“Man’s destiny is so precarious that neither your law nor our own appear to me to influence it, or at the best but slightly.
“One of your learned Talebs, or our men of science, as they call themselves, with the due modesty of conscious worth, is passing down a street, and from a house-top slips a tile and falls upon his head. There he lies huddled up, an ugly bundle of old clothes, inert and shapeless, whilst his immortal soul leaves his poor mortal body, without which all its divinity is incomplete; then perhaps after an hour comes back again, and the man staggering to his feet begins to talk about God’s attributes, or about carrying a line of railroad along a precipice.”
The Sherif, who had been listening with the respect that every well-bred Arab gives to the man who has possession of the word, said, “It was so written. The man could not have died or never could have come to life again had it not been Allah’s will.”
His friend smiled grimly and rejoined, “That is so; but as Allah never manifests his will, except in action, just as we act towards a swarm of ants, annihilating some and sparing others as we pass, it does not matter very much what Allah thinks about, as it regards ourselves.”
“When I was young,” slowly said the Sherif, “whilst in the slave trade far away beyond the desert, I met the pagan tribes.
“They had no God . . . like Christians. . . Pardon me, I know you know our phrase: nothing but images of wood.
“Those infidels, who, by the way, were just as apt at a good bargain as if their fathers all had bowed themselves in Christian temple or in mosque, when they received no answer to their prayers, would pull their accursed images down from their shrines, paint them jet black, and hang them from a nail.
“Heathens they were, ignorant even of the name of God, finding their heaven and their hell here upon earth, just like the animals, but . . . sometimes I have thought not quite bereft of reason, for they had not the difficulties you have about the will of Allah and the way in which he works.
“They made their gods themselves, just as we do,” and as he spoke he lowered his voice and peered out of the tent door; “but wiser than ourselves they kept a tight hand on them, and made their will, as far as possible, coincide with their own.
“It is the hour of prayer. . . .