CHAPTER VIII

THE GYPSY IN AMERICA

_The Gypsies of the Brazil_

The Romá of the North American Republic are well known, and their

emigration is of modern date. During the wars between England and

France which followed the great Revolution many of them exchanged a

wandering life for the service of the country, having been either

kidnapped or impressed, or having taken the shilling. Of course, after

obtaining a passage to the American colonies, they deserted the army,

found friends, and settled in the country. The half-bandit bands of

Scottish Gypsies were mostly broken up in this way.

On the other hand, South America is very little known; and yet the

part with which I am most familiar, the Brazil, is full of Gypsies.

When Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (A.D. 1492) issued the

exterminating edict against Moors, Jews, and Gitanos, the latter slunk

into hiding-places; they were again proscribed by Charles V. (A.D.

1582); and Philip III. (A.D. 1619) issued from Belem in Portugal an

order for all the Gypsies to quit the country within six months--an

order renewed by Philip IV. in A.D. 1633. There was some reason for

this severity. The “masterful beggars” had made themselves infamous

by turning spies to the Turks and Saracens; and if the general

prejudice against them was unfounded, it rested at least upon a solid

foundation--their hatred of the Christian Busno, Gacho, or non-Gypsy.

Thus every maritime city of the Brazil to which the exiles were shipped

presently contained a Gypsy _bairro_, or quarter, the Portuguese

Moreria (Moorery) corresponding with the Spanish Gitaneria, and not a

little resembling the Ghettos of the Italian Jews. For instance, the

Rocco, now the handsomest square in superb Rio de Janeiro, was of old

the Campo dos Ciganos--the Gypsies’ Field. The “Egyptian pilgrims”

thence spread abroad over the Interior, where their tents often attract

the traveller’s eye; and some of them became distinguished criminals,

like the Gypsy Beijú, one of the chief Thugs, whose career, ended by

hanging for the murders which long disgraced the Mantiqueira Mountains,

I have described in the _Highlands of the Brazil_ (i. 63).

Wandering about the provinces of S. Paulo and Minas Geraes, I often met

Gypsy groups whose appearance, language, and occupations were those

of Europe. They are here perhaps a little more violent and dangerous,

and the wayfarer looks to his revolver as he nears their camp at the

dusk hour; yet they are hardly worse than the “Morpheticos” (lepers),

who are allowed to haunt the country. Popular books and reviews ignore

them; but the peasantry regard them with disgust and religious dread.

They protest themselves to be pious Catholics, yet they are so far the

best of Protestants, as they protest, practically and energetically,

against the whole concern. Their religion, in fact, is embodied in the

axiom: “Cras moriemur--post mortem nulla voluptas.” We may well believe

the common rumour which charges them with being robbers of poultry and

horses, and with doing at times a trifle in the way of assassination.

On May 3, 1866, when riding from Rio Claro to Piracicava Saõ Paulo,

I visited a gang of these “verminous ones”; and attended by my armed

servants, I spent a night in their tents. The scene was familiar: the

tilt-tent swarmed with dark children, the pot hung from the triangle,

and horses and ponies for carriage, and perhaps for sale, were picketed

about. The features and complexion were those of the foreign tinkler;

the women, besides trumpery ornaments of brass, coral, and beads, wore

scarlet leg-wraps; and some of the girls were pretty and well dressed

as the memorable Selina, of Bagley Wood, Oxford. Apparently they were

owners of negro slaves, possibly runaways. According to the Brazilians,

they are fond of _nomes esquisitos_ (fancy names); Esmeralda and

Sapphira are common, and they borrow from trees, plants, and animals.

Their chief occupations are petty trade and fortune-telling, when they

reveal for a consideration all the mysteries of “love and law, health

and wealth, losses and crosses.” They also “keen” at funerals during

the livelong day, and drink, sing, and dance through the night--a

regular wake. I could not induce them to use their own tongue, yet they

evidently understood me. This desire to conceal their Gypsy origin I

have frequently noticed elsewhere. It is probably a relic of the days

of their persecution. Fortunately in most civilized countries to-day

the Gypsy can count equal rights with other men.

III. EL ISLAM

EL ISLAM

OR

THE RANK OF MUHAMMADANISM AMONG THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD

A great philosopher in days of yore informs us that we may search the

world throughout, and that in no region where man has lived can we find

a city without the knowledge of a god or the practice of a religion

(Plutarch).

This apophthegm embodies a dogma somewhat too rash and sweeping. The

necessity of a Demiurgos--a Creator--so familiar to our minds is

generally strange to savages. The wilder tribes of Singhalese Veddahs,

for instance, have no superstition; these savages have not even

attained the fear of demons. It has but scant hold upon the imagination

of barbarous men. The Buddhists and Jains ascribed after Sakya-Muni the

phenomena of the universe to Swabháva, or force inherent in matter,

Matra, and independent of an Ishwara-Karta, or Manufacturing God.

Aristotle and Spinoza believed with Pythagoras the world to be eternal,

and that a God cannot exist without the world, as height without

breadth. Hence Hegel’s “eternal nihilum”--creation being everything

for created beings--in direct opposition to Calvin, who opined that

creation is not a transfusion of essence, but a commencement of it out

of nothing. In the present day, the Kafirs of the Cape, the ancient

Egyptians, and African races generally, barbarians and semi-barbarians,

by no means deficient in intellect and acuteness, have never been able

to comprehend the existence or the necessity of a One God. With them,

as with a multitude of civilized philosophers--the Indian Charvakas,

for instance--Nature is self-existent, Matter is beginningless and

endless; in fact, the world is their God. _Ex nihilo nihil fit_ is the

first article of their creed. Absolute ignorance of any God, then, was

the earliest spiritual condition of the human family.

But veneration is inherent in the human breast. Presently mankind,

emerging from intellectual infancy, began to detect absurdity in

creation without a Creator, in effects without causes. As yet,

however, they did not dare to throw upon a Single Being the whole

onus of the world of matter, creation, preservation, and destruction.

Man, instinctively impressed by a sense of his own unworthiness,

would hopelessly have attempted to conceive the idea of a purely

Spiritual Being, omnipotent and omnipresent. Awestruck by the

admirable phenomena and the stupendous powers of Nature, filled with a

sentiment of individual weakness, he abandoned himself to a flood of

superstitious fears, and prostrated himself before natural objects,

inanimate as well as animate. Thus comforted by the sun and fire,

benefited by wind and rain, improved by hero and sage, destroyed

by wild beasts, dispersed by convulsions of Nature, he fell into a

rude, degrading, and cowardly Fetissism, the faith of fear, and the

transition state from utter savagery to barbarism.

In support of this opinion it may be observed that this religion--if

indeed Fetissism merit that sacred name--in its earliest form contains

no traces of a Godhead or a Creator.[211] It is a systematic worship

of the personified elements, productions, and powers of Nature, male

and female, and supported by a host of associates and subordinates.

Its triad is Indra, the Æther-god; Varuna ([Greek: ουρανος: ouranos]),

the Sun-god; and Agni, the Fire-god. The polytheistic triad of the

Puranas being then unknown, the Creator, Brahma, appears in the Vedas;

the Preserver, Vishnu, inferior to Indra, represents the firmament;

and Siwa is proved by Lassen to have been a local god, subsequently

admitted by the Brahmans into their vast Pantheon. Still further from

man’s belief in those early days is the bold and original thought

of the Upanashids and Vedantas, destined so soon to fall before the

formulæ of the schools and law-books, the Puranas and other traditions.

There Brahm, or the One Almighty, is made the pinnacle of the gorgeous

pagoda of belief; the whole universe, matter and spirit, is represented

to be the very substance and development of the Demiurgos. In support

of their grand Pantheism the Brahma-Sutra declares the human soul to

be a portion of the Deity--_divinæ particula auræ_--“the relation not

being that of master and servant, but that of the whole and part.”

Creation was assumed to be the extension of the Creator’s essence,

as the mathematical point produces by its increase length, depth,

and breadth by endowing empty space with the properties of figure.

From this refined and metaphysical dogma, this theoretical emanation

of being from, and its corollary, refusion into, the Soul of the

World, springs the doctrine of Metempsychosis, “implying belief in

an after-state of rewards and punishments and a moral government of

creation.” The votary of Hinduism has now progressed so far as to

symbolize the vulgar idolatry of the people. Beneficent animals are

explained as symbols of Brahma’s creative and Vishnu’s preserving

functions; wild and ferocious beasts are typified as the Deity’s

destroying power. They revere men of splendid abilities and glorious

actions as having more of the divine essence and a directer emanation

than the vulgar herd. Hence the senseless idol worship of the

unlearned. Select forms also, as the cleft of a tree, are chosen to

represent materially--_oculis subjecta fidelibus_--the passive power of

generation, an upright rock expressing the active.

Thus semi-civilized man explains away the follies of his childhood,

and excuses himself for leaving the ignorant in the outer glooms of a

symbolical faith. But does knowledge precede ignorance--the explanation

the fable? Or is it reasonable to suppose that a symbol, a type, a

myth, was ever worshipped, or that men were ever ashamed of their

gods? The Hindu, and indeed many a Christian, still adores the bull

and cow, the rock, the river, the idol, the relic, and the actual

image; they do not kneel before its metaphysics. The learned explain

them into mere deifications. They are, however, still deities to the

layman and the esoteric; and any attempt to allegorize them would be

held, as in ancient Greece, like the reform of Epicurus, mere Atheism.

We must, however, justly to appreciate these ancient dogmas, rebecome

the primitive children of earth--man in his infancy.[212] The wisdom

of Egypt, the learning of the East are now puerility. But “who knows

what luminous proofs were propagated under the disguise of their old

idolatry? Who cannot see that imagination, first active faculty of

the mind, was fostered by myth, the moral sense by fable, and the

first vacillating steps of knowledge were encouraged by precepts now

seemingly childish and absurd?” (Dabistan). Confucius was as disposed

to primarize secondary causes as his predecessors. Owning that he knew

nothing about the gods, he therefore preferred to avoid the subject.

The ancient Persians, according to Herodotus, who conversed with them,

ignored Dualism, their later scheme. Rejecting the images of gods and

angels, they worshipped without personification or allegory æthereal

fire drawn from the Sun. The universe was their temple, their altars

Pyrætheia, or circles of stones, in the centre of which stood the

kiblah of their simple ignicolism. The very Puritans of heathenry,

they hated the grandiose fanes of the Egyptians, they plundered their

magnificent tombs, slew their bestial deities, and devoured their

garden gods. Presently symbolism began to intrude upon the simple and

primitive faith of Iran. Light and fire, according to Strabo, were

worshipped as the fittest emblems of spirit and subtile intelligence.

Zoroaster was made to believe in a God, “the Best, Incorruptible,

Eternal, Unmade, Indivisible, and most Unlike everything”; in fact,

an abstraction, a negative. Yet Hyde, Anquetil du Perron, and other

moderns make the Parsee sect to represent with their complicated system

of rites and ceremonies, their legion of supernatural beings, powers,

and influences, and abstruse Dualism, the pure ignicolism of the old

Guebre.

