religion had (at a comparatively advanced stage) been so involved in law
as to be almost stifled by law is furnished by the Jewish people as we
find them under Roman dominion. The lawyers referred to in the New
Testament[95] (a class of whom there are but few traces before the
Captivity) are not priests (though of course a priest might happen to be
learned in the law), yet they have a quasi-sacerdotal position as
conversant with and able to interpret a body of rules which are of
divine origin, and embrace the relations of man to God as well as to his
fellow men. Between religious duty and religious ceremony on the one
hand and the performance of civil duties on the other there is no line
of demarcation: all are of like obligation and are tried by similar
canons. Hence piety tends to degenerate into formalism: hence the
precisians who insist upon petty externalities and neglect the weightier
duties deserve and incur the rebukes of a higher spiritual teaching. It
may indeed be said that one great part of the work recorded in the
Gospels, regarded on its historical side, was to disjoin Law from
Religion or Religion from Law. And this work was performed not merely by
superseding parts of the law known as that of Moses, or by giving a new
sense to that law, but also by transforming Religion itself, purging
away the externals of sacrifice and other ceremonial rights, and leading
the renewed and purified soul into ‘the glorious liberty of the people
of God.’
-----
Footnote 95:
The γραμματεῖς (scribes), νομικοί (lawyers), and νομοδιδάσκαλοι
(doctors of the law) of the New Testament seem to be different names
for the same class, and identical with the ἱερογραμματεῖς of Josephus.
-----
That majority of the Jewish race which did not accept the teachings of
Christ continued for many centuries, scattered and depressed as it was
after the destruction of Jerusalem, to treat its ancient law-books and
the traditions which had gathered round them as being both a body of
civil rules and a religious guide of life. Despite the tendency to
formalism which has been noted, there were among the Rabbis of the early
centuries A.D. not a few who dwelt upon the moral and emotional side of
the Mosaic Law, and who through it sustained the spirit of the sorely
tried nation.
In the Christian Church also ceremonies and external observances came
before long to play a great part in worship, and were for ages an
essential element in the popular conception, indeed in the practically
universal conception, of Christianity itself both as a theology and as a
religion. The atmosphere which surrounded nascent Christianity was an
atmosphere saturated with rites and observances. There were in the
primitive Church some few usages and in the New Testament some few texts
on which it was possible to erect a fabric of ceremonial worship. But
even if these conditions had been absent, the tendencies of human nature
to create a body of ritual and to attach a sort of legal sanction to the
external duties which custom prescribed would have prevailed.
How far the rites and practices which nearly every branch of the
Christian Church has to a greater or less extent enjoined are each of
them interwoven with the vital tenets of the faith, is a question not
likely to be settled in any future that we can foresee. But the
conception of the ‘Kingdom of the Heavens’ as something dissevered from
the obligations imposed by legal tradition has also remained ever since
in Christianity as a principle of profound significance, which has at
different times emerged in various forms to become sometimes a
destroying, sometimes a vivifying and transforming force. Such sayings
as ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,’ or ‘He hath made
you kings and priests to God,’ or ‘Ye are not under the Law but under
Grace,’ have from time to time roused men to hold themselves delivered
from all bonds of custom expounded or rules enforced by ecclesiastical
authority.
I will not, however, attempt to follow out the intricate relations
between the two conceptions, as they appear in the long course either of
Christian or of Jewish annals, but will pass on to consider the
phenomena of their connexion in another field, one in which the
phenomena are comparatively simple, and lie open to-day to the study of
every traveller in a land where the old and the new stand in striking
contrast.
The best modern instance of the identity of Religion and Law is to be
found in that originally misconceived and subsequently perverted form of
Judaism which still prevails extensively over the eastern world, and
recognizes Muhamad of Mecca as the last and greatest of the prophets of
Jehovah. In Islam, Law is Religion and Religion is Law, because both
have the same source and an equal authority, being both contained in the
same divine revelation. I cannot better illustrate their union than by
giving a short account of an ancient and splendid University where they
are taught as one, hoping that so much of digression as is thereby
involved will be pardoned in respect of the interest which this famous
seat of learning deserves to excite, and of the light which it casts on
the early history of the Universities of Europe—of Bologna and Paris, of
Padua and Salamanca and Prague, and of our own Oxford and Cambridge.
