Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The pilgrimage to Meccah occupies a large place in the thoughts, and is the great event in the life of every true believer; and where the faith is so elementary, so much reduced to the very simplest expression of belief, all are believers. The great event of the year at Cairo, is the return of the caravan of pilgrims from Meccah. The whole city is moved. Many go out to welcome back the happy saints. At no other time are men, or women, so demonstrative. In these days, no Christian people, except the lower classes in Russia, have the ideas which produce these emotions. No others are, speaking of the bulk of the people generally, in the pilgrim condition of mind. There was, however, a time when, in this matter, we were all alike. The pilgrim staff and shell were then as common, and as much valued, in England as elsewhere.

We now ask how these ideas came to exist in men’s minds? An equally pertinent question is how they became extinct? The answer to either will be the answer to both. A little vivisection, which may be practised on the mind of the modern Arab, will reveal to us the secret. On dissecting it we find that it is in that state in which the distinction between things moral and spiritual on the one side, and things physical on the other, has not yet been made. These two classes of ideas are in his mind in a state of intimate fluid commixture. There is a vast difference here between the mind of the Arab and that of the European, excepting of course from the latter a large part of the Greek communion, and some small fractions of the most behindhand of the Latin. With us these two classes of ideas have become disentangled, and have separated themselves from each other. Each has crystallized into its own proper form, and retired into its own proper domain. Hence it is that the idea of the value of pilgrimages still holds its ground amongst them, but has disappeared from amongst us.

It belongs to precisely the same class of ideas as the belief that if a man drinks the ink, with which a text of the Koran has been written, dissolved in a cup of water, he will be thereby spiritually benefited; that bodily uncleanness injuriously affects the soul; that having eaten some particles of dust from the Prophet’s tomb makes you a better man; or to take the process reversely, that the thoughts of an envious or covetous man (the evil eye), will do you some bodily hurt; or that Ghouls and Afreets—creatures of your mind—feed on dead bodies, and throw stones at you from the house-top. When our Christian ancestors were in the same stage of mental progress, similar beliefs, or rather confusions of ideas, some precisely the same, were manifested in them. A great advance has been made when men have come to see that what defiles is not what goes in at the mouth, but what comes from the heart. This has a wide application; at all events men, when it is seen, go no more pilgrimages.

I went up to Jerusalem with the ideas about pilgrimages I have just set down stirring in my mind. My object in going was that I might be enabled the better to understand history by making myself acquainted with the very scenes on which it had been enacted. I wished to become familiar with those peculiar local aspects, and influences of nature, which had gone some way towards forming the character of those who had made the history, and which had, indeed, themselves had in this way much to do with the making of it. Nothing could be further from the pilgrim condition of mind. I believe, however, that I did not come away with my (as some would call it) cold-blooded philosophy quite untouched. True, I turned with repugnance from the scenes that presented themselves around the supposed Holy Sepulchre. I felt commiseration, mingled in some sort with respect, for the prostrations, the tears, the hysterical sobs of the poor Greek, Armenian, and Latin pilgrims. I contemplated them for a time, till feelings of pain preponderated, which, as I turned away, were exchanged only for feelings of disgust as I saw the priests, and thought of their frauds, their greed, their indifference, their dirt, and their mutual animosities. I again had to repress the same feelings in the Garden of Gethsemane, when I found it in possession of some unusually begrimed monks, who had enclosed it with a wall ten feet high, and without a single opening through which the eye could catch a glimpse of the interior; and who only admitted you in the hope of backsheesh. Still the pilgrim feeling grew upon me. I had crossed the Brook Kedron to a place where there had been a garden; I had stood in what had been the courts of the temple, and where had been the temple itself; I had looked on the goodly stones of the substructures of the temple, I had beheld the city from the Mount of Olives. In my walks round the walls I had stood on the rock, somewhere at the north-west angle, where the Light of the world had sealed His truth with His life-blood. Imagination on the spot had recalled the particulars of the scene. Day by day I was conscious that the pilgrim feeling was gaining strength within me. And now that I am quietly at home again, I can hardly persuade myself but that I am in a different position from what I was in before: I can hardly think that I am just as other men are—that all this is nothing. I have trodden the same ground, I have been warmed by the same sun, and I have breathed the same air, as He. I have looked on the same objects, and they have impressed on my brain the same images as on His.

But we must get over these pilgrim feelings—we must not allow ourselves to be juggled and cheated by the old confusion of things physical with things spiritual. It is not poetry to put the chaff for the corn. There is no talisman like truth. He is not there: nor are we the nearer to Him for being there. He still exists for us in His words. The thought, the spirit that is in them we can take into our hearts and minds. This is truly to be very near to Him; this is to be one with Him. This is a pilgrimage all can go, and which really saves.

CHAPTER XXXIX.
ARAB SUPERSTITIONS.—THE EVIL EYE.

Many an amulet and charm

That would do neither good nor harm.—Hudibras.