."^'^ ^m^ u\.¥)A(i\cvt d. 1^ f(L/L ^'^ ff)' ESSAYS ON EASTERN QUESTIONS. \A ESSAYS ON EASTERN QUESTIONS. BY WILLIAM GIFFOPvD PALGEAYE, AUTHOR OF ' CENTRAL AND EASTERN ARABIA.' MACMILLAN AND CO. 1872. OXFORD: BY T. COJIBE, MA., E. B. GABDNEK, E. PICKABD HAI.L, AND 3. H. STACY, I'UINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 6 ^ /^5- ■P3 tOANi STACK B y i ^ D TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF DERBY WHOSE GUIDANCE OF ENGLAND'S FOREIGN POLICY HAS BEEN ALWAYS MARKED BY A STATESMANLIKE INSIGHT INTO CHARACTER AND RACE THESE ESSAYS ARE RESPECTFULLY AND GRATEFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR as INTRODUCTION. To expect that the collection of a few Essays from the scattered periodicals in which they originally appeared, and their republication in a more condensed form, can have any material effect towards removing erroneous ideas, or substituting exacter ones, about the Maho- metan East of our own times, would be presumptuous indeed. Yet even these writings may in a measure contribute to so desirable a result; for correct appreci- ations are, like incorrect ones, formed not at once but little by little : true knowledge is a construction, not a monolith. These Essays, taken together, form a sketch, mostly outline, part filled in, of the living East, as included within the Asiatic limits of the Ottoman Empire. Now, as for centuries past, the central figure of that picture is Islam, based on the energies of Arabia and the institutions of Mahomet, propped up by the memories of Chaliphs, and the power of Sultans; and, though somewhat disguised by the later incrustations of Tura- nian superstition, still retaining the chief lineaments, and not little of the stability and strength, of its former days. Round it cluster the motley phantoms of Eastern Christianity, indigenous or adventitious ; and by its VI INTRODUCTION. side rises the threatening Russian colossus, with its triple asj»ect of Byzantine bigotry, Western centrali- zation, and Eastern despotism. This group, in its whole and in some of its details, I have at different times en- deavoured to delineate ; and if the pencil be an unskilful one, its tracings, so far as they go, have the recommen- dation, not perhaps of artistic gracefulness, but at least of realistic truth. The first, second, and third of these Essays have for their object the portraiture of Mahometanism, as it now exists among its followers throughout the greater part of the East-Turkish Empire. A fourth assigns its special attitude at the present day ; and a fifth gives the details of a local development of the same force in a remote corner of its demesnes. In the sixth Essay the most prevalent forms of Eastern Christianity are passed in review; while its 'Greek' or Byzantine modification is more minutely illustrated in the seventh. The eighth describes one of the many struggles between the Christianity of Russia on one side, and the Islam of the Caucasus on the other. The ninth and tenth supply the background of Arab life and vigour in the times which immediately preceded or followed the birth of Mahomotanism. CONTENTS. PAGE I. MaHOMETANISM IX THE LEVANT .... 1 II. Mahomet ANiSM in the Levant — Continued . 43 III. Mahometanism in the Levant — Concluded . . 81 IV. The Mahometan 'Revival' . . . . Ill V. The Turkomans and other Tribes of the North- east Turkish frontier 142 VI. Eastern Christians 164 VII. The Monastery of Sumelas 225 VIII. The Abkhasian Insurrection .... 250 IX. Thk Poet 'Omar 271 X. The Brigand, Ta'abbet Shubran . . . 301 I. MAHOMET ANISM IN THE LEVANT. Dead and buried had they seen me, so their ready tale they spread ; Yet I lived to see the tellers buried all themselves and dead. Arah Poet. (Published in "Feaser's Magazine," August, 1870.) NOTICE. This and the two following were Avi'itten at Trebizond, in Asia Minor, after several years of residence or travel. In these three Essays I have endeavoured to classify, so far as possible, the Maho- metan population of the East Ottoman Empire, according to its principal social divisions ; with a separate sketch of the characteristic features of each. Those of official rank, civil and military, come first ; the landowners and peasants next ; then the mercantile classes ; the learned professions follow ; while the pastoral tribes, Koorde or Arab, the maritime classes, and the ' mixed multitude ' of the Mahometan Levant bring up the rear. Why I have marshalled them in this order will sufficiently appear in the treatment of the subject itself. Like the other writings in this volume, these particular Essays have no pretensions to being exhaustive ; they supply samples, suggest general effects, and no more. But the samples are all facts ; and the general effects the results of actual and long-continued observation. The only objection I anticipate from some, is that my view of human and Islamitic nature in the East is over-favourable ; more so, at least, than that taken by many other European travellers and