[FN#370] Arab. "Lб tankati'н;" do not be too often absent from us. I have noticed the whimsical resemblance of "Kat'" and our "cut"; and here the metaphorical sense is almost identical.
[FN#371] See Ibn Khallikan ii. 455.
[FN#372] The Turkish body-guard. See vol. iii. 81.
[FN#373] Twelfth Abbaside (A.H. 248-252=862-866) the son of a slave-concubine Mukhбrik. He was virtuous and accomplished, comely, fair-skinned, pock-marked and famed for defective pronunciation; and he first set the fashion of shortening men's capes and widening the sleeves. After may troubles with the Turks, who were now the Prжtorian guard of Baghdad, he was murdered at the instigation of Al-Mu' tazz, who succeeded him, by his Chamberlain Sa'id bin Salнh.
[FN#374] Arab. "Usъl," his forbears, his ancestors.
[FN#375] Lane rejects this tale because it is "extremely objectionable; far more so than the title might lead me to expect." But he quotes the following marginal note by his Shaykh: —"Many persons (women) reckon marrying a second time amongst the most disgraceful of actions. This opinion is commonest in the country-towns and villages; and my mother's relations are thus distinguished; so that a woman of them, when her husband dieth or divorceth her while she is young, passeth in widowhood her life, however long it may be, and disdaineth to marry a second time." I fear that this state of things belongs to the good old days now utterly gone by; and the loose rule of the stranger, especially the English, in Egypt will renew the scenes which characterised Sind when Sir Charles Napier hanged every husband who cut down an adulterous wife. I have elsewhere noticed the ignorant idea that Moslems deny to women souls and seats in Paradise, whilst Mohammed canonised two women in his own family. The theory arose with the "Fathers" of the Christian Church who simply exaggerated the misogyny of St. Paul. St. Ambrose commenting on Corinthians i. ii., boldly says:—"Feminas ad imaginem Dei factas non esse." St. Thomas Aquinas and his school adopted the Aristotelian view, "Mulier est erratum naturж, et mas occasionatus, et per accidens generatur; atque ideo est monstrum." For other instances see Bayle s. v. Gediacus (Revd. Simon of Brandebourg) who in 1695 published a "Defensio Sexus muliebris," a refutation of an anti-Socinian satire or squib, "Disputatio perjucunda, Mulieres homines non esse," Parisiis, 1693. But when Islam arose in the seventh century, the Christian learned cleverly affixed the stigma of their own misogyny upon the Moslems ad captandas fњminas and in Southern Europe the calumny still bears fruit. Mohammed (Koran, chapt. xxiv.) commands for the first time, in the sixth year of his mission, the veiling and, by inference, the seclusion of women, which was apparently unknown to the Badawin and, if practised in the cities was probably of the laxest. Nor can one but confess that such modified separation of the sexes, which it would be impossible to introduce into European manners, has great and notable advantages. It promotes the freest intercourse between man and man, and thus civilises what we call the "lower orders": in no Moslem land, from Morocco to China, do we find the brutals without manners or morals which are bred by European and especially by English civilisation. For the same reason it enables women to enjoy fullest intimacy and friendship with one another, and we know that the best of both sexes are those who prefer the society of their own as opposed to "quite the lady's man" and "quite the gentleman's woman." It also adds an important item to social decorum by abolishing e.g. such indecencies as the "ball-room flirtation"—a word which must be borrowed from us, not translated by foreigners. And especially it gives to religious meetings, a tone which the presence of women modifies and not for the better. Perhaps, the best form is that semi-seclusion of the sex, which prevailed in the heroic ages of Greece, Rome, and India (before the Moslem invasion), and which is perpetuated in Christian Armenia and in modern Hellas. It is a something between the conventual strictness of Al-Islam and the liberty, or rather licence, of the "Anglo-Saxon" and the "Anglo-American." And when England shall have cast off that peculiar insularity which makes her differ from all civilised peoples, she will probably abolish three gross abuses, time-honoured scandals, which bear very heavily on women and children. The first is the Briton's right to will property away from his wife and offspring. The second is the action for "breach of promise," salving the broken heart with pounds, shillings, and pence: it should be treated simply as an exaggerated breach of contract. The third is the procedure popularly called "Crim. Con.," and this is the most scandalous of all: the offence is against the rights of property, like robbery or burglary, and it ought to be treated criminally with fine, imprisonment and in cases with corporal punishment after the sensible procedure of Moslem law.
[FN#376] "Moon of the age," a name which has before occurred.
[FN#377] The Malocchio or gettatura, so often noticed.
[FN#378] The crescent of the month Zu 'l-Ka'dah when the Ramazan-fast is broken. This allusion is common. Comp. vol. i. 84.
[FN#379] This line contains one of the Yes, Yes and No, No trifles alluded to in vol. ii, 60. Captain Lockett (M. A. 103) renders it "I saw a fawn upon a hillock whose beauty eclipsed the full moon. I said, What is thy name? she answered Deer. What my Dear said I, but she replied, no, no!" To preserve the sound I have sacrificed sense: Lulu is a pearl, Li? li? (= for me, for me?) and La! La! = no! no! See vol. i, 217. I should have explained a line which has puzzled some readers,