A CENTRE OF ISLAM
“To learn is the duty of every Moslem.”
--Verse from the Hadith or Words of the Prophet.
In a narrow street, hidden in the midst of the most ancient Arab
quarters of Cairo, in the very heat of a close labyrinth mysteriously
shady, an exquisite doorway opens into a wide space bathed in sunshine;
a doorway formed of two elaborate arches, and surmounted by a high
frontal on which intertwined arabesques form wonderful rosework, and
holy writings are enscrolled with the most ingenious complications.
It is the entrance to El-Azhar, a venerable place in Islam, whence
have issued for nearly a thousand years the generations of priests and
doctors charged with the propagation of the word of the Prophet amongst
the nations, from the Mohreb to the Arabian Sea, passing through the
great deserts. About the end of our tenth century the glorious Fatimee
Caliphs built this immense assemblage of arches and columns, which
became the seat of the most renowned Moslem university in the world. And
since then successive sovereigns of Egypt have vied with one another
in perfecting and enlarging it, adding new halls, new galleries, new
minarets, till they have made of El-Azhar almost a town within a town.
*****
“He who seeks instruction is more loved of God than he who fights
in a holy war.”
--A verse from the Hadith.
Eleven o'clock on a day of burning sunshine and dazzling light. El-Azhar
still vibrates with the murmur of many voices, although the lessons of
the morning are nearly finished.
Once past the threshold of the double ornamented door we enter the
courtyard, at this moment empty as the desert and dazzling with
sunshine. Beyond, quite open, the mosque spreads out its endless
arcades, which are continued and repeated till they are lost in the
gloom of the far interior, and in this dim place, with its perplexing
depths, innumerable people in turbans, sitting in a close crowd, are
singing, or rather chanting, in a low voice, and marking time as it were
to their declamation by a slight rhythmic swaying from the hips. They
are the ten thousand students come from all parts of the world to absorb
the changeless doctrine of El-Azhar.
At the first view it is difficult to distinguish them, for they are far
down in the shadow, and out here we are almost blinded by the sun. In
little attentive groups of from ten to twenty, seated on mats around a
grave professor, they docilely repeat their lessons, which in the course
of centuries have grown old without changing like Islam itself. And we
wonder how those in the circles down there, in the aisles at the
bottom where the daylight scarcely penetrates, can see to read the old
difficult writings in the pages of their books.
In any case, let us not trouble them--as so many tourists nowadays do
not hesitate to do; we will enter a little later, when the studies of
the morning are over.
This court, upon which the sun of the forenoon now pours its white fire,
is an enclosure severely and magnificently Arab; it has isolated us
suddenly from time and things; it must lend to the Moslem prayer what
formerly our Gothic churches lent to the Christian. It is vast as a
tournament list; confined on one side by the mosque itself, and on the
others by a high wall which effectively separates it from the outer
world. The walls are of a reddish hue, burnt by centuries of sun into
the colour of raw sienna or of bloodstone. At the bottom they are
straight, simple, a little forbidding in their austerity, but their
summits are elaborately ornamented and crowned with battlements, which
show in profile against the sky a long series of denticulated stonework.
And over this sort of reddish fretwork of the top, which seems as if it
were there as a frame to the deep blue vault above us, we see rising up
distractedly all the minarets of the neighbourhood; and these minarets
are red-coloured too, redder even than the jealous walls, and are
decorated with arabesques, pierced by the daylight and complicated
with aerial galleries. Some of them are a little distance away; others,
startlingly close, seem to scale the zenith; and all are ravishing and
strange, with their shining crescents and outstretched shafts of wood
that call to the great birds of space. Spite of ourselves we raise our
heads, fascinated by all the beauty that is in the air; but there is
only this square of marvellous sky, a sort of limpid sapphire, set
in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by those audacious slender
towers. We are in the religious East of olden days and we feel how the
mystery of this magnificent court--whose architectural ornament consists
merely in geometrical designs repeated to infinity, and does not
commence till quite high up on the battlements, where the minarets point
into the eternal blue--must cast its spell upon the imagination of the
young priests who are being trained here.
*****
“He who instructs the ignorant is like a living man amongst the dead.”
“If a day passes without my having learnt something which brings me
nearer to God, let not the dawn of that day be blessed.”
Verses from the Hadith.
He who has brought me to this place to-day is my friend, Mustapha Kamel
Pacha, the tribune of Egypt, and I owe to his presence the fact that I
am not treated like a casual visitor. Our names are taken at once to
the great master of El-Azhar, a high personage in Islam, whose pupil
Mustapha formerly was, and who no doubt will receive us in person.
