FOOTNOTES:
[A] Long narrow carts, the sides of which are only very slightly raised.
[B] The former is the black covering worn by all classes. The poorer women make it of two lengths of material two metres long, joined together on the selvedge. The ends of one breadth are sewn up and form the skirt, while the upper breadth is left to pass over the head and fold over the upper part of the person like a shawl. The richer, from the middle class upwards, sew the lower breadth into a band forming a skirt, and the upper breadth is cut smaller to form only a cape fastened on to the waist band at the back, coming up over the head, falling by rights over the whole upper part of the body, but frequently cut so as to scarcely reach the elbow. The latter is worn by the poorer classes; and by many of the older women of the better class it is made of black crape and is tied over the face from just below the eyes and extends to below the waist; by the upper classes and more wealthy it was made in fine white muslin but sufficient to disguise the features. Now it is frequently made in chiffon.
[C] The ordinary dress, cut rather like a dressing gown and made in cotton or silk. If the latter, it is usually elaborately trimmed with flounces and lace.
V
BEHIND THE OPENING DOOR IN TUNIS
The lot of a Tunisian woman is probably a brighter one than that of many of her Moslem sisters who have not the privilege of living under the enlightened rule of a European government.
It is not possible for her, under existing circumstances, to have the perfect liberty of European women, but should justice not be granted by an Arab tribunal, she has always the right of appeal to the French authorities, who take care to see that the laws are rightly administered.
The English-speaking race, accustomed to greater freedom for its women than any other on the face of the earth perhaps, would find it hard to be shut up in an Arab house, taking no long country walks, joining in no outdoor games, knowing nothing of the pleasures of shopping expeditions, having no literary pursuits, and meeting no men outside the circle of their relatives; and indeed it is a sadly narrow life. But we must remember that our Moslem sisters have never known anything better, and the majority are perfectly contented with things as they are. To thoroughly appreciate and make a right use of liberty, one must be trained, there must be education to meet its responsibilities, and without this its effects would be disastrous. To an Arab lady who never goes out otherwise than closely veiled, it would be a far greater trial to walk through the streets with face exposed, than to the European to cover herself.
Much has been said about the hardships of the woman's being locked in during her husband's absence from the house. This is not infrequent and does appear somewhat prison-like; but it is often done solely as a protection. I knew one woman who preferred to be thus locked in, but arranged with her husband that on the days of my visits the key should not be turned on her. And the doors of Arab houses are always so constructed that, even when locked, they can be opened from inside on an emergency though they cannot be reclosed without the key.
When I came to this country some twelve years ago, the thing that most struck me in visiting Arab houses was the cheerfulness and even gaiety of the women. I had a preconceived picture in my mind of poor creatures sitting within prison walls, pining to get out, and in utter misery.
Nothing of the kind! What did I find? Laughter, chatter, the distraction of periodic visits to saints' tombs, or that centre of social intercourse—the bath. Old women, the scandal-mongers of the neighborhood, go round to retail their news. (And it will be allowed that even in England there are many who take a deeper interest in the doings of their neighbors than in more elevated topics of conversation.)
Here Jewesses, spreading out their pretty, silken goods to tempt purchasers, or neighbors who had "dropped in" by way of the roof for a gossip, not over a dish of tea, but a cup of black coffee. There Arab women, much like children, quickly shaking off little troubles and meeting greater trials with the resignation of fatalism, which finds comfort in the magic word, "Maktoob" (It is decreed), in a manner incomprehensible to the Western mind.
Is it surprising that I almost accused my fellow-missionaries of misrepresenting the home life of the people? But I only saw the surface and had not yet probed the deep sore of Mohammedanism nor realized the heavy burdens which its system entails.
Let me tell you of three of the heaviest of these burdens: Polygamy, Divorce, and the Ignorance which results from complete lack of education and walks hand-in-hand with its twin-sister, Superstition.
Polygamy shall be placed first, although it is not the greatest bane of Tunisian home life. By Mohammedan law a man is allowed four wives, but in Tunisia, though it is by no means rare for a man to have two, he seldom takes more than that number at one time. Occasionally they live in separate houses, sometimes in different towns, and may be quite unknown to each other. A Moslem will frequently take a second wife in the hope of having children, or it may be a son, the first wife being childless.
