Five Years in a Persian Town

by Napier Malcolm

From what has been previously said it will be understood that from the missionary point of view there are, when dealing with the Persian, certain peculiar difficulties, and also certain things which tend to make missionary work more easy. We have to deal with a people whose fundamental notions of God and of His dealings with men are absolutely different from our own. I am not now so much speaking of those tenets on which the Mussulman loves to dwell, but rather of those tenets of which he does not think it necessary to speak, which are not so much the objects of his faith, but rather indisputable facts which stand outside the sphere of faith. The difficulty is not so much that the Persian is repelled by our holding contrary ideas; he cannot believe that we hold them; and indeed it is a serious difficulty that in accepting the Persian language we often unconsciously admit the very Mussulman ideas which we intend to attack, and give to the Persian premises upon which he can build his whole argument. To give an illustration; a Persian enquirer will say to the missionary, “Of course you allow that Moses and David were prophets?” The missionary will probably admit this. Now if the Persian has used the most ordinary term for such prophets, that is, the term paighambar, he will naturally suppose that the missionary has admitted the following: first of all, that God sends from time to time men who are appointed by Him to reveal a new law of human action, which, so far as the moral commandments are concerned, has no necessary connection with previous revelation; secondly, that Moses and David gave each of them a sufficient direction to the peoples of their day to enable them to apprehend salvation. In all probability your Mussulman friend will assume that you have granted even more; for instance, that Moses and David were both of them commissioned to invite everyone they came across to accept their religion; and I should be sorry to say that you would not have been supposed to have made other still more impossible admissions.

I do not think that it would be possible to avoid this difficulty by extreme scrupulosity in accepting terms. The result of such hesitation would probably be to puzzle and perplex the sincere enquirer who was genuinely anxious to find out what Christianity really meant. A more possible way out of the difficulty is to take the first opportunity of stating the difference between Mussulman and Christian belief upon these subjects, and I shall perhaps be pardoned for suggesting that such matters ought to be thoroughly thought out beforehand. There are a good many terms that we use in the present day, such as “perpetuity of the moral law,” and “continuity and growth of revelation,” which require very careful analysis before they can be presented to minds which have not been accustomed to the ideas they represent. I have previously compared the mind of the Yezdi to a field-glass of very small range and high power, and have pointed out that the man possessing such a glass sees very clearly within a limited area. The Yezdi is utterly different from the European. The latter looks for a generally consistent system, and, knowing how difficult it is to get such a thing, he is content to find certain points where the agreement has not been thoroughly worked out. The typical Yezdi expects a much more clearly worked out conception of that small number of points which are at one time presented to his range of vision. But when he has turned his glasses in another direction the first set of ideas is blotted out, and the second group as a whole may be absolutely contradictory to the first, so long as it is consistent in itself. The result is that he is absolutely untouched by criticism which appears to the European crushing and final. Then the missionary gets to regard him as an imbecile, and presents to him an idea which he has not clearly thought out himself. The Persian turns the tables on him in a moment, and frequently the missionary is greatly surprised. The only way to meet this difficulty is both to prepare and select your arguments carefully, and, generally speaking, you can never use with the ordinary Shiah Mussulman an argument that contains more than three steps. As to the difficulties of the language, some have been previously mentioned, and to these must be added the entire absence of words conveying certain important conceptions. Perhaps we are not quite so badly off as the missionary to the Esquimaux, who has to explain our Lord’s parables to people who know of hardly any domestic animals at all, and who have never seen a tree; nor is the Persian so intensely dull as the inhabitants of the Indian district where the mirzas declared that the meaning of the “field to bury strangers in” could not possibly be understood unless the strangers were described as dead; but to find a people who are sufficiently advanced to have an elaborate system of psychology, and yet have no term for conscience is a difficulty of almost a new kind. Between this sort of deficiency on the one hand, and on the other the impossibility of forming a sentence with an accurate meaning, or of making the meaning understood when it is formed, the missionary is sometimes inclined to wish the Persian language at the bottom of the sea.

