see, by and by, if she has told the truth or is a liar. He writes a
letter (which tradition says was perfumed with musk and sealed with the
king’s signet), and he commands the bird to take it to the land of Saba.
Some say that the lapwing delivered the letter by throwing it into the
queen’s bosom as she sat surrounded by her army; others that she brought
it to her through an open window when she was sitting in her chamber: at
any rate, it reached its destination, and the lapwing’s character was
completely rehabilitated. With regard to Queen Balkis, the Bible, the
Koran, and the Emperor Menelek may be consulted.
One of the beasts most esteemed by Moslems, one of those who, with
Balaam’s ass, Jonah’s whale, Abraham’s ram, Solomon’s ant, and several
other favourite animals, are known to have been admitted into the
highest heaven, is the dog in the Moslem version of the “Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus,” the legend of the seven young men who hid in a cave and
slept safely through a long period of persecution. The dog has a Divine
command to say to the young men, “I love those who are dear to God, and
I will guard you.” He lay stretched across the mouth of the cave during
the whole time that the persecution lasted. Moslems say of a very
avaricious man, “He would not give a bone to the dog of the Seven
Sleepers.” The dog’s name was Katmîr (though some said it was Al Rakîm),
and people wrote it as a talisman on important letters sent to a
distance or oversea, to make sure of their arriving safely: it was like
registration without the fee. He appears to have slept, as did his
masters, while he guarded the entrance to the cave: the protection which
he afforded must be attributed to his supernatural gifts as a
devil-scarer rather than to the watch he kept. Dogs were believed to see
“things invisible to us”—_i.e._, demons. If a dog barks in the night the
Faithful ask God’s aid against Satan. The cock is also a devil-scarer
and sees angels as well as demons: when he crows it is a sign that he
has just seen one.
Sometimes genii take the form of certain animals such as cats, dogs, and
serpents (animals which are not eaten). If a man would kill one of the
animals in which genii often appear, he must first warn the genii to
vacate its form. This means that there is a greater prejudice against
taking the life of such animals than in the case of animals slaughtered
for food, when it is sufficient (though necessary) to say “If it pleases
God.” While non-mystical Moslems did not respect life as such,
nevertheless they realised the great scientific truth that _life_ is the
supreme mystery. “The idols ye invoke besides God,” says the Koran, “can
never create a single fly although they were all assembled for that
purpose, and if the fly snatch anything from them” (such as offerings of
honey) “they cannot recover the same from it.” Moslems are fond of the
legend from the Gospel of the Infancy of how the Child Jesus, when He
and other children were playing at making clay sparrows, breathed on the
birds made by Him and they flew away or hopped on His hands. The parents
of the other children forbade them to play any more with the Holy Child,
whom they thought to be a sorcerer. That the Jews really imagined the
unusual things done by Christ to be magic-working, and that this belief
entered more into their wish to compass His death than is commonly
supposed, a knowledge of Eastern ideas on magic inclines one to think.
Moslems readily admit the truth of the miracle of the sparrows as of the
other miracles of Jesus; they add, however, that life came into the clay
figures “by permission of God.”
Towards the end of the world, animals will speak with human language.
Before this happens will have come to pass the reign of the “Rooh
Allah,” the Spirit of God, as all Moslems call Christ. It is told that
He will descend near the White Tower east of Damascus and will remain on
earth for forty (or for twenty-four) years, during which period malice
and hatred will be laid aside and peace and plenty will rejoice the
hearts of men. While Jesus reigns, lions and camels and bears and sheep
will live in amity and a child will play with serpents unhurt.
A kind of perpetual local Nature Peace prevails at Mecca; no animals are
allowed to be slaughtered within a certain distance of the sacred
precinct. It should be noted also that pilgrims are severely prohibited
from hunting; the wording of the verse in the Koran which establishes
this rule seems to imply the possibility that wild animals themselves
are doing the pilgrimage; hence they must be held sacred.
