The modern Egyptians’ ideas of unclean things and persons, of the obligation of washing hands before meals, and their practice, while eating, of sitting round the dish and dipping into it, were, we know, very much the same among the Hebrews.
The serpent charmer still charms the adder, as in the Psalmist’s day, with neither more nor less of wisdom.
It was an enactment of the law given by Moses, that if a poor man pawned his clothes, they should be returned to him at sunset, that he might have something to sleep in. So is it with the modern Arab; he passes the night in the clothes he had worn during the day.
Hospitality, the treatment of women, the relation of the sexes, respect for age and for learning, belief in dreams, the arbitrary character of the government, indifference to human suffering, absence of repugnance to take human life, and, indeed, almost all that goes to constitute what is distinctive in the life of a people, is the same now in the East as it was in the earliest days of which we have any record. Some differences, however, and not unimportant ones, are obvious at a glance—as, for instance, that in the organization of society, and the well-being of its members, there has been great and lamentable retrogression. For this our good friends, the Turks, are in no small degree responsible.
The perpetual change among Europeans in great things as well as in small—in manners and customs, in social ideas and practices, in dress, in laws, in ideas and forms of government—indicate the operation of widely different influences.
CHAPTER XXXV.
ARE ALL ORIENTALS MAD?
They hear a voice you cannot hear.
They see a hand you cannot see.—Tickell.
A friend of mine who has resided much among Orientals, and is very familiar with their ways of thinking and acting, is in the habit of affirming that he never had dealings with any one of them without soon discovering in him a loose screw. Every mother’s son of them, he thinks, is, to some degree, and in some way or other, mad. The meaning of this I take to be that their way of looking at, and estimating things, and feeling about them, is different from ours. They see what we cannot, and cannot see what we can. This is, I believe, very much a question of religion.