writers, modern ones especially. But, after all, as we see and hear, so we judge ; and ' to speak of a man as we find him,' is just judg- ment. Perhaps, then, I have been more fortunate in my Eastern experiences ; perhaps less prejudiced. Besides, a disciple in this B 2 MAHOMETAN TSM IN THE LEVANT. [i. matter of Chrysostom, himself a native of Syria, I hold with him, that man has naturally more good in him than evil, is of himself more prone to virtue than to vice; and I find, or seem to find, that Mahometanism,— the nearest approach made by any set creed to what is called ' natural religion,' — has perhaps, on the whole, less tendency than any other system I am yet acquainted with, to cramp and thwart the innate excellence of human nature. Hence I am not surprised to meet with much that deserves esteem, much that attracts sjTiipathy, among the followers of Islam; though much also is wanting, much positively awry. Yet the earth is, as Clough says, 'very tolerably beautiful ; ' and so are the men on it too, even though Mahometans. The East, the Levant East especially, abounds in sights charming at a distance, and in general eifect, but of which the details will not always bear too near an inspection. Constantinople when viewed from the Bosporus, Damascus from the heights of Anti-Lebanon, are instances in point. But there are other sights in the Levant, beautiful alike from far or near, partly on their own account, partly from association and suggestion, the perspectives of the mind. And to this class belongs one that our Western friends may at their pleasure share with us, if they will join in a saunter this evening across the busy Meidan or open space — square we cannot call it, though it answers the purposes of one, for it is the most irregular of polygons — that lies in the eastern quarter of our j'^'^^o temj^ore home, the town of Tre- bizond, on the Black Sea coast. Round the verge of this Meidan, and visible from it further off at intervals through the town, rises a forest of tall thin minarets, ghostly white against the slaty star-si)riiikled ssky. But now each minaret is gorgeous with circlets of light, some more, some fewer, formed by rows of lamps, three, four, and five deep, threaded at intervals on I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 3 the slender half-seen stem. And even now, before we are well across the Meidan, bursts forth from every turret, from every crowned gallery of rays, the loud modulated cry that asserts the Unity of God and the veracity of the Prophet. Some commemoration of more than ordinary sanctity, some night of note, is evidently on hand; but as we do not happen to be at the moment aware of the precise date in the Mahometan calendar, we stop a turbaned passer-by, who has just saluted us on his way mosque-wards, and enquire of him what mean all these extra lamps and accompanying signs of extra so- lemnity. His reply reminds us that this is ' Leylet- ul-Raghey'ib,' or ' Night of Desires ; ' the night namely preceding the first Friday in Eegeb, sacred month, and prelude of Kamadan ; whence follow many super- natural excellences and privileges ; not much better known, mayhap, to the Western world in general than are those of St. John's or of Hallowmas Eve at Trebizond itself. A few minutes more, and beneath the festooned lamps that illuminate the interior of every mosque, line after line of turbans, reaching back from the * Mihrab ' or sanctuary (an analogous but not an exact translation), where stands the prayer-reciting ' Imam,' to the outermost door, will at one ' Allaho-Akbar,' ' God alone is great,' ' bow prostrate to the dust ; and the head of the Pasha will touch the floor-mat side by side with that of the poorest day-labourer of the town in one act of adoration, one without more or less in each and all ; the act that, while it acknowledges the divine mission of Islam, rejects every other creed, every other system. That Mahometanism is fast declining, fading, waning away ; that the day is not distant, may already be B 2 4 MAHOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. calculated, when the mosques of the Turkish Empu"e from Galatz to Basrah will convert or re-convert them- selves into churches (though in favour of what par- ticular form of Christianity may not be so easy to conjectiu-e — the choice is a large one!); that pigs will soon lose their prescriptive immunity from Turkish knives, and beer and \vine wash excellent Anatolian hams down once Islamitic throats ; that Mecca will only be known as a railroad terminus, and the Koran be registered by some Constantinopolitan Disraeli among Curiosities of Literature, are pleasing speculations, more pleasing as hopes, and fit to cheer the drooping spirits of those who mourn over the con- secration of a heretic, or the disestabhshment of a Church. Nay, even the cool-blooded Gallio of Pall Mall has been found among the predictors of the fall of Islam ; and the verdict of a Mill or a Lefevre might be on this subject not