It is in a hall very Arab in its character, furnished only with divans,
that the great master welcomes us, with the simplicity of an ascetic and
the elegant manners of a prelate. His look, and indeed his whole face,
tell how onerous is the sacred office which he exercises: to preside,
namely, at the instruction of these thousands of young priests, who
afterwards are to carry faith and peace and immobility to more than
three hundred millions of men.
And in a few moments Mustapha and he are busy discussing--as if it were
a matter of actual interest--a controversial question concerning the
events which followed the death of the Prophet, and the part played by
Ali. . . . In that moment how my good friend Mustapha, whom I had seen
so French in France, appeared all at once a Moslem to the bottom of
his soul! The same thing is true indeed of the greater number of these
Orientals, who, if we meet them in our own country, seem to be quite
parisianised; their modernity is only on the surface: in their inmost
souls Islam remains intact. And it is not difficult to understand,
perhaps, how the spectacle of our troubles, our despairs, our miseries,
in these new ways in which our lot is cast, should make them reflect and
turn again to the tranquil dream of their ancestors. . . .
While waiting for the conclusion of the morning studies, we are
conducted through some of the dependencies of El-Azhar. Halls of every
epoch, added one to another, go to form a little labyrinth; many contain
_Mihrabs_, which, as we know already, are a kind of portico, festooned
and denticulated till they look as if covered with rime. And library
after library, with ceilings of cedarwood, carved in times when men
had more leisure and more patience. Thousands of precious manuscripts,
dating back some hundreds of years, but which here in El-Azhar are no
whit out of date. Open, in glass cases, are numerous inestimable Korans,
which in olden times had been written fair and illuminated on parchment
by pious khedives. And, in a place of honour, a large astronomical
glass, through which men watch the rising of the moon of Ramadan. . . .
All this savours of the past. And what is being taught to-day to the ten
thousand students of El-Azhar scarcely differs from what was taught to
their predecessors in the glorious reign of the Fatimites--and which was
then transcendent and even new: the Koran and all its commentaries; the
subtleties of syntax and of pronunciation; jurisprudence; calligraphy,
which still is dear to the heart of Orientals; versification; and, last
of all, mathematics, of which the Arabs were the inventors.
Yes, all this savours of the past, of the dust of remote ages. And
though, assuredly, the priests trained in this thousand-year-old
university may grow to men of rarest soul, they will remain, these calm
and noble dreamers, merely laggards, safe in their shelter from the
whirlwind which carries us along.
*****
“It is a sacrilege to prohibit knowledge. To seek knowledge is to
perform an act of adoration towards God; to instruct is to do an act of
charity.”
“Knowledge is the life of Islam, the column of faith.”
Verses from the Hadith.
The lesson of the morning is now finished and we are able, without
disturbing anybody, to visit the mosque.
When we return to the great courtyard, with its battlemented walls,
it is the hour of recreation for this crowd of young men in robes and
turbans, who now emerge from the shadow of the sanctuary.
Since the early morning they have remained seated on their mats,
immersed in study and prayer, amid the confused buzzing of their
thousands of voices; and now they scatter themselves about the
contiguous Arab quarters until such time as the evening lessons
commence. They walk along in little groups, sometimes holding one
another's hands like children; most of them carry their heads high and
raise their eyes to the heavens, although the sun which greets them
outside dazzles them a little with its rays. They seem innumerable, and
as they pass show us faces of the most diverse types. They come from
all quarters of the world; some from Baghdad, others from Bassorah, from
Mossul and even from the interior of Hedjaz. Those from the north have
eyes that are bright and clear; and amongst those from Moghreb, from
Morocco and the Sahara, are many whose skins are almost black. But
the expression of all the faces is alike: something of ecstasy and of
aloofness marks them all; the same detachment, a preoccupation with the
self-same dream. And in the sky, to which they raise their eyes, the
heavens--framed always by the battlements of El-Azhar--are almost white
from the excess of light, with a border of tall, red minarets, which
seem to be aglow with the refection of some great fire. And, watching
them pass, all these young priests or jurists, at once so different
and so alike, we understand better than before how Islam, the old, old
Islam, keeps still its cohesion and its power.
The mosque in which they pursue their studies is now almost empty.
In its restful twilight there is silence, and the unexpected music of
little birds; it is the brooding season and the ceilings of carved wood
are full of nests, which nobody disturbs.
