Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

In the world of spirit a religion is a real, organic, living, acting entity. It animates, it subdues, it pervades, it colours, it guides men’s minds and hearts. They breathe it. They feed upon it. They are what it makes them. Now our religion is characterized by liberty. It leaves men to construct their own polities, and to devise for themselves the laws they are to live by. It obliges them to understand that they are the arbiters and the architects of their own fortunes. It leaves them free, from age to age, to battle about, and to construct their own theology, with the certainty that whether the same or different forms are used, it will always in the end be adjusted to the ideas of the age, and even of the individual. It appeals to men’s own ideas of God, which vary as knowledge advances; and to the sense mankind have of what is just, and merciful, and lovely, and of good report. It does not define these things, for it supposes that the ideas of them are in man. It makes the light that is within the measure of duty. One of the general results of such a religion is, that it renders men capable, and desirous, too, of thinking. It produces within them an habitual desire to see things as they are, and to conform their feelings and their conduct to realities.

The system which is most diametrically opposite to this is that which the Oriental has adopted. He has no liberty of any kind. He must think, and feel, and live in accordance with, and every detail of his inner and outer life must be conformed to, what were the ideas of the Arab barbarians of twelve centuries ago. This is the procrustean bed on which the mind of every Oriental is laid. This, then, is what my friend’s nineteenth-century Christianity, or, if you prefer it, his nineteenth-century ideas and feelings, have been brought into contact with—the ideas and feelings of Arab barbarians of twelve centuries ago. It would be somewhat surprising if he did not perceive something of lunacy in the minds of such people.

What struck me in the Oriental was a kind of childishness. Both men and women appeared to be only children of a larger growth. There was an expression of childishness in their features, and there were very perceptible indications of a corresponding condition of their minds. It looked like moral and intellectual arrest. The manhood of the mind had never been called into exercise, and had, in consequence, become aborted. They never think. Why should they? All truth of every kind has already been fully revealed to them. To question what they have received, or to endeavour to attain to more, would be impious. They have hardly any occasion to act, for is it not Allah who directly does everything as it pleases Him, on the earth beneath, as well as in the heaven above?... There is in them a softness of expression which could not co-exist with activity, and firmness, and largeness of brain. Child-like, they believe anything and everything. The more wonderful, and the more contradictory to nature it may be, the more readily do they believe it. They have no idea of extorting the secrets of nature. What good would it do them to seek to know anything or everything? Allah will reveal what He pleases, and when. Such knowledge would not promote their happiness. Their idea of blissfulness is that of the Arab of the Desert. Shade and rest. Plashing fountains and delightful odours. Lovely houris. This is not the stuff that makes men.

Nature also works against them. Much time is needed for the acquisition and digestion of knowledge, and for the growth of the moral and intellectual faculties to what we regard as their full stature. The time, however, allotted to them for these sovereign purposes is very short. Where girls are married women at eleven, what time can there be for the mind to mature itself? Compare this with the many years of deliberate culture amongst ourselves. What can be done by the age of eleven? What should we be if our mental culture and growth ended at that age? But in their case it is so with half the community—the mothers; and so also with the other half—the fathers, only in a somewhat less degree. Of the negroes of the interior Sir Samuel Baker observes that the little children are quick enough, but that mental development appears to have ceased by the age of fourteen. I observed, and heard from several Americans that they had observed, something of the same kind in the negro schools of the United States. Up to an age not quite so advanced as that Sir S. Baker speaks of, the coloured children appear to be as quick as the children of the whites; but beyond that point they begin to fall behind. Their apprehensiveness appears to have exhausted itself. This must doom the black race in the United States, in their struggle with the whites for the means of subsistence, to extinction. Just so, too, must his prematurity always place the Oriental, in the struggle between nations, at a disadvantage in comparison with the European. In him Nature does not allow herself the time for doing what ought to be done.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE KORAN.

An quicquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipiatur.—Lemma.

With respect to the Koran, the Orientals are at this day in the position into which, as respects our Holy Scriptures, an attempt was made to bring our forefathers in the days of mediæval scholasticism. They believe that in their sacred volume is contained all knowledge, either explicitly or implicitly. We have long abandoned definitively this idea. We have come to understand that the New Testament announces itself only as a moral revelation; and of that gives only the spirit, and not the letter; that is to say, that it does not profess to give, and, as a matter of fact, does not contain, a definite system of law, but the principles only which should regulate such a system. It leaves us, therefore, to go not only for our astronomy to astronomers, and for our geology to geologists, but also for our municipal law to jurists and legislators, so long as what they propound and enact is not at discord with Christian principles. The Mahomedan, however, has not this liberty, for the Koran professes to contain an all-embracing and sufficient code. It regulates everything. This is very unfortunate; or, whatever it was at first, it has, in process of time, come to be very unfortunate; for it makes the ideas—what we must regard as the ignorance rather than the knowledge—of a more than half-savage Arab of the seventh century the rule by which everything in law, life, and thought is to be measured for all time.

While I was in the East I was full of commiseration for the people I saw bound hand and foot in this way. They are handsome, clean-limbed fellows, and quick-witted enough. There is in them the making of great nations. Power, however, is an attribute of mind, and mind cannot work unless it be free. While I commiserated them, I saw no hope for them. The evil they are afflicted by appears not to admit of a remedy; because while, for men who have advanced so far as they have, it is intellectual suicide to be faithful to such a religion, to be unfaithful to it has hitherto proved to be moral suicide.

Their ideas and sentiments on all the ordinary concerns and events of life, and, in short, on all subjects, are the same in all, all being drawn from the same source. So also are even their very modes of expression. There is a prescribed form for everything that occurs; of course, not drawn, in every instance, first-hand from the Koran, but, at all events, ultimately from it, for these expressions are what have come to be adopted by the people universally, as being most in harmony with the spirit and ideas of the Book. The words to be used at meetings and at partings, under all circumstances; the words in which unbecoming acts and sentiments are to be corrected and acknowledged; the words, in short, which are appropriate to every occasion of life, are all prescribed, and laid up in the memory, ready for use. God’s name is rarely omitted in these formulæ, reference being made sometimes to one of His attributes, sometimes to another, as the occasion may require. Sometimes a pious sentiment is to be expressed; sometimes a pious ejaculation will be the correct thing. But everybody knows what is to be said on every occurrence, great or small, of life.