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The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10

R >> Richard F. Burton >> The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10




I need say no more on this heading, the civilisation of Baghdad
contrasting with the barbarism of Europe then Germanic, The
Nights itself being the best expositor. On the other hand the
action of the state-religion upon the state, the condition of Al-
Islam during the reign of Al-Rashid, its declension from the
primitive creed and its relation to Christianity and Christendom,
require a somewhat extended notice. In offering the following
observations it is only fair to declare my standpoints.

1. All forms of "faith," that is, belief in things unseen, not
subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present
stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory:
no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect
of being final or otherwise than finite.

2. Religious ideas, which are necessarily limited, may all be
traced home to the old seat of science and art, creeds and polity
in the Nile-Valley and to this day they retain the clearest signs
of their origin.

3. All so-called "revealed" religions consist mainly of three
portions, a cosmogony more or less mythical, a history more or
less falsified and a moral code more or less pure.

Al-Islam, it has been said, is essentially a fighting faith and
never shows to full advantage save in the field. The faith and
luxury of a wealthy capital, the debauchery and variety of vices
which would spring up therein, naturally as weeds in a rich
fallow, and the cosmopolitan views which suggest themselves in a
meeting-place of nations, were sore trials to the primitive
simplicity of the "Religion of Resignation"--the saving faith.
Harun and his cousin-wife, as has been shown, were orthodox and
even fanatical; but the Barmecides were strongly suspected of
heretical leanings; and while the many- headed showed itself, as
usual, violent, and ready to do battle about an Azan-call, the
learned, who sooner or later leaven the masses, were profoundly
dissatisfied with the dryness and barrenness of Mohammed's creed,
so acceptable to the vulgar, and were devising a series of
schisms and innovations.

In the Tale of Tawaddud (vol. v. 189) the reader has seen a
fairly extended catechism of the Creed (Din), the ceremonial
observances (Mazhab) and the apostolic practices (Sunnat) of the
Shafi'i school which, with minor modifications, applies to the
other three orthodox. Europe has by this time clean forgotten
some tricks of her former bigotry, such as "Mawmet" (an idol!)
and "Mahommerie" (mummery[FN#315]), a place of Moslem worship:
educated men no longer speak with Ockley of the "great impostor
Mahomet," nor believe with the learned and violent Dr. Prideaux
that he was foolish and wicked enough to dispossess "certain poor
orphans, the sons of an inferior artificer" (the Banu Najjar!). A
host of books has attempted, though hardly with success, to
enlighten popular ignorance upon a crucial point; namely, that
the Founder of Al-Islam, like the Founder of Christianity, never
pretended to establish a new religion. His claims, indeed, were
limited to purging the "School of Nazareth" of the dross of ages
and of the manifold abuses with which long use had infected its
early constitution: hence to the unprejudiced observer his
reformation seems to have brought it nearer the primitive and
original doctrine than any subsequent attempts, especially the
Judaizing tendencies of the so-called "Protestant" churches. The
Meccan Apostle preached that the Hanafiyyah or orthodox belief,
which he subsequently named Al-Islam, was first taught by Allah,
in all its purity and perfection, to Adam and consigned to
certain inspired volumes now lost; and that this primal Holy Writ
received additions in the days of his descendants Shis (Seth) and
Idris (Enoch?), the founder of the Sabian (not "Sabaean") faith.
Here, therefore, Al-Islam at once avoided the deplorable
assumption of the Hebrews and the Christians,--an error which has
been so injurious to their science and their progress,--of
placing their "firstman" in circa B. C. 4000 or somewhat
subsequent to the building of the Pyramids: the Pre-
Adamite[FN#316] races and dynasties of the Moslems remove a great
stumbling-block and square with the anthropological views of the
present day. In process of time, when the Adamite religion
demanded a restoration and a supplement, its pristine virtue was
revived, restored and further developed by the books communicated
to Abraham, whose dispensation thus takes the place of the Hebrew
Noah and his Noachidae. In due time the Torah, or Pentateuch,
superseded and abrogated the Abrahamic dispensation; the "Zabur"
of David (a book not confined to the Psalms) reformed the Torah;
the Injil or Evangel reformed the Zabur and was itself purified,
quickened and perfected by the Koran which means the
Reading or the Recital. Hence Locke, with many others, held
Moslems to be unorthodox, that is, anti-Trinitarian Christians
who believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Ascension and in
the divine mission of Jesus; and when Priestley affirmed that
"Jesus was sent from God," all Moslems do the same. Thus they
are, in the main point of doctrine connected with the Deity,
simply Arians as opposed to Athanasians. History proves that the
former was the earlier faith which, though formally condemned in
A. D. 325 by Constantine's Council of Nice, [FN#317] overspread
the Orient beginning with Eastern Europe, where Ulphilas
converted the Goths; which extended into Africa with the Vandals,
claimed a victim or martyr as late as in the sixteenth century
[FN#318] and has by no means died out in this our day.

