“O light of the eyes of Mahomet the mighty, O lieutenant of Ali the
lion! Abbas has perished, Ali-Akber has suffered martyrdom. O my uncle,
thou hast no warriors left, and no standard-bearer! The roses are gone
and gone are their buds; the jessamine is gone, the poppies are gone. I
alone, I am still left in the garden of the Faith, a thorn, and
miserable. If thou hast any kindness for the orphan, suffer me to go
forth and fight.”
Hussein refuses. “My child,” he says, “thou wast the light of the eyes
of the Imam Hassan, thou art my beloved remembrance of him; ask me not
this; urge me not, entreat me not; to have lost Ali-Akber is enough.”
Kassem answers:—“That Kassem should live and Ali-Akber be
marytred—sooner let the earth cover me! O king, be generous to the
beggar at thy gate. See how my eyes run over with tears and my lips are
dried up with thirst. Cast thine eyes toward the waters of the heavenly
Euphrates! I die of thirst; grant me, O thou marked of God, a full
pitcher of the water of life! it flows in the Paradise which awaits me.”
Hussein still refuses; Kassem breaks forth in complaints and
lamentations, his mother comes to him and learns the reason. She then
says:—
“Complain not against the Imam, light of my eyes; only by his order can
the commission of martyrdom be given. In that commission are sealed
two-and-seventy witnesses, all righteous, and among the two-and-seventy
is thy name. Know that thy destiny of death is commanded in the writing
which thou wearest on thine arm.”
This writing is the testament of his father Hassan. He bears it in
triumph to the Imam Hussein, who finds written there that he should, on
the death-plain of Kerbela, suffer Kassem to have his will, but that he
should marry him first to his daughter Zobeyda. Kassem consents, though
in astonishment. “Consider,” he says, “there lies Ali-Akber, mangled by
the enemies’ hands! Under this sky of ebon blackness, how can joy show
her face? Nevertheless if thou commandest it, what have I to do but
obey? Thy commandment is that of the Prophet, and his voice is that of
God.” But Hussein has also to overcome the reluctance of the intended
bride and of all the women of his family.
“Heir of the vicar of God,” says Kassem’s mother to the Imam, “bid me
die, but speak not to me of a bridal. If Zobeyda is to be a bride and
Kassem a bridegroom, where is the henna to tinge their hands, where is
the bridal chamber?” “Mother of Kassem,” answers the Imam solemnly, “yet
a few moments, and in this field of anguish the tomb shall be for
marriage-bed, and the winding-sheet for bridal garment!” All give way to
the will of their sacred Head. The women and children surround Kassem,
sprinkle him with rose-water, hang bracelets and necklaces on him, and
scatter bon-bons around; and then the marriage procession is formed.
Suddenly drums and trumpets are heard, and the Syrian troops appear.
Ibn-Said and Shemer are at their head. “The Prince of the Faith
celebrates a marriage in the desert,” they exclaim tauntingly; “we will
soon change his festivity into mourning.” They pass by, and Kassem takes
leave of his bride. “God keep thee, my bride,” he says, embracing her,
“for I must forsake thee!” “One moment,” she says, “remain in thy place
one moment! thy countenance is as the lamp which giveth us light; suffer
me to turn around thee as the butterfly turneth, gently, gently!” And
making a turn around him, she performs the ancient Eastern rites of
respect from a new-married wife to her husband. Troubled, he rises to
go: “The reins of my will are slipping away from me!” he murmurs. She
lays hold of his robe: “Take off thy hand,” he cries, “we belong not to
ourselves!”
Then he asks the Imam to array him in his winding-sheet. “O nightingale
of the divine orchard of martyrdom,” says Hussein, as he complies with
his wish, “I clothe thee with thy winding-sheet, I kiss thy face; there
is no fear, and no hope, but of God!” Kassem commits his little brother
Abdallah to the Imam’s care. Omm-Leyla looks up from her son’s corpse,
and says to Kassem: “When thou enterest the garden of Paradise, kiss for
me the head of Ali-Akber!”
The Syrian troops again appear. Kassem rushes upon them and they all go
off fighting. The Family of the Tent, at Hussein’s command, put the
Koran on their heads and pray, covering themselves with sand. Kassem
reappears victorious. He has slain Azrek, a chief captain of the
Syrians, but his thirst is intolerable. “Uncle,” he says to the Imam,
who asks him what reward he wishes for his valor, “my tongue cleaves to
the roof of my mouth; the reward I wish is _water_.” “Thou coverest me
with shame, Kassem,” his uncle answers; “what can I do? Thou askest
water; there is no water!”
