st of Ramazán the devout Mussulman may win the privilege of becoming a Hájí in the following year. The 7th is the anniversary of Muhammad’s victory over the Kuraish in the battle of Badre, and is a great day with all Islamites. For the rest, the Arabs follow the example of their Prophet in breaking their fast on dates and water; special angels are appointed to plant heavenly trees, and to build divine palaces in readiness for such of the Muslims as should neither neglect their religious purifications nor forget to behave themselves as “Allah’s guests.” Many Muslims, unquestionably, adhere strictly to all the rites and observances of the occasion; not a few, on the other hand, though they may fast during the day, devote the night to feasting. Indeed, in every capital of Islám, in Teheran, in Constantinople, and in Cairo, the darkling hours are given up by certain people to amusements and sometimes to vicious pursuits.

The heavenly hosts under the Archangel Gabriel, with his five hundred and ninety-eight wings wide open, and his green banner flying over the gate of the Ka’bah,—the heavenly hosts, I say, dispersing through the Muslim world on the eve of Ghadre will prevail on the ghosts of the one hundred and twenty-four thousand prophets to kiss the Muslims that are piously engaged at night, delivering them from the danger of drowning, of being buried under ruins, of choking at meal times, and of being killed by wild beasts. For them the grave will have no terror, and on leaving it a substantial cheque on the keeper of Paradise, crossed and made payable to bearer, will be placed in the hands of each one of them.

On the first day of the moon of Shavvál, the fast of Ramazán being over, all true Muslims are supposed to give away in charity a measure of wheat, barley, dates, raisins, or other provisions in common use. The guests who stay over the preceding night are entitled to receive a portion of the alms distributed by the master of the house next morning; and hence only the poor and needy are invited to accept hospitality on the occasion of the Zikat-é-Fetre—that is, the festival of alms-giving. The fulfilment of the law is believed not only to produce an increase of wealth in the forthcoming year, but also to cleanse the body of all impurities. So much for the rewards as a stimulus to honesty. Now for the penalty as a deterrent from greed. In the third Súra of the Kurán it is written: “But let not those who are covetous of what God of His bounty hath granted them imagine that their avarice is better for them; nay, rather it is worse for them. For that which they have covetously reserved shall be bound as a collar about their necks on the day of the resurrection: and God is well acquainted with what ye do.” Shiahs are reluctant to get married in the interval between the first of Shavvál and the tenth of Zú-’l-hijjah, because the Prophet is said to have married Aishah, the enemy of ’Alí, about that time. On the other hand the Sunnis, who reverence that brilliant woman, commemorate her wedding day by solemnising their own during this season, unless they are performing the pilgrimage of Mecca.

The most sacred day of the following month—the moon of Zú-’l-ka’dah—is the twenty-fifth. On that day Adam was created; Abraham, Ishmael, and Jesus were born, and the Shiah Messiah, the concealed Imám, will come again to judge the world. A Muslim, if he keep fast on the twenty-fifth of Zú-’l-ka’dah, will earn the rewards of a man to whom Allah in his mercy should grant the privilege and the power of praying for nine hundred years. On the first of Zú-’l-hijjah, which is the month of pilgrimage, Abraham received from God the title of Al-Khalíl, or the Friend of Allah. It is accounted a good deed to fast from the first to the tenth day of this the last journeying month; it is also wise to do so, for it is not every month in the year that the Mussulman can win, by nine days of fasting, the fruits of a whole lifetime of self-denial. Another tradition deserving of mention in connection with this month is that Jesus, in the company of Gabriel, was sent to earth by God with five prayers, which he was commanded to repeat on the first five days of the pilgrims’ moon; but the two holiest days of the moon of Zú-’l-hijjah are the ninth and the tenth. On the ninth, after morning prayer, the pilgrims, in olden times, departed from the Valley of Mina, whither they had come on the previous day, and rushed in a headlong manner to Mount Arafat, where a sermon is preached, and where they performed the devotions entitling them to be called Hájís. But nowadays they pass through Mina to Mount Arafat without stopping on the outward journey; and at sunset, after the sermon is over, they betake themselves to Muzdalifah, an oratory between Arafat and Mina, and there the hours of the night are spent in prayer and in reading the Kurán.

On the tenth, by daybreak, the holy monument, or al Masher al harám, is visited, after which the pilgrims hasten back, on the rising of the sun, to the Valley of Mina, where, on the 10th and the two following days, the stoning of the Devil takes place, every pilgrim casting a certain number of stones at three pillars. This rite is as old as Abraham, who, being interrupted by Satan when he was about to sacrifice his son Ishmael, was commanded by God to put the tempter to flight by throwing stones at him. Next, still on the same day, the tenth of Zú-’l-hijjah, and in the same place, the Valley of Mina, the pilgrims slay their victims, and when the sacrifice is over they shave their heads and trim their nails, and then return to Mecca in order to take their leave of the Ka’bah. All these ceremonies will be described in detail in the forthcoming narrative. Meanwhile, by way of further introduction, a few words must be said as to the animals sacrificed. The victims should be camels, kine, sheep, or goats. The camels and kine should be females and the sheep and goats males. In age the camels should be five years and not less; the cows and goats in their second year; and the sheep not younger than six months. All should be without blemish, neither blind nor lame: their ears should not have been cut, nor their horns have been broken. The males should be complete, and all be well fed. They were woefully lean, however, in the year 1319 of the Flight. The camels are sacrificed while standing, the fore and hind legs being tied together. A single blow is delivered where the head joins the neck, the name of God being uttered the while. The victim must face the Kiblah, and the butcher or the pilgrim, as the case may be, stands on the right of the animal he is going to slay. If the pilgrim be too tender-hearted to deal the blow, he should catch hold of the butcher’s wrist, so as to take part in the act of sacrifice. All the other victims—namely, the kine, the sheep, and the goats—are made to lie on their sides facing Mecca, all four legs being securely fastened, then their throats are cut with a sharp knife, without, however, severing the head from the body.

The custom of sacrificing a camel on the tenth day of Zú-’l-hijjah prevails among the Shiahs in most of the towns of Persia and of Central Asia. The ceremony varies with the locality; but the one we witnessed was so picturesque that we cannot refrain from describing it. For the first nine days the camel, richly caparisoned, is led through the streets of the city; half a dozen Dervishes, intoning passages of the Kurán, swing along at the head of the procession; at every house the camel is made to halt, and subscriptions are raised towards its purchase-money and its maintenance. The victim, goaded on from street to street and from square to square, ends at last by collecting alms for its tormentors. On the eve of the Day of Sacrifice the camel is stripped of its gaudy trappings, and its body is, as it were, mapped out into portions with red ink, one portion being allotted to every quarter of the city. The place of sacrifice is usually outside the city walls, and early in the morning each district arms its strongest men to go and claim its share of the carcase. Each group may contain as many as twenty men, bristling from head to foot with uncouth weapons, and a band of drummers adds to the barbaric display the sounds of discordant music. One man in each group rides on horseback and wears a cashmere shawl; it is he who receives into his hands the sacrificial share of the parish he represents. Prayers are said, and then, at a given signal, the butcher prepares his knife, and the cutters appointed by the respective quarters make ready to hack the victim in pieces. The camel, bare of covering, and marked all over with the red lines, turns its supercilious eyes on the eager cutters, and they, in their turn, watch the butcher. The wretched victim may or may not be conscious of its fate. I believe it to be conscious; but, whether it is or not, there is no sign of terror in its eyes, only the customary look of sly disdain. No sooner does the butcher plunge the knife into the camel’s windpipe than the cutters vie with one another as to who shall be the first to finish carving the still animate body, each allotted part of which is handed warm and well-nigh throbbing with life, to the horseman of the quarter to which it belongs. He takes it in procession to the house of the magistrate, who distributes it among the poor.

The prayer most acceptable to God is that of Nodbeh, which must be said by the pilgrims on Mount Arafat, with tears pouring from their eyes. The Prophet rose to a noble conception of the next life. He not only believed that the pure-hearted will see God, he also proclaimed that blessing to be the height of heavenly bliss. The Muslim Paradise, therefore, in its material aspect unalloyed, is the invention of the tradition-mongers. According to the orthodox among them, it is situated above the seven heavens, immediately under the Throne of God. Some say that the soil of it consists of the finest wheat flour, others will have it to be of the purest musk, and others again of saffron. Its palaces have walls of solid gold, its stones are pearls and jacinths, and of its trees, all of which have golden trunks, the most remarkable is the Tree of Happiness, Túba, as they call it. This tree, which stands in the Palace of Muhammad, is laden with fruits of every kind, with grapes and pomegranates, with oranges and dates, and peaches and nectarines, which are of a growth and a flavour unknown to mortals. In response to the desire of the blessed, it will yield, in addition to the luscious fruit, not only birds ready dressed for the table, but also flowing garments of silk and of velvet, and gaily caparisoned steeds to ride on, all of which will burst out from its leaves. There will be no need to reach out the hand to the branches, for the branches will bend down of their own accord to the hand of the person who would gather of their products. So large is the Túba tree that a man “mounted on the fleetest horse would not be able to gallop from one end of its shade to the other in a hundred years.” All the rivers of Paradise take their rise from the root of the Tree of Happiness; some of them flow with water, some with milk, some with wine, and others with honey. Their beds are of musk, their sides of saffron, their earth of camphire, and their pebbles are rubies and emeralds. The most noteworthy among them, after the River of Life, is Al-Káwthar. This word, Al-Káwthar, which signifies abundance, has come to mean the gift of prophecy, and the water of the river of that name is derived into Muhammad’s pond. According to a tradition of the Prophet, this river, wherein his Lord promised him abundance of wisdom, is whiter than milk, cooler than snow, sweeter than honey, and smoother than cream; and those who drink of it shall never be thirsty.

The blessed, having quenched their thirst in Muhammad’s pond, are admitted into Paradise, and there they are entertained to dinner by the Supreme Host. For meat they will have the ox Balám and the fish Nún, and for bread—mark this—God will turn the whole earth into one huge loaf, and hand it to His guests, “holding it like a cake.” When the repast is over they will be conducted to the palaces prepared for them, where they will dwell with the houris they have won by their good deeds on earth. They will fare sumptuously through all eternity, and without loss of appetite, eat as much as they will: for all superfluities will be discharged by sweat as fragrant as musk, so that the last morsel of food will be as comforting as the first.

The imagination of the tradition-mongers is not less extravagant when it busies itself with the holy festivals of the faith. The A’yáde-Shadir, perhaps the most important of these feast-days, falls on the eighteenth of Zú-’l-hijjah. Books might be written—nay, tomes innumerable have been filled—to do honour to the attributes of that day. In fact, Oriental exaggeration in general, and the Shiah superstition in particular, reach the climax of fancy in the description of the events that are supposed by the devout Shiah to have happened on the A’yád of Ghadir. For was it not on the eighteenth of Zú-’l-hijjah that Muhammad mounted a camel, and, raising ’Alí in his arms, appointed this chivalrous cousin and son-in-law of his to be his lawful successor? This righteous act on the part of the Prophet is the corner-stone of the Shiah faith, and so it is not unnatural, perhaps, that it should have been made the source of unnumbered traditions. We read, among other inventions, that it was on that day that God chose to humiliate Satan by ordering an angel to rub his nose in the dirt; that the Archangel Gabriel, along with a host of angels, came down from heaven in the evening, bearing a throne of light, which he placed opposite to the Ka’bah, and from which he preached to his companions a stirring sermon in praise of Islám and its Prophet; that Moses had made his will in favour of Aaron and that Jesus had selected Simon Peter to go and preach to the Jews on the same day in their own lives.

The waters that acknowledged ’Alí to be the Prophet’s successor became “sweet” or fresh on the eighteenth of Zú-’l-hijjah. The rest either remained salt or turned brackish. The birds that accepted ’Alí as Muhammad’s heir were taught to sing like a nightingale or to talk like a parrot. Those that denied him were stricken deaf and dumb. For the angels who delighted to honour him a sumptuous palace was built with slabs of gold and silver in alternate order. Two hundred thousand domes crowned this edifice, and half of them were made of red rubies, and half of green emeralds. Through the courtyard flowed four rivers: one with water, one with milk, another with honey, and a fourth with wine. Trees of gold, bearing fruits of turquoise, grew along the banks, and on the branches were perched the most marvellous birds. Their bodies were made of pearls, their right wings of rubies, and their left wings of turquoises. All the hosts of heaven gathered together, praising God. The birds dived, singing, into the streams. The angels clapped their hands and shouted. The houris joined in the chorus. Then, with one accord, they all raised their voices in homage of ’Alí and his wife, the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. Lovers should remember to strengthen the bond of affection by exchanging rings. The men should kiss each other frequently whenever and wherever they meet. The servants should kiss their master’s hands, and the children those of their parents. If a Muslim smile on his brother-Muslim on this holy a’yád, God will smile on him on the day of the resurrection. If he die, he will receive the rewards of a martyr of the faith. If he call on a true believer, he will be visited in the grave when he draws his last breath by seventy thousand angels. If he neglect neither the ordained prayer nor the prescribed purification, he will be entitled to rank with the man to whom God has granted the rewards of one hundred thousand pilgrimages to Mecca. And a week later, on the 25th of Zú-’l-hijjah, the angel of revelations brought down from heaven to the Prophet the chapter of the Kurán, entitled Man, and told Muhammad that God congratulated him on the virtues of his family.

VIII.—Persian Súfíism; and Persian Shiahism in Its Relation to the Persian Passion-Drama.

Since the narrative which follows this introduction is written rather from the Persian and Shiah than from the Turkish and Sunni point of view, it is necessary for us to dwell briefly on two more important subjects in connection with Persian thought:—(a) on the love of metaphysical speculation which vindicates the claim of Aryan thought to be free, and which has given rise to the doctrines of Súfíism,—our immediate consideration; and (b) on the growth of Shiahism, the State religion, and more particularly in its relation to the Passion-Drama, which is the outcome of the Muharram celebrations in honour of Huseyn’s martyrdom.

(a) Persian Súfíism.

Now the Súfís, who are split up into numerous sects, with slightly varying doctrines, speak of themselves as travellers, for they regard life as a journey from their earthly abode to the spiritual world. The stages between them and their destination are reckoned as seven. Some call them seven regions, and others seven towns. Unless the traveller get rid of his animal passions and pass safely through these seven stages he cannot hope to lose himself in the ocean of Union, nor slake his thirst for immortality in the unexampled wine of Love. The first region before the traveller, the region of Aspiration, can only be traversed on the charger of Patience. Though a thousand temptations beset him on the road he must not lose heart, but must seek to cleanse his mind from all selfish desires. Other-worldliness should alone absorb his thoughts, and to that end the gates of friendship and of enmity should be closed against the people of the world. Only thus can he find his way into the heart of the realm, wherein every traveller is a lover in search of the True Beloved.

One day Majnún, whose love for Laili has inspired many a Persian poet, was playing in a little sand heap when a friend came to him and said—“Why are you wasting your time in an occupation so childish?” “I am seeking Laili in these sands,” replied Majnún: whereat his friend, all lost in amazement, cried—“Why, Laili is an angel, so what is the use of seeking her in the common earth?” “I seek her everywhere,” said Majnún, bowing his head, “that I may find her somewhere.”

And so the traveller, on this stage of his pilgrimage, should regard no earthly abode as too humble a shrine for the spirit of the True Beloved. He should eat, but only to live; he should drink, but only to love; and, though all worldlings should be shunned, he should keep in touch with the hearts of his fellow-travellers lest, peradventure, he might lose a guide to his destination. Now, if he find in this region some sign from the Unsigned, and trace the lost Beloved, he will pass forthwith into the limitless bourne of Devotion, and see the setting of the sun of Inspiration, and watch in rapture the dawn of Love. At this time the crops of Wisdom are burnt in the fire of Affection, and the traveller loses all consciousness of self; he knows neither knowledge nor ignorance; he recognises neither certainty nor doubt; but, turning his back on the dusk of perplexity, he rides breast forward on the charger of Pain and Endurance, drawing ever nearer to the light of salvation. In this Kingdom of the Soul, he will know nothing but tribulation unless he strive strenuously to escape from himself on the wings of self-renunciation. “Oh, traveller, if thou wouldst gaze on the Joseph face of thy Beloved turn not away from the Egypt of Love! And wouldst thou attain to divine truth, oh learn the way of friendship from the grate, consuming thyself for the sake of the True Beloved! For the love that thou wouldst find demands the sacrifice of self to the end that the heart may be filled with the passion to stand within the Holy of Holies, in which alone the mysteries of the True Beloved can be revealed unto thee. This is so.”

A PERSIAN SUFÍ OF THE ORDER OF THE LATE SEPHÍ ’ALÍ SHÁH.

