FOOTNOTES:
[9] Baskets, panniers made of leaves of palm, used in conveying fruits and bread, while heavier articles are carried in bags of leather or skin.
[10] Calender, a sort of privileged beggar or fakir among the Mohammedans, who wore a dress of sheepskin, with a leathern girdle about his loins, and collected alms. A dervish is a poor man, who is not bound by any vow of poverty to abstain from meat, and may relinquish his profession at will.
[11] This may probably be an allusion to the two great divisions prevailing among the Mohammedans, the Soonnis and the Shiites. The former upheld the legitimacy of the three first successions of Mohammed; the latter maintained the right of his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and his descendants, called Fatemites or Ismaelites. They both received the Koran, but the one added to it the Sonna, or certain oral traditions attributed to Mohammed, which the other rejected.
[12] The dog is in great disrepute among the Mohammedans. Mohammed is reported to have said, "No angel enters where a dog is." Cats, on the contrary, are great favorites, and sometimes accompany their masters when they go to their mosque. The Mohammedans are under certain restrictions in food; they are forbidden to eat the hare, wolf, the cat, and all animals forbidden by the law of Moses. The shrimp is forbidden among fish.—Bernard Picard.
[13] This is the ordinary mode in the East of calling the attendants in waiting.
[14] In this manner the apartments of ladies were constantly guarded.—Beckford's Vathek, Notes to p. 204.
[15] Eblis, or Degial, the evil spirit, who, according to the Koran, betrayed Adam to transgression, and yet seeks to inflict injury on his race.
[16] Sir Paul Ricaut gives this account of the dress of the dervish. "Their shirts are of coarse linen, with a white plaid or mantle about their shoulders. Their caps are like the crown of a hat of the largest size. Their legs are always bare, and their breasts open, which some of them burn or scar in token of greater devotion. They wear a leathern girdle, with some shining stone upon the buckle before. They always carry a string of beads, which they call Tesbe, and oftener run them over than our friars do their rosary, at every bead repeating the name of God."—History of Ottoman Empire, p. 263.
"Their order has few rules, except of performing their fantastic rites every Tuesday and Friday. They meet in a large hall, where they all stand with their eyes fixed on the ground, and their arms crossed, while the imaun or preacher reads part of the Koran from a pulpit, and after a short exposition on what he has read, they stand around their superior, and tying their robe, which is very wide, round their waist, begin to turn round with an amazing swiftness, moving fast or slow as the music is played. This lasts above an hour, without any of them showing the least appearance of giddiness, which is not to be wondered at when it is considered they are used to it from their infancy. There were among them some little dervishes, of six or seven years old, who seemed no more disordered by that exercise than the others. At the end of the ceremony they shout out, 'There is no other god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet'; after which they kiss the superior's hand and retire. The whole is performed with the most solemn gravity." Lady M. W. Montague's Letters, vol. ii, p. 43.