MOSLEM
Mohammedanism is the religion which is everywhere in evidence in the
East to-day. From the smart Turkish officer who drops in to smoke a
cigarette with you in the tent after dinner, and discusses European
politics in excellent French, down to the beggar who beseeches you in
the name of Allah for a pipeful of tobacco or the end of your cigar,
your acquaintance in Syria is Moslem. From the consecration of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Moslem capture of Jerusalem was
exactly three hundred years. When, in 637, Jerusalem fell, Damascus had
already fallen, and Antioch was to follow next year--all within sixteen
years of the beginning of the Mohammedan era. The conquest was
inevitable. First Persia and then the scattered tribes of pagan Arabs
had proved too much for the Byzantine empire in Syria. Then the man
appeared who understood his opportunity. The Eastern world was in
confusion. Heathens constituted the ruling race, the Jews were scattered
in their dispersion, and the Christians torn into many fragmentary
heretical sects. It was the moment for a great union of scattered
forces. The Arabs were united by the new faith in God, for which they
abandoned their paganism with a marvellous willingness. The bond of
union with Christians and Jews was the common ancestry in Abraham by
which Mohammed hoped to rally and unite the Syrian world. One sharp
battle at the Yarmuk threw Syria open to his advance, and the crisis of
the faith was past.
Mohammed has been declared an impostor, who from first to last won his
way by cleverness without faith; he has been idealised as a hero and
prince of heroes in the religious world. Dean Milman, perhaps, is wisest
when he says, “To the question whether Mohammed was hero, sage,
impostor, or fanatic ... the best reply is the reverential phrase of
Islam: ‘God knows.’” One thing is certain, viz., that he founded a
religion which proved itself capable of wakening response from the
Semitic East with a swiftness and a completeness never elsewhere known.
It would be a matter of rather serious consequences to affirm that such
sweeping success is possible without any vestige of honest faith on the
part of its own prophet.
Arabia found Islam a religion after her own heart. The conquest of the
Arabian mind, and that sudden transference of religious and political
loyalties which changed it from chaos into cosmos, is little short of
miraculous. In the words of one of the severest critics of Islam: “In
A.D. 570, Abdullah, the son of Abd el Muttalib, a Mecca merchant, went
on a trading trip from Mecca to Medina and died there; the same year his
wife, Amina, gave birth to a boy, named Mohammed, at Mecca. One hundred
years later the name of this Arab lad, joined to that of the Almighty,
was called out from ten thousand mosques five times daily, from Muscat
to Morocco, and his new religion was sweeping everything before it in
three continents.”[24] In many ways the new religion was congenial to
Arabia. “Although it made a most vigorous effort to conquer the world,
it is, after all, a religion of the desert, of the tent, and the
caravan, and is confined to nomad and savage or half-civilised nations,
chiefly Arabs, Persians, and Turks. It never made an impression on
Europe except by brute force; it is only encamped, not really
domesticated, in Constantinople, and when it must withdraw from Europe
it will leave no trace behind.”[25] It gave the heathen Arabs, in
exchange for their precarious dependence on incalculable and wayward
gods, the sublime conception of “Islam,” the absolute surrender to the
One God, whom it declared to be Almighty, All-Wise, and All-Merciful.
For the rest, its secret was simplicity. It drove straight for its
object, sacrificing art, appetite, the purity of home life, the
spirituality of religious imagination, and some of the accepted
moralities of conscience. What was left was a creed and standard,
somewhat impoverished truly, but workable and uncompromising. A thousand
difficult questions were avoided, and one of those forces set in play
before whose rough simplicity finer and more delicate things are swept
away.
Mohammedanism meets the traveller at every turn in Syria. Now and then a
dervish is encountered--the extremest sort of Moslem. It would seem
difficult to develop a mystic school within the pale of so clear-cut a
faith as Mohammedanism; yet it has been done. But the Mohammedan
dervishes escape from this despised material world by the vulgar process
of hypnotising themselves by the repetition of the word “Allah” or “Hu,”
or by whirling in circles until they are stupefied. This they call the
ecstatic state, and when they have reached it they are said to perform
many violent tricks, stabbing their flesh or eating broken glass,
without appearing to feel pain. In Syria they are by no means impressive
in appearance. Here and there you meet one, with hair crimped in long
thin pointed wisps, and sticking out in a wiry fashion from his head in
all directions. The dazed and rather weak look in the eyes is suggestive
of a strayed reveller rather than a holy man, but the people hold them
in great reverence.
