myself; because the Koran is in Arabic; because Arabic is the language
of Paradise." This hadith, or saying, of Mohammed might be put upon the
banner of the old university of Cairo, El Azhar; that is, the Splendid.
El Azhar was founded in the tenth century, when Cairo itself was hardly
more than a name. In its unmoved attachment to the beliefs of its
founders, to their old enthusiasms, their methods and hates, El Azhar
has opposed an inflexible front to the advance of European ideas,
sending out year after year its hundreds of pupils to all parts of Egypt
and to Nubia, to the Soudan and to Morocco, to Turkey, Arabia, and
Syria, to India and Ceylon, and to the borders of Persia, believing that
so long as it could keep the education of the young in its grasp the
reign of the Prophet was secure. It is to-day the most important
Mohammedan college in the world; for though it has no longer the twenty
thousand students who crowded its courts in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, there is still an annual attendance of from seven
to ten thousand; by some authorities the number is given as twelve
thousand. The twelve thousand have no academic groves; they have not
even one tree. There is nothing sequestered about El Azhar; it is near
the bazaars in the old part of the town, where the houses are crowded
together like wasps' nests. One sees nothing of it as one approaches
save the minarets above, and in the narrow, crowded lane an outer
portal. Here the visitor must show his permit and put on the
mosque-shoes, for El Azhar was once a mosque, and is now mosque and
university combined. After the shoes are on he steps over the low bar,
and finds himself within the porch, which is a marvel as it stands, with
its fretwork, carved stones, faded reds, and those old plaques of
inscription which excite one's curiosity so desperately, and which no
dragoman can ever translate, no matter in how many languages he can
complacently ask, "You satisfi?" One soon learns something of the older
tongue; hieroglyphics are not difficult; any one with eyes can discover
after a while that the A of the ancient Egyptians is, often, a bird who
bears a strong resemblance to a pigeon; that their L is a lion; and that
the name of the builder of the Great Pyramid, for instance, is
represented by a design which looks like two freshly hatched chickens, a
football, and a horned lizard (speaking, of course, respectfully of them
all). But one can never find out the meaning of the tantalizing
characters, so many thousand years nearer our own day, which confront
us, surrounded by arabesques, over old Cairo gateways, across the fronts
of the street fountains, or inscribed in faded gilt on the crumbling
walls of mosques. It is probable that they are Kufic, and one would
hardly demand, I suppose, that an English guide should read
black-letter? But who can be reasonable in the land of Aladdin's Lamp?
The porch leads to the large central court, which is open to the sky,
the breeze, and the birds; and this last is not merely a possibility,
for birds of all kinds are numerous in Egypt, and unmolested. On the
pavement of this court, squatting in groups, are hundreds of the
turbaned students, some studying aloud, some reading aloud (it is always
aloud), some listening to a professor (who also squats), some eating
their frugal meals, some mending their clothes, and some merely
chatting. These groups are so many and so close together that often the
visitor can only make the circuit of the place on its outskirts; he
cannot cross. There is generally a carrier of drinking-water making his
rounds amid the serried ranks. "For whoever is thirsty, here is water
from God," he chants. One is almost afraid to put down the melodious
phrase, for the street cries of Cairo have become as trite as the _Ranz
des Vaches_ of Switzerland. Still, some of them are so imaginative and
quaint that they should be rescued from triteness and made classic. Here
is one which is chanted by the seller of vegetables--the best beans, it
should be explained, come from Embebeh, beyond Boulak--"Help, O Embebeh,
help! The beans of Embebeh are better than almonds. Oh-h, how _sweet_
are the little sons of the river!" (This last phrase makes poetical
allusion to the soaking in Nile water, which is required before the
beans can be cooked.) Certain famous baked beans nearer home also
require preliminary soaking. Let us imagine a huckster calling out in
Boston streets, as he pursues his way: "Help, O Beverly, help! The beans
of Beverly are better than peaches. Oh-h, how _sweet_ are the little
sons of Cochituate!"