And thenceforward the traveller, his heart aglow with the sacred fire of Love, tears aside the curtain of earthly passions, and wins his way into the Kingdom of Knowledge. He has passed by slow degrees from doubt into certainty and from darkness into light. Seeing with clearer eyes he is now quick to discern wisdom in ignorance and in oppression justice. Then, on ascending hopefully the ladder of Wisdom, he rises higher and higher above the ocean of being, and enters into closer communion with the spirit of the one he seeks. The arc of truth becomes an almost perfect round, and he is drawn irresistibly towards the centre, where dwells the object of his quest. After traversing the realm of knowledge, which is the last stage of fear, the traveller enters the first City of Union, and drinks deep from the bowl of its spirit: and the next thing he does is to enter the chamber of the True Beloved. As all the shine of the sea and its shade are reflected in the heart of a single pearl, so now the infinite splendour is manifested within the traveller’s soul. Looking round him with the eyes of Unity he recognises his true identity in that of his host, and reads the name of the Beloved in his own name. The circle of his aspirations will soon be complete, for the sun of divine grace is seen to rise equally on all creatures; and he is prepared in spirit to advance one step nearer the end. And soon, on the breeze of godly independence, which blows from the spirit’s flame and burns the curtain of poverty, the traveller is borne into the City of Freedom. There he will know no sorrow, but will pass through the gates of joy, and, though he be on the earth, will ride the heaven of power, and quench his thirst in the wine of love. The sixth stage on the road to immortality is that of Amazement. Sometimes he will notice perfect poverty in riches, and sometimes perfect wealth in poverty. His surprise will grow at every step. Each second will bring a fresh revelation. Now he will dive into the ocean of divine omniscience, and now be carried to the crest of omnipotence divine.

The traveller passes swiftly from this stage into the region of absolute poverty and nothingness, which is the true forgetfulness of self in the love of the Beloved. He is now as a pearl in the sea of the infinite splendour: poor in the things created, but rich beyond counting in the things that are spiritual and pure. And thus, casting aside the burden of consciousness for ever, he becomes one with the Beloved and enters the Kingdom of Immortality. The renunciation of self, therefore, is the Alpha and Omega of the Súfí doctrine: the lover, in other words, must turn the Beloved, otherwise he can never hope to gain admittance into the Chamber of Love. “One came to the Beloved’s door and knocked. And a voice from within whispered, ‘Who is there?’ And the lover answered, saying, ‘It is I.’ Then the voice said, ‘There is not room in this house for thee and me,’ and the door was not opened unto him. So the lover went back into the desert and fasted and prayed. And at the end of a year he returned once more to the Beloved’s door and knocked. And the voice from within said again, ‘Who is there?’ And this time the lover, having learned the lesson of self-renunciation, answered, ‘It is thyself,’ and the door was opened unto him.”

(b) The Shiah Faith in its Relation to the Persian Passion Play.

The Shiah faith is as old as ’Alí; for, on the feast of Ghadir, he is said to have been selected by Muhammad as his successor. In the ages immediately succeeding the Prophet, it spread itself East and West. The Muslim colonies, in various parts of the Empire, embraced its political teaching. It took root even in Mecca and Medina; but it was in Persia alone that it grew, in the Ninth Century, to be the State religion, waning and waxing in its hold on the people during the dynastic changes to which the country subsequently submitted itself; until, in the declining years of the Fifteenth Century, under the Safaví Kings, it re-established its grip, this time for good, on the national conscience. The mourning celebration of the month of Muharram, in which the whole country, with the exception of the Sunnis, takes part to this day, was founded in the Tenth Century by Ahmad Muizz-u’d-Dawlat. In order to appreciate the depth of feeling underlying this yearly commemoration, the reigns of the early Caliphs must be reviewed. For, in the story of the family of the Tent, lies the raison d’être of the Muharram celebration.

When Muhammad died he was succeeded by his father-in-law, Abú Bekr, a man of great prudence and sincere piety. His rule was accepted by all the Prophet’s companions, if we except the Hashemites, who, under the leadership of ’Alí, declined at first to take the oath of fidelity. But the death of Fatima, the wife of ’Alí, so subdued the spirit of her husband that he made his peace with the aged Caliph, who died after a reign of two years, bequeathing his sceptre to the iron hand of the incorruptible Omar. In the twelfth year of a reign of unexampled glory Omar was assassinated, and his successor was elected by six of his most trustworthy lieutenants. Othman, the man chosen by them, had been Muhammad’s secretary: he was not a successful ruler. His helpless character and resourcelessness of mind succumbed to the burden of his responsibilities; his subjects rose in arms throughout his Empire, and the treachery of one of his secretaries hastened his downfall. The brother of Ayeshah is believed to have led the assassins, and Othman, with the Kurán on his knees, was pierced with a multitude of wounds. He died in the year 655 A.D., in the eleventh year of his reign. The inauguration of ’Alí put an end to the anarchy that ensued; but, with all his bravery and all the brilliancy of his endowments, ’Alí was alike too forbearing and too magnanimous to cope successfully with the difficulties of his position. He was not so much a politician as a poet turned knight-errant, a religious enthusiast turned soldier. The first Caliph would have secured the allegiance of Telha and Zobeir, two of the most powerful of the Arabian chieftains, by gifts. Omar, the second Caliph, would have insured his authority and checked their lawlessness by casting them into prison. Whereas ’Alí, from purely chivalrous motives, left them to their own devices without, however, in his contempt for what he had condemned in another as self-seeking generosity, bribing them to keep the peace. And so Telha and Zobeir escaping from Medina, fled, and raised the standard of revolt in Assyria. The Prophet’s widow, Ayeshah, the implacable enemy of ’Alí, accompanied them, and was present at the battle in which the Caliph, at the head of twenty-nine thousand men, defeated the enemy, and in which the rebel leaders were slain. This battle was called the Day of the Camel: for, “in the heat of the action, seventy men, who held the bridle of Ayeshah’s camel, were successively killed or wounded; and the cage or litter in which she sat was struck with javelins and darts like the quills of a porcupine.” Ayeshah was reproached by the victorious ’Alí, and then sent under escort to Medina where she lived to the end of her days at her husband’s tomb.

Meanwhile, Moawiyah, the son of Abú Sophian, had assumed the title of Caliph and won the support of the Syrians and the interest of the house of Ommiyah, and against him ’Alí now marched. Mounted on a piebald horse, and wielding his two-edged sword with terrific effect, he literally ploughed his way through the ranks of the Syrians, crying out at every stroke of the blade, “God is victorious.” In the course of the night in which the battle raged he was heard to repeat “that tremendous exclamation” four hundred times. Nothing save flight would have saved his enemies, had not the crafty Moawiyah exposed on the foremost lances the sacred books of the Kurán, thus turning the pious zeal of his opponents against themselves; and ’Alí, in the face of his followers’ awe, was constrained to submit to a humiliating truce. In his grief and anger he retreated to Kufa; his party was dejected; the distant provinces of Persia, of Yemen, and of Egypt acclaimed his stealthy rival; and he himself, in the mosque of his city of refuge, fell a victim to a fanatic’s knife.

Moawiyah, after the death of ’Alí, brought about the abdication of the latter’s son Hasan, who, retiring without regret from the Palace of Kufá, went to live in a hermit’s cell near the tomb of the Prophet, his grandfather. There he was poisoned, and, as many believe, by his wife. But Huseyn, his younger brother, was not set aside so easily. In every way worthy to inherit the regal and sacerdotal office, he added to Hasan’s benevolence and piety, no insignificant measure of his father’s indomitable spirit, having served with honour against the Christians in the siege of Constantinople. So that, when Moawiyah proclaimed his son Yazid, who was as dissolute as he was weak-minded, to be the Commander of the Faithful and the successor of the Apostle of God, Huseyn, who was living in Medina at the time, scorned to acknowledge the title of the youth, whose vicious habits he despised. One hundred and forty thousand Muslims of Kufá and thereabouts professed their attachment to Huseyn’s cause, and a list of these adherents of his was transmitted to Medina. Against the advice of his wisest friends, he resolved to traverse the desert of Arabia, and to appear on the banks of the Euphrates—a river held sacred to this day by every Shiah. He set out with his family, crossed the barren expanse of desert, and approached the confines of Assyria, where he was alarmed by the hostile aspect of the country and “suspected either the ruin or the defection of his party.” His fears were well founded. Obeidullah, the Governor of Kufá, had quelled the rising insurrection; and Huseyn, in the plain of Kerbela, was surrounded by a body of five thousand horse, who cut off his communication with the city and the river. Rather than retreat to a fortress in the desert and confide in the fidelity of the tribe of Tai he proposed to the chief of the enemy the choice of three honourable courses of action—that he should be allowed to return to Medina, or be stationed in a frontier garrison against the Turks, or safely conducted to the presence of Yazid. He was informed that he must surrender unconditionally or accept the consequences of his rebellion. “Do you think to terrify me with death?” he replied, and to his sister Zainab, who deplored the impending ruin of his house, he said: “Our trust is in God alone. All things, both in heaven and in earth, must perish and return to their Creator. My brother [Hasan], my father [’Alí], my mother [Fatima], were better than I am; and every Mussulman has an example in the Prophet.” His little band of followers consisted only of thirty-two horsemen and forty foot soldiers. He begged them to make good their own escape by a hasty flight; but they held firm to their allegiance, refusing to desert him in his straits. In return he prayed that God might accept his death as a propitiation for their sins; they vowed they would not survive him, and the family of the Tent, as Huseyn and his fellow-martyrs are lovingly called by the Shiahs, passed the night in holy devotions.

The last hours of their lives cannot be more tersely told, and therefore more suitably to our purpose, than in the words of Gibbon:

“On the morning of the fatal day, Huseyn mounted on horseback, with his sword in one hand and the Kurán in the other; his generous band of martyrs were secured in their flanks and rear, by the tent-ropes and by a deep trench which they had filled with lighted faggots, according to the practice of the Arabs. The enemy advanced with reluctance, and one of their chiefs deserted, with thirty followers, to claim the partnership of inevitable death. In a very close onset, or single combat, the despair of the Fatimites was invincible; but the surrounding multitude galled them from a distance with a cloud of arrows, and the horses and men were successively slain: a truce was allowed on both sides for the hour of prayer; and the battle at length expired by the death of the last of the companions of Huseyn. Alone, weary, and wounded, he seated himself at the door of his tent. As he tasted a drop of water he was pierced in the mouth with a dart; and his son and nephew, two beautiful youths, were killed in his arms. He lifted his hands to heaven; they were full of blood, and he uttered a funeral prayer for the living and the dead. In a transport of despair his sister issued from the tent, and adjured the general of the Cufians that he would not suffer Huseyn to be murdered before his eyes; a tear trickled down his venerable beard; and the boldest of his soldiers fell back on every side as the dying hero threw himself among them. The remorseless Shamer, a name detested by the Faithful, reproached their cowardice; and the grandson of Mahomet was slain with three and thirty strokes of lances and swords. After they had trampled on his body, they carried his head to the castle of Kufá, and the inhuman Obeidullah struck him on the mouth with a cane. ‘Alas!’ exclaimed an aged Mussulman, ‘on these lips have I seen the lips of the Prophet of God!’ In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Huseyn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader. On the annual festival of his martyrdom, in the devout pilgrimage to his sepulchre, his Persian votaries abandon their souls to the religious frenzy of sorrow and indignation.”

The date of Huseyn’s death was the tenth of Muharram. The month is one of mourning throughout the Shiah world, every man and every woman wearing black, and Passion plays based on the tragedy of the Tent being performed in all the chief cities and even in the more important villages of Persia, while the day itself is made the occasion of a yearly outburst of grief, of rage, and of fanaticism, which is as unbridled as it is sincere. On this the Day of Cutting, processions bearing banners draped in black pass weeping through the streets; the Muslim Friars, or, to give them their true title, the Seyyid Rúsé Kháns, lead the way, rending their naked breasts with knives or with needles, and swelling the shouts of “Yá-Huseyn! Yá-Hasan!” with the refrains of their wildest hymns. The flow of blood drives the populace beside itself. In every thoroughfare men of the lower classes run to join the ranks of the mourners, laying bare their right shoulders and breasts to the weapons they carry. And soon every ward of every city in the country echoes and re-echoes, not less to the curses showered on the head of Omar, than to the cries in lamentation of ’Alí’s assassination, of Hasan’s murder, and of Huseyn’s martyrdom. The universal mourning animates the collective body of the nation as with one soul. If it is mixed with a mean hatred for a man of unrivalled integrity and force of character, it is still, as the expression of the nation’s love for its chosen hero, a sentiment of loyal devotion and enduring compassion. The noise of the grief over Huseyn’s remote death may ring discordant, unphilosophic, and almost barbaric, in these days of the lukewarm enthusiasms and uninspiring scepticism which sap the energies of the more cultured of mankind; but it rings all the more moving to those who can hear and understand. For “it is the noise of the mourning of a nation” mighty in its grief, as Lionel Tennyson has it.

So true and so deep is this outburst of sorrow that every Englishman who believes the Persian people to be corrupt should weigh well his evidence before he passes a sentence so sweeping and so unjust. The nobility of a nation is dependent, not so much on ends which consist in “immediate material possession” of European means and methods of transport, as “on its capability of being stirred by memories,” on its faculty to animate an alien creed with the breath of its own spirit, or on the courage of its conscience to remain incorruptible in the day of persecution and death. These tests, though they be of the spirit and as such unworthy of the consideration of a trading nation and a commercial age, would, if applied to Persia, raise that distressful country to the rank of the first eminence. The power of steam, though it rules the waves and devours distance, has its limits as a civilising influence, among mankind. It cannot fill the hungry heart, though it may be the means of overloading the belly; much less, if less may be, can it inspire in the soul by its achievements the passion whereof the religious drama of Persia is the embodiment. The incorruptibility of the Persian’s outlook on spiritual truth has been vindicated in the blood of countless martyrs, and out of his susceptibility to be inspired by the heroism of the mighty dead, or, to put the proposition more particularly, out of his unfeigned devotion to the memory of the family of the Tent, has sprung the Shiah Passion-drama, as from the depth of a whole Empire’s sorrow. Were it not so, the growth of the Miracle-play, that passionate outcry of the Aryan spirit in the Persian Muslim, would be a miracle indeed.

The truth is, the Shiah religious drama makes a most touching appeal to the best qualities of the heart and the mind. In its pathos, the episode of the Tent recalls the tragedy of Calvary, and the virtues of the members of the House of Hashem might have been modelled on those of the twelve Apostles of Christ. The sublime figure of Huseyn stands out among them as the redeemer of his people. As the Founder of Christianity was tempted of the devil in the wilderness to forego His lofty mission that He might gain a worldly kingdom, so Huseyn, in the scene on the plain of Kerbela, rejects the assistance offered to him by the King of the Jinns on purpose to atone for the sins of his people by death. On the Cross Christ’s heart forsook him—once, and only once. It was when He cried: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” In like manner the heroic Huseyn, within sight of Kufá, having to baffle the attack of Yazíd and his hosts by turning aside from the direct road leading to his city of refuge, and seeing the exceeding anguish of his beloved sister Zainab, had felt the sting of his own destiny: “Ye crooked conducted spheres,” he had cried, “how long will ye tyrannise over us? How long will ye act thus cruelly to the family of God’s Prophet?” Then, nerving himself to the trial, he prophesied his death on the morrow, and said, with his customary fortitude, that the sacrifice of himself and his companions was not a cause for grief, since it would work for the salvation of his grandfather’s people; and thenceforward his resolution to meet the fate he had chosen for himself never swerved; not even when the very angels of heaven sought to save his life from sheer love of a soul so dauntless and so incorruptible.

The reward of his martyrdom is won in the last scene of all, which represents the resurrection. The Prophet, failing to save his followers from punishment, notwithstanding the united efforts of himself, of ’Alí, and of Hasan, throws away his rod, his cloak, and his turban, in his disappointment. Nor is he in the least pacified until Gabriel makes it clear to him that Huseyn, who “has suffered most,” must lend him the assistance he requires. The compassionate heart of the man is wrung, so that when Huseyn makes his appearance it is to receive from his magnanimous grandsire the key of intercession. The Prophet says to him: “Go thou, and deliver from the flames every one who hath in his lifetime shed a single tear for thee, every one who hath in any way helped thee, every one who hath performed a pilgrimage to thy shrine, or mourned for thee, and every one who hath written tragic verses to thee. Bear each and all with thee to Paradise.” And this being done, all the sinners redeemed by their mediator enter into heaven, crying: “God be praised! by Huseyn’s grace we are made happy, and by his favour we are delivered from destruction.”

One word more. Among the sinners whom Muhammad commanded Huseyn to rescue from hell-fire, as the reader will have read, perhaps with a smile, were those who had written tragic verses in praise of the martyr of the Tent. His smile may, possibly, ring out in a laugh when we inform him that the Seyyid Rúzé Kháns, the Shiah friars, are said to have been the originators of the Passion-drama. The foresight of the authors in thus securing for themselves an entrance into Paradise and for their fellow-writers the yearly prayers of the endless generations of mankind, was it not ingenuously artful?

Part II
THE STORY OF THE PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER I
LONDON TO JIDDAH

On bidding good-bye to the mighty capital of the world I reminded her that though her sombre stone mansions and teeming streets—and shall I say her epic atmosphere?—have for me an unspeakable charm, I was glad to be on my way to the city of great concourse, towards which I had so often turned my face in prayer, and in which the hearts of many millions of people are deeply rooted. Indeed, so certain are the majority of finding salvation within her sacred walls that it would be no exaggeration to declare their highest aspiration to be to see Mecca and die. Ah, well, I for one shall pray to see London again, for how could I ever forget the least of her gifts to me? Dear Alma Mater, au revoir!