A very similar difficulty is to be found in the absolute denial, especially by the Babis, of any limitations to the use of parabolic language. I can best explain this by instancing a very common Babi argument, by which it is attempted to minimise the extraordinary nature of Christ’s ministry, this being a preparatory step to the advancement of the claims of Behāu’llah. Christ on one occasion said, “Let the dead bury their dead.” In this text it is obvious that the word “dead” refers in one case rather to spiritual than to physical death. Consequently, they say, the miracles of raising the dead to life which are recounted in the Gospels are not to be taken as referring to physical death either. The obvious answer, that parabolic language, when used without any warning and under circumstances that make it certain to be interpreted as literal statement, is simply another name for falsehood, entirely fails to appeal to the Persian mind, even though it is pointed out in addition that, in the stories of the raising of the dead, local colour and special circumstances are added in such a way that the details of the stories do not admit of any intelligible allegoric interpretation.

In meeting this kind of position the difficulty is occasionally increased by the Babi controversialist being aware that certain European objectors hold a very similar opinion about our Lord’s ministry. I think, however, that I am right in saying that no European critic has ever attempted to take up what seems to us the impossible position of accepting the absolute truth and inspiration of the New Testament, which the Babi fully admits, while at the same time trying to explain away the plain statements of the Gospels.

Another difficulty is that some, and those not always the least intelligent, of the Yezdi enquirers mistrust absolutely all reported evidence. This is after all only the logical result of life in a Persian town. To say that a certain point, even the most elementary, such as the fact of our Lord’s appearance in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago, is a matter of history, or is universally acknowledged, means to the Yezdi absolutely nothing. Sometimes, however, when you are able to explain that historical criticism is not an impossibility in Europe, this extreme scepticism partially subsides, particularly when you are able to show that the demand for direct evidence is not altogether impossible to satisfy.

Of course, too, there are difficulties in argument arising from the intense ignorance of the Yezdi, and more particularly from his extremely limited ideas of the size of the world. For instance, when he is repeating the story that the text of the Bible was changed in the time of Mohammed, the verses referring to the prophet being eliminated, it is almost impossible to explain the enormous difficulty that would have attended such a proceeding. This must of course be the case in other places, but I venture to think that the peculiar nature of the Persian desert towns makes this state of mind compatible with a greater degree of intelligence than one would have believed possible.

When everything has been said, the strong attachment felt by the Yezdi to Islam remains the greatest difficulty of all. It has been previously shown that Islam is much more than a creed, and much more than a set of commandments. Behind these things are a number of more or less connected ideas upon the relations of God and man, which have not only been accepted without question for generations, but are considered by the Mussulman to be axiomatic and impossible to call in question. Also around Islam there has grown up a system of domestic and social life and of personal habit, which fills up every moment of the day. Habits of personal cleanliness, the system of cooking food, the fashion of dress, and the method of speech are all more or less connected with Islam. The same thing is true of the more normal amusements of the Yezdi. There is a certain amount of singing and playing which is in direct contravention of Mohammedan law; but the things which in the life of the people take the place of the concert-hall and of the theatre are the ruza-khani, which is the recitation of religious poems by the Mohammedan mulla, and the Muharram festival, which is entirely religious, being a miracle-play depicting the martyrdom of the Imam Husain. Even the more usual street shows, which are presented by story-telling dervishes, are the property of a class possessing a peculiar religious status. Under these circumstances who can wonder that to separate himself from Islam without leaving the country seems to the enquirer almost impossible? Further, he is inclined to say that, if it is possible, it is only to be done by joining himself to the life of the Ferangi household. It is very difficult to explain to the Mussulman that Christianity is not a politico-religious system like Islam, but it is still more difficult to make him understand that a certain amount of the Islamic system can in any way remain lawful to him when he becomes a Christian.

The difficulty is really an enormous one. Men who would be ready to face death, if death was in the air, are not always ready to face boycott and petty persecution, their neighbours regarding them as unclean, and their new co-religionists, though not refusing to associate with them, having apparently no idea of providing them with a new home atmosphere. Those, too, who are dependent on their professions or trades feel that as Christians the friction with Islam will be so great that, even if they are not treated as infidels and at once turned adrift, their seeking of their livelihood will be a daily martyrdom, often extremely distressing to their newly-awakened religious feelings.