Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Learning the Koran by heart is education. It is for this that schools are established. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are de luxe, or for certain occupations only. History and science, of course, have no existence to their minds.

They treat the material volume itself, which contains the sacred words, with corresponding respect. For instance, when carrying it they will not allow it to descend below the girdle. They will not place it on the ground, or on a low shelf. They will not, when unclean, touch it. They will not print it for fear of there being something unclean in the ink, the paper, or the printer. They will not sell it to any unbelievers, even to such partial unbelievers as Jews or Christians. And in many other ways, indeed in every way in their power, they endeavour to show how sacred in their eyes is the Book.

In principle and effect it makes no great difference whether the letter of the Sacred Text be exclusively adhered to, or whether it be supplemented by more or less of tradition, and of the interpretations and decisions of certain learned and pious Doctors of the Law. The latter case, as far as the view we are now taking of the action of the system is concerned, would be equivalent only to the addition of a few more chapters to the Sacred Text. The existing generation would equally be barred from doing anything for itself. If the laws of Alfred, or of Edward the Confessor, had been preserved and accepted by ourselves as a heaven-sent code, incapable of addition or improvement; or if the laws of either had been received, with an enlargement of certain traditions, interpretations, and decisions—we should, in either case, equally have lost the practice and the idea of legislating for ourselves: that is to say, we should have lost the invigorating and improving process of incessantly discussing, adapting, and endeavouring to perfect our polity and our code: so that what is now with us the self-acting and highest discipline of the intellect, and of the moral faculty, would have been transformed into the constant and most effectual discipline for their enfeeblement and extinction.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
ORIENTAL PRAYER.

Like one that stands upon a promontory,

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal to his eye.—Shakspeare.

Prayer is still in the East, just what it was of old time, a matter of prescribed words, postures, and repetitions. This, however, is only what it is on the outside, and it is not the outside of anything that keeps it alive, but what is within. It is there we must look for what gives life. We shall be misled, too, again, if in our search for life in this practice we suppose that what prompts it in Orientals must be, precisely, the same as what prompts it in ourselves. Our manifestation of this instinct is somewhat different from theirs. Prayer with them is the bringing the mind into close contact with the ideas of infinitude—infinite power, infinite wisdom, infinite goodness. It calls up within them, by an intense effort of the imagination, their idea of God, just as the same kind of effort calls up within ourselves any image we please. The image called up, whatever it may be, produces certain corresponding sensations and emotions. But none can produce such deep emotions as the idea of God: it moves the whole soul. It is the ultimate concentrated essence of all thought. The man who is brought under its influence is prostrated in abasement, or nerved to patient endurance, or driven into wild fanaticism. It calms and soothes. It fills with light. It puts into a trance. Mental sensations may be pleasurable just as those of the body, and the deeper the sensation the more intense the satisfaction. In their simple religion these attributes of God are really, as well as ostensibly, the nucleus, the soul, of the matter. All things else are merely corollaries to and deductions from them—matter that is evidently very subordinate. Theirs is a religion of one idea, the idea of God. And the calling up within them of this idea is their prayer.

Or we may put this in another way. We may say that prayer is with them the conscious presentation to their minds of certain ideas, and the prostration of their minds before them—namely, the ideas of the different forms of moral perfectness, the idea of intellectual perfectness or complete knowledge, and the idea, belonging to the physical order, of perfect power. Their conception of these ideas is, of course, not identical with ours, but such as their past history, and the existing conditions of Eastern society, enable them to attain to. We can separate this effort of theirs into two parts. First, there is the creation in the mind of these ideas of the several kinds of perfectness; and then there is the effect the holding of them in the mind has on the mind itself. That effect is the production in themselves of a tendency towards making these forms of moral being, such as they have been conceived, instinctive sentiments, and instinctive principles of action.