Another occasional freak of Mohammedanism is the religious procession,
which is conducted on the principle of a rival show to the Christian
fêtes. It starts on Good Friday from Jerusalem to visit the tomb of
Moses--a late fiction, somewhat daring in its contradiction to the old
belief that the tomb of Moses was known to no man. It is amusingly
described by witnesses, but appears to be rather a poor affair on the
whole.
These extravagances apart, one is never out of sight of Mohammedan
religion for an hour of travel in Syria. The worship, like old idolatry,
seems to have claimed every high hill and every green tree for its own.
It has settled itself, in the very seat of old Judaism, on the sacred
area of the temple. Almost every one of the prominent hills of Palestine
is crowned with a little building, domed and whitewashed, opening in a
porch in front, and containing a single empty chamber. This is the weli
(_i.e._ monument, not necessarily tomb) of a Mohammedan saint. What the
terms of canonisation may be, it is perhaps best not to inquire too
minutely. Many of these departed saints are said to have been prophets,
but the discoverer of coffee has his monument in Mocha, to which great
processions come, and there is more than one weli in Palestine
commemorative of a dead robber chief. Not the less sacred are they to
the Mohammedans. In various parts of the country we were puzzled by
little piles of stones, gathered and arranged in considerable numbers on
the tops of long ascents or passes, and bearing a curious resemblance to
the cairns which in certain districts of the west of Scotland mark the
spots at which funeral processions have halted to change the
coffin-bearers. The explanation of these little piles is very simple.
When a Mohammedan comes to the hill-top, and looking around him sees a
weli shining in the distance, he offers up a prayer, and drops a stone
there, to call the attention of the next comer, that he also may look
and pray. Very picturesque and quaint these little holy houses are;
serving, like the hermit’s tower of old in Western lands, for landmarks
as well as for shrines--the white light-houses of the inland.
It is not at the white tombs only that the Moslem prays. Five times a
day, at the call from the mosque, he is summoned to his devotions.
Often, indeed, it is inconvenient to worship at some of these hours, and
it is permissible to say the prayer five times in succession in the
evening, when there is most leisure. Sometimes he carries with him his
rosary, to help his memory with the ninety-nine beautiful names of
Allah, and in railway trains or steamers wealthy gentlemen are to be
seen cherishing a string of amber beads which appear more like the
property of young girls than of grown men. To perform his devotions the
Syrian goes to a fountain, when that is possible, as it is part of the
ritual to wash the hands before praying; but the Arab, spreading his
carpet in the shade of his camel, far away upon the desert, where no
water is to be had but the precious drops in his leathern bottle, is
permitted to wash his hands and lips with sand instead. That which
impresses every spectator is the extraordinary faculty for abstraction
which is manifested. The Moslem seems to have at command the power of
annihilating the world around him, and entering the unseen. His eyes are
open, but you may pass within a yard of them and they will not seem to
see you. They are fixed on the far distance, as if, over the Southern
edge of the world, the man saw the Holy City towards which he bows, with
its Kaaba and its black stone. He might be crystal-gazing, or watching
the horizon for a sail at sea. People may be dancing and singing by his
side, but he does not see them nor hear. Bathing once in the waters of
Elisha’s fountain at Jericho we had a memorable instance of this. We
found the pool empty and the walls undergoing repair. A lad who had
charge of the place was persuaded in the usual fashion to let down the
door of a sluice and so allow the pool to fill, greatly to the detriment
of the newly mortared wall. When we had stripped, the owner of the place
appeared, and we rose to the surface from a dive to hear a controversy
going on, with violent gesture and apoplectic fury, which marks a high
point in our register of vituperation. The water seemed on the whole to
be the safest place, and we kept to it until suddenly we perceived that
a great silence had fallen on the landscape. Looking anxiously to see
what had happened, we found the owner on his knees, praying by his own
spring. We dressed without delay, and had to pass in front of him to
reach the tents, but he never seemed to know that we had passed.