The law forbidding Moslems to eat the flesh of swine was copied from the
Jewish ordinance, without doubt from the conviction that it was
unwholesome. Those who were driven by extreme hunger to eat of it were
not branded as unclean. There is a curious Indian folk-tale which gives
an account of why swine-flesh was forbidden. At the beginning Allah
restrained man from eating any animals but those which died a natural
death. As they did not die as quickly as they wished, men began to
hasten their deaths by striking them and throwing stones at them. The
animals complained to Allah, who sent Gabriel to order all the men and
all the animals to assemble so that He might decide the case. But the
obstinate pig did not come. So Allah said: “The pigs, the lowest of
animals, are disobedient; let no one eat them or touch them.” There is
no record whatever of the pigs having signed a protest.
It is by no means clear when the prejudice against dogs took hold of the
Moslem mind. At first their presence was even tolerated inside the
Mosque, and the report that the Prophet ordered all the dogs at Medina
to be killed, especially those of a dark colour, is certainly a fable.
The Caliph Abu Djafar al Mausur asked a learned man this very question:
why dogs were treated with scorn? The learned man was so worthy of that
description that he had the courage to say he did not know. “Tradition
said so.” The Caliph suggested that it might be because dogs bark at
guests and at beggars. There is a modern saying that angels never go
into a house where there is a dog or an image. Still, the ordinary
kindness of the Turks to the pariah dogs at Constantinople, where the
beggar shares his last crust with them, shows that the feeling belongs
more to philology than to nature. The pariah dog is the type of the
despised outcast, but when a European throws poisoned bread to him the
act is not admired by the Moslem more than it deserves to be.
Several _savants_ have thought that the dog is scorned by Moslems
because he was revered by Mazdeans; that he suffered indignity at the
hands of the new believers as a protest against the excess of honour he
had received from the old. This theory, though ingenious, does not seem
to be borne out by facts. The comparisons of the qualities of the good
dervish and the dog, which is a sort of vade mecum of dervishes
everywhere, was almost certainly suggested by the “Eight
Characteristics” of the dog in the Avesta. It is singular that the dog
gets far better treatment in the Moslem comparisons than in the Mazdean.
“The dog is always hungry: so is it with the faithful; he sleeps but
little by night: so is it with those plunged in divine Love; if he die,
he leaves no heritage: so is it with ascetics; he forsakes not his
master even if driven away: so is it with adepts; he is content with few
temporal goods: so is it with the pursuers of temperance; if he is
expelled from one place he seeks another: so is it with the humble; if
he is chastised and dismissed and then called back he obeys: so is it
with the modest; if he sees food he remains standing afar: so is it with
those who are consecrated to poverty; if he go on a journey he carries
no refreshment for the way: so is it with those who have renounced the
world.” Some of these “Characteristics” are flung back in irony at the
dervishes by those who bitterly deride them, as the friars in the ages
of Faith were derided in Europe—without its making the least difference
to their popularity—but the homily itself is quite serious and meant for
edification. Hasan Basri, who died in 728 A.D., was the author or
adapter. Its wide diffusion is due to the accuracy with which it depicts
the wandering mystic, whether he be called a dervish or a Fakeer, or, in
the Western translation of Fakeer, a “Poverello” of St. Francis.
A certain rich man apologised to a Dervish because his servants, without
his knowledge, had often driven him away: the holy man showed, he said,
great patience and humility in coming back after such ill-treatment. The
dervish replied that it was no merit but only one of the “traits of the
dog,” which returns however often it is driven off. The worst enemies to
the dervish have ever been the Ulemas, for whom he is a kind of
dangerous lunatic strongly tinged with heresy. Among his unconventional
ideas was sure to penetrate, more or less, the neoplatonist or Sufic
view of animals. Wherever transcendental meditations on the union of the
created with the Creator begin to prevail, men’s minds take the
direction of admitting a more intimate relation of all living things
with God. We might be sure that the dervishes would follow this
psychological law even if we could not prove it. To prove it, however,
we need go no further than the great prayer, one of the noblest of human
prayers, which is used by many of the Dervish orders. There we read:
“Thy science is everlasting and knows even the numbers of the breaths of
Thy creatures: Thou seest and hearest the movements of all Thy
creatures; thou hearest even the footsteps of the ant when in the dark
night she walks on black stones; even the birds of the air praise Thee
in their nests; the wild beasts of the desert adore Thee; the most
secret as well as the most exposed thoughts of Thy servants Thou
knowest....”
