fruits, dainties from Arabia Felix. Through the open door, the wide
night air was a discord from this polyphony of silks and gems, of cedar
and spice and ceramic. And there arose the voices of distant women in
song. It was the women of the house, locked from the rooms where men of
the profane world might come and drink tea with the masters.
The song drifted palpitant and humble. My thought went out to the
Mellah--to the place where windows faced outward, where women showed
their faces....
_c._ _Ishmael and Israel_
Forty men, women, children fill the room with a voice. They are Jews,
Jews of the Moorish Mellah. The unveiled faces of the women are fertile,
less metallic, harder than the faces of their sisters. The eyes are
deeper, their consistency more solid. Gaunt determination holds the
warmth of these women like an armor. The men are more variant and less
harmonious. A burnouse or red fez in place of the black would pass most
of them as Arabs. In their eyes the same cunning, the same swift
hardness. Yet underneath dwells a distinction: an enduring spiritual
source--a quiet water--of which the agitation of their external lives is
tributary.
After the song of the Arab minstrels; after the singers of Fez beneath
the Merinidean tombs shouting to the twang of a string; after the fakirs
of the Socco in Tangiers who bounce and prance their monkey shines to
the lilt of an apish cry, to the crash of a scissors; after the mystic
monotone of the Darwish whirling his soul into the Absolute; after the
service of the Ouled-Naïl who sway like trees deep-rooted and who shriek
like Liliths--now, this Jewish music. Ten women step to the center of
the room and squat in a circle around a copper cauldron. They sing, and
as they sing they beat with open palms upon the upturned cauldron. Their
song is in Arabic; it has similitudes with Moorish songs: there are the
ceaseless verses, the narrative design with rhythm and note recurring.
But the women are ample-breasted, leoninely gay. The beat of palms upon
the copper drum rises like a copper wall about the women and the women’s
song.
As a mountain torrent carries the rigor of grim heights through a low
tropic zone, so this music moves through the Moorish Mellah with its
prophetic past. For all its tides of blood and wandering, it is still.
The music of Arab races like stripped steeds; that of the Moor jangles
like bone, snaps like sinew. Here is a song that dwells wide over
fields, tops the cedars of Lebanon, swings with the sun--and yet is but
a prayer. Its immobility has voyaged. The prophets are here; and Ruth
with her eyes fertile as the wheat; and Judith scabbarded in beauty. And
Babylon to which, as Tangiers now, the scum of peoples rose; where magic
parded with penury, coins glinted in blood. Spain is here, a
perpendicular starkness rising from the low tide of the music--Spain,
with her singing seers. And Araby has dropped her gold into a humble
song. As in the streets where the street women sing, here is the
cry--shrill, lithic: dangling but a moment on the plaint like a
barbarous dart upon a mother’s breast.
* * * * *
Like the Jews, the Moslems are the People of a Book. The Bible is the
compiled and edited remnant of a literature ranging from epigram to
epic, into whose making went a thousand years. The Koran is the work of
a generation, and of a man. Whatever divergence from the prophetic mouth
is due to the disciples, Omar and Ali,[4] it is sure that before
Mohammed there was no Koran and after him his text has changed only
through processes of natural error. Before the Koran, the Arabs
possessed an anthology of verse, lapidic, utterly objective: poems
singing the loves and tribulations of the desert. These did not go, like
the ancestral heritage of the Hebrews, into their holy book. After the
Koran, this strain, celebrating passion, thirst, hospitality and war,
went on. The heightened activity of the Arabs enlarged their letters.
But the Koran, unlike what came after as before, is subjective. Pictures
of Paradise, explicit laws, ways of the wrath of Allah, pleadings and
campaigns, float in the swim of an inchoate exhortation. There is no
reason to doubt that the Prophet did dictate the Koran--and revised it
little. The book’s substance is an anarchic potpourri of what Mohammed
must have thought out for himself, together with what he heard in
synagogue and church. There is a canny set of laws: there is an endless
repetition of the delights of heaven “where are the gardens under which
flow waters” and of the miraculous nature of the virgins there, who are
never unclean, being perpetual lovers and perpetual virgins. There is
great harping on the unpleasantness of Hell. There are periodic
outbursts against the Jews and much gentle reproval of the Christians
whom Mohammed wooed with worshipful references to Jesus and to Mary.
