Courtney McGrailThe World of Books
In recent decades a multitude of books have been published trying to explain Islam and ‘the Arab mind’ to the West – and indeed to the East, for Islam is just as strange in many ways to the vast populations of India, China and Japan.
When we remember that the earliest translation of Al-Koran, the Islamic holy book, was made in Latin by Robertus Ketenensis for European use in 1143, we see that at the time of the crusades, the effort has been going on a long time. But it was probably only in the 18th and 19th Century that a greater effort was made to enter the mind of not only the prophet, but also his followers, who by that date, in the way of all humans with all religions, had split and diversified their beliefs in a manner quite as confusing to the uninitiated as the divisions of Christianity.
One of the classic books of this period, Edward William Lane’s Manner and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, was written after he lived in Cairo in the 1820s and 30s. It was Lane who translated the Thousand and One Nights, the great Arab literary classic. But it is the earlier book which remains important to an understanding, not of medieval Islam, but modern Islam.
The book, though available in reprint editions, is not available in a scholarly edition, which seems very odd, given its importance.
One area where he was unable to go himself, the women’s quarters of the Arab households, was opened up to him in a later book ostensibly by his sister. Conservative Victorians were fascinated by the private lives of those living in a polygamous society. But such material distracts from what might seem to many these days to be a even more relevant area of Arab life, religion.
Rules
Here Lane is very instructive. Considering that the religious life of the Muslim is governed by rules going back to the earlier tradition of their faith little of this has changed. But he is also clear, which many western politicians and commentators are not, on the differences between the different streams of Islamic tradition. A great deal of what passes as “laid down by the Prophet” is in fact derived from wrings much later that that.
In a short article such as this, however, a lengthy discussion of a book that runs to 600 pages is impossible. But I was struck on looking again into my copy the other day by a passage relating to the ‘Schoolboy’s Prayer’, recited at the close of lessons.
“I seek refuge with God from Satan the accursed. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O God, aid El-Islam; and exalt the word of truth, and the faith, by the preservation thy servant, and the son of thy servant, the Sultan of the two continents, and Khakan of the two seas, the Sultan, son of the Sultan, the Sultan Mahmood Khan. O God, assist him, and assist his armies, and all the forces of the Muslims: O Lord the beings of the whole world. O God, destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion. O God make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families and their households and their women and their children and their relations by marriage and their brothers and their friends and their possession and their race and their wealth and their lands as booty to the Muslims: O Lord of the beings of the whole world.”
Lane, after quoting this, adds: “Not to convey too harsh a censure of the Muslims of Egypt, by the insertion of this prayer, I should add that the excessive fanaticism which it indicates is not to be universally imputed to this people.” He had already noted in his chapter on religion that some of the more extreme expressions in the prayers said in the mosques on Friday were edited by more progressive Imans.
When we read such a prayer, though, it is worth recalling the hateful expressions used by Christians of all kinds about each other in the 1820s and ‘30s.