While I was thus meditating the train puffed out of the station, and the shore of the English Channel was reached. The weather was mild, the sky was clear; even the worst sailor might feel sure of having a delightful passage, and I, praise the Powers, am a good sailor. And so it was: we reached the neighbouring shore without the slightest qualm, and arrived in Paris at six o’clock in the morning. Many people were already on the move—unlike London, where hardly anybody is seen about at that time of the day, except, perhaps, the loitering scum that begins to rise from the excess of the previous night’s libations. On the way from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon I noticed signs of the festivities in connection with the Centenary of Victor Hugo, and I could not help admiring the new statue raised this year to commemorate the strenuous genius of that great man. One short hour in Paris, then our train sped southward in brilliant sunshine, which seemed to draw me nearer to that burning Arabian land whither I was bound.

On my arrival at Marseilles I booked a berth on board the steamer Rewa, belonging to the British India Steam Navigation Company, as it proved to be the only one that would enable me to reach Port Said and to proceed thence to Suez by rail in time to catch the connection by boat to Jiddah.

I shall neither tax the reader’s patience nor trespass on my space by relating the trivial incidents of a voyage that presented little of interest to a travel-worn mind. It will be enough to say that the wind, which was as fair as one could desire till we reached the Straits of Messina, was bent afterwards on making another and an angrier sea. The discomfort of the passengers, most of whom were Britains bound for India, was betrayed by their seclusion from the open air. The nearer we approached the East, the more kindly grew the elements, until, on the seventh day, about seven o’clock in the morning, Port Said hove in sight. An hour later I had packed my kit and was ready for a hearty landing. Steaming slowly into the canal we passed the pier, which was still in course of construction, saluted the statue of de Lesseps, and raised a shout of surprise on counting not less than five Russian warships before we had reached our moorings. Those guardians of Russian prestige had come from Chinese waters, had remained five days at Suez, and were now coaling at Port Said, where they had arrived on the previous day. Not one single British man-of-war was to be seen. I had my breakfast at eight, after which I bade farewell to the captain and my travelling companions, going ashore in one of the boats that surrounded our steamer.

Two trains start from Port Said to Suez every day, one in the forenoon and one in the evening. The line as far as Ismailia is a narrow tramway having a gauge of 2ft. 8in.; the cars are consequently both narrow and uncomfortable, and take about three hours to do the journey. On my bidding good-bye to the dragoman I had engaged, he assured me that he was far too devout a Muslim to fleece so pious a pilgrim as myself, and he would not accept a centime more than five francs for the boat, the carriage, and his special services. It was from him that I first heard of the outbreak of cholera in Arabia—a report that was unfortunately confirmed at Suez, whither I journeyed in the discomfort of a dust-storm and a hot easterly wind. We arrived at Ismailia at one o’clock, or thereabouts, having left Port Said at a quarter to ten o’clock. This place, when the canal was being cut, was the headquarters of the workmen; but now it has sunk in importance, many of the buildings having actually fallen in ruins. Some of the managers of the company, however, are still living there, and the best houses in the town are at their disposal. Employment is provided on the canal for some hundred and twenty pilots, most of whom are Greeks and Frenchmen, though a few Englishmen have been recently added to the staff. The railway from Cairo to Suez, which belongs to the Egyptian Government, passes through Ismailia and picks up the passengers for Suez who have travelled so far by the Canal Company’s toy line. Henceforward the journey was made in comfort, for the line, though a single one, is a standard British gauge and the train provided with an excellent waggon-restaurant. Nearly all the passengers on board were Arabs and low-class Europeans in the third-class compartments. We stopped at three stations on the way, and every time it happened we were greeted by a weird chorus of Arab song, of which the burden was the “Wondrous names of God and the virtues of His Prophet.” I was somewhat amused to hear the words, “Not I, by God!” in reply to my inquiry as to whether or not a certain Arab would be good enough to fetch a bottle of soda water for me. For I, being unused to the climate, had suffered tortures from thirst in the scorching heat and driving dust-clouds, the intervals between the stages being extremely long and tedious—in fact, it took the train seven hours and a quarter to cover the hundred miles that separate Port Said from Suez. Nor was the prospect of a sort to slake the thirst of the weary pilgrim. All along the line hugs the right bank of the canal, and nothing is to be seen except the soft white sand of the glowing desert, unless it be an occasional patch of green grass or a cluster of date trees, irrigated by the fresh-water canal newly cut in order to conduct the much-needed water from a spot near Cairo to Port Said and Suez, the latter a place which stands in sore want of the cleansing and refreshing element.

A PILGRIM “AT SEA”—SUEZ RAILWAY STATION.

A GROUP OF MIXED PILGRIMS.

On my arrival at the station a dragoman, one of the plagues of Egypt, joined himself to my suite, informing me with glib mendacity that he carried both Arabia and the Land of the Pyramids in his pocket, whereas, as a matter of fact, he had not once left his native town. However, as I could not shake the fellow off, I made the best of a bad bargain by taking him out shopping with me. First, I bought a deep crimson fez with a long black silk tassel and a straw lining. Though it looked both cool and fanciful, and was therefore pleasing to my Oriental eye, I am not certain that a turban would not have been more in keeping with the complete Arab suit which I subsequently purchased. This consisted of a thin linen shirt, a pair of trousers, and two long and graceful robes. The shirt was worn as long as a night-shirt, it had no collar, and the roomy sleeves were left open at the wrists. The trousers were more interesting, and of a curious shape and an odd material, being made of thin white calico, and so cut that whereas an elephant’s thigh could scarcely fill the ample width of the uppermost part, one had the greatest difficulty in slipping the feet through the lower ends which clung tightly round the ankles. As for the two robes, which were long enough to cover the nether garments, the inner one was made of the finest silk, striped in successive colours of red, yellow, and green, and was left entirely open in front, but the left breast overlapped the right, to which it was buttoned from the armpits downwards. The outer habit of a blueish colour served as a cloak to the inner one, was made of the same material, and cut in precisely the same way. No socks were worn, and the shoes were not unlike ordinary slippers, with this exception, that they were turned up at the toes.

On donning this picturesque attire I returned to the Hôtel d’Orient by way of the narrow and filthy bazaars, where my attention was attracted by a band of dancers who were drawing together a crowd of sightseers of every nationality. While one man was cutting his capers in the skin of a Polar bear, a second, tambourine in hand, powdered his face to imitate a European, while a third, got up in guise of a Negro, played with a lively monkey in chains, and three dancing girls with huge artificial moles on their faces completed the company. All these, including the monkey, pranced up and down to the tune vociferated by the women and accompanied on the tambourine by the man with the white face, repeating at intervals the shrill cry of “Hullá-hee-há-há.”

As I sat within the courtyard of the Hotel, listening to the voice of the Greek prima donna who sang nightly to the assembled guests, I could not refrain from smiling within myself at the transformation in my appearance and demeanour which recalled to my memory a line of Obaid Zakani’s satire of “The Mouse and the Cat,” which runs: “Be of good cheer, comrades, the cat has become pious.” These glad tidings were spread abroad by a little mouse that, having hidden itself under the altar of a mosque at Kirmán, overheard the cat reading aloud the passage of repentance, meekly kneeling on its knees. Unfortunately the cat, the symbol of vicious cunning, broke its vows a little time after, and I wondered how far and how long I should succeed in keeping mine.

Next morning I came across a blind Arabian priest patiently waiting on the landing-stage for the departure of the steamer, and in the evening he was still in the self-same spot, kneeling on his prayer-rug and singing aloud the verses of the Kurán in a deep original Arab melody, rosary in hand. His young son was kneeling by his side, listening with downcast eyes to the never-ceasing chants of his father, who knew by heart every word of the sacred book, to say nothing of the saddening elegies of the Arabian traditionists. Like most of the singers of the East, who pour out their rhapsodies all day long in an ever-flowing torrent of melody, he was extremely monotonous, and so I sought to stem the current of his song by entering into conversation with him. On hearing from me that he would be obliged to descend into the hell of the Turkish quarantine and to remain there five days before he could hope to ascend into the pilgrim’s paradise of Mecca, a look of keen distress swept like a cloud over his enraptured countenance. Rising slowly to his feet, he raised his sightless eyes, saying: “God, if it please Him, will provide me with a swift means of transport to His city. We shall meet again.” So confident was his tone that my own misgivings yielded to the hope that I should yet overcome the difficulty of the quarantine. And soon after I was informed that all the first-class passengers on board the last pilgrim boat would be allowed to proceed to their destination without let or hindrance, but the unfortunate deck passengers would have to conform to the regulations. Never was the privilege of wealth and the curse of poverty brought home to the hearts of the weary in a more convincing fashion. The next best thing to being wealthy, I told myself, is to have the prerogatives of wealth thrust upon one.

Having had my passport viséd, I booked a berth and went on board the Khedivieh steamer, which completed the distance between Suez and Jiddah—some six hundred and forty-five nautical miles—in about eighty hours. At ordinary times these steamers are simply employed on the mail service, one of them leaving Suez for Jiddah every week—generally on Thursday—and another leaving Jiddah for Suez on the same day. Though they practically belong to a British syndicate, they go under the name of Khedivieh steamers. The captain and the chief officers are English, whereas the crew are Egyptians and Lascars. During the pilgrimage steamers run frequently between the two ports, and in the year 1902 not less than two hundred thousand pilgrims, I was told, had landed at Jiddah, the majority of whom embarked at Suez. Among these numbers must be reckoned the eighty thousand Russian subjects from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who, for the first time since they came under the Russian rule, had been granted the privilege of undertaking the ancient pilgrimage. Rumour credited them with being the main cause of the cholera that year. If only the half of what I heard about them were true their pollution would still beggar description.

The cruise in the Red Sea is not so interesting as that in the Mediterranean. Save an occasional ragged rock rising from the yellow waters, or a flight of white birds over the steamer, nothing was to be seen from hour to hour.

PREPARING TO EMBARK AT SUEZ.

When we sighted the port of Jiddah, which I shall describe by-and-by, we were told to put on our ihrám, or sacred habit, before entering the holy territory on our way to Mecca. As a preliminary, I at once removed my Arabian costume, washed my hands, up to the elbow, and my feet, up to the knees; I afterwards shaved the upper lip, leaving the fresh-grown, unsightly beard to its own fate. Then, having performed the prescribed ablution of the head, I closed my eyes and expressed, with the tongue of my heart, the earnest desire to cast off the garb of unrighteousness and pride and to put on the winding-sheet of humility and of passive obedience to God’s will. Last of all, that I might be worthy to visit His house, I prostrated myself on the prayer-rug and said aloud the following formula of devotion: “O Almighty God, Thou art without a mate; I praise Thy sovereign grace with all my heart; Thou art pure and everlasting;” then I repeated three times: “O Lord, Thou art without a mate,” adding, “I praise, O Lord, Thy apostle Muhammad and his disciples and his family; in like manner, I also praise our father Abraham and his house.” The next thing I said was: “Send down upon me, O Lord, the healthful spirit of Thy satisfaction; open unto me, I beseech Thee, the gates of Paradise, and shelter me from the fire of Hell.” And this petition I also repeated three times. I was then ready to don the sacred habit.

Now, my ihrám, which I had bought at Suez, consisted of two thin woollen wrappers and a pair of sandals. One wrapper was tied about the middle and allowed to fall all round to the ankles, while the other was thrown over the shoulders, leaving my head and the forearms bare. Both wrappers were spotlessly white, and had neither seam nor hem. The sandal was a kind of shoe, consisting of a sole fastened to the foot by means of a tie which passed between the large toe and the first toe of the foot; it left uncovered both the instep and the heel. This sacred habit was worn by all pilgrims during the four days preceding the Hájj Day. While they have it on they must neither hunt nor fowl, though they are allowed to fish—a doubtful privilege in a dry land. This precept, according to Ahmad Ebn Yûsuf, is so strictly observed that nothing will induce pilgrims to kill so much as a flea. We are told by Al Beidáwí, however, that there are some noxious animals that they have permission to kill during the pilgrimage, such animals, for instance, as kites, ravens, scorpions, mice, and dogs given to bite. Pilgrims must keep a constant watch over their words and their actions so long as they wear the sacred habit. Not a single abusive word must be uttered; all obscene discourse and all converse with women must be avoided; and not a single woman’s face must be seen, save that of a wife, a sister, or a cousin-german, i.e., a sister’s or a brother’s daughter. The men, as I have said, must now doff their sewn clothes and must keep both their faces and their heads uncovered; but the woman must be, as it were, hermetically sealed in their stitched cloaks and veils. The only part of their bodies that they have the right to expose, if they like, is the palms of their hands. For the rest, they must not travel alone, but must be accompanied by a man who may lawfully see them unveiled.

Poor pilgrims! They suffered from right and left. First came the blood-suckers’ passport picnic. Here the pilgrim was plagued to death with questions that the most cursory perusal of his safe-conduct had rendered unnecessary. “Where do you come from? When did you leave? How did you get here? What are your intentions? Why this? How that? When the other?” The poorer pilgrims complained that they were positively fleeced on the most frivolous pretexts. “Your passport is not properly written; you must pay forty-eight piastres,” and so on.

Then the customs’ authorities emerged. “Will you walk into my parlour?” these mosquitoes said to the pilgrims. To the imaginative mind the buzzing which filled the room spelt the word bakhshísh. Woe betide the pilgrim who did not so interpret the sound! All these officials, as a Persian would say, had arms longer than their legs—in other words, they reached out an itching palm to every pilgrim, and, casting an appealing smile on him, seemed as though they would ask him to tickle it with the counter-irritant of a “tip.” They opened my kit-bags and turned everything topsy-turvy before I had time to bridle their official zeal in the customary way. Among the contents were an English newspaper and a novel, and these were promptly confiscated for no other reason than that I had read them both. I cannot say that I made them a present of my purse by way of pouring coals of fire on their heads. It was otherwise in my case. I tied my purse-strings a little tighter, and responded to their bakhshísh-coveting smiles with a smile equally bakhshísh-coveting. It is wise, when you know the ropes, to husband your resources till you reach the interior, for there your comfort in travelling will depend on your having a purse well lined. By following this rule, I was not so ill-prepared as I might otherwise have been to meet the claims on my charity of the professional beggars who waylaid my every step in the quaint old city of Jiddah.

Such a scene! Crowds of Arabs were lying on the filthy ground, which, despite the heat, seemed strangely damp. Some were praying, some were snoring, others were smoking, many were wrestling in the mud, but by far the greater number of them merely dreamed away the passing hours, too idle even to open their eyes. You might stay from sunrise to sunset by the side of the more meditative among them without their showing the least signs of life. How differently constituted are these loafers from the free-born Arabs of the desert! The women held themselves somewhat aloof from the men, and sat smoking their pipes, or chatting like magpies, in groups of three or four. The sight of a new face seemed to have lost its attraction for them, or perhaps they had grown weary of criticising the gait and the appearance of the incoming pilgrims. Having now seen a good many of them, however, as it were by stealth, I think I may say with confidence that among the Arabs of Hejaz the men are far better-looking than the women. This is mostly the women’s own fault, for they ruin the beauty of their faces by tattooing their chins. Were it not for this unsightly custom, peculiar to the Arabs, the womenfolk, though corpulent, might be regarded as comely. The men, on the other hand, are fairly handsome, being tall and lean, and having high-bridged noses, flashing black eyes, and lofty foreheads. I am speaking more especially of the wild Arabs of the desert and not of the townsmen, whose faces, however handsome they may be, are too often marred by an expression of cupidity and cunning.

Jiddah, though dirty, is a very picturesque city. It has narrow serpentine streets which are rarely more than seven or eight feet wide, and is surrounded by five turreted walls of great antiquity rising to a height of twelve feet or so. Of these walls the northern measures in length about seven hundred and thirty-one yards, the southern seven hundred and sixty-nine, the eastern five hundred and eighty-five, the western six hundred and twenty-four, and the south-eastern some three hundred and seventy-nine. There are about three thousand houses in the city, most of which are built of limestone and shut out from the street by walls which sometimes conceal the roofs of the houses within. Here and there a small window in the surrounding walls affords ventilation to the house. It is only a few years since a big well was dug at a place called Bashtar, some two miles distant from the city, the water of which is conducted by means of underground passages. This well bears the name of the reigning Sultan of Turkey. Pure drinking water being scarce, sakkás or water-carriers are seen about the streets carrying the precious liquid on their backs in big leathern bags. Of recent years several mosques and caravanserais and one steam mill have been erected outside the city walls. The governor’s residence, together with the post-office and almost all of the more modern buildings, lies outside the walls, facing the Red Sea. The shops, raised not more than a foot above the ground, are about two yards and a half in width and some three yards deep in the interior. Butchers, grocers, fruiterers, and linen drapers are crowded together much as they are in an English street. The babble within the bazaar is beyond description. Your first conjecture is that a free fight is about to begin between the tradesman and his customer; but, on making ready to intervene in the cause of peace, you find to your pleasure or your chagrin that the vociferous couple shake hands, first by touching the right hand and then by raising both hands to the right eye, after which the shopkeeper makes tender inquiries as to his customer’s health, and then the bargaining begins. It took me over an hour to buy a few yards of cloth. The ancient draper was too lazy to reach out for the stuff himself, so he ordered his boy to bestir himself in my interests. The cloth being handed to him, the draper fingered it caressingly, saying: “The cloth is soft to the touch, its splendour dazzles the eyes! Such an exquisite material has not been seen in this market for years!” The cloth was to my liking, and so I made haste to ask the price of it. The draper shook his head reprovingly. Then he said: “Hurry and haste belong to Satan: I usually sell this cloth at thirty piastres a yard to my customers, but to you I will sell it for twenty-five, because you have found favour in my sight.” I made him a counter-bid of five piastres a yard in order to cut the barter short. Whereupon the draper, nodding in admiration of my guile, gazed around him for close on five minutes. When he opened his mouth at last it was to say in his most winning voice: “My good sir, since you are looking so well, so handsome, and so distinguished, I will part with this priceless material at the trifling cost to yourself of fifteen piastres a yard.” “Not so,” I replied. “Since you are a bright old man I will increase my favour in your sight by adding a piastre to my last bid; in other words, I now offer you six piastres a yard.” The draper raised his hand to Heaven. “That is impossible! I ask pardon of God.” I now turned on my heel and walked away. He called me back at once. “Sir,” he said, “I would not have you leave me in displeasure. Give whatever you like, the cloth is yours. I am your sacrifice.” I retraced my steps. “Nonsense,” I returned; “how is it possible for me to give what I like for the stuff, since you are the tradesman and know its proper value?” The old man smiled, and said, “Honoured sir, the lowest price I can possibly accept for this material is ten piastres a yard.” It was now my turn to smile. “Sir,” I replied, “I have no wish to offend you by leaving your shop, and so I will buy the cloth from you for seven piastres a yard instead of going to your rival yonder, who has offered to sell me some at six and a half piastres.”