There is, above all, ceaseless plagiary from the Old Testament tales,
whose beauty and significance are usually scrapped in Mohammed’s zest to
get to his main point. And the point, as a rule, is that Abraham, Moses
and Jesus were all true Moslems, that the Hebrews knew full well the
ultimate prophecy of Mohammed, that their Book tells them so, and that
only their wickedness keeps them from avowal. Finally, the book holds to
a running comment on contemporary events and neighboring peoples; and
the effect of this, within the holy Script, must have been vast since
here was virtually God himself dictating an editorial page on headline
stories.
Such matters lay in a great jumble in Mohammed’s head; for the Prophet
was too great and too busy a man to keep a clear literary mind. And in
such jumble they poured forth to make the verbose, extraordinarily
rhythmed mosaic of the 114 Suras of the Koran. The book is above all an
impressionistic portrait of Mohammed; in Mohammed, of the greatest
figure and of the greatest era of the Arabs. Even in translation, it
reveals the intense afflatus of a man who, from the age of forty till
his death at sixty-three, conquered a world, prepared successors to
conquer others, ruled savagely and wisely over a race as unruly as it
was naturally keen, won the love even of his foes and the submission of
almost countless maidens.
Mohammed was a great statesman, a great captain, a great lawmaker, a
great poet: he was not the creator of a great religion. Innumerable
mystic and religious men have worshiped Allah and performed the
ceremonials of the Prophet. But the Mohammedanism of Mohammed, of the
Koran, of the _source_ is not essentially a religion at all. A religion
is a revealed experience of the relation between a man and his cosmos.
If it is not experience, it may be philosophy but it is less than a
religion. If it is not revealed, it may be an ecstatic or poetic state,
but it is less than a religion. Its conclusion may be suicide for the
human spirit, as in some religions of India; its field of consciousness
may be narrowly naturalistic or animistic as in the religions of the
savage. But no plan for life on earth, however exalted, is of itself a
religion; no scheme for reaching heaven. Nor is a system which exploits
an already existing sense of God as a means toward a determined human
goal a system of religion. This, moreover, is the system of Mohammed. It
employs the latent religiosity of the Arab world to a pragmatic end. It
exploits the idea of God as modern pragmatism the idea of progress.
Mohammed uplifted a race. Where, in this, is his equal? At his hand an
anarchy of tribes filling the desert with internecine blood: and from
this anarchy he prepared the force which mastered half Africa, half
Asia, Spain--which bound with great houses and great culture Bagdad to
Toledo. The religious energy of the Arabs had for ages straggled and
fumed in loss; creating but a variety of impotence. The religious energy
of the Jews had thrown forth light in the world, and left the Jewish
body desolate. Rome? The immense creature, camped about the Latin Sea,
accepted Christ in its senility. Its principle of growth had not been
Christ; Christ was to help to rot and to transform it. Mohammed studied
Rome. He observed this one live element in that immense decay. The
religious element. He took it, as the modern pragmatist takes the idea
of progress and of science, to express himself and to advance his
people.
He lived in a religious age. God for seven hundred years had made a
wrangling and a shambles of the marts of the east. God alone, in all
Rome, seemed alive. God served to energize Mohammed’s act. In the Koran,
Allah is a voice bearing no fresh body of eternity or love, bearing no
experience of Nature or of a spirit that transcends it: Allah is at best
the charged echo of past holy voices, here applied to spur the Arab on.
The quantity that gave Islam weight was the force of its leader and the
latent might of his race: God was the _n_ by which the Prophet raised
this quantity to the pitch of action.
And Mohammed is the full rich presence in the Koran. Though God speaks,
Mohammed has the eye, the answer, the blessing and the curse for all the
ambient world. Mohammed tells the Arab about God chiefly that God is
telling the Arab about Mohammed. What else he says is not the crux of
the matter. Mohammed is Prophet, to obey him is good, to disobey him is
hell, the Jews are a bad lot, Allah is ruthless but to the believer
kind--such degradations from the old rationales of faith are not
dissonant from religion. Mohammed proceeds, after Moses, to instruct the
faithful in diet, in justice, in commerce, marriage, war. His plan of
success generates its power shrewdly from the normal appetites: man’s
dream of heaven, his fear of hell, his love of woman, his thirst for
water, his need of forgiveness whenever he has burned his fingers. Here,
too, there is no divergence from the usual theocratic Code. But the
Koran is distinguished by the relative place of God and of man’s
experience of God within the system.
