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LESSON 10
OUR cities are filled and ornamented with hotels, coffee-houses, hospitals, work-houses, prisons, and similar conspicuous buildings. Generally speaking, there are none of these in the East. Hospitals and institutions for the sick and the poor were the offspring of Christianity, and are, I am inclined to think, peculiar to Christian lands.
There are few prisons in the East, and these are very wretched. Imprisonment as a
punishment
is little practised, and is altogether unsuited to the Mohammedan law and mode of thinking. Life is not so sacred as with us. It is urged that if a man deserves to be confined as a dangerous member of society, he deserves to die; society will never miss him, and some expense will be spared: “Off with his head;
—so much for Buckingham.”
Hence in Damascus, and in the East generally, people are not liable to the reproach which is sometimes brought against us—that the best house in the county is the jail. Besides, in the East, punishment follows crime instantaneously. The judge, the mufti,
the prisoner, and the executioner, are all in the court at the same time. As soon as the sentence is delivered, the back is made bare, the donkey is ready (for perjury, in Damascus, the man rides through the city with his face to the tail), or the head falls, according to the crime, in the presence of all the people. Awful severity, and the rapidity of lightning, are the principles of their laws; nor do they deem it necessary to make the exact and minute distinctions of crime that we do. The object is to prevent crime, and this is most effectually done by the principle of terror and the certainty of immediate punishment.
A certain baker in Constantinople used false weights in selling his bread: the Sultan ordered him to be roasted alive in his own oven, and afterwards boasted that this one act of severity had effectually prevented all similar crimes. Here you see the principle of government in the East; —it is nothing but terror and religious fanaticism.
As to coffee-houses, there are plenty of them in Damascus; but they can hardly be called houses, much less palaces: they are open courts with fountains of water, sheltered from the sun; and in many cases they have little stools, some six inches high, on which, if you do not prefer the ground, you can rest while you enjoy your sherbet, coffee, and tobacco. Pipes, nargilies,
ices, eau sucre,
sherbet, and fruits of all kinds, are in abundance, and of the lowest possible price.
These cafés are very quiet: there is no excitement, no reading of newspapers, no discussion of politics and religion; no fiery demagogue or popular orator to mislead the people; no Attic
wit provokes a smile, and no bold repartee calls forth applauding laughter on the other side. But yet they have their own amusements, and they play earnestly at games both of chance and of skill. The traveller tells his escapes and dangers to an admiring little circle; the story-teller repeats one of the “Thousand and One Nights”
to a wondering audience; and if memory fails, the imagination, fertile as an oriental spring, supplies its boundless stores.
We have in the East great khans,
but they bear little relation to our hotels.
Ring, eat, and pay
, is not the law in the East. They have no bells in Damascus, nor even the silver call or whistle which our grandmothers used in England. Bells in churches and in houses are alike an abomination to the Moslems; and the Maronites
alone, by permission of the Government, have a right to use them.
The Khan in Damascus is a large circular building surmounted by a noble dome, in which the great merchants have their goods and wares of all kinds; and in which the traveller can find a resting-place for himself and his camels, and be supplied with water from the central fountain;—but there are no tables spread for the travellers, and no beds ready made for the weary pilgrims: you must find your dinner as you best can, make your own bed, and when you rise, take it up, and walk. The Khan is, however, a very noble building, and excites not a little astonishment among the Orientals.
In European cities your attention is arrested by book-shops, pictures, placards, caricatures, &c.; now in Damascus we have nothing of the sort. Among the Jews you may find a few miserable stalls, from which you may pick up a copy of the Talmud,
or some old rabbinical prayer-book
. The sheikh
who sold me the Koran
, laid his hand upon his neck, and told me to be silent, for were it known that he had done so, he might lose his head. In the schools they are taught only to read the Koran, and to master the simplest elements of arithmetic and writing.
Men of letters there are at present none, and the highest of their sciences is the knowledge of grammar. When I lived in Damascus, some wit (the first thing of the kind known) uttered a pun or squib reflecting on the corpulency of the pasha, and he was banished for it! The old observation of the caliph, as he fired the Alexandrian library
, holds true in the East still— “If the books agree with the Koran, they are useless; if they oppose it, they are pernicious; and in both cases they are unnecessary.”
“But has not Damascus one hundred thousand inhabitants?” says the traveller. “Where are their newspapers, spreading light and knowledge through a portion of the sixty millions who use the noble Arabic language? Take me to the office of some Oriental Sun, Times, Globe, or Morning Chronicle ”
There is no such thing. Even in Constantinople there is only one newspaper, and the one half of it is in Turkish, and the other in French! Tyranny and superstition, like two monstrous mill-stones, rest upon and compress the energies of the oriental nations; even Greece, the fountain of science and literary and mental activity, was for a time blotted from the rank of nations, and the inquisitive character of its people all but annihilated by the stern rule of the Turks.
