The extra amount of food everywhere attracts swarms of flies, and the sticky smell of fruit and meat is rather overpowering, when the temperature is about 106 degrees in the shade. One year I rode round myself and paid calls, but the next time I was wiser and invited the sheikhs and notables to a light meal at the Markaz, after their own solid luncheon, and even then, although showing post-prandial symptoms, they managed to eat very heartily. It was at one of these entertainments that I learnt that the Siwans have special names for people who offend against the strict etiquette of eating. The following are all highly condemned:
The man who turns round and looks to see whether more is coming.
The individual who bites a piece of meat and replaces it in the dish.
The person who blows on his food to cool it.
The one who is undecided and fingers first one piece, then the other.
And finally the visitor who orders about his host’s servants, which I have noticed myself as being a very common habit.
In the afternoon of the mulid the younger men and boys go out into the gardens, where they lie singing and drinking lubki. At dusk the people begin to collect in the open space below the highest part of the old town, round the square, white tomb of Sidi Suliman, which is illuminated with candles and lanterns, and ornamented with banners stuck along the parapet of the roof. Crowds of men keep on passing up the steps and in and out of the tomb, shuffling off their shoes at the entrance and praying at the grave of the saint. Then everybody collects at his own particular mosque, in various parts of the town, and a great “zikr,” a kind of prayer-meeting and religious dance, is held outside the Medinia mosque in the eastern quarter of the town. It is a very wonderful sight, and is attended by four or five hundred devotees.
There is a large, open space outside the mosque surrounded by tall houses, whose little black windows look like gaping eyes, and behind them one catches a glimpse of the tops of palm trees in some gardens darkly silhouetted against the deep blue African sky. The whole scene is flooded with brilliant moonlight, except where the cold, black shadows fall from the high houses. The ground is entirely carpeted with old rugs and mats whose faded colours show dimly in the moonlight; along one side, in front of the mosque, sit the sheikhs and notables of the Medinia sect, and on the other three sides of the square there is a vast congregation of white-robed, seated natives, row upon row of “dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed.” A carpeted space in the centre is kept empty.
Among the shadows of the houses there are more blurred white figures, and in one corner of the square kettles are being boiled on open fires, and men in flowing robes walk to and fro across the light from the flames. There is a subdued murmur of conversation. The first part of the entertainment is a solemn tea-drinking. Dozens of men move about, barefooted and silent, carrying trays and distributing hundreds of little glasses of tea, which is made and poured out by the sheikhs. After everybody has drunk three glasses the low tables in front of the sheikhs are carried away, and the audience becomes absolutely silent. Then the chief sheikh of the Medinia mosque, a handsome, bearded man wearing the green turban, whose looks belie his notoriously bad character, begins intoning verses from the Koran in a sonorous, impressive voice, sitting on the carpet with his hands spread on his knees. When he stops one of the other sheikhs begins, until most of them have had a turn. After this three men step into the space in the centre of the seated audience. One of them is quite a boy with a very beautiful voice, the other two are older men. They walk slowly round and round the square, abreast, singing together a tune which resembles the solemn grandeur of a Gregorian chant, and after each verse the whole audience, several hundred powerful male voices, intone the refrain. It is an intensely impressive performance and one feels thrilled at being the only white man present at such a spectacle. The bright moonlight shines down on the massed ranks of motionless natives whose faces look black, much darker than they actually are, in comparison with their white robes and white skull caps or turbans. For a background there are the high houses, and on the roofs, peering down at the square, a number of heavily veiled women, and “over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded with the eternal stars.”
After some time everybody rises and all the full-grown men close up and form a circle, tightly wedged together. The old sheikh steps into the centre and begins repeating more prayers, quietly at first then with restrained violence. The audience join in, chanting the Mohammedan creed. Gradually the singing grows louder, the voice of the sheikh is drowned, and the ring of white-robed men begin swaying to and fro, backwards and forwards, their voices become hoarse and raucous; every man jerks to and fro in a frenzy of religious excitement, and the prayer becomes a violent repetition of the word “Allah—’la, ’la, ’la.” Then the sheikh who leads the prayer gradually slows down, and the congregation repeat more quietly the Mohammedan creed, “La ilahi illa—llah, wa Mohammed rasul Allah”—there is no deity but God, and Mohammed the prophet of God. The contrast between the performers at the beginning of the zikr, when they are calm and grave, and at its close, when they are hot, dishevelled and exhausted, is very remarkable.