[Illustration: PORCH OF EL AZHAR
From a photograph by Sebah, Cairo]
The central court of the Splendid is surrounded by colonnades, whose
walls are now undergoing repairs; but the propping beams do not appear
to disturb either the pupils or teachers. On the east side is the
sanctuary, which is also a school-room, but a covered one; it is a
large, low-ceilinged hall, covering an area of thirty-six hundred square
yards; by day its light is dusky; by night it is illuminated by twelve
hundred twinkling little lamps suspended from the ceiling by bronze
chains. The roof is supported by three hundred and eighty antique
columns of marble and granite placed in irregular ranges; there are so
many of these pillars that to be among them is like standing in a grove.
The pavement is smoothly covered with straw matting; and here also are
assembled throngs of pupils--some studying, some reciting, some asleep.
I paid many visits to El Azhar, moving about quietly with my venerable
little dragoman, whom I had selected for an unusual accomplishment--silence.
One day I came upon an arithmetic class; the professor, a thin,
ardent-eyed man of forty, was squatted upon a beautiful Turkish rug at
the base of a granite column; his class of boys, numbering thirty, were
squatted in a half-circle facing him, their slates on the matting before
them. The professor had a small black-board which he had propped up so
that all could see it, and there on its surface I saw inscribed that
enemy of my own youth, a sum in fractions--three-eighths of seven-ninths
of twelve-twentieths of ten-thirty-fifths, and so on; evidently the
terrible thing is as savage as ever! The professor grew excited; he
harangued his pupils; he did the sum over and over, rubbing out and
rewriting his ferocious conundrum with a bit of chalk. Slender Arabian
hands tried the sum furtively on the little slates; but no one had
accomplished the task when, afraid of being remarked, I at last turned
away.
The outfit of a well-provided student at El Azhar consists of a rug, a
low desk like a small portfolio-easel, a Koran, a slate, an inkstand,
and an earthen dish. Instruction is free, and boys are admitted at the
early age of eight years. The majority of the pupils do not remain after
their twelfth or fourteenth year; a large number, however, pursue their
studies much longer, and old students return from time to time to obtain
further instruction, so that it is not uncommon to see a gray-bearded
pupil studying by the side of a child who might be his grandson. To me
it seemed that two-thirds of the students were men between thirty and
forty years of age; but this may have been because one noticed them
more, as collegians so mature are an unusual sight for American eyes.
All the pupils bow as they study, with a motion like that of the bowing
porcelain mandarins. The custom is attributed to the necessity for
bending the head whenever the name of Allah is encountered; as the first
text-book is always the Koran, children have found it easier to bow at
regular intervals with an even motion than to watch for the numerous
repetitions of the name. The habit thus formed in childhood remains, and
one often sees old merchants in the bazaars reading for their own
entertainment, and bowing to and fro as they read. I have even beheld
young men, smartly dressed in full European attire, who, lost in the
interest of a newspaper, had forgotten themselves for the moment, and
were bending to and fro unconsciously at the door of a French cafe. A
nation that enjoys the rocking-chair ought to understand this. Some of
the students of El Azhar have rooms outside, but many of them possess no
other shelter than these two courts, where they sleep upon their rugs
spread over the matting or pavement. Food can be brought in at pleasure,
but those two Oriental time-consumers, pipes and coffee, are not allowed
within the precincts. In one of the porches barbers are established;
there is generally a row of students undergoing the process of
head-shaving. The fierce, fanatical blind pupils, so often described in
the past by travellers, are no longer there; the porter can show only
their empty school-room. Blindness is prevalent in Egypt; no doubt the
sunshine of the long summer has something to do with it, but another
cause is the neglected condition of young children. There is no belief
so firmly established in the minds of Egyptian mothers as the
superstition that the child who is clean and well-dressed will
inevitably attract the dreaded evil-eye, and suffer ever afterwards from
the effects of the malign glance. I have seen women who evidently
belonged to the upper ranks of the middle class--women dressed in silk,
with gold ornaments, and a following servant--who were accompanied by a
poor baby of two or three years of age, so dirty, so squalid and
neglected, that any one unacquainted with the country would have
supposed it to be the child of a beggar.