Go back not to the Mishna, and the Prophets; but to the barbarous Torah.
Science and method are as demoded here as ethics. Blood and corporal
anguish are obsessive symbols. Justice is a matter of plagues and
trumpetings. Yet is God present. These old fathers would be abstract
save for the dwelling in them of a universal principle, called Jehovah.
It is He who moves these semi-savage tales. Hunger for a common
experience which, being both true and beautiful, is divine, informs the
acts of these men, directs their faltering passage. In the suicidal will
of the Buddhist, in the Dionysian dance of the Greek, in the metaphysic
of Paul or of Plotinus, dwells ever variant this single purpose: the
will to fuse (though it be to fuse with loss) man’s personal act and his
experience of the universal. This is religion. It is not in the
religious mechanics of Mohammed.
The Prophet invites Heraclius, emperor of Rome, to join or to
acknowledge him. He is denied, of course. But Islam is a “carry-all.” It
assimilates Mary and Jesus quite as it has garbled the Talmud. It places
Mohammed at the top of an agglomeration unified by him from the whirling
chaos of the east. Energy, thus drawn from a hundred confusions, thrusts
in a hundred directions.
* * * * *
If classic Islam is not essentially a religion, it is an Idea. An Idea
in motion. Its motion is horizontal; and its premiss of departure is
success. The follower of the Prophet cannot lose. At the worst comes
death: death in holy warfare means beatitude and houris. But Mohammed
does not lean too heavily on so dim a guerdon. He has genius in the arts
of diplomacy and war. He fights innumerable battles, and nearly always
he wins. When he does lose, he turns defeat into a strategic triumph. In
his first lean years as a Prophet, he has garnered a rare capital for a
religious leader: that capital is material success. He loans out his
prestige at a usurer’s rates. It is clear, soon enough, that to follow
Mohammed means victory in arms, means booty, means fresh women.
Health in Islam became a state of profitable war. From the mobile chaos
of the desert was created this intent mobility of advance. Islam was a
perpetual raid. Its health meant war: and war meant expedition,
conquest, ultimate death. The contrary of war, of health, of Islam--was
then the dwelling in the present life, and was Peace.
What contrast to the Jew in these brother Semites! Their mobility of
steel to the chemic mobility of Judah! The Idea of Islam has indeed for
matrix the unrest, physical and spiritual, of the Roman world. Peoples
stirred, because the great People were broken. The interior displacement
acted like suction on the peripheries of Rome. Dreams of power, opiate
creeds went through the windy world, creating new currents, creating and
moving new masses. Araby was drawn, so: and awoke. But this Idea of the
Arab could not have lived so well within the womb of the world had it
been alien to the Arab soul. In the Arab, as in all desert people,
worked the impulse of expansion.
Here Arab and Jew are one. Who has seen the desert understands: this
indomitable urge born of the sand-sea, to be moving, to pass horizons,
to be moving forever. The desert impulse in the Hebrew was sublimated.
Not his body, but his god should pass horizons! When the Jews’ body
migrated, Jehovah became static. Only when the body took deep roots--in
Palestine, in Spain, in the Talmud at worst (in America perhaps
tomorrow)--could the transfigured Jewish God pass the horizons. But the
balance held: as the Jews’ spirit spread, their body remained an atom.
With the Arabs, it was the body that expanded. Before the Prophet, it
had expanded impotently in civil conflict. Mohammed brought this energy
to order. But even he knew of no principle of expansion higher than the
raid and the empire.
Arabia expanded. Persia, Abyssinia, India, Egypt, the Sahara, Spain
became parts of Islam that was Araby in motion. The Jew discovered that
to spread in the spirit was to be immobile in the life. Not so the Arab.
The Jew learned that only an unmoving and an unmoved God could pass
horizons. But in Islam, to expand still meant to move. The law of
balance between inner and outer energy was not transcended. The Idea of
Islam became all body: all moving, conquering body. Here went the
Moslem energy. The energy that dwelt in that hid precinct of creative
thought was sapped to a low ebb. In the person of Mohammed, there was
energy both for conquest and for the subtler dominance of law and
wisdom. He elected that the ideas, the forms, the rituals, the
experience, and truth which he created should suffice for all time for
his peoples. All their powers might hence be transformed into the
stupendous business of outward conquest.
