On attaining the age of puberty, Tuareg youths in Air put on the large trousers which all Moslems should wear, and soon afterwards they begin to carry a sword and wear an arm ring. The first event may take place when they reach sixteen or seventeen; the others, two or three years later. As soon as they have put on the dress of a man they are inscribed in the register of the Holy Man of their village or tribe and they commence their individual existence. The veil, however, is sometimes not donned until the mature age of twenty-five years; in no case is it worn until several years have elapsed after the sword is girt on. The ceremony of putting on the veil for the first time is accompanied by much rejoicing in the family and feasting and dancing.
Two aspects of this habit strike one. In the first place the ceremonial significance to which I have already alluded is very apparent, and in the second place the comparatively late age at which the veil first begins to be worn is curious in an Eastern people, where physical development takes place early in life. A parallel may perhaps be noticed in the late date at which marriages take place in Air. I questioned Ahodu closely about these practices connected with the veil, but obtained no satisfactory information: he had nothing to say on the subject except that a man was not a proper man until he had put on the veil. And there, for the moment, one must leave the matter.
The veil will be found wherever the Tuareg live, and only when the riddle of their origin is solved will an explanation probably be forthcoming. Equally obscure is the absence of any reference to the veil among them until the time of the Arab authors. But up to the present no reasonable theory has been advanced.
Mention has been made on several occasions of the Holy Men of Air. As is natural among superstitious people, they have always been a powerful part of the community. In mitigation, it must be said that they have probably had a hard fight to keep the Tuareg in the way of Islam at all. Where Europeans have been concerned their influence has been uncompromisingly hostile. It was certainly the Inisilman, as they are called in Temajegh, of T’intaghoda who tried to have Barth and his companions killed on more than one occasion. The attack on the Foureau-Lamy Mission at Iferuan was also due to them. Their counsel to fall on the French expedition a second time would have prevailed at Agades had it not been for the advice of Ahodu and the common-sense of the Sultan, who replied to their promptings that if the attack failed he would have to face the consequences alone, while they, in the name of God and the Faith, saved their own skins.
With an effete monarch and lazy Añastafidet at Agades, the most important men in Air to-day are Inisilman like Haj Musa of Agellal, Haj Saleh of the Kel Aggata at Agades, Agajida of the Kel Takrizat, ’Umbellu of T’imia, and Abd el Rahman of the Ikazkazan. Their influence is not exerted through sectarian organisations nor has any “tariqa” like that of the Senussi taken root in Air. The Tuareg have repeatedly come under the influence of the Senussiya, especially during the late war, but in Air at least they never became affiliated to the sect. They have continued to regard its tenets as heretical and its policy as selfish.
A certain number of the Air tribes such as the Igdalen, Kel Takrizat, Isherifan, etc., are reputed to be holy. The Igdalen are said not to carry or resort to arms, but use only pens and prayer. It is difficult to ascertain the exact nature of the distinction which they possess over other noble tribes, but the same differentiation is known among other sections of the People of the Veil. They cannot and do not claim descent from the Prophet, nor are their lives any holier or in the main different from those of their fellows. The Kel T’intaghoda who are Inisilman are reputed even in Air to be great scoundrels. The Kel Takrizat are not less warlike than other tribes. Their raison d’être must be sought in the shadowy past to which all problems surrounding the early religion of the Tuareg are still relegated. On this subject too little information is at present available.