dissimilar in the main from that of a Spurgeon or a Manning. For ourselves, neither prophets nor sons of prophets, but mere lookers-on, by business of the State or other- wise, in Turkey, we must sadly confess that some sixteen years or so of Levant residence have as yet opened to us no glimpse of a so 'devoutly to be wished' consummation ; nor do the converging lines of the Mahometan prospect indicate to our optics any vanish- ing point, however distant. On the contrary, if the future be, as runs the rule, foreshadowed in the }>resent, and if sight and hearing avail anything to discern the ' signs of the times,' these readily lighted lamps, these answering cries ' No god but God,' * Mahomet is the Prophet of God,' these long lines of Mecca -turned worshippers, among whom every rank and degree is merged in the brotherhood of Islam, tell a very dif- ferent tale. I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 5 The ostricli was believed to hide its head in the sand on the approach of danger ; and when it had thus insured the disappearance of the hunter from its own field of vision, to infer il logically that the said hunter had ceased to exist. Ostriches of this kind are numerous, not in Africa only, but eveu in Europe ; minds that, when their own horizon, often a very limited one, does not include a given object, are prone to conclude that there is no such object at all. Add the paternity of wish to thought, add a fair amount of prejudice, add misinformation, and we shall cease to wonder at certain statements and opinions current enough about numerous topics, where facts would, we might naturally have thought, have warranted con- clusions precisely opposite. Islam, in its present and in its future, may stand for an example. Take misrepresentation only. Thus, we have heard, not once, but repeatedly, and on seemingly good au- thority, that the fast of Ramadan can now scarce lay a claim to even a decent pretext of observance ; that the veil is already dropping from the faces of Mahometan women, the harem opening its jealous gates ; that the mosque is habitually deserted for the theatre, the * medreseh ' for the ' cafe chantant ; ' in a word, that European customs, dresses, inventions, organisations, literature, and so forth, will have soon rendered the Asia of the Muslims a thing of the past. Let us endeavour to determine first how far all tliis is true ; and next, if more or less true, what it portends. And here, at tlie very outset, we may be met by a plausible objection, the objection of those who say, * What need of further research in so beaten a field ? and how should Europe, how should England in particular, not know the East, whether Mahometan or Christian, land, and people, and all 1 Is not all that lies from the 6 MAHOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. ^gean to the Tigris, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, pictured in the pages of Keith, and written in the book, the red-bound book, of Murray ^ Have not a Lane and a St. John given us the entree of houses and harems ? has not a Slade passed the armies and the navies of the East in review before us ? has not a Strangford unveiled, evening by evening, the Isis of its politics, a Sale the Cybele of its religion 1 Who can err with such guides ? or complain of darkness with so many and so brilliant lights around '{ ' True, the guides are faithful, the lights brilHant, and the authorities first-rate, each in his kind. But a handful of gold-dust would not be more surely lost if scattered over a Sahara of sand than are the opinions and facts conveyed by informants like these, when diluted beyond all recognition among the far greater number of errors, prejudices, and misstatements that, having once found currency, still abound on every side. Witness the giant misconceptions so often reflected from European opinion upon European statesmanship and diplomacy, regarding the relative positions of ' Christians ' and ' Turks ; ' witness the popular por- traits of either worthy to lank with Shakespeare's Joan of Arc or Dryden's Aurungzebe ; witness nine-tenths at least of our leading newspaper articles on the Sultan's visit in 1867 ; witness the surprise evinced when any truer view of Mahomet and Mahometanism, as Mr. Deutsch's admirable, though somewhat one- sided, Essay in a late Quartei'ly, for instance, is given to the world ; surj^rise which avows ]^re-existent ideas of a very different colour. It would not be too much to say that the vulgarly received idea of Mahometanism as it was, is, and may be, bears scarce a closer resem- blance to the reality than do Luther's Reforniatioii in the pages of Baronius or the French lie volution in I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 7 those of Alison to their historical counterparts. Nor is the reason far to seek. When false has to be sifted from true, it often becomes no less necessary to enquire who was the sayer than what was the said ; more especially when rehgions, parties, public