“But you talk of cruelty: it is such men as Mustafa Pasha, who was one of those who besieged Acre when Abdallah Pasha was firmanlee” (proscribed), “that you should call cruel; he was indeed a sanguinary tyrant. Doctor, he made a noise sometimes like the low growl of a tiger, and his people knew then that blood must flow. It was his custom, when the fit was on him, to send for some poor wretch from prison, and kill him with his own hand. He would then grow calm, smoke his pipe, and seem for a time quieted. But he was a shrewd man, and a clever pasha. He wrote with his own hand (which pashas never do, except on particular occasions) a letter to the Shaykh Beshýr, desiring him to pay marked attention to me. The Shaykh was highly flattered with the distinction shown him.”
The recollection of the Pasha’s civility and the Shaykh Beshýr’s letter recalled her thoughts to what she had proposed to do at the beginning of the evening, which was to write an answer to Sir Gore Ouseley, and to thank the Oriental Translation Fund Society for their present. This was done in a letter from which the following are extracts:—
To the Right Hon. Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart.
Djoun, on Mount Lebanon,
November 20, 1837.
Forgotten by the world, I cannot feel otherwise than much flattered by the mark of attention which it has pleased the society of learned men to honour me with. I must therefore beg leave, in expressing my gratitude, to return them my sincere thanks. You must not suppose that I am the least of an Arabic scholar, for I can neither read nor write one word of that language, and am (without affectation) a great dunce upon some subjects. Having lived part of my life with the greatest philosophers and politicians of the age, I have been able to make this observation, that all of them, however they may dispute and ingeniously reason upon abstruse subjects, have, in moments of confidence, candidly declared that we can go no farther. Here we must stop—all is problematical: therefore I have wished, however it may appear presumptuous, to go farther and remove some of these stumbling-blocks, not by erudition, but by trusting to some happy accident.
It is extraordinary that many of this nature have occurred to me during my residence in the East. First, many proofs of the fallacy of history; next, the denial of many curious facts, which are even scouted as gross superstitions, and are pretended to be doubted, because no one knows how to account for them, but which real knowledge can clearly substantiate. Then there is a gap in history which ought to be filled up with the reign of Malek Sayf (a second King Solomon), and his family, and after him with that of Hamzy, the sort of Messiah of the Druzes, who is expected to return in another form. I once saw a work, which clearly proved the Pyramids to be antediluvian, and that Japhet was aware the deluge was to be partial, as he placed that which was most valuable to him in another quarter of the world.
The Bedoween Arabs may be divided into two distinct classes, original Arabs, and the descendants of Ismael, whose daughter married the ninth descendant of the great Katàn, out of which germ sprang the famous tribe of the Koreish, subdivided into many tribes, and which are a mixture of Hebrew blood. One of the most famous tribes was that of the Beni Hasheniz, from which spring the Boshnàk and the Beni Omeyn, the Irish, always famed for the beauty of their women. The Scotch are likewise Koreish—the nobility descending from the King Al Yem (and his court), father of Gebailuata, who headed the 50,000 horse, when they took their flight from the Hedjáz, after a quarrel with the Caliph Omar. They resided some time in Syria; but, when the town of Gebeili became inadequate to contain their numbers, many took themselves off to the Emperor Herculius,[13] towards Antioch and Tarsus.
You must look over the Scotch titles and names of persons and places, and you will see how many there are, who, it is plain to perceive, are of Arabic origin; and you will soon observe the relation they bear either to circumstances, former employments, propensities, or tastes.
You cannot expect, as when a Frenchman remains forty years in England, and can neither pronounce nor spell a name, that, during such a lapse of time, many of these names should not have undergone changes; but their origin is yet evident.
The Duke of Leinster’s motto (Croom Aboo—his father’s vineyards) has a grand signification, alluding to the most learned of works, of which only two copies exist, and which was not well understood even by the great Ulemas until about five hundred years afterwards, when Shaikh Mohadeen of the Beni Taya found out the key.