mud. They have fine old doors of carven wood, but no windows looking on
the streets. A sort of inlaid cupboard, with a glass window, half open,
a spread of wares, and a Moslem sitting in the midst, is a shop. Thus
sits the vendor of goods, but also the maker--the tinsmith at work,
the coppersmith, the maker of hats. The bazaars are rich and rare, and
in the shadow of the covered streets--there are fifty of them--the
lustrous silks and carpets, and pots and slippers, in the shops each
side of the way, have an extraordinary magnificence; the gorgeous
vendors, sitting patiently, not asking you to buy, staring at the heaps
of metallics, silver-bits and notes resting on the little tabourets
in front of them, belong to an age which I thought was only to be
found in books. What a wealthy city it is! It offers more silks and
carpets for sale than London or Paris; it is an endless warehouse of
covetable goods.
What strikes you at Jerusalem or Constantinople is the abundance
of English goods for sale, but here at Bokhara there is a strange
absence of Western commodities. Formerly the English sent all sorts of
manufactures by the caravan road from India, but since the Russians
ringed round their Customs system the commercial influence of England
has waned. Western goods come via Russia. What European articles there
are come from Germany or Scandinavia. For the rest, as in other Eastern
cities, the street arabs hawk churek-cakes and _lepeshki_; men in white
sit at corners selling, in this case, _Bokharese_ delight, brown twists
of toffee, old-fashioned sugar-candy which in piles looks like so much
rock crystal. Beggars in rags sit outside the mosques and hold up to
you Russian basins--they do not, however, cry and clamour and follow
you, as in the tourist-visited cities of Asia Minor and North Africa.
Outside every other shop is a bird-cage and a large pet bird; in some
cases falcons, much prized in these lands. I admired the falcons, and
their owners seemed childishly pleased at the attention I gave them.
I gave a piece of Bokharese silver to a beggar outside a mosque (the
Bokharese have their own silver coinage, which, however, looks like
ancient coin rather than any which is now in use). In one of the big
shadowy bazaars I bought a delicious silk scarf of old-rose colour full
of light and loveliness, falling into a voluminous grandeur as the
melancholy Eastern showed it me. I did not bargain about its price,
that seemed almost impossible, only five roubles (ten shillings), and
the lady who has it now says it is enough to make a whole robe. Somehow
I liked it better as a scarf than I could if it were “made up.”
I passed out of the city and walked round the walls. A road encompasses
them, and on the road are camels with blue beads on their necks and
many Easterns riding them. There is a strange feeling of contrast in
being outside the city. The arc of the grey walls goes gradually round
and away from you, surrounding and enclosing the life of the city; the
city is like a magical box full of strange magicians and singers and
toy shop-men and customers; it is like a strange human beehive full
of life. And outside the walls there is the sudden contrast of fresh
air and space and life and greenery and broad sky. Inside the city
the streets are so narrow that you feel the “box” has got the lid on.
Someone said to me when I went to New York: “We’ll give you the freedom
of the city with the lid off.” Well, Bokhara has the lid _on_. And
you feel that certainly when you get outside and look at the silent,
significant enclosing wall. But the fields are deep in verdure, and it
is like a lovely June day in England--the willow leaning lovingly over
you, overwhelmed with leaves. The walls are battlemented, rent, patched
up, buttressed; there are eleven gates, and at each gate the traffic
going in and out has a processional aspect. Along the walls, between
gate and gate, there is a deep and gentle peace. No sound comes through
the walls; they are broad and high and solid. The swallows nesting
there twitter. You cannot obtain a glimpse, even of the high mosques
within.
I entered the city once more, lost myself in its mazes, and was obliged
to take a native cab in order to get out again. I was living outside
the town in an inn specially built for men on Government service. I
got the last empty room. Pleasant it was to lie back in the sun and be
carried along twenty wonderful streets and lanes, seeing once more all
I had seen before of colour and Orientalism.
The Bokharese are a gentle people. They wear no weapons. They sit
in the grass market and chatter and smile over their basins of tea.