In addition to the bowing motion, instruction at El Azhar is aided by a
mnemonic system, the rules of grammar, and other lessons also, being
given in rhyme. I suppose our public schools are above devices of this
sort; but there are some of us among the elders who still fly mentally,
when the subject of English history comes up, to that useful poem
beginning "First, William the Norman;" and I have heard of the rules for
the use of "shall" and "will" being properly remembered only when set to
the tune of "Scotland's burning!" Surely any tune--even "Man the
Life-boat"--would become valuable if it could clear up the bogs of the
subjunctive.
It must be mentioned that El Azhar did not invent its mnemonics; it has
inherited them from the past. All the mediaeval universities made use of
the system.
The central court is surrounded on three sides by chambers, one of which
belongs to each country and to each Egyptian province represented at the
college. These sombre apartments are filled with oddly-shaped wardrobes,
which are assigned to the students for their clothes. There is a legend
connected with these rooms: At dusk a man whose heart is pure is
sometimes permitted to see the elves who come at that hour to play
games in the inner court under the columns; here they run races, they
chase each other over the matting, they climb the pillars, and indulge
in a thousand antics. The little creatures are said to live in the
wardrobes, and each student occasionally places a few flowers within, to
avert from himself the danger that comes from their too great love of
tricks. There are other inhabitants of these rooms who also indulge in
tricks. These are little animals which I took to be ferrets; twice I had
a glimpse of a disappearing tail, like a dark flash, as I passed over a
threshold. Probably they are kept as mouse-hunters, for pets are not
allowed; if they were, it would be entertaining to note those which
would be brought hither by homesick pupils from the Somali coast, or
Yemen.
In beginning his education the first task for a boy is to commit the
Koran to memory. As he learns a portion he is taught to read and to
write those paragraphs; in this way he goes through the entire volume.
Grammar comes next; at El Azhar the word includes logic, rhetoric,
composition, versification, elocution, and other branches. Then follows
law, secular and religious. But the law, like the logic, like all the
instruction, is founded exclusively upon the Koran. As there is no
inquiry into anything new, the precepts have naturally taken a fixed
shape; the rules were long ago established, and they have never been
altered; the student of 1890 receives the information given to the
student of 1490, and no more. But it is this very fact which makes El
Azhar interesting to the looker-on; it is a living relic, a survival in
the nineteenth century of the university of the fourteenth and
fifteenth. It is true that when we think of those great colleges of the
past, the picture which rises in the mind is not one of turbaned, seated
figures in flowing robes; it is rather of aggressively agile youths,
with small braggadocio caps perched on their long locks, their
slender waists outlined in the shortest of jackets, and their long legs
incased in the tightest of party-colored hose. But this is because the
great painters of the past have given immortality to these astonishing
scholars of their own lands by putting them upon their canvases. They
confined themselves to their own lands too, unfortunately for us; they
did not set sail, with their colors and brushes, upon Homer's "misty
deep." It would be interesting to see what Pinturicchio would have made
of El Azhar; or how Gentile da Fabriano would have copied the crowded
outer court.
[Illustration: STUDENTS IN THE OUTER COURT, EL AZHAR From a photograph
by Abdullah Freres, Cairo]
The president of El Azhar occupies, in native estimation, a position of
the highest authority. Napoleon, recognizing this power, requested the
aid of his influence in inducing Cairo to surrender in 1798. The sheykh
complied; and a month later the wonderful Frenchman, in full Oriental
costume, visited the university in state, and listened to a recitation
from the Koran.
Now that modern schools have been established by the government in
addition to the excellent and energetic mission seminaries maintained by
the English, the Americans, the Germans, and the French, one wonders
whether this venerable Arabian college will modify its tenets or shrink
to a shadow and disappear. There are hopeful souls who prophesy the
former; but I do not agree with them. Let us aid the American schools by
all the means in our power. But as for El Azhar, may it fade (as fade it
must) with its ancient legends draped untouched about it.