The draper then handed me a stool, and said, smiling, “You are not easy to deal with. Come, sit down, and smoke this hukah, and we shall not part in anger.” So I sat down in front of the shop, and while I sucked meditatively at the pipe he handed to me, the stuff was measured, cut, and folded, the tacit understanding between us being that we would meet half-way, namely at eight piastres and a half. By the time I had finished my smoke the material was ready for me, and so I lost no time in returning to the hotel.

The harvest season of the shopkeepers is during the journeying months. Their most striking characteristic in the eyes of a Persian pilgrim is that they all wear white beards. The reason of this probably is that young shopkeepers would stand not a ghost of a chance of competing successfully with their elderly rivals. Moreover, all greybeards in the Muhammadan religion are entitled to receive special veneration from the young. Another reason is that nearly all the young men are employed by the pilgrims as guides, as servants, and as drivers.

PILGRIMS EMBARKING AT SUEZ.

BEFORE WEIGHING ANCHOR AT SUEZ.

Everything moves slowly in these Arab towns. You will break the laws of good breeding if you walk fast there. Consider the camel of the desert, how he walks; he hurries not, neither does he make a sound: so take this finnikin creature as your model and form your gait on the camel’s. All Orientals pin implicit faith in the doctrine of “slow but sure,” and when they give you some work they recommend you to be “slow over it,” believing that a thing done smartly is not often done well.

CHAPTER II
FROM JIDDAH TO MECCA

The time at my disposal being limited, I went at once in search of a guide, who should accompany me to Mecca and thence to Arafat, and put me in the way of performing the rites and mysteries of the Hájj. The men who officiate in that capacity are called moghavems. The pick of them had fallen to the lot of the early-comers who had flocked to Jiddah in great numbers; but with my customary luck, I chanced upon a Persian moghavem, whose knowledge of the ceremonies and the holy places of the Pilgrimage was seasoned with the waggish conceits of a singularly original mind. His sceptical witticisms were the more piquant in that he gloried in the name of Seyyid ’Alí. For the rest, he had travelled far and wide, had sat down and laughed beside the waters of Babylon, had wandered on foot as far to the East as Benares, and had undertaken the Pilgrimage of Mecca half a dozen times. I congratulated him on his globe-trotting habit, whereupon he showed a gleam of white teeth, raising himself on the tips of his toes, and stroked his unkempt beard complacently. Then he aired his knowledge of geography. “Yá-Moulai,” he said with unexpected gravity, “Allah has had me in His keeping, may He be praised! He has revealed to me the innermost secrets of the world, and shown to me the whole creation. I have been everywhere except in Hell, and even that experience will not be withheld from me, I trust, when I come to die. True it is, yá-Moulai, that this life is a riddle; we solve it when we give up the ghost—perhaps. Anyhow, my one desire in this world is to go to Europe that I may see China and study the philosophy of that wonderful land.” I had to avert my head lest he should detect the struggle between amusement and politeness which convulsed every feature of my face.

“Ah,” said he, “your Excellency is fortunate to have met me: the Hájj Season is far advanced: moghavems are scarce: and I am one of the most reasonable of men. If you will burst from the bonds of economics in the matter of salary, you will find in me a pleasant travelling companion and a lettered guide.”

“Will two dollars a day content you?” I asked. The offer was a liberal one, and on the spur of a grateful impulse he clinched the bargain without a moment’s hesitation. This trait of character endeared him to me, and so I treated him on a footing of social equality so long as he was my cicerone.

Now, the day was the sixth day of the moon: a distance of some forty-six miles lay between us and the Holy City: and, furthermore, since the Pilgrims had to leave Mecca on the 8th for the hill of Arafat, it followed that we had not a single moment to lose in making preparations for our journey. With many words Seyyid ’Alí staked his wages that, by hiring asses and riding alone, we could cover the road in eleven hours. “Of course,” said he, “we must run the risk of being attacked by Bedouins who lie in wait for stragglers. Indeed, only two days ago, so the rumour runs in the bazaars, a caravan of forty Persian pilgrims was robbed on leaving Heddah for Mecca: and everybody we meet—depend upon it—will do his utmost to terrify us with blood-curdling stories of Arab lawlessness and violence. However, let us pin our faith not in firearms and bravado, but in our cool heads and our stout hearts. And, in the meanwhile, I will take you to a caravanserai, where we shall find an acquaintance of mine, who is the owner of a drove of the fleetest asses in Hejaz. His name is Nassir, and he owns allegiance to the fighting clan of Harb. From him we will hire three donkeys: one for your Excellency, one for the effects we have with us, and a third for myself. Nassir will accompany us on foot, and be a protector to us in the wilderness. Let us hasten lest his services be engaged.”

After bartering with Nassir, it was settled that I should pay him two dollars for the use of each animal (two-thirds to be paid in advance and one-third on alighting in Mecca), while he himself was to receive, in return for his services, a bakhshísh in proportion to his usefulness on the road.

In appearance he was a typical representative of his race, both in bearing and in dress, as well as in accoutrements and in strength. Tall and lean, he had the appearance of a man that had been baked in an oven: his skin was as brown and as wrinkled as a walnut-shell, his features seemed to leap out of the face, while his eyes declared the nobility of a virile though savage nature. He wore a long yellow shirt, reaching below the knees, with a red cotton belt round the waist, in which was stuck an ugly-looking dagger. Slung crosswise over his back a Bedouin generally carries an old-fashioned flint rifle, having a barrel some two yards in length, with a bow-shaped stock covered all over with small square chips of white shells. For this ungainly weapon Nassir substituted a stout Arab club, which was a fortunate thing for Seyyid ’Alí, perhaps, inasmuch as wordy wars between the two men came to be of hourly occurrence.

About five o’clock in the evening, after having smoked a pipe of peace at a coffee-house in the bazaars, we mounted our asses, Seyyid ’Alí and myself, while the fleet-footed driver, go as hard as we might, kept pace with us, without so much as turning a hair. We rode through the Mecca gate, and then bore off in a north-easterly direction in order that I might have an opportunity of visiting Eve’s Tomb. This excursion, because it took us a little out of our way, was not to the liking of our Harbi warrior, who, in his anxiety to reach Mecca by sunrise, was bent on sparing both his own breath and his beasts of burden. But I, having made up my mind to pay my respects to the resting-place of our common mother, was not to be gainsaid; and I contrived to convict my opponent of churlishness by making a point of reaching my destination within half an hour—that is in less than half the time he had said it would take.

Assuredly, Arabia is the cradle of credulity. In that land of legend the historian catches his breath. He is ill at ease, alternately bewildered and sceptical, as might be expected of a man, who, reaching out for truth, lays hold of a myth at every step. Thus, on gaining admittance to the enclosure, I was amazed to notice the exceeding length of the Tomb, and on measuring the low walls believed to define the outlines of Eve’s body, I found that they were one hundred and seventy-three yards long, and about twelve feet broad. In the centre a low dome is conspicuous; it is said to crown Eve’s navel. “What a monster!” I cried, laughing, “easy lies the head of our common mother.” The guide corrected me, saying, “The Well of Wisdom is mistaken. The tomb was not long enough to contain her blessed head. It is well known that only the trunk and limbs of her lie here.” Rising to my full height, five feet nine in my sandals, I asked him to account for the dwindling in the size of man. “The Fountain of Learning must remember,” he replied, “that Eve, our Mother, fell, and with her fell the stature of the human race.” The explanation found a crack in the armour of my credulity, and so, turning back into the direct road, we resumed our journey, joining a caravan of about thirty pilgrims of mixed nationalities, Egyptians, Syrians, Caucasians, Indians, and Malays.

Instead of refreshing breezes, which would have come as a positive godsend, the wind, blowing from the south-west, spread abroad an abominable vapour, and caused the sand to rise and fall like the bosom of the ocean. Sand-heaps twelve feet high might be scattered at any moment in these whirlwinds; but, fortunately, though our asses often sunk over their fetlocks, we reached in safety the Hill of Gaem (the first stage for caravans), where, according to a local superstition, the Messiah will first appear. A small booth here made ample amends for the scarcity of water, and I could not remember ever having tasted more fragrant and delicious coffee.

Slowly but surely the ground now began to rise, and the sand to grow firmer. A caravan of camels glided stealthily by, bells tinkling, pilgrims reciting the Kurán, and the drivers singing to their camels a deeply melodious song called Hodi, which has on them the effect of a goad, urging them on to a brisk unchanging pace. To this accompaniment a camel will cover a great distance without stopping, the general belief being that the camel gets drunk with the sweet burden of the Hodi song.

Overnight, long after sunset, my Harbi driver himself began to sing aloud in the gathering darkness, asking God to protect him from the goblins of the wilderness, and always in a lugubrious minor key, as if he was going to weep. But ever and anon we heard an original song set to the music of the desert, wild as the wastes, elusive as the winds, as revealing and obscure as the tuneless solitudes from whose heart it would seem to spring—a song that broke through melody, and added its tameless burden to the music of the spheres. On cultured Europeans these untutored outbursts would have an uncanny effect, causing the centuries to roll back to the days of their barbarian ancestry, and awakening within them, perhaps, one of those haunting dream-memories of birth far back in the misty past, of an anterior existence in keeping with the strains of incoherent minstrelsy when men, labouring under the burdens of consciousness, sang as the spirit moved them, knowing nothing of the laws of counterpoint and harmony. Such a song was sung by Seyyid ’Alí as we left Heddah, a song written by a famous Sufí writer—

“My sorrow is Sorrow; my companion is Sorrow; my mate is Sorrow;

Where’er I go there’s none to care for me but Sorrow;

My Sorrow does not let me sleep alone at night;

Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow!”

The surrounding hills caught the intonation in their ragged arms and flung it back into the dim-lit sea of eddying sand, echoing and re-echoing the word “Sorrow!” Then my own Arab driver, carried beyond himself, raised his voice in the self-same song, and soon the whole caravan burst out, crying, “Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow,” the hills repeating the last word. Wagner, the one master who has given us the music of the sea and the stars, of the winds and the streams, and of all the vague yearnings that torment the human heart, would have understood us, would perhaps have played the part of echo on his return to civilisation, would certainly have joined in the chorus of that wild Arabian air attuned to Arabia’s barren though luminous solitudes.

Here, at Heddah, a more than usually serious quarrel arose between Seyyid ’Alí and Nassir on the subject of the national virtues of their respective countries. It would certainly have ended in a free fight, had not I, awaking from a snooze at the uproar, turned to the pugnacious Arab, who had accused the Persian of hypocrisy, and said in a tone of gentle reproof: “Yá Nassir, is it true that a Persian is double-faced?” For the space of a minute he eyed the supercilious Seyyid, deliberating; then he turned to me. “I wish he were only double-faced,” he replied, “for then I should know how to deal with him. But Satan has given him as many as two thousand faces, and it is beyond the power of any one man to see them all in his lifetime.” I pursued the inquiry, saying, “Oh, Nassir, supposing you were asked to describe the Persian character, how would you sum it up?” This time he turned his flashing eyes on me. “Character comes from conscience,” he answered; “but a Persian has none.” My guide spat derisively on the sand, muttering, “Courtesy is unknown to these people;” then he addressed me in his own language, saying: “But, yá-Moulai, there’s truth in what the burnt-father said, the Almighty Mason having put so many constituents into the clay of a Persian that it is very difficult to analyse it. Our countryman has as many coils and colours as a serpent. He is the essence of politeness and native refinement. He is the personification of jealousy and envy. Conceit and hypocrisy are embodied in him, and so also are generosity and amour propre.”

The mere sound of the mellifluous Persian drove Nassir beside himself. Raising his stout Arab club, which the Persians call Hájí Yemút or the Pilgrim Slayer, he vowed that he would teach the guide a lesson in courtesy; and then, suddenly bethinking himself that any act of violence on his part would be sure to affect his pocket in the matter of bakhshísh, he turned a contemptuous back upon his adversary, and said to me, smiling all over his face: “This club of mine has many qualifications. It is useful in urging my ass to mend its pace, it gives me support when I am tired, and shelter from the sun when I am sleepy”—here he stuck it in the sand, and tied at the top a strip of cloth on a crossbar—“it serves as a line on which to dry my washed clothes, as an altar when it is the hour for me to pray, as a leaping-pole when a mountain torrent stems my path; and, may Allah be praised, it is my surest defence against all my enemies, be they men or beasts, and so, when I die, God forbid, I will leave it as an inheritance to my son.”

Midnight saw us again on the way, and, in the course of our ride over the gravelly ground that rose ever higher the nearer we approached the mountains, we overtook a big caravan that was preceded by a couple of heralds, who bore aloft the green banner of the Faith, whereon was inscribed the Muhammadan watchword. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” Then came the cavalcade of pilgrims, the rear being brought up by a string of camels, and other beasts of burden, heavily laden with tents and water-skins, or mashks, with kitchen utensils and provisions. Like ourselves, these men were latecomers, but being overburdened they were soon left far in the rear by us, indeed they could not hope to reach Mecca before noon on the following day, whereas we were bent on sighting the Holy City ere the rising of the sun.

At the last resting-house, I struck up acquaintance with a Persian pilgrim, seated on a coarse mat; he declared the Arabs to be cowards, while I defied him to justify this charge. “What!” he cried, “anything will frighten them; they are so superstitious. For instance, if a rabbit spring up at their feet and run away from them they will pursue it until it is lost to sight. But if the rabbit comes towards them, they will lose heart, turn on their heels and scuttle as fast as they can lay their legs to the ground, the timid creature in hot pursuit at their heels. However, I will admit that they hold fast together, that they are staunch and true to one another, that they will sacrifice their lives to protect their comrades against the strangers at their gates.” He then began to scratch himself vigorously, giving voice the while to an impromptu verse. Said he; “From sunset to early dawn there’s a merry-making in the kingdom of my body. The mosquitoes are the flutists, the fleas the dancers, and I’m the harpist”—that is, the scratcher, the same word being used in Persian. I left the quaint fellow playing the accompaniment to the dance of the frolicsome fleas and humming mosquitoes, and rode on my way, singing. The ground rose higher and higher. On passing Mount Shíní the road takes a north-easterly direction, and leads to the tomb of Sheykh Mahmud, a priest who is held in special veneration by the Arabs, though the dilapidated state of his grave would scarcely confirm this attitude towards him. And then, at last, on pursuing the way a little further, the minarets of the City of God rise, with the sun, before the pilgrim’s eyes. “Oh, would that I, having beheld its domes, might fall and die,” is now the true Muslim’s devoutest wish.

CHAPTER III
WITHIN THE HAREM—SOME REMARKS ON THE ORTHODOX SECTS OF ISLÁM

The first thing I did before entering Mecca was to perform my ablutions and say my prayers, according to the custom; and then I rode to the encampment on the outskirts of the city where I hoped to find two Persian friends of mine who, in accordance with a previous arrangement between us, had been good enough to take along with them the camp equipment which they had bought for me at Cairo. When I had discovered their whereabouts, I dismissed Nassir, giving him a liberal present, and then sat down to breakfast, my friends congratulating me upon my safe arrival.

The meal over, Seyyid ’Alí took me under his wing, urging me to accompany him to the Harem of the House of God without loss of time, that we might perform the initial ceremony—namely, the compassing of the Ka’bah—in the cool of the early morning. So bidding my friends good-bye, I set out with my guide, who was in sore straits to cloak his native mirthfulness in the folds of his íhram. Do what he would to conceal his natural character, he could not wholly restrain it within the limits of decorum incumbent on every pilgrim wearing that winding-sheet of humility.