characters, and the like, are under discussion. Now, excepting the few already noticed, and setting aside those whom evident interest or national sym- pathy excludes from the impartial witness-box, we find our usual masters in the Eastern school to be three : the Tourist, the Resident, and the Levantine. Let us call them up each in his turn. The average Tourist need not detain us long. He who has studied Turks in Pera or in the Frank quarter of Smyrna, and Arabs at Alexandria or Beyrout ; he who has never conversed save through the medium of a Greek or Maltese dragoman ; he who with time limited by a travelling ticket, and with a stock in hand of knowledge regarding Mahometan history, lite- rature, and customs, equal about to that of ' Tancred ' setting out for Mount Lebanon and the Queen of the ' Ansarey,' as it pleases him to call them ; such a one has all the right to speak and to be listened to re- garding Mahometan Turkey, present or future, that a Japanese or a Spaniard would have on Irish Church Disestablishment or the Landlord and Tenant question after an equal time passed on the quays of Portsmouth, or in the precincts of Leicester Square. And even should his random guesses and hazardous assertions ever happen to be right, small merit of his, — ' a hit, but no aicher,' says the Arab proverb. Nor can the resident Europeans, forty-nine out of fifty, show a better title to their magisterial diploma. Cigarette-smoking for four or five houis in an otfice or 8 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. chancery, lounging for two or three more along a European-frequented road, or boating it on the Bos- porus ; tlie rest of their time passed in society exclusively European and mostly national, amid Euro- pean cards and billiards, or reading the latest arrived European periodicals ; unless the knowledge of Islam and the solution of its problems be imparted like the wisdom of Solomon during the hours of sleep, it is hard to conjecture when or where our European friends whom diplomatic, consular, or commercial interests detain in the East, can possibly acquire them. The truth is, that far the greater number neither possess such knowledge, nor care to possess it. But if the Resident, whatever his real or acquired nationality, Latin or Teutonic, be not a genuine Euro- pean, but a Levantine, that is, one born in the Levant, and with a moiety of Greek or Armenian blood in his veins to dilute the other half, French, English, or Itahan, as luck may have it, then, 'oh thou, whom- soever thou mayst be,' desirous of solving the Asian mystery, pass on, nor hope in that office, in that par- lour, at that table, to read the riddle of the East. No man would seem by birth and circumstance better entitled to cosmopolitanism than the Levantine ; no one in fact passes through and out of this world in completer ignorance of all except its Levantine aspect even as regards that little corner where he has vege- tated. To a more than Eur()i)ean non-acquaintance with the spirit and often with the very letter of the institutions around him, the Levantine adds a more than Greek or any otlier 'native Christian' prejudice against the Prophet and his followers. ' Rakee ' his ordinary, sometimes his hourly, drink, cards his chief pastime, dogs liis pet companions, swine-ilesh, where attainal)le, his favourite food ; all four ol»jects as re- I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 9 pulsive to any true Maslini as the first could be to a teetotaler, the second to a Quaker, the third to a Goethe, and the fourth to a Jew ; no wonder that his house is rarely visited by a disci j^le of Islam, and then only under the compulsion of some immediate necessity, some affair to be quickly and exclusively despatched. Nor is the Levantine himself more fre- quently found within the doors of his Mahometan neighbours. A band apart, he and his colleagues pass their hours in the tattle and scandle-mongering of their tribe, aping, but never imitating, European fashion, ' alia Franga,' as they call it ; of Europe it- self, its politics and its tendencies, its feelings and customs, they may possibly have what imported know- ledge Galignani or Charivari can give at a distance; with the Asiatic, the Mahometan world around them, they have no communion whatever. The nearest, the only point at which the circle touches the Islamitic is in words of command or abuse to some Mahometan out-of-door servant, whom poverty has induced to accept the pay of the 'Giaour' he despises — ah, Byron, Byron ! how came you ever to make the ' Giaour ' into a hero ? — or in the fellowship of some ne'er-do-weel ' Be-lillah,' i.e. scapegrace of a young Turk, in whom strong di'ink and its accompaniments have efiaced all of Islam except the name. Besides, if we look over to the other side of the hedge, we shall find that the genuine turban-wearer, be he Turk or Arab (of Persians we advisedly say nothing), is on many grounds averse from too much i'.itercourse with the hat-wearei", Levantine