The Talmud had been completed a full century before Mohammed's
time and the Evangel had been translated into Arabic; moreover
travel and converse with his Jewish and Christian friends and
companions must have convinced the Meccan Apostle that
Christianity was calling as loudly for reform as Judaism had
done. [FN#319] An exaggerated Trinitarianism or rather Tritheism,
a "Fourth Person" and Saint-worship had virtually dethroned the
Deity; whilst Mariolatry had made the faith a religio muliebris,
and superstition had drawn from its horrid fecundity an
incredible number of heresies and monstrous absurdities. Even
ecclesiastic writers draw the gloomiest pictures of the Christian
Church in the fourth and seventh centuries, and one declares that
the "Kingdom of Heaven had become a Hell." Egypt, distracted by
the blood- thirsty religious wars of Copt and Greek, had been
covered with hermitages by a yens aeterna of semi-maniacal
superstition. Syria, ever "feracious of heresies," had allowed
many of her finest tracts to be monopolised by monkeries and
nunneries.[FN#320] After many a tentative measure Mohammed seems
to have built his edifice upon two bases, the unity of the
Godhead and the priesthood of the pater-familias. He abolished
for ever the "sacerdos alter Christus" whose existence, as some
one acutely said, is the best proof of Christianity, and whom all
know to be its weakest point. The Moslem family, however humble,
was to be the model in miniature of the State, and every father
in Al-Islam was made priest and pontiff in his own house, able
unaided to marry himself, to circumcise (to baptise as it were)
his children, to instruct them in the law and canonically to bury
himself (vol. viii. 22). Ritual, properly so called, there was
none; congregational prayers were merely those of the individual
en masse, and the only admitted approach to a sacerdotal order
were the Olema or scholars learned in the legistic and the Mullah
or schoolmaster. By thus abolishing the priesthood Mohammed
reconciled ancient with modern wisdom. "Scito dominum," said
Cato, "pro tota familia rem divinam facere": "No priest at a
birth, no priest at a marriage, no priest at a death," is the
aspiration of the present Rationalistic School.

The Meccan Apostle wisely retained the compulsory sacrament of
circumcision and the ceremonial ablutions of the Mosaic law; and
the five daily prayers not only diverted man's thoughts from the
world but tended to keep his body pure. These two institutions
had been practiced throughout life by the Founder of
Christianity; but the followers who had never seen him, abolished
them for purposes evidently political and propagandist. By
ignoring the truth that cleanliness is next to godliness they
paved the way for such saints as Simon Stylites and Sabba who,
like the lowest Hindu orders of ascetics, made filth a
concominant and an evidence of piety: even now English Catholic
girls are at times forbidden by Italian priests a frequent use of
the bath as a sign post to the sin of "luxury." Mohammed would
have accepted the morals contained in the Sermon on the Mount
much more readily than did the Jews from whom its matter was
borrowed.[FN#321] He did something to abolish the use of wine,
which in the East means only its abuse; and he denounced games of
chance, well knowing that the excitable races of sub-tropical
climates cannot play with patience, fairness or moderation. He
set aside certain sums for charity to be paid by every Believer
and he was the first to establish a poor-rate (Zakat): thus he
avoided the shame and scandal of mendicancy which, beginning in
the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, extends to Syria and
as far East as Christianity is found. By these and other measures
of the same import he made the ideal Moslem's life physically
clean, moderate and temperace.

