There was a man sitting in an open room, ornamented with fine long-tailed sentences of the Koran: some in red, some in blue; some written diagonally over the paper; some so shaped as to represent ships, dragons, or mysterious animals. The man squatted on a carpet in the middle of the room, with folded arms, wriggling his head to and fro, swaying about, and singing through his nose choice phrases from the sacred work.
In the room above he discovers a schoolroom where a child was being chastised and Thackeray comments “I pity that poor blubbering Mahometan: he will never be able to relish the “Arabian Nights” in the original, all his life long,” he continued “they still occasionally beat a man for going into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of ferocious vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast.”[43]
A negative does not prove a positive, but arriving in the city he declared what he had not seen during the holy month of Ramadan rather than what he had witnessed:
I didn’t see the dancing dervishes, it was Ramazan; nor the howling dervishes at Scutari, it was Ramazan; nor the interior of St Sophia, nor the women’s apartments of Seraglio, nor the fashionable promenade of the Sweet Waters, always because it was Ramazan; during which period the dervishes dance and howl but rarely, their legs and lungs unequal to much exertion during the fast of fifteen hours. Royal palaces and mosques are shut; and though the Valley of the Sweet Waters is there, no one goes to walk; the people remaining asleep all day, and passing the night in feasting and carousing.[44]
While in the island of Rhodes, he refers to the Sultan as “the picture of debauch and ennui” and continues, in some scathing terms, an irrational allusion: “the awful camel driver, the supernatural husband of Khadija” to the holy prophet:
This sad spectacle of the decay of two of the great institutions of the world. Knighthood is gone – amen; it expired with dignity; face to the foe: and old Mahometanism is lingering just about to drop. … Think of the poor dear houris in Paradise, how sad they must look as the arrivals of the faithful become less and less frequent every day… the fountains of eternal wine are beginning to run rather dry, and of a questionable liquor; the ready-roasted-meat trees may cry “Come eat me”, every now and then in a faint voice, without any gravy in it – but the faithful begin to doubt about the quality of the victuals. Of nights you may see the houris sitting sadly under them, darning their faded muslins: Ali, Omar and the Imaums are reconciled and have gloomy conversations; and the Chief of the Faithful himself, the awful camel driver, the supernatural husband of Khadija sits alone in a tumbledown kiosk, thinking moodily of the destiny that is impending over him; and of the day when the gardens of bliss shall be as vacant as the bankrupt Olympus…[45]
Finally arrived at Cairo, Thackeray makes the profoundly obtuse observation about the Pyramids that:
… the truth is, nobody was seriously moved. And why should they, because of an exaggeration of bricks ever so enormous? I confess, for my part, that the Pyramids are very big.
The constant theme is of Islam as ‘Other’, different, inaccessible, interesting, yet beneath the gaze of the “snob” Englishman he outlined in his “Book of Snobs.”[46] A snob, of course, was an adaptation of the term to refer to people who felt that they were superior to others, and held those whom they encountered as being their social, intellectual (and religious) inferiors.
An exactly contemporary figure, George Gordon Noel, the sixth Baron Byron, born 22 January 1788, commonly known as Lord Byron, or Byron, was an English poet, a Lord and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems ‘Don Juan’, ’Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’ and the short lyric "She Walks in Beauty”.
Byron’s wife, Anne Isabella, believed that he had become a “Mussulman”. This contention probably arose from his great interest in the Levant and from his travels between 1809 and 1811 in the East that concluded in his ‘Turkish Tales’. Determined to study the fascinating Orient, he arrived in Malta and took Arabic lessons. In Albania he made friends with the independent pasha, Ali, who loaned him a bodyguard for his journey to Corinth. But in Greece, if Greece is in the Orient, Byron’s friends were Christians, yet there were numerous Turks there, with whom Byron may have made contact. Whether Byron knew Persian is unclear, but he did include amongst his juvenile reading ”Ferdausi, author of the Shahnameh the Perisan Illiad, Sadi, and Hafiz the oriental Anacreon…”[47] Byron had read Rycaut who treats Oriental women as objects of lust. “... books upon the East I had read as well as Rycaut, before I was ten years old.”[48]
Yet Byron believed in destiny for he outlined his fatalistic creed in ‘The Giaour’ :
But look — ‘tis written on my brow!
There read of Cain the curse and crime,
In characters unworn by Time.[49]
Despite a love of boys,[50] Byron addresses women in his story ‘The Giaour’ where he contends that Islam treats women as the ‘toy’[s] of ‘tyrant[s]’:
Oh! Who young Leila’s glance could read
And keep that portion of his creed ,
Which saith that woman is but dust
A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust?