or Euro- pean even. National pride, the pride of a conquering though now a declining race, the haughty memories of gxeat Caliphs and Sultans, the sack of Constanti- nople, the siege of Vienna, the conquest of half a 10 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. world keep him at a distance from those whose every gesture is an assumption, not of equality merely, but of superiority ; rehgious pride, the pride of him who bows to one God only, the Unchanging, the All-power- ful, the Eternal, estranges him from the polytheist, the idolater, the unbeliever ; personal pride contrasts his own ceremonial purity with the uncleanness of the unablutioned swine-eater ; family pride places a barrier between the ' Beg,' the descendant of so many noble chiefs, so many lords, and those of whose fathers he knows nothing, except that they may have been, and 23robably were, shopkeepers or spirit-sellers. Injurious and blameable such feelings may be, but they exist ; nor are we now occupied on a diatribe or a panegyric ; we only state simple facts. But no such sentiments intervene to hold aloof the ' native Christian ' from welcoming in the Euro- pean resident or visitant, if not a man and a brother, at least a tool and a gain. He f\istens on the stranger as naturally, I once heard a Turk say, as a flea on a dog ; and is not more easily to be shaken off". His tongue is ready for any flattery, however gross ; his hand for any service, however base ; while his eye is steadily fixed on the lodestar of the European's pocket, whither hand and tongue tortuously but surely direct his course. He is the first to greet the new-comer on the steps of the Custom-house, and the last to quit him on the quarter-deck of the steamer ; the Alpha and the Omega of the profits are his also. Thus re- pelled on the one side, and attracted on the other, what wonder if the traveller, ignorant of those he foregathers with no less than of those from whom he turns away, hears and sees only through Greek, Maltese, or Armenian ears and eyes ; if the Levantine herds with his kind, or, lower still, with the store- I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 11 house keepers and retail-job dealers of the native Christian population ; while the resident gentleman, diplomatic, consular, or business, strives to preserve his own national mind and tone, by excluding the contact of every other; and returns, after few years or many, to Florence, Paris, or England, almost as Italian, French, or English, as when he first arrived in the East, and also almost as ignorant ? Nor can he be much blamed for so doing ; better, in general, no companionship at all than the companionship of such as hang on the Europeans foot-track in the Levant. Enough of these and theirs. Let us now cast aside (in imagination only, of course) the hat, don the tur- ban, and survey the Islamitic world around us from an Islamitic point of view. And, hey presto ! the supposed unit ' Mahometan ' disentangles itself into a round dozen of figures, each different from the other, and each holding a distinct and separate place in the gradations of Islam, as in those of nationality and patriotism. It is a very trite observation, yet one to be carefully borne in mind, that in the Levantine East — that is, throughout the entire tract of country included really or nominally in the existing Asiatic Turkish Empire — nationality and religion are almost convertible terms, so much that not the specific differences only, but even the intensitive degrees of the latter, go far on investigation to trace out the limits of the former ; which is itself again, historically considered, the groundwork and often the ultimate cause of the latter. Among Mahometans, however, the essential simplicity of whose creed hardly admits of other dogmatic varia- tions than shadings too faint almost for the eye of an outsider, the correctness of this rule is at times 1 2 3fA IIOMETANISM ly THE L E VA X T. [i . less evident than it is among the adherents of the more modifiable, because more complicated, Cliristian formula ; though it may in general be exemplified not ambiguously in varieties of practice, even amid apparent uniformity of theory. But these varieties, which arrest at once the eve of an Eastern, miofht prove unnoticeable, or, at least, unintelligible, to a European. Hence, while not forgetful of the general rule, we will on this occasion assume a different classification, and review our Levantine Mahometans accordinof to their social rather than their national distribution. To the Civil Service, so important in a country where self-government is not even an aspiration, we will assign the first place ; the military must content them- selves with the second ; land-owners and peasants, merchants and to^vnsmen, lawyers and divines, shall follow in due order. Shepherds, sailors, dervishes, and such like odds and ends of society will find their place as occasion offers ; wholly anomalous classes, Koordes and Bedouins