Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

by C. R. Conder

It was no less than four hundred years after the death of Mohammed that Togrul Bey, of the Turkish race of the Seljuks, defeated the Khalif Mahmud and usurped the position of Emîr el Omara, becoming virtually the protector of the monarch whose religious supremacy he admitted and whose faith he adopted. It is from this origin that the dynasty of the present Turkish Sultan traces its descent; and the right to be considered the “Khalif” or “successor” of the Prophet in the eyes of all the Sunni Moslems was thus derived originally from the sword. We have already had more than one indication of the discredit which has lately overtaken the pretensions of the usurper, whose claims to be regarded as the spiritual head of Islam are founded on no surer basis than that of the Czar, whose religious supremacy is derived from the usurpation of the Russian patriarchal dignity by Peter the Great.

It must not be forgotten, moreover, that in Arabia are still to be found the germs of a revolutionary movement among the Wahabi princes of the Nejed. The desert puritans were indeed discouraged by the persecution of Mohammed Aly, but the anti-Turkish sentiment of the revival is an element of considerable danger to the supremacy of the Sultan; and it needs but slight discernment to feel assured, that when next Turkey finds herself engaged in a struggle for existence in Europe, the opportunity will have arrived which will be eagerly seized by the Arab and the Syrian alike to shake off the hated yoke of their Turanian masters. We may perhaps see more than one Moslem state rising on the ruins of Turkish decadence, and from Persia to the Mediterranean, from Aden to the Taurus, the emancipation of Semitic nationalities must either accompany or immediately follow the self-liberation of Slavs and Greeks in Europe.

To such a future for Syria England might well look forward with satisfaction. Among the sturdy peasantry and warlike nomads of Palestine and the desert, she might find allies of extreme value in the great task of defending the communications with her Indian Empire. Military authorities are not wanting who believe in the further advance of Russia on the Euphrates, and on the Syrian shores of the Mediterranean, an advance to which England could not remain indifferent. It is in the hatred of Greek Christianity and of Russian cruelty among the Moslems of Arab race that our hope of organising an effective resistance must lie. Turkish weakness and corruption lays the present rulers of Syria open to the designs of her worst enemy, but a strong and patriotic Moslem government would no doubt reflect those feelings of friendship and admiration with regard to England which are so commonly expressed among the natives of Syria; and the value of such an ally in defence of our two highways to India, by the Red Sea and the Euphrates, would be beyond calculation.

The policy which has been pursued by the Turks towards the great families of their Asiatic possessions has become the nemesis of their tyranny. Hidden in the country districts among the mountains and in the more remote villages, the great families of Sheikhs and Emîrs still linger in decay. In the preceding chapters we have made acquaintance with some of these native chiefs: the Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem, the Jerrâr north of Nâblus, the Jiyûsi at Kûr, the Zeidanîyin in Galilee. Driven from power, plundered and oppressed, still respected by the peasantry, and still mindful of their past history, these native leaders must constitute a danger to the state in the present decadence of Turkish power, and form the nucleus round which the rebellion of Syria might gather. Had the Sultan been able in time of need to call round him these descendants of a feudal aristocracy, he might have counted on the devotion of his subjects. The mongrel caste of the present Pachas, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Jews, Levantines, and renegades of every nationality, can only be trusted to care for their personal interests in the great impending catastrophe.

The history of the Turks has been that of an uncivilised, a cruel, and a rapacious race, whose transitory conquests were due to the decay of a superior civilisation, and whose literature, religion, and law have all been stolen from the conquered Arab. The history of the Arab race has been that of a progressive and intelligent people of peculiar genius, whose civilisation is founded on the most ancient civilisation of Asia; a commercial race, moreover, of hardy traders who, from the earliest times, have explored for the rest of the trading nations of the world the great highways of commerce in unknown lands.

When first the conquering armies of Islam marched forth from the desert to the Euphrates and to Syria, they were no further advanced in civilisation, in art, or in science, than the Bedawi of our own times, but the capacity of the race was evinced by the rapid assimilation of all that was most valuable in the civilisation of the lands they conquered, and of the neighbouring kingdoms of Persia and India. The earliest efforts of Arab architecture under the Ommîyeh Khalifs may be contrasted with the glorious and original style of Saracenic art in Spain as an indication of the genius which so rapidly surpassed the clumsy art of the Byzantine Empire.

As early as the time of Aly, the fourth Khalif, the study of grammar, which the Arabs have raised to the rank of a fine art, had commenced, and historians recorded the victories of the faithful in the days of Othman. Under Walid, coins were struck, and works on astronomy and philosophy translated into Arabic. It was only about 200 years after the death of Mohammed that Baghdad became the centre of the science and literature of the east under the glorious family of Abbas; and thus at a time when Europe was still plunged in barbarism, and England not as yet a nation, the Arabs had become the teachers of mankind, and the guardians of our most precious sciences.

The glories of the great age of Arab literature and civilisation are almost forgotten by those who have most reason to remember their obligation to this gifted race. A just government, a polite and learned society, a tolerant creed and a wide-spread trade, were the distinctive features of the rule of the Abbasside Khalifs of Baghdad in the ninth century of our era, when Harûn-er-Rashid sent an embassy to Charlemagne in France.

The water-clock measured time in the capital of his empire a century before the horn lamps of Alfred were invented, and a golden age of literature had commenced at Baghdad in the time of Mamûn, when grammar, poetry, music, history, archæology, astronomy, and mathematics were studied, more than a century before its influence was extended through the Arab colleges of Spain to the distant shores of Italy, France, and England.

The progress which had been made in the ninth century in the great science of astronomy by the learned men who flourished at Baghdad, “the City of Peace,” is evidenced by the fact that an arc of the meridian was then measured in more than one place; and the Arab power of assimilating the learning of other races is illustrated by the translations of El Fahdl, for Mamûn, of the Persian and Greek works found in conquered cities. Syriac, Sanscrit, and Chaldee manuscripts were in like manner ransacked in the search for knowledge, and a great observatory was built at Baghdad in the same century.