_Kassem._—“If I might but wet my mouth, I could presently make an end of
the men of Kufa.”
_Hussein._—“As I live, I have not one drop of water!”
_Kassem._—“Were it but lawful, I would wet my mouth with my own blood.”
_Hussein._—“Beloved child, what the Prophet forbids, that cannot I make
lawful.”
_Kassem._—“I beseech thee, let my lips be but once moistened, and I will
vanquish thine enemies!”
Hussein presses his own lips to those of Kassem, who, refreshed, again
rushes forth, and returns bleeding and stuck with darts, to die at the
Imam’s feet in the tent. So ends the marriage of Kassem.
But the great day is the tenth day of the Moharrem, when comes the death
of the Imam himself. The narrative of Gibbon well sums up the events of
this great tenth day. “The battle at length expired by the death of the
last of the companions of Hussein. Alone, weary, and wounded, he seated
himself at the door of his tent. He was pierced in the mouth with a
dart. He lifted his hands to heaven—they were full of blood—and he
uttered a funeral prayer for the living and the dead. In a transport of
despair, his sister issued from the tent, and adjured the general of the
Kufians that he would not suffer Hussein to be murdered before his eyes.
A tear trickled down the soldier’s venerable beard; and the boldest of
his men fell back on every side as the dying Imam threw himself among
them. The remorseless Shemer—a name detested by the faithful—reproached
their cowardice; and the grandson of Mahomet was slain with three and
thirty strokes of lances and swords. After they had trampled on his
body, they carried his head to the castle of Kufa, and the inhuman
Obeidallah (the governor) struck him on the mouth with a cane. ‘Alas!’
exclaimed an aged Mussulman, ‘on those lips have I seen the lips of the
Apostle of God!’”
For this catastrophe no one _tazya_ suffices; all the companies of
actors unite in a vast open space; booths and tents are pitched round
the outside circle for the spectators; in the center is the Imam’s camp,
and the day ends with its conflagration.
Nor are there wanting pieces which carry on the story beyond the death
of Hussein. One which produces an extraordinary effect is _The Christian
Damsel_. The carnage is over, the enemy are gone. To the awe-struck
beholders, the scene shows the silent plain of Kerbela and the tombs of
the martyrs. Their bodies, full of wounds, and with weapons sticking in
them still, are exposed to view; but around them all are crowns of
burning candles, circles of light, to show that they have entered into
glory. At one end of the _sakou_ is a high tomb by itself; it is the
tomb of the Imam Hussein, and his pierced body is seen stretched out
upon it. A brilliant caravan enters, with camels, soldiers, servants,
and a young lady on horseback, in European costume, or what passes in
Persia for European costume. She halts near the tombs and proposes to
encamp. Her servants try to pitch a tent; but wherever they drive a pole
into the ground, blood springs up, and a groan of horror bursts from the
audience. Then the fair traveler, instead of encamping, mounts into the
_tâgnumâ_, lies down to rest there, and falls asleep. Jesus Christ
appears to her, and makes known that this is Kerbela, and what has
happened here. Meanwhile, an Arab of the desert, a Bedouin who had
formerly received Hussein’s bounty, comes stealthily, intent on plunder,
upon the _sakou_. He finds nothing, and in a paroxysm of brutal fury he
begins to ill-treat the corpses. Blood flows. The feeling of Asiatics
about their dead is well known, and the horror of the audience rises to
its height. Presently the ruffian assails and wounds the corpse of the
Imam himself, over whom white doves are hovering; the voice of Hussein,
deep and mournful, calls from his tomb: “_There is no God but God!_” The
robber flies in terror; the angels, the prophets, Mahomet, Jesus Christ,
Moses, the Imams, the holy women, all come upon the _sakou_, press round
Hussein, load him with honors. The Christian damsel wakes, and embraces
Islam, the Islam of the sect of the Shiahs.