The streets were crowded with tents, camels, mules, asses, horses, pariah dogs, and a motley crowd of pilgrims. The din the dogs made in the small hours of the day was indescribable. A pack of jackals would be quiet in comparison. Through even the narrowest lanes must pass the lordly Sheríf and his suite, the sun-baked Sheykhs on horseback, the ladies of the harem sitting astride of mules led by their servants, the peasant pilgrims on foot, and every kind of beast of burden heavily laden with water-skins and provisions. Accidents were consequently of hourly occurrence in the press of the throng. On reaching the holy precincts, my guide turned to me and said, in a cautious undertone, pointing to the Ka’bah in the middle of the Harem: “What need have I of the Ka’bah? it is only four walls; the Ka’bah round which I hop is the face of my Beloved.”

Now, the word Harem which is used to designate the courtyard of every Muhammadan mosque, means “holy place;” and thus the famous mosque of Mecca or, more correctly, the open court in the middle of which the House of God is situated bears the name of Harem. The same expression is used by the Turks to denote the inner apartments of their houses, since the women who dwell there are held sacred to the family. The Harem of the Holy City is an imperfect rhomboid in shape, its opposite sides being not quite equal. The length extends from east to west and the breadth from north to south. The northern side is one hundred and seventy-eight yards long, and the southern one hundred and eighty, while the western side is one hundred and eighteen yards broad, and the eastern one hundred and seventeen. Of the twenty-two gates that give admittance to its precincts, eight are on the northern length, four on the eastern breadth, seven on the southern length, and three on the western breadth. The most sacred of these gates are the Gate of Peace (Salám) and the Gate of Purity (Safá). The Gate of Peace, through which the pilgrims must enter, taking care to say the prescribed prayer on its threshold, leads into the extreme north-eastern end of the Harem; while the Gate of Safá is the one in the centre of the southern length, through which the pilgrims must pass out in order to say their prayers on the platform beyond, from which platform, indeed, the gate takes its name of Purity. There are no doors to these gates, and from every one a flight of steps conducts the Faithful down to the Harem, the surface of which lies about twelve feet below that of the streets, dipping gradually another three feet towards the centre, where the Ka’bah stands; and on the walls of each gate are inscribed the names of the four Caliphs, Abú Bekr, ’Omar, ’Othmán, and ’Alí. The Shiahs, having rubbed their hands on the name of the fourth Caliph, raise them to their faces, and say: “May peace be with Muhammad and with his people.”

To the best of my reckoning, there are some five hundred and seventy-five pillars in the colonnade that runs round the four sides of the Harem. But the Muhammadans, in general, have a prejudice against counting them, and the Meccans, in particular, declare them to be “innumerable.” The eastern side of the Harem is enclosed by a single row of columns, while the other sides have columns three deep. These columns, roughly speaking, measure about two feet in diameter and twenty feet in height. Some of them bear Arabic inscriptions that are scarcely legible now, and others are strengthened by means of iron bands or by iron shafts running from top to bottom. Every third column is round, standing between two octagonal pillars, some four feet apart; every second column supports a pointed arch; and every fourth column a dome that is whitewashed from without, and painted from within in stripes of blue, red, and yellow. The front of the arches are coloured in the same gaudy fashion, as are also the greater number of the seven beautiful minarets from which the muezzins raise the voice of the Faith calling the pilgrims to prayers. There are three of these minarets along the northern length, one at each corner of the opposite side, a sixth along the eastern breadth, and a seventh at the thither end of the cloister attached to the northern side of the Harem. The columns, with the exception of a few on the northern and eastern sides, said to have been brought from Egypt, reflect no artistic taste whatever on the part of the sculptors that carved them. Those that are made of marble or of porphyry are in one piece—huge blocks rough-hewn by unskilful hands—and the others are made of granite or of sandstone from the neighbouring mountains, and composed of three slabs, shaped, dressed, and then cemented together. At least a dozen raised pavements—called Farsh-ul-Hajar—of varying widths, lead to and from the gates of the Ka’bah, the broadest being from the Zaideh gate to the House of God. The floor of the colonnades is paved all round, but the granite slabs are put together in a very rough and ready fashion. The inner path immediately round the Ka’bah is a few inches below the general surface, itself some fifteen feet below that of the streets without; but beyond the iron pillars, from which are hung the glass lanterns that light up the precincts of the House of God by night, rises a second paved way, somewhat higher than the inner one, about five yards broad, while a third, on a still higher level, is even wider. Bordering on this pavement from without are the Meghámé Ibrahím, the Station of Abraham, the Bábé Shaibeh, the Arch of Peace, and the four Megháms belonging to the four Sunni orthodox sects, behind which runs the gravelled expanse of the Harem. Dozens of sweepers are engaged daily in cleaning the floors and pavements, but their efforts, in face of the crowd all too careless of the laws of cleanliness, are vain.

Of the four Megháms above-mentioned the Meghámé-Hanefi is the largest, and is situated to the east of the Ka’bah, some twelve yards from it. It rests on twelve pillars, is open on all sides, and has a small upper chamber, whence the muezzins call the Hanefites to prayer. These are known as “the followers of reason,” and owe their origin to Abú Hanífa al Nómán Ebn Thábet. He was born at Cufa in the eightieth year of the Hegira, and died in the hundred and fiftieth in prison at Bagdad, where he had been confined because he refused to be made a kádi or judge. The reason he gave for refusing to officiate in that capacity may be given in his own words. “If I speak the truth, they’ll say I am unfit; but if I tell a lie a liar is not worthy to be a judge.” He is said to have read the Kurán no less than seven thousand times during his imprisonment. His doctrine brought into prominence by Abú Yúsúf, Chief Justice under the Caliphs al Hádi and Harún ur Rashid, now prevails generally among the Turks and Tartars. In the time of Ignorance the Kuraish used to hold their councils where the Meghámé-Hanefi now stands. The Maleki pulpit, to the south-west of the Ka’bah, is a small building open on all sides, and resting on four pillars. The learned doctor who founded the sect of the Malekites was called Malek Ebn Ans. He was born at Medina in the year ninety of the Hegira, and there he also died at the age of eighty-seven. His teaching is based on the traditions of the Prophet. On his death-bed he said to a friend who found him in tears: “How should I not weep, and who has more reason to weep than I? Would to God that for every question decided by me according to my own opinion I had received so many stripes, then would my accounts be easier. Would to God I had never given any decision of my own.” His followers are scattered over Africa, mainly in Barbary. The Sháfeïtes have their Meghám on the top of the cupola-crowned building which covers the Zem-Zem well, whence the criers call to worship, but the congregation pray round the Ka’bah itself. The author of this, the third orthodox sect, went by the name of Muhammad Ebn Edris al Sháfeí. His birthplace is uncertain. Some say he was born at Caza, others at Ascalon, in Palestine, on the very day that Abú Hanifa died in the year one hundred and fifty of the Hegira. At the age of seven he was taken to Mecca, where he was educated. He is said to have been the first Muhammadan to reduce the science of jurisprudence into a systematic method, and he was undoubtedly a man of great learning, of sincere piety, and of calm, deliberate judgment. Two sayings attributed to him throw a light on his character: “Whoever pretends to love the world and its Creator at the same time is a liar;” “I am considering first whether it be better to speak or to hold my tongue.” This was said to a man who, having asked his opinion and received no reply, demanded an explanation of this silence. The doctrine of this sect, like that of the Malekites, is founded on the traditions of Muhammad, and is now embraced by a good many people in Arabia and by a few in Persia as well.

The Meghám of the fourth orthodox sect, that bears the name of Hanbalí, is situated not far from the Zem-Zem well, opposite the Black Stone—which is itself embodied in the south-eastern wall of the Ka’bah—and is of the same structure as that of the Sháfeïtes. It is there that the Sheríf and many of the other dignitaries perform their worship. It is divided into two compartments by means of a canvas wall, the men occupying the front, and the women the back part, at evening prayers. There are two traditions as to the birthplace of Ahmed Ebn Hanbal, who founded this school of religious thought. Those who believe him to have been born at Merve, in Khorasán, the native city of his parents, assure us that his mother brought him thence to Bagdad when he was still at the breast; while others declare that he was born after his mother’s arrival in that city, in the year of the Hegira 164. He was an intimate friend of al Sháfeí, who was also his master, and was so well instructed by him in the traditions of the Prophet that it is said he could repeat over a million of them. On his return from Egypt he refused to acknowledge the Kurán to be created, and was consequently scourged and cast into prison by order of the Caliph al Mutasem. On the day of his death no fewer than twenty thousand Christians, Jews, and Magians embraced the Mussulman faith, and he was followed to his grave by eight hundred thousand men and sixty thousand women. This sect soon became extremely powerful, so much so indeed that in the year 323 H., in the Caliphate of al Rádi, they burst from all restraint in their iconoclastic zeal, breaking into people’s houses in Bagdad, spilling any wine they found, chastising the singing women they came across, and smashing their musical instruments in bits. A severe edict had the effect of bridling their undisciplined fervour, so that the Hanbalites are not very numerous nowadays outside the boundaries of Arabia. The followers of these four men worship together in the evening, but at other times they pray in the order of their seniority. The four pulpits were erected, in 973 of the Hegira, by Sultán Suleymán, who also founded, outside the Harem, a school for fifteen students under a head master and a preacher for each one of the orthodox sects, allotting to every school a portion of the floor of the Harem as a place of worship. These schools are said to be still flourishing, and are subsidised from the funds of the Ka’bah.

Before the time of the Prophet the ground on which the Harem is now situated belonged to several landlords of the tribe of Kuraish, who laid great store by the property on account of its proximity to the House of God. To Omar, the second Caliph, the idea of extending the Harem first occurred, and it was he who built the walls round it. The gates were erected by Abdullah Zobair. Thenceforward every Caliph and every Sultán made a point of beautifying the sacred enclosure until it came at last to wear its present appearance. However, considering the enormous sums contributed by the quick and the dead on purpose to keep it in repair it is being shamefully neglected in this year of the Flight. How the priests who batten on the fund can find it in their consciences to watch the decay of their surroundings without loosening their purse-strings in order to check it is a source of wonder to many a child of Islám. They are “resigned,” these unrighteous stewards, for no other reason than because theirs is a bed of roses. “After us the Deluge” is their motto, and it cannot be denied that of all the sacred places of the Faith that of the Harem, situated as it is in the gap of the surrounding cliffs and dipping as it does towards the centre where the Ka’bah stands, is the best adapted to be a target to the winds and the rain. For the floods, when they descend, rush down the flights of steps of the gateways and inundate the open sanctuaries, and that is why the Ka’bah has been so often destroyed and rebuilt in the course of the centuries. These priests of the Harem may be as wise as serpents where their own interests are involved, but they are not so harmless as doves where those of the Faithful in general clamour for redress.

Talking of the Deluge reminds me of the pigeons that strut about the floor of the Harem or wing their flight above its sacred buildings. They are the prettiest birds imaginable, and so tame that they will come and perch on the pilgrims’ shoulders and feed out of their hands. In colour they are of a blueish brown, with deeper spots of the same colour on their breasts and backs. They have grey rings round their necks, and their wings are streaked with black lines. A traditionist says that to feed one of these birds is to ensure to one’s self a sumptuous palace in heaven; whereas to kill one of them is as bad as committing homicide, and meets with the same punishment hereafter. The consequence of this belief is that there are crowds of women whose business it is to sell grain to the pilgrims for the Harem pigeons, about twenty grains of wheat in a box costing not less than one piastre. The tradition was that the pigeons never alighted on the domes and minarets of the Harem, but hovered above them, like guardian angels. The fact that the sanctuaries now stand in frequent need of whitewashing is taken to be a proof of the growing wickedness of the people, and a certain sign that the Day of Judgment is at hand.

A MOORISH GENTLEMAN IN MOORISH DRESS.

On entering the Harem all men are equal, all privileges of rank must be waived. The most despotic Oriental ruler has no power over his fellows there. Even the Hereditary Sheríf of Mecca must be as courteous to his servants or his slaves as he would be to the Sultan of Turkey were he present. Everybody is come to worship his Creator, the Ruler Supreme over empires and republics, and so all distinctions of rank are laid aside. The Prophet, wise in his generation beyond all men, was the first to protect the helpless against despotism by ruling the conduct of human affairs through the principle of religious equality. But for his laws the lower classes of the East would have been at the mercy of their co-religionists of the higher castes. If the Prophet alternately cajoled and coerced the superstitious to be virtuous and meek by the promise of a material Paradise and by the fear of a material Hell, what then? He sought merely to achieve his end through the weaknesses of the natural man, knowing that there is nothing that men covet more than the permanent pleasures which satiate human passions, and nothing that they had rather shun than a punishment which endures for ever. The spirit of his teaching and his laws, however, was anything but material. It made for unity and fraternity and equality, and the consequence was that in the early days of the Faith his followers were inspired by the noblest aspirations of the mind and heart. And as for the corporeal joys of Paradise they knew that these were not the highest their Prophet had promised to them, for they hoped to attain to that most blessed degree of heavenly felicity which is reserved for the Faithful who are found worthy to behold God’s face from the rising of the sun till the going down of the same. The case is otherwise with the majority of the Muhammadans of to-day. For their country and their countrymen they take too little thought, each one of them beseeching God to shower His favours on himself or herself alone. The priests of the Golden Age of the Faith sat on a camel or stood on a high hill and preached, not on form but on spirit. Their watchword was unity—unity of religion under the banner of faith and charity. To-day, on the contrary, the Mullás of Mecca mount a pulpit and air their erudition, that is, their knowledge of the traditions, as they interpret them according to their respective schools, and end with a few wandering, lifeless sentences in condemnation of all heretics, in contempt of this life, and in praise of the world to come. A philosopher would consider their sermons ridiculous. The freethinkers of the times of ’Omar and ’Alí had no sound excuse for raising their voices against the priests, who were then the guides of the mind as well as those of the conduct. But the wonder now is that a Faithful can be found to obey the behests of these tradition-ridden miracle-mongers, who do nothing to lessen the breach between the sects, but leave the more enlightened laymen to lead the way to reunion.

Muhammad set these miracle-mongers a good example. For we read that when Muaz was appointed Governor of Yemen he was asked by the Prophet by what rule he would be guided in the administration of the province. “By the law of the Kurán,” said Muaz. “But if you find no direction therein?” “Then I will act according to the example of the Prophet.” “But if that fails?” “Then I will exercise my own judgment.” Muhammad not only approved of the answer of his follower, but also advised his other representatives to follow the same rule of conduct. That rule ought to be written over the door of every mosque in Islám. My Meccan experiences prove this, that the faith of the priest is stagnant from the want of the breath of reason. In its decadence Islám is priest-begotten and priest-ridden. In its purity it was full of the spirit of the Holy Ghost, a religion simple and sincere, whereof such men as ’Alí and ’Omar were made. The founder would be the first to cleanse the minds of his present-day disciples of the false traditions that have been ascribed to him. He would bid them look up, facing the light, and setting their thoughts free to soar. In his lifetime he, believing “God to be more loving to His servants than the mother to her young,” fought strenuously and with a patience almost sublime to overcome the corrupt and idolatrous practices of his fellow-countrymen of the time of Ignorance. Not otherwise would he fight to-day in order to free his co-religionists from the ever-permeating spread of the priestly misinterpretations of his message. His voice would be raised to proclaim the right of every man to reject what is unreasonable in the dictations of the priests. “Knowledge,” said he on one occasion, “is our friend in the desert, our companion when friendless, our ornament among friends, our armour against our enemies.... To listen to the words of the learned and to inculcate the lessons of science is of more value than religious exercises.”

Now, a religion which is lively to-day chiefly through the appeal it can make to what is corporeal and comfortable, as is undoubtedly the case with Islámism at the present time, stands in sore need of a spiritual reformer, the more so because its spirit is still alive, in the pages of the Kurán and in the memory of the mighty dead. Many Muslims still seek the name, and are diligent in seeking it, but they less often try to find the object, forgetting that the moon is not in the stream but in the sky. “He, God, is the Enduring, and all else passeth away”—all except such futile traditions as, heaven knows, are dead enough to have earned a decent burial, and the arbitrary ruling of the priests, to whose pernicious influence there would appear to be no limit. The hearts of these unrighteous stewards deserve to be branded with the two matchless odes, admirably translated by Professor Browne, of Cambridge University, which are inscribed on the tomb of Háfiz, in an orange garden at Shíráz, the two first lines of which run:

“Where is the good tidings of union with Thee? for I will rise up with my whole heart;

I am a bird of Paradise, and I will soar upwards from the snare of the world.”

And again:

“O heart, be the slave of the King of the World, and be a king!

Abide continually under the protection of God’s favour!”

CHAPTER IV
COMPASSING OF THE KA’BAH

When we reached the outer gateway of the Bábé Salám, which leads into the vestibule, it was to bow humbly and then to prostrate ourselves twice on the threshold, kissing its sacred dust. After this we rose, saying aloud, with closed eyes and outstretched hands:

“O God, this city is Thy city and this temple Thy temple. I am come hither in search of Thy compassion, and in perfect obedience to Thy commands. O Lord, I am submissive to Thy power, I am in passive contentment with Thy chastisements, I seek the fulfilment of all my desires from Thee and from none but Thee. Oblige me with Thy divine compassion, O God, and fling open to me the gates of Paradise.”