But Mohammed, the "master mind of the age," had, we must own, a
"genuine prophetic power, a sinking of self in the Divine not
distinguishable in kind from the inspiration of the Hebrew
prophets," especially in that puritanical and pharisaic
narrowness which, with characteristic simplicity, can see no good
outside its own petty pale. He had insight as well as outsight,
and the two taught him that personal and external reformation
were mean matters compared with elevating the inner man. In the
"purer Faith," which he was commissioned to abrogate and to
quicken, he found two vital defects equally fatal to its energy
and to its longevity. These were (and are) its egoism and its
degradation of humanity. Thus it cannot be a "pleroma": it needs
a Higher Law.[FN#322] As Judaism promised the good Jew all manner
of temporal blessings, issue, riches, wealth, honour, power,
length of days, so Christianity offered the good Christian, as a
bribe to lead a godly life, personal salvation and a future state
of happiness, in fact the Kingdom of Heaven, with an alternative
threat of Hell. It never rose to the height of the Hindu Brahmans
and Lao-Tse (the "Ancient Teacher"); of Zeno the Stoic and his
disciples the noble Pharisees[FN#323] who believed and preached
that Virtue is its own reward. It never dared to say, "Do good
for Good's sake;"[FN#324] even now it does not declare with
Cicero, "The sum of all is that what is right should be sought
for its own sake, because it is right, and not because it is
enacted." It does not even now venture to say with Philo Judaeus,
"The good man seeks the day for the sake of the day, and the
light for the light's sake; and he labours to acquire what is
good for the sake of the good itself, and not of anything else."
So far for the egotism, naive and unconscious, of Christianity,
whose burden is, "Do good to escape Hell and gain Heaven."

A no less defect in the "School of Galilee" is its low view of
human nature. Adopting as sober and authentic history an Osirian-
Hebrew myth which Philo and a host of Rabbis explain away, each
after his own fashion, Christianity dwells, lovingly as it were,
upon the "Fall" of man[FN#325] and seems to revel in the
contemptible condition to which "original sin" condemned him;
thus grovelling before God ad majorem Dei gloriam. To such a
point was and is this carried that the Synod of Dort declared,
Infantes infidelium morientes in infantia reprobatos esse statui
mus; nay, many of the orthodox still hold a Christian babe dying
unbaptised to be unfit for a higher existence, and some have even
created a "limbo" expressly to domicile the innocents "of whom is
the kingdom of Heaven." Here, if any where, the cloven foot shows
itself and teaches us that the only solid stratum underlying
priestcraft is one composed of L s. d.

And I never can now believe it, my Lord! (Bishop) we come to this
earth Ready damned, with the seeds of evil sown quite so thick at
our birth, sings Edwin Arnold.[FN#326] We ask, can infatuation or
hypocrisy--for it must be the one or the other--go farther? But
the Adamical myth is opposed to all our modern studies. The
deeper we dig into the Earth's "crust," the lower are the
specimens of human remains which occur; and hitherto not a single
"find" has come to revive the faded glories of

Adam the goodliest man of men since born (!)
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.

Thus Christianity, admitting, like Judaism, its own saints and
santons, utterly ignores the progress of humanity, perhaps the
only belief in which the wise man can take unmingled
satisfaction. Both have proposed an originally perfect being with
hyacinthine locks, from whose type all the subsequent humans are
degradations physical and moral. We on the other hand hold, from
the evidence of our senses, that early man was a savage very
little superior to the brute; that during man's millions of years
upon earth there has been a gradual advance towards perfection,
at times irregular and even retrograde, but in the main
progressive; and that a comparison of man in the xixth century
with the caveman[FN#327] affords us the means of measuring past
progress and of calculating the future of humanity.

Mahommed was far from rising to the moral heights of the ancient
sages: he did nothing to abate the egotism of Christianity; he
even exaggerated the pleasures of its Heaven and the horrors of
its Hell. On the other hand he did much to exalt human nature. He
passed over the "Fall" with a light hand; he made man superior to
the angels; he encouraged his fellow creatures to be great and
good by dwelling upon their nobler not their meaner side; he
acknowledged, even in this world, the perfectability of mankind,
including womankind, and in proposing the loftiest ideal he acted
unconsciously upon the grand dictum of chivalry--Honneur
oblige.[FN#328] His prophets were mostly faultless men; and, if
the "Pure of Allah" sinned, he "sinned against himself." Lastly,
he made Allah predetermine the career and fortunes, not only of
empires, but of every created being; thus inculcating sympathy
and tolerance of others, which is true humanity, and a proud
resignation to evil as to good fortune. This is the doctrine
which teaches the vulgar Moslem a dignity observed even by the
"blind traveller," and which enables him to display a moderation,
a fortitude, and a self-command rare enough amongst the followers
of the "purer creed."