But the dark epoch of savage Atheism having fulfilled its time, already

in the Fetissism, the Polytheism, the Pantheism, the Metempsychosis

dogma, and the Idolatry of the early East may be descried the

dawning of an enlightened Theism. Like the dogma of a future state

of rewards and punishments in Moses’ day, it was not unknown though

unexplored. The Hindus had their Vedas Shashwata, and the Guebres

their Akarana Zarwána. The former ruled the triads; the latter was

superior to Hormuzd, the Sun, and Ahriman Ahura-mana, the Evil

Principle personified. So the Greeks had a [Greek: Θεος: Theos], and

the Romans a Deus, ignored except as a theory. The Arabs and the

Mexicans in their vast Polytheism still distinguished Al, the Supreme

Being, from the crowd of subaltern gods, angels and devils, mediators,

subordinate intelligences, incarnations, transmigrations, emanations,

manifestations, and similar earthly representatives. Here, then, was

the thought-germ of an eternal, unmade, incorruptible, and creative

Deity. Enveloped in the mists and shades of priestly fraud and popular

ignorance, still the dogma did exist; and so comforting has been its

light to the soul of man, that no earthly power has ever availed to

extinguish it.

The Vedas Shashwata has been interpreted by philologists to signify

the Sun. Akarana Zarwána (boundless time) is clearly synonymous with

venerable Chronos. So the Mulungu of East Africa and the Uhlungu of the

Kafirs mean equally a spirit, the sun, or the firmament. Amongst the

Masai race, near Kilimanjaro, Engai, the Creator, is feminine, God and

rain being confounded.

The similarity of belief, of manners and customs, and even of the

coincidence of lawful and unlawful food, between India and Egypt is

too striking to be accounted for by mere chance. The Fetissism of the

one exactly resembled that of the other. Both worshipped personified

Nature, or Manushya-Ohakta; they exalted into godhead and adored the

objects of gratitude and reverence, of hope and fear. The “great holy

family” of India became, on the banks of the Nile, Osiris, Isis, and

Horus. Osiris, afterwards typified as the “incarnate Goodness of the

Supreme,” perished to overcome Evil, was raised to life once more, and

became the Judge of the quick and the dead. Isis again is the giver of

Death, and Horus, or Hor, the entrance or re-entrance into Life. Every

male deity in both systems had his Sakti, or passive energy, symbolized

by a woman. Both mythologies had sacred cattle. Eggs, onions, and

beans--favourite articles of diet among the present Muslims--were

forbidden to both for mystical reasons. The lotus flower, an aboriginal

of India, and connected with the superstitions of either country,

has perished out of Egypt with the Muslims, who have no object in

preserving the exotic. In Indian mythology was the Trisiras, in Egypt

the Tevnon, in Greece and Rome the Cerberus, that three-headed dog in

Hades, whose existence must have been communicated from one people to

another. India worships the Sacred Serpent, the modern Muslim of Egypt

adores that of Jebel Shaykh Haridi. Hindu Yogis and Saunyasis still

wander to the banks of the Nile, and prostrate themselves before its

ruined fanes. Society in India was divided into four great separate

bodies--priests, soldiers, tradesmen, and serviles. The Egyptians

numbered a sacerdotal order, a military caste, husbandmen, tradesmen

and artificers, and, lastly, the shepherds, their abomination. Diodorus

Siculus enumerates five castes. The fifth, however, or shepherds,

probably did not belong to society; they were outcasts, corresponding

with the Hindu mixed bloods. In ancient Persia the rigid castes were

also four in number. And as the Aryas or Hindus of Aryavarrta, the

Land of Men, are aborigines of Ariana and cognates of the Arian race,

perhaps this system of artificial and unnatural distinctions arose

in the regions of Mid-Asia. Indeed, Sir W. Jones came to a broader

conclusion; namely, that the three primitive races of mankind must

originally have migrated from a vast central region of earth, and that

that region was Iran.

As time wore on, Pantheism, which sees a deity everywhere, even within

ourselves, regarded the terrestrial gods as earthly vessels animated

with a spark of the Universal Soul. The subaltern deities, the objects

of Sabæan worship, as the sun, the moon, and the fixed stars, were held

to be superior mediating powers with the Almighty Power. A thousand

interpretations, physical, symbolical, mystical, and astronomical, were

framed by the wise of Memphis. And as amongst the Hindus, so the Deity

of Egypt was, though revealed to the initiated, sedulously obscured to

the vulgar by a host of Avatars and incarnations, of transmigrations

and subordinate intelligences.

History is silent upon that most interesting subject, the early

connexion of India and Egypt. There are, however, still traces of its

existence through Arabia, although Wilford greatly exaggerated the

subject. Throughout Oman and Eastern Arabia there are traces to the

present day of castish prejudice. No Kabílí, or man of noble tribe,

however poor, will become a Haddâd (blacksmith), a Shámmár (shoemaker,

in Hindustani Chamár), a Dabbagh (tanner), and a Nayyál (dyer). The

Hindus of Maskat have an Avatar. Every Pandit knows that Shiva and

his wife, under the names of Kapot-Eshwara and Kapot-Eshwari, visited

Mecca, and were there worshipped under the form of male and female

pigeons. This notes a direct communication along the coast of the

Shepherd Kings. Again, it is possible that in ages now forgotten the

Æthiopians may have received from the Hindus their arts, sciences, and

civilization, which would naturally float northwards with the Nile.

From Egypt these dogmas passed over to Greece, from Greece to the

Rasenian people of ancient Etruria. This diffusion, proved by the

similarity of their belief, is supported by old tradition. Herodotus

explains the fable of the black pigeon that fled to Dodona, and there

established the oracle on the ground that it was founded by a female

captive from the Thebaïd. The manifest resemblance of the rites

and ceremonies, the processions and mysteries, together with the

historic fact that the greatest minds in Greece had studied with the

priest-philosophers of Helispotes and Memphis, are the main points of

circumstantial evidence whence rose Warburton’s luminous theory that

the knowledge of the “Secret One” was preserved by the esoteric, but

concealed for fear of the profane. He was an atheist who believed in a

Single Deity because he thus degraded and dishonoured the vulgar gods;

and the ancients, most pious men, solemnly tore to pieces all guilty of

similar impiety. The Arcana, however, were sacred; under their shadow

any dogma might flourish.

Some ethnologists have wondered at the remarkable coincidences between

the Etruscan cosmogony and that of Moses. The marvel is easily

explained. Both systems were borrowed from the Egyptians “skilled in

ancient learning” (Apuleius).

India and Persia, we have seen, left their Deity an abstruse and

philosophical doctrine, a mere abstraction, “infinite and eternal

Nothings.” Simple efforts of the mind and intellect, they were probably

added by after-thought to perfect and complete the Pantheon. They were

involved in the deepest gloom, whilst man’s vision was engrossed by the

stars and other objective creations familiar to his eyes, and through

them to his sensuous mind. The most ancient philosophers then theorized

concerning an Almighty Creator, believed in him by stealth and theory,

but in practice left him to oblivion and neglect. The vulgar bowed,

not to a deity, but to deifications of his attributes, which they had

rendered material and congenial.

It is to be presumed that Egypt advanced a step beyond India

and Persia, otherwise so many of her dogmas would not have been

incorporated with the Mosaic Code. Doubtless Egyptian priestly seers

made their Demiurgos not a mere being of the intellect, but a dominant

idea in religious theory, whilst the grovelling Fetissism of the people

received from them a mystic and abstruse interpretation. But herein lay

their fatal error. The priests were not only ministers of religion,

they were the repositories of every branch of useful knowledge, from

medicine to philosophy. The king was by law a priest. If a member of

the second or military caste was raised to the throne, he was at once

initiated; for the “sons of God,” as the sovereigns were called, could

belong to none but the holy order. The learned respected and revered

as types and symbols what the vulgar worshipped and adored with heart

and soul. But they kept to themselves the benefits of their reason,

and invented mysteries and gnostic ceremonies--the purple robe of

religion--to veil that Holy Truth the contemplation of whose unadorned

charms belongs to mankind. They left their fellow-creatures, “the most

religious of men,” utterly ignorant of divine knowledge, the abject

worshippers of the Nile and the desert, of the ichneumon and the cat.

True they secured to a caste the knowledge which is power amongst

semi-civilized races. But an ecclesiastical order, even in the most

extensive hierarchies, is only the fraction of a people; they divided

therefore their brother-men into priests and slaves. Woe to him who

thus bids the human mind go into darkness!

We have seen, then, that Fetissism supplanted Atheism in the

developing mind of man. Even as alchemy preceded chemistry, magic

physics, and astrology astronomy, in fact as ignorance and error have

ever paved the way for true learning, so was the worship of Nature the

fit preliminary to the worship of Nature’s God. The fulness of time now

came for the revelation of Theism, the religion of Love, and the only

dogma that has taken firm root in the hearts and minds of the nobler

types of man. It matters little what was the _modus operandi_ of this

inspiration. Any information above the common understanding of the age

is justly called a revelation, and every nation has received some by

which the human family has benefited (Dabistan). We may leave Zealots

and Thaumaturgists, Sceptics and Atheists to dispute _ad libitum_ a

point unsolvable, and which, if solved, would be of little advantage to

mankind.

Moses, whose mighty mind drew from obscurity Theism, or a belief in

the One God, to become the corner-stone of the creed, not of a few

initiated sages and esoteric students, but of a whole people--who

shared out to mankind their birthright, a knowledge of divine

truth--fully understood the fatal error of his preceptors, the priestly

sages of Egypt. His history, elaborately dressed in the garb of fable

by after-ages, appears to be this. Circumstances of an accidental

nature drove him from the banks of the Nile into the eastern deserts.

Whilst feeding the flocks of his Bedawin father-in-law amid the

awful scenery and the silent, solemn wolds of Shur, he nerved his

mind to the patriotic task, the gigantic scheme of converting into a

great nation and a Chosen People a mere handful of degraded slaves.

There, too, he made those local observations which, seen through the

mists of antiquity and exaggerated by the additions and traditions of

subsequent ages, became the groundwork of what is never wanting in

the East--wonders and signs and miracles from heaven. His powers and

energies concentrated by solitude--and there is no such strengthener of

the soul when the soul is strong--he returned to Egypt for the purpose

of carrying into execution his stupendous scheme.

But Moses found it impossible, with no stronger hold upon his people

than certain obsolete tenets almost forgotten by the unworthy

descendants of patriarchal ancestors, in the atmosphere of superstition

around him and under the baneful shadow of a hostile and priestly rule,

to elevate to the dignity of manhood the spirits of an enthralled,

despised, and therefore a degraded race. What better proof of their

degeneracy than their demanding to know the name of a God?