We then passed into the vestibule, and, no sooner did our eyes behold from the inner gateway the surface of the Harem than we stretched out our hands once more to the sky and closed our eyes in prayer, saying:

“O Lord, this harem is Thy harem and the harem of Thy apostle. Therefore, since I am here in response to Thy command, preserve my flesh and blood from the fire of Hell and deliver me from Thy punishments on the Day of Judgment.”

Then, advancing the left foot, we said:

“O God, grant me Thy protection from the temptations of the devil—may he be accursed! I praise Thy prophet, O Lord, and also his disciples; O, forgive me my sins and open on me the gates of Thy mercy.”

Next, when we walked through the inner gateway, and went down the double flight of steps leading to the colonnades, whence the Ka’bah twinkled on us its dusky, square face, we bowed reverently to the House of God and forthwith recited the prayer, which being interpreted, runs:

“In the Name of the great Lord who is alone. There is no god like unto Him. O God, I visit this Thy temple, praising Thee, and glorifying Thy name. Nothing can be done save through Thee, for Thine is the power, and Thine the will alone.”

Then I paused awhile, and my eyes took in the impressive scene.

The open Harem, surrounded on a higher level by the colonnades that are surmounted by the crescented domes, was packed with pilgrims from every quarter of Islám. In the middle is the Ka’bah, hemmed in on three sides of its solid cubic walls by the semi-circular row of columns already described. Now, facing the gold Spout, on the outer side of the pillared enclosure, stands the station of the Hanifites. There, in front of the pulpit, were grouped in the space between the paved ways and in every attitude of worship the followers of reason. Some were standing erect, their hands folded on their breasts, others were kneeling on their prayer rugs, and many were bowed to the lump of clay. Opposite to them were praying the Hanbalites before the pavilion-shaped pulpit that forms the extreme limit of the enclosure on the side nearest to the Black Stone. Priests and peasants, merchants and princes, all had come from far and near to render unto God their hearts and minds in accordance with the law of the Prophet. Those living people clothed in the garments of the dead, there they were, in the very centre whence had sprung the Faith that flashed forth its rays over the East, there they were, and why? To do homage to Him whom Muhammad had made manifest and had delighted to honour thirteen hundred and twenty years ago. It must be conceded, even by the sceptical and the scoffer, that the voice of the “illiterate” Prophet has still the power to work wonders. Hark, his followers are shouting their allegiance to his watchword. Up go their voices to the burning sky overhead: “There is no god but God! Muhammad is the Messenger of God!”

Few could remain silent on hearing the cry of Faith within the columned square of the Harem. It rang out like a trumpet-call, filling the heart with an emotion never felt before. Sincere and true, it drowned the rambling eloquence of the priest haranguing the Malekites out there to the west. It gathered in volume as it passed from lip to lip until the very pillars of the Harem seemed to shake. And then from time to time was sung the Talbih, which might be called the song of the winding-sheet, so frequently was it repeated by the pilgrims in íhrám:

Labbaik, Allahomma, Labbaik!

Labbaik, la Sherika lak Labbaik!

Labbaik, enal-hamda, vanahmeta lak Labbaik!

Labbaik, la Sherika lak Labbaik!

It swelled ever higher, my guide and I joining in the chorus of praise and thanksgiving, since it was our bounden duty so to do on setting foot inside the sacred precincts. Having fulfilled the law of the Prophet or of tradition in that particular, we were about to direct our steps to the Ka’bah through the old gate of Beni-Sheybeh, which is similar in shape to a triumphal arch, when my guide, standing suddenly stock-still, turned on me a countenance of such antic self-reproach that I was more than half afraid he had made up his mind to wring from me a present ere he would pursue his avocation. Perhaps my determination to resist his blandishments expressed itself in my face, for he lost no time in correcting the impression he had made, saying: “Yá-Moulai, I ask pardon of al Moakkibát, I prostrate myself before the two guardian angels who, in order to cope with the difficulty of recording in their respective books the good and the evil actions of every Muslim, are changed from day to day, and I entreat the ones who are on duty now not only to overlook the negligence whereof I accuse myself, but also to allow me to retrieve, to the furtherance of our eternal welfare, the blunder which I have committed. Know then, that to him who reads a certain prayer near the Salám Gate, after descending the steps thereof and passing the colonnades, shall be granted the free gift of one hundred thousand good deeds, together with this additional benefit, that an equal number of his sins shall be blotted out. Come, yá-Moulai, let us lose no time in laying down the burden of our misdeeds.” So saying, he conducted me to the proper place, and made me repeat after him the following prayer:

“I begin in the name of God, and by the help of God, from God and towards God, and through what is ordained by God, and on the faith of the apostle of God. Praise be to God, peace be with the apostle of God, peace be with Muhammad, the son of Abdullah. O prophet of God, may God in His compassion grant thee His peace! And may peace be with all the prophets of God: with Abraham, the friend of God, and with the messengers of God. Praise be to the Lord of the two worlds. May peace be with us, and with all the pious creatures of God. O Lord, may Muhammad be praised, and may his people be praised. May Muhammad be glorified, and may his people be glorified. May Muhammad be redeemed, and may his people be redeemed. May Abraham be praised, and all his people. O Lord, verily, Thou art magnanimous, and highly to be praised. O Lord, I praise Muhammad Thy slave and Thy prophet. O Lord, I praise Abraham Thy friend, and all Thy messengers. O Lord, open to me the gates of Thy mercy, and bring me into obedience to Thee and into submission to Thy will. O Lord, protect me under the shelter of faith. For, verily, I am Thy slave, O Lord, and Thy guest in this Thy house. O Lord the Compassionate, I remind thee that there is no Lord but Thee. Thou art alone, and hast no mate. Thou art everlasting. Thou begettest not, neither art Thou begotten, and there is not any one like unto Thee. Verily, Muhammad is Thy slave and Thy apostle—may peace be with him and with his people. O Generous, O Magnanimous, O Exalted, O Just!”

Then we said three times, “God is Great!” and then, “I seek shelter in Thee from the snares of the devils of man and jinn, and from the evils that may betide the Arab and Ajem!” We afterwards put the right foot foremost on the floor of the Harem, and thence returned with steady steps to the arch of Beni-Sheybeh, which is hard by the Station of Abraham, and there we raised our hands again and cried: “O Lord, grant me admittance into Thy place of righteousness, and likewise a safe return therefrom, and send down to us by Thy saving power a mighty king that we may say: ‘Then came Right and destroyed Wrong. Verily, Wrong is destroyable.’”

Now, the first ceremony of the Tewaff—that is, of the compassing of the Ka’bah—must be performed in front of the Hajerul-Asvad or Black Stone—a sacred relic which requires a short description before we proceed on our way round the Ka’bah: and as an introduction to this description we must relate the story of the creation of Adam, as told by the Muhammadans. They tell us that God, having resolved to fashion a creature in his own likeness, sent the angels, Gabriel, Michael, and Israfil, one after another, to fetch for that purpose seven handfuls of earth from seven depths and of seven colours. The earth, however, foreseeing the revolt of man from the will of his Creator, persuaded the angels to return without performing God’s command, so sure was she of drawing down on herself the divine wrath should the inanimate clay be made to breathe. The angel Azraïl was then despatched by God on the same errand, and he, closing his heart against the earth’s appeal, executed his commission remorselessly, on which account the Lord appointed him to be the angel of death, charging him thenceforward to separate the souls from the bodies. The earth which Azraïl had taken was carried to a place between Mecca and Tayef, where it was first kneaded by the angels, and then moulded by God into a human form. It was afterwards left to dry for the space of forty years, the angels visiting it frequently. Among these angels was Edris—who from being of those that are nearest to God became the devil—and he, not contented with looking on the work of the Creator, which he knew to have been designed to be his superior, vowed he would never acknowledge it as such, and he kicked it till it rang. Then God breathed His own spirit into the clay, so that it was made man, and God called his name Adam, and placed him in Paradise, and formed Eve out of his left side.

Now, when Adam fell and was cast out of Paradise there fell with him a certain Stone, which has since become the most cherished possession in the Muhammadan world. The legend runs that it was restored to Paradise at the Deluge, after which it was brought back to the earth by Gabriel and given to Abraham, who set it in the south-eastern corner of the Ka’bah, which he is said to have built. There it remained till the Karmatians—that sect, founded in the year 278 of the Hegira by a native of Khúzistán called Karmata, which overturned the fundamental points of Islám—bore it away in triumph to their capital, having first polluted its sacred precincts by burying there three thousand dead bodies, by tearing the golden Spout from its place, and by dividing among themselves the veil of the temple itself. The citizens of Mecca sought to redeem the Stone by offering no less than five thousand pieces of gold for it; but the ransom was scornfully rejected by the impious sectaries, who hoped by keeping it in their possession to draw the pilgrims from the Holy City to their own capital. Some twenty-two years later, however, having failed to achieve the purpose they had at heart, they sent back the Stone of their own free will, covering their discomfiture by declaring it to be a counterfeit. The dismay of the Meccans was allayed when they discovered that the stone would swim on water, that being the peculiar quality of the stone they had lost, and so they were satisfied that the true one had been returned to them.

At first the Stone was whiter than milk, but it grew to be black, either by the touch of a certain class of woman, by the sins of mankind, or by the kisses of the pilgrims. All believers, whatever may be the cause to which they attribute the change of colour, agree that the defilement is purely superficial, the inside of the Stone being still as white as the driven snow. Let us hope that the same thing can be said of the hearts of the Faithful, whose lips are supposed to have wrought on this lodestone of theirs a transformation so miraculous. The silver box wherein it lies is about twenty inches square, and is raised a little more than five feet from the ground. A round window having a diameter of some nine inches is kept open on purpose to enable the pilgrims to kiss or to touch the treasure within, which is known as “the right hand of God on earth.” This year the act of osculation was not performed by more than ten pilgrims out of every hundred that attempted it, the crowd being utterly undisciplined in its zeal. It must be confessed that I owed my good fortune to main strength, for I shoved my way through the excited mob and examined the Stone curiously while kissing it. In colour it is a shining black; in shape, hollow like a saucer, presumably the result of the pressure of devoted lips. A pilgrim, if he fail in touching the Stone, must make a reverential salám before it, and then pass on. Special prayers are also said. My guide, before leaving, recited for my edification certain lines from the “Fotúhúl Haremeyn,” which in rhythmic prose would run something like this:

“Think not that the Ka’bah was made from the earth—in the body of the world it took the place of the heart. And the stone that you call the Black Stone was itself a ball of dazzling light. In ages past, the Prophet said, it shone like the crescent moon, until at last the shadows, falling from the sinful hearts of those that gazed on it, turned its surface black. Now, since this amber gem that came to the earth from Paradise with the Holy Ghost has received such impressions on itself, what should be the impressions which our hearts receive? Verily, whosoever shall touch it, being pure of conscience, is like unto him that has shaken hands with God.”

In front of this Stone, the first rite is performed: it is called Niyyat or Determination. The various forms and ceremonies at this stage of the pilgrim’s initiation vary with the sect to which he belongs, but six points are common to all Muhammadans. First, Niyyat, including the declaration of passive obedience to God’s will, the belief in His day of judgment, and the formal repentance of all sins committed; second, the frequent recitation of the watchword of the Faith which is called Takbir; third, the reading of Esteghfar, a short chapter of repentance and of tacit submission to God’s ordinance; fourth, certain formulæ in praise of Allah and the Prophet, which are known by the name of Tahleel; fifth, the intoning of Hamde, which is the chapter of praise; and lastly, the lively repetition of Ghúl-hú-Allah, which runs: “In the name of the most merciful God. Say, God is one God; the eternal God: He begetteth not, neither is He begotten: and there is not any one like unto Him.” The pilgrim, on making his “Determination,” must raise his hands to his cheeks, putting the thumbs under the lobes of his ears, and stretch up his shoulders, allowing his chest to droop inward, and say in a voice toned to a reverent spirit: “O Allah, Thou art omnipotent, Thou art glorified. I purpose, in Thy excellent name, to make seven complete circuits round Thy blessed house.” Having repeated this after the motewaff or guide, I cried out: “In the name of God, God is great!” Then the stream of Hájís caught me to its bosom, and I was tossed about as in a whirlpool. Fortunately Seyyid ’Alí stuck close to my side, and there, in the eddying torrent of human beings that gave forth a sound as of a swelling sea, we raised our voices, my motewaff and I, one after the other, and cried: “O Allah, I do perform this rite out of the fulness of my belief in Thee, in acknowledgment of Thy book, and in faithfulness to Thy covenant, according to the example of Thy prophet Muhammad—may he be blessed and glorified!” And all the while we struggled as hard as we could to get within touch of the Hajerul-Asvad, which, as we knew well from the pressure of the throng, was the lodestone that drew the sheeted pilgrims to the south-eastern corner of the house. Now we were driven forward, and then we were hurled back; indeed, the bare-footed Faithful, seeing their hopes alternately rise and fall, grew grimly resolute to kiss the Black Stone, cost them what it might. The yearning to do so, which had filled their hearts with piety in the seclusion of their homes, gave place at close quarters to a determination so fierce and so uncontrollable as might have offered to a cool-headed spectator a living picture of Pandemonium. Every now and then a pilgrim would succeed in snatching a hasty kiss, after which he would be flung aside, and another, less fortunate than himself, would have to be contented with touching the Stone with his hand and kissing that; but by far the greater number had no other choice than to pass on with a salaam expressive of good intentions. Some said their prayers with the tongue of their hearts, and with tears in their eyes; others said them aloud, the sweat streaming down their cheeks. “O Lord, I bring my heart and soul to Thee, I acknowledge Thy Book faithfully, I give evidence that there is not any one equal to Thee, and I promise to obey Thy Commandments.”

Opposite to the place called al-Moltezem, between the Black Stone and the gate of the Ka’bah, we paused and said: “O Allah, Thou who art omnipotent, I beseech Thee to pardon my sins in violating Thy commands.” A few steps forward brought us face to face with the gate itself, whose threshold is raised so high above the ground that the pilgrims must mount by means of steps moving on wheels which are kept alongside a wall of the Zem-Zem well when not in use. There we stopped again, saying:

“O Allah, this house is Thy house, this sanctuary is Thy sanctuary, this peaceful shelter is Thy shelter, and this place is the place of all those that flee to Thee from hell-fire. O Allah, Thy house is great and Thou art magnanimous; verily, Thou art compassionate and merciful. From fire, O Allah, and from the cursed Satan deliver me: yea, render my flesh and blood scatheless in the fire of hell, and pour on me Thy mercy on the day of judgment, and shower on me Thy blessings in this world and the next.”

We proceeded thence to the north-eastern angle called the Rokné-Araghi, where we halted in order to ask another blessing, and cried out in a tone of deepest contrition: “O Allah, I take refuge with Thee from evil, from doubt, from disobedience, from disunion, from immorality, from hypocrisy, and from all evil thoughts concerning one’s family and one’s estate.” And when we went in front of the Mizab, gold Spout, a few paces farther on, it was to say: “O Allah, grant me refuge under the canopy of Thy heaven on the day whereon there is no shelter save Thy shelter. O Allah, make me to drink of the same cup as Muhammad, on whom be blessings and glory!” Then we proceeded on our way till we reached the Rokné-Shami or the north-western angle, and there we said: “O Allah, may it please Thee to accept this pilgrimage, making it a praiseworthy perseverance and a laudable deed. O Compassionate, O Beloved, O Lord, O Merciful, and Omnipotent!” Next, on reaching the south-western angle or Rokné-Yemani, we fell again to praying, in accordance with the law: “O, Allah, our Lord and Ruler, grant us prosperity in this world and happiness in the next, and deliver us from the punishments of fire. O Allah, I seek shelter in Thee from infidelity and from poverty and from the sorrows of life and from the pangs of death; I also take refuge in Thee from ignominy in this world and in the world to come.” The last prayer we said was at the starting point, facing the Black Stone. Finding it impossible to approach within arm’s reach, we lifted up our hands from afar, and then bowed, saying: “O Lord of this sacred relic, I flee to Thee and to ‘Thy right hand on earth’ from all want and also from all infidelity.”

In this, the first circuit or “shaut,” we used the step called “harvaleh,” walking briskly and shrugging the shoulders up and down, and we adopted the same gait on the second and third “ashwat” (plural form of “shaut”). But, in performing the remaining four circuits, a more grave and stately tread was assumed according to the custom. This ordinary eastern walk is called “teamol” and combines dignity of demeanour with leisure of pace; it is a contemplative fashion of walking, what the French would call recueilli, and is admirably suited to a pilgrim’s devotional stroll round the House of God. On the other hand, the reformer who should wish to introduce the go-ahead civilisation of the West could not begin better than by levying a prohibitive tax on the “teamol.” Sale records the tradition that this sevenfold compassing of the Ka’bah was ordered by Muhammad, “that his followers might show themselves strong and active, to cut off the hopes of the infidels, who gave out that the immoderate heats of Medina had rendered them weak.” A second tradition is that the circular motion represents the orbicular motion of the heavenly bodies; a third, that it is meant to symbolise the Egyptian wheels, those hieroglyphics of the instability of human fortune; and a fourth, that it arose from a custom among the Pagan Arabs, who, if they wished to humble themselves, were wont to walk seven times round the person or persons whom they delighted to exalt. Anyhow, the compassing of the Ka’bah, be its origin what it may, is held by the Muhammadans to be an act of self-sacrifice from man to God. I was much struck by the fact that the victims of cholera and of other diseases were borne round the sacred precincts in rude wooden coffins by their friends, who cried out in tones of lamentation, “Yá-Allah! Yá-Allah!” It was an impressive funeral procession, and is said to relieve the pressure of the grave, and to insure to the corpse a safe and a speedy entrance into Paradise. The Tewaff is brought to a close by a reverential visit to the tomb of Abraham, which faces the door of the House. It is an open pavilion resting on four pillars, and crowned with a crescented cupola.

