Talking of the Deluge reminds me of the pigeons that strut about the floor of the Harem or wing their flight above its sacred buildings. They are the prettiest birds imaginable, and so tame that they will come and perch on the pilgrims’ shoulders and feed out of their hands. In colour they are of a blueish brown, with deeper spots of the same colour on their breasts and backs. They have grey rings round their necks, and their wings are streaked with black lines. A traditionist says that to feed one of these birds is to ensure to one’s self a sumptuous palace in heaven; whereas to kill one of them is as bad as committing homicide, and meets with the same punishment hereafter. The consequence of this belief is that there are crowds of women whose business it is to sell grain to the pilgrims for the Harem pigeons, about twenty grains of wheat in a box costing not less than one piastre. The tradition was that the pigeons never alighted on the domes and minarets of the Harem, but hovered above them, like guardian angels. The fact that the sanctuaries now stand in frequent need of whitewashing is taken to be a proof of the growing wickedness of the people, and a certain sign that the Day of Judgment is at hand.
A MOORISH GENTLEMAN IN MOORISH DRESS.
On entering the Harem all men are equal, all privileges of rank must be waived. The most despotic Oriental ruler has no power over his fellows there. Even the Hereditary Sheríf of Mecca must be as courteous to his servants or his slaves as he would be to the Sultan of Turkey were he present. Everybody is come to worship his Creator, the Ruler Supreme over empires and republics, and so all distinctions of rank are laid aside. The Prophet, wise in his generation beyond all men, was the first to protect the helpless against despotism by ruling the conduct of human affairs through the principle of religious equality. But for his laws the lower classes of the East would have been at the mercy of their co-religionists of the higher castes. If the Prophet alternately cajoled and coerced the superstitious to be virtuous and meek by the promise of a material Paradise and by the fear of a material Hell, what then? He sought merely to achieve his end through the weaknesses of the natural man, knowing that there is nothing that men covet more than the permanent pleasures which satiate human passions, and nothing that they had rather shun than a punishment which endures for ever. The spirit of his teaching and his laws, however, was anything but material. It made for unity and fraternity and equality, and the consequence was that in the early days of the Faith his followers were inspired by the noblest aspirations of the mind and heart. And as for the corporeal joys of Paradise they knew that these were not the highest their Prophet had promised to them, for they hoped to attain to that most blessed degree of heavenly felicity which is reserved for the Faithful who are found worthy to behold God’s face from the rising of the sun till the going down of the same. The case is otherwise with the majority of the Muhammadans of to-day. For their country and their countrymen they take too little thought, each one of them beseeching God to shower His favours on himself or herself alone. The priests of the Golden Age of the Faith sat on a camel or stood on a high hill and preached, not on form but on spirit. Their watchword was unity—unity of religion under the banner of faith and charity. To-day, on the contrary, the Mullás of Mecca mount a pulpit and air their erudition, that is, their knowledge of the traditions, as they interpret them according to their respective schools, and end with a few wandering, lifeless sentences in condemnation of all heretics, in contempt of this life, and in praise of the world to come. A philosopher would consider their sermons ridiculous. The freethinkers of the times of ’Omar and ’Alí had no sound excuse for raising their voices against the priests, who were then the guides of the mind as well as those of the conduct. But the wonder now is that a Faithful can be found to obey the behests of these tradition-ridden miracle-mongers, who do nothing to lessen the breach between the sects, but leave the more enlightened laymen to lead the way to reunion.
Muhammad set these miracle-mongers a good example. For we read that when Muaz was appointed Governor of Yemen he was asked by the Prophet by what rule he would be guided in the administration of the province. “By the law of the Kurán,” said Muaz. “But if you find no direction therein?” “Then I will act according to the example of the Prophet.” “But if that fails?” “Then I will exercise my own judgment.” Muhammad not only approved of the answer of his follower, but also advised his other representatives to follow the same rule of conduct. That rule ought to be written over the door of every mosque in Islám. My Meccan experiences prove this, that the faith of the priest is stagnant from the want of the breath of reason. In its decadence Islám is priest-begotten and priest-ridden. In its purity it was full of the spirit of the Holy Ghost, a religion simple and sincere, whereof such men as ’Alí and ’Omar were made. The founder would be the first to cleanse the minds of his present-day disciples of the false traditions that have been ascribed to him. He would bid them look up, facing the light, and setting their thoughts free to soar. In his lifetime he, believing “God to be more loving to His servants than the mother to her young,” fought strenuously and with a patience almost sublime to overcome the corrupt and idolatrous practices of his fellow-countrymen of the time of Ignorance. Not otherwise would he fight to-day in order to free his co-religionists from the ever-permeating spread of the priestly misinterpretations of his message. His voice would be raised to proclaim the right of every man to reject what is unreasonable in the dictations of the priests. “Knowledge,” said he on one occasion, “is our friend in the desert, our companion when friendless, our ornament among friends, our armour against our enemies.... To listen to the words of the learned and to inculcate the lessons of science is of more value than religious exercises.”
Now, a religion which is lively to-day chiefly through the appeal it can make to what is corporeal and comfortable, as is undoubtedly the case with Islámism at the present time, stands in sore need of a spiritual reformer, the more so because its spirit is still alive, in the pages of the Kurán and in the memory of the mighty dead. Many Muslims still seek the name, and are diligent in seeking it, but they less often try to find the object, forgetting that the moon is not in the stream but in the sky. “He, God, is the Enduring, and all else passeth away”—all except such futile traditions as, heaven knows, are dead enough to have earned a decent burial, and the arbitrary ruling of the priests, to whose pernicious influence there would appear to be no limit. The hearts of these unrighteous stewards deserve to be branded with the two matchless odes, admirably translated by Professor Browne, of Cambridge University, which are inscribed on the tomb of Háfiz, in an orange garden at Shíráz, the two first lines of which run:
“Where is the good tidings of union with Thee? for I will rise up with my whole heart;
I am a bird of Paradise, and I will soar upwards from the snare of the world.”
And again:
“O heart, be the slave of the King of the World, and be a king!