This is the spiritual state of the Indian Pariah, who has his idols,

but no idea of an Almighty Godhead, and who deems his dead deities

inferior in dignity to a live Brahman. What more indicative of their

mental subjection to the superstitions of Egypt than their imaging the

One Supreme by a calf or young bull, the emblem of Priapus all over the

ancient world? They were equally inferior in physical force. Manetho

numbers them at 80,000--a prodigious rate of increase, considering

their circumstances and social state, for the descendants from seventy

persons in the short space of 430 years. The compilers of the Book

of Numbers[213] give 603,550 fighting men from twenty years old and

upwards; this, with women and children, would amount to nearly three

millions of human beings--an extravagant estimate.

From this state of degradation the thousands of Israel must be

raised--must return to the condition of their ancestors the bold free

chiefs of the Bedawin. They must therefore depart from Egypt, and must

prepare themselves, morally as well as physically by the discipline

of the vast and terrible wilderness, to enter as conquerors the holy

Promised Land. Many must perish under the hardships, privations, and

fatigues of desert-travelling. According to Ibn Khaldun, the Hebrews,

debased by slavery, were unable to oppose the Philistines or Arabs of

Canaan until the old generation had died off and a new one had grown up

in the hardy life of the wilderness.

The great Lawgiver, a man of angry temper, as are all who accomplish

wonderful actions, and master of the learning of Egypt, displayed

in effecting the deliverance of his compatriots a work of itself

wonderful, a strength of will, a power of contrivance, a might of words

and deeds, which, seen by after-ages through the dim atmosphere of

tradition and the mists of national vanity, has caused him to stand

forth in the eyes of later ages a giant amongst his kind. He has been

made the subject of fable, physically as well as spiritually. Josephus

speaks of his divine form and vast stature. To the present day the

Arabs of Sinai show traces of gigantic feet and indentations made by a

rod which must have been taller than a mast. The monuments of Egypt,

so full of minute information, allude neither to Moses nor to the

Exodus. The migration of a few brickmaking slaves was, amongst a people

surrounded by nomadic tribes, an event too common, too unconsequential,

to claim a line of hieroglyph. But the people of old, in this point

reversing our modern style of national genealogy, ever strove to

dignify and to adorn their birth; and the Hebrews, who claimed the most

ancient as well as the noblest of pedigrees, could not tell the tale

of their origin as a nation without elevating its simple estate by a

hundred fables, and embellishing it with signs and marvels and wonders

tending to the honour of the Chosen People and of their great leader.

In one main point the Lawgiver miscalculated his powers. He had

proposed making of his Hebrew followers a race of pure Theists, a

kingdom of priests, a holy nation, reverencing nothing but the One

Supreme, worshipping him without medium or mediator, and therefore

independent of temples and sacerdotal castes and the long list of

ceremonies and sacred paraphernalia by which hierarchies strengthen

and perpetuate their sway. But the Hebrew mind was thoroughly unfitted

to receive pure truth. Amid the awful preternatural scenes which,

according to their own accounts, heralded the proclamation of the God

of Israel, with battle and destruction, miraculous plagues and fire and

openings of the earth ever ready to punish those who denied their Deity

or disobeyed his servants, this wonderful people were in a perpetual

state of useless gainsaying and impotent revolt. Deeply imbued with the

tenacious superstitions of the Nile, the stiff-necked race had become

irritable rather than strong under the painful training of the desert,

they longed and begged for a return to slavery, and none had eyes to

look steadfastly upon the unveiled light of Revelation emanating from

their leader and lawgiver.

Finding, after his return from temporary seclusion and retirement,[214]

his chosen people worshipping a molten calf, the god Apis, and

_playing_--in other words, a scene of Egyptian debauchery--Moses broke

in wrath the first Tables of the Law (Exod. xxxii. 19). These consisted

simply of the Ten Commandments, a forbiddal to make gods of gold and

silver, easy directions for building an earthen altar of sacrifice,

and a brief civil and criminal code embodied in three chapters. After

another term of forty days and nights spent in solitude amongst the

awful and impressive scenes which had witnessed his meditations when

feeding Jethro’s flocks, and now saw the disappointment of his early

aspirations, Moses returned with a code (Exod. xxxiv.) better fitted

to the sickly and diseased condition of the Hebrew soul. Of this the

proportion of the ritual to the moral precepts is as ten to two. It

is a priestly system, a faith of feasts and sacrifices, of holy days

and ceremonies purposely assimilated to those idolatries of Egypt with

which the minds of the people were familiar but secured to the worship

of Jehovah their God. The Lawgiver no longer disdained to borrow from

symbolical religion, especially in the ceremonial worship, which at

first he appears to have avoided. The ark and the tabernacle were old

types amongst the Egyptians, memorials of their Northern migration.

The Urim and Thummim (Ra and Thenei) were the Sun and personified

Justice--Light and Truth. The Elohim were Kneph and Pthah, the

presiding spirit and the creative intellect of the Supreme. The Spirit

of God that moved upon the face of the waters is again the Deity

Kneph. The silence with which Jehovah was to be adored appears to be an

idea borrowed from Amun Ra, the Unutterable Word, similar to the Hindu

“Aum,” which never must be spoken of man. The Tree of Life, whose fruit

made gods of those who tasted it, was a mere symbol, long before the

day of Moses incorporated in the Indian and Egyptian mythologies. It

survived in the Christian’s early belief, and has even left its traces

in the Tuba or Paradisiacal tree of El Islam.

The cosmogony of Moses may be traced to the same origin. The formation

of the globe, so different from modern theory; the separating of

matter into four elements, fiery firmament, air, sea, and earth;

and the derivation of animals from dust, were Egyptian dogmas. The

Hebrew historian held to the eternity of matter, the theory of ancient

philosophy in general.

The creation of man (Gen. i.), which we take figuratively, referring

divine resemblance to the soul, to righteousness, and to true holiness,

the Hebrews believed in literally and physically. As the Lord formed

man in his own image, so man in return anthropomorphized the Deity.

Theirs was a personal God with mortal shape and human passions, who

hated the Canaanites for no sin of their own, and loved the Hebrews for

no merit of their own, but for the sake of their ancestors. The “angry

God” and the “jealous God of Moses” stand for the orthodox opinion of

even the modern Jews.[215]

In proportion as we return to the ignorance of antiquity and seek out

the metaphysics of savage races, so we find the personality of a God,

a description of his form, and an account of his actions and passions

most prominently brought forward. Savages and barbarians cannot believe

without anthropomorphizing their Great Spirit. On the other hand,

Muslims reject the tenet. Amongst them some sects, as the Bayzawi,

deny, and hold it impiety to assert, that even in a future state the

eyes of the beatified shall see Allah.

Again, the Hebrew Paradise is the vestige of an old legend current

throughout the Eastern world. The Hindus had their Satya Yug, the

Persians Eriene Vigo, and the Greeks their Golden Age. It must be

observed, however, that, though we place the Garden upon earth, learned

Rabbis locate it in the first or lowest heaven, which is the exact

reflection of this nether world. Sakya Buddha taught that human beings

first appeared by apparitional birth. They were glorious and happy,

pure and passionless, till one of them tasted a savoury substance

produced by the earth. The example was followed by the rest; thus

purity decayed, the empire of sense gained the ascendency, excess

followed indulgence, and degeneracy excess. The same legend has been

preserved in grosser form by El Islam. Adam is made to eat wheat, and

thus became subject to human infirmities. The Magian Scriptures contain

traditions of a migratory march of the people of Hormuzd, under their

patriarch Jamshid, from Eriene Vigo or pure Iran, supposed by the

Guebres to be the primeval seat of their race, and located near Balkh,

the ancient Bactria. It was the region of all delights till Ahriman the

Evil One made in its river the Serpent of Winter. With respect to the

inhabitants of Paradise, our first parents, it may be mentioned that

many Eastern as well as Western learned men have supposed that Adam

prior to the creation of Eve was androgynous; that is to say, at once

male and female (Mirabeau).

The promulgation of Moses’ new code was not popular among the Hebrews.

Checked in his patriotic intentions, the Lawgiver, however, bravely

persisted in the course of preparation which he had commenced. Long

and long years the Chosen People wandered in danger and difficulty

round and round a region ever and in every way fitted to produce a

hardy, rugged, and warlike race. And when all was prepared for the work

of conquest, the great Leader would not head the expedition to the

Land of Promise. In his latest act he displayed the magnanimity which

had supported him through a life of labour and disappointment, the

real vigour and grandeur of his mind. Casting away the superstitions

concerning man’s body which Egypt taught, and resisting the temptation

that might have seduced a softer soul, namely, a train of mourners and

a mausoleum as a last home, he did for himself what he had done for his

followers: he wandered over the desert till his hour approached, he

chose as leader of the expedition a younger and more energetic man, and

finally he died and left the place of his tomb to this day unknown. He

bequeathed, however, to the world a cosmogony, history, and ethnography

the essence of old Oriental learning, and to the present day perhaps

the most interesting document of the kind ever penned by man. He gave

to his followers a code in which the highest intellect is blended with

experience and thought in the most trivial things; the cantonment

orders, for instance, cannot be improved in the present century. He

left men where he had found slaves, a successor trained to carry out

the favourite scheme and hope of his life, and finally a name that will

float down the stream of time till merged into the ocean of eternal

oblivion.

But Moses left his dispensation imperfect. He feared the relapse of

his followers into the dark idolatries of the Nile. He therefore dealt

only in obscure allusions to a resurrection, to another life, to

a futurity of rewards and punishments--the mighty lever with which

religion moves the moral world of man. That such was the case is proved

by this fact: the prophets and others who succeeded Moses, viewing

the future practically and not with philosophical indifference, made

in all their schemes the hereafter of man a prominent feature. The

dogma, moreover, as we have seen, was known, and well known, to all

the semi-civilized races of men. In the creed of Moses, however, a

purely temporal system of rewards and punishments supplied the place

of that future retribution so elaborated in the Hindu, the Guebre, and

the Egyptian systems. This was the great defect in his grand scheme.

The hope and fear of a life to come, of a world in which the apparent

inconsistencies of the transient mundane state shall be explained and

remedied, where suffering virtue shall triumph and triumphant vice

shall suffer--a proclivity for this belief is implanted by nature in

the very soul and heart of man. Like veneration, it is instinctive

rather than reasoning, an exertion of sentiment rather than an effect

of intellect. Against a dogma based upon such foundations it is vain

to contend. And in the moral government of the world it presents such

vantage-ground to all who would discipline and elevate mankind, that it

has been cultivated in every system, proscribed by none. The Hebrews,

however, were left to learn this essential article of faith, during

the Babylonish captivity, from the Assyrians, the Guebres, and other

Pagans.

The Jehovah of Moses, moreover, was in other points than personality

an imperfect conception. The Deity, it is true, was drawn forth from

the thick veil of mystery with which the learned of India and Egypt had

invested him. His existence was proclaimed not to a caste or a class;

it was published to a whole people. Still, he was the God of Abraham,

of Isaac, and of Jacob, not the God of Eternity--the God of all men.

A local deity, his cult and knowledge were confined to one people,

to a mere fraction of the human kind. Moses, then, was essentially a

benefactor to the Hebrews, but he was not a benefactor to man.