In other houses one finds under the same roof two wives of one husband, each having a large number of children. Each wife will have two or three maid-servants who sit with their mistresses and mingle freely in the conversation, and, if the family be wealthy, the elder daughters have their own special attendants. Thus a household may contain a large number of women who live together more or less harmoniously, and whose numerous quarrels do not conduce to the tranquillity of the master of the house. But what does he care as long as he is master and reigns supreme? There is probably not much affection between him and the wife whom he never saw before the wedding-day, but he loves his children, being specially fond of the little ones and showing all a father's pride in his sons. His hours of recreation are spent at the café or the more aristocratic rendezvous—the barber's shop—and the charms of sweet home life he has never imagined.
Year by year, however, Western education is slowly but surely telling on the Oriental mind. The young men, trained in French schools and imbibing modern ideas, show a strong tendency to follow the manners and customs of their teachers, and it is at least considered more "comme-il-faut" to take only one wife and in some measure copy the European "ménage."
Divorce is, however, the great curse which blights domestic happiness, and words fail me to describe the misery it brings.
The Moslem population of the city of Tunis is sixty thousand. Setting aside men and children there remain, roughly speaking, about twenty-five thousand women, and comparing my own experience with that of other lady missionaries we are agreed in affirming that the majority of these women in the middle and lower classes have been divorced at least once in their lives, many of them two or three times, while some few have had a number of husbands. In the upper class and wealthy families divorce is not nearly so common, and for obvious reasons.
I have never known a man to have thirty or forty wives in succession as one hears of in some Mohammedan lands. A man once told my brother-in-law that he had been married eighteen times, and I heard of another who had taken (the Arab expression) twelve wives, one after another; but this last was related with bated breath as being an unusual and opprobrious act.
When a woman is divorced she returns to her father's house and remains dependent on him until he finds her another husband, her monetary value being now greatly reduced. The quarrel which led to the separation is sometimes adjusted and she returns to her husband, but never if he has pronounced the words, "Tulka be thaléthe" (Divorce by three, or threefold). This, even though uttered in a moment of anger, may never be recalled, and if he really care for his wife and wish to take her back again, she must be married to another man and divorced by him before she can return to her first husband. But the laws relating to marriage, divorce, and the guardianship of the children, would require a volume to themselves and cannot be entered upon here.
One is led to ask, what is the cause of this dark cloud of evil which casts its terrible shadow over so many homes?
No doubt it chiefly arises from the low standard of Moslem morality and is intensified by the whole basis of the marriage relationship.
Among the upper classes a girl does not often marry till about seventeen years old, but a poorer man is glad to get his daughters off his hands at a much earlier age, especially if he can obtain a good dowry in payment. The girl goes through a form of acceptance, relying on the representations of her relatives, which are often far from truthful. She never sees her husband until the wedding day and then, no matter how old, ugly, or repulsive the man may be, it is too late to refuse; no wonder that mutual disappointment often ensues, deepening into strong dislike, which produces constant friction, culminating in a violent quarrel; as in the case of a young girl whom I knew, married to an old man, and divorced a few years later through a quarrel over a pound of meat.
Dorothy and Fatimah
The history of the two little girls in the accompanying photograph, shows clearly the contrast between the life of an English and that of an Arab child. It was taken about eight years ago at the birthday party of my little niece, who had been allowed, as a treat, to invite a number of Arab girls to tea, and was photographed with one who was about the same age as herself. The one, Dorothy, is now thirteen years old and still a happy, light-hearted schoolgirl, carefully sheltered from all knowledge of evil. The other, Fatima, to-day, sits in her father's house, divorced, desolate, and soured in temper by her hard fate. And, indeed, her story makes one's heart ache.
Some few months ago she was married to a young man, who, though not yet twenty, had already divorced his first wife. Still, Fatima's parents considered that no drawback, since he was in prosperous circumstances and willing to pay six hundred francs for the charming little bride. The marriage festivities lasted a week, friends showered blessings upon the bride and the bridegroom, who were mutually pleased with each other, and all seemed to augur well for the future.
