seems to be a certain amount of affection. One little wife said to me
the other day, "I love my husband now, but if he ever takes another wife
I shall hate him and leave him."
Could one blame her?
In most cases just as a girl has learned to read she has been forbidden
by her husband, and I have been told, "My husband says there is no
profit in women learning to read and he has forbidden it."
How one has felt for and grieved with some of these women! One day in
going as usual to give a reading lesson to a mother and daughter (these
two really loved each other), I found them both very sad and miserable.
It seemed that the father of the girl determined to marry her to an
elderly man whom, of course, she had never seen. The mother said her
daughter was too young to be married, and she knew something of the
character of the man. She begged me to try and do something, but we were
quite helpless in the matter; a large sum of money was paid for the
daughter. Some time afterwards when I visited the house the mother said
to me, "Yes, Bibi, she is married to him and I have had to sit in the
room listening to the cries of my child as he ill-treated her in the
next room, but I could do nothing."
How one longs for the skill to bring home to our favored English girls
and wives and mothers, the awful wrongs and the needs of these their
Moslem sisters! But what human weakness cannot do, God by His Holy
Spirit can. May He lead some of you to give yourselves to the glorious
work of bringing light and life to these your sisters who are "Sitting
in darkness and the shadow of death." Love is what they want. Our love
that will bring knowledge of Christ's great love to them. Will you not
pray for them?
X
OUR ARABIAN SISTERS
"Women are worthless creatures and soil men's reputations."
"The heart of a woman is given to folly."
--ARABIC PROVERBS.
This is an outline sketch of the pitiful intellectual, social, and moral
condition of the nearly four million women and girls in Mohammedan
Arabia. To begin with, the percentage of illiteracy, although not so
great as in some other Moslem lands, is at least eighty per cent, of the
whole number. In Eastern Arabia a number of girls attend schools, but
the instruction and discipline are very indifferent; attention to the
lesson is not demanded, so that a Moslem school is a paradise for a lazy
girl! A girl is removed from school very early to prepare for her
life-work and that is marriage. In a majority of cases she soon forgets
what little knowledge she may have attained. A few women are good
readers, but these are the most bigoted and fanatical of all women, and
it is difficult to make any impression upon them as they are firmly
convinced that the Koran contains all they need for salvation now and
hereafter.
General ignorance is the cause of general unhappiness and such dense
ignorance often makes them suspicious and unreasonable. Nothing is done
by the men to educate their women. On the contrary, their object seems
to be to keep them from thinking for themselves. They "treat them like
brutes and they behave as such." The men keep their feet on the necks of
their women and then expect them to rise! The same men who themselves
indulge in the grossest form of immorality become very angry and cruel
if there is a breath of scandal against their women. In Bahrein, a young
pearl-diver heard a rumor that his sister was not a pure woman; he
returned immediately from the divings and stabbed her in a most
diabolical way without even inquiring as to the truth of the matter. She
died in great agony from her injuries, and the brother was acquitted by
a Moslem judge, who is himself capable of breaking all the commandments.
Polygamy is practised by all who can afford this so-called luxury,
particularly by those in high positions. The wives of these men are not
happy, but submit since they believe it is the will of God and of His
prophet. The women are not at all content with their condition, and each
one wishes herself to be the favored one and will take steps to insure
this if possible. Those who have learned a little of the social
condition of women in Christian lands very readily appreciate the
difference.
[Illustration: WOMEN CHURNING BUTTER IN BEDOUIN CAMP (Arabia)]
It is a common thing for us to be asked to prescribe poison for a rival
wife who has been added to the household and for the time being is
the favorite. Through jealousy some of these supplanted wives plunge
into a life of sin. I do not know anything more pathetic than to have to
listen to a poor soul pleading for a love-philter or potion to bring
back the so-called love of a perfidious husband. Women, whether rich or
poor, naturally prefer to be the only wife. Divorce is fearfully common;
I think perhaps it is the case in nine out of every ten marriages. Many
women have been divorced several times. They marry again, but this early
and frequent divorce causes much immorality. Some divorced women return
to the house of their parents, while the homeless ones are most
miserable and find escape from misery only in death.