Another piece closes the whole story, by bringing the captive women and
children of the Iman’s family to Damascus, to the presence of the Caliph
Yezid. It is in this piece that there comes the magnificent tableau,
already mentioned, of the court of the caliph. The crown jewels are lent
for it, and the dresses of the ladies of Yezid’s court, represented by
boys chosen for their good looks, are said to be worth thousands and
thousands of pounds; but the audience see them without favor, for this
brilliant court of Yezid is cruel to the captives of Kerbela. The
captives are thrust into a wretched dungeon under the palace walls; but
the Caliph’s wife had formerly been a slave of Mahomet’s daughter
Fatima, the mother of Hussein and Zeyneb. She goes to see Zeyneb in
prison, her heart is touched, she passes into an agony of repentance,
returns to her husband, upbraids him with his crimes, and intercedes for
the women of the holy family, and for the children, who keep calling for
the Imam Hussein. Yezid orders his wife to be put to death, and sends
the head of Hussein to the children. Sekyna, the Imam’s youngest
daughter, a child of four years old, takes the beloved head in her arms,
kisses it, and lies down beside it. Then Hussein appears to her as in
life: “Oh! my father,” she cries, “where wast thou? I was hungry, I was
cold, I was beaten—where wast thou?” But now she sees him again, and is
happy. In the vision of her happiness she passes away out of this
troublesome life, she enters into rest, and the piece ends with her
mother and her aunts burying her.
These are the martyrs of Kerbela; and these are the sufferings which
awaken in an Asiatic audience sympathy so deep and serious, transports
so genuine of pity, love, and gratitude, that to match them at all one
must take the feelings raised at Ammergau. And now, where are we to
look, in the subject-matter of the Persian passion-play, for the source
of all this emotion?
Count Gobineau suggests that it is to be found in the feeling of
patriotism; and that our Indo-European kinsmen, the Persians, conquered
by the Semitic Arabians, find in the sufferings of Hussein a portrait of
their own martyrdom. “Hussein,” says Count Gobineau, “is not only the
son of Ali, he is the husband of a princess of the blood of the Persian
kings; he, his father Ali, the whole body of Imams taken together,
represent the nation, represent Persia, invaded, ill-treated, despoiled,
stripped of its inhabitants, by the Arabians. The right which is
insulted and violated in Hussein, is identified with the right of
Persia. The Arabians, the Turks, the Afghans,—Persia’s implacable and
hereditary enemies,—recognize Yezid as legitimate caliph; Persia finds
therein an excuse for hating them the more, and identifies herself the
more with the usurper’s victims. It is _patriotism_ therefore, which has
taken the form, here, of the drama to express itself.” No doubt there is
much truth in what Count Gobineau thus says; and it is certain that the
division of Shiahs and Sunis has its true cause in a division of races,
rather than in a difference of religious belief.
But I confess that if the interest of the Persian passion-plays had
seemed to me to lie solely in the curious evidence they afford of the
workings of patriotic feeling in a conquered people, I should hardly
have occupied myself with them at all this length. I believe that they
point to something much more interesting. What this is, I cannot do more
than simply indicate; but indicate it I will, in conclusion, and then
leave the student of human nature to follow it out for himself.
When Mahomet’s cousin Jaffer, and others of his first converts,
persecuted by the idolaters of Mecca, fled in the year of our era 615,
seven years before the Hegira, into Abyssinia, and took refuge with the
King of that country, the people of Mecca sent after the fugitives to
demand that they should be given up to them. Abyssinia was then already
Christian. The king asked Jaffer and his companions what was this new
religion for which they had left their country. Jaffer answered: “We
were plunged in the darkness of ignorance, we were worshipers of idols.
Given over to all our passions, we knew no law but that of the
strongest, when God raised up among us a man of our own race, of noble
descent, and long held in esteem by us for his virtues. This apostle
called us to believe in one God, to worship God only, to reject the
superstitions of our fathers, to despise divinities of wood and stone.
He commanded us to eschew wickedness, to be truthful in speech, faithful
to our engagements, kind and helpful to our relations and neighbors. He
bade us respect the chastity of women, and not to rob the orphan. He
exhorted us to prayer, alms-giving, and fasting. We believed in his
mission, and we accepted the doctrines and the rule of life which he
brought to us from God. For this our countrymen have persecuted us; and
now they want to make us return to their idolatry.” The king of
Abyssinia refused to surrender the fugitives, and then, turning again to
Jaffer, after a few more explanations, he picked up a straw from the
ground, and said to him: “Between your religion and ours there is not
the thickness of this straw difference.”