The little pink doves of the streets search between their bare feet
for crumbs. The wild birds of the desert build in the walls of their
houses and bazaars. On the top of the tower of every other mosque is
an immense storks’ nest, overlapping the turret on all sides. Some of
these nests must be eight to ten feet high; they are round, and so look
like part of the design of the architecture. Storks are encouraged to
build there by the Mohammedans, by whom they are held sacred. It is
pleasant to watch the bird itself, standing on one leg, a black but
living and moving silhouette against the sky; to listen to the clatter
of bills when the father stork suddenly flies down to a nest with food.
Bokhara is a sort of Mussulman perfection--there is no progress to
be obtained there except after the destruction of old forms. The
Bokharese keep to the forms of their religion and its ethical laws;
they wear their clothes correctly; they know their crafts. They are a
great contrast to the Russians, who are careless and inexact, and in
their worship often nonchalant to their God; to the Russians, who wear
nothing correctly and come out in almost any sort of attire; to the
Russians, so ignorant and clumsy in their crafts. Yet Russia has all
before her, and Bokhara has all behind her.
The Bokharese have no ambition; civilisation and mechanical progress
do not tempt them. They have a happy smile for everything that comes
along, but nothing moves them. A Russian motor-car comes bounding over
the cobbles, whooping and coughing its alarm signals; a score of dogs
try to set on it and bite it as it passes, and the natives sit in their
cupboard shops and laugh. If the car stops, they do not collect round
it, as would a village of Caucasian tribesmen, for instance. There was
one Bokharian--a Sart, in full cloak and turban--who rode a bicycle, an
astonishing exception.
[Illustration: OUTSIDE ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS OF THE MOSQUES]
The Russians at present hold Bokhara very lightly, but will no doubt
tighten their hands on it later, as they are taking the solidification
of their Central Asian Empire very seriously. At present there are no
passports, and there is mixed money; but passports are coming in, and
the banks are taking up all the ancient Sartish bits they can get and
giving Russian silver in exchange. There are several Russian banks
within the city walls, and they have a great influence. The Emir is
friendly towards Russia, and is a pompous figure at the Russian Court,
though it is rumoured that in his native palaces he whiles the long
empty day away by playing such elementary card games as _durak_, snap,
and happy family. The Russians have permission to build schools in the
city, and the Russian bricklayer is to be seen at work with trowel
and line, whilst the native navvy carries the hod to and fro. The
foreign goods in the bazaar are mostly cotton, and if you examine the
splendidly gay prints that go to form the clothing of the natives you
find it is all marked Moscow manufacture. The Bokharese merchants go
to Nizhni Fair not only to sell, but to buy. There are no English in
the streets, no tourists, no Americans. Indeed, I asked myself once in
wonder: Where are the Americans? The only people in Western attire are
commercial travellers (_commerçants_), and they are mostly Russians or
Armenians, though Germans are occasionally to be seen. I noticed knots
of these men discussing prices of horsehair, wool, oil-cake, carpets,
silks. It should be remembered that that district is more justly famous
for its carpets than for its silks. The best carpets in the world are
made by the Tekintsi. Armenians, Turkomans and Persians work in whole
villages and settlements in Transcaspia making carpets with needle and
loom. They have the original tradition of carpet-making, a sense for
the particular art of weaving those wonderful patterns of Persia, and
for them a carpet is not a covering on which it could be possible to
imagine a man walking with muddy boots; it is for dainty naked feet in
the harem, or it is a whole picture to be hung on a wall, not thrown
on the floor. Singer’s sewing machines are, of course, installed at
Bokhara; they are in every town in the wide world. The cinema also has
come, and a green poster announces that the Tango will be shown after
the presentation of a striking comedy called “The Suffragette.”
But what does this really matter? Let us ask the deliberate stork,
standing on one leg on the height of the mosque of Lava-Khedei. The
mosque tower has a clock, and the stork seems to be trying to read the
time. But he will give no answer, nor will the Mussulmans below; they
also are scanning the wall to see if it is nearer the hour to pray. And
the clock, be it observed, is not set by Petrograd time.
IV
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES AND MOHAMMEDANISM
The consideration of the wonderful Moslem cities, Constantinople,
Cairo, Jerusalem and Bokhara, with their marvellous blending of
colours, their characteristic covered ways and bazaars, their great
spreads of lace and silk and carpets, slippers, fezes, turbans, copper
ware, their gloomy stone ways and close courts, their blind houses,
made windowless that their women be not seen, their great mosques and
splendid tombs, inevitably suggests a great question of the East. What
is Mohammedanism, what does it mean? At Cairo and Jerusalem, and even
at Constantinople, it is possible to doubt the real nature of the
Moslem world; it seems a makeshift world giving way readily to Western
influence, or, in any case, reproved by the more splendid and vital
institutions of the West standing side by side with many shabby and
wretched phenomena of the East.