Christian historians explain variously the portentous rise of Al-
Islam and its marvellous spread over vast regions, not only of
pagans and idolators but of Christians. Prideaux disingenuously
suggests that it "seems to have been purposely raised up by God,
to be a scourge to the Christian Church for not living in
accordance with their most holy religion." The popular excuse is
by the free use of the sword; this, however, is mere ignorance:
in Mohammed's day and early Al-Islam only actual fighters were
slain:[FN#329] the rest were allowed to pay the Jizyah, or
capitation-tax, and to become tributaries, enjoying almost all
the privileges of Moslems. But even had forcible conversion been
most systematically practiced, it would have afforded an
insufficient explanation of the phenomenal rise of an empire
which covered more ground in eighty years than Rome had gained in
eight hundred. During so short a time the grand revival of
Monotheism had consolidated into a mighty nation, despite their
eternal blood-feuds, the scattered Arab tribes; a six-years'
campaign had conquered Syria, and a lustre or two utterly
overthrew Persia, humbled the Graeco-Roman, subdued Egypt and
extended the Faith along northern Africa as far as the Atlantic.
Within three generations the Copts of Nile-land had formally cast
out Christianity, and the same was the case with Syria, the
cradle of the Nazarene, and Mesopotamia, one of his strongholds,
although both were backed by all the remaining power of the
Byzantine empire. Northwestern Africa, which had rejected the
idolatro-philosophic system of pagan and imperial Rome, and had
accepted, after lukewarm fashion, the Arian Christianity imported
by the Vandals, and the "Nicene mystery of the Trinity," hailed
with enthusiasm the doctrines of the Koran and has never ceased
to be most zealous in its Islam. And while Mohammedanism speedily
reduced the limits of Christendom by one-third, while through-out
the Arabian, Saracenic and Turkish invasions whole Christian
peoples embraced the monotheistic faith, there are hardly any
instances of defection from the new creed and, with the exception
of Spain and Sicily, it has never been suppressed in any land
where once it took root. Even now, when Mohammedanism no longer
wields the sword, it is spreading over wide regions in China, in
the Indian Archipelago, and especially in Western and Central
Africa, propagated only by self-educated individuals, trading
travellers, while Christianity makes no progress and cannot exist
on the Dark Continent without strong support from Government. Nor
can we explain this honourable reception by the "licentiousness"
ignorantly attributed to Al-Islam, one of the most severely moral
of institutions; or by the allurements of polygamy and
concubinage, slavery,[FN#330] and a "wholly sensual Paradise"
devoted to eating, drinking[FN#331] and the pleasures of the
sixth sense. The true and simple explanation is that this grand
Reformation of Christianity was urgently wanted when it appeared,
that it suited the people better than the creed which it
superseded and that it has not ceased to be sufficient for their
requirements, social, sexual and vital. As the practical
Orientalist, Dr. Leitner, well observes from his own experience,
"The Mohammedan religion can adapt itself better than any other
and has adapted itself to circumstances and to the needs of the
various races which profess it, in accordance with the spirit of
the age."[FN#332] Hence, I add, its wide diffusion and its
impregnable position. "The dead hand, stiff and motionless," is a
forcible simile for the present condition of Al-Islam; but it
results from limited and imperfect observation and it fails in
the sine qua non of similes and metaphors, a foundation of fact.