for instance, require to be treated of apart. Nor will we minutely distinguish in each class between its ccjmponent Turks and Arabs ; though, as our actual residence lies — much to our regret — among the former, we will give their nationality the prece- dence throughout. ''Tis known, at least it should be known,' that or- thodox Mahornetanism admits four doctrinal schools, slightly differing each from each in theory and in prac- tice ; those, namely, of Moluunmed Ebn Idreescsh-Sha- fey'ee ; of Malek Ebn Ins ; of Ahmed Ebn Hanbal ; and of Nooman Aboo-Haneefali. Now wliile tlie three former have found favour among Arabs and other Semitic or African races, the Turks on their first con- version to Islam adoi)ted and have ever since adhered I.] MAHOMET AN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 13 to the fourth, or Hanefee school. It was well said by the shrewd and learned Mohee-ed-Deen (of Hamah, in Syria), that ' in the circle of orthodoxy, the teaching of Ebn Hanbal' (the strictest among the four great masters) ' might stand for the centre, and that of Aboo-Haneefah for the circumference.' More indul- gent than any of his brother doctors, Aboo-Haneefah stretched the rigid lines of Islam almost to breaking ; the doubtful concessions of a moderate indulgence in fermented liquors, of non-Mahometan alliance, and of considerable facilitations in the laborious ceremonies of prayer and pilgrimage, with a general tendency, not unlike that of the Eoman Catholic Liguori, to relax whatever was severe, and soften whatever was harsh in theory as in practice, all characterise his teaching. At the same time, in obedience to a well-known y sycho- logical law, the easiest-going of divines was — Liguori- like again — the most superstitious. Omens and auguries, dreams and amulets, the observance of lucky days, and the annual visitation of tombs, these and more of their kind found favour in the eyes of Aboo-Haneefah ; while his dervish-Kke austerity of life, and his avowed claim to no less than a hundred visionary admittances within the celestial regions, revealed the great Doctor's personal leanings, and encouraged that fanciful asce- ticism which in Islam no less than in Christianity has proved an outgrowth from, if not a corruption of, its original simplicity. Naturally enough the double trunk bore in due time double fruit, and the Turkish Hanefee, even while holdmg fast enough, in Cameronian phrase, 'the root of the matter,' has been of all times notorious for his proclivity now to the too much, and now to the too little ; sometimes lax, sometimes observant in excess. Specimens of either kind abound in all professions and 14 MAUOMETANISM IX THE LEVANT. [r. modes of life tliroughout the Empire ; but in some categories the one, in some the other, is more frequent. However, the former, or lax type, is most often to be met with in the Civil Service, our first field of inspec- tion, and which has had the honour, more than all the rest, of producing that peculiar being commonly desig- nated by the epithet of * Stamboollee,' or ' Constantino- politan,' to which derivative the title ' Effendee,' a word equivalent in meaning to our * Mr./ but now-a-days of a semi-official character, is liberally added. Let him come forward and speak for himself. He is easily recognised ; for besides his individual frequency, especially since the publication of the last new ' Tashkeelat,' or Eegulations, he is the first, and not rarely the only, Mahometan whose acquaintance is made by the European traveller or resident. Whether our ' Stamboollee ' bears the rank of Efiendee, of Beg, or of Pasha, matters little. The same loose black frock-coat, black trousers, generally unbuttoned just where European ideas would most rigorously exact buttoning, the same padded underclothes, shiny boots, and slight red cap, the same sallow pufly features, indi- cative of an unhealthy regimen, the same shuffling gait and lack-lustre eye, characterise every man of the tribe : — Facies non omnibus una, Nee diversa tamen. Let US follow our Effendee' s career from the day when his father first held him up, a swathed infant, with his face towards the ' Kibleh,' and thrice pro- nounced the Mehemet, Osman, or Ahmed, by which our hero is to be known in after life. We may, how- ever, omit the gutter-] laying period of existence, that almost indispensable i)reface to every Eastern biogra- I.] MAHOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. 