mohammedanism is the religion which is everywhere in evidence in the east to-day. from the smart turkish officer who drops in to smoke a cigarette with you in the tent after dinner, and discusses european politics in excellent french, down to the beggar who beseeches you in the name of allah for a pipeful of tobacco or the end of your cigar, your acquaintance in syria is moslem. from the consecration of the church of the holy sepulchre to the moslem capture of jerusalem was exactly three hundred years. when, in 637, jerusalem fell, damascus had already fallen, and antioch was to follow next year—all within sixteen years of the beginning of the mohammedan era. the conquest was inevitable. first persia and then the scattered tribes of pagan arabs had proved too much for the byzantine empire in syria. then the man appeared who understood his opportunity. the eastern world was in confusion. heathens constituted the ruling race, the jews were scattered in their dispersion, and the christians torn into many fragmentary heretical{138} sects. it was the moment for a great union of scattered forces. the arabs were united by the new faith in god, for which they abandoned their paganism with a marvellous willingness. the bond of union with christians and jews was the common ancestry in abraham by which mohammed hoped to rally and unite the syrian world. one sharp battle at the yarmuk threw syria open to his advance, and the crisis of the faith was past.
mohammed has been declared an impostor, who from first to last won his way by cleverness without faith; he has been idealised as a hero and prince of heroes in the religious world. dean milman, perhaps, is wisest when he says, “to the question whether mohammed was hero, sage, impostor, or fanatic ... the best reply is the reverential phrase of islam: ‘god knows.’” one thing is certain, viz., that he founded a religion which proved itself capable of wakening response from the semitic east with a swiftness and a completeness never elsewhere known. it would be a matter of rather serious consequences to affirm that such sweeping success is possible without any vestige of honest faith on the part of its own prophet.
arabia found islam a religion after her own heart. the conquest of the arabian mind, and that sudden transference of religious and political loyalties which changed it from chaos into cosmos, is little short of miraculous. in the words of one of the severest critics of islam: “in a.d. 570, abdullah, the son of abd el muttalib, a mecca merchant,{139} went on a trading trip from mecca to medina and died there; the same year his wife, amina, gave birth to a boy, named mohammed, at mecca. one hundred years later the name of this arab lad, joined to that of the almighty, was called out from ten thousand mosques five times daily, from muscat to morocco, and his new religion was sweeping everything before it in three continents.”[24] in many ways the new religion was congenial to arabia. “although it made a most vigorous effort to conquer the world, it is, after all, a religion of the desert, of the tent, and the caravan, and is confined to nomad and savage or half-civilised nations, chiefly arabs, persians, and turks. it never made an impression on europe except by brute force; it is only encamped, not really domesticated, in constantinople, and when it must withdraw from europe it will leave no trace behind.”[25] it gave the heathen arabs, in exchange for their precarious dependence on incalculable and wayward gods, the sublime conception of “islam,” the absolute surrender to the one god, whom it declared to be almighty, all-wise, and all-merciful. for the rest, its secret was simplicity. it drove straight for its object, sacrificing art, appetite, the purity of home life, the spirituality of religious imagination, and some of the accepted moralities of conscience. what was left was a creed and standard, somewhat impoverished truly, but workable and uncompromising. a thousand difficult questions were avoided, and one of those forces set in{140} play before whose rough simplicity finer and more delicate things are swept away.
mohammedanism meets the traveller at every turn in syria. now and then a dervish is encountered—the extremest sort of moslem. it would seem difficult to develop a mystic school within the pale of so clear-cut a faith as mohammedanism; yet it has been done. but the mohammedan dervishes escape from this despised material world by the vulgar process of hypnotising themselves by the repetition of the word “allah” or “hu,” or by whirling in circles until they are stupefied. this they call the ecstatic state, and when they have reached it they are said to perform many violent tricks, stabbing their flesh or eating broken glass, without appearing to feel pain. in syria they are by no means impressive in appearance. here and there you meet one, with hair crimped in long thin pointed wisps, and sticking out in a wiry fashion from his head in all directions. the dazed and rather weak look in the eyes is suggestive of a strayed reveller rather than a holy man, but the people hold them in great reverence.
