[FN#335] I especially allude to an able but most superficial book, the “Ten Great Religions” by James F. Clarke (Boston, Osgood, 1876), which caricatures and exaggerates the false portraiture of Mr. Palgrave. The writer’s admission that, “Something is always gained by learning what the believers in a system have to say in its behalf,” clearly shows us the man we have to deal with and the “depths of his self-consciousness.”
[FN#336] But how could the Arabist write such hideous grammar as
“La Il h illa All h” for “Lá iláha (accus.) ill’ Allah”?
[FN#337] p. 996 “Muhammad” in vol. iii. Dictionary of Christian Biography. See also the Illustration of the Mohammedan Creed, etc., from Al-Ghazáli introduced (pp. 72-77) into Bell and Sons’ “History of the Saracens” by Simon Ockley, B.D. (London, 1878). I regret some Orientalist did not correct the proofs: everybody will not detect “Al-Lauh al-Mahfúz” (the Guarded Tablet) in “Allauh ho’hnehphoud” (p. 171); and this but a pinch out of a camel-load.
[FN#338] The word should have been Arianism. This “heresy” of the early Christians was much aided by the “Discipline of the Secret,” supposed to be of apostolic origin, which concealed from neophytes, catechumens and penitents all the higher mysteries, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Metastoicheiosis (transubstantiation), the Real Presence, the Eucharist and the Seven Sacraments; when Arnobius could ask, Quid Deo cum vino est? and when Justin, fearing the charge of Polytheism, could expressly declare the inferior nature of the Son to the Father. Hence the creed was appropriately called Symbol i.e., Sign of the Secret. This “mental reservation” lasted till the Edict of Toleration, issued by Constantine in the fourth century, held Christianity secure when divulging her “mysteries”; and it allowed Arianism to become the popular creed.
[FN#339] The Gnostics played rather a fantastic rôle in Christianity with their Demiurge, their Æonogony, their Æons by syzygies or couples, their Maio and Sabscho and their beatified bride of Jesus, Sophia Achamoth, and some of them descended to absolute absurdities, e.g., the Tascodrugitæ and the Pattalorhinchitæ who during prayers placed their fingers upon their noses or in their mouths, &c., reading Psalm cxli. 3.
[FN#340] “Kitáb al-’Unwán fí Makáid al-Niswán” = The Book of the
Beginnings on the Wiles of Womankind (Lane i. 38).
[FN#341] This person was one of the Amsál or Exampla of the Arabs. For her first thirty years she whored; during the next three decades she pimped for friend and foe, and, during the last third of her life, when bed-ridden by age and infirmities, she had a buckgoat and a nanny tied up in her room and solaced herself by contemplating their amorous conflicts.
[FN#342] And modern Moslem feeling upon the subject has apparently undergone a change. Ashraf Khan, the Afghan poet, sings,
Since I, the parted one, have come the secrets of the world to
ken,
Women in hosts therein I find, but few (and very few) of men.
And the Osmanli proverb is, “Of ten men nine are women!”