But, as in the old fairy story, no one had reckoned on the machinations of the bad fairy who soon presented herself in the form of the girl's grandmother. The old lady strongly objected to the match on the ground that a slur was cast on the family by Fatima's being married before her elder sister, Hanani, who was not so good-looking and had consequently been passed over by the professional matchmakers. She vowed to separate the young couple by "working the works of Satan" over them, which in plain English means, exercising sorcery. But I will tell the story as I heard it from the mother.
Five weeks after the wedding the old woman contrived to steal secretly into the bride's room and sprinkle over it a powder possessing the power of casting an evil spell over those she wished to injure, and, to make her work more efficacious, she further wrapped a knife with evil charms and hid it amongst the bridegroom's clothes. Shortly after she met the young man, and clutching him by the arm, her sharp eyes gleaming from between the folds of her veil, she hissed: "Know, O man, that I have bewitched thee and ere long thou shalt be separated from thy bride!" On entering the house that evening, he complained that he felt as though in a furnace. It was a cold night and the family were shivering, but he kept casting off one garment after another, exclaiming that the awful heat was unendurable and that he was surely bewitched.
This went on evening after evening for a whole week until he declared that he could stand it no longer, and could only rid himself of his sufferings by a divorce. Before the kadi he explained that he had nothing against the girl nor their family, who had always treated him with great kindness, but he was under the influence of sorcery and must be divorced. And this statement was accepted as perfectly reasonable. What astonished me the most was, that the bride's parents exonerated him from all blame. As the mother said, "I loved him as my own son, but he could not help it." The old woman had worked the works of Satan over him, and how could he escape?
This incident shows not only the slender nature of the marriage ties but also the immense power which superstition exercises over the mind. It seems to be part of a Moslem woman's very nature, and largely influences all her life from the cradle to the grave.
Beware, when visiting an Arab woman, of too greatly admiring her tiny baby, however engaging it may be! Such admiration would surely attract "the evil eye," and then woe to the little one! The safest course of an ignorant Roumi (Christian) is merely to glance at her little child and say, "Mabrouk" (May it be blest).
Is there illness in the house, a message is first sent to the "degaz" (soothsayer), who writes a magic paper, encloses it in a leather case, and sends it to the sick one with directions to fasten it on the head, arm, etc., according to the part affected.
Another favorite remedy is to pour a little water into a basin on which passages from the Koran are written, and then either drink or bathe with it as the disease may appear to require.
These powerful remedies failing to restore health, the invalid is next taken to the tomb of some celebrated "saint." There, offerings are made and prayers recited. A favorite resort in Tunis is the Zawia of Sidi Abdallah, situated just outside the city wall. Here a black cock is sacrificed and a little of its blood sprinkled on the neck, elbow, and knee of the sufferer on whose behalf it is offered.
An Arab Woman Entering a Saint's Tomb (Tunis)
Before our house stands a Zawia (saint's tomb), built in honor of a female saint, and at this tomb one day stood an Arab woman, knocking gently at the door and crying in piteous tones, "O lady! Heal me, for I am very ill! I have giddiness in my head! I am very weak! Do heal me!" The poor creature calling in her ignorance on a dead saint not only moves the heart to pity but also creates in the mind a wonder as to who these saints may be, and what has led to their being thus honored.
Let me give you a sketch of a noted dervish, or saint, who has just passed away. I first saw Sidi Ali Ben Jaber some years ago seated in front of a café in the Halfouine—the quarter where the late Bey had built him a house. By his side were native musicians making a discordant noise while at intervals the holy man was bellowing like a mad bull. Securing a corner of a doorstep, I managed to peep over the surrounding crowd and my curiosity was rewarded by the sight of a decrepit, filthy old man, his bald pate encircled by scant grizzled hair and unadorned by the usual fez cap. His sole covering was a dirty cotton shirt, open at the neck and descending no lower than the knees. But what a shirt! As a mark of saintliness, it had not left his body for years, but had gradually increased in thickness, for when sufficiently caked with accumulations of filth and snuff, a clean piece of calico had been sewn over it. This had been covered by successive layers as required, until it is just possible that the initiated might have been able to determine the age of the wearer by the concentric rings of his garment!
Sidi Ali was not always, however, thus seated in state. He would, from time to time, parade the Halfouine, stopping occasionally to demand a gift, which was seldom refused. Stories are told of swift judgments overtaking bold Moslems who slighted the wish of the holy man, and equally thrilling accounts of deliverance from peril to the Faithful who granted his desire.