The muezzin, or call to prayer from the minaret, is one of the most
affecting of all Eastern sounds. Men are chosen for this office with
singularly mellow and rich voices; they intone, with a very musical
little cadence in a minor key, the first chapter of the Koran, and
sometimes other prayers. At the great Mosque of Damascus, a solitary
reciter calls from the slender minaret, and is answered from the balcony
of the broader one across the court by twenty voices in unison. While
the waves of rich sound float out over the city, and are caught and
faintly echoed from scores of other minarets, one remembers how that
voice has rolled forth already over innumerable villages from Bengal
westwards, and men have paused from their labour to pray according to
their lights.
Islam is usually supposed to have been the “Ishmaelite in church
history,” with hand against every man from the first. Really, when it
was Arabian, as it remained for four centuries, it was very tolerant,
and the Christian pilgrims, priests, and monks were little disturbed.
But in 1086 the Seljuk chiefs of wandering Turkish tribes came into
possession, and the days of suspicion and that heavy cruelty which is
characteristic of the stupid began. There were massacres of monks on
Carmel and elsewhere then, and such a state of general tyranny and
oppression that the cry reached the West, and the Crusades began. The
Crusades, as they dragged their slow length along, did not tend to
better understandings; and after Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, we
read that the walls and pavement of the Mosque of Omar had to be
purified with copious showers of water distilled from the fragrant roses
of Damascus. The relations between Moslem and Christian in the land
to-day are happier, and the intercourse of increasing trade and travel
is breaking down old partitions here as elsewhere. Yet little love is
lost between the professors of the rival faiths even now. Dr. Andrew
Thomson relates how, in recent years, “it had been observed that at a
particular period of the day the shadow of the great Mosque of Omar fell
upon a certain Christian burying-ground. Even the honour of
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE AREA AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, FROM MOUNT ZION.
The dome on the right is that of the Mosque of El Aksa, and that on
the left is the Mosque of Omar. Between these domes, and just below
the principal group of cypresses, is the “Wailing Place.” The hills
in the background are the Mount of Olives.
]
blessing conveyed by so sacred a shadow was grudged. The public
authorities in Jerusalem were strongly urged to have the Christian
cemetery removed to some more distant place, and it required all the
combined influence of the European consulates to prevent a scandalous
order to this effect from being issued.” The Ordnance Survey party was
on several occasions attacked, and even fired upon. In fanatical Moslem
cities like Hebron and Nablus, travellers have to conduct themselves
with the utmost discretion, and even then will probably be stoned with
more or less effect according to the courage and the marksmanship of the
thrower. The Christians return the animosity with a kind of impatient
ridicule, which seems to indicate a lack of refined piety on their part.
Our camp-waiters were Christians, and they used to give us very freely
their opinions on the theological differences between them and the
Mohammedans. There would be a reverent if somewhat startling account of
the Holy Trinity, and then, in scornful contrast: “Mohammedans only
One,--and Mohammed all the rest!” The scorn is hardly to be wondered at
when one remembers the intellectual level of the powers that be. This is
forced upon one’s notice by countless tales of the custom-house and
censorship officials. A map of ancient Palestine was objected to because
“there were no maps in those days!” An engineer, telegraphing about a
pump, was arrested because the message read: “One hundred revolutions!”
In certain Bibles the text was erased, “Jesus Christ came into the world
to save sinners”; and it was directed that the word “Christians” should
be substituted, as there were no sinners in the Turkish empire! After a
certain amount of that regime, one would no doubt put new meaning into
the prayer which invokes God’s mercy “upon all Turks,” as well as on
infidels and heretics!
In spite of all this there is a good deal of interchange between the two
faiths, or at least of borrowing on the part of Islam from Christian
tradition. So many points have the two in common, that a theory has been
broached on which Mohammed appears only as the Judaiser (as it were) of
later days, who saw the difficulty that Christians had in working with
general principles, and set himself to simplify the situation by
reducing Christianity to a stereotyped system. Carlyle distinctly calls
Islam “a kind of Christianity.” However this may be, there is no
question as to the immense amount which Syrian Mohammedanism borrows
from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Countless tombs and other
monuments are dedicated to Joshua and other Old Testament worthies.
This, of course, may be due to the fact that many Moslem saints have
borne the old names, and as time went on their memories came to be
confused with those of their more famous namesakes. Samson’s exploits
especially have appealed to the Mohammedan imagination, and he appears
under the _incognito_ of “Ismân Aly,” among many other names. St. George
is a very popular saint for Moslem worship. It startles us still more to
find that in the great fire at Damascus numbers of Moslems threw
themselves into the flames in the attempt to rescue the head of John
the Baptist; while a copy of the Koran--one of the original four
copies--which lay below the relic, was forgotten and destroyed.