All who visit Cairo see the Assiout ware--pottery made of red and black
earth, and turned on a wheel; it comes from Assiout, two hundred and
thirty miles up the Nile, and the simple forms of the vases and jugs,
the rose-water stoups and narrow-necked perfume-throwers, are often
very graceful. Assiout ware is offered for sale in the streets; but the
itinerant venders are sent out by a dealer in the bazaars, and the
fatality which makes it happen that the vender has two black stoups and
one red jug when you wish for one black stoup and two red jugs sent us
to headquarters. But the crowded booth did not contain our heart's
desire, and as we still lingered, making ourselves, I dare say, too
pressing for the Oriental ease of the proprietor, it was at last
suggested that Mustapha might perhaps go to the store-room for more--?
(the interrogation-point meaning backsheesh). Seizing the opportunity,
we asked permission to accompany the messenger. No one objecting--as the
natives consider all strangers more or less mad--we were soon following
our guide through a dusky passageway behind the shop, the darkness lit
by the gleam of his white teeth as he turned, every now and then, to
give us an encouraging smile and a wink of his one eye, over his
shoulder. At length--still in the dark--we arrived at a stairway, and,
ascending, found ourselves in a second-story court, which was roofed
over with matting. This court was surrounded by chambers fitted with
rough, sliding fronts: almost all of the fronts were at the moment
thrown up, as a window is thrown up and held by its pulleys. In one of
these rooms we found Assiout ware in all its varieties; but we made a
slow choice. We were evidently in a lodging-house of native Cairo; all
the chambers save this one store-room appeared to be occupied as
bachelors' apartments. The two rooms nearest us belonged to El Azhar
students, so Mustapha said: he could speak no English, but he imparted
the information in Arabic to our dragoman. Seeing that we were more
interested in the general scene than in his red jugs, Mustapha left the
Assiout ware to its fate, and, lighting a cigarette, seated himself on
the railing with a disengaged air, as much as to say: "Two more mad
women! But it's nothing to me." One of the students was evidently an
ascetic; his room contained piles of books and pamphlets, and almost
nothing else; his one rug was spread out close to the front in order to
get the light, and placed upon it we saw his open inkstand, his pens,
and a page of freshly copied manuscript. When we asked where he was,
Mustapha replied that he had gone down to the fountain to wash himself,
so that he could say his prayers. The second chamber belonged to a
student of another disposition; this extravagant young man had three
rugs; clothes hung from pegs upon his walls, and he possessed an extra
pair of lemon-colored slippers; in addition we saw cups and saucers upon
a shelf. Only two books were visible, and these were put away in a
corner; instead of books he had flowers; the whole place was adorned
with them; pots containing plants in full bloom were standing on the
floor round the walls of his largely exposed abode, and were also drawn
up in two rows in the passageway outside, where he himself, sitting on a
mat, was sewing. His blossoms were so gay that involuntarily we smiled.
Whereupon he smiled too, and gave us a salam. Opposite the rooms of the
students there was a large chamber, almost entirely filled with white
bales, like small cotton bales; in a niche between these high piles, an
old man, kneeling at the threshold, was washing something in a large
earthen-ware tub of a pink tint. His body was bare from the waist
upward, and, as he bent over his task, his short chest, with all the
ribs clearly visible, his long brown back with the vertebrae of the spine
standing out, and his lean, seesawing arms, looked skeleton-like, while
his head, supported on a small wizened throat, was adorned with such an
enormous bobbing turban, dark green in hue, that it resembled vegetation
of some sort--a colossal cabbage. Directly behind him, also on the
threshold, squatted a large gray baboon, whose countenance expressed a
fixed misanthropy. Every now and then this creature, who was secured by
a long, loose cord, ascended slowly to the top of the bales and came
down on the other side, facing his master. He then looked deeply into
the tub for several minutes, touched the water carefully with his small
black hand, withdrew it, and inspected the palm, and then returned
gravely, and by the same roundabout way over the bales, to resume his
position at the doorsill, looking as if he could not understand the
folly of such unnecessary and silly toil.
In another chamber a large, very black negro, dressed in pure white, was
seated upon the floor, with his feet stretched out in front of him, his
hands placed stiffly on his knees, his eyes staring straight before him.