Sidi Ali Ben Jaber once met another Arab, Sidi Ben Faraji, dragged him into a neighboring shop and insisted on his buying a large and expensive block of marble with which to embellish the "saint's" house, for that happened to be the holy man's craze for the time. On his way home Sidi Ben Faraji had to pass under a bridge, which fell, severely crushing his left arm, and now was apparent the virtue of his gift to the holy man; for had he refused to buy the marble as requested, the bridge would assuredly have fallen, not on his arm only, but on his whole body, and he would have become a shapeless mass. Our "Halfouine saint" was sometimes in a violent state of mind. Then, as he approached, the butchers would quickly hide their meat, the confectioners' display of cakes became suddenly scanty, while other shops appeared equally bare.
The "saint" might enter a shop, turn the contents into the street, and work general havoc; the owner not daring to say him nay, but cherishing the hope of recompense in Heaven to atone for present loss. In cases of illness, Sidi Ali would be taken to the house of the sick one, and his presence was said invariably to bring blessing and relief.
He is also said to have foretold the introduction of electric trams, but this appears to have been only thought of when they had already made their appearance in the city.
For months the poor old man had been growing feebler, and in the month of January last he passed away. His death caused general mourning and lamentation, many women weeping bitterly. The corpse was escorted to the mosque and thence to the cemetery by various sects displaying colored silk banners, emblazoned with Koran verses. Crowds pressed round the bier fighting for a chance of seizing it for a moment and thus securing "merit" in heaven, and it was only a strong force of police which prevented the whole being upset. Fumes of incense filled the air, dervishes swayed in their wild chants till one and the other fell exhausted, and when the tomb was finally reached the bier was broken into fragments and distributed amongst eager claimants from amongst the thirty thousand Moslems assembled.
Such, dear readers, is a Moslem saint, and their name is legion. It is by the intercession of such as these that the superstitious hope to obtain earthly and heavenly benefits, and it is at the shrines of such as these that the poor Moslem women come, in the dark days of trouble, to pour out their hearts and seek for help and blessing.
Some time ago one of my schoolgirls asked me to go and see her sister, who had been brought from a neighboring village seriously ill. On reaching the house I found a young woman of about eighteen stretched on a mattress on the floor, and sitting by her side, her husband, who was at least fifty years of age. The poor creature was in great suffering and evidently too ill for any simple remedy, so I called in the help of a French lady doctor, who kindly came and prescribed for her.
On going to the house next day, great was my surprise to find that the medicine ordered had not been given, and the surprise gave place to indignation when I discovered that the family firmly believed that the whole trouble was caused by an evil spirit which had taken possession of the young wife, and that the black sheep, tied up in the courtyard, had been placed there in the hope that the demon would prefer to inhabit the body of the animal and might thus be induced to leave its present abode. Poor young thing! She died not long after, but her friends to this day believe that they did all in their power to help her, and her death could not have been averted since it was surely decreed.
The veil that shrouds the Moslem home life in Tunis has been raised and my readers have had a peep at its sadder side, but it is only a peep! The farther one penetrates the more intolerable its noisome atmosphere becomes. Deceit and lying are so prevalent that a mother questions the simplest statements of her own son, and I have seen a mistress insist on a servant swearing on the Koran before she would accept his word. Demoralizing conversation is freely indulged in before the children, till their minds become depraved to such an extent that in our school we could not allow the girls to tell each other stories or even ask riddles because of their indecent character; and bad language, even from the little ones, was a thing with which we constantly had to contend.
And now we, to whom God has given so much light and so many privileges, are brought face to face with the problem, What can be done to help our Mohammedan sisters to lift the burdens which mar the happiness of so many lives?
In the first place it seems to me a necessity that the man's eyes should be opened to see the true condition of affairs from a Western, or better still a Christian, standpoint, and should realize the larger amount of domestic happiness he, himself, is losing. And this may be done by education and the free intercourse with Christian families, which will give him an insight into the joys of their home circles.
As was before hinted, European education is already cultivating the intelligence of the upper classes and slowly extending its leavening influence among the masses. There is an increasing desire, not only that the boys should receive a good French education, but that the girls should share its benefits too. Tennyson's words in the mouth of King Arthur have a new significance:—
"The old order changeth, giving place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways."