That is not quite so; yet thus much we may affirm, that Jaffer’s account
of the religion of Mahomet is a great deal truer than the accounts of it
which are commonly current amongst us. Indeed, for the credit of
humanity, as more than a hundred millions of men are said to profess the
Mahometan religion, one is glad to think so. To popular opinion
everywhere, religion is proved by miracles. All religions but a man’s
own are utterly false and vain; the authors of them are mere impostors;
and the miracles which are said to attest them, fictitious. We forget
that this is a game which two can play at; although the believer of each
religion always imagines the prodigies which attest his own religion to
be fenced by a guard granted to them alone. Yet how much more safe is
it, as well as more fruitful, to look for the main confirmation of a
religion in its intrinsic correspondence with urgent wants of human
nature, in its profound necessity! Differing religions will then be
found to have much in common, but this will be an additional proof of
the value of that religion which does most for that which is thus
commonly recognized as salutary and necessary. In Christendom one need
not go about to establish that the religion of the Hebrews is a better
religion than the religion of the Arabs, or that the Bible is a greater
book than the Koran. The Bible _grew_, the Koran _was made_; there lies
the immense difference in depth and truth between them! This very
inferiority may make the Koran, for certain purposes and for people at a
low stage of mental growth, a more powerful instrument than the Bible.
From the circumstances of its origin, the Koran has the intensely
dogmatic character, it has the perpetual insistence on the motive of
future rewards and punishments, the palpable exhibition of paradise and
hell, which the Bible has not. Among the little known and little
advanced races of the great African continent, the Mahometan
missionaries, by reason of the sort of power which this character of the
Koran gives, are said to be more successful than ours. Nevertheless even
in Africa it will assuredly one day be manifest, that whereas the
Bible-people trace themselves to Abraham through Isaac, and the
Koran-people trace themselves to Abraham through Ishmael, the difference
between the religion of the Bible and the religion of the Koran is
almost as the difference between Isaac and Ishmael. I mean that the
seriousness about righteousness, which is what the hatred of idolatry
really means, and the profound and inexhaustible doctrines that the
righteous Eternal loveth righteousness, that there is no peace for the
wicked, that the righteous is an everlasting foundation, are exhibited
and inculcated in the Old Testament with an authority, majesty, and
truth which leave the Koran immeasurably behind, and which, the more
mankind grows and gains light, the more will be felt to have no fellows.
Mahomet was no doubt acquainted with the Jews and their documents, and
gained something from this source for his religion. But his religion is
not a mere plagiarism from Judea, any more than it is a mere mass of
falsehood. No; in the seriousness, elevation, and moral energy of
himself and of that Semitic race from which he sprang and to which he
spoke, Mahomet mainly found that scorn and hatred of idolatry, that
sense of the worth and truth of righteousness, judgment, and justice,
which make the real greatness of him and his Koran, and which are thus
rather an independent testimony to the essential doctrines of the Old
Testament, than a plagiarism from them. The world needs righteousness,
and the Bible is the grand teacher of it, but for certain times and
certain men Mahomet too, in his way, was a teacher of righteousness.
But we know how the Old Testament conception of righteousness ceased
with time to have the freshness and force of an intuition, became
something petrified, narrow, and formal, needed renewing. We know how
Christianity renewed it, carrying into these hard waters of Judaism a
sort of warm gulf-stream of tender emotion, due chiefly to qualities
which may be summed up as those of inwardness, mildness, and
self-renouncement. Mahometanism had no such renewing. It began with a
conception of righteousness, lofty indeed, but narrow, and which we may
call old Jewish; and there it remained. It is not a _feeling_ religion.
No one would say that the virtues of gentleness, mildness, and
self-sacrifice were its virtues; and the more it went on, the more the
faults of its original narrow basis became visible, more and more it
became fierce and militant, less and less was it amiable. Now, what are
Ali, and Hassan, and Hussein and the Imams, but an insurrection of noble
and pious natures against this hardness and aridity of the religion
round them? an insurrection making its authors seem weak, helpless, and
unsuccessful to the world and amidst the struggles of the world, but
enabling them to know the joy and peace for which the world thirsts in
vain, and inspiring in the heart of mankind an irresistible sympathy.