Of course, this was not strictly to be. Many ideas of Islam were born
after the Prophet’s death. Even the Koran may have been amended. The
Moslem architectures, the Moslem philosophies both mystical and
materialistic, much of the Moslem ritual, would have been strange to
Mohammed. But independent growths of the spirit could not become organic
within Islam. For in the Idea, there was the law that only Body of Islam
could expand: its thought and vision were create, forever. In
consequence, the few new crystallizations called forth by the new needs
of Islamic empire became endowed at once with the old principle of
fixity, with the sanctity of intransigent stagnation. The body moved.
The forms of the body did not move. Wherefore, as soon as the body
ceased to add unto itself by outward conquest, it began to rot.
This is the tragedy of Islam. It is writ large in symbols of the
present. Fez and Rbat and Bagdad are fetid relics of gone loveliness.
Their life has no virtue of rejuvenation; there was in Islam no autonomy
of method for the creating of ideas whereby life is recreated. The Arab
literary language is identical with the Koran’s. Dogma declares that the
hodge-podge splendor of Mohammed’s script is perfection: who shall dare
change perfection? So Arabic literature today is an archaic grimace: a
spirit muffled by the masque of thirteen hundred years. And the spoken
language, as divergent from the classic as French from Latin, is noisy
and yet mute. Moslem architecture has not evolved. The mosque of today
is a faithful imitation of some antique model. Prayer has not changed.
Science has not changed. The Idea of Islam has forbidden its own growth.
But if this death from inanition is patent in modern Islam, it is
implicit in the source. The fruit, only, of the religious impulse lives,
for it alone holds the rounding of life’s circle. The religious act--be
it art or be it ethics--cannot exhaust itself, because each forward step
is an approach to the beginning. The man possessed of religion is
possessed of a universal principle; and what he does cannot die. The
forms and words of his activity may grow archaic--like the sculpture of
Egypt, like the gods of the Rig-Veda. But the activity itself is forever
an approach to the Source. The farther the religious man goes afield,
the closer he will come to the Primordial Fountain, since all his life
is plotted to a circle. And if he lose his life, then will he win it.
But with the unreligious will, each act is a severance from source. The
unreligious is the incomplete. And its symbol is the unreal straight
line which moves away from its beginning.[5]
Even in its classic mosque, Islam betrays its unreligious essence. The
mosque is a patchwork of details, a mosaic of finery for the senses. The
very character of the mosaic is unreligious. For it represents the
analytic, not the One. The minaret has no relation with the aspirant
Phallus, or with the sublimated Phallus of the Christian church. The
minaret is a down-tending structure upon which the muedzin stands, not
to send prayer to Allah, but orders to the people.
The religion of the Koran is a caricature of God drawn in the lying
lines of time and space.
_CHAPTER II_
_HINTERLAND IN SPAIN_
The sun is hidden from this dawn. The snow range is a crest to the south
and east. Air, pouring over, cold and hard like pearls, is the dawn upon
Spain. Tidy huertas are green crystals in the dawn. Villages,
orange-marged, make a pied flash in it. Fig and olive march in armies up
the slopes of the Sierra, toward snow, toward dawn. When the sun stands
at last in the ridge, the day is hot.
This is the south. After Guadix, toward the eastern sea, the human world
grows dim. The carretera, at the entrance of a town, slides in a slough
of mud. Rain is rare and violent; it becomes a torrent from the
impervious mountain. Dark men in black grimed capes walk beside laden
donkeys. Women herd goats; the tuberous udders sticking on the mud.
Children are rhythms in a maze of rags. The eyes of humans are like the
eyes of burros.
The Sierras have disappeared behind the depopulous hills. The verdant
valleys of Granada are folded back. Villages here are hard like the
parched clay. The carretera is a swathe of dust, glittering in the sun.
The land is sere as if a flame dwelt on it. The eyes of humans are
velvet dark, like the eyes of a dream.
Murcia, now. Even the sparse irrigated huertas disappear. The barbarous
abruptness of the soil turns to desert. Villages are a single eyeless
street of houses, abject under the eye of the sun. The world is a
turmoil of yellow waste. The villages are splinters of the waste. Only,
to break the yellow, walls of cactus--a Maya-like green sculpture
matching its lush planes with the harsh planes of the clay. Goats, dusty
and crabbed, crop an invisible herb. The Barbary fig is the olive and
the grape of this land. Villages grow lower, sparser--merge with the
desert. Villages disappear.
Under the sky huge mounds of sterile hill rise now; and on their slopes,
red and advancing with the mirrored sun, are serried shadows. Caves.