All these horrible social conditions complicate matters and it is
difficult to find out who is who in these mixed houses. It is far more
pathetic to go through some Moslem homes than to visit a home for
foundlings. When a woman is divorced, the father may keep the children
if he wishes, and no matter how much a heart-broken mother may plead for
them, she is not allowed to have them. If the man does not wish to keep
them he sends the children with the mother, and if she marries again the
new husband does not expect to contribute to the support of the children
of the former marriage.
There can be no pure home-life, as the children are wise above their
years in the knowledge of sin. Nothing is kept from them and they are
perfectly conversant with the personal history of their parents, past
and present.
A man may have a new wife every few months if he so desires, and in some
parts of Arabia this is a common state of affairs among the rich chiefs.
The result of all this looseness of morals is indescribable. Unnatural
vice abounds, and so do contagious diseases which are the inheritance of
poor little children.
There is a very large per cent. of infant mortality partly on this
account, and partly on account of gross ignorance in the treatment of
the diseases of childhood.
Instead of a home full of love and peace, there is dissension and
distrust. The heart of the husband does not trust his wife and she seeks
to do him evil, not good. For example, a woman is thought very clever if
she can cheat her husband out of his money or capital, and lay it up for
herself in case she is divorced. There is nothing to bind them in sweet
communion and interchange of confidences. As a rule, when a man and a
woman marry they do not look for mutual consideration and respect and
courtesy; marriage is rather looked upon as a good or a bad bargain.
That marriage has anything to do with the affections does not often
occur to them. If only a man's passions can be satisfied and his
material needs provided, that is all he expects from marriage.
But I do not deny that there are grand though not frequent exceptions to
this evil system. I have seen a man cling to his wife and love her and
grieve sadly when she died. And some Arab fathers dearly love their
daughters and mourn at the loss of one, and the little girls show
sincere affection for their fathers. And yet all these bright spots only
make the general blackness of home-life seem more dense and dismal.
Missionary schools and education in general have done much in breaking
up this system. Many Moslems of the higher class are trying to justify
the grosser side of their book-religion by spiritualizing the Koran
teaching. But secular education will never make a firm foundation for
the elevation of a nation or an individual. Those who have been led to
see the weakness of a religion that degrades women, have gained their
knowledge through the Gospel.
The fact that attention is paid to suffering women by medical missions
is already changing the prevalent idea that woman is inferior and
worthless. And although it may seem sometimes an impossible task to ever
raise these women to think higher thoughts and to rise from the
degradation of centuries, yet we know from experience that those who
come in contact with Christian women soon learn to avoid all unclean
conversation in their presence. Visiting them in their huts and homes is
also a means of breaking down prejudice. The daily clinic in the three
mission hospitals of East Arabia, where thousands of sick women receive
as much attention as do the men, is winning the hearts and opening the
eyes of many to see what disinterested love is. They can scarcely
understand what constrains Christian women to go into such unlovely
surroundings and touch bodies loathsome from disease in the
dispensaries.
When the men have wisdom to perceive that the education of their women
and girls means the elevation of their nation, and when they give the
women an opportunity to become more than mere animals, then will the
nation become progressive and alive to its great possibilities.
Reformation cannot come from within but must come from without, from the
living power of the Christ. Are you not responsible to God for a part in
the evangelization of Arabia in this generation?
"Let none whom He hath ransomed fail to greet Him,
Through thy neglect unfit to see His face."