There my guide and I, taking up our position on the thither side of the tomb which was thus placed between ourselves and the House of God, prostrated ourselves twice, saying our morning prayers the while; and then, sitting on our hips, we raised our hands to the sky and said with closed eyes:

“We give praise to Thee, O Lord, we glorify Thee in the name of Muhammad—may peace be with him and with his people! O God, accept this Hájj from me, and allow it not to be the last one. I praise thee, O Lord, in all Thy attributes, I praise Thee for all Thy blessings; I praise Thee for all Thou willest, I praise Thee for all Thy power. O Lord, accept this worship from me, and cleanse my heart, and sharpen my sense of duty. Take compassion on me, O God, for my worship’s sake, and because I accept the words of Thy prophet—on whom be peace! O Lord, make me to detest those that do not worship Thee, and make me to love those who love Thee, and those who love Thy prophet and Thy angels and all Thy pious creatures.”

Then, bowing our foreheads to the ground, we said aloud:

“O Lord, I worship Thee on my face; there is no God but Thee; Thou art just and merciful; Thou art the beginning of everything, and the end of everything; for Thine is the management and Thine the power alone. O Thou that forgivest the sins of Thy people, pardon my offences, for in Thee do I now confess my sins. Verily, no one can pardon grave sinners except Thyself. I say, there is not any one to be compared with Thee.”

The rewards of a correct performance of the Tewaff and of the necessary prayers—preferably at sundown, the best time for meditation—are of a sort to render the rite extremely popular among the pilgrims. At every step they take, in making the seven circuits, no fewer than seventy thousand sins will be blotted out of their bad books, and an equal number of virtues be added to the companion volumes containing their good actions. Nor is this all, for they will be made, at the same rate, the intercessors of seventy thousand sinners; they will build up to themselves the same number of palaces in heaven, and will earn the fulfilment of seven hundred thousand of their desires in this world, and of seventy thousand in the world to come. And that, no doubt, is why we took precious care that our steps, even when walking briskly, as we were obliged to do for the first three circuits, should be, if smart, extremely short ones.

CHAPTER V
THE COURSE OF PERSEVERANCE

Having encompassed the Ka’bah seven times, we stood hard by the tomb of Abraham and watched the pilgrims fighting to kiss the Black Stone. The wonder was that we had emerged from the tight scrimmage with a skin more or less whole. The perspiration oozed out of the pores in streams: laying hold of the fag end of my sacred habit I wiped my forehead. “You must not touch yourself,” said Seyyid ’Alí; “it is a grievous sin.” “Let your conscience rest in peace,” I replied; “I will do penance by sacrificing a sheep.”

The guide smiled. “There is no stain, however vile, but money shall blot it out. Would that I were a rich man!” “Thou fool,” I cried, “how about the stain of superstition? Will money wipe it out, think you?” “Yá-Moulai,” he whispered, “speak low.... Listen. It is easier to dig the heart out of a mountain with the sharp end of a needle than to remove ignorance from the mind of a mullá. However, the Course of Perseverance has yet to be trod. Come let us hop and be of good courage, for to-morrow we must go in procession to Arafat. We must begin again with Niyyat; that is, with a declaration of intention in front of the Black Stone, and after that we must proceed to Safá, and say our prayers there.” “I ask pardon of Allah!” I shrilled. “Look, the people will be trodden under foot near the Black Stone!” The guide was silent, his eyes were turned to where the crowd was thickest. “Look,” he said, “a man is down. They are trampling him to death. That has often happened. In 581 of the Hegira no less than eighty-four men were trodden to death inside the Ka’bah. In 972 of the Flight sixty-five men were suffocated through the pressure of the crowd in the Harem itself.... Praise Allah, the man is up again.... See, his friends are bearing him to a place of safety.” ...

God of love, what a sight! “He has achieved merit,” said the guide, “except, it may be, in the eyes of the ‘mother of his children.’ She will cease to love him when she sees him. However, he may die, and thus she may be spared the shock of—did you—but what have I done to offend you?” My reply was curt. “I find your levity somewhat tedious,” I said impatiently. The wag was irrepressible. He waxed argumentative suddenly, affirming that the snares of the heart are beauty of face and charm of voice. He bade me to look on his own manly countenance. I might believe it or not, but even he had been deceived more than once. What chance of keeping love, therefore, had the wretch whose face had been stamped as flat as the palm of his hand? “Listen, and I will hum you a song,” he whispered, “but it must be low, since it concerns the heart, the theme of the poets, and not the soul, which is the concern of the priests. For my part I am on the side of the poets. Even in Mecca. The song is old. It was sung by Adam in the Garden of Eden after the Fall. I have found it true. Therefore, and for no other reason, it is worth quoting—

“‘Oh, heart of mine, how often canst thou trace

Thy aching wounds to one bright maiden’s Face!

How often must, amid discordant din,

Another’s Voice be toned to take you in!

“‘Yet ah, my heart, among thy darling foes,

Was one that matched both Nightingale and Rose;

A Flow’r, she bloomed a day; a Bird, her flight

She winged ... and turned thy Day to endless Night.’”

“Alas, my poor heart, its disease is incurable, I fear. No matter. Safá awaits our coming. We will go and ‘declare our intention,’ and then be off to the hill of Purity. Let us skip and hop, for to-morrow we die. Yá-Allah! yá-Muhammad!” So, approaching as near as we could to the Black Stone, we closed our eyes, giving it as our determination to run seven times between the platforms of Safá and Marveh, and to recite the prescribed prayers at the appointed places. It is considered an act of grace in the devout to proceed thence to the Zem-Zem well, and, drawing a bucket of water by means of the windlass with his own hands, to besprinkle therewith his head and back and stomach, after which he should drink a handful of the water, repeating the following prayer: “O Lord, I beseech Thee to make this draught for me a source of inexhaustible knowledge, a vast livelihood, and a preventive of all pains and diseases.”

THE POORER SIDE OF EGYPTIAN MUSLIMS.

Frequent allusion is made to this spring in Arabian and Persian literature. Its water ranks second to that of Kúsar, a stream that runs in the Garden of Paradise, keeping the grass ever green and the flowers ever blooming. The prettiest ruby wine is compared by the poets to the water of Zem-Zem; for they believe it to be the spring that “gushed out for the relief of Ishmael,” when Hagar, his mother, wandered beside him in the wilderness. The story goes that when she saw the bubbling water it was to call to her son, in the Egyptian tongue, “Zem, zem!” (“Stay, stay!”). The taste of the water is difficult to describe, but it is certainly bitterish. My guide, to whom I had appealed in the matter, answered, saying, “Allah—may I be His sacrifice—has made this water sacred, as you know. It is neither sweet nor bitter, neither fresh nor salt, neither scented nor stinking, but would appear in its taste to be a mixture of all these qualities. In everything sacred there must be a mystery, or how could the mullás live?” As to its attributes, they may be counted by the hundred. There is no disease that it will not cure provided it be taken with a “pure” conscience. It is as inspiring to a Muslim poet as that of Helicon to an unbeliever. It prolongs life and purifies the soul of him that drinks it in unswerving obedience to God through the mediation of Muhammad. The rich pilgrims carried gold or silver flasks in which they poured the precious water, keeping it as a preservative of health, or as a remedy in case of sickness. An Indian Prince told me that he intended to keep his in order to restore the eyesight of his brother, who had been unable to accompany him on the pilgrimage. The Faithful bring their winding-sheets along with them and wash them in the holy spring. Some Negroes from Zanzibar have the honour to be the guardians of the well and the dispensers of its contents, and they exact as much as twenty piastres from the poor pilgrims for the washing of one of these winding-sheets, and ten times that amount from the rich.

Now, this practice of washing the grave-clothes stands in need of explanation. When a Muslim dies and is buried, he is received by a heavenly host, who gives him notice of the coming of the two examiners, Nakir and Monker. These are two angels as livid as death and as black as a putrid corpse, and they proceed to question him concerning his faith, more especially as to the unity of God and the apostleship of the Prophet. If he prove himself a true Mussulman, he is suffered to rest in peace and is refreshed by the air of Paradise. But, if he be of a loose belief, he is gnawed and stung till the resurrection by ninety-nine dragons that have seven heads each, the earth pressing harder and harder on his body without, unfortunately, injuring the dragons. It is in order to escape from this torture that the pilgrims wash their winding-sheets, in the life-giving water of Zem-Zem, some of them taking the precaution to make assurance doubly certain by inscribing on the sheets, in coloured letters, the most sacred chapters of the Kurán. One of the pilgrims showed me a winding-sheet belonging to himself on which had been written in green ink every single chapter of the Book. The well is covered with a small square building crowned with a cupola and a crescent, and is paved inside with marble. There are four Chinese windlasses at the top of the shrine for drawing the water, and these were working all day long, the keepers having the greatest difficulty in restraining the ardour of the poor, tradition-ridden devouts, some of whom were wrought to such a pitch of blind fanaticism that it was as much as the Negroes could do to prevent them from flinging themselves into the well.

Since I had not the good fortune to win my way to the windlass, I took a jug of Zem-Zem water, making the attendant a present of ten piastres for it. Then, having performed the necessary ablutions, I went out by the old gate (on the thither side of the Place of Abraham) and ascended the stairs of Safá. We found the platform alive with pilgrims, and there, facing the Ka’bah, we had to pass in review all the blessings we had received from God during our lives, from the days of our birth upward. That done, we repeated seven times in an audible tone: “God is great.... I praise thee, O Lord!... There is no god but God....” Three times: “There is no god but the one God; there is not anyone like unto Him. For His is the kingdom, and to Him do we lift up our praise. He is the giver of life and the giver of death. Death and life He bestoweth on all living creatures, but He dieth not, neither doth He sleep. He is almighty over everything....” Once: “O Lord, I praise Muhammad and his people.” Three times: “I praise the Lord who endureth for ever, I praise the everlasting Lord.” Three times: “I confess there is no god but God, and I confess likewise that Muhammad is His slave and His apostle. We worship Him whom we praise, and none but Him!” Then three times we cried: “O Lord, have mercy on me, and be compassionate to me, and give me justice in this world and in the world to come.... O Lord, give us Thy blessing in this life, and grant us Thy peace in the next, and protect us from the punishment of fire.” Next, having repeated one hundred times the words “God is great; there is no god but God, and Him do I praise,” I said aloud: “O Lord, I praise Thee in death and in what comes after death. In Thee, O God, do I seek shelter from the darkness of the grave, from the pressure of the grave, and the disturbance of the grave. Under the canopy of Thy divine compassion do I take refuge on the day when there is no shelter but Thy shelter.” Then, in my inmost mind, I gave up to the Lord my faith, my person, and my people, crying: “I return to Thee, O Lord, Who alone art compassionate and merciful, my faith, myself, my people, my property, and my progeny. O Lord, make me to act according to Thy Book and the dictation of Thy apostle: make me faithful to Thy people, and protect me from revolution.” As an increase of wealth, so says tradition, this prayer should also be read: “O Lord, I seek shelter in Thee from the punishments of the grave: from its troubles, and its separations, and its awe, and its percussion, and its blackness, and its closeness.” Then, uncovering the back, one should raise the voice, crying out loud: “O Lord, pardon! O Thou who hast commanded to pardon, O Thou who art the first to pardon—pardon, pardon, pardon, pardon! O Generous! O Compassionate! O Near! O Far! make me to achieve Thy satisfaction by acting in obedience unto Thee!” Then, descending from the platform, I said: “I persevere seven times in running between Safá and Marveh, and this I do in order to fulfil my pilgrimage and in obedience to the command of the Lord of the Universe.”

The distance between the two hills is four hundred and thirty-eight yards. The course has to be traversed seven times. It begins at Safá and ends on the seventh lap at Marveh. Those who are too weak or too ill “to persevere” on foot must be carried on a horse, a camel, a mule, or a donkey, like the women, who, if sufficiently wealthy, are accompanied by three hired servants. The first, the forerunner, who clears the way, wears an expression of indescribable gravity. You can tell by his face that you have only to cast an eye behind him to behold a “Light of the Harem.” The second, leading the beast by the bridle, looks religiously ahead, and the third brings up the rear, doing all in his power to protect his precious burden from the shrieking crowd. If a pilgrim at this stage of initiation allow his thoughts to dwell on the fair sex he must sacrifice a calf in the Valley of Mina. From the foot of Safá to the first minaret at the south-eastern end of the Harem the pilgrim must walk at his ease, and there he must say a prayer. It is this: “I begin in the name of God, and by God, and God is great. May peace be with Muhammad and with his household. O Lord, the compassionate and merciful, who art capable beyond my knowledge, O Thou who art most exalted and most generous, take this act of worship of mine, which is not worthy of Thee, and, enriching it with Thy abundance, make it more deserving of Thy acceptance. I offer up my ‘perseverance’ to Thee, O Lord, and in Thee my hope and my strength are fixed. O Thou that acceptest the devotion of the pious, reject not my offering, O God.” Thenceforward, until he reached the Baghleh Gate, some eighty yards away, the pilgrim had to suit his gait as far as in him lay to the rolling pace of a camel on the trot. He had now reached the starting point for hopping. Two big green flags were flying to give him warning. Up went the left leg of every mother’s son and of many a father’s daughter—for to every woman who rode there were twenty on foot—and a great deal of panting confusion and breathless excitement ensued. Hands were lifted to the sky, voices were raised in praise of God, asking for strength “to persevere,” mules stampeded, horses lashed out with their heels, camels pierced their way through the surging mob as silently and as irresistibly as a ship breasts the sea, men and women being hurled aside like waves. The endurance displayed by the bare-footed devout was marvellous. They were buoyed by the assurance that they were supported by the angels, Gabriel being the captain of the guard.

Now shoved forward by the pilgrims in the rear, now carried back by those who were returning from Marveh, I hopped about in a vicious circle, groaning and perspiring, like a man bereft of his senses. Should I never reach the blessed Gate of Ali! Who said the distance was not more than seventy-five yards? Let him hop over the course and he will multiply its figures by ten at every step. The folly of it all seemed to crash down on the crown of my bare head, shattering my belief in human sanity. For, carried away by the obligation of imitating the “persevering” antics of my fellow-pilgrims, I found myself now hopping on one leg like a melancholy heron, and now, on reaching Ali’s Gate, pitching and rolling and labouring along like a spent camel under a goad. Yá-Allah! yá-Muhammad! I cut a sorry figure in my own estimation, no matter what merit I earned in the minds of my co-mates in affliction. So depressed was I that I had forgotten to say the prescribed prayer at the second minaret before reaching the Baghleh Gate: “O God, the possessor of praise and knowledge and mercy and magnanimity, pardon my trespasses, for, verily, there is no forgiver of sins but Thee alone.” Many were maimed for life, not a few were killed, accident followed accident, but still the unheeding wave of pilgrims swept along over the fiery sand, shrieking and gesticulating, till my senses seemed to swoon. My guide, inured to the Arabian heat and to the unhallowed confusion of the course, performed his part with a studied dignity and a nimbleness of resource which added a touch of humour to an exhibition otherwise saddening. But these pilgrims themselves were tormented by no such self-accusing thoughts. If their feet were cut they had the consolation of believing that the streams of Paradise would wash them whole, for the cool water of Salsabíl and Tasním, if they succumbed to their devotional exertions, would it not be lifted to their parched lips by divine peris and everlasting life be theirs?

What might strike the spectator most of all would probably be the contrast presented by the dignity of the prayers and the occasional outbursts of religious extravagance on the part of the priest-ridden and ignorant among the pilgrims. The prayers might be read in any church in Christendom. The stormy outburst from all reserve could only be witnessed nowadays in the East, where religion, that ship of salvation, though seaworthy enough in its undeniable if narrow sincerity, is in constant danger of being wrecked in the breakers of fanaticism. Muhammad reverenced science. Several sayings have been already quoted in which it was rated by him at its true value. The priests persist in disregarding its lessons from sheer self-interest. It is not the light of religion which they spread abroad. It is the fire of fanaticism which they fan—a fire which, by throwing out abundant heat but no light whatever, burns while diffusing darkness. “God does not change the condition of a people,” said Muhammad, “until they change it for themselves.” If these retrograde priests had kept themselves abreast of the times, as they were in duty bound to do as followers of a man of progressive genius, the crescent of Islám had been a well-nigh perfect round long ago. Enlightenment was not wanting on the part of a great number of laymen, as I shall show later on; but as to the greater number of the priests I met at Mecca, well, let us hope that, on ascending the platform of Marveh, they were conscious of falling short of the responsibilities of their office, and that they made amends by throwing into the prayer of repentance the burden of a contrite spirit: “O Lord, Thou that hast commanded to pardon; O Thou that lovest pardon; O Thou that grantest pardon; O Thou that forgivest with pardon; O Lord, pardon! pardon! pardon! pardon!” And if they could then weep out of the fulness of a heart ill at ease in its breast, and not perfunctorily as by law ordained, there might be some hope of their redemption. All joined in the concluding prayer, which runs: “O Lord, verily, I beseech Thee, in all circumstances, to endow me plentifully with tacit faith in Thee, and also to grant that I may be pure of intention in my resignation to Thy divine will.”