Presently a new Reformer appeared upon the worldly stage. The Hebrew

code had long before his day begun to decline; for forms of faith,

being but earthly things, are subject to that eternal law which to

every beginning pre-creates and ordains an end. Its decay was hastened

by political convulsions. The captivity of the Jews had supplied them

with a multitude of new and strange articles of belief derived from

their Pagan masters. Hence arose heresies and schisms, which further

weakened the ancient edifice, tottering as it was from the effects of

age, from the new creed-wants of the people, and from the shocks of

the passing events. The Sadducees, adhering to the letter, rejected

the spirit of the Books of Moses. Pharisaic superstition founded upon

tradition--that earthy alloy ever added to the pure ores of heavenly

revelation--was fast undermining the temple of Judaism. Idolatry had

perished by slow degrees out of the land; but the contrary extreme,

bibliolatry, to use a modern word, sown upon the wide ground of

priestly pride and castish prejudice, had spread rankly over the world

of Judaism. To clear away this poison growth, to reform the people of

Israel, Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry.

A man of humble fortune, but of proud birth, the Founder of

Christianity preached a creed in conformity with his circumstances. His

tenets were the Essene, the third sect of philosophizing Jews. “While

the Pharisees were heaping traditions upon the original structure

of the Mosaic system, and the Sadducees were rigidly preserving and

adhering to the simplicity of that structure, the Essene gave their

whole mind to the ascertainment and realization of its moral import.”

They were thus the Sufis, the Spiritualists, and the Gnostics of

Judaism. They abounded most at Alexandria, then the grand centre where

the Greek and the Roman, the Indian and the Persian, met the Arab

and the Egyptian. A species of anchorite philosophers, they called

themselves physicians of souls and bodies; they lived in voluntary

poverty, rigid chastity, and implicit obedience to the civil power;

they were purists in language, non-resistants, and haters of political

action.

Such tenets, publicly announced as a voice from heaven, were of course

offensive to the ruling factions at Jerusalem. The people also that

flocked to the preaching of the new Prophet were disappointed by his

proclaiming to them a spiritual kingdom not the heritage of wealth,

splendour, and glory, so distinctly promised to them by the seers of

former generations. They were but poorly put off with a type or symbol.

A reformer is rarely popular, and reform is a dangerous work among

a people so hasty and headstrong as the Jews. But Christ’s teaching

was not for the Jews only; he was preparing to spread abroad amongst

mankind a knowledge of the One Supreme, when, falling a victim to

priestly wiles, the Prophet of Nazareth suffered an ignominious death.

But he had given an impetus to the progress of mankind by systematizing

a religion of the highest moral loveliness, showing what an imperfect

race can and may become; and by the labour of a devoted life he had

instituted a college of successors who after him might preach the glad

tidings to all the nations of the earth.

The Prophet of Nazareth had declared his mission to be for the purpose

of establishing and confirming the Law of Moses. As it first appeared,

Christianity was rather strong in the weakness around it than strong

in its own strength. It was a system for anchorites and ascetics.

The reformed faith abounded also in a matter usually consigned in the

East to bards and mystics; namely, principles of almost superhuman

beauty often couched in highly poetical language, principles not the

creation of one mind, but the current coinage of philanthropy from

time immemorial. Islam all over the East has left its principles as a

heritage to poets, and right well have they performed their duty to

mankind. From the literature of the Hindus and Persians, the Egyptians

and the Arabs, it would be easy to collect a code of morality and a law

of benevolence as pure and amiable as ever entered the heart of man.

The whole practice of the Sufi consists in seeking the Divinity, not

as the “popular prudential and mercenary devotee,” but from fervency

of love to God and man. He “proclaims the invisible truth above the

visible comfort”; his entire resignation can face the horrors of

eternal death inflicted by divine Will; “he has something higher even

than everlasting gain.”

Eventually, however, this almost supernatural morality, incorporated

with a creed to the detriment of its practical tendency; this

substitution of love for justice, of mercy for retribution, of

forgiveness for punishment; this purely spiritual system, that first

neglected all the most necessary material details of ablution,

dietetics, and even formulæ and positions of prayer, could never endure

in the sensuous and passionate populations of the East. From its

further hold upon the instincts, the affections, and the prepossessions

of the Jews, this reformation had neither extension nor continuance.

The Ceremonial Law of Moses, adapted to an idle and unoccupied race

in a temperate climate and a land of plenty with its operose and

time-wasting system of prayer and purification, of festivals and

processions, was it is true at first not abolished but confirmed.

But a simple and far more catholic system was required for the wants

of the universe. Amongst the inspired followers of the Founder of

Christianity one was found capable of executing the task. With a

daring hand Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, rent asunder the tie

connecting Christianity with Judaism. His efforts were crowned with

success. He offered to the great family of man a Church with a Deity

at its head and a religion peculiarly of principles. He left the moral

code of Christianity untouched in its loveliness. But he abolished

the civil and criminal law of Moses. And he boldly did away with the

long-cherished customs and the ordinances of food and diet which in

olden times were used as the means of segregating the Israelites from

the races around them. Circumcision was no longer necessary, although

his divine Master had submitted to the rite; the distinction between

beings pure and impure, one of the strongholds of Judaism, was broken

down; and finally, as neophytes began to multiply, the Gentile was

raised to the level of the Jew.

The last step taken by the stern Apostle suggests the possibility of

his having determined to disconnect totally the reformed religion

with Judæa. A Roman himself, and therefore well acquainted with that

ruling race, and convinced of their physical and psychical superiority

over the Asiatic family, he courted conveyance to Rome, and there

energetically carried on the work of propagandism. He died a martyr;

but not in vain was his blood shed. From the grain of faith implanted

by him in the little dungeon below the Capitol sprang a goodly tree,

under whose comfortable shade half the civilized world have found

repose. In process of time the offshoots spread amongst the noble

barbarians of the North, then beginning to occupy the stage of the

world. Christianity, which in Judæa and confined to the East would

have been the faith of a few hermits and visionaries, acquired in

Europe a depth and fervency of popular belief which shortly overthrew

all opposition. It is not wonderful that in this course of events the

Christian distinguishes the finger of God!

When the master-minds had vanished from the scene, their successors in

the East introduced other and less defensible changes. Christianity in

the East was surrounded by the impurest of influences. Its latitude

of belief and absence of ceremonial allowed it to be worked upon by

the theurgic incarnations of the Buddhists, the demiurgic theories

of the Eastern and Western Gnostics, the Triad of the Brahmans, the

Dualism of the Persians, the Pharisaic doctrine of the first Son of

the Supreme--Osiris in a new shape--together with the metaphysics

of the Ebionites, the Speculatists, and other sects of Grecian or

rather of Egyptian origin. From the Straits of Hercules to the coast

of Coromandel, it was split up into a legion of heresies and schisms.

Syria and Arabia seem to have been the grand central focus. The Church

was distracted by the frowardness of her children, and the Religion of

Love was dishonoured by malice and hate, persecution and bloodshed.

Still the reformed religion throve--and what tenets do not?--under the

influence of a moderate persecution. When, however, under the rule of

Constantine, the sun of prosperity poured its splendours full upon

the favoured faith, an ascetic enthusiasm, gloomy ideas of seclusion,

celibacy, and self-immolation, and a censure on wealth and industry

pronounced by religious hallucination, in fact the poisonous portions

of the Essene School, spread subtilely through the whole body of

Christianity. Everywhere in the East these practices require to be

suppressed, not to be encouraged. Where the face of Nature is gay and

riant, to impressionize mankind gloom and horror in the World of Spirit

are contrasted with the glory and the brilliancy of the scenes of

sense. This is the stronghold of the Demonolatry and Witchcraft of the

Fetissist, the abominable paganisms of the Hindu, the superstitious

follies of the Guebre, and the terrible Sabaism of the ancient Mexican.

All are perfectly suitable to the genius of the people, to the climate,

and to the scenery around them.

Thus in Syria and Egypt Christianity became degraded. It sank into

a species of idolatry. The acme of absurdity was attained by the

Stylites, who conceived that mankind had no nobler end than to live

and die upon the capital of a column. Thus nations were weakened.

Self-mortification and religious penances soon degenerate a race,

especially in hot climates, where a moderate indulgence in the

comforts, the luxuries, and the pleasures of life strengthens the

body and with it the mind of man. The founders of Christianity had

neglected to insist upon daily prayer at stated times, and ceremonial

cleanliness, which is next to godliness. They forgot those dietetic

directions and prescriptions so necessary in the East, and allowed the

use of inebrients, together with impure and unwholesome meats as pork

and rabbit’s flesh. Man’s physique suffered from their improvidence.

Thus, whilst Christianity increased in numbers and powers, some once

populous and flourishing countries--Egypt for instance--declined, and

fell to the lowest depths of degradation. It is the race of man that

exalts the faith in proportion to man’s moral and material excellence.

The faith fails, on the other hand, to raise a degraded race. The

Armenians and Abyssinians have derived little from the specific

virtues of Christianity. Inferior in mind and body to the Turks and

Arabs, they have degenerated into a semi-idolatry at once ridiculous

and contemptible. With respect to moral conduct, a modern traveller

(Curzon, _Armenia_) has had the courage openly to state that in Turkey

not one-tenth part of the crime exists which is annually committed

in Christendom. Sectarians are fond of citing in favour of their

Reformation the superiority of the Protestant over the Catholic cantons

of Switzerland. They forget that the former belong to the hardy and

industrious nations of the North, and that the latter are in climate

and population indolent Southrons.

To return eastward. About the sixth century of its era the Christian

world called loudly for reform. When things were at their worst,

Muhammad first appeared upon the stage of life. It is here proposed

to touch briefly upon the points wherein due measure of justice has

not yet been dealt by philosophic and learned Europe to the merits

and value of El Islam. The Western nations were so long taught to

look upon the forcible propagandism of Muhammad as a creed personally

hostile to them, they were so deeply offended by the intolerant Deism

and Monotheism of the scheme, and finally so rancoured by their fierce

wars and deadly collisions with the Muslim, that certain false views

have long been, and still continue to be, part or rather essence of

the subject. And though in this our modern day a wiser and more

catholic spirit of inquiry and judgment has not been deterred from

manifesting itself, still even in the writings of those who pride

themselves most upon candour and freedom from prejudice not a little

of the bad old leaven offends the taste. Men do not now, it is true,

fear the imputation of “turning Turk”[216]--an expression since become

common, and coupled by old writers (Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_)

with “betraying father, prince, and country, forsaking religion, and

abjuring God.” Nor does there survive in Europe the former rancorous

hate for the founder and creed, for the apostles and followers of El

Islam. Still, it is to be repeated the Saving Faith has not yet been

allowed to assume its proper rank and position amongst the religions

of the world. And the moderns rather busy themselves in philosophizing

over and in detecting flaws and falsehood rather than in seeking

out the truth, the merits, and the beauties of a religion which for

thirteen centuries has been the light and “life guidance” of one-fifth

of mankind (Carlyle, _Hero Worship_).