another occasional freak of mohammedanism is the religious procession, which is conducted on the principle of a rival show to the christian fêtes. it starts on good friday from jerusalem to visit the tomb of moses—a late fiction, somewhat daring in its contradiction to the old belief that the tomb of moses was known to no man. it is amusingly described by witnesses, but appears to be rather a poor affair on the whole.{141}
these extravagances apart, one is never out of sight of mohammedan religion for an hour of travel in syria. the worship, like old idolatry, seems to have claimed every high hill and every green tree for its own. it has settled itself, in the very seat of old judaism, on the sacred area of the temple. almost every one of the prominent hills of palestine is crowned with a little building, domed and whitewashed, opening in a porch in front, and containing a single empty chamber. this is the weli (i.e. monument, not necessarily tomb) of a mohammedan saint. what the terms of canonisation may be, it is perhaps best not to inquire too minutely. many of these departed saints are said to have been prophets, but the discoverer of coffee has his monument in mocha, to which great processions come, and there is more than one weli in palestine commemorative of a dead robber chief. not the less sacred are they to the mohammedans. in various parts of the country we were puzzled by little piles of stones, gathered and arranged in considerable numbers on the tops of long ascents or passes, and bearing a curious resemblance to the cairns which in certain districts of the west of scotland mark the spots at which funeral processions have halted to change the coffin-bearers. the explanation of these little piles is very simple. when a mohammedan comes to the hill-top, and looking around him sees a weli shining in the distance, he offers up a prayer, and drops a stone there, to call the attention of the next comer, that he also may look and pray. very {142}picturesque and quaint these little holy houses are; serving, like the hermit’s tower of old in western lands, for landmarks as well as for shrines—the white light-houses of the inland.
it is not at the white tombs only that the moslem prays. five times a day, at the call from the mosque, he is summoned to his devotions. often, indeed, it is inconvenient to worship at some of these hours, and it is permissible to say the prayer five times in succession in the evening, when there is most leisure. sometimes he carries with him his rosary, to help his memory with the ninety-nine beautiful names of allah, and in railway trains or steamers wealthy gentlemen are to be seen cherishing a string of amber beads which appear more like the property of young girls than of grown men. to perform his devotions the syrian goes to a fountain, when that is possible, as it is part of the ritual to wash the hands before praying; but the arab, spreading his carpet in the shade of his camel, far away upon the desert, where no water is to be had but the precious drops in his leathern bottle, is permitted to wash his hands and lips with sand instead. that which impresses every spectator is the extraordinary faculty for abstraction which is manifested. the moslem seems to have at command the power of annihilating the world around him, and entering the unseen. his eyes are open, but you may pass within a yard of them and they will not seem to see you. they are fixed on the far distance, as if, over the southern edge of the world, the man saw the holy city towards which he bows, with its kaaba and its black stone. he might be crystal-gazing, or watching the horizon for a sail at sea.{143} people may be dancing and singing by his side, but he does not see them nor hear. bathing once in the waters of elisha’s fountain at jericho we had a memorable instance of this. we found the pool empty and the walls undergoing repair. a lad who had charge of the place was persuaded in the usual fashion to let down the door of a sluice and so allow the pool to fill, greatly to the detriment of the newly mortared wall. when we had stripped, the owner of the place appeared, and we rose to the surface from a dive to hear a controversy going on, with violent gesture and apoplectic fury, which marks a high point in our register of vituperation. the water seemed on the whole to be the safest place, and we kept to it until suddenly we perceived that a great silence had fallen on the landscape. looking anxiously to see what had happened, we found the owner on his knees, praying by his own spring. we dressed without delay, and had to pass in front of him to reach the tents, but he never seemed to know that we had passed.