He was motionless; he seemed hardly to breathe.
"What is he doing?" I said to the dragoman.
"He? Oh, he _berry_ good man; he pray."
In a chamber next to the negro two grave old Arabs were playing chess.
They were perched upon one of those Cairo settees which look like square
chicken-coops. One often sees these seats in the streets, placed for
messengers and porters, and for some time I took them for actual
chicken-coops, and wondered why they were always empty. Chickens might
well have inhabited the one used by the chess-players, for the central
court upon which all these chambers opened was covered with a layer of
rubbish and dirt several inches thick, which contained many of their
feathers. It was upon this same day that we made our search for the Khan
of Kait Bey. No dragoman knows where it is. The best way, indeed, to see
the old quarters is to select from a map the name of a street as remote
as possible from the usual thoroughfares beloved by these tasselled
guides, and then demand to be conducted thither.
[Illustration: BEFORE THE SACRED NICHE
From a photograph by Sebah, Cairo]
We did this in connection with the Khan of Kait Bey. But when we had
achieved the distinction of finding it, we discovered that it was
impossible to see it. The winding street is so narrow, and so constantly
crowded with two opposed streams of traffic, that your donkey cannot
pause to give you a chance to inspect the portion which is close to your
eyes, and there is no spot where you can get a view in perspective of
the whole. So you pass up the lane, turn, and come down again; and, if
conscientious, you repeat the process, obtaining for all your pains only
a confused impression of horizontal plaques and panels, with ruined
walls tottering above them, and squalid shops below. There is a fine
arched gateway adorned with pendentives; that, on account of its size,
you can see; it leads into the khan proper, where were once the chambers
for the travelling merchants and the stalls for their beasts; but all
this is now a ruin. One of the best authorities on Saracenic art has
announced that this khan is adorned with more varieties of exquisite
arabesques than any single building in Cairo. This may be true. But to
appreciate the truth of the statement one needs wings or a ladder. The
word ladder opens the subject of the two ways of looking at
architecture--in detail or as a whole. The natural power of the eye has
more to do with this than is acknowledged. If one can distinctly see,
without effort and aid, a whole facade at a glance, with the general
effect of its proportions, the style of its ornament, the lights and
shadows, the outline of the top against the sky, one is more interested
in this than in the small traceries, for instance, over one especial
window. There are those of us who remember the English cathedrals by
their great towers rising in the gray air, with the birds flying about
them. There are others who, never having clearly seen this vision--for
no opera-glass can give the whole--recall, for their share of the
pleasure, the details of the carvings over the porches, or of the old
tombs within. It is simply the far-sighted and the near-sighted view.
Another authority, a master who has had many disciples, has (of late
years, at least) devoted himself principally to the near-sighted view.
In his maroon-colored Tracts on Venice he has given us a minute account
of the features of the small faces of the capitals of the columns of the
Doge's palace (all these ofs express the minuteness of it); but when we
stand on the pavement below the palace--and naturally we cannot stand in
mid-air--we find that it is impossible to follow him: I speak of the old
capitals, some of which are still untouched. The solution lies in the
ladder. And Ruskin, as regards his later writings, may be called the
ladder critic. The poet Longfellow, arriving in Verona during one of his
Italian journeys, learned that Ruskin was also there, and not finding
him at the hotel, went out in search of his friend. After a while he
came upon him at the Tombs of the Scaligers. Here high in the air, at
the top of a long ladder, with a servant keeping watch below, was a
small figure. It was Ruskin, who, nose to nose with them, was making a
careful drawing of some of the delicate terminal ornaments of those
splendid Gothic structures. One does not object to the careful drawings
any more than to the descriptions of the little faces at Venice. They
are good in their way. But one wishes to put upon record the suggestion
that architectural beauty as viewed from a ladder, inch by inch, is not
the only aspect of that beauty; nor is it, for a large number of us, the
most important aspect. A man who is somewhat deaf, if talking about a
symphony, will naturally dwell upon the strains which he has heard--that
is, the louder portions; but he ought not therefore to assume that the
softer notes are insignificant.
THE DERVISHES