These four are briefly the most popular errors of the present day upon

the subject of El Islam:

In the first place, it is determined to be merely a perceptive

faith, and therefore adapted only to that portion of mankind whose

minds, still undeveloped and uncultivated, are unripe for a religion

of principles. This is partly correct of the corrupted, untrue of

the pure, belief; it will somewhat apply to the tenets of the Turks

and Persians, but not to those of the first Muslims and the modern

Wahhabis. The spirit of the religion, its sentiments, and its æsthetics

were committed to the poets of El Islam, and right worthily have they

fulfilled their task. It is not too much to assert that almost every

celebrated metrical composition amongst Muslims is either directly or

indirectly devotional. Even the licentious Anacreons of Persia and

India, Hafiz and Jafar i Zatalli, disguise their grossness under a garb

of mystical _double entente_.

But even in their purely spiritual songs and hymns the poets of

El Islam do not betray that poverty of invention and puerility of

imagination that distinguish the religious rhymesters of Christianity.

In the great and noble literature of England, for instance, there is

but one poem founded upon the base of revelation--_Paradise Lost_.

Who can arise from its perusal without the conviction that a splendid

genius has so fettered himself with his theme that many ballad-mongers

have produced more poetical effects upon the reader? Who rises

without disgust at the dialogues of the Father and the Son in which

is discussed at length Calvinistic sectarianism? And what Christian,

who deems his Holy Trinity a sacred mystery of the Spirit beyond, not

contrary to, material reason, would not blush to see his Divinity thus

degraded in the eyes of the stern deistical Muslim?

The Koran--the only standard of divine Truth universally admitted by

El Islam--consists of threefold matter: of historical and legendary

lore, of principles moral and psychical, and of materials for a loose

and scattered code of laws. And here, it may be observed, that, with

perhaps the exception of the Pentateuch, which we have seen required

its tradition, no code embodied in the sacred writings of any race

has sufficed to govern it. What Christian nation has ever been ruled

by Christian law? Even its codes are either of its own invention or

borrowed from ancient custom or translated from Pagan legislation. No

divine system yet promulgated to mankind has sufficed for the civil and

criminal wants of future and more civilized generations. And thus it

was with the Koran. The precepts of the Saving Faith were not fixed and

definite enough for the sensuous and objective spirit of the East. In

religion, as in politics, wherever public opinion is lax and impotent,

law is, and must be, a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to

provide for every contingency. Such codes cannot deal in principles and

spirit; these must be extracted--by the few that require them--from a

well-organized system of practical precepts. Thus the Muslim in the

earliest ages sought to supply the imperfections of the code bequeathed

to him. A remedy was at hand. The deceased Prophet’s sayings were

still fresh in the minds of his wives and immediate descendants, of his

companions, and his early successors. All lent their best endeavours

to the pious task. The earliest traditions were of sensible and useful

import. Presently the most trivial precepts and the most puerile

practices were either forged or remembered by so-called saints who made

this collection the business of their lives. Thus in course of time and

by slow degrees appeared that bulky mass of traditional lore popularly

known as the Ahadis or Sayings and the Sunnat or Doings of the Prophet.

By such arts were subtle practices and silly legends grafted by

scholasticism upon the primitive annals and laws of El Islam. In that

faith almost every tenet or practice to which the philosopher could

object may be traced to the Sunnat and Ahadis; the Koran is wholly free

from them. Amongst others, upon these, and upon these solely, must be

charged the defect of making the system eminently perceptive. Muhammad,

like all other Eastern lawgivers, had suited his ordinances to the

genius of his people by addressing them as semi-civilized men. The

schools degraded their Muslims to the intellectual rank of babes and

sucklings.

Regarding these Sunnat and Ahadis, however, it must be borne in mind

that they are purely sectarian. The four self-called orthodox schools

hold to one tradition. The principal heresies, as the Shiahs and the

Bayzawi, have their own recognized collections, whence all emanations

from impure, that is to say, from other sources, have been carefully

removed. But El Islam has existed, and can exist, independently

of them. Had the Wahhabis, those Puritans or rather Reformers of

the Saving Faith, succeeded in restoring to the Arabs their simple

primitive belief, little of the Ahadis and the Sunnat would have been

left to misguide and offend mankind.

Secondly, men object that the Saving Faith is one of pure sensuality.

It is difficult to divine how this most erroneous estimate could have

been formed except by the grossest ignorance. Possibly it was a vicious

conclusion thus drawn: that as the Muslim’s Paradise is one of sense,

consequently there is no limit to his sensuality in this world. But El

Jannat, or the Heavenly Garden, has many mansions; the ignorant and

savage, the hungry and sensual Bedawin will taste the flesh of birds,

live in a golden house, command any number of angelic wives, and drink

the nectars of Kafur and Zingibil. But, as in Christianity so in El

Islam, eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, nor hath fancy conceived

the spiritual joys of those who in mundane life have qualified

themselves for heavenly futurity. The popular error that the Muslim

Prophet denied immortal souls to women, and therefore degraded them to

the mere instruments of man’s comfort and passions, might also have

tended to represent El Islam as a scheme of sense. Possibly, again,

the monogamic races of a Northern clime--for monogamy, polygamy, and

polyandry are an affair of geography--shocked by the permission to

marry four wives and to maintain an indefinite number of concubines,

overlooked in characterizing Muhammad’s ordinances the strict limits

therein laid down for luxury and pleasure. The Muslim may not take to

himself a single spouse, unless able to make a settlement upon her,

to support, clothe, and satisfy her. He must act with the most rigid

impartiality towards the whole household, and strictly avoid showing

undue preference. He is allowed four wives with a view of increasing

and multiplying his tribe. Man in hot and enervating climates coming to

maturity early, and soon losing the powers which he is tempted by moral

as well as physical agencies to abuse, would never raise up a large

family as the husband of only one wife. Like the Patriarchs, he must

have handmaids. Like the Jews, he must be allowed polygamy and power

of divorce. These, forbidden by the ascetic Essene, are necessary to

the increase of mankind in the East, and no religion can consecrate an

ordinance which, directly opposed to the first law given by the Creator

to his creatures (Genesis), tends to check that natural increase of

population which is the foundation of all progress and civilization.

Laying aside these considerations as too shallow for discussion, can

we call that faith sensual which forbids a man to look upon a statue

or a picture? Which condemns even the most moderate use of inebrients,

and indeed is not certain upon the subject of coffee and tobacco?

Which will not allow even the most harmless game of chance or skill?

Which rigorously prohibits music, dancing, and even poetry and works

of fiction upon any but strictly religious subjects? Above all things,

which debars man from the charms of female society, making sinful a

glance at a strange woman’s unveiled face? A religion whose votaries

must pray five times a day at all seasons, in joy as in sorrow, in

sickness as in health? A system which demands regular almsgiving and

forbids all manner of interest upon money to those who would be saved?

Whose yearly fast often becomes one of the severest trials to which

the human frame can be exposed? To whom distant pilgrimage with all

its trials and hardships is obligatory at least once in life? Whose

Prophet exclaimed, like the Founder of Christianity, [Arabic: الفقر

فخري: Al-faqru fakhary][217] (Poverty is my pride), and who taught his

followers that two things ruin men, “much wealth and many words”?

Those who best know El Islam, instead of charging it with sensuality,

lament its leaven of asceticism. They regret to see men investing these

fair nether scenes with mourning hues; “the world is the Muslim’s

prison, the tomb his stronghold, and Paradise his journey’s end.” But

this could not be otherwise. Asceticism and celibacy are the wonted

growth of hot and Southern climates, where man appears liable to a

manner of religious monomania. The Brahman householder, after doing

his duty to mankind by becoming a husband and the father of a family,

ought by the law of Menu to leave the world and to end life a Sanyasi

amongst the beasts of the jungle. No religion is more monastic than

Buddhism; yet it is atheistic. Thus the votaries of this organized

system of selfishness, this vast scheme of profits and losses, reduced

to regularity, are deprived of all hope in death, and yet live the

most comfortless and unnatural of lives. “The world knows nothing of

its greatest men,” is true in more views than one. To the Muslim, time

is but a point in illimitable eternity, life is but a step from the

womb to the tomb. He passes from this world directly into the other,

but not into a new existence; its every aspect and circumstance is as

familiar to his mind as is the routine of earthly existence. He has no

great secret to learn. The Valley of Death has no shadow for him;[218]

no darkness of uncertainty and doubt horrifies his fancy. So it came

to pass that, although Muhammad expressly and repeatedly declared,

“There is no monkery in El Islam,” few schemes have produced a more

systematic or rigid asceticism. Even before his death monasticism

began to appear; and now the Muslim world is overrun with Sufis and

Kalandars, with Fakirs and Derwayshes, with Santons and recluses.

The third error is that the Founder of the Saving Faith began his

ministry as an enthusiast and ended as an impostor. This is the

improved modern fashion of treating the “perjuryose lying Machomete”

of our forefathers. We are less gross and dogmatical than they were,

though scarcely more charitable or philosophical. The recognized proofs

of “imposition” seem to be:

Firstly, the convenient appearance of the Ayát, or inspired Versets.

But what would have been their use had they not descended when wanted

to solve a difficulty or convey a precept? Do we doubt the Books

of Moses because Revelation is conducted upon precisely the same

principle? And who will deny that enthusiasm would have produced them

more effectually than fraud? It is a general rule that to deceive

others well we must first deceive ourselves. He that would be believed

in by others must thoroughly believe in himself. Is it likely that such

men as Abubekr and Umar would become the victims of a mere fraud, so

palpable to every petty annalist and compiler in this our modern day?

Neither they nor Muhammad even at his dying hour seem to have doubted

his inspiration. The Prophet’s last words were, “Prayer! Prayer!” And,

according to the Shiahs, a few minutes before breathing his last he

called for an inkholder and a pen to write the name of his successor.

Is this the death-bed scene of a hypocrite or an impostor?

Secondly, the delivery of the inspiration by the Archangel Gabriel,

and the frequent visions of heaven and heavenly beings recorded by

the Muslim Prophet. Without having recourse to any other explanation,

are not instances of the kind perpetually recorded in the history of

mankind? And granting that such apparitions are purely subjective,

shall we charge with fraud all those subject to them? How often has

the Founder of Christianity appeared to the highly imaginative races

of Southern Europe? How frequently have fervent Muslims been favoured

with “a call” by Muhammad and Ali? Physicians and men of science have

accounted for these seemingly marvellous apparitions by natural causes.

Why then, unless by the action of mere prejudice, should we determine

the same thing to be imposture in one man and yet regard it with

reverence in another? Who also has even ventured to decide what the

_modus inspirandi_ or the divine afflatus really is? The most ancient

theory apparently is that angels ([Greek: αγγελοι: angeloi]) were used

as messengers between God and man; and thus the Muslims, whose tenets

are identical in this point with the Jews, rank angelic below human

nature.

