The Russians at present hold Bokhara very lightly, but will no doubt tighten their hands on it later, as they are taking the solidification of their Central Asian Empire very seriously. At present there are no passports, and there is mixed money; but passports are coming in, and the banks are taking up all the ancient Sartish bits they can get and giving Russian silver in exchange. There are several Russian banks within the city walls, and they have a great influence. The Emir is friendly towards Russia, and is a pompous figure at the Russian Court, though it is rumoured that in his native palaces he whiles the long empty day away by playing such elementary card games as durak, snap, and happy family. The Russians have permission to build schools in the city, and the Russian bricklayer is to be seen at work with trowel and line, whilst the native navvy carries the hod to and fro. The foreign goods in the bazaar are mostly cotton, and if you examine the splendidly gay prints that go to form the clothing of the natives you find it is all marked Moscow manufacture. The Bokharese merchants go to Nizhni Fair not only to sell, but to buy. There are no English in the streets, no tourists, no Americans. Indeed, I asked myself once in wonder: Where are the Americans? The only people in Western attire are commercial travellers (commerçants), and they are mostly Russians or Armenians, though Germans are occasionally to be seen. I noticed knots of these men discussing prices of horsehair, wool, oil-cake, carpets, silks. It should be remembered that that district is more justly famous for its carpets than for its silks. The best carpets in the world are made by the Tekintsi. Armenians, Turkomans and Persians work in whole villages and settlements in Transcaspia making carpets with needle and loom. They have the original tradition of carpet-making, a sense for the particular art of weaving those wonderful patterns of Persia, and for them a carpet is not a covering on which it could be possible to imagine a man walking with muddy boots; it is for dainty naked feet in the harem, or it is a whole picture to be hung on a wall, not thrown on the floor. Singer’s sewing machines are, of course, installed at Bokhara; they are in every town in the wide world. The cinema also has come, and a green poster announces that the Tango will be shown after the presentation of a striking comedy called “The Suffragette.”
But what does this really matter? Let us ask the deliberate stork, standing on one leg on the height of the mosque of Lava-Khedei. The mosque tower has a clock, and the stork seems to be trying to read the time. But he will give no answer, nor will the Mussulmans below; they also are scanning the wall to see if it is nearer the hour to pray. And the clock, be it observed, is not set by Petrograd time.
IV
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES AND MOHAMMEDANISM
THE consideration of the wonderful Moslem cities, Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem and Bokhara, with their marvellous blending of colours, their characteristic covered ways and bazaars, their great spreads of lace and silk and carpets, slippers, fezes, turbans, copper ware, their gloomy stone ways and close courts, their blind houses, made windowless that their women be not seen, their great mosques and splendid tombs, inevitably suggests a great question of the East. What is Mohammedanism, what does it mean? At Cairo and Jerusalem, and even at Constantinople, it is possible to doubt the real nature of the Moslem world; it seems a makeshift world giving way readily to Western influence, or, in any case, reproved by the more splendid and vital institutions of the West standing side by side with many shabby and wretched phenomena of the East.
But Bokhara is a perfect place. It is much more remote even than Delhi, and is almost untouched, unaffected by Western life. It is a city of a dream, and if a magician wished to transport some modern Aladdin to a fairy city, where there would be nothing recognisable and yet everything would be beautiful and bewildering, he need only bring him to the walls of Bokhara. Through Bokhara and its undisturbed peace and beauty, one obtains a new vision of Mohammedanism, and it becomes absurd to think that the real Moslem world is of the same pattern as the Westernised and yet strangely picturesque cities with which we are familiar. We remember the fact that there are so many millions more Mohammedans than there are Christians, that they live off the railways, in deserts, in far away and remote cities, that they journey on camels and in caravans, and that to them their religion and way of life are sufficient, that they do not seek new words or inspiration, nor do they want time to do other things, nor change of any kind. We remember their mystery, their faith and loyalty, their superb detachment, their state of being enough unto themselves, their playfulness, audacity, hospitality, how they shine compared with Christians in the keeping of the conventions of their religion, their punctual piety, their pilgrimages, and, with all that, their fixed and definite inferiority of caste.
A HOLIDAY AT SAMARKAND: BOYS OF THE MILITARY SCHOOL
PLAYING AMONG THE RUINS OF THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE
Their pilgrimage to Mecca, which we are apt to regard merely as something picturesque, is in reality one of the most mysterious of human processions. From Northern Africa, from Syria, from Turkey and Armenia, from Turkestan, from the Chinese marches (there are even Chinese Mohammedans, the Duncani), from India, from the depths of Arabia and Persia—to Mecca. Through Russia alone there travel annually considerably more Moslems to Mecca than there do Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem; and some of these Mohammedan pilgrims are the most outlandish pilgrims. They are illiterate, simple, unremarked. They do not possess minds which could understand our modern Christian missionaries, and Russia, at least, has no desire to proselytise among them. If the peoples of the world could be seen as part of a great design of embroidery on the garment of God, it would probably be seen that Mohammedanism at the present moment is part of the beauty of the pattern and the amazing labyrinthine scheme. It is not a rent, not a disfigurement.
Mahomet and the Mohammedans is not a subject to dismiss, and when we look at those wondrous cities of the East it is worth while remembering that we are looking at a new image and superscription, and are in the presence of people who own a different but none the less true allegiance. As upon one of the planets we might come across a different race that had not had, and could not have, our revelation.
Our prejudice as militant Christians, however, ought necessarily to be against Mohammedans. They have ever been our religious enemies in arms, the Saracens, the Paynim, the Tartar hordes; we are not very amicably disposed to those of our argumentative brothers who, to show their independence of thought, say they prefer Mohammedanism or Buddhism or Confucianism or what not.