It is now necessary for us to touch on some aspects of Mohammedanism in Yezd with which it was impossible to deal fully while sketching the essential system. In the last chapter we were primarily dealing with the religious ideas that had been brought to bear upon the country as influences, but in this chapter we shall speak rather more of their results. First of all, I should like to give two stories. I give the two, because one is the account of a conversation which I had with a man who was not an orthodox Shiah; and, although I fancy I have heard similar remarks made by men whose orthodoxy was unimpeachable, it is well to be on the safe side. I had been challenged to give my reasons for preferring Christianity to Mohammedanism, and in reply I gave an account of a conversation I had had with another Mohammedan only a day or two before. I had been trying to show him that lying was a sin, and he had replied to me: “It’s all very well for Ferangis to say that; but the fact is that they can’t tell lies, and we can.” I quoted this story simply as bringing out very forcibly a common Persian idea, for Persians trust Ferangis implicitly, not because they respect them, but because they believe they have a constitutional difficulty in telling lies. Having quoted it, I went on to say that as we all acknowledged in theory that truth-telling was right, it was reasonable to infer that a religion which had produced a mental constitution supposed to be incapable of falsehood, was better than a religion which had produced the exact contrary. The answer of the Mohammedan was that truth-speaking and honesty had nothing to do with religion, but were purely a matter of climate. “In that case,” I said, “the people of Persia ought to speak the truth very well, for one of the Greek historians who lived before the Mohammedan era declared that the Persians were famous for speaking the truth.” “But who does not know,” said the Mohammedan, “that the climate of a country changes entirely every two thousand years?”
At another time a Mohammedan of undoubted orthodoxy was answering a similar position, only he was trying to explain away not only the difference in honesty, but also in other matters. He said: “These facts cannot be denied, but they prove the truth of Islam, and not its falsity. If you find that thieves have broken the doors and windows of a house, do you not conclude that there is something worth stealing inside?” I have reason to believe that this is a well-known retort, for other Europeans in other parts of Persia have been met by it. It is therefore well worth examination. I myself find in it two assumptions which seem to me to be peculiar features of Islam. First there is the assumption that the possession of the treasure gives no safety to the doors and windows: that is to say that the possession of true religion does not in any way assist the keeping of God’s commandments. The fact is that Mohammed’s commandment is not expected to be a source of spiritual strength, but only a set of orders. Then there is the equally un-Christian assumption that the keeping of the moral commandments of God is in no sense the treasure, but something entirely extraneous to it, which is not essential to the state of the treasure-holder. These two assumptions are to be found running through the whole of Persian Islam, and producing the most extraordinary results. Very few Mohammedans will hesitate to acknowledge the low state of Mussulman morality as opposed to that of the Armenians, or even of the Parsis, whom they regard as little better than idolaters. If a Mussulman of the teacher class has anything to gain by confessing or making it plain to an infidel that he has been guilty of gross sin, he will not consider that he has in the least forfeited his claim to a superior position by doing so.
Of course being non-ethical the religion becomes superstitious. The Mohammedan considers that there is no known principle by which the commands of the Deity can be connected and understood, consequently he admits actions in his religious code which we should regard as ridiculous. The whole theory of Mussulman pilgrimages is absurd, and the practice is even more so. What can be more intrinsically foolish, as well as heartless and cruel, than the custom of sending off the old women, when they are past work, to some holy shrine, under the impression that, if they die on the very difficult journey, as in a certain class of cases they generally do, they will go straight to Heaven? It is rather a ghastly custom to send vast quantities of bodies for interment in the exceedingly inadequate space at Qum, over a country where there is no vehicular transport. But the natural demand for a more easy set of roads to Heaven has caused a multiplication of such practices as these far beyond anything that was originally taught in the mosques. Things have gone so far in this respect, that the most popular edition of the Quran in Persia is a very minute round one in two parts, absolutely illegible, and only suitable for wearing in a sewn-up case.
As in most superstitious countries, we find a number of superstitions connected with divining; and these are largely sanctioned by the mullas, who will divine with the Quran in a mosque for a fee. The commoner form of divining is with a rosary, rather on the plan of “Two, four, six, eight, Mary at the cottage gate.” Persians use this to an extent that is hardly believable. They will consult the beads as to whether to send for the doctor, and again, after he has come, to see whether they should buy the medicine he prescribes, and finally, after buying it, they consult them once more before deciding whether the patient shall take a dose. At the same time it is quite permissible to “call threes.” A woman with raging toothache got permission from the beads to send for a European lady to extract the tooth, but on taking the beads for the extraction after her arrival they were unfavourable, so arrangements were at once made for divining with the Quran at a mosque, which would of course overrule any result with the beads. A Persian will consider himself quite justified in breaking a business engagement if the beads tell him he had better avoid the interview; indeed very often he will not so much as fix a date for the payment of a bill before he has consulted his almanac, and discovered which are the lucky and which are the unlucky days.
CORPSES EN ROUTE TO THE QUM CEMETERY.
SANDY DESERT NEAR YEZD.
The vast empty deserts which surround Yezd, and the huge mountain ridges which form the horizon are to the Yezdi by no means empty. It is an axiom of science that Nature abhors a vacuum, and it is a corresponding psychological law that the human imagination cannot tolerate absolute emptiness. So the Yezdi, like the Arabian, peoples his deserts with jins and dīvs and devils, and wherever there is a space not filled in he imagines strange forms of animal life. At the risk of being considered superstitious myself I must own that I should like to see some of the travellers’ tales of Persia more carefully investigated, particularly those relating to the existence of very large lizards which are dangerous to human life. One is familiar with the defences that are being constantly brought forward for the fable of the sea-serpent; how that the sea is after all an almost unknown waste, only crossed in a very few places by well established water-roads that can be most easily avoided; and although the desert cannot be said to afford as much cover as the ocean, for it is not possible to plunge below the surface at any point at any time, still its vast expanses are almost as untraversed and unknown as the ocean wastes, and there are not a few places, especially in the mountains, honeycombed with caves and clefts. This however is a digression. In such a country as I have described, with its vast and barren solitudes, it would be difficult for a people to exist and maintain their reason, if they did not believe in something corresponding to the jins and divs. Consequently we find jins in the keyholes, jins in the qan’ats, divs in the mountains, divs in the rocks, anywhere, everywhere, a vast population filling up the huge interstices left by Nature. Most of this population is malevolent; so naturally the ordinary Persian is a mass of charms: nobody goes about without cold iron in his pocket, and a large number of people wear either the sacred book in its entirety, or large portions of it somewhere about their person. Also they are terribly afraid of the evil eye; and numbers of their charms, especially for the children, are directed against it. It is not that they think the evil eye common: any Persian will tell you that very few people have it, but they all know of at least one case, and they are terribly afraid of it, sometimes refusing to admit strangers to their house until they are satisfied they have not got it. If a mother sees a dead body before the birth of her child, then, unless she takes the precaution of placing some salt on the corpse, and afterwards putting a little of it in the child’s eye, her child will inevitably have the evil eye, and everything that is pleasing to its eye will be cursed. The evil eye is likely to kill children of tender years, so very young children are always hidden under the chādar when carried in the street.