In the same way, it was natural that the Dervishes should be supposed to
have the power attributed to all holy (or harmless) men over the kings
of the desert and forest. It could not be otherwise. Bishop Heber heard
of two Indian Yogis who lived in different parts of a jungle infested by
tigers in perfect safety; indeed, it was reported that one of these
ascetics had a nightly visit from a tiger, who licked his hands and was
fondled by him. This is a Hindu jungle story, but it would be just as
credible if it were told of a Dervish. Of the credibility of the first
part of it, and probably of the last also, there is not a single
wandering ascetic of any sort who would entertain a doubt. Some years
ago a Moslem recluse deliberately put his arm into the cage of Moti, the
tiger in the Lahore Zoological Gardens. The tiger lacerated the arm, and
the poor man died in the hospital after some days’ suffering, during
which he showed perfect serenity. He had made a mistake; the tiger,
brought up as a cub by British officers and deprived of his liberty, was
not endowed with the power of discrimination possessed by a king of the
wild. This, I hope, the Fakeer reflected, but it is more likely that he
deemed that cruel clutch a sign of his own unworthiness and accepted
death meekly, hoping not for reward but for pardon.
One would like to know more of a book which Mr. Charles M. Doughty found
a certain reputed saint “poring and half weeping over,” the argument of
which was “God’s creatures the beasts,” while its purpose was to show
that every beast yields life-worship unto God. Even if this Damascus
saint was not very saintly (as the author of “Arabia Deserta” hints),
yet it is interesting to note that this subject should have appeared to
a would-be new Messiah the most important he could choose for his
Gospel.
A Persian poet, Azz’ Eddin Elmocadessi, advises man to learn from the
birds,
“Virtues that may gild thy name;
And their faults if thou wouldst scan,
Know thy failings are the same.”
The recognition in animals of most human qualities in a distinct though
it may be a limited form underlies all Eastern animal-lore and gives it
a force and a reality even when it deals with extravagant fancies. There
is a broad difference between the power of feeling _for_ animals and the
power of feeling _with_ them. The same difference moulds the sentiments
of man to man: nine men in ten can feel for their fellow-humans, but
scarcely one man in ten can feel with them. They even know it, and they
say ungrammatically, “I feel the greatest sympathy _for_ so and so.” An
instance of true _mitempfindung_, of insight into the very soul of a
creature, exists in an Arabian poem by Lebid, who was one of the most
interesting figures of the period in which the destinies of the Arab
race were cast. He was the glory of the Arabs, not only on account of
his faultless verse, but also because of his noble character. It is told
of him that whenever an east wind blew, he provided a feast for the
poor. Himself a pre-Islamic theist, he hailed the Prophet as the
inspired enunciator of the creed he had held imperfectly and in private.
All his poems were composed in the “Ignorance”; on being asked for a
poem after his conversion at ninety years of age, he copied out a
chapter of the Koran, and said, “God has given me this in exchange for
poesy.” I do not think this meant that he despised the poet’s art, but
that now, when he could no longer exercise it, he had what was still
more precious.
The passage in question is one of several which show Lebid’s
surprisingly close acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of wild
animals. It is one of those elaborate similes which were the pride of
Arabian poets, who often preferred to take comparisons already in use
than to invent new ones. Wherever literature became a living
entertainment, something of this kind happened: witness the borrowings
from the Classics by the poets of the Renaissance; people liked to
recognise familiar ideas in a new dress. Lebid’s similes have been
turned and re-turned by other poets, but none approached the art and
truth he infused into them. I am indebted to Sir Charles Lyall for the
following version, which is not included in his volume of splendid
translations of early Arabian poetry. The subject of the passage is the
grief of a wild cow that has lost her calf:—
“Flat-nosed is she—she has lost her calf and ceases not to roam
About the marge of the sand meadows and cry
For her youngling, just weaned, white, whose limbs have been torn
By the ash-grey hunting wolves who lack not for food.