But this change cannot be accomplished in a day, nor without a struggle between the old and new systems. This may be illustrated by an amusing scene I once witnessed.
I was one day sitting in the house of a wealthy Arab whose mind had been enlarged by travelling in many lands. His eldest daughter was one of the very few Arab girls I have met who could read and write Arabic beautifully. I was accustomed to give her French lessons, and she was at that moment in the opposite room across the courtyard, taking a lesson from a Jewish music master on a new piano lately sent by her fiancé.
Suddenly two servant girls rushed into the room exclaiming: "Sidi Mohammed is coming! Here is Sidi Mohammed!" The grandfather, the head of the family, was at the door, and great would be his wrath should he see his granddaughter learning music, and above all from a man. Fortunately the old gentleman, being somewhat infirm, could not quickly descend from his carriage although assisted by his two men-servants, so that by the time he made his appearance the music master was simply hidden away in a tiny inner room and the whole family assembled in the courtyard; ready with profuse salutations, welcomes, and kissing of hands, to conduct him to one of the principal apartments, not that in which the Jew was imprisoned. I have often wondered how long the visit lasted, and whether the musician was as fortunate as myself in being soon able to beat a retreat.
Yes! the people are ripe for education—but is there not a serious danger in giving them education and education only? Is it not to be feared that with minds enlightened to see the errors of Mohammedanism, they will cast off its bonds only to become entangled in the meshes of atheism and become a nation of "libre-penseurs," so that having escaped the rocks of Scylla they find themselves engulfed in the whirlpool of Charybdis?
My second illustration represents a poor Arab woman entering a saint's tomb, over the portal of which is written: "He (God) opens the doors. Open to us (O Lord) the best door!" And with my Christian readers I would plead that they would do all in their power both by prayer and by effort, that while the doors of education and progress are being thrown wide to these Moslems, the best door—the door of the Gospel—may be opened also, so that they too may know the glorious liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.
VI
"NOT DEAD, ONLY DRY"
"It is useless to plant anything: the earth is dead."
"No, it is not dead, it is only dry."
"But I tell you, it is dead. In summer the earth is always dead: see here." And the Arab who spoke stooped and picked up a rock-like clod, that he had hewn with his pickaxe from the trench at his feet. It looked dead enough certainly; the Algerian soil in August is much the same in texture as a well-trodden highway. But it is only waiting.
"It is the very same earth that it is in winter," I replied; "all it wants is water, and water you must give it."
With an Oriental's laconic patience, though all unconvinced, the man went on with the digging of his trench, and the planting therein of acacia clippings to make a new thorn hedge where it had been broken down.
And with a new hope in God my own words came back to me as I turned away. "It is not dead: it is only dry."
For of all the soils in the world our Moslem soil in Algiers seems the most barren, while friend and foe repeat the same words: "It is useless to plant anything: the earth is dead."
But in the face of both—in the face of the hosts of darkness who take up the words and fling them at us with a stinging taunt—we affirm in faith:
"No, it is not dead. It is only dry."
Dry: that we know sorrowfully well; it cannot be otherwise. It is dry soil because Islam has come nearer doing "despite to the Spirit of grace" than any other religion; it is, as has been truly said, the one anti-Christian faith, the one of openly avowed enmity to the Cross of Christ, the one that deliberately tramples under foot the Son of God.
It is dry also because in the religion itself there is something searing, blighting, as with a subtle breath of hell. This is true of the lands where it has laid hold, and true of the hearts,—it is dry.
Dry soil, not dead soil. If you were out here in Algiers and could see and know the people, you would say so too. The next best thing is to bring you some of their faces to look at that you may judge whether the possibilities have gone out of them yet or not: women faces and girl faces, for it is of these that I write. Will you spend five minutes of your hours to-day in looking—just looking—at them, till they have sunk down into your heart? Are they the faces of a dead people? Do you see no material for Christ if they had a chance of the Water of Life? These are real living women, living to-day, unmet by Him.
