AN ARAB WEDDING PROCESSION

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I have described more fully elsewhere a marriage to which my wife and I were invited as guests, and as such full details of the ceremonial are given in Lane’s Modern Egyptians I shall not dwell on it here. Lane’s argument to those who severely condemn Islamic marriage laws is this: ‘As Moses allowed God’s chosen people, for the hardness of their hearts, to put away their wives, and forbade neither polygamy nor concubinage, he who believes that Moses was divinely inspired to enact the best laws for his people, must hold the permission of these practices to be less injurious to morality than their prohibition, among a people similar to the ancient Jews.’ This sounds fairly plausible, but we must not forget that Mohammedans accept Christ as a prophet as well as Moses, and also avow that each prophet taught them something higher than the preceding one had done, and there is certainly no licence as to polygamy or concubinage allowed in the teaching of our Lord. Their last prophet, and according to them their greatest, Mohammed, had overlooked this, and probably only codified what had more or less become a common practice in his day.

As the modern Jews now hold to one wife just as do the people amongst whom they live, so it is possible that in time the Moslems may also modify their marriage customs. Supply and demand has already had its effect, for with the restrictions on slavery, concubinage has of necessity lessened and respect for the husband of one wife is increasing amongst the better educated classes.

I started on a subject on the following morning, of an old house built alongside and overhanging an entrance to a mosque. A little coffee-shop under an archway, on the opposite side of the street, made an excellent point of vantage from which I could do my work without attracting too much attention. Mohammed, who accompanied me, made arrangements with the owner of the stall for my accommodation, and sat on the high bench near me, so as to keep off the more inquisitive. An ideal post for him, for he could smoke a nárgeeleh, sip coffee, and chat with the other clients as much as he pleased. He would brush away the flies with one end of his whisp, and poke with the other end any small boy who ventured too near me. ‘If one comes it may not matter, but if one stays fifty others will come also,’ he would say, as the stick of the whisp and a boy’s head came in contact.

It was also in the interest of the owner of the coffee-shop,—as Mohammed was careful to explain to him,—to make things comfortable for me, as I should spend many mornings here if I were not molested in my work. Besides my subject, which was a very beautiful one in itself, this was a useful perch from which to make studies of the people and animals which passed. It was in the Nahasseen, one of the busiest thoroughfares of Cairo, and scarcely an hour would go by without hearing the zaghareet, the shrill cries of joy which told of the approach of a bridal procession, or the doleful chorus, ‘Lá iláha illa-lláh,’ would prepare one for the passing of a funeral.

It has happened that the zaghareet was not always the accompaniment of the more cheerful procession, for these shrill cries of joy replace those of lamentation when a welee, a person of great sanctity, is carried to his last resting-place. The idea conveyed is that the joys now awaiting him more than compensate those he has left behind for his loss. There is a curious superstition, or maybe some other cause which we cannot explain, that if these cries of joy cease for more than a minute the bearers of the corpse cannot proceed. It is also maintained that a welee is able to direct the steps of his bearers to a particular spot where he may wish to be buried. Lane tells the following anecdote, describing an ingenious mode of puzzling a dead saint of this kind. ‘Some men were lately bearing the corpse of a welee to a tomb prepared for it in the great cemetery on the north of the metropolis; but on arriving at the gate called Bab-en-Nasr, which leads to this cemetery, they found themselves unable to proceed further from the cause above-mentioned. “It seems,” said one of the bearers, “that the sheykh is determined not to be buried in the cemetery of Bab-en-Nasr; and what shall we do?” They were all much perplexed; but being as obstinate as the saint himself, they did not immediately yield to his caprice. Retreating a few paces, and then advancing with a quick step, they thought by such an impetus to force the corpse through the gateway; but their efforts were unsuccessful; and the same experiment they repeated in vain several times. They then placed the bier on the ground, to rest and consult; and one of them beckoning away his comrades to a distance, beyond the hearing of the dead saint, said to them, “Let us take up the bier again, and turn it round quickly several times till the sheykh becomes giddy; he then will not know in what direction we are going, and we may take him easily through the gate.” This they did; the saint was puzzled, as they expected, and quietly buried in the place he had striven to avoid.’

I witnessed a similar thing in Japan, a year or two ago; but in that case it was an idol which showed a similar obstinacy. It was at the ‘Gion Matsuri,’ which annually takes place at Kyôto, when the Shinto god Susa-no-o is carried to his O Tabisho—that is, his sojourn in the country with his goddess.