15 phy, be it gentle or simple ; and pass lightly over the four, five, or six years at the Mekteb, or Grammar School, where, however, the young idea learns, not grammar, but the first rudiments of reading minus spelling, and of writing mimes caligraphy, besides a certain number of the shorter * Soorahs/ or chapters of the Koran, consigned to sheer mechanical memory, without so much as an attempt to form any notion of the meaning. Issuing with these acquirements from the ' Mekteb,' he passes another half-dozen years chiefly under his father's roof, alternating between the ' Sa- lamlik ' of hourly visitors, and the secluded apartments of the Harem ; while day by day the spoilt child grows gradually up into a spoilt boy ; humoured in every whim by a fond and foolish mother, a fond and not overwise father, and servants whose intimacy supplies timely lessons of vice and roguery, wliile their obse- quiousness promotes not less efficaciously his growth in insolence and self-will. Of general knowledge, of moral and mental discipline, of self-restraint and self-respect, of the dignity of work, the bond of duty, the life of honourable deed, he learns nothing ; these are growths all too strange to the climate of his rearing. Besides the parents and servants already mentioned is some poorly- paid, salary-snatching iKhojah,' or private tutor, under whose instruction he attains a fairly good handwriting, a parrot-knowledge of ' Nahoo,' or grammar, that is, of Arab grammar, wholly alien in its principles, and mostly alien in its application, from whatever is Turk- ish, Tatar, or Turanian, Mr. Ferguson might say, in the vernacular language. To this he may, perhaps, add a no less parrot-smattering of Arab and Persian literature. Occasional attendance at a ' Mekteb Rush- dee,' or ' School of guidance,' by which name the higher- class establishments of public education are designated. 16 MAHOMETANTSM IX THE LEVANT. [i. will probably have coated over his intellectual store with a superficial varnish of French. Of history, geography, mathematics, and positive sciences, as of English, German, or any other European tongue, ex- cept the all-supplementing French, he is, and will for all his life, remain blissfully ignorant. But in cigarette- smoking, in gambling, probably in vice, perhaps in drinking, and certainly in the arts of lounging and time- wasting, he is already a creditable proficient, almost a master. If learning only went by contraries, he might have further acquired the science of economy from the paternal housekeeping, truthfulness and honour from the ' Khizmetkars ' and ' Chibookjees ' (house-servants and pipe-bearers), his earliest and closest associates, diligence from the lads of his own age and standing at school and in the street, and job-hating probity from the French and Levantine examples held up to his admiration as pattern types of civilisation and progress. Needs not track our hero minutelv tlirouofh the various phases of his after career, which we will suppose an upward one, in service and in salary. But whether his ultimate apotheosis rank him among the ' Musheers,' or privy-councillors, those first mag- nitude stars of the Ottoman Empire, or whether de- ficiency of patronage and of purse detain him in the dim nebula of * Kateebs,' or Government clerks ; whether his lines be cast among the 'Mudeerliks' and ' Kaimmakamliks' (local prefectures) of some dis- tant half-barbarous province, or fall in pleasant places under the immediate shadow (the broiling sun we should rather say) of the august ' Kapoo ' or Con- stantinople Downing Street itself, the man is still the same. At twenty, at eighteen, at sixteen even, his character was formed for life. The intellectual coating, thinner or thicker, which French professors, I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 17 and a certain amount of contact with Gallo- or Italo- Levantine associates may have given, will indeed rub off; his cosmical science will return to, or sink below, the level of El-Mas'udee ; his historical store shrink within the limits of the ' Musteclrif ' or the 'Nowadir Soheylee,' at best ; and so forth. But moral modifi- cations are more quickly wrought, and, in the average of things, more firmly retained, than intellectual. Hence our ' StambooUee ' will all his life long be ready, occasion given, to put in practice the lessons taught in the school whence his real tutors issued, the royal law of which patronage is the first table, and dishonesty the second. ' Alia Franga ' has been the motto of his youth, it will be the guide of his advancing years. But what 'Alia Franga!' His notions of family life, of social intercourse, of general morality, will be a reflex of George Sand and of Bal- zac ; his notions of probity, political or monetary, of the Savoy and Jecker transactions ; his notions of finance will be borrowed from Khaviar-Klian, the Bourse of Galata ; his notions of statesmanship from the charlatanism of Pera, and the expediencies of the day. Of old Turkish courage, Turkish honour, Turk- ish decorum, scarce a trace, if even a trace, will remain. A Turkish Pasha afraid to mount a horse, a high-titled Osmaulee jobbing Government lands and public works to the profit of his own pocket, a Beg the son of Begs openly drinking ' rakee ' in a street- side tavern among Greek and Armenian rabble — things little dreamt of by the Sokollis and Koprilees of former times — are now not uncommon, are now of daily occurrence, but among the StambooUee tribe. The prospects of Islam if confided to the