Types in Tunis and Algiers
To begin with, the first glance will show their intelligence. Get an average ignorant Englishwoman of the peasant class to repeat a Bible story that she has never heard before. She will dully remember one or two salient facts. Go up to a mountain village here and get a group of women and talk to them, and choose one of them to repeat to the others what you have said. You will feel after a sentence or two that your Arabic was only English put into Arabic words; hers is sparkling with racy idiom. More than that, she is making the story live before her hearers: a touch of local color here—a quaint addition there. It is all aglow. And this a woman who has sat year after year in her one garment of red woollen drapery, cooking meals and nursing children, with nothing to stimulate any thoughts beyond the day's need.
And their powers of feeling: do their faces look as if these have been crushed out by a life of servitude? Not a bit of it. No European who has not lived among them can have any idea of their intensity: love, hate, grief, reign by turns. Anger and grief can take such possession of them as to bring real illness of a strange and undiagnosable kind. We have known such cases to last for months; not unfrequently they end fatally; and more than one whom we have met has gone stone-blind with crying for a dead husband who probably made things none too easy while he lived.
And then their will power: the faces tell of that too. The women have far more backbone than their menkind, who have been indulged from babyhood; their school of suffering has not been in vain. In the beautiful balance of God's justice, all that man has taken from them in outward rights has been more than made up in the qualities of endurance and sacrifice that stand, fire-tried, in their character.
And down beyond these outward capacities, how about their spirit-nature? It may be hard to believe at home, but it is a fact that just as the parched ground of August is the very same as the fertile earth of spring, so these souls are the very same as other souls. God is "the God of the spirits of all flesh." "He hath made of one blood all the inhabitants of the earth." For impressionableness on the Divine side, they are as quick as in enlightened lands: I think, quicker. It is only that as soon as the impression is made "then cometh the devil" with an awful force that is only now beginning to be known in Christian countries, and there is not enough of the Holy Spirit's power to put him to flight. There will be when the showers come!
As yet the soil is dry: the womenkind are a host of locked-up possibilities for good and sadly free possibilities for evil.
The dark side lies in untrueness born of constant fear of the consequence of every trifling act, moral impurity that steeps even the children—wild jealousy that will make them pine away and die if a rival baby comes. Their minds are rife with superstition and fertile in intrigue.
And while all this has full play, unchecked and unheeded, the latent capacities for serving God and man are wasting themselves in uselessness, pressed down by the weight of things. There is something very pathetic in watching the failing brain-power of the girls. Until fourteen or fifteen years they are bright, quick at learning; but then it is like a flower closing, so far as mental effort goes, and soon there is the complaint: "I cannot get hold of it, it goes from me." Once grown up, it is painful to see the labor with which they learn even the alphabet. Imagination, perception, poetry remain, and resourcefulness for good and evil, but apart from God's grace, solid brain power dies. Probably in the unexplored question of heredity lies the clue; for at that age for generations the sorrows and cares of married life have come and stopped mind development till the brain has lost its power of expansion as womanhood comes on. Life is often over, in more senses than one, before they are twenty.
The story comes before me of three warm-hearted maidens who a few years ago belonged to our girls' class: the eldest came but seldom, for she was toiling over shirtmaking for the support of her mother and sister. This sister and a friend made up the trio.
Their mothers were "adherents"—we had hoped at one time more than adherents, but compromise was already winning the day: the daughters had open hearts towards the Lord, all of them in a child-like way.
Where are they now?
They came to marriageable age, and Moslem etiquette required that they should marry. We begged the mothers to wait a while and see if some Christian lads were not forthcoming: but no, fashion binds as much in a Moslem town as in the West End of London.
The eldest girl was carried out fainting from her home to be the wife of a countryman. He was good to her: his mother became madly jealous. Within two years the bride fell into a strange kind of decline; when death came there were symptoms showing that it was from slow poison.
The second to marry was the little friend. At her wedding feast those who had forced the marriage on, drugged her with one of their terrible brain-poisons. The spell worked till she could not bear the sight of us, and hated and denounced Christ.
It wore itself out after a few months and light and love crept back. We went away for the summer. Before we returned she had been put to death by her husband. Through the delirium of the last day and night her one intelligible cry was "Jesus"; so the broken-hearted mother told us. She was an only child.
The third is still alive, a mere girl. She has been divorced twice already from drunken, dissolute husbands. Long intervals of silent melancholy come upon her, intense and dumb, like threatening brain-trouble. She was playful as a kitten five years ago.