The people of Air belong to the Maliki persuasion of Islam, as a result of the teaching of a great leader who came amongst them in the early sixteenth century. His name was Muhammad ben Abd el Kerim el Maghili, surnamed El Baghdadi, and he was the Apostle of Islam in the Central Sudan. El Maghili belonged to Tilemsan and was born either at that place or in Tuat, where he was brought up. He was a contemporary of El Soyuti (A.D. 1445-1505), the Egyptian, whose encyclopædic works were destined to perpetuate Moslem learning of the fifteenth century. El Maghili was a man of bold and enterprising character. By his uncompromising fanaticism he stirred up massacres of the Jews in Tuat, which he eventually left in order to convert the Sudan. He preached in Katsina and in Kano, as well as in Air.[255] “Living in the time when the great Songhai empire began to decline from that pitch of power which it had reached under the energetic sway of Sunni Ali and Muhammad el Haj Askia, and stung by the injustice of Askia Ismail, who refused to punish the murderers of his son, he (El Maghili) turned his eyes on the country where successful resistance had first been made against the all-absorbing power of the Asaki, and turned his steps towards Katsina.” On his way thither he passed through Air, where he preached and gave to those Tuareg who were already Moslems a way of salvation, and to the others the first beginnings of their present Faith. He founded a mosque at Abattul near Auderas, and one of his sons is said to have been buried there; the tomb at least is described as his. A short distance away on the road north from Auderas he knelt to pray in the Erarar n’Dendemu at the point known as Taghist, and the place was marked by a roughly rectangular enclosure of stones with a semi-circular bay in the eastern side near a small tree marking the Qibla. Travellers always stay there to make their prayers by the road. The place is remembered and far-famed as the “Makam el Sheikh ben Abd el Kerim,” but others call it the “Msid Sidi el Baghdadi,” the name by which he is usually known in Air, where men who have lived long in the East often earn this surname. His stay in Air was not entirely peaceable, for he was eventually driven out by these lax Moslems on account of his uncompromising attitude. It is reported traditionally that he was attacked by a party of Aulimmiden in Western Air, but was not apparently killed, for thereafter he again preached in Katsina. He eventually heard that one of his sons had been murdered in Tuat, probably by the Jews, for motives of revenge, and he set out for the north once more, but died before reaching the end of his journey. It is probably to this period that the attack in the west on his person must be referred. His death occurred between A.D. 1530 and 1540. El Maghili left behind him the greatest name of any religious teacher in Air and in the Central Sudan. Twenty volumes of his works on law and theology, in addition to a correspondence in verse and prose with El Soyuti,[256] have survived in various places.
Near the “Makam el Sheikh ben Abd el Kerim,” which is only one of many similar prayer enclosures in Air, are some mounds of loose stones. On every important road such enclosures and mounds may be seen. The simplest form of praying-place is a semi-circular line of stones; the larger places have a rectangular plan like the mosques. Whenever a standing camp is set up, a place of prayer is cleared and marked, and once made these hallowed areas are not disturbed. The mounds of stones by the roadside mark spots where some holy man has stopped to pray or where some equally important but long since forgotten incident has befallen. But although oblivion may have overtaken the event, passing caravans continue to commemorate the place; each man picks up a stone and throws it on the heap. The habit is good, for it clears the paths of loose stones. I acquired much respect by observing the custom scrupulously myself. I made my men do the same, and so assisted in perpetuating a highly commendable and utilitarian practice. Thanks to the many prayers which El Baghdadi must have said all over the neighbourhood, the paths over the Erarar n’Dendemu have been cleared of loose stones. The heaping of stones serves the additional purpose of marking tracks in a difficult country. Where rocks abound or the exact way through a defile is hard to find, it has also become the habit to indicate the way by placing different coloured stones in little heaps on the guiding rocks. It is a superstition that if the traveller does not either add to a mound or help to mark a path, some evil will befall him by the way.
In spite of the proselytising of El Baghdadi and the Holy Men of Air, much of the older Faith remained. They were unable to eradicate the use of the cross. The people are also given at times to using camel bells despite the injunctions of the Prophet, who denounced it as an object associated with Christianity. It is also possible to see in the status of women the practice of monogamy, the ownership of property by women, and the treatment of the wife as her husband’s equal, survivals of a state of society which must in many respects have been regarded by El Baghdadi as heretical and tending towards Christian ideals.
Is there after all any difficulty in accepting the view that the Tuareg were Christians before Islam in the Near East became victorious over all that schismatic and heterogeneous Christianity of the Dark Ages which did so little credit to the religion which we profess? There was a time when the Bishoprics of North Africa were numbered by the score. What was more natural than that Christianity should have spread into the interior? When the Arabs first came into Africa, we are told by Ibn Khaldun and El Bekri that they found in Tunisia and Algeria a majority of the population apparently Christian. Certain “Berber” tribes, however, were Jews, while the Muleththemin, in part, were heathens. The profession of Judaism by people including the inhabitants of the Aures hills, who had Kahena the Queen as their leader in the eighth century A.D., means no more than that they professed some form of monotheism which is not inconsistent with Aryan Christianity. But in any case Christianity was quite sufficiently widespread to have accounted for the survival of certain beliefs among the People of the Veil. Even so remote a part of Africa as Bornu was known to have been subjected to the influence of Coptic Christianity from the Nile Valley, and we have Bello’s testimony that the Gober chiefs were Copts.[257] Why, then, should not the Tuareg have been Christians too?