The most extensive and curious point of contact between the two
religions is found in those mosques which were formerly built as
Christian churches, and then appropriated by the conquerors. The Grand
Mosque of Damascus is a conspicuous case in point. It is built on the
site of a pagan temple, part of whose hoary front still stands, a
magnificent fragment of ancient heavy masonry and carving now brown and
grey with age. On the ruins of the temple rose the Christian church of
St. John the Baptist, whose date is about the beginning of the fifth
century. After the Mohammedan conquest the church became a mosque, and
fabulous sums were spent on its decoration. It has twice been destroyed
by fire, and is now being restored after the last of these
destructions.[26] The restoration has a very brand-new appearance, yet
it is magnificent with its wealth of marble and of other costly stone.
The Mosque of Samaria, conspicuous from a distance by its minaret is
another Christian church reconstructed for Mohammedan worship. There was
a sixth-century basilica here, but the present mosque is built out of
the material of the Crusader church which replaced that. The severity
and bareness of its stone walls and pillars are relieved only by one
touch of colour--the flags and the lovely green pillars of the pulpit.
The wall at the pulpit’s side has been recessed into a mihrab or niche,
which points towards Mecca and so gives the worshipper his bearings. In
the crypt, where the Crusaders believed they had the tomb of John the
Baptist, large slabs of polished marble attest the former wealth of
decoration, and these slabs are of peculiar interest because of one
curious little fact. It was customary to carve on Christian buildings
the sign of the Cross--a Maltese cross, set within a circle. Such a
cross may be distinctly seen on one of the stones close to the embedded
pillar at the south door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. On the
marble slabs of the crypt in Samaria these encircled crosses are to be
seen; but the Mohammedans have chipped away the uprights of them,
leaving only the meaningless horizontal bar bisecting the circle, and
the obvious mark of the chisel in their rough workmanship leaves the
uprights also faintly visible. Perhaps the most interesting case of all
is the Mosque el Aksa, close to the Mosque of Omar, within the temple
area. This is that “far-off place of prayer” which Mohammed counted
among the most holy shrines in the world. Founded by Justinian as a
Christian basilica, it was converted into a mosque by Omar, and adorned
with unheard-of lavishness by Abd el Melik, who overlaid its doors with
gold and silver plates. Since then it has passed through many
adventures. Widened to efface some suggestion of cruciform shape, its
breadth became unmanageable, and six rows of pillars support the roof.
The roof has fallen in, and earthquakes have broken the building more
than once, so that most of the masonry is comparatively modern, the
great arches of the structure which supports the dome being “anchored”
by wooden beams which throw horizontal bridges from capital to capital
in Arab fashion. The green-and-gold mosaic with which the interior of
the dome and the upper portion of the adjacent masonry is covered,
cannot be very old, though their dim and antique beauty is worthy of the
older art. The pulpit, richly inlaid with Aleppo work of ivory and
mother-of-pearl, was Saladin’s gift seven hundred years ago. But that
which most of all attracts the eye and fascinates the imagination is the
aspect of the pillars, whose variegated colours are peculiarly rich and
harmonious. Up to a certain height they are polished to the shining
point by the garments of worshippers rubbing against them as they pass;
above that they are smooth, unpolished stone. The capitals, and some at
least of the columns, are very ancient, and may have stood in the
original basilica.
The Mosque of Omar is not, strictly speaking, a mosque at all. The
mosque is El Aksa, and the more famous building is but a glorified
praying-station of the nature of a weli in its court. It stands near the
centre of a wide open space, practically the only such space in
Jerusalem, which occupies one-sixth part of the whole area of the city
within the walls. The enclosure is partly artificial, supported on vast
substructures of vaulted building which raise the enclosed ground to a
general level. The mosque is set up on a platform ten feet higher than
this level.