About three hundred and fifty years after Muhamad, and towards the end
of the tenth century of the Christian era, Johar, general of the
Fatimite Sultans established at Tunis, conquered Egypt. When he built
Cairo (El Kahira, ‘the Victorious’), not far from the decayed Memphis,
he founded in the new city a mosque which presently obtained the name of
El Azhar, that is to say, ‘The Flowers’ or ‘The Flourishing.’ The
Fatimites, belonging to the schismatic sect of the Shiites, were
particularly anxious to establish their ecclesiastical position against
the orthodox Sunnites, and, just as Protestant princes in the sixteenth
century founded universities for the defence of their tenets—as, for
instance, Elector John of Saxony set up the University of Jena—so the
second Fatimite ruler of Egypt, Khalif Aziz Billah, resolved to attract
learned men to his capital. He gathered famous teachers to the Mosque,
and there was soon a great afflux of students. Sultan Hakim (probably a
madman), who went so far beyond the doctrines of Shiism as to declare
himself an incarnation of Ali and a Mahdi, closed El Azhar, and
transferred the University to another mosque which he had founded.
However, the teaching staff was subsequently brought back to El Azhar
(which returned finally to Sunnite orthodoxy with the conquest of Egypt
by Saladin in 1171 A.D.), and it has been now for many centuries the
greatest University in the Musulman world, being situate in what has
been, since the decline of Bagdad, the greatest purely Musulman
city[96]. The number of students sometimes reaches ten thousand; at the
time of my visit (in 1888) it was estimated at eight thousand.
-----
Footnote 96:
Stambul (Constantinople) is larger, but Stambul has always had a large
Christian element, whereas Cairo was till about thirty years ago
almost wholly Muhamadan. Moreover Cairo was better situated for
drawing students from North Africa and Western Asia than Stambul,
which is almost on the outermost edge of the Musulman world.
-----
The whole teaching of the University is carried on within the walls of
the Mosque, a large group of buildings, approached by six gates, and
standing in the oldest part of Cairo. The chief entrance is from the
Alley (or arcade) of the Booksellers in the Bazaar. At the outer portal,
in the portico, the visitor leaves his shoes. To the left of the inner
portal I found a noble square hall, said to date from the fourteenth
century, as lofty as the chapel of Magdalen College and about as large,
though different in shape, with beautiful marbles on the walls, and an
aisle separated from the rest of the chamber by a row of tall columns,
supporting slightly pointed arches. The sunlight came in through large
openings, filled by no glass, under the roof. In the centre there were
sitting or kneeling or crouching some eighty or ninety men in an
irregular circle, mostly young men, yet many over thirty and some as old
as fifty, with their shoes laid beside them on the matting. In front of
them, sitting cross-legged on a low wooden throne, was an elderly
professor, holding a book in his hands, and appearing to read from it.
Now and then a question came to him from the circle, which he answered
quickly; but otherwise the audience were perfectly still, and no sound
was heard save his own low voice and the beating of the wings of the
birds as they flew to and fro above. The book was an authoritative
commentary on the Sacred Law, to which he added his own explanations as
he read; and he was treating of the four requisites of prayer,
especially of the first of the four, viz. Devotional Intent. No one took
notes, but all listened with the closest attention. He was the Chief
Sheik of the Mosque, and in virtue of his office, also the
Sheik-ul-Islam or chief ecclesiastical and legal authority of Egypt,
which, being expressed in the terms of an English University, would make
him Chancellor, Regius Professor of Divinity and Regius Professor of
Civil Law rolled into one, and therewithal also Archbishop of Canterbury
and Lord High Chancellor.
In the similar but rather less spacious and ornate room opposite I found
another class, smaller, and composed of somewhat younger men, listening
to a lecture on what the Muslims call Dealings, _i.e._ civil law. The
subject was Wills, and the requisites to the validity of a will, such as
the sanity, freedom and full age of the testator, were being explained
with reference to a book of authority which lay before the lecturer, a
younger man than the Chief Sheik. He spoke with a fluency, clearness and
evident power of interesting the class, which reminded me of a brilliant
teacher whom I had heard twenty-five years before discoursing on the
same subject at Heidelberg.