The following earnest words, from one who being dead yet speaketh, are a
plea for more workers to come out to Arabia. Marion Wells Thoms, M. D.,
labored for five years in Arabia and wrote in one of her last letters as
follows:
"The Mohammedan religion has done much to degrade womanhood. To be sure,
female infanticide formerly practised by the heathen Arabs was
abolished by Islam, but that death was not so terrible as the living
death of thousands of the Arab women who have lived since the reign of
the 'merciful' prophet, nor was its effect upon society in general so
demoralizing. In the 'time of ignorance,' that is time before Mohammed,
women often occupied positions of honor. There were celebrated poetesses
and we read of Arab queens ruling their tribes.
"Such a state of things does not exist to-day, but the woman's
influence, though never recognized by the men, is nevertheless
indirectly a potent factor, but never of a broadening or uplifting
character. To have been long regarded as naturally evil has had a
degrading influence. Mohammedan classical writers have done their best
to revile womanhood. 'May Allah never bless womankind' is a quotation
from one of them.
"Moslem literature, it is true, exhibits isolated glimpses of a worthier
estimation of womanhood, but the later view, which comes more and more
into prevalence, is the only one which finds its expression in the
sacred tradition, which represents hell as full of women, and refuses to
acknowledge in its women, apart from rare exceptions, either reason or
religion, in poems which refer all the evil in the world to the woman as
its root, in proverbs which represent a careful education of girls as
mere waste.
"When the learned ones ascribe such characteristics to women, is it any
wonder that they have come to regard themselves as mere beasts of
burden? The Arab boy spends ten or twelve years of his life largely in
the women's quarters, listening to their idle conversation about
household affairs and their worse than idle talk about their jealousies
and intrigues.
"When the boy becomes a man, although he has absolute dominion over his
wife as far as the right to punish or divorce her is concerned, he often
yields to her decision in regard to some line of action. In treating a
woman I have sometimes appealed to the husband to prevail upon his wife
to consent to more severe treatment than she was willing to receive.
After conversing with his wife his answer has been, 'She will not
consent,' and that has been final. Lady Ann Blunt, who has travelled
among the Bedouins, says, 'In more than one sheikh's tent it is the
women's half of it in which the politics of the tribe are settled.'
"In regard to their religion they believe what they have been told or
have heard read from the Koran and other religious books. They do not
travel as much as the men, and do not have the opportunity of listening
to those who do, hence their ideas are not changed by what they see and
hear. All the traditions of Mohammed and other heroes are frequently
rehearsed and implicitly believed.
"Although the Arab race is considered a strong one, we find among the
women every ill to which their flesh is heir, unrelieved and oftentimes
even aggravated by their foolish native treatment. A mother's heart
cannot help but ache as she hears the Arab mother tell of the loss of
two, three, four, or more of her children, the sacrifice perhaps to her
own ignorance. The physical need of the Arab women is great and we pray
that it may soon appeal to some whose medical training fits them to
administer to this need in all parts of Arabia.
"In the towns in which there are missionaries there are comparatively
few houses in which they are not welcomed. In our own station there are
more open houses than we have ever had time to visit. Wherever women
travellers, of whom there have been two of some note, have gone, they
have been met with kindness; hence it will be seen that the open door is
not lacking."
Ignorance, superstition, and sensuality are the characteristics which
impress themselves most strongly at first upon one who visits the Arab
harem, but there are those, too, among the women who are really
attractive. It is a dark picture, and we do not urge the need of more
workers because the fields are white to harvest. We ask that more offer
themselves and be sent soon, rather, that, after they have learned the
difficult language, they may be able to begin _to prepare the ground for
seed-sowing_. It is a work that can only be done by women, for while the
Bedouin women have greater freedom to go about and converse with the men
than the town women have, and while some of the poorer classes in the
towns will allow themselves to be treated by a man doctor, and sit and
listen to an address made in the dispensary, the better class are only
accessible in their houses. Their whole range of ideas is so limited and
so far below ours that it will require "line upon line and precept upon
precept" to teach these women that there is a higher and better life for
them. In fact there must be the creation of the desire for better things
as far as most of them are concerned, but love and tact accompanied by
the power of the Holy Spirit can win their way to these hearts and
accomplish the same results that have been accomplished among other
Oriental women.