Its history has been a strange one. Behind the time of its erection lies
all the story of the Temple, whose sacred ark Jewish tradition affirms
to have been concealed here by Jeremiah. But that rock, whose red
outcrop breaks through the floor of the mosque, leads us back to a
dimmer past, and to the story of Abraham’s sacrifice upon Moriah, whose
site this is said to be. Various theories have been advocated as to the
place which the rock held in the arrangements of the Jewish temple. The
Jews of to-day have a legend that on it somewhere the Unspeakable Name
is written, and they explain the miracles of Jesus by the supposition
that He had succeeded in deciphering it. We, too, for whom its chief
interest and pathos lie in the fact that Christ came hither to worship,
and in the things that befell Him here, may accept the meaning at least
of that curious legend. For His own words were that He had declared to
men the name of His Father, and that declaration has truly revealed to
mankind the hidden meaning of their holiest things.
It was in 680 A.D. that the first Mohammedan sanctuary was erected on
the temple area, but the date of the present building is two hundred
years later. It struck us as a curious fact a year ago in Damascus that
the burnt mosque was being rebuilt almost entirely by Christian masons.
Still more surprising is it to learn that the Mosque of Omar was built
by Byzantine architects and modelled on the Rotunda of the Holy
Sepulchre. Two hundred years later the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, and,
according to the dreadful story, “the carnage in the Mosque of Omar
swept away the bodies of thousands in a deluge of human blood.”[27]
Mistaking the Mosque for the veritable Temple of Solomon, they founded
there the Society of the Knights Templars, on whose armorial bearings
the dome appears. They converted the building into “Templum Domini,” and
planted a large gilded cross upon the summit of it. Traces of their
invasion still remain in the cutting of the rock to suit their altar,
and in the great wrought-iron enclosing screen. For almost a century the
Templum Domini remained in Christian hands, until 1187, when Saladin
conquered Jerusalem. His generosity and gentleness contrasted strangely
with the “loathsome triumph” of the Crusaders; but the first destination
of the triumphal march was the mosque, from whose dome the Cross was
hurled to the ground, and for two days dragged about the streets. From
that time the mosque has been one of the most exclusive places in the
world. Till recent years no Christian was permitted to enter it, and
Jews avoid it, lest they should unwittingly tread upon the ground of the
ancient Holy of Holies.
The first impressions of the Mosque of Omar are very pleasing. There is
a barbaric splendour in its rich colouring and metallic glitter when
seen from a short distance, while the more distant view of it is one of
rare soft beauty. Its wide courts, too, give it a fresh and open-air
character which is very refreshing after the stifling dark heat and
closeness of the Holy Sepulchre. Above all it impresses one with its
grand simplicity. The sharp-edge angles of the octagon are taken in at
a glance; the rock within is bare rock, and infinitely more impressive
than the silk and marble in which rock masquerades at Bethlehem. The
great number of its pillars, screens, reading-stands, and other
furniture, leaves little open room, and it feels rather a crowded than a
spacious place for worship. Yet, on the other hand, you are not wearied
with the complex symbolism of many of the ancient churches. The meaning
of this may be poorer, but at least it is plain. This means just a
perfectly shapely and highly coloured octagon, where men have worshipped
God for a thousand years in the least complicated way in which worship
has been done. Thus the mosque is typical of the faith and the policy
that created it. “I do not believe,” says Disraeli’s _Tancred_, “that
anything great is ever effected by management.... You require something
more vigorous and more simple.... You must act like Moses and Mohammed.”
On the other hand, the enthusiasm for Mohammedan simplicity is sorely
tried when the first moment of almost awestruck feeling ends with the
advance of the guide. He is to shew you the wonders of the mosque, and
the torrent of mingled absurdity and superstition by which you find
yourself swept on is very trying to the would-be admirer of the faith
and its monument. First of all, there are the relics--the footprint of
Mohammed, and the hairs of his beard; the praying-places of Abraham and
Elijah and other “very fine, high-class people,” as our dragoman
described
[Illustration: THE WEST SIDE OF THE TEMPLE AREA.
From the barracks near the site of the Tower of Antonia. Above the
domed building in the right foreground rises Mount Zion. The rosy
hills to the left are the mountains of Judea.