Yet, underneath the text, Byron wrote a footnote that attempts to refute this preposterous charge: ‘’A vulgar error; the Koran allots at least a third of paradise to well-behaved women’’, he adds; but in reality the holy Qur’an states that all men and women who qualify may be forgiven their sins and achieve the ‘great reward’ which means paradise for eternity.[51] Byron’s women, Donna Julia, who is partly a Moor, Haidee who is at least half Moor, and Gulbeyez who is completely Turkish, would have to be counted as representative of the Orient and are objects of lust in his, and many Western, eyes. Turkish women in the bath houses where they appeared naked to the traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,[52] would also have afforded some attraction to Lord Byron.
In ‘The Siege’ he portrays Minotti as standing “darkly, sternly, and all alone…/o’er the altar stone”[53] while he expects an attack from the Muslims. Minotti, a Christian, is guarded by the icon of the Madonna and child as the “Musselman” attacks in “slaughter” with “steel and flame.”[54] The final result of the siege is that both the Christians and the Muslim warriors are destroyed, not before Minotti takes up the torch and uses it to genuflect with the sign of the cross on his breast. The church is destroyed and all the Christians and Muslims are massacred. But Byron makes the outcome a victory for the Christians by claiming that “Corinth was lost and won”[55] suggesting a rout for the Infidel, and identifying Byron, by his emphases, with the Christian, Venetian and Greek sides.
Byron’s peers [and his wife] saw his interest in Islam as eccentric; and his Islam was pseudo, invented, only based on reading and what he had picked up in his travels in the East. A highly complex writer, it remains an incomplete criticism that does not admire his literary genius.
The position of women, where the Church of England is currently debating the enthronement of women as bishops in the church, is not an issue that troubles the Muslim world. The English author Christopher Hitchins in ‘Slate’ magazine and elsewhere[56] has challenged the Islamic view on women, claiming that they are unable to express themselves fully as individuals. On religion, he says: “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”[57] Women’s rights are a fundamental prerogative for girls and women in Britain and the wider world. Despite his protestations, and perhaps those of Byron, Muslim women do pray alongside of men, and they are on equal footing with them in all areas – spiritual, social, economic, political, legal and matrimonial.[58] Women fought alongside the Prophet in early Islam and the Prophet’s wives hold the highest status in Islam among all.
Ancient Egypt’s enlightened civilisation slowly faded into the desert after Cleopatra’s reign. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley records how one such Empire slowly disappeared beneath the desert: “the lone and level sands stretch far away” just as in Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandius’ where the decaying ruin of the statue of a former Emperor:
…whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,[59]
remains damaged and broken. The proud Ozymandius who claims:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
lies rotting in the desert, according to “a traveller from an antique land.”[60]
The writers of the period were antipathetic to Islam, and had nothing good to say about it: the accent is upon Christianity, and the focus is always towards Christians. Charles Doughty (1843 – 1926) was an English poet, writer, and traveller who was born in Saxmundham, Suffolk and attended private schools in Laleham and Elstree. His two-volume work written in the style of the King James Bible, is pretentious, damaging and intolerant towards Muslims in Arabia where, he visited, in disguise, on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Doughty claims uncomprehendingly that “ – the Moslem religion ever makes numbness and death in some part of the human understanding.”[61] He produced another travel book for the late-Victorians entitled ‘Travels in Arabia Deserta’.[62] In his travels he meets one Mohammed, from a ‘princely family’ and reports that:
Mohammed has the four wives of their religious licence, two are hathariyat, ‘women of the settlements, and other two are beduwiyat. By strange adventure, one of these townswomen, we have seen, is named “a Christian.” This I often heard; but what truth there might be in their words, I cannot tell. What countrywoman she was, I could not learn of them. ‘She came to Hayil few years before with her brother, a young man who showing them masteries, and fencing with the lance upon horseback,’ had delighted these loose riding and unfeaty Arabians.[63]
He goes on to say rather lugubriously and mean spiritedly that:
Mohammed puts away and takes new wives, at his list, “month by month”: howbeit the princely wretch cannot purchase the common blessing! His children are as dead within him, and the dreaded inhabitant of yonder castle remains a desolate man, or less than a man in the midst of his marriages.”64]
It is a common preconception among writers of his time that the practice of polygamy -sanctioned, approved and preferred of Arabians was somehow inferior to that of the Christian practice of monogamy. It is to be remembered that, at the time of the Prophet, it was necessary for a number of reasons to permit the soldiers of Islam more than one wife, because many widows had been left bereft after the battles of Badr, Uhud, (625 A D) and so on, and because it allowed for the natural and healthy, but virtuous not carnal, needs of Islamic warriors at that time of the religion’s development. The era of Charles Doughty saw the Arabian Peninsula as a source of sexual pleasure and readers would have been interested in the supposed physical advantages to a man of the possession of more than one wife.
