Children of Persia

by Mrs. Napier Malcolm

After Ramazān the dispensaries are full of patients who have made themselves ill by fasting all day and overeating themselves at night.

Besides the younger children there are a good many other people who get off the fast. Opium-eaters need not fast; travellers need not fast on a journey; sick people can get a dispensation from a mulla. A great many people take advantage of this, and make a small ailment an excuse for not fasting, but they are supposed to make it up at some other time of year.

If anyone forgets and thoughtlessly breaks his fast no great harm is done, but he must fast an extra day in the year to make up for it. Some people “forget” every day, but such people do not usually make it up at any other time.

Just before Ramazān a good many people are fasting, having put off to the last minute the making-up of the fast days for the previous Ramazān.

People who want to be very good sometimes fast on Saints’ Days too, and one old lady always fasted on the day when Muhammadan tradition says that our Lord Jesus Christ was born.

Another way in which Muhammadans think they can gain merit is by making a pilgrimage to some holy place.

Pilgrimages may be made to any place where a Muhammadan saint is buried, but there are four special places to which the Persians go—Qum, Meshed, Kerbela, and Mecca. Mecca is considered far the greatest place of pilgrimage, because it is the place where Muhammad was born. A pilgrimage to Qum gives the pilgrim no commonly used title, but if he goes to Meshed he becomes Meshedi; if to Kerbela, Kerbelāī; and, if to Mecca, Hājī; and a Hājī always uses his title. In accosting a working-class stranger it is polite to call him Meshedi, and more polite to call him Kerbelāī, but Hājī is too important a title to be used in this way. Quite little boys and girls are sometimes Hājīs—they have been taken to Mecca by their parents.

But the people who most frequently go are the business men and the old people. The business men manage to make a business journey, which will include Mecca, and the old people, old women especially, are often sent as a polite way of getting rid of them when they are cranky and ill-tempered. If they die on the way, they are supposed to go straight to Heaven. A good many do die on the road, which is a very rough one. It reminds one of the man who said of his enemies that he should like to convert them and send them to Heaven before they had time to backslide.

One day in a caravansarai, or native inn, I met a young woman who told me a friend who was going on a pilgrimage had passed through her village and had persuaded her to come too. She was going to walk all the way and trust to charity for food, as many pilgrims do, for it is considered a greater work of merit to give to a pilgrim than to an ordinary beggar. The journey would take several months.

I asked her a few questions.