"Remove the veil from your women," he said. "At the beginning it was the badge of shame. What says the Koran? 'O Prophet, speak to thy wives and thy daughters that they let their wrappers fall so that they may not be affronted.'
"Dismiss the madness of a bygone age that woman is inferior to man. We are all children of one mother. What says the Prophet? 'Paradise lies under the feet of mothers.' The proverb of our people says, 'The threshold weeps for forty days when a girl is born,' but I tell you the stars sing for joy and the dry wells of the desert spring afresh. Man's dominion over woman is the product of darkness—put it away. O my brothers, woman's suffering in the world is so great that if she does not cry aloud the mountains themselves will groan."
If Ishmael's teaching offended certain of the men, it attracted great multitudes of the women, many of whom laid aside their veils to come to him, and among others that came were a number of black girls from Omdurman who were known to have been the paramours of British and Egyptian soldiers at Khartoum. His bearing towards these girls had that shy tenderness which is peculiar to the pure-minded man in his dealings with erring women, and when some of his followers grumbled at his intercourse with such notorious sinners he told them a story of the Lord Isa (Jesus).
It was the story of His visit to the rich man's house, and of the sinful woman who did not cease to wash His feet with her tears and to dry them with the hair of her head.
"Shall I be less charitable than the Lord of the Christians?" he asked, and the choking pathos of his story silenced everybody.
In his preaching he turned for ever to the prophets—the prophet Abraham, the prophet Moses, the prophet Mohammed, and above all, the prophet Isa. He called Jesus the divine teacher of Judæa, one of the great brother souls.
"Only a poor Jewish man," he said, with a memory of his own that none might share, "only a poor carpenter, but perhaps the greatest and noblest spirit save one that ever lived in the world."
Thus, evening after evening, when the blazing sun had gone down, Ishmael sat on the angerib in front of his uncle's house and taught the ever-increasing crowds that squatted before him on the brown and yellow sand. The heat and flame of his teaching burnt itself into the wild Arab souls of the great body of his hearers, but there were some among his own people who asked—
"Is not this the Ishmael Ameer who denounced the Christians as the corrupters of our faith?"
And there were others who answered—