Led hence under the lofty gateway which gives access to the great court,
I saw, like an earlier traveller, characters inscribed above the gate,
and was told by my Virgil that their import was—‘Actions must be judged
by their intent, and every man shall be requited according to what he
purposed’—a maxim which belongs in one sense to religion, in another to
law, but requires, like the corresponding phrase of our civilians—_Actus
non est reus nisi mens sit rea_—to be carefully defined and qualified
before it can be applied, seeing how often good intent is followed by
bad result.
The great Court of the Mosque is a quadrangle nearly as large as that of
Christ Church, Oxford, and was once, like that of Christ Church,
surrounded by arcades resting on columns, of which now only a few
remain. There are three tanks for ablutions and a great cistern of Nile
water beneath, whence vessels are filled by boys who carry it round
among the groups. It is the hour of forenoon rest between the morning
lecture and the noontide meal, and a confused din of many voices rises
from the six or seven hundred persons scattered through the quadrangle,
whose ample space they do not crowd. The men, mostly young, are sitting
or lying all over the flagged surface, reading or talking or reciting
with a book open before them, many swaying backwards and forwards as
they chant, all in the blaze of sunlight. Piles of thin, tough cakes, of
which more anon, stand here and there. Through the groups walks a sturdy
official bearing aloft a formidable symbol of order, two long and heavy
flat strips of leather attached to a stout handle, wherewith he coerces
any disturber of the peace of the Mosque. Discipline is easily
maintained, for the Oriental, unless violently excited, is submissive to
authority, and dangerous only in a mob. Moreover the students are mostly
poor, and therefore attentive to their studies. The arcade on the
south-east side is filled with knots of boys from eight to fourteen
years of age sitting round their teachers, each with a metal slate, a
brass ink-horn, and a reed pen; some gathered round a teacher armed with
a long palm stick. They read aloud from the slate what they have
written, thus learning by heart verses of the Koran, copies of which are
set up on wicker stands, because the sacred volume must never be lower
than the reader’s waist.
Adjoining the great quadrangle is the Liwan, or hall for prayer and
preaching. It is really two parallel halls, partially separated by a
wall, and divided into nine aisles by rows of columns nearly four
hundred in number, the shafts of granite or marble with carved capitals.
They were doubtless brought hither from Christian churches long since
destroyed[97], churches that may have echoed to the voices of Athanasius
and of Cyril. Along the side towards Mecca are four short recesses
(Kiblas) resembling the apses of an early Christian basilica, though
much smaller, one for each of the four legal orthodox sects of Muslims.
Beside the chief Kibla there is placed, high up on the wall, a small
wooden box containing relics, among which is one equally fit to be
revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims, viz. a piece of Noah’s Ark. The
effect of the hall is due rather to its vastness and to the maze of
pillars than to any beauty in form or decorations; for the walls are
plain, and the low roof makes the interior more sombre than either the
famous mosque of Kêrwan or the still more rich and majestic mosque of
the Ommiyad Khalifs at Cordova. As I entered this Liwan, the hour of
midday prayers had arrived, and the crowd of students rose suddenly and,
turning towards the four Kiblas, performed their devotions. This done,
the multitude, passing noiselessly, for every foot is unshod, through
the maze of columns, sorted itself into classes, each grouped in an
incomplete circle round its own professor. Every regular professor has
his column, at whose foot he sits, leaning against it; and here he reads
or talks loudly enough to be heard over the din by those near him, for
the clamour of many voices is lessened by the amplitude of the chamber.