I have been striving to show that there is a crying need for work among
the Arab women and that there are ample opportunities for service. I
appeal to the women of the church whose sympathies have so long gone out
to heathen women everywhere, not to have less sympathy for them, but to
include Mohammedan Arabia and her womanhood more and more in their love,
their gifts, and their prayers. In the days of Mohammed, after the
battle of Khaibar, in which so many of her people had been mercilessly
slaughtered, Zeinab, the Jewess, who prepared a meal for Mohammed and
his men, put poison in the mutton and all but caused the prophet's
death. It is said by some that he never fully recovered from the effects
of the poison, and that it was an indirect cause of his death. It seems
to us who have lived and labored in the land of the false prophet that
his religion will only receive its death-blow when Christian women rise
to their duty and privilege, and by love and sacrifice, not in vengeance
but in mercy, send the true religion to these our neglected, degraded
sisters,--sisters in Him who "hath made of one blood all nations."
XI
WOMEN'S LIFE IN THE YEMEN
The term "Yemen," meaning the land on the right hand, is the name
applied to that whole tract of land in Arabia south of Mecca and west of
the Hadramaut, which has always been looked upon as a dependency or
province.
In early historical times the Yemen was occupied by Homerites and other
aborigines, but later on by the Himyarites, who drove many of the
original inhabitants to seek a new home in Africa, where, having
intermarried with the Gallas, Kaffirs, and Dankalis, they formed a new
race which is generally known nowadays as the Somali.
The physical conformation of the Yemen is not unlike that of the portion
of Africa immediately opposite, where there is as great diversity in
climate and soil as there is in the manners and customs of the peoples.
From Aden, the Eastern Gibraltar, right northward there stretches a
range of mountains chiefly formed of igneous rocks that have been bent,
torn, and twisted like the iron girders of a huge building that has been
destroyed by fire and almost covered by the ruin. Bare peak after peak
rises from the mass of débris yet everywhere pierced, scarred, and
seamed by the monsoon floods seeking their way to the ocean bed; they
seldom reach it, however, as a stream and never as a river, because of
the barren, scorched, sandy zone which belts the Red Sea and sucks into
its huge maw everything that the hills send down.
Like his country the Yemen Arab is girded about with an arid zone of
reserve which few Europeans have ever crossed, but when they have
managed to do so, according to the individual they have met, they have
found it may be a man with a heart as hard as a nether millstone.
Marrying one day and divorcing almost the next, only to marry another as
soon as he can scrape together sufficient funds to purchase a wife, this
type of man looks upon woman as an inferior animal formed for man's
gratification, and to be flung aside like a sucked orange when the juice
is gone.
Or on the other hand, they may find men whom real love has saved and
made to give forth warm affection and true domestic joy, just as the
terraced ridges on their mountain slopes retain the God-given moisture
and send forth a luxuriant crop of strengthening cereals, delicious
coffee, and luscious grapes.
I have known young men of twenty-four who have been married and divorced
half a dozen times, and also Arabs whose days are in the sere and yellow
leaf who never had but one wife.
There was a native chief who used to come occasionally to our dispensary
whose children were numbered by three figures, and Khan Bahadur
Numcherjee Rustomjee, C. I. E., who was for many years a magistrate in
Aden, told me he knew a woman who had been legally married more than
fifty times and had actually forgotten the names of the fathers of two
of her children!
One day an Arab brought a fine-looking woman to our dispensary, and as
he was very kind to her and seemed to love her very much I ventured to
tell him that she was suffering from diabetes mellitus, and that in
order to preserve her life he would require to be careful with her diet.
He thanked me most profoundly, promised to do all that he could for her,
took her home and divorced her the same day, casting her off in the
village and leaving her without a copper.
Next morning she came weeping to the dispensary and I tried to get
compensation, but the man pleaded poverty, and because I was the cause
of her plight I felt in duty bound to support her until she died some
months later.