Thirdly, the change from peaceful to warlike language, from the arts of

eloquence and persuasion to the propagandism of fire and steel. But did

not the Founder of Christianity declare, “I came not to send peace, but

a sword” (Matt, x. 34)? And did Moses disdain to place carnal weapons

in the hands of his people? The great Lawgiver of Israel sanctioned

the murder in cold blood of women and childish captives. Even kings

were hewed in pieces before the Lord. These atrocities were strictly

forbidden by Muhammad. Even forcible proselytism was not allowed. The

_protégé_ of El Islam paid a small capitation tax, and was allowed to

practise his faith and to worship his God as his law directed. Had,

moreover, the Prophet forged the fresh order to propagate his scheme

by the sword, surely he was not so shallow an impostor as to leave

behind him those peaceful revelations which might so easily have been

cast into the fire. No; the man honestly believed, like Moses, that the

voice of Allah spoke within him.

The fourth error is that Muhammad, unable to abolish certain

superstitious rites and customs of the ancient and Pagan Arabs,

incorporated them into his scheme, and thus propitiated many that

before avoided him. We have seen that the same might be objected to

Moses. But Muhammad may surely have believed in the defilement of

Allah’s holy places by Pagans, and have restored them to their pure

original purposes. Thus the Kaabah, that Pantheon of the idolater, was

given to El Islam as the house built by Abraham and Ishmael. And what

antiquary so wise as to declare that the Friend of God did not visit

Mecca and there lay the foundations of a mosque and an abode?[219] The

gigantic tombs of Adam and Eve at Mecca and Jeddah were in the olden

times places of litholatry. Yet might not the numerous Arab Christians,

in whose religion Muhammad believed before the old dispensation was

abrogated by a new scheme, have had traditions concerning the meeting

of our first parents on the Mount of Arafat, and their sepulture in

the Holy Land? Mecca was at that time consecrated by no less than five

religions. The Guebre had established there the Shrine of Saturn. The

Hindu had made it the residence of the third person of his triad. The

Pagan Arabs had erected there a gigantic Pantheon. The Jews revered it

because, as Ibn Shaybat relates, Moses and Aaron performed pilgrimages

there; when the famous Tobba Judaized, he invested the house with a

splendid curtain. And, finally, the Christians, according to some

authors, had procured admission into the Kaabah for the images of the

Virgin and Child. Colonists and expatriated men readily connect the

remarkable events and incidents of their religion and history with

the strange objects revered in foreign lands. The Muslims in Sindh, as

an instance, have occupied in force most of the sacred places of the

Hindus; often, too, both Monotheist and Polytheist worship at the same

shrine. The original Yoni becomes a Da'asah, or footprint of Hazrat

Ali; and the sacred alligator of the Hindus is revered as the creation

of a Muslim saint. Thus in Ceylon Buddha’s retreat has become Adam’s

Peak. The description of St. Mary and the Holy Infant resting in the

shade of the sycamore tree of Heliopolis in the old apocryphal gospels

is clearly borrowed from the old Egyptian symbol, Isis with Horus in

her lap sitting under the Hiero-sycaminon. In the incorporations of

traditions then current amongst the Arab Christians there is no valid

reason for charging Muhammad with fraud.

To rank the Saving Faith amongst the religions of the world, it is

necessary briefly to relate what its founder did for mankind. A youth

of noble origin, but fallen fortunes, as was the Prophet of Nazareth,

he was strengthened like the Jewish Lawgiver Moses by travel, solitude,

and meditation. Jebel Hira was his Mount Horeb. But though surrounded

by learned Jew and Christian, his education was defective; and though,

a genuine Arab, he thought strongly and clearly, and he was a perfect

master of eloquence, he had none of that knowledge which passes for a

preternaturalism amongst a barbarous people. His probity won for him

in early manhood the surname of El Amin, or the Trusty, and his noble

qualities enabled him to marry the wealthy widow in whose service he

had lived a hireling.

After a long course of meditation, fired with anger by the absurd

fanaticism of the Jews, the superstitions of the Syrian and

Arabian Christians, and the horrid idolatries of his unbelieving

countrymen, an enthusiast too--and what great soul has not been an

enthusiast?--he determined to reform those abuses which rendered

revelation contemptible to the learned and prejudicial to the vulgar.

He introduced himself as one inspired to a body of his relations and

fellow-clansmen. The step was a failure, except that it won for him

a proselyte worth a thousand sabres in the person of Ali, son of Abu

Talib. With an uncommon mixture of prudence and energy he pursued his

task till he overcame the hate, the ridicule, and the persecution of

such men as Abubekr, Umar, and Usman. Expelled by the violence of

his enemies, he fled his native city--a wonderful contrast to the

fierceness and the impatience of his race. But after a long course of

meekness and longsuffering in the work of proselytizing, his spirit,

like that of Moses, rose high against violence and oppression, and at

last--for he was an Arab--abrogating his peaceful precepts he appealed

to the God of Battles in his combat for a righteous cause. Heroes and

mighty men like Hamzah Khalid and Amru el Ays flocked to his standard,

and his personal valour and high qualities as a guerilla soldier soon

led him on to fortune. After several years’ exile, he re-entered as a

visitor the walls of his native city, whence he had fled persecuted and

proscribed. And he lived long enough to witness the splendid success of

his early projects.

Abolishing all belief in a local or personal God, he announced to his

Arabs the One Supreme, now in terms as terrible as man could bear,

then in words so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the

heart-core of his followers. He broke to pieces with his own hand

the images of the Kaabah, and he witnessed the total extinction of

a gigantic idolatry--a work of itself sufficient to immortalize the

memory of one reformer. He said of the Deity, “He is not enclosed by

the bonds of space or by the limits of time; he hath no form which

requireth a former from whom he is free; and whatever concerning him

entereth thy mind to that he is the contrary.” He preached Allah, the

God unapprehensible, incomprehensible, omnipotent, all-beneficent,

spiritual, and eternal.

He revived the earliest scheme of Mosaicism and the pristine simplicity

of Christianity by making every man priest and patriarch of his own

household. Preceding faiths had attempted to elevate human nature above

itself, and had, as might be expected, degraded the object of their

endeavours. He inculcated the dignity of man instead of perpetually

preaching human degradation, he respected mortal nature, and therefore

he made his scheme eminently practical with something of a higher

flight. He did away with the incestuous marriage with a father’s widow;

he abolished the Wad el Banat, or the murderous inhumation of female

children. He corrected the laxity and immorality of the age by making

drinking and gambling penal offences, and by forbidding modest women to

appear in public unveiled. Finally, to mention no other great and good

works, by the enunciation of a modified Fatalism--they greatly err who

confound it with an absolute Predestination--he attempted to check that

tendency of self-mortification which he could not wholly expel from

the affections of his countrymen. He died, not like an enthusiast or

an impostor, but as one true to the tenets and practices of his life;

and he bequeathed to the world a Law and a Faith than which none has

been more firmly or more fervently believed in by mankind, whose wide

prevalence--wider indeed than that of any other creed--alone suffices

to prove its extrinsic value to the human family. This much did

Muhammad for his fellow-creatures.

Can we wonder that the Arabian Prophet, finding himself, despite the

accidents of fortune, of time, and place, so much in advance of his

age, so solitary a being amongst the fanatic, the superstitious, and

the debased, fondly believed himself Allah’s Apostle, and the chosen

instrument of man’s regeneration? Considering the ardent temperament

of the Arab, his high development of veneration, and his discerning

the divine hand in every human work and change, can we marvel that he

attributed the fire of his soul and the strong workings of his mind

to a something preternatural--an inspiration or a revelation? The

celebrated mystic Mansur el Hallaj was stoned by the crowd for using

the words, “I am Truth” (_i.e._ the Lord). But his Sufi confraternity

still explain away the apparent irreverence of the saying, and believe

him to have been, as was said of Spinoza, a God-intoxicated man.

Muhammad’s mission, then, was one purely of reform. He held that four

dispensations had preceded his own, and that his object was to restore

their pristine purity. But the Adamical had been obsoletized by the

Noachian scheme; and this by the Mosaic, which in its turn becoming

defunct, had left all its powers and prerogatives to Christianity; thus

also the latter dispensation in the fulness of time had been superseded

by the revelations of El Islam, the Saving Faith. All the past was now

effete and abrogated. All the future would be mere imposture; for his

was the latest of religions, he the Soul of the Prophets. He accused

the Jews and Christians of entire corruption, of spiritual death,

and preached to them with fervour a new faith, a doctrine of life. He

openly charged them with having altered and remodelled their sacred

writings.[220] Nor could this charge be denied. It is now, and was

then, impossible to discover what Moses wrote or what was written for

him by Ezra the scribe and other compilers. The difference of style and

language, the frequent changes from the first person to the third, and

finally the account of the Lawgiver’s death and burial conclusively

prove that the Pentateuch had in its present state more than one

author. Probably the original draught was concise and short.

Even the Koran contained little that was new. With the exception of

some legends, the addition of some regulations touching the daily

prayers and the purification of property, with a few ordinances as that

of Diyat or blood-money, disallowed by the Pentateuch (Numb. xxxv. and

Deut. xix.), but rendered necessary by the state of Arab society, and

some dietetic modifications--the camel for instance and the horse were

recognized as pure food,--the Koran might almost be extracted from the

Mosaic and Rabbinical writings, from the Evangelists and apocryphalists

of the Christian era. There is also but little to commend in it, except

its fiery and commanding eloquence. As a code of laws it is eminently

defective. He who could write such a work could have written much

better. Muhammad, however, relied for the success of his mission upon

far higher claims than any book.

Muhammad laid no claims to prophecy or to miracles. He called himself

El Rasúl, and El Nabbi, the announcer of good tidings from Allah to

the Adamites. He did not give his name to a new system of belief; his

ordinances were designated in a mass as El Islam, the Salvation or the

Saving Faith. His night journey to heaven, the subject of so much

opprobrious declamation, was either a vision or a dream. The splitting

of the moon, a tale so monstrously told by his posterity, rests upon

no broader basis than a line in the Koran which might properly be

translated: “The hour [of Judgment] shall come, and the moon shall

cleave asunder.” Probably this absurdity was the invention of followers

who determined to dispute for their lawgiver with Joshua’s command over

the host of heaven. An ignorant Afghan is said to have boasted that his

Pir, or spiritual pastor, the celebrated poet Abd el Kahman, was in the

habit of making night journeys like Muhammad to Paradise, and to have

bastinadoed the holy man severely when, taxed with impiety, he denied

the irreverent assertion. Such a Muhaddis, or relater of the Prophet’s

sayings, as Abu Hurayrah, the Father of the Kitten, may fairly, to

judge him by his recognized writings, be suspected of such a forgery.

Muhammad the more especially disdained the claim to miraculous powers

which, as those who know Eastern lands, belong to every petty saint and

village santon. The “most extraordinary of ordinary men,” the historian

Hume, inferred that, because he himself had never seen a miracle, no

one else ever saw a miracle. The Oriental traveller will disbelieve in

miracles for the opposite reason--because he has seen so many.