Doughty is completely anti-Islamic for in his assessment of Prophet Muhammad, after mentioning his ‘barbaric ignorance’, ‘murderous cruelty’ and “our contempt of an hysterical prophetism and polygamous living”, he goes on to enquire: “what was the child Mohammed? – a pensive orphan, a herding lad: the young man was sometimes a caravan trader, - wherein he discovered his ambitious meaning, when he would not enter Damascus!”[65]
He continues in a similar anti-prophetic vein:
His was a soaring and wounded (because infirm) spirit, a musing solitary conscience; and his youth was full of dim vaticination of himself and of religious aspiration.[66]
In the chapter ’ Setting-Forth from Damascus’, in the autumn of 1876, Charles Doughty is the only Christian in a caravan of six thousand Muslim pilgrims riding across "this wild waste earth" by camel to Mecca. He grumbles and complains in a most unpilgrim-like manner, insulting of the prophet:
The caravaners pass the ruined and abandoned kellas with curses between their teeth, which they cast, I know not how justly, at the Haj officers and say "all the birkets leak and there is no water for the hajjaj; every year there is money paid out of the treasury that should be for the maintenance of the buildings; these embezzling pashas swallow the public silver; we may hardly draw now of any cistern before Maan, but after the long marches must send far to seek it, and that we may find is not good to drink." Turkish peculation is notorious in all the Haj service, which somewhat to abate certain Greek Christians, Syrians, are always bursars in Damascus of the great Mohammedan pilgrimage: - this is the law of the road, that all look through their fingers. The decay of the road is also, because much less of the public treasure is now spent for the Haj service. The impoverished Ottoman government has withdrawn the not long established camp at Maan, and greatly diminished the kella allowances; but the yearly cost of the Haj road is said to be yet 50,000 [Pounds Sterling], levied from the province of Syria, where the Christians cry out, it is tyranny that they too must pay from their slender purses, for this seeking hallows of the Moslemîn. A yearly loss to the empire is the surra or "bundles of money" to buy a peaceful passage of the abhorred Beduins: the half part of Western Arabia is fed thereby, and yet it were of more cost, for the military escort to pass "by the sword." The destitute Beduins will abate nothing of their yearly pension: that which was paid to their fathers, they believe should be always due to them out of the treasures of the "Sooltan" and if any less be proffered them they would say "The unfaithful pashas have devoured it!" the pilgrimage should not pass, and none might persuade them, although the Dowla (Sultan's Empire) were perishing. It were news to them that the Sultan of Islam is but a Turk and of strange blood: they take him to be as the personage of a prophet, king of the world by the divine will, unto whom all owe obedience. Malcontent, as has been often seen, they would assault the Haj march or set upon some corner of the camp by night, hoping to drive off a booty of camels: in warfare they beset the strait places, where the firing down of a hundred beggarly matchlocks upon the thick multitude must cost many lives; so an Egyptian army of Ibrahåm Pasha was defeated in the south country of Harb Beduins.
It hardly adds to the understanding of the ‘hajj’ pilgrimage that, admittedly, contains some hardships, and even these hardships are to be silently endured by the pilgrim in his quest for sanctity and redemption after his penances.
He did not understand the spiritual nature of the ‘’hajj’, nor did Doughty have anything good to say about the language of the Arabs, for he found it unequal to previous times:
Nevertheless in the opinion of perfect [European] scholars, the Arabic tongue in the koran [sic] is somewhat drooping from the freshness and candour which is found in their poets of the generation before Mohammad. The Arabs’ speech is at best like the hollow words dropping out of the mouth of a spent old man…”[67]
As we mentioned at the beginning, the Christian West was concerned to portray the East in an unfavourable light and, deliberately or non-deliberately, to obtain adherents to the Christian faith. Actually the purpose of Doughty’s mission, because he thought that Islam was a false religion, was really to proselytise for and on behalf of Christianity in the hope that he would return wandering souls to the fold.
The book was championed by T E Lawrence, who caused further editions of the work to be published. He was a great admirer of Doughty and found much of benefit in his reading of it during his travels in Arabia.[68]
I have studied it for ten years, and have grown to consider it a book not like other books, but something particular, a bible of its kind. To turn round now and reckon its merits and demerits seems absurd. I do not think that any traveller in Arabia before or after Mr. Doughty has qualified himself to praise the book - much less to blame it.