……
But there is another great difference between the general appearance of London and of Damascus, namely, in the eastern city you see not the bright, joyous countenance of woman—she is deeply veiled. In Egypt she is enveloped from head to foot in a dark, and in Syria in a white sheet, which effectually obliterates all traces of shape, absolutely equalizes to the eye all ranks, ages, and conditions, and suggests to the beholder the idea of a company of ghosts……
Conceive now how ludicrous the streets of London would appear, if green, white, black, and gray turbans moved indiscriminately, instead of the present hats; and if all the ladies, walking or on donkeys, instead of the present varieties of showy dress, beautiful bonnets, and smiling faces, presented only the appearance of headless ghosts clothed in white!
As to the general motion and life , the difference is immense between Damascus and a western city. Let us glance for a moment at two streets, and compare them: —
1. In Damascus there is more openness and publicity . The tradesmen of every kind work in the open bazaars; many of the merchants and artisans dine in public—that is, eat their bread and oil, bread and honey, or bread and grapes, in the street where they work. All are smoking, without exception, in the intervals of business. Some are engaged in reading the Koran, swinging their bodies to and fro in the most earnest and violent manner. Some are sleeping calmly, with the long pipe in their mouth! There a butcher is killing a sheep, surrounded by a circle of hungry, expectant dogs. Yonder is a company engaged at a game of skill. Everything is done in the open air, and nothing seems to be concealed but the ladies.
2. In the eastern city there is much more quiet. Their manners are sober, formal, and stately; arising partly, I believe, from the famous and universal dogma of obedience. There is, indeed, hardly any other law. The subject, the wife, the son, the slave obeys: to hear is to obey. This principle of unhesitating, unquestioning obedience leads to quiet. There is no contradiction. There is nothing to talk about. There is nothing like politics. There is no public opinion, of course; for that is based upon private opinion, and determined, resolute will. This extraordinary quiet and solemnity of demeanour may arise partly, also, from a sense of danger. Every man has arms, and has the right both of wearing and of using them: and no man makes a journey, be it only to a neighbouring village, without sword and pistols. Now this tends to quiet, earnest, solemn manners. If a scuffle takes place, it is not a black eye or a bloody face that is the result, but the certain death of some of the parties; and hence they are taught the principle of self-restraint and moral control……
3. The Arabs, and Orientals in general, sit much more than we do. The tradesmen all sit at their work: the smith, the carpenter, and the merchant, the butcher, the joiner, and the spice-monger, sit quietly and transact their business. They sit as tailors do, cross-legged, but with their feet doubled in beneath them. They sit on their feet, and maintain that such is the most natural and easy position! They seem to have no pleasure in motion: no man goes out to take a walk; no man moves for the sake of exercise. They go out, as they say, to smell the air , by some spreading tree or fountain of water. And yet they are capable of enduring great and long-continued labour. Abu Mausur travelled with us nearly forty days, during which we rode at the rate of from six to eighteen hours a day; and yet, though never upon a horse, he was always with us at the requisite time and place. He performed the journey on foot, and was rarely far behind.
Take, then, these things together, and you will easily perceive that in the city of Damascus everything is still and calm as the unclouded sky and the balmy air. The hoof of the camel falls noiselessly on the unpaved street; the sheep-skin foot-gloves of the Damascenes make no sound; and all the movements, both of men and of animals, are slow and solemn.
— REV. DR. GRAHAM
abomination, object of disgust.
amusements, entertainments.
annihilated, extinguished.
applauding, approving.
astonishment, wonder.
corpulency, fatness.
demeanour, deportment.
distinction, discrimination.
dogma, maxim law.
effectually, thoroughly.
enduring, undergoing.
engaged, occupied.
excitement, stir.
expectant, waiting.
hospitals, infirmaries.
inclined, disposed.
indiscriminately, confusedly.
inquisitive, prying.
instantaneously, immediately.
ludicrous, ridiculous.
obliterates, destroys.
perjury, false swearing.
permission, sanction.
pernicious, mischievous.
principle, rule.
reflecting, animadverting.
reproach, censure.
sheltered, protected.
similar, of the same nature.
solemnity, gravity.
superstition, fanaticism.
transact, discharge.
unsuited, inappropriate.
Of what public buildings are eastern cities generally destitute? Why are there few prisons in the East? What is the object of their penal system? How do they attain it? Describe the appearance of a Damascus coffee-house. What is a khan? What are the children taught in the schools? How is the absence of newspapers to be explained? How do women go about in Damascus? In comparing two streets, one in London, the other in Damascus, what three points of difference would be most noticeable?