the muezzin, or call to prayer from the minaret, is one of the most affecting of all eastern sounds. men are chosen for this office with singularly mellow and rich voices; they intone, with a very musical little cadence in a minor key, the first chapter of the koran, and sometimes other prayers. at the great mosque of damascus, a solitary reciter calls from the slender minaret, and is answered from the balcony of the broader one across the court by twenty voices in unison. while the waves of rich sound float out over the city, and are caught and faintly echoed from{144} scores of other minarets, one remembers how that voice has rolled forth already over innumerable villages from bengal westwards, and men have paused from their labour to pray according to their lights.
islam is usually supposed to have been the “ishmaelite in church history,” with hand against every man from the first. really, when it was arabian, as it remained for four centuries, it was very tolerant, and the christian pilgrims, priests, and monks were little disturbed. but in 1086 the seljuk chiefs of wandering turkish tribes came into possession, and the days of suspicion and that heavy cruelty which is characteristic of the stupid began. there were massacres of monks on carmel and elsewhere then, and such a state of general tyranny and oppression that the cry reached the west, and the crusades began. the crusades, as they dragged their slow length along, did not tend to better understandings; and after saladin’s conquest of jerusalem, we read that the walls and pavement of the mosque of omar had to be purified with copious showers of water distilled from the fragrant roses of damascus. the relations between moslem and christian in the land to-day are happier, and the intercourse of increasing trade and travel is breaking down old partitions here as elsewhere. yet little love is lost between the professors of the rival faiths even now. dr. andrew thomson relates how, in recent years, “it had been observed that at a particular period of the day the shadow of the great mosque of omar fell upon a certain christian burying-ground. even the honour of
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the temple area and the mount of olives, from mount zion.
the dome on the right is that of the mosque of el aksa, and that on the left is the mosque of omar. between these domes, and just below the principal group of cypresses, is the “wailing place.” the hills in the background are the mount of olives.
{145}
blessing conveyed by so sacred a shadow was grudged. the public authorities in jerusalem were strongly urged to have the christian cemetery removed to some more distant place, and it required all the combined influence of the european consulates to prevent a scandalous order to this effect from being issued.” the ordnance survey party was on several occasions attacked, and even fired upon. in fanatical moslem cities like hebron and nablus, travellers have to conduct themselves with the utmost discretion, and even then will probably be stoned with more or less effect according to the courage and the marksmanship of the thrower. the christians return the animosity with a kind of impatient ridicule, which seems to indicate a lack of refined piety on their part. our camp-waiters were christians, and they used to give us very freely their opinions on the theological differences between them and the mohammedans. there would be a reverent if somewhat startling account of the holy trinity, and then, in scornful contrast: “mohammedans only one,—and mohammed all the rest!” the scorn is hardly to be wondered at when one remembers the intellectual level of the powers that be. this is forced upon one’s notice by countless tales of the custom-house and censorship officials. a map of ancient palestine was objected to because “there were no maps in those days!” an engineer, telegraphing about a pump, was arrested because the message read: “one hundred revolutions!” in certain bibles the text was erased, “jesus christ came into the world to save sinners”{146}; and it was directed that the word “christians” should be substituted, as there were no sinners in the turkish empire! after a certain amount of that regime, one would no doubt put new meaning into the prayer which invokes god’s mercy “upon all turks,” as well as on infidels and heretics!
in spite of all this there is a good deal of interchange between the two faiths, or at least of borrowing on the part of islam from christian tradition. so many points have the two in common, that a theory has been broached on which mohammed appears only as the judaiser (as it were) of later days, who saw the difficulty that christians had in working with general principles, and set himself to simplify the situation by reducing christianity to a stereotyped system. carlyle distinctly calls islam “a kind of christianity.” however this may be, there is no question as to the immense amount which syrian mohammedanism borrows from the jewish and christian scriptures. countless tombs and other monuments are dedicated to joshua and other old testament worthies. this, of course, may be due to the fact that many moslem saints have borne the old names, and as time went on their memories came to be confused with those of their more famous namesakes. samson’s exploits especially have appealed to the mohammedan imagination, and he appears under the incognito of “isman aly,” among many other names. st. george is a very popular saint for moslem worship. it startles us still more to find that in the great fire at damascus numbers of moslems threw themselves{147} into the flames in the attempt to rescue the head of john the baptist; while a copy of the koran—one of the original four copies—which lay below the relic, was forgotten and destroyed.