Villages of caves. This is below Phœnicia in time. This is Iberia. A
Spanish folk still dwells here.
The hills are steep. There is a row of caves, horizontally curved. Above
each cave is a tiny aperture for smoke. Then comes another row. In the
foreground, the cactus is cultivated for its fruit. There is a hooded
well.
It is not yet noon. But the summer sun has turned the heaven into
irradiant steel. Light and heat strike like solids on the solid soil, on
the intricate levels of the hills. In their rebound, light and heat
become polyphonous, weaving the world into their image.
The sun, rising, faints into its own immensity of heat. And the cave
villages grow larger. Between them, the sterile hills leap in a monotone
against the day’s pressure. A cave town flings sheer to the ridge of a
pyramidal mountain. A hundred threads of smoke thresh the air like
filaments of wire. Caves are dark eyes that hide from the steel heaven.
The eyes of the dwellers are caves.
Shadow is cold. Here is a town with houses. Where the sun strikes the
street, horses, donkeys, moving forms of people gyre and funnel and
become a fume in the sun. Signs on shops, blue shutters, yellow parasols
of women tremble and swerve as if they were in flame. But shadow is
cold.
Outside, there is desert and the sky has melted. All the steel strokes
of the sun, beating down, beating up, are melted: heaven has fallen into
waves. Villages live in this fierce element. Men and women, donkeys and
goats live in this radiant sea.
Over the brow of a _despoblado_, the sun goes. The desert flattens, like
a sea after storm. The sterile hills are farther away, and on the even
plain there is grass. The desert becomes a moor. Salt wort suggests the
ocean. The road circles, catching the sun again. The sun splinters and
breaks on the moor. Huge masses of dried dung, the fuel of these people,
catch a last ray. There is a hill, dark-mottled. The hill is a city. At
the height, there are caves and dwellings cut in clay. At the base,
there is dust: and in the dust are streets.
Sordid wineshops, stores, squat in the dust. All is dust save the people
who are clay; clay black-baked in the sun.
_CHAPTER III_
_ANDALUSIA_
_a._ _El Andalús_
_b._ _The Eye_
_c._ _The Bowels_
_d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_
_e._ _The Gypsies Dance_
_f._ _Spain Dances_
_a._ _El Andalús_
In the year of Islam 89 and of Christ 711, an Arab host recruited with
proselytes from the pagan Berbers and the Christian Copts, and captained
by Târik whose name is a fossil in the rock Gibraltar (_Jebel Târik_)
crossed the strait from Africa to Europe. After seven summers, all
Spain, even to the Galician mountains, was in the sway of the Prophet.
To their new conquest the Arabs gave the name Andalús, which means the
land of the west.
Their first pause was in a smiling world. Southern Spain, roughly the
part which is Andalusia now, for many ages had drawn the wandering
hungers of the nations. Here had been Tartessos, the Tarshish of the
thunder of Isaiah, a realm near the present sites of Seville and Cadiz,
known as the Land of Silver and whose greatness was synchronous with
Crete. Here had been Phœnician Malaca and Gades, cities famous for their
gay vice. Here had been Bætican Rome, birthplace of Seneca and of the
Stoic mind which in reality was Spanish. Here, from Babylon, came the
urgent Jews among the indolent Visigoths. A smiling world. On the
breasts of the Sierras, groves of olive and of cork. In the valleys
rivers that were veins of wealth. Luxuriant crops, fat kine, orchards
and vineyards: shade: and by the alternance of sun and cool a natural
culture. Now within this mellowness, the harsh Idea born of the desert
dearth.
Historians will give you the facts: how Andalusia did not hold the Arab:
how he swarmed the mesas of Castile: how he fanned east to the Ebro and
west to the Asturias: how only stubborn knots of Basques withheld him:
how he scaled the abrupt wall of Spain and poured down the suaver
Pyrenees of France; and how at last, near Poictiers, he was stopped by
Charles Martel and driven back forever. The truth is otherwise. Not the
Franks, but the smiling south of Spain stopped Islam. When the Arabs
faced the French at “Tours,” they were turned back already. The desert,
the mountains, the incessant war could not weaken Islam. These were its
food and its health. But Andalusia was poison. A luxuriant land worked
on the spirit of the Arab, causing in the rear a flinching and
dissension. This, several years after the “defeat of Tours,” caused the
return from France.