A world, this mosque, in which thousands of people could easily find
room. Some hundred and fifty marble columns, brought from ancient
temples, support the arches of the seven parallel aisles. There is
no light save that which comes through the arcade opening into the
courtyard, and it is so dark in the aisles at the far end that we wonder
again how the faithful can see to read when the sun of Egypt happens to
be veiled.
Some score of students, who seem almost lost in the vast solitude, still
remain during the hour of rest, and are busy sweeping the floor with
long palms made into a kind of broom. These are the poor students, whose
only meal is of dry bread, and who at night stretch themselves to sleep
on the same mat on which they have sat studying during the day.
The residence at the university is free to all the scholars, the cost of
their education and maintenance being provided by pious donations. But,
inasmuch as the bequests are restricted according to nationality, there
is necessarily inequality in the treatment doled out to the different
students: thus the young men of a given country may be almost rich,
possessing a room and a good bed; while those of a neighbouring country
must sleep on the ground and have barely enough to keep body and soul
together. But none of them complain, and they know how to help one
another.[*]
[*] The duration of the studies at El-Azhar varies from
three to six years.
Near to us, one of these needy students is eating, without any false
shame, his midday meal of dry bread; and he welcomes with a smile the
sparrows and the other little winged thieves who come to dispute with
him the crumbs of his repast. And farther down, in the dimly lighted
vaults at the end, is one who disdains to eat, or who, maybe, has no
bread; who, when his sweeping is done, reseats himself on his mat,
and, opening his Koran, commences to read aloud with the customary
intonation. His voice, rich and facile, and moderated with discretion,
has a charm that is irresistible in the sonorous old mosque, where at
this hour the only other sound is the scarcely perceptible twittering of
the little broods above, among the dull gold beams of the ceiling. Those
who have been familiar with the sanctuaries of Islam know, as well as I,
that there is no book so exquisitely rhythmical as that of the Prophet.
Even if the sense of the verses escape you, the chanted reading, which
forms part of certain of the offices, acts upon you by the simple magic
of its sounds, in the same way as the oratorios which draw tears in
the churches of Christ. Rising and falling like some sad lullaby, the
declamation of this young priest, with his face of visionary, and garb
of decent poverty, swells involuntarily, till gradually it seems to fill
the seven deserted aisles of El-Azhar.
We stop in spite of ourselves, and listen, in the midst of the silence
of midday. And in this so venerable place, where dilapidation and
the usury of centuries are revealed on every side--even on the marble
columns worn by the constant friction of hands--this voice of gold
that rises alone seems as if it were intoning the last lament over the
death-pang of Old Islam and the end of time, the elegy, as it were, of
the universal death of faith in the heart of man.
*****
“Science is one religion; prayer is another. Study is better than
worship. Go; seek knowledge everywhere, if needs be, even into China.”
Verses from the Hadith.
Amongst us Europeans it is commonly accepted as a proven fact that
Islam is merely a religion of obscurantism, bringing in its train the
stagnation of nations, and hampering them in that march to the unknown
which we call “progress.” But such an attitude shows not only an
absolute ignorance of the teaching of the Prophet, but a blind
forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier
centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it
gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all question.
To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is altogether
too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period
of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a
law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them
from their torpor and they awake.
This immobility of the countries of the Crescent was once dear to me.
If the end is to pass through life with the minimum of suffering,
disdaining all vain striving, and to die entranced by radiant hopes, the
Orientals are the only wise men. But now that greedy nations beset them
on all sides their dreaming is no longer possible. They must awake,
alas.
They must awake; and already the awakening is at hand. Here, in Egypt,
where the need is felt to change so many things, it is proposed, too,
to reform the old university of El-Azhar, one of the chief centres of
Islam. One thinks of it with a kind of fear, knowing what danger there
is in laying hands upon institutions which have lasted for a thousand
years. Reform, however, has, in principle, been decided upon. New
knowledge, brought from the West, is penetrating into the tabernacle
of the Fatimites. Has not the Prophet said: “Go; seek knowledge far and
wide, if needs be even into China”? What will come of it? Who can tell?
But this, at least, is certain: that in the dazzling hours of noon,
or in the golden hours of evening, when the crowd of these modernised
students spreads itself over the vast courtyard, overlooked by its
countless minarets, there will no longer be seen in their eyes the
mystic light of to-day; and it will no longer be the old unshakable
faith, nor the lofty and serene indifference, nor the profound peace,
that these messengers will carry to the ends of the Mussulman
earth. . . .