Another man of more than fifty years carried the wife of his youth to
our dispensary on his back. She was suffering from Bright's disease and
ascites, yet he toiled on and till now has shown no sign of wavering in
his allegiance. Warm-hearted, courteous, and kind, I look upon him as
one of nature's noblemen whom even Mohammedanism cannot spoil.
Another man whose wife had an ovarian tumor brought her down from
Hodeidah for me to operate on, and faithfully attended to all her wants
while she was ill, and at last when the wound caused by operation was
healed, took her home joyfully as a bridegroom takes home the bride of
his choice.
A third man, who had either two or three wives at the time, called me to
see one who had been in labor for six days. When the Arab midwives
confessed that they could do nothing more for her and when he saw her
sinking, love triumphed over prejudice, and he came hurriedly for me. I
performed a Cæsarean section, and so earned the gratitude of both
husband and wife, who, though years have gone, still take a warm
interest in all that concerns the mission.
I wish, however, that I could say that cases like these were common
experiences with me, but unfortunately the reverse is the case. Men seem
always ashamed to speak of their wives and when wanting medicine for
them or me to visit them always speak of them as, "my family"--"the
mother of my children"--"my uncle's daughters," or like circumlocution.
Once I boxed a boy's ears for speaking of his own mother as his
"father's cow!"
Brought up in ignorance, unable to read, write, sew, or do fancy
work--in all my experience out here I have never known of a real Arab
girl being sent to school nor a real Arab woman who knew the alphabet.
Sold at a marriageable age, in many cases to the highest bidder, then
kept closely secluded in the house, is it any wonder that her health is
undermined and when brought to child-bed there is no strength left?
Called one day to see a Somali woman I missed the whip usually seen in a
Somali's house, and jokingly asked how her husband managed to keep her
in order without a whip. She, taking her husband and me by the hand,
said, "You are my father and this is my husband. Love unites us, and
where love is there is no need for whips."
I was so pleased with her speech that I offered her husband, who was out
of work, a subordinate place in our dispensary. Yet less than a month
later I heard that he had divorced his wife and turned her out of doors.
The following case will, I think, illustrate the usual attitude of the
Arabs in the Yemen towards womankind:
A man whose wife had been in labor two days came asking for medicine to
make her well. My reply was that it was necessary to see the woman
before I could give such a drug as he wished. "Well," said he, "she will
die before I allow you or any other man to see her," and two days after
I heard of her death.
I have often remonstrated with the men for keeping their wives so
closely confined and for not delighting in their company, and making
them companions and friends. But almost invariably I have been answered
thus, "The Prophet (upon whom be blessing and peace) said, 'Do not
trouble them with what they cannot bear, for they are prisoners in your
hands whom you took in trust from God.'" And therefore as prisoners they
are to be kept and treated as being of inferior intellect.
I have known cases where a man gave his daughter in marriage on
condition that the bridegroom would never marry another wife; but the
man broke his word and married a second wife, whereupon he was summoned
before the kadi, who ruled that, "When a man marries a woman on
condition that he would not marry another at the same time with her, the
contract is valid and the condition void because it makes unlawful what
is lawful, and God knoweth all."
The consequence of such laws is that the women become prone to criminal
intrigues, and I have known dozens of cases where mothers have helped
their daughters and even acted as procuresses for them to avenge some
slight upon them or injury done to them. There is no fear of God before
their eyes. Heaven to them is little better than a place of
prostitution. Why, then, should they desire it? Here they know the
bitterness of being one of two or three wives, why then should they wish
to be "one of seventy"?
XII
PEN-AND-INK SKETCHES IN PALESTINE
Sir William Muir, who lived for forty years in India, says: "The sword
of Islam and the Koran are the most obstinate foes to civilization,
liberty, and truth the world has yet known." After a residence of nearly
twenty years in Palestine and much intercourse among all classes, both
in city and village life, the writer of this chapter can confirm the
statement.
Islam is the same everywhere and changes not.