]
them to us; the round hole where the rock let Mohammed through when he
ascended to heaven, the hollow place in the roof of the cavern where it
rose to let him stand erect to pray, the tongue with which it spoke, and
the mark of the angel Gabriel’s finger when it had to be held down from
following him in his ascension. Still more disenchanting is the knot of
underground superstitions that desecrate the holy place, and rob it of
its freshness and healthy simplicity, like snakes in the garden. The
wild imagination of the East has pictured to itself the regions which
lie underneath this sanctuary in its own grim way. In spite of a very
obvious pillar, and a bit of white-washed wall to be seen in the cavern,
the rock is supposed to hover unsupported over the abyss. Beneath is
“the well of souls,” where the dead assemble twice weekly to pray. Some
think of these departed ones as those who wait for the Resurrection, but
a darker fancy holds that the gates of hell are here. The worshipper
feels the souls of the dead flitting about him, and prays with the cries
of the lost in his ears. Even the open spaces of the court are haunted
by unclean legends, and seem to be heavy with the odour of graveyard
mould. Here, at St. George’s dome, with the two red granite pillars in
front of it, is the place where Solomon tormented the demons; there, by
the eastern wall, is the throne whereon he sat when dead, the corpse
leaning on his staff to cheat them, until worms gnawed the staff
through, the body fell forward, and the demons found out the trick.
In common decency, any place that lays claim to sacredness must have
something to say to worshippers regarding conduct; but the ethics of the
Mosque of Omar are a match for its impostures, alike in gruesomeness and
in impudence. They are all of the nature of magic tests, by which souls
are to be tried for their eternal fate. The little arcades at the top of
the steps of the platform are called “Balances” because the scales of
judgment are to be suspended there on the Great Day. The Dome of the
Chain owes its name to the circumstance that there a golden chain hung
at David’s place of judgment, which had to be grasped by witnesses and
dropped a link when a lie was told. A place in the outer wall is shown
from which a wire will be suspended on the Day of Judgment, whose other
end will be made fast on the Mount of Olives. Christ will sit on the
wall and Mohammed on the mount. Over this wire must all men find their
way, but only the good will cross, the wicked falling into the valley
beneath. In the El Aksa Mosque a couple of pillars stand very near each
other, so worn that they are perceptibly thinned. The space between them
bulges, in which a piece of spiked iron-work is now inserted. These were
another test for the final award--he who could squeeze himself through
the aperture, and he alone, had found the true “narrow way” to heaven.
Frauds such as these force upon every visitor the question how far the
Mohammedans themselves believe them. The utter want of earnestness, or
anything that to a Western mind bears the resemblance of reality, is
painfully evident in the attendants who guide you through the mosque.
You are forced to respect its sacredness by purchasing the loan of
slippers to cover your boots, and you feel rather like one entering a
circus than a place of worship, when you have been transformed into an
illuminated caricature by means of one yellow and another red slipper.
Your guide, who wears the appearance of a convict in clericals, greatly
enjoys your picturesqueness, and makes haste to conduct you to a certain
jasper slab into which Mohammed drove nineteen nails of gold (which
look, however, indistinguishable from iron). A nail comes out at the end
of every epoch, and when all are gone the end of the world will come.
One day the devil destroyed all but three and a half of them, when the
Angel Gabriel, caught napping for once, stopped the mischief just in
time. Here you are invited to lay any coins you may chance to have about
you, and assured that if the coin be silver you will save your soul by
giving it. As the coins are tabled, the whole body of assistant clergy
assembles to count the collection.
All this, and much else, is but the inevitable outcome of a worship that
gathers round a stone. It is a petrified worship, hard and dead as its
sacred rock. Nothing could be more pathetic than a window in El Aksa
almost darkened with little rags of clothing hung there by poor folk who
come to pray for their sick friends. If Syrian Christianity is corrupt,
it is at least not so pitiless as Syrian Mohammedanism. The very aspect
and situation of the rival shrines is symbolic. The mosque does not
really love men, whether it really believes in God or not. It sits apart
in its wide enclosure, while the Church of the Sepulchre is huddled
indistinguishably into the thickest pressure of the life of men and
women in the city. The church seems, by its rugged and broken outline,
to sympathise with the shattered fortunes of the life around it; it is
grey and ruinous-looking, as if it had borne man’s sorrows and carried
them. The mosque, with all its beauty, seems to sit there like some
great sleek sphinx, watching everything, but sharing little and loving
none of the misery around it. In this city of ruins there is something
repellent about its smooth and self-complacent finish. No, the mosque
does not really love men; whether it really believes in itself and its
miracles or not is another of the many Mohammedan things which God only
knows.