Lawrence thought that Doughty was “very really the hero of his journey, and the Arabs knew how great he was”, but a calmer appraisal may be that the homosexual Lawrence was hypocritical towards the Arabs and denied them the independence they sought from the British and the French. His duplicity became well known after the First World War with the reneging of his promises of independence to the Arabs, because of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain.[69]
Lawrence felt that Doughty understood the Arabs well and in the Introduction that he (Lawrence) wrote to ‘Travels in Arabia Deserta’ he stated that Doughty “went among these Arabs dispassionately and because “Doughty tried to tell the full and exact truth of all that he saw”, “the realism of the book is complete.”[70]
He puts it clearly in black and white terms to point up Doughty’s attitudes to Muslims:
Semites are black and white and not only in vision, with their inner furnishings; black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts live easiest among extremes. They inhabit superlatives by choice… They are limited narrow-minded people whose inert intellects lie incuriously fallow… They show no longing for great industry, no organization of mind or body anywhere. They invent no system of philosophy or mythologies… 71]
He ignores the great achievements of Arab scholars, philosophers, physicians, mathematicians, astrologers and explorers, or the great realm of Andalusia, that were known to many people before his work was written.
The Victorian traveler, diplomatist and adventurer, Sir Richard Burton, wrote a personal narrative to bring to the attention of the world the nature of the pilgrimage to Mecca. He, however, makes some very derogatory remarks about the holy pilgrimage and its pilgrims. How the city could be “cursed of God” when it is one of the most holy sites on earth, attended during the ‘Hajj’ by the largest crowd ever seen on the face of the planet, is inexplicable:
his carauana conteyned threescore and foure thousande camelles, and a hundred Mamalukes to guyde them. And here ought you to consyder that, by the opinion of all men, this citie is greatly cursed of God, as appereth by the great barrennesse thereof, for it is destitute of all maner of fruites and corne. It is scorched with drynesse for lacke of water, and therefore the water is there growen to suche pryce, that you cannot for twelve pence buye as much water as wyll satysfie your thyrst for one day.
The ‘Hajj’ has always presented organisational and logistic difficulties, but modern day pilgrimages are conducted admirably by the Saudi Arabian authorities whose expenditure on the pilgrimage is a substantial part of its gross domestic output. In 2005 GDP ranged from 210 billion US dollars to 296 billion US dollars. As of 2010, about three million pilgrims[72] participated in the annual pilgrimage to Makkah al Mukkaramah, as it is known in Arabic.
The Black Stone that was embedded in the Ka’aba by Prophet Muhammad is a meteorite that has fallen from the sky and has been taken to symbolise the joining of earth and heaven. For Burton, “it was the place for the pouring forth of tears”, and yet this is also a misinterpretation since Muslims revere the stone and make a point to try to touch or kiss it as part of their rituals, and certainly experience a great sense of happiness, as they do so.
The Zamzam water from Hagar’s holy well that forms part of the ‘Hajj’ ritual is referred to as: “the nauseous draught” and he claims that “the flavour is a salt-bitter, much resembling an infusion of a teaspoonful of Epsom salts in a large tumbler of tepid water. Moreover, it is exceedingly “heavy” to the digestion.”[73] But it is considered by Muslims all over the world as one of the miraculous sources of water that refreshed Hagar, the wife of Abraham, after she ran back and forth seven times to find water for her thirsty son, Ismail. It has an original, characteristic, fruity, flavour, but to describe it as ‘nauseous’ is inaccurate. The French Ministry of Health has pronounced the water as fit to drink, and the Saudi Arabian authorities have claimed that there is no danger to health in taking the water.[74]
He confessed that it was possible to steal a piece of the cloth from the ‘Kiswa’, the embroidered covering of the ‘Q’ibla’. The Kiswa is made from black silk and gold and is a covering of the Ka’aba or cubic structure in the centre of the mosque that is the house of Abraham. According to Burton “it is considered a mere peccadillo to purloin a bit of the venerable stuff”,[75] but he avoided direct involvement by arranging with “the boy Mohammad before [I] left Mecca” to buy the purloined souvenir.
Richard Burton’s “Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah”[76] exemplifies the British army officer in his exhaustive, military-like account of the ‘Hajj’. It is duplicitous, in that entry to the ‘hajj’ pilgrimage is only permitted to Muslims, and Burton never attested that he was a devotee of the Prophet, but disguised himself as one ‘Mirza Abdullah’. His wife refers to this in her introduction to the work which clearly explains the “role” that he took on to obtain his material:
It meant living with his life in his hand, amongst the strangest and wildest companions, adopting their unfamiliar manners, living for nine months in the hottest and most unhealthy climate, upon repulsive food; it meant complete and absolute isolation from everything that makes life tolerable, from all civilisation, from all his natural habits; the brain at high tension, but the mind never wavering from the role he had adopted
So, it is a devious and hypocritical account by one who dissembled in order to bring his record to the West — a region that was unfamiliar with Arabia and its religion — yet it is unfortunate that his account is so obscured and mysteriously tainted against Islam.