They came upon it while she knew not, and dealt her a deadly woe:
—Verily, Death, when it shoots, misses not the mark!
The night came upon her, as the dripping rain of the steady shower
Poured on and its continuous flow soaked the leafage through and
through.
She took refuge in the hollow trunk of a tree with lofty branches
standing apart
On the skirts of the sandhills where the fine sand sloped her way.
The steady rain poured down, and the flood reached the ridge of her
back,
In a night when thick darkness hid away all the stars;
And she shone in the face of the mirk with a white, glimmering light
Like a pearl born in a sea-shell, that has dropped from its string.
Until, when the darkness was folded away and morning dawned,
She stood, her legs slipping in the muddy earth.
She wandered distracted about all the pools of So’âid
For seven nights twinned with seven whole long days,
Until she lost all hope, and her udders shrunk—
The udders that had not failed in all the days of the suckling and
weaning,
Then she heard the sound of men and it filled her heart with fear,
Of men from a hidden place; and men, she knew, were her bane.
She rushed blindly along, now thinking the chase before,
And now behind her: each was a place of dread.
Until, when the archers lost hope, they let loose on her
Trained hounds with hanging ears, each with a stiff leather collar
on its neck;
They beset her and she turned to meet them with her horns
Like to spears of Semhar in their sharpness and their length.
To thrust them away: for she knew well, if she drove them not off,
That the fated day of her death among the fates of beasts had come;
And among them, Kesâb was thrust through and slain and rolled in blood
lay there,
And Sukhâm was left in the place where he made his onset.”
There the description breaks off. In spite of the haunting cry of the
cow of Lucretius, in spite of the immortal tears of Shakespeare’s “poor
sequester’d stag”—no vision of a desperate animal in all literature
seems to me so charged with every element of pathos and dramatic
intensity as this cow of Lebid. How fine is the altogether unforeseen
close, which leaves us wondering, breathless: Will she escape? Will no
revengeful arrow reach her? Will the archers do as Om Piet did to the
wildebeest?—
“A wildebeest cow and calf were pursued by Om Piet with three
hunting-dogs. The Boer hunter tells the tale: ‘The old cow laid
the first dog low; the calf is now tired. The second dog comes
up to seize it; the cow strikes him down. Now the third dog
tries to bite the little one, who can run no more, but the cow
treats him so that there’s nothing to be done but to shoot him.
Then Om Piet stands face to face with the wildebeest, who snorts
but does not fly. Now though I come to shoot a wildebeest yet
can I not kill a beast that has so bravely fought and will not
run away; so Om Piet takes off his hat, and says, “Good-day to
you, old wildebeest. You are a good and strong old wildebeest.”
And we dine off springbuck that night at the farm.’”[7]
Footnote 7:
“A Breath from the Veldt,” by Guille Millais, 2nd edition, 1899.
I ought to explain that, like the “cow” of Om Piet, Lebid’s “cow” is an
antelope—the _Antilope defassa_—of which a good specimen may be seen in
the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. The old Boer’s hunting
yarn brings an unexpected confirmation of the Arabian poet’s testimony
to its courage and maternal love.
Since the chase began, down to the blind brutality of the battue (which
wiped it out) chivalry has been a trait of the genuine sportsman. In the
golden legend of hunter’s generosity should be inscribed for ever the
tale—the true tale as I believe it to be—of the Moslem prince
Sebectighin, who rose from slave-birth to the greatest of Persian
thrones—and more honour to him, notwithstanding the slur which Firdusi,
stung by Mahmoud’s want of appreciation, cast, in a foolish moment, on
his father’s origin. Sebectighin was a horseman in the service of the
Sultan and as a preparation for greater things he found a vent for his
pent-up energies in the chase. One day he remarked a deer with her
little fawn peacefully grazing in a glade of the forest. He galloped to
the spot, and in less than a second he had seized the fawn, which, after
binding its legs, he placed across his saddle-bows. Thus he started to
go home, but looking back, he saw the mother following, with every mark
of grief. Sebectighin’s heart was touched; he loosened the fawn and
restored it to its dam. And in the night he had a vision in his dreams
of One who said to him, “The kindness and compassion which thou hast
this day shown to a distressed animal has been approved of in the
presence of God; therefore in the records of Providence the kingdom of
Ghusni is marked as a reward against thy name. Let not greatness destroy
thy virtue, but continue thy benevolence to man.”