But Bokhara is a perfect place. It is much more remote even than Delhi,
and is almost untouched, unaffected by Western life. It is a city of
a dream, and if a magician wished to transport some modern Aladdin
to a fairy city, where there would be nothing recognisable and yet
everything would be beautiful and bewildering, he need only bring him
to the walls of Bokhara. Through Bokhara and its undisturbed peace
and beauty, one obtains a new vision of Mohammedanism, and it becomes
absurd to think that the real Moslem world is of the same pattern as
the Westernised and yet strangely picturesque cities with which we are
familiar. We remember the fact that there are so many millions more
Mohammedans than there are Christians, that they live off the railways,
in deserts, in far away and remote cities, that they journey on camels
and in caravans, and that to them their religion and way of life are
sufficient, that they do not seek new words or inspiration, nor do
they want time to do other things, nor change of any kind. We remember
their mystery, their faith and loyalty, their superb detachment, their
state of being enough unto themselves, their playfulness, audacity,
hospitality, how they shine compared with Christians in the keeping
of the conventions of their religion, their punctual piety, their
pilgrimages, and, with all that, their fixed and definite inferiority
of caste.
[Illustration: A HOLIDAY AT SAMARKAND: BOYS OF THE MILITARY SCHOOL
PLAYING AMONG THE RUINS OF THE TOMB OF TAMERLANE]
Their pilgrimage to Mecca, which we are apt to regard merely as
something picturesque, is in reality one of the most mysterious of
human processions. From Northern Africa, from Syria, from Turkey and
Armenia, from Turkestan, from the Chinese marches (there are even
Chinese Mohammedans, the Duncani), from India, from the depths of
Arabia and Persia--to Mecca. Through Russia alone there travel annually
considerably more Moslems to Mecca than there do Christian pilgrims
to Jerusalem; and some of these Mohammedan pilgrims are the most
outlandish pilgrims. They are illiterate, simple, unremarked. They
do not possess minds which could understand our modern Christian
missionaries, and Russia, at least, has no desire to proselytise among
them. If the peoples of the world could be seen as part of a great
design of embroidery on the garment of God, it would probably be seen
that Mohammedanism at the present moment is part of the beauty of the
pattern and the amazing labyrinthine scheme. It is not a rent, not a
disfigurement.
Mahomet and the Mohammedans is not a subject to dismiss, and when we
look at those wondrous cities of the East it is worth while remembering
that we are looking at a new image and superscription, and are in
the presence of people who own a different but none the less true
allegiance. As upon one of the planets we might come across a different
race that had not had, and could not have, our revelation.
Our prejudice as militant Christians, however, ought necessarily to be
against Mohammedans. They have ever been our religious enemies in arms,
the Saracens, the Paynim, the Tartar hordes; we are not very amicably
disposed to those of our argumentative brothers who, to show their
independence of thought, say they prefer Mohammedanism or Buddhism or
Confucianism or what not.
In reading Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-worship” there is a haunting
feeling that it was a pity that for the “Hero as Prophet” he chose
Mahomet and not Jesus, or that, choosing Mahomet, he had not travelled
in Mohammedan countries, investigating his subject more thoroughly
and giving a truer picture of the significance of Mohammedanism and
of the man who founded it. The Mahomet section of “Heroes” is like a
note that does not sound. Heading the lecture over again, one is struck
with a new fact about Carlyle--his insularity of intelligence. Despite
the fact that he is preoccupied with French and German history, you
notice his narrowness of vision, or perhaps it is that the general
vision of the world which men have now was not so accessible in his
day, and the differences in national psychology now manifest were
hidden in obscurity then. Carlyle saw mankind as Scotsmen, and all
true religion whatsoever as a sort of Southern Scottish Puritanism.