“The twelve Imams,” says Gibbon, “Ali, Hassan, Hussein, and the lineal
descendants of Hussein, to the ninth generation, without arms, or
treasures, or subjects, successively enjoyed the veneration of the
people. Their names were often the pretense of sedition and civil war;
but these royal saints despised the pomp of the world, submitted to the
will of God and the injustice of man, and devoted their innocent lives
to the study and practice of religion.”
Abnegation and mildness, based on the depth of the inner life, and
visited by unmerited misfortune, made the power of the first and famous
Imams, Ali, Hassan, and Hussein, over the popular imagination. “O
brother,” said Hassan, as he was dying of poison, to Hussein who sought
to find out and punish his murderer, “O brother, let him alone till he
and I meet together before God!” So his father Ali had stood back from
his rights instead of snatching at them. So of Hussein himself it was
said by his successful rival, the usurping Caliph Yezid: “God loved
Hussein, _but he would not suffer him to attain to anything_.” They
might attain to nothing, they were too pure, these great ones of the
world as by birth they were; but the people, which itself also can
attain to so little, loved them all the better on that account, loved
them for their abnegation and mildness, felt that they were dear to God,
that God loved them, and that they and their lives filled a void in the
severe religion of Mahomet. These saintly self-deniers, these resigned
sufferers, who would not strive nor cry, supplied a tender and pathetic
side in Islam. The conquered Persians, a more mobile, more
impressionable, and gentler race than their concentrated, narrow, and
austere Semitic conquerors, felt the need of it most, and gave most
prominence to the ideals which satisfied the need; but in Arabs and
Turks also, and in all the Mahometan world, Ali and his sons excite
enthusiasm and affection. Round the central sufferer, Hussein, has come
to group itself everything which is most tender and touching. His person
brings to the Mussulman’s mind the most human side of Mahomet himself,
his fondness for children,—for Mahomet had loved to nurse the little
Hussein on his knee, and to show him from the pulpit to his people. The
Family of the Tent is full of women and children, and their devotion and
sufferings,—blameless and saintly women, lovely and innocent children.
There, too, are lovers with their story, the beauty and the love of
youth; and all follow the attraction of the pure and resigned Imam, all
die for him. The tender pathos from all these flows into the pathos from
him and enhances it, until finally there arises for the popular
imagination an immense ideal of mildness and self-sacrifice, melting and
overpowering the soul.
Even for us, to whom almost all the names are strange, whose interest in
the places and persons is faint, who have them before us for a moment
to-day, to see them again, probably, no more forever,—even for us,
unless I err greatly, the power and pathos of this ideal are
recognizable. What must they be for those to whom every name is
familiar, and calls up the most solemn and cherished associations; who
have had their adoring gaze fixed all their lives upon this exemplar of
self-denial and gentleness, and who have no other? If it was superfluous
to say to English people that the religion of the Koran has not the
value of the religion of the Old Testament, still more is it superfluous
to say that the religion of the Imams has not the value of Christianity.
The character and discourse of Jesus Christ possess, I have elsewhere
often said, two signal powers: mildness and sweet reasonableness. The
latter, the power which so puts before our view duty of every kind as to
give it the force of an intuition, as to make it seem,—to make the total
sacrifice of our ordinary self seem,—the most simple, natural, winning,
necessary thing in the world, has been hitherto applied with but a very
limited range, it is destined to an infinitely wider application, and
has a fruitfulness which will yet transform the world. Of this the Imams
have nothing, except so far as all mildness and self-sacrifice have in
them something of sweet reasonableness and are its indispensable
preliminary. This they have, _mildness and self-sacrifice_; and we have
seen what an attraction it exercises. Could we ask for a stronger
testimony to Christianity? Could we wish for any sign more convincing,
that Jesus Christ was indeed, what Christians call him, _the desire of
all nations_? So salutary, so necessary is what Christianity contains,
that a religion,—a great, powerful, successful religion,—arises without
it, and the missing virtue forces its way in! Christianity may say to
these Persian Mahometans, with their gaze fondly turned towards the
martyred Imams, what in our Bible God says by Isaiah to Cyrus, their
great ancestor:—“_I girded thee, though thou hast not known me._” It is
a long way from Kerbela to Calvary; but the sufferers of Kerbela hold
aloft to the eyes of millions of our race the lesson so loved by the
sufferer of Calvary. For he said: “Learn of me, that I am _mild_, and
_lowly of heart_; and ye shall find _rest unto your souls_.”