From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Their difficulties, however, did not proceed from the followers of Mohammed so much as from lack of material resources and from the paucity of subjects for the ever-expanding work of the mission. So many calls were made on their charity by the poor that they were at times forced to live on only a single piece of dry bread a day, with nothing to flavor it but a small clove of garlic. Then both priests and bishops were decimated by the plague while ministering at the bedside of the stricken members of their flock. On one occasion the Carmelite superior of Bagdad saw himself without any assistants whatever. Age and disease had taken them all from him one after another. In this extremity he wrote letter after letter to his superior general in Rome, conjuring him to send him men. “I have none, was the general’s answer; if you want them, come and seek them.”

The superior, Father Marie-Joseph, took the general at his word. Poor as Job, he borrowed money enough to hire a camel and alone, with a single Arab and a sack of dates and a leather bottle of water, he started for Aleppo on the long journey—nearly eight hundred miles—through the inhospitable Arabian and Syrian deserts. Twice his alertness and eloquence saved him from bands of marauding Bedouins. But, finally, after untold difficulties and sufferings he reached Aleppo and Rome. His superior general in the Eternal City was so impressed by the magnificent audacity of the zealous missionary that he found a means of procuring for him the assistants he so much needed and sent him back to his flock rejoicing. Among these assistants was Father Damien, formerly a practicing physician, who soon proved to be a godsend to the suffering poor of Bagdad, whom he gladly treated and supplied with medicine without any compensation whatever.[422]

As in the missions of Edessa and Mosul, the missionaries of Bagdad are nobly assisted in their moral and civilizing work by devoted nuns from France. But the life of these devoted sisters is one of the greatest self-sacrifice. They may not, as did the Carmelite priests, have attempted to imitate St. Peter of Alcantara, who took but one repast and that of the most frugal kind, only once every three days; but the privations which they for years had to endure would daunt all but the most courageous souls. Even before they reached the scene of their missionary activities they had to pass through an experience that, for delicately reared women as they were, was truly disheartening for any but those engaged in the service of the Master. This was their long journey on horseback—in great part—through a wild and forbidding desert from Beirut to Bagdad. They were twenty-four days in the saddle. The nights they had to spend in the filthy, noisy, dilapidated caravansaries which were scarcely fit shelter for the beasts that carried them. And yet these heroic religieuses always maintained the same cheerfulness during this long and trying journey as ever characterizes them in the performance of their arduous labors in the schoolroom and at the bedside of the sick and suffering.[423]

But the labors of these ardent souls is not without compensation, even in this world. Notwithstanding all the drawbacks that confront them they have the comfort of knowing that their sacrifices are not in vain. The number of their pupils, Mohammedans and Jews, as well as Christians of all the numerous rites in Mesopotamia, is so rapidly augmenting, that it is difficult for the good nuns to house them and secure enough teachers to take care of them. For, in addition to the ordinary branches of an elementary education, they teach their young charges various kinds of needlework and the simpler principles of domestic economy.

“The children of Bagdad are very bright and very eager to learn,” said one of the sisters to me in answer to a question I had asked, “and nowhere will you find pupils who are more studious or more grateful for the opportunities they have of improving their minds. Our great grief is that our school-buildings are not larger and that we have not more sisters to meet the constantly increasing demands that are made on us in our class-rooms. But,” she said, in sweet resignation, “the Bon Dieu will provide in His own good time.”

Never before did I so much regret that I was not a millionaire as I did when I visited the schools of these perfervid and laborious religieuses and saw what splendid results they were achieving with the very limited resources at their disposal and learned how much more they could accomplish if they had the necessary means. If the good and generous people of America could only realize the noble work which the good Sisters of the Presentation are achieving in Bagdad and how very worthy they are of assistance, I am sure that many would open wide their purses for the benefit of both teachers and pupils. I know of few places where money could be spent to better purpose. When one remembers that these ardent souls are condemned to perpetual exile by the atrocious Association Laws of their mother country and that they frequently lack the ordinary necessities of life because they are unable to reach a public that would gladly succor them in their needs and coöperate with them in their admirable work, one cannot help sympathizing with them and feel that it is one’s duty to help them in every way possible.

The school for boys under the direction of the Carmelite Fathers is recognized as the best in Bagdad. It, with the church and monastery of the Fathers, occupies a capital position in the center of the city and is pronounced by foreigners to be “a French oasis in the midst of the desert.”

It will interest the reader to know that the study of French is obligatory from the lowest to the highest classes of the school. The result is that many of the pupils speak the language with wonderful facility and correctness. At the commencement exercises at the end of the year they exhibit their proficiency before a large audience made up of the élite of the city by giving a play from Racine. It is in consequence of their thorough knowledge of the language of Molière and Bossuet that after leaving school they are given high positions in the leading houses of commerce and in all the administrative offices of the government. The traveler is often surprised at the extent to which French is spoken in the Near East; but when one remembers that the schools and colleges in the Ottoman Empire, which are under the direction of French priests, sisters, and laymen are numbered by the thousand, the wonder ceases. It is for this reason that the empire is, in the words of Pierre Loti—presque un pays de langue française—almost a country of the French language.[424]

The missionaries in Bagdad—from the Archbishop down to the humblest nun—are greatly attached to the city in which Divine Providence has called them to labor and—to suffer. Not the least reason for this attachment is the glorious position which Bagdad so long occupied in the history of the world. Until the late war the average reader knew little about it except that it was in some way associated with the “Arabian Nights.” And this association was so vague in his mind that he was not sure whether Bagdad ever had an actual existence or whether it, like the famous characters in Thousand and One Nights, belonged only to fable land.

For this reason it seems this chapter would be incomplete without some account of the famous city which, during five hundred years, was the capital of the Abbasside Caliphs; which, there is reason to believe, was for a considerable period the largest city in the world; which, during many centuries bore rule from the Oxus to the Nile and from the Caucasus to the Gulf of Oman; and which, during a half millennium, was to Islam what Rome is to Christendom.