The younger or less privileged lecturers mostly gather their hearers
outside in the Court, though I found a class of youths learning the
elements of grammar at the foot of one of the Liwan columns. The
lectures were mostly on grammar, which has a religious side, because it
includes prosody and the proper pronunciation of the Koran. One eminent
professor, who was also Select Preacher for the time being, was
discoursing on Ibn Malek’s treatise on Arabic Grammar, holding in his
hand the treatise, which is a poem of one thousand verses. All the class
had copies, and continued to listen with untroubled gravity while a cat
walked across between them and the professor. Another teacher, lecturing
on logic, was being interrupted by a running fire of questions from his
pupils, which he answered with swift promptitude and terseness.
-----
Footnote 97:
The columns of the ancient and most sacred mosque at Kairoan or Kêrwan
(in the territory of Tunis), built by Sidi Okba, the conqueror of
North Africa, were brought from Christian churches, and many from the
great basilica of Carthage, the floor of which has been recently
uncovered.
-----
There are about two hundred and thirty professors, that is to say,
persons authorized to teach and engaged in teaching[98]. As in the
universities of mediaeval Europe, graduation consists in a certificate
of competence to teach; and this is given to those who have spent the
prescribed time in study by inscribing in the copy of the book which the
graduate has been studying a statement by the teacher that he has
mastered the contents of that book. When a certificate of wider
attainments is sought, the candidate is examined orally by two or three
sheiks. As in the Middle Ages, there are no written examinations; and
indeed writing is but little used, the aim of teaching being rather to
cultivate the memory. The books studied are always the same, so there is
no occasion for examination statutes and Notices of Boards of Studies.
The freshman begins with what is called Balagha, the use of language, a
subject which comprises grammar, logic (with the elements of
metaphysics), and rhetoric. Next follows theology, the Nature of God and
the functions of the Prophet, after which comes the Law, including both
the precepts of religion as applied in practice and those of what we
should call civil or secular law, both of them based on the Koran and
the Hadith or sacred tradition. Instruction is no longer given in
medicine here. When taught, it was taught, as it is still in the
University of Fez, from an Arabic translation of Aristotle. The course
prescribed for one who aspires to be a Kadi (Judge of the Sheriat or
Sacred Law) is fourteen years, but an even longer time would be needed
to fit a man to be a Mufti or doctor of the law. Five or six years, I
was told, would qualify a student to become a village schoolmaster, able
to teach the elements of religion and to advise the peasants on
questions of divorce, just as in rural England the schoolmaster used to
draw wills, with much ultimate benefit to the legal profession: and the
same length of study might enable a man to become Imam (curate in
charge) of a small mosque. Study consists, in every branch, chiefly in
learning by heart. Even religion is taught through rules for prayer and
alms-giving, which must be exactly remembered. But there is also a large
field for the development of subtlety of mind in the casuistical
distinctions which form a large part of law, both moral and civil.
Neither physical science, nor history, nor any language save Arabic is
recognized, nor (which is more surprising) do arithmetic and mathematics
now find a place[99].
-----
Footnote 98:
In the session of 1898-9 there were 198 professors and 7,676 students
attached to the Mosque itself (without counting its dependent
Kuttabs).
Footnote 99:
In 1896 (eight years after my visit) instruction began to be provided
in geometry, algebra, arithmetic and geography, but it is given by
secular teachers appointed by the Egyptian Government, not by the
regular staff of the Mosque.
-----
The students come from all parts of the Musulman world, but the large
majority from Egypt: and the Muslim legal sect to which most Egyptians
belong (the Shafite) is accordingly the most numerous[100], amounting to
nearly half the total. They are mostly poor, and live to some extent on
the charitable gifts of the citizens, paying nothing for their
instruction. But a certain number share in a kind of endowment which
deserves notice, because it is the germ of a College—a germ, however,
which never grew into a plant.
-----
Footnote 100:
In 1898-9 the numbers of the four sects were as follows:
Shafites—Professors, 86; Students, 3,495.
Hanefites—Professors, 41; Students, 2,168.
Malekites—Professors, 68; Students, 1,983.
Hanbalites—Professors, 3; Students, 30.
-----
The word _Riwak_ (accent on the last syllable), properly a colonnade or
corridor, is used at El Azhar to denote an apartment or set of
apartments, allotted to certain students as sleeping-quarters. There are
in the Mosque buildings many Riwaks, and several are set apart for
students coming from some particular countries[101]. There is one for
the Syrians, one for the natives of Mogreb (North-West Africa, from
Tripoli to Morocco), one for the Kurds, one for the natives of Mecca and
Medina (El Haramein), one for the Sudanese of Sennaar, and so forth.