the most extensive and curious point of contact between the two religions is found in those mosques which were formerly built as christian churches, and then appropriated by the conquerors. the grand mosque of damascus is a conspicuous case in point. it is built on the site of a pagan temple, part of whose hoary front still stands, a magnificent fragment of ancient heavy masonry and carving now brown and grey with age. on the ruins of the temple rose the christian church of st. john the baptist, whose date is about the beginning of the fifth century. after the mohammedan conquest the church became a mosque, and fabulous sums were spent on its decoration. it has twice been destroyed by fire, and is now being restored after the last of these destructions.[26] the restoration has a very brand-new appearance, yet it is magnificent with its wealth of marble and of other costly stone. the mosque of samaria, conspicuous from a distance by its minaret is another christian church reconstructed for mohammedan worship. there was a sixth-century basilica here, but the present mosque is built out of the material of the crusader church which replaced that. the severity and bareness of its stone walls and pillars are relieved only by one touch of colour—the flags and the lovely green pillars of the pulpit. the wall at the pulpit’s side has been recessed into a{148} mihrab or niche, which points towards mecca and so gives the worshipper his bearings. in the crypt, where the crusaders believed they had the tomb of john the baptist, large slabs of polished marble attest the former wealth of decoration, and these slabs are of peculiar interest because of one curious little fact. it was customary to carve on christian buildings the sign of the cross—a maltese cross, set within a circle. such a cross may be distinctly seen on one of the stones close to the embedded pillar at the south door of the church of the holy sepulchre. on the marble slabs of the crypt in samaria these encircled crosses are to be seen; but the mohammedans have chipped away the uprights of them, leaving only the meaningless horizontal bar bisecting the circle, and the obvious mark of the chisel in their rough workmanship leaves the uprights also faintly visible. perhaps the most interesting case of all is the mosque el aksa, close to the mosque of omar, within the temple area. this is that “far-off place of prayer” which mohammed counted among the most holy shrines in the world. founded by justinian as a christian basilica, it was converted into a mosque by omar, and adorned with unheard-of lavishness by abd el melik, who overlaid its doors with gold and silver plates. since then it has passed through many adventures. widened to efface some suggestion of cruciform shape, its breadth became unmanageable, and six rows of pillars support the roof. the roof has fallen in, and earthquakes have broken the building more than once, so that most of the masonry is comparatively{149} modern, the great arches of the structure which supports the dome being “anchored” by wooden beams which throw horizontal bridges from capital to capital in arab fashion. the green-and-gold mosaic with which the interior of the dome and the upper portion of the adjacent masonry is covered, cannot be very old, though their dim and antique beauty is worthy of the older art. the pulpit, richly inlaid with aleppo work of ivory and mother-of-pearl, was saladin’s gift seven hundred years ago. but that which most of all attracts the eye and fascinates the imagination is the aspect of the pillars, whose variegated colours are peculiarly rich and harmonious. up to a certain height they are polished to the shining point by the garments of worshippers rubbing against them as they pass; above that they are smooth, unpolished stone. the capitals, and some at least of the columns, are very ancient, and may have stood in the original basilica.
the mosque of omar is not, strictly speaking, a mosque at all. the mosque is el aksa, and the more famous building is but a glorified praying-station of the nature of a weli in its court. it stands near the centre of a wide open space, practically the only such space in jerusalem, which occupies one-sixth part of the whole area of the city within the walls. the enclosure is partly artificial, supported on vast substructures of vaulted building which raise the enclosed ground to a general level. the mosque is set up on a platform ten feet higher than this level.