He saw all national destinies in one and the same type, without any
conception of fundamental differences of soul. He admired the Germans,
and the Germans adopted him and his works. And he disliked the French
because so few of them had that “fixity of purpose” and “manliness,”
“thoroughness,” “grim earnestness” of his compatriots. Russia was a
very vague country, but Carlyle approved of the Tsar, dimly discerning
in him one who must have something in common with Cromwell or
Frederick the Great, “keeping by the aid of Cossack and cannon such
a vast empire together.” And the further his imagination ranges the
more do his notions of foreign peoples and races fail to correspond
with his patterns of humanity. Among the many other destinies which
Carlyle might have had and lived through, one can imagine one wherein
he travelled, and found in real life what he sought in museums and
libraries. He would have been a wonderful traveller, and would have
known and shown more of the verities and mysteries of the world than he
was able to do through the medium of history.
Carlyle’s Mahomet is an example of old-fashioned visions. It is clear
now that this “deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming
black eyes and open social deep soul,” was not that determined,
conscientious British sort of character that he is made out to be, nor
has Mohammedanism that Cromwellian earnestness which Carlyle imputed to
it.
It is impossible to find in the Moslem soul “the infinite nature of
duty,” but we would not explain the “gross sensual paradise” and the
“horrible flaming hell” of the Mohammedans by saying that to them
“Right is to Wrong as life is to death, as heaven to hell. The one
must nowise be done, the other in nowise be left undone.” Mahomet and
Mohammedanism are not explainable in these terms.
Probably the most common assumption in the West is that Mohammedanism
does not count. In its adherents it greatly outnumbers Christianity,
but not even those who believe that the will of majorities should
prevail would recognise the Mohammedan majority. For though more
warlike than we, they have not our weapons, and though they are finer
physically, they have not our helps to Nature, nor our civilisation,
nor our passion. They are apart, they are scarcely human beings in our
Western sense of the term, and are negligible. Still, Mohammedanism
is an extraordinary portent in the world. The Mohammedans, those
many millions, are not merely potential Christians, a set of people
remaining in error because our missionary enterprise is not sufficient
to bring them to the Light. It is not an accident, or a makeshift
religion, but evidently a happy form suitable to the millions who
embody it. It is a poetically fitting religion, part of the very fibre
of the people who have it, and it cannot easily be got rid of or
supplanted.
As enthusiastic Christians we consider the Moslem world with some
vexation; some of us even with malice and a readiness to take arms
against it. But as pleasure-seeking tourists and worldly men and women,
we rather love the Turk and the Arab for his “picturesqueness,” for the
picturesqueness of his religion. As sportsmen, we love him because he
has the reputation of fighting well.
[Illustration: MOHAMMEDAN TOMBS AND RUINS IN THE YOUNGEST OF THE
RUSSIAN COLONIES]
It was with a certain amount of dissatisfaction that I fell into the
hands of an Arab guide when I was in Cairo, and was shown, first
of all, the picturesque mosques so beloved of tourists--the Mosque
of Sultan Hassan, the Alabaster Mosque, and so on. Not the ancient
Egyptian remains, which are the most significant thing in Egypt; not
the Early Christian ruins, which are most dear to us (the old Christian
monasteries which the Copts possess seemed to be known by none), but
the mosques made of the stolen stones of the Pyramids and of the tombs,
and inlaid with the jewels taken from ikon frames and rood-screens of
the first churches of Christianity. And as I listened to the details of
the blinding of the architects, the destruction of the Mamelukes,
the fighting and the robbing, the disparaging thought arose: “They are
all a pack of robbers, these Mohammedans.”
They are robbers by instinct, and non-progressive not only in life, but
in ideas. But they are picturesque, and have given to a considerable
portion of the earth’s face a characteristic quaintness and beauty.
They cannot be dismissed.
Carlyle tries to see some light in the Koran, and fails. Probably the
Koran is translated in a wrong spirit or to suit a British taste. But
obviously it is meant to be chanted, and it is full of rhythms with
which we are unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as we are with the sobbing,
plaintive, screaming music that is melody in the Moslem’s ears. The
soul of the Koran is not like the soul of the Bible, just as the soul
of a mediæval Christian city such as Florence or Rome is unlike Khiva
or Bokhara or Samarkand, just as the souls of our eager mystical
populations are different from the souls of those simple, satisfied
and fatalistic people. It is not easy to communicate the difference by
words; it is not merely a difference in clothes. It is a difference
in the spirit, a difference in the spirit that causes the expression
to be different, whether that expression be clothes, or houses, or
cities, or way of life, or music, or literature, or prayer. And while
our expression changes, theirs remains the same. Our spirit remains the
same, theirs remains the same, but only with us does the expression
change.