Among the Afghan ballads collected by James Darmesteter, of which it has
been aptly said that they give an admirable idea of Homer in a state of
becoming, there is one composed in a gentler mood than the songs of war
and carnage which has a gazelle for heroine and the Prophet as _Deus ex
machina_. As there is no translation of it into English I have attempted
the following version:—
“The Son of Abu Jail he set a snare for a gazelle,
Without a thought along she sped, and in the snare she fell.
‘O woe is me!’ she weeping cried, ‘that I to look forgot!
Fain would I live for my dear babes, but hope, alas! is not.’
Then to the Merciful she made this short and fervent prayer:
‘I left two little fawns at home; Lord, keep them in Thy care!’
The son of Abu Jail he came, in haste and glee he ran,
‘Ah, now I’ve got you in my net, and who to save you can?’
He grasped her by her tender throat, his fearsome sword did draw,
When lo! the Lord held back his hand! The Prophet’s self he saw!
‘The world was saved for love of thee, save for thy pity’s sake!’
So breathed the trembling doe, and then the holy Prophet spake:
‘Abu, my friend, this doe let go, and hark to my appeal;
She has two tender fawns at home who pangs of hunger feel,
‘Let her go back one hour to them, no longer will she stay,
And when she comes, O heartless man, then mayest thou have thy way!
But if, by chance, she should not come, then by my faith will I
Be unto thee a bonded slave until the day I die.’
Then Abu the gazelle let go; to her dear young she went,
‘Quick, children, take my breast,’ she said, ‘my life is almost spent;
‘The Master of the Universe for me a pledge I gave,
But I must swift return and then no man my life can save.’
Then said the little ones to her, ‘Mother, we dare not eat;
Go swiftly back, redeem the pledge, fast as can fly thy feet.’
One hour had scarce run fully out when, panting, she was there;
Now, Abu, son of Abu, thou mayest take her life or spare!
Said Abu, ‘In the Prophet’s name, depart, I set you free ...
But thou, our Helper, at God’s throne, do thou remember me!’
So have I told, as long ago my father used to tell,
How Pagan Abu Moslem turned and saved his soul from hell.”
This brief sketch will suffice to show that if the Moslem is not humane
to animals it is his own fault, as I think it is his own fault if he is
not humane to man. Teaching humanity to animals must always imply the
teaching of humanity to men. This was perfectly understood well by all
these Oriental tellers of beast-stories: they would all have endorsed
the saying of one of my Lombard peasant-women (dear, good soul!), “Chi
non è buono per le bestie, non è buono per i Cristiani”; _Cristiano_
meaning, in Italian popular speech, a human being. Under the most varied
forms, in fiction which while the world lasts, can never lose its
freshness, the law of kindness is brought home. Perhaps the most
beautiful of all humane legends is one preserved in a poem by Abu
Mohammed ben Yusuf, Sheikh Nizan-eddin, known to Europeans as Nizami.
This Persian poet, who died sixty-three years before Dante was born, may
have taken the legend from some collection of Christ-lore, some
uncanonical book impossible now to trace; it is unlikely that he
invented it. As Jesus walks with His disciples through the market-place
at evening, He comes upon a crowd which is giving vent to every
expression of abhorrence at the sight of a poor dead dog lying in the
gutter. When they have all had their say, and have pointed in disgust to
his blear eyes, foul ears, bare ribs, torn hide, “which will not even
yield a decent shoe-string,” Jesus says, “How beautifully white his
teeth are!” No story of the Saviour outside the Gospels is so worthy to
have been in them.
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XII
THE FRIEND OF THE CREATURE