I cannot quit this subject without a passing reference to an
admirably written passage in Mr. Palgrave's travels[FN#333] which
is essentially unfair to Al-Islam. The author has had ample
opportunities of comparing creeds: of Jewish blood and born a
Protestant, he became a Catholic and a Jesuit (Pere Michel
Cohen)[FN#334] in a Syrian convent; he crossed Arabia as a good
Moslem and he finally returned to his premier amour, Anglicanism.
But his picturesque depreciation of Mohammedanism, which has
found due appreciation in more than one popular volume, [FN#335]
is a notable specimen of special pleading, of the ad captandum in
its modern and least honest form. The writer begins by assuming
the arid and barren Wahhabi-ism, which he had personally studied,
as a fair expression of the Saving Faith. What should we say to a
Moslem traveller who would make the Calvinism of the sourest
Covenanter, model, genuine and ancient Christianity? What would
sensible Moslems say to these propositions of Professor Maccovius
and the Synod of Dort:--Good works are an obstacle to salvation.
God does by no means will the salvation of all men: he does will
sin and he destines men to sin, as sin? What would they think of
the Inadmissible Grace, the Perseverance of the Elect, the
Supralapsarian and the Sublapsarian and, finally, of a Deity the
author of man's existence, temptation and fall, who deliberately
pre-ordains sin and ruin? "Father Cohen" carries out into the
regions of the extreme his strictures on the one grand vitalising
idea of Al-Islam, "There is no god but God;"[FN#336] and his
deduction concerning the Pantheism of Force sounds unreal and
unsound, compared with the sensible remarks upon the same subject
by Dr. Badgers[FN#337] who sees the abstruseness of the doctrine
and does not care to include it in hard and fast lines or to
subject it to mere logical analysis. Upon the subject of
"predestination" Mr. Palgrave quotes, not from the Koran, but
from the Ahadis or Traditional Sayings of the Apostle; but what
importance attaches to a legend in the Mischnah, or Oral Law, of
the Hebrews utterly ignored by the Written Law? He joins the many
in complaining that even the mention of "the love of God" is
absent from Mohammed's theology, burking the fact that it never
occurs in the Jewish scriptures and that the genius of Arabic,
like Hebrew, does not admit the expression: worse still, he keeps
from his reader such Koranic passages as, to quote no other,
"Allah loveth you and will forgive your sins" (iii. 29). He
pities Allah for having "no son, companion or counsellor" and, of
course, he must equally commiserate Jehovah. Finally his views of
the lifelessness of Al-Islam are directly opposed to the opinions
of Dr. Leitner and the experience of all who have lived in Moslem
lands. Such are the ingenious but not ingenuous distortions of
fact, the fine instances of the pathetic fallacy, and the
noteworthy illustrations of the falsehood of extremes, which have
engendered "Mohammedanism a Relapse: the worst form of
Monotheism,"[FN#338] and which have been eagerly seized upon and
further deformed by the authors of popular books, that is,
volumes written by those who know little for those who know less.

In Al-Rashid's day a mighty change had passed over the primitive
simplicity of Al-Islam, the change to which faiths and creeds,
like races and empires and all things sublunary, are subject. The
proximity of Persia and the close intercourse with the Graeco-
Romans had polished and greatly modified the physiognomy of the
rugged old belief: all manner of metaphysical subtleties had
cropped up, with the usual disintegrating effect, and some of
these threatened even the unity of the Godhead. Musaylimah and
Karmat had left traces of their handiwork: the Mutazilites
(separatists or secessors) actively propagated their doctrine of
a created and temporal Koran. The Khariji or Ibazi, who rejects
and reviles Abu Turab (Caliph Ali), contended passionately with
the Shi'ah who reviles and rejects the other three "Successors;"
and these sectarians, favoured by the learned, and by the
Abbasides in their jealous hatred of the Ommiades, went to the
extreme length of the Ali-Ilahi--the God-makers of Ali--whilst
the Dahri and the Zindik, the Mundanist and the Agnoetic,
proposed to sweep away the whole edifice. The neo-Platonism and
Gnosticism which had not essentially affected
Christendom,[FN#339] found in Al-Islam a rich fallow and gained
strength and luxuriance by the solid materialism and conservatism
of its basis. Such were a few of the distracting and resolving
influences which Time had brought to bear upon the True Believer
and which, after some half a dozen generations, had separated the
several schisms by a wider breach than that which yawns between
Orthodox, Romanist and Lutheran. Nor was this scandal in Al-Islam
abated until the Tartar sword applied to it the sharpest remedy.





B.--Woman.



The next point I propose to consider is the position of womanhood
in The Nights, so curiously at variance with the stock ideas
concerning the Moslem home and domestic policy still prevalent,
not only in England, but throughout Europe. Many readers of these
volumes have remarked to me with much astonishment that they find
the female characters more remarkable for decision, action and
manliness than the male; and are wonderstruck by their masterful
attitude and by the supreme influence they exercise upon public
and private life.

I have glanced at the subject of the sex in Al-Islam to such an
extent throughout my notes that little remains here to be added.
Women, all the world over are what men make them; and the main
charm of Amazonian fiction is to see how they live and move and
have their being without any masculine guidance. But it is the
old ever-new fable

"Who drew the Lion vanquished? 'Twas a man!''

The books of the Ancients, written in that stage of civilisation
when the sexes are at civil war, make women even more than in
real life the creatures of their masters: hence from the dawn of
literature to the present day the sex has been the subject of
disappointed abuse and eulogy almost as unmerited. Ecclesiastes,
perhaps the strangest specimen of an "inspired volume" the world
has yet produced, boldly declares "One (upright) man among a
thousand I have found; but a woman among all have I not found"
(vol. vii. 28), thus confirming the pessimism of Petronius:--

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