“God is great; we must submit to God,” is Mohammedan wisdom. It is in
a way a common ground--we must submit. But with the Mohammedan there
is a waiting for God’s will to be shown, whereas with us rather a
divination of it in advance. We are alive to find out what God wills
for us. After “Thy will be done!” we put an exclamation mark and
rejoice. Mohammedanism is fatalism, but Christianity is not fatalism.
And if fatalism gives a tinge of melancholy to life, especially to an
unfortunate life, it still makes life easier. It relieves the soul
of care and takes a world of responsibility off the shoulders. The
Mohammedan is a care-free being. He has, more than we have, the life of
a child.
Consequently, one of the greatest characteristics of Mohammedan people
is playfulness. All is play to them. They are playful in their attire,
in their business, in their fighting, in their talking. They buy and
sell, and make a great game of their buying and selling. They lack
“seriousness.” They are in no hurry to strike a bargain and get ahead
in trade. Their instinct is for the game rather than for the business.
Hence the comparative poverty of the Tartars--the most commercial
people of the East. They are not serious enough to get rich in our
Western way. If they would get really rich as a Western merchant is
rich, they must not waste time playing and haggling. They fight well
because they see the game in fighting. Death is not so great a calamity
to them as to us, for life is not such a serious thing. They look on
playfully at suffering, and laugh to see men’s limbs blown away by
bombs. They like the gamble of modern warfare. And, of course, they
were warriors and robbers before they were Mohammedans. Fighting is
one of their deepest instincts, and as they do not change with time
as we do, they have an almost anachronistic love of battle. They are
fond of weapons as of toys, fingering blades and laughing, guffawing at
the sight of cannon. They love steamboats and battleships as children
love toy steamboats, and they sail them on the waters of the Levant as
children would their toys. Their hospitality is mirthful, as are also
their murders and their massacres. Their heaven and hell are playful
conceptions.
The condition of their remaining children is obedience to the simple
laws of their religion. These obeyed, they are free of all troubles.
And they obey. Hence, from Delhi to Cairo and from Kashgar to
Constantinople, a playful and sometimes mischievous and difficult
world. Looking at the great cities, with their quaint figures and
their chaffering, their elfish spires and minarets, their covered ways
and gloomy and mysterious passages; looking at this city of Bokhara,
with its covered ways crowded with these children-merchants and
children-purchasers, their beggars, tombs, shrines, we must remember it
is all a children’s contrivance, something put together by a people who
do not grow up and do not grow serious as we do--mysterious yet simple,
fierce yet childlike, valorous and yet amused by suffering, Islam, the
enemy of the Church in arms, to this day.
V
THE HISTORY OF THE TRIBES
From Bokhara I proceeded to Samarkand, the grave of Timour. Turkestan
has four great cities remaining in splendour from the most remote
times--Bokhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and Tashkent. Alexander the Great
conquered most of this territory and established himself at Samarkand
for winter quarters, but there are few traces of Alexander to-day.
In his day the land was inhabited by tribes who had come out of the
Pamir--Persians, Indians, Tadzhiks. There were also primeval nomads,
with their tents and their herds, a people something like the Jews when
they were simply the Children of Israel, when they were a _family_.
There were possibly hordes of Jews, as there were hordes of Tartars and
Mongols. At the time of the shepherd dynasty of Egypt the peoples of
the East were living in patriarchal families, resembling in a way the
families of the Kirghiz in Central Asia to-day.
For the ethnologist Central Asia is necessarily one of the most
interesting districts of the world, and its inhabitants are like living
specimens in a great ethnological museum. The races there tell us more
about the past of the world in which we are interested than any pages
in the history book. Here we may feel what the Children of Israel were,
the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Turks, the Russians.
We see the destiny of Rome, the destiny of the Church of Christ, of
Christianity, of barbarism.
Not that there are many pure or clear types of historical races in
Central Asia to-day. The land has been a running ground for fierce
tribes coming out of China and Manchuria, coming from the mysterious
and vague regions of the Pamir and Thibet. The Kirghiz to-day exhibit
every shade of difference between the Mongol and the Turk.