The rapid and extensive spread of El Islam, considered by the Faithful

a remarkable instance of divine aid, is to be accounted for without

the intervention of a Deity. The Arabs poured forth from their great

centre, till the whole surplus population was exhausted. Everywhere

they appeared as liberators of slaves, especially in Turkey and Persia,

where an artificial and over-refined state of society had produced

tyrannical despots, an innumerable and insatiable nobility, and a

people robbed and spoiled. Another circumstance favoured the growth of

“the Religion of the Heavens and the Earth.” Whether we consider the

Arabs to have been the aborigines of their native wilds, or, as the

modern theory is, we derive them from the Highlands of Æthiopia, it is

certain that their great success lay amongst a kindred people speaking

cognate languages. From the earliest times, indeed, Arabia had sent

forth several extensive streams of emigration. Essentially an Asiatic

form of belief, El Islam could not progress beyond the barriers opposed

to it by geography. Not having a St. Paul to modify, to change it, the

Saving Faith broke upon the rock of a new race.

But this I claim for El Islam.

The recurring purpose which runs through the world is chiefly

manifested by the higher esteem in which man holds man. David made him

little lower than the angels. Christianity, a system of asceticism,

confirmed this estimate: we are fallen beings, fallen not through

our own fault; condemned to eternal death, not by our own demerits;

ransomed by a Divine Being, not through our own merits. El Islam, on

the contrary, raised man from this debased status, and with the sound

good sense which characterizes the creed inspired and raised him in the

scale of creation by teaching him the dignity of human nature. Thus

modern Spiritualism is giving a shock to Christianity, whereas El Islam

has power to resist it.

But, however El Islam prospered amongst the kindred races, it fell flat

elsewhere. No power of propagandism availed in China. In Southern Spain

the faith maintained itself for a long time; its letter and spirit,

however, were almost lost. The Zegris and Abencerrages were European

knights, not Eastern. And when pushed forward into a Northern people,

a single destructive defeat sufficed to set for it bounds which it has

never attempted to cross. In Hungary and Austria again, with a tenfold

power, it failed to establish a footing; and when “Holy Russia” became

sufficiently united to be powerful, El Islam was cast out like a corpse.

Again, what reconciled the ancient Muslim and endears the modern

to his creed is its noble simplicity. The votary has little or

nothing comparatively speaking to pay for his moral and spiritual

necessary--religion. He has no tithes, and few fees. His places of

worship are built and maintained by religious bequests, carefully

guarded by law and custom. Muhammad Ali, it is true, confiscated

the “Wakf” left to many of the Cairene mosques and tombs. He also,

following the example of Turkey, substituted at Mecca and El Medinah

yearly pensions for the produce of their ancient extensive church

lands. But he carried out these measures among Egyptians, a race of men

whose languor and apathy require repeated inducements to fight for the

faith; in Kabul and Bokhara the boldest and most powerful extortioners

would hardly venture upon such a sacrilege. The Islam Muslim, moreover,

has no priesthood; those whose duty it is to preach and pray to the

people are not churchmen; they temporarily receive from the Wahil, or

mosque-warden, a few piastres per month; but all must live by some

honest secular calling. Even the Sultan, the Defender of the Faith, the

Representative of the Khalifs, and the Vicegerent of Allah upon earth,

does not disdain handicraft, to make and sell toothpicks. Finally, the

Muslim has no baptism; he is circumcised by a barber; he can marry

himself with a reason for deviating from popular custom; and he can be

bathed, buried, and prayed over by any lay fellow-religionist.

It is generally believed in Europe that El Islam is on the decline;

and the old prejudices bequeathed by Crusades tend to make the

assertion popular. It is based upon insufficient grounds. With as much

correctness might the Muslim predict the present fall of Christianity

by the heresies and schisms that distract the Church, from the wide

spread of visionary Swedenborgians and of the shallow imposture

Mormonism.[221] Turkey and Egypt may show traces of latitudinarianism,

even as France and Germany have done; no Muslim people, however, has

yet ventured to abolish El Islam by law. But Arabia and Afghanistan

still stand firm as in the first ages of the faith. Generally it may be

remarked that in Eastern religions the propagandism and missioning of

the West has tended to strengthen and confirm the tenets against which

they have been directed. Thus Hinduism, after giving a few outcasts to

Christianity, has entrenched itself behind the stronghold of Vedantism;

the learned are pure Deists, the ignorant pure idolaters. Buddhism

remains untouched, and the very nature of its encyclopedian tenets

renders it unassailable. Even the sect of Guebres has been strengthened

by polemical arguments, and bids fair to rival its antagonists in

disputative theology. In spite of the mighty force brought against

it, the Parsee converts to Christianity might be numbered on a man’s

fingers. Nor can these faiths yield to compulsion. The laws of Menu,

of Zoroaster, and of Muhammad have still bulwarks not easily to be

battered down. And should Christianity, as it has often threatened,

ever meet the Saving Faith in mortal conflict, and the Cross assail the

Crescent in the latest of crusades, the Muslim scimitar, rusty as it is

with the rust of ages, will prove the good metal of which it was in the

beginning forged.

Supposing, however, El Islam abolished by civilization, underminded

by the slow action of the Christian Powers closing around it, or

become decrepit from old age, what would be the result? Some renewal

essentially the same, formally different; some revival of its eternal

principle, Monotheism, disguised under a fresh garb of those outward

accidents that constitute a religion. Such has ever been the history of

the world’s creeds. At all times

emerging from the storm,

Primeval faith uplifts her changeful form,

Mounts from her funeral pile on wings of flame,

And soars and shines another and the same.

FINIS.

FOOTNOTES:

[211] Existence of God is not “the common and almost universal belief

of mankind.” The truth that there is a God is usually thus demonstrated:

1. Physical argument, in which effects and events are traced to causes,

till arrival at a First Cause, uncaused.

2. Argument from final causes and design, of which innumerable

evidences in physical and mental worlds point to a Great Original

Designer.

3. Moral argument, based upon innate feeling of obligation and

responsibility.

4. Historical argument and the consensus of mankind.

[212] The idea that man is a compound being, consisting partly of

spirit and partly of matter, mysteriously linked together, and acting

and reacting upon each other, is a neocosmic dream. Savages hold mind

to be a property of matter, like philosophers.

[213] [Chap i. 46.]

[214] Deuteronomy ix. 9. The term was forty days and nights. Amongst

Muslims this has become the recognized period of isolation for those

who are being initiated in mystical and magical practices. It is,

however, directly opposed to the spirit and letter of El Islam.

[215] A modern philosopher was accustomed to say: “And as for that

Christianity which is such, according to the fashion of modern

philosophers and pantheists, without a personal God, without

immortality, without an individuality of man, without historical

faith--it may be a very ingenious and subtle philosophy, but it is no

Christianity at all” (Niebuhr).

[216] Shakespeare, _Hamlet_, Act III., scene ii.

[217] [_The program you use to display the Arabic may reverse the word

order. Reading right to left, the first word is_ الفقر.--_Transcriber_.]

[218] “I think,” said Captain Wyatt, “the Red Indians die better than

white men; perhaps from having less fear about the future.” An acute

conjecture!

[219] Some geographers identify Massa, the town and castle of the

seventh son of Ishmael (Gen. xxv. 14), with Mecca.

[220] Muhammad probably little thought how much more directly this

charge was to be brought against his own revelations. The Ayát, or

inspired versets, were jotted down without order or time in the Musnad

character, which admitted no “vowel points,” upon palm leaves, shoulder

blades of sheep, and similar wild substitutes for paper. In this state

they were cast into a box, and consigned to the keeping of Hafsah, one

of the “Mothers of the Muslims.” After the Prophet’s death they were

drawn from their concealment in a state of disorder, which explains

their present confusion. An edition of the Ayát was first published by

Abubekr, who called it the Koran, or “What shall be read.” This work

was full of errors. The second issue was from the hands of Usman, one

of whose modern titles is “Scribe of the Koran.” His subjects, however,

put him to death, though he had surrounded himself with a rampart

of sacred writings, for his impiety in meddling with inspiration.

Finally, Ali the Khalif, who was more of a scholar than most Arabs,

who wrote poetry, indited proverbs, and according to some improved the

syllabarium by the invention of vowel points, recalled all others,

and issued his own. The Shiah schism to the present day declare that

a whole Juz, or section, of which the Koran now contains thirty, was

omitted and destroyed by the Khalifs hostile to Ali as it was in his

praise. Some passages from the lost revelation are actually quoted in

their theological works. It is true that nothing in the sacred writings

of the Muslims, not a jot or tittle, can be altered, added, or omitted.

Like the Jews, they have numbered and recorded every letter and vowel

point. Unfortunately they have taken this wise step too late; as the

Eastern proverb is, they have looked to halter and heel-ropes after the

horse is stolen.

[221] [In his _City of the Saints_, written after his visit to Salt

Lake City, and published in 1861, Burton takes a different view of

Mormonism.]

INDEX

N.B.--Numbers printed in italics refer to the footnotes.

Abbott, William, 18.

Abyssinians, the, 321.

_Academy_, Burton’s letter to the, 136-143.

_Academy_, Bataillard’s letter to the, 144-166.

Africa, the Gypsies of, 233-262.

Algeria, the Gypsies of, 258-261.

America, the Gypsies in, 282-285.

Arabshah, 190.

Armenians, the, 321.

Arnim, Count, 17.

_Arubim_, _79_.

Arya, 180.

Ascheri, 110.

Ascoli, 180.

Ashkenazím, the, 46-56.

Asia, the Gypsies in, 211-232.

Asia Minor, the Gypsies of, 219.

Aviabron, 18.

Bactriana, 180.

Baramaki, the, 231, 236.

Barbary, 260, 261.

Bartalus, M., 174-176.

Basnage, 15.

Bataillard, Paul, letter to the _Academy_, 144-156;

_list of works by_, _157_, _158_;

claim to priority in discovering identity of Gypsy and Jat

answered, 164-171;

his reviews reviewed, 171-201.

_Bauer_, _17_.

Bavaria, 203.

Bearnary, 17.

Bedawin, the, 174, 199, 200, 217, 219, 230, _234_, 236, 254.

Belochis, the, 139, 142, 169, 170.

Belochistan, the Jats of, 215-217.

Belochki dialect, the, 142, 166.

Beni Aros, the, 260.

Berber (Barbar), 181.

Berbruger, M., 198.

Beth Yusuf, 111.

Black Jews, the, 58.

Bocthor, Ellious, 146, 149.

Borrow, George (quoted), _158_, _161_, 163, 165, _169_, _170_, 190,

192, _241_, 260, 261, 269, 281.

Boudin, Dr., 12.

Braham, 17.

Brazil, 282-285.

Brosset, 185.

Bunyan, John, supposed to be of Gypsy descent, 163.

Burnouf, Émile, 188.

Cairo, 238, 240.

Cantemir, Count, 17.

Caraïtes, the. _See_ Karaïtes.

Chinganeh, 134, 219, 220.

Ciga, 190.

Cingani, 181.

Cohen, M. J., 92 ff.

Cordova, Francisca de, _203_, 270, 271.

