Turbeh of Sultan Selim II in St. Sophia.
Mohammed.
Speaking of religion, while wandering about the streets and byways of Constantinople I used often to wonder whether, were it not for the voice of the muezzin, Christians would see anything to remind them that there was any difference between the religion of this people and their own. The Byzantine architecture of the mosques makes them seem very like churches; of the Islam rites there is no external evidence; while Turkish soldiers may be seen escorting the viaticum through the streets. An uneducated Christian might remain a year in Constantinople without being aware that Mohammed, not Christ, claimed the allegiance of the greater part of the population; and this led me on to reflect upon the slight nature of the fundamental difference—the blade of grass, as the Abyssinian Christians called it in speaking to the first followers of Mohammed—which divides the two religions, and the trifling cause which led Arabia to adopt Islamism instead of Christianity, or, if not Christianity, at all events something so closely resembling it that, even had it never developed into that outright, it would have seriously altered the destinies of the entire Eastern world. This slight cause was nothing more or less than the voluptuous nature of a certain handsome young Arabian, tall, fair, ardent, with black eyes and musical voice—he lacked the force to dominate his own passions, and so, instead of cutting at the root of his people’s prevailing sin, he contented himself with pruning the branches, and in lieu of proclaiming conjugal unity as he proclaimed the unity of God, merely confined within somewhat narrower bounds, and then proceeded to give the countenance of religion to, the dissolute selfishness of men. No doubt he would have had to encounter a more determined opposition in the one case than in the other, but that it was in his power to succeed who can question when it is remembered that in order to establish the worship of one sole God among a people given over to idolatry he was obliged to first overthrow an enormous superstructure of tradition and superstition, including innumerable grants and privileges all closely interlaced, the result of centuries of growth, and that he made them accept, as one of the dogmas of his religion for which millions of believers subsequently died, a paradise which at its first announcement aroused a universal feeling of scorn and indignation? Unfortunately, however, this handsome young Arab temporized with his passions, and as a consequence the face of half the globe is changed, since polygamy was, without doubt, the besetting vice of his rule and the principal cause of the decadence of all those races who have adopted his religion. It is the degradation of one sex for the benefit of the other, the open sanction of a glaring injustice which disturbs the entire course of human rights, corrupts the rich, oppresses the poor, encourages ignorance, breaks up the family, and by causing endless complications in the rights of birth among the reigning dynasties overturns kingdoms and states, finally placing an insuperable barrier in the way of the union of Mussulman society with the people of other faiths who populate the East. If, to return to the original proposition, that handsome young Arab had only been endowed with a little more strength of character, had the spiritual in his nature but outweighed, by ever so small an amount, the animal, who knows?—perhaps we would now have an Orient orderly, well-governed, and the world be a century nearer universal civilization.
Ramazan.
Happening to be in Constantinople in the month of Ramazân, the ninth month in the Turkish calendar, in which the twenty-eight days’ fast falls, I was able to enjoy every evening a spectacle so exceedingly comical that I think it merits a description. Throughout the entire fast the Turks are forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke from sunrise to sunset. Most of them make it up by feasting all night, but as long as the sun is shining the rule is very generally observed, and no one dares, in public at any rate, to transgress it.
One morning my friend and I went to call upon a friend of ours, a young aide-de-camp of the Sultan, who prided himself upon his liberal views. We found him in one of the rooms on the ground floor of the imperial palace with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Why,” said Yunk, “how do you dare to drink coffee hours after sunrise?” The young man shrugged his shoulders, and remarked carelessly that he did not care a fig for Ramazân or the fast; but just at that moment, a door near by suddenly opening, he was in such a hurry to hide the telltale cup that half its contents were spilled at his feet. One can readily imagine from this incident how rigorously all those must abstain whose entire day is passed beneath the public eye, the boatmen for instance. To get a really good idea of it one should stand on the Sultan Validéh bridge at about sunset. What with the boats at the landings and those which are going from one place to another, the ones near at hand and those in the distance, there must be very nearly a thousand in sight. Every boatman has fasted since sunrise, and by this time is ravenously hungry. His supper is all ready in the käik, and his eyes travel constantly from it to where the sun is nearing the horizon, and then back again, while he has the restless, uneasy air of a wild animal who paces about his cage as the feeding-hour approaches. Sunset is announced by the firing of a gun, and until that signal is heard not so much as a crumb of bread or drop of water crosses the lips of one of them. Sometimes in a retired spot in the Golden Horn we would try to induce our boatman to eat something, but the invariable answer was, “Jok! jok! jok!” (No! no! no!), accompanied by an uneasy gesture toward the western horizon. When the sun gets about halfway down behind the mountains the men begin to finger their pieces of bread, inhaling its smell voluptuously. Then it gets so low that nothing can be seen but a golden arc, and the rowers lay down their oars. Those who are busy and those who are idle, some midway across the Golden Horn, some lying in retired inlets, others on the Bosphorus, others over near the Asiatic shore, others, again, who are plying on the Sea of Marmora, one and all, turning toward the west, remain immovable, their eyes fixed on the fast-disappearing disk with mouth open, kindling eye, and bread firmly clasped in the right hand. Now nothing can be seen but a tiny point of fire: a thousand hunks of bread are held close to a thousand mouths, and then the fiery eye drops out of sight, the cannons thunders, and on the instant thirty-two thousand teeth tear a thousand huge mouthsful from a thousand loaves! But why say a thousand, when in every house and café and restaurant a similar scene is being enacted at precisely the same moment, and for a short time the Turkish city is nothing but a huge monster whose hundred thousand jaws are all tearing and devouring at once?