PLAN OF THE HAREM.
An Explanation of the [Frontispiece].

SM indicates the Salám Gate, through which the pilgrim must enter and where the course begins; AM, the Tomb of Abraham; BK, the Black Stone; K, the Ka’bah, or House of God; Z, the Fountain of Zem-Zem; SA, the Safá Gate, through which the pilgrim passes out on his course; S, Safá, the platform on which one must walk and pray; BH, the Baghleh Gate, the starting-point for hopping; AI, the Ali Gate, the finishing place for hopping, but on the return journey the starting-point, with BH as its ending. M indicates Marveh, the platform on which the pilgrim must walk and pray. The distance for hopping—marked by two pointers at BH and AI—is some seventy-five yards, the dotted lines showing the Course of Perseverance, and the arrow-heads indicating its direction.

CHAPTER VI
SCENE IN AN EATING-HOUSE—VISIT TO THE KA’BAH

It was two o’clock by the time we had completed the Course of Perseverance, and, since we had broken our fast at an early hour in the morning, we betook ourselves in a mighty hurry to the eating-house of Stád Mukhtar, the Effendi pastrycook of Mecca. The caravan we had left behind us at Heddah, swollen beyond recognition on the journey up, had just arrived, and Mussah-street was in a veritable delirium of excitement. It was dry and blazing weather, with a glow as of a furnace in the air, and the passing of the caravan, with its streaming banners, its jaded camels, and its betousled pilgrims, added to the poignance of our hunger by delaying the hour that should see it satisfied. Only one glimpse we took of the medley of men and beasts. As we raised our eyes we saw, securely strapped on an ambling mule, a man of lofty mien, albeit distressingly wasted, with streaming white beard and hair, and the face of a corpse for tense impassivity. His eyes, deep sunk and expressionless, met mine. He at once raised his voice—and never shall I forget the eerie exaltation ringing in its tones—and cried aloud: “Praise be to God on high, who hath brought me alive into His house. Blessed is he who dieth in the house of the Lord. May He be praised and glorified!” And from the crowd there arose a shout, that passed from lip to lip in a fervour of congratulation: “May it be auspicious.... May your eyes be lightened.... May your years be increased.... May your shadow never grow less.... Yá—Allah!... Yá—Muhammad!” The grim fortitude of that towering wraith of a man on the nimble-footed mule stirred in his co-religionists I know not what feelings of awe and gratification. For pity there was no room in their breasts; envy there might have been, but of a sort whereof heroism is engendered; not one among them but had wished to be in the place of him who, supported by faith and guided by death, had won the crown of self-martyrdom. In a moment the man was gone past.

“Islám,” said Seyyid ’Alí, “see how brightly it burns in a grate worthy to contain the sacred fire. That man’s zeal has made me rich in faith. I tell you that the stars of heaven were a mean decoration for a zealot so long-suffering and sincere. But come, Yá-Moulai, let us break our fast in the famous eating-house of Stád Mukhtar. Behold, the entrance awaits our coming, for the door is open.”

MUSSAH STREET AT MECCA.

PUTTING ON IHRÁM AT JIDDAH.

On crossing the threshold we uttered a loud salám, looking up into the air the while. Then we stepped inside, for, as the Persians say, if you wish to escape reproof you must assume the same “colour” as your company. The shop was oblong, measuring some 24ft. by 9ft., at a guess. Rough stools and low black erections on four legs took the place of chairs and tables. I counted no less than sixty pilgrims engaged in eating. It would have been impossible to count the beggars who came crowding in. These I brushed unceremoniously aside, much to the annoyance of one of them, who cried out in vulgar Arabic: “May your meal not sit well on you! How can you eat while we are starving here?” Compassion laid its hand in mine, and I would have given the petitioner a present, ungracious though he was, had not Seyyid ’Alí restrained me, saying: “Yá-Moulai, do not judge our friend by his looks. His appearance, I grant, is poverty-stricken beyond the power of repletion, but, you may take my word for it, his wealth underground surpasses the dreams of this slave of yours.” In this opinion he was supported by the pilgrims inside, who assured me that the residential beggars of Mecca are often extremely rich and in the habit of burying the money they wring from the credulity or the generosity of the strangers within the gates. The din in the eating-house was beyond belief. Everybody spoke at once, and at the top of his voice. A pack of children fresh from school would give you an idea of the uproar. The first questions the pilgrims asked of one another were their names, their nationalities, their professions, and their family pedigrees. Around one of the diminutive tables were seated two men, and, as there were a couple of vacant stools, I took one of them, my guide, as a mark of respect, sitting down on my left. Shortly after another pilgrim came in, and, picking up a stool, wedged himself between Seyyid ’Alí and myself, muttering a half-reluctant “Bismillah!” The gentleman directly facing me was a Turkish Effendi, Mahmud Bey by name. Like the majority of the inmates, he was clad in íhram, but his face singled itself out by virtue of its stony reserve. On the extreme right was a Persian Mirza, called Zainul-Abedin, whose countenance prepared me for the authoritative unction of his speech. A stalwart Afghan sat on my guide’s left hand, while the intruder, who had separated us, was a native of Hyderabad, Deccan. His name was Abdul Saleh.

The Persian Mirza was the first to break the silence. Looking at each of us in turn he said, in his mellowest tones: “Bah! Bah! Khúsh amedid! You are welcome. You have brought purity into the City of God.”

“And so have you,” was ’Alí’s affable response. “I was the essence of impurity when I left my native town of Ardebil to perform this holy pilgrimage; but I trust that God may purify my conscience.” The guide changed his birthplace with his company. “Do you come from Ardebil, my friend?” said Abdul Saleh. “Many learned people have come from that blessed city. The poet calls it the House of Knowledge.”

Seyyid ’Alí smiled a sarcastic smile. “Even the learned, my good brother of Hindustan,” quoth he, “are prisoners within the limits of the knowable, so fear not to inform the company wherein the fame of Ardebil consists.” My guide referred to the fact that the place he had chosen as his native town is the convict station of Persia.

“God forbid!” replied Abdul Saleh, courteously, “for the tact that is yours shows the poet to have been right. The abode of learning must count you among its most honoured citizens.” These amenities put the whole table in a good temper, and Seyyid ’Alí was not long in summoning the waiter, Omar, who, having informed us that his master, Stád Mukhtar, had gone to Mina in order to open a branch establishment there, awaited our orders in an attitude so free and easy that Mahmud Bey, frowning ever so slightly, grew a degree more reserved than ever. The waiter wore a fez with a streaming tassel, a long white robe, and a bright silk sash, from which hung an apron that had once been white. The dishes we ordered were a ghormeh of camel’s flesh roasted in onions; a kúfteh, or mincemeat, served with rice and seasoned with spices; a lamb kebab on a skewer folded in a sheet of bread fresh from the oven; and a sweet called mehlabi, which looked like English jelly. Omar, placing his right hand to his ear, like a muezzin bugling out the cry of the Faith, shouted out at the top of his voice to the cook in the adjoining kitchen: “Ghormeh! Kúfteh! Kebab! Melabi! Eikki!” then, seeing that his cigarette was gone out, he asked me to provide him with a match, which was given to him by my guide, who did not share Mahmud Bey’s ill-disguised disapproval of the waiter’s demeanour. The Turk, raising his eyes to mine, said across the table: “Effendim, the waiters of Stambul have better manners—however.” A contemptuous shrug of the shoulders completed the sentence. The speaker addressed me in his own language, though he was a good Arabic scholar; but a political discussion which followed a question of mine as to whether Abdul Saleh approved or disapproved of the British rule in India was held in Arabic.

“The poet says: ‘The essence of human enjoyment is the belly,’” said my guide, “so let us enjoy ourselves in a human fashion.”

“What will you say,” objected Masoud, “if I assure you that the poet means the spiritual belly and not the bodily one?”

“This,” replied Seyyid ’Alí, quickly, “that there was once a Dervish whose mysticism had so clouded his understanding that he interpreted the writings of Omar Khayyam as you would have me interpret them. The drinking of wine, according to him, was meant to symbolise the adoration of God. Now, it chanced that the dervish broke the law, and was brought before his Governor, who sentenced him ‘to eat five hundred sticks.’ The farrashes, fortified by the juice of the grape, laid on with a will. It was heart-rending to hear the shrieks of the sufferer. His philosophy deserted him, so that he yelled for mercy. The minions of the law appealed to the Governor, who said to the dervish: ‘Have no fear, they are merely spiritual sticks. You must eat them every one. May they go down well with you.’ Are you answered?”

“Blessed be Islám. Long live the Caliphs of the Faith!” cried Abdul Saleh, as though he had just awoke from sleep.

“And long live the Ameers!” said Masoud, in a frenzy of patriotism. “May the soul of Abdur Rahman Khan, the conqueror of Kafiristan, the light of the nation and religion, rest in peace, and may the sword of Islám grow sharper day by day.”

“The sword of Islám is sharp enough,” cried Seyyid ’Alí, “but it requires men to use it, as in the age of the blessed Caliphs.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Persian Mirza, in anger. “Do you think we have no men in Persia? May God keep stiff the neck of Iran. One man of Iran is worth fifty foreign unbelievers.”

“Particularly if they come from Káshán and Isfahán,” added the guide, sarcastically, referring to the alleged lack of courage in the inhabitants of those two towns.

“May your heart be cleansed,” cried the Mirza. “Your sarcasm, I take it, is aimed at the authorities, that enlist so few soldiers from the southern provinces, and scarce a single man from the towns you mention.”

The Turk looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that Isfahán and Káshán do not contribute to the strength of the Persian Nizam?” he asked. “How, then, can Persia defend herself against aggression?”

“You do not know, my good friend,” replied the Mirza, “what the Persians can do. We have no cause to fear any foreign invasion.”

“Certainly not,” said the Afghan, with the tongue in his cheek, dreaming no doubt of the sacking of Isfahán by his countrymen.

AN EGYPTIAN COFFEE-HOUSE FREQUENTED BY THE POOR.

“If you will have patience,” said the guide, “I will tell you the circumstances that led the authorities, whereon the sun of the Faith shines, to abandon the practice of enrolling recruits from Káshán and Isfahán.”

We had now finished our meal and were drinking coffee and smoking hukkahs, and so we lent a willing ear to the sceptical rogue, who proceeded thus:

“Early in the reign of the late martyred Shah-in-Shah—may peace be on his soul—the late Amin-ud-dowleh of Káshán assumed the reins of government, and when that came to pass his fellow-citizens implored him to free them from the obligation of serving in the Army. The Minister laid before them a plan whereby they might achieve the end they had in view. Now you must know that Teherán is a mighty capital, and if any one of you doubt the fact let him go there at midday and listen to the booming of the great gun, which shatters the buildings round about, laying whole streets in ruins. Well, one day, when the Shah-in-Shah was driving through the parade square, he saw a squad of Kásháni soldiers weeping over a dead comrade. His Majesty, having made inquiries, was informed that the brave Kásháni had died from the fright caused by the sound of the midday gun. Then the Shah, bursting out laughing, disbanded the whole regiment, giving strict orders to discontinue the enlistment of soldiers from Káshán.”

“Why don’t you finish the story, my friend?” asked the Mirza. “The sting lies in the tail thereof. For when the regiment was disbanded the soldiers asked for a Cavalry escort to conduct them safely home.” A roar of laughter followed.

“As for the non-enlistment of soldiers from Isfahán,” resumed the Mirza, “take this story from me as its true cause. The soldiers of the Isfahán regiment had not received any pay for a long time, and so they waylaid his Majesty one day when he was driving to the shrine of Shah Abdul Azim and asked him to give them relief. The Secretary for War, fearing revelations and the consequences, approached his Majesty and told him that the soldiers had rebelled in connection with the cursed Bábí Rebellion. The late Shah returned to the Palace at once, and had fourteen of the soldiers executed, and then started on a trip to the hills. When he came back it was to discover the mistake he had made, and, as an act of repentance, he absolved the town from the yoke of soldiery.”

The Turk, Mahmud Bey, rose and made to leave the eating-house. Looking the Persian Mirza in the eyes, he said: “My friend, it is better to be seated in a corner, deaf and dumb, than to have a tongue that is not under one’s control. I have the honour to bid you good-bye.” My guide and I followed him, leaving the others to digest his admonition at their leisure, and bent our steps once more in the direction of the Harem for the purpose of visiting the interior of the House of God.

The gate of the House, except on certain occasions, is kept shut. It is opened for men on the tenth day of the month of Muharram, and for women on the following day. During each of the months of Rabíu-’l-avval, Rajab, and Ramazán (the Muhammadan Lent) admittance is granted on two occasions to the devout, who are again free to cross the sacred threshold once in the month of Sha’ban. On the twelfth day of Rabíu-’l-avval prayers are offered by the high priest of Mecca, within the Ka’bah, for the health of his Majesty the Sultan. This ceremony is a private one. The open sesame to the house, in the days of pilgrimage, is the seductive jingle of gold. An influential Hájí, by means of bakhshísh, can effect an entrance whenever he likes, but his poverty-stricken fellow-pilgrims are not granted the same privilege. Twice every year the house is ceremoniously cleaned and washed. When that happens it is incumbent on the Sheríf, the Governor-General of Hejaz, the head priest, the keepers, and the priestly officials to be present, after they have performed the prescribed purifications and ablutions of the body. The first annual cleaning takes place on the twentieth day of Rabíu-’l-avval. First the floor of the house is scrubbed with the water from the Zem-Zem well, then the walls are besprinkled with ottar of roses and other fragrant scents. Aloe-wood is kindled in braziers, and spreads its delicious perfume through the air. The officials prostrate themselves twice in prayer, after which they withdraw. The second cleaning of the year is effected in the same fashion on the twentieth day of Zi-ka’d, preparatory to the ceremony of draping the outer walls of the house with ihrám. For, thirteen days before the Hájj-day, the Ka’bah itself is clothed in the winding-sheet of humility, as though it were regarded unworthy to be called the House of God.

With the pilgrims to Mecca: The great pilgrimage of A.H. 1319; A.D. 1902

WITH THE PILGRIMS TO MECCA

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ERRATA

Part I
A PERSIAN PILGRIM IN THE MAKING

I.—Message of the Prophet.

II.—Conditions of Pilgrimage.

III.—Forbidden Viands.

IV.—The Work of Purification.

V.—Prayers.

VI.—Aspects of Social Islám.

VII.—Story of the Muslim Moons.

VIII.—Persian Súfíism; and Persian Shiahism in Its Relation to the Persian Passion-Drama.

(a) Persian Súfíism.

(b) The Shiah Faith in its Relation to the Persian Passion Play.

Part II
THE STORY OF THE PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER I
LONDON TO JIDDAH

CHAPTER II
FROM JIDDAH TO MECCA

CHAPTER III
WITHIN THE HAREM—SOME REMARKS ON THE ORTHODOX SECTS OF ISLÁM

CHAPTER IV
COMPASSING OF THE KA’BAH

CHAPTER V
THE COURSE OF PERSEVERANCE

PLAN OF THE HAREM.
An Explanation of the [Frontispiece].

CHAPTER VI
SCENE IN AN EATING-HOUSE—VISIT TO THE KA’BAH

With the pilgrims to Mecca: The great pilgrimage of A.H. 1319; A.D. 1902

WITH THE PILGRIMS TO MECCA

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ERRATA

Part IA PERSIAN PILGRIM IN THE MAKING

I.—Message of the Prophet.

II.—Conditions of Pilgrimage.

III.—Forbidden Viands.

IV.—The Work of Purification.

V.—Prayers.

VI.—Aspects of Social Islám.

VII.—Story of the Muslim Moons.

VIII.—Persian Súfíism; and Persian Shiahism in Its Relation to the Persian Passion-Drama.

(a) Persian Súfíism.

(b) The Shiah Faith in its Relation to the Persian Passion Play.

Part IITHE STORY OF THE PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER ILONDON TO JIDDAH

CHAPTER IIFROM JIDDAH TO MECCA

CHAPTER IIIWITHIN THE HAREM—SOME REMARKS ON THE ORTHODOX SECTS OF ISLÁM

CHAPTER IVCOMPASSING OF THE KA’BAH

CHAPTER VTHE COURSE OF PERSEVERANCE

PLAN OF THE HAREM.An Explanation of the [Frontispiece].

CHAPTER VISCENE IN AN EATING-HOUSE—VISIT TO THE KA’BAH

Part I
A PERSIAN PILGRIM IN THE MAKING

Part II
THE STORY OF THE PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER I
LONDON TO JIDDAH

CHAPTER II
FROM JIDDAH TO MECCA

CHAPTER III
WITHIN THE HAREM—SOME REMARKS ON THE ORTHODOX SECTS OF ISLÁM

CHAPTER IV
COMPASSING OF THE KA’BAH

CHAPTER V
THE COURSE OF PERSEVERANCE

PLAN OF THE HAREM.
An Explanation of the [Frontispiece].

CHAPTER VI
SCENE IN AN EATING-HOUSE—VISIT TO THE KA’BAH