Some are well ventilated and comfortable, such as that endowed by Ratib
Pasha for Hanefites: some plain and bare. It is of course only in the
three or four colder months that a roof is needed; during the summer
night quarters _à la belle étoile_ are preferable. Practically, I was
told, every student who wished could obtain quarters in a Riwak, because
only the poor desire to be so accommodated: and a sleeping-place means
no more than a bit of floor on which to spread your prayer carpet and
place your chest of books and clothes. But the Riwaks (or most of them)
also supply rations of bread to those students who apply for them when
they have reached a certain stage of proficiency, that is, have mastered
two or three books and obtained a certificate to that effect. These
rations consist of wheaten cakes, thin and tough, and are supplied out
of endowments which have from time to time been bestowed on the Mosque
or on particular Riwaks by pious founders. These wheaten cakes are in
fact the very rudest form of what is called in Scotland a Bursary, and
in England an Exhibition or Scholarship; and the assignment of a Riwak
as lodgings to students from a particular district may be compared with
the earliest provision of a dwelling and a pittance for students in
England, the acorn out of which there has grown the superb system of the
Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, many of them originally connected with
particular counties.
-----
Footnote 101:
Place of birth constituted an important basis of classification in
mediaeval Universities. In Oxford, as in Paris, the students were
divided into the Northern and Southern nations (whence the two
Proctors), and in each of the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen
there are still four Nations, a system of organization preserved for
the purposes of the election of a Lord Rector. Nations exist also in
the University of Upsala.
-----
The Mosque, that is to say the University, as distinguished from the
particular Riwaks, had at one time considerable endowments, called in
Arabic Wakfs (pronounced Wakufs); but a large part of these endowments
were seized by Muhamad Ali early in the nineteenth century (about 1820).
In respect of them a considerable sum is now paid from the public
treasury, and a further income is derived from the Wakfs which not
having been seized, are now administered by the Government department in
charge of charitable foundations. The present income of such foundations
as remain is trifling, and the slender incomes of the senior professors
are supplemented by small payments from Government and by gifts from
pious persons. The richer students are also expected to offer gifts, and
sometimes a charitable citizen will send a sheep to give the poor
students a better dinner on a feast-day[102].
-----
Footnote 102:
In 1898-9 the total sum paid to El Azhar out of the public treasury
was LE (Egyptian pounds) 6,611, and out of the administration of the
Wakfs LE5,224, besides a sum of LE1,512 derived from the endowments of
the several Riwaks. The best endowed Riwaks are those of the Turks
(516) and of the Mogrebins (364). I owe these figures to the kindness
of my friend Yacoub Artin Pasha, the energetic and enlightened head of
the educational administration of Egypt. The Egyptian pound is about
twenty shillings and fourpence.
-----
Before leaving the University I was presented to its head, the Sheik El
Azhar, whom I found sitting to hear and determine divers matters, his
lectures having been disposed of in the forenoon. He was too great a man
to rise to receive me, nor is it easy to rise when one sits
cross-legged; but he placed his hand upon his heart with a dignified
courtesy and invited me to seat myself beside him. His disciples were
kneeling round him. He was more like an old Lord Chancellor than an old
archbishop, with an air rather of complacent judicial shrewdness than of
apostolic unction. When it had been explained to him that I was a lawyer
and that law was taught in the Universities of England, he remarked that
religion consists in conduct and behaviour, whereto I replied that the
Roman jurists stated another side of the same truth when they said,
‘Iuris praecepta haec sunt, _honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum
cuique tribuere_.’
It was impossible to spend a day in El Azhar without being struck by its
similarity to the Universities of Europe as they existed in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
In both an extreme simplicity of appliances. Nothing more than a few
buildings capable of giving shelter has been needed here or was needed
there: for a University is after all only a mass of persons possessing
or desiring learning, a concourse of men, some willing to teach and
others eager to be taught.