its history has been a strange one. behind the time of its erection lies all the story of the temple,{150} whose sacred ark jewish tradition affirms to have been concealed here by jeremiah. but that rock, whose red outcrop breaks through the floor of the mosque, leads us back to a dimmer past, and to the story of abraham’s sacrifice upon moriah, whose site this is said to be. various theories have been advocated as to the place which the rock held in the arrangements of the jewish temple. the jews of to-day have a legend that on it somewhere the unspeakable name is written, and they explain the miracles of jesus by the supposition that he had succeeded in deciphering it. we, too, for whom its chief interest and pathos lie in the fact that christ came hither to worship, and in the things that befell him here, may accept the meaning at least of that curious legend. for his own words were that he had declared to men the name of his father, and that declaration has truly revealed to mankind the hidden meaning of their holiest things.
it was in 680 a.d. that the first mohammedan sanctuary was erected on the temple area, but the date of the present building is two hundred years later. it struck us as a curious fact a year ago in damascus that the burnt mosque was being rebuilt almost entirely by christian masons. still more surprising is it to learn that the mosque of omar was built by byzantine architects and modelled on the rotunda of the holy sepulchre. two hundred years later the crusaders entered jerusalem, and, according to the dreadful story, “the carnage in the mosque of omar swept away the{151} bodies of thousands in a deluge of human blood.”[27] mistaking the mosque for the veritable temple of solomon, they founded there the society of the knights templars, on whose armorial bearings the dome appears. they converted the building into “templum domini,” and planted a large gilded cross upon the summit of it. traces of their invasion still remain in the cutting of the rock to suit their altar, and in the great wrought-iron enclosing screen. for almost a century the templum domini remained in christian hands, until 1187, when saladin conquered jerusalem. his generosity and gentleness contrasted strangely with the “loathsome triumph” of the crusaders; but the first destination of the triumphal march was the mosque, from whose dome the cross was hurled to the ground, and for two days dragged about the streets. from that time the mosque has been one of the most exclusive places in the world. till recent years no christian was permitted to enter it, and jews avoid it, lest they should unwittingly tread upon the ground of the ancient holy of holies.
the first impressions of the mosque of omar are very pleasing. there is a barbaric splendour in its rich colouring and metallic glitter when seen from a short distance, while the more distant view of it is one of rare soft beauty. its wide courts, too, give it a fresh and open-air character which is very refreshing after the stifling dark heat and closeness of the holy sepulchre. above all it impresses one with its grand simplicity.{152} the sharp-edge angles of the octagon are taken in at a glance; the rock within is bare rock, and infinitely more impressive than the silk and marble in which rock masquerades at bethlehem. the great number of its pillars, screens, reading-stands, and other furniture, leaves little open room, and it feels rather a crowded than a spacious place for worship. yet, on the other hand, you are not wearied with the complex symbolism of many of the ancient churches. the meaning of this may be poorer, but at least it is plain. this means just a perfectly shapely and highly coloured octagon, where men have worshipped god for a thousand years in the least complicated way in which worship has been done. thus the mosque is typical of the faith and the policy that created it. “i do not believe,” says disraeli’s tancred, “that anything great is ever effected by management.... you require something more vigorous and more simple.... you must act like moses and mohammed.”
on the other hand, the enthusiasm for mohammedan simplicity is sorely tried when the first moment of almost awestruck feeling ends with the advance of the guide. he is to shew you the wonders of the mosque, and the torrent of mingled absurdity and superstition by which you find yourself swept on is very trying to the would-be admirer of the faith and its monument. first of all, there are the relics—the footprint of mohammed, and the hairs of his beard; the praying-places of abraham and elijah and other “very fine, high-class people,” as our dragoman described{153}
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the west side of the temple area.
from the barracks near the site of the tower of antonia. above the domed building in the right foreground rises mount zion. the rosy hills to the left are the mountains of judea.