Poor little souls—crushed every one of them at sixteen or seventeen under the heel of Islam. Do you wonder that we do not consider it an elevating creed?
And yet they have gone under without tasting the bitterest dregs of a native woman's cup; for (save a baby of the eldest girl's who lived only a few weeks) there were no children in the question. And the woman's deepest anguish begins where they are concerned. For divorce is always hanging over her head. The birth of a daughter when a son had been hoped for, an illness that has become a bit tedious, a bit of caprice or counter-attraction on the husband's part—any of these things may mean that he will "tear the paper" that binds them together, and for eight francs the kadi will set him free. This means that the children will be forced from the mother and knocked about by the next wife that comes on the scene; and the mother-heart will suffer a constant martyrdom from her husband if only divorce can be averted. The Algerian women may claim the boys till seven and the girls till ten or twelve; the countrywomen have no claim after the little life becomes independent of them for existence.
Look at the awful and fierce sadness of this face: more like a wild creature than a woman.[D] She has probably been tossed from home to home until she is left stranded, or wrecked on rocks of unspeakable sin and shame: for that is how it ends, again and again.
Turn from her: we cannot have her to be the last. Look once more at a girl, untroubled as yet. If you want to see what the women could be if but the social yoke of Islam were loosed from their shoulders, study the little maidens upon whom it has not yet come. Take one of them if you can get hold of her—even a stupid one, as this one may be with all her soft grace—let her expand for a few weeks in an atmosphere of love and purity. Watch the awakening: it is as lovely a thing as you could wish to see, outside the kingdom of God.
A Young Girl of the Abu Saad Tribe
And if this budding and blossoming can come with the poor watering of human love, what could it be with the heavenly showers, in their miracle-power of drawing out all that there is in the earth that they visit. Oh the capacities that are there! The soil is "only dry."
And in the very fact of its utter dryness lies our claim upon God. "I will make the shower to come down in his season; there shall be showers of blessing," is His promise. The "season" for the showers in these southern lands, is the time of utmost drought. It is not in July when the gold lingers in the grass, but in September when the tangle of the spring has sunk to ashen gray, ready to crumble at a touch—it is then that we know the rains are nearing. God's "season" comes when all has gone down to despair.
So we look round on our Moslem field, and triumph in the dryness that is so like death, for it shows that we need not have long to wait.
But a great fight is fought overhead in the natural world out here before the rains are set free: the poor dry lands seem to wrestle against the one thing that they need. Before the clouds burst there will come days—weeks, perhaps, off and on—of fierce sirocco, hurling them back as they try to gather. Sometimes they seem on the point of breaking, and a few drops may get through the heavy air, then back go the clouds, leaving the brassy glare undimmed. On the fight goes, and gets only harder and harder, till suddenly the victory is won. The south wind drops, or shifts to the west, and the clouds, laden now with their treasure, mass themselves in the east; then the wind wheels to the east and gets behind them, and in an hour or less, unresisted, they are overhead; unresisted, the windows of heaven are opened, and the rain comes down in floods with a joyful splash, drenching the earth to its depths, and calling to life every hidden potentiality.
A fight like that lies before us in the lands of Islam. It has begun even now; for we have seen again and again the clouds gather and swept back, leaving a few drops at best, and these often quickly dried. They are not yet full of rain, so they do not empty themselves upon the earth.
And it is not from this side that they can be stored: it is not the thirsty earth that can fill them. They travel from afar, where ocean, river, and lake can breathe their vapors upward, swept unseen by the wind that bloweth where it listeth, to the parched places. We need you, in the far-off, Spirit-watered lands to store the showers. You may be but a roadside pool, but your prayer-breath may go up to be gathered in God's clouds and break in His "plentiful rain." When the clouds are full He will still the sirocco blast of evil that fights it back, and it will come down with the sudden swift ease that marks the setting in of the rains here, year by year.
Do we believe that each heaven-sent prayer brings the cloud-burst nearer? That one last cry of faith, somewhere, will set it free? Do we act as if we believed it? Shall we give ourselves to hasten it?
And when it comes, we shall see the latent possibilities awake, and the latent powers assert themselves, and the people of Moslem countries, men and women, show what they can be and do for Him and in His kingdom. For, thank God, they are not dead lands, they are "only dry."