Crosse, A. F., _264_, 267.

Cushite theory, the, 155.

Damascus, 231, 232.

Darfur, 239.

Das, 182.

Davis, Dr. J. B., 143.

Denman, Major, 262.

Denmark, the Gypsy in, 203, 209.

Derush, 97.

“Diním,” the, 111.

Djat, the, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 165, 183, 195.

Doba, Capt. S. de, 268.

Dunsterville, Col., 214.

Eben ha-Azar, 111.

Ebionites, the, 54.

Egypt, the Gypsy in, 233-257.

Egyptian religion, the, 296, 297, 298, 300, 320.

El Islam, 216, 218, 255, 321-346;

popular errors concerning, 322-334.

England, Gypsy in, 208.

Essene School, the, 319.

Europe, Gypsy of, 202-210, 263-281.

_Excommunication, Jewish forms of_, _82_.

Fagnan, M., 188, 195.

Falashas, the, 116.

Ferdoussy, 145, 148.

Fetissism, 291, 292, 293, 296, 301, 302.

Fez, 260.

Fleischer, Prof., 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 165, 184.

France, the Gypsy in, 203, 204, 209, 265, 269.

Frascator, 13.

Gavbar, the, 218.

Gemara, the, 100, 101, 102, 103.

Getæ, the, 134, 141, 150, 165, 216.

Ghagar, the, 198, 200, 233-257.

Ghawázi, the, 236, 237, 252.

Gházieh, the, 181.

Gill’s _Notices of the Jews_, 3.

Goeje, Prof. de, 136, 144, 150, 151, 152, 153, 165, 183, 188, 191,

192, 195, 196.

Goldsmids, the, 18.

Gondomar, 18.

Goths, the, 134, 141.

Grellman, 202, _241_.

Greece, 177, 182, 299.

Grisi, 17.

Gypsy, the, of Africa, 233-262;

of Algeria, 258-261;

of America, 282-285;

of Asia, 211-232;

of Barbary, 260, 261;

of Bavaria, 203;

of Belochistan, 215-217;

of Brazil, 282-285;

compared with the Jat, 133, 134, 137, 139 ff;

compared with the Jew, 5, _17_, 161, 162;

of Damascus, 231, 232;

of Denmark, 203, 209;

dress of, 277;

of Egypt, 233-257;

of England, 208;

of Europe, 202-210, 263-281;

famous Gypsies, 163;

of France, 203, 204, 209, 265, 269;

of Germany, 203-208;

of Hungary, 202, 263-269;

Indian affinities of, 136-143;

of Italy, 205, 206, 265;

language of, 134, 240, 279, 280;

of Morocco, 258-261;

of the Netherlands, 209;

of the Panjab, 211-215;

of Persia, 217-219;

of Rome, 206;

of Said, 237;

of Spain, 203, 207, 265, 269-281;

of Sweden, 203, 209;

of Switzerland, 203;

of Syria, 219-224.

_Ha-fraká fast_, _10_.

Hagadah, the, 98.

Halakah, the, 98.

Halevi, 18.

Hamza Ispahani, 146, 148, 150, 151.

Hasse, hypothesis of, 179, 185.

Hawi, the, 234, 235.

Heine, 17.

Helebis, the, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257.

Herklots, Dr., 258.

_Hermann_, _17_.

Hillel, 101.

Horus, 297.

Hoshen Mishpat, 111.

Hughes, A. W., 215.

Hungary, 202, 263-269.

India, 296, 297, 298, 303.

Indian mythology, 297.

Irby, O. P., 22.

Ishaz al Fasi, Rabbi, 110.

Isis, 296.

Islam. _See_ El Islam.

Ispahani, Hamza. _See_ Hamza.

Italy, 205, 206, 265.

Játaki language, the, 137-140, 180, 215.

Jats, the. _See_ Gypsy.

_Jerusalem, population of_, _68_.

Jesus, 313-316.

Jews, the, acclimatization, 13;

atrocities among, 115-129;

cause of vitality, 9, 10;

compared with Gypsy, 5, _17_, 161, 162;

consanguinity, 7;

cupidity, 18, 26, 27, 28;

fecundity, 5;

future prospects, 62-71;

general character of, 20-45;

illustrious, 17;

immorality, 8;

of the Holy Land, 46-62;

longevity, 14;

mental characteristics of, 6, 7;

mutable character and physique of, 6;

physical appearance of the Eastern, 59;

physique of, 6, 7;

_population_, _25_;

vitality, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13.

Jin-tchi, the, 134, 142.

“Jore Déah,” 111, 113.

Joseph Karo, Rabbi, 111.

Judophobic opinion of the Jew, 62, 63.

_Jurisdiction, Jewish_, _90_.

Kamûz, the, 146, 148, 151, 165.

Kaoli, the, 218.

Karaïtes, the, 56, 57.

Khabad, the, 54, 55.

Khasidím, the, 53, 54, 55.

Koran, the, 324, 340, 341.

Kremer, Von (quoted), _199_, 234-250, 252.

Kurbat, the, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 250, 256.

Kurbat words, vocabulary of, 224-228.

Kushite theory, 194, 195.

Lane, _234_, 258.

Lemnos, 184.

“Liberal” opinion of Jewish future, 62.

Luri, the, 145, 146, 165.

Macaulay, Lord, speech of, 18, 19.

MacGregor’s _Rob Roy on the Jordan_, 31.

Mackenzie, G. Muir, 22.

Maghribí, the, 239.

Maimonides, 110.

Massena, 17.

Massorah, the, 97.

McCaul, Dr. Alexander, _37_, _75_, _85_, 88.

Mendelssohn, 17.

Mendizelal, Señor, 17.

Metempsychosis, 295.

Meyerbeer, 17.

Mezzofanti, 269.

Midrash, the, 96.

Miklosich, 156, 177, 178, 179.

Mills’ _British Jew_, 37.

Mishnah, the, 96-106.

_Montefiore, Sir Moses_, _32_, _33_.

_Mormons, the_, _97_.

Morocco, 258-261.

Moses, 302-313.

Moses of Cordova, 112.

Moses of Trani, 111.

Movers, 194.

Muhammad, attempt to poison, 33, 116;

life of, 334-337.

Nat'h, the, 143.

Nawar, the, 220, 228, 230, 231, 250, 257.

Neander, Prof., 17.

Netherlands, the, 209.

Neufville, De, 14.

Newbold, Capt., 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, _238_, _239_, _240_,

_242_, _243_, _247_, 250, 251, 252, 253, 256.

_Noachidæ, the_, _79_, _80_.

Noachidæ, code of the, 78, 79.

Nott’s _Physical History of the Jewish Race_, 3.

Offenbach, 17.

Orach Chaüin, 111.

Oral law, Jewish, 72-92, 99, 102, 117.

Osiris, 296.

Palestine, 219.

_Palgrave_, _17_.

Panjab, 137, 139, 140, 141, 168, 211-215.

Pantheism, 295, 298.

Parushím, the, 53, 55.

Paspati, A. G., _160_, 173, 174, 178, 182, 185, 191.

Pasquier, 269.

Pasta, 17.

Paul, 317, 318.

Perier, 159.

Persia, 217-219.

Persians, religion of the ancient, 294, 295, 297.

Peshat, the, 97.

Physician, the Jewish, 113, 114.

_Pococke, Bishop_, _219_.

Polytheism, 295.

_Postans Capt._, _167_.

Pott, Prof., 136, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 165, 181.

_Proselytes, Jewish_, _79_.

Quasimus, 114.

Rabanu Jacob Be-Rab, 110, 111, 113.

Rabbinical law, 72-114.

Rachel, 17.

Rasscho, Shaykh, 220, 222.

_Ratisbonne, De_, _17_.

“Reformed British Jews,” the, 58.

Reinaud, 147, 149, 150, 151, 165.

Religion, earliest forms of, 289-302.

Remiz, the, 97.

Ricardos, the, 18.

_Roberts, Samuel_, _276_.

Rödiger, 150.

Rogers, Consul E. T., 231, 232.

Romá, the, 160, 164, 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 186, 187,

198, 202, 221, 228, 233, 252, 261.

Roman Catholic view of Jewish future, 62, 63.

Romani-chíb, 181, 197.

Rome, 206.

Rossini, 17.

Rothschilds, the, 18.

Rouhers, the, 18.

Rumeli, 220.

Russia and the Holy Land, 66, 67, 70.

Sabbath, the Jewish, 74-77, 86.

_Sabbath Services, the Jewish_, _76_.

Sadík, 11.

Safed, School of, 68, 92, 106-114.

Said, 251.

Saint-Martin, V. de, 185.

Samaritans, the, 57, 58.

Sanhedrin, the, 94, 95, 96.

Santa, Dr. de Pietra, 258-260.

Saracens, 203, 205.

Scotland, 172, 178, 213, 282.

Segor, 181.

Sephardím, the, 46, 47, 48, 49, 55, 56.

Shahnameh, the, 146, 148, 150, 165.

Shalomon Alkabez, Rabbi, 111.

Shammai, 101.

Sicani, the, 180, 185.

Sidi Hamed au Muza, 260.

Siginnoi, the, 185.

Sím, El, 240, 241.

Sindh, 138, 139.

Singani, 181.

Sinties, the, 184, 185.

Sleeman, W. H., 141, 165, 211, 231.

Sochæus, 11.

Sod, 98.

Soult, Marshal, 17.

Spain, 178.

Spinoza, 17, _70_, _95_.

Sweden, 203, 209.

Syria, 219-224, 228-232, 250, 320.

Talmud Babli, 101, 102.

Talmudic law, 72-114, 118.

Tchangar, the, 156.

Theism, 302.

Tiberias, School of, 92-106.

Ticknor, 271.

Torlonias, the, 18.

Trumpp, Dr. Ernest, 137, 156, _168_, 197.

Tschudi, 13.

Tsigans, the, 147, 152, 153, 175, 183, 185, 189, 190, 193, 198, 201,

263 ff.

Ukayl, 137.

“White Jews,” the, 58.

Wohl, 17.

_Wolff_, _17_.

Xapol, 18.

Yad ha-Hazaka, 110.

Yahuda, Rabbi, 94, 95.

_Yom ha-Kippur_, _65_.

Zengi, the, 150.

Zigeuner, the, 150, 151, 165, 192, 219, 234, _241_, 268.

Zincali, the, 187, 192, 219.

Zingaro, derivation of, 190.

Zuth, the, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 165, 231, _239_.

PRINTED BY

HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.,

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Archaic, obsolete and inconsistent spellings are maintained from the

original book. There were no obvious misspellings. No changes were made

to the text with the following exceptions:

--some footnotes inserted to comment about transliterations,

--for words in the Arabic alphabet (including Arabic, Persian,

Sindhi, etc.) or Devangari (Sanskrit, Hindi, etc.), I have included

a transliteration if one was not already in the text,

--all footnotes moved to the end of their chapter,

--CONTENTS, PREFACE, INDEX, and TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE added to the Table

of Contents, and

--added this note.