them to us; the round hole where the rock let mohammed through when he ascended to heaven, the hollow place in the roof of the cavern where it rose to let him stand erect to pray, the tongue with which it spoke, and the mark of the angel gabriel’s finger when it had to be held down from following him in his ascension. still more disenchanting is the knot of underground superstitions that desecrate the holy place, and rob it of its freshness and healthy simplicity, like snakes in the garden. the wild imagination of the east has pictured to itself the regions which lie underneath this sanctuary in its own grim way. in spite of a very obvious pillar, and a bit of white-washed wall to be seen in the cavern, the rock is supposed to hover unsupported over the abyss. beneath is “the well of souls,” where the dead assemble twice weekly to pray. some think of these departed ones as those who wait for the resurrection, but a darker fancy holds that the gates of hell are here. the worshipper feels the souls of the dead flitting about him, and prays with the cries of the lost in his ears. even the open spaces of the court are haunted by unclean legends, and seem to be heavy with the odour of graveyard mould. here, at st. george’s dome, with the two red granite pillars in front of it, is the place where solomon tormented the demons; there, by the eastern wall, is the throne whereon he sat when dead, the corpse leaning on his staff to cheat them, until worms gnawed the staff through, the body fell forward, and the demons found out the trick.{154}
in common decency, any place that lays claim to sacredness must have something to say to worshippers regarding conduct; but the ethics of the mosque of omar are a match for its impostures, alike in gruesomeness and in impudence. they are all of the nature of magic tests, by which souls are to be tried for their eternal fate. the little arcades at the top of the steps of the platform are called “balances” because the scales of judgment are to be suspended there on the great day. the dome of the chain owes its name to the circumstance that there a golden chain hung at david’s place of judgment, which had to be grasped by witnesses and dropped a link when a lie was told. a place in the outer wall is shown from which a wire will be suspended on the day of judgment, whose other end will be made fast on the mount of olives. christ will sit on the wall and mohammed on the mount. over this wire must all men find their way, but only the good will cross, the wicked falling into the valley beneath. in the el aksa mosque a couple of pillars stand very near each other, so worn that they are perceptibly thinned. the space between them bulges, in which a piece of spiked iron-work is now inserted. these were another test for the final award—he who could squeeze himself through the aperture, and he alone, had found the true “narrow way” to heaven.
frauds such as these force upon every visitor the question how far the mohammedans themselves believe them. the utter want of earnestness, or anything that to a western mind bears the resemblance of reality, is{155} painfully evident in the attendants who guide you through the mosque. you are forced to respect its sacredness by purchasing the loan of slippers to cover your boots, and you feel rather like one entering a circus than a place of worship, when you have been transformed into an illuminated caricature by means of one yellow and another red slipper. your guide, who wears the appearance of a convict in clericals, greatly enjoys your picturesqueness, and makes haste to conduct you to a certain jasper slab into which mohammed drove nineteen nails of gold (which look, however, indistinguishable from iron). a nail comes out at the end of every epoch, and when all are gone the end of the world will come. one day the devil destroyed all but three and a half of them, when the angel gabriel, caught napping for once, stopped the mischief just in time. here you are invited to lay any coins you may chance to have about you, and assured that if the coin be silver you will save your soul by giving it. as the coins are tabled, the whole body of assistant clergy assembles to count the collection.
all this, and much else, is but the inevitable outcome of a worship that gathers round a stone. it is a petrified worship, hard and dead as its sacred rock. nothing could be more pathetic than a window in el aksa almost darkened with little rags of clothing hung there by poor folk who come to pray for their sick friends. if syrian christianity is corrupt, it is at least not so pitiless as syrian mohammedanism. the very aspect and situation of the rival shrines is symbolic.{156} the mosque does not really love men, whether it really believes in god or not. it sits apart in its wide enclosure, while the church of the sepulchre is huddled indistinguishably into the thickest pressure of the life of men and women in the city. the church seems, by its rugged and broken outline, to sympathise with the shattered fortunes of the life around it; it is grey and ruinous-looking, as if it had borne man’s sorrows and carried them. the mosque, with all its beauty, seems to sit there like some great sleek sphinx, watching everything, but sharing little and loving none of the misery around it. in this city of ruins there is something repellent about its smooth and self-complacent finish. no, the mosque does not really love men; whether it really believes in itself and its miracles or not is another of the many mohammedan things which god only knows.