sole guar- dianship of such as these may easily be guessed. Life- less, spiritless, regardless of everything except the c 18 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. most trifling amusemeuts, the meanest self-interest, the coarsest pleasures, with all the apathetic negli- gence of the degenerate Turk, united to all the frivolous immorality of the degenerate Perote Levan- tine ; without public spirit, without patriotism, with- out nationality ; what place can the law of the austere 'Omar, the intrepid Khalid, the generous Mu'amah, the energetic Ma'moon find in such breasts 1 How should minds like these apprehend the stem, unchanging unity of the all-ordaining, all-regulating Deity of Islam, the operosus nimis Deus, whom even Cicero recoiled from "? or how entertain one spark of the single-minded enthusiasm of the soldier-Prophet, who, having subdued an entire nation to his will, and founded an empire scarcely less vast but more lasting than that of the Csesars, left not in death where- withal to give liis o\\m body a decent burial '? In fact, were the type of modern Mahometanisra and the presage of its destinies to be sought in this class, and among these men, we might here lay aside our task, leave our friends and readers to draw their own conclusions, and for our own part subscribe to the nearest date at which — his Infallible Holiness, let us say — may choose to fix the doomsday of Islam. But this would be, in French phrase, a ' massive error,' though it is the very one to which Euro])eans, official even, are prone, led astray by the identical circum- stance which has led us to place our ' SUimboollee ' in the vanguard of the Mahometan procession, namely, his bad prominence rather than eminence. The first glance at a pool rests chiefly on the scum of the surface ; the first object that comes into view on a steeple is the weathercock. ' Stamboollees ' are but the scum of the pseudo-centralisation of that very dirty pool, tlie ca])ital, of the varnisli civilisation of Beg- I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 19 Ogloo ; they are the weathercock, an ominous one undoubtedly, but indicative only of the Westerly breeze that for some years past, sweeping over the Bosporus and the -<^gean, is now awakening a yet stronger counterblast of Easterly antagonism. But before gladly dismissing them, to pass on to other classes in the long catalogue yet before us, let us add a word to anticipate a second error that some might fall into, imagining the luilovely portrait just drawn to be so far a family one that it might stand at random for any member whatever of the present Ottoman Civil Service.. It is not so. That the 'Ka- lara,' or civil staff of the Porte, has much too large a proportion of the men above described we cannot deny ; but it contains also in its ranks, both upper and lower, numerous individuals of a very different stamp, — men whose souls know what it is to have a cause, and whose cause is their duty and their coun- try ; men of the old sturdy Osmaulee caste, not wholly imadorned by European acquirements ; men who, in Cromwell's words, ' bring a conscience to their work,' and whose conscience is that of Islam. But it is not among the ' Stambool-Effendee ' latter-day crea- tion, among the selfish, the frivolous, the emasculate set of those whose sham-Europeanism blossoms in the atmosphere of Mabille and ' cafes chantants,' of gam- bling-rooms and third-class theatres, that we must look for specimens of this better, and in the Civil Service, we say it with regret, this rarer type. They are plants of another soil ; the offspring of classes which will claim our attention further on. But they are also less prominent from a stranger's point of view ; a European may pass months and even years in Turkey, and yet rarely come across these men, or recognise them when he does. The others readily, and, as it c 2 20 MAHOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. were, by a kind of prescriptive right, obtrude them- selves on his notice, and form the staple material of his opinions and judgments. On these, with their stereotyped phrases of borrowed French about civili- sation, progress, and so forth, he is apt to build alike his hopes for Turkey and his prognostics of the eva- nescence of Islam — hopes and prognostics which, to be themselves firm, should rest on a deeper and wider basis than the ejDhemeral Stamboollee clique, or even the administration of which it forms a part. Any given bureaucracy is a page easily turned over in the history of an empire. ' The sword is a surer argument than books,' sang, in the third century of Islam, its great poet Habeeb et-Tai'ee ; and eminent as undoubtedly were the ad- ministrative qualities which for so many lustres gave the tribe of Osman the ascendency over the countless races that bowed to their dominion, yet the sword has always been their first boast and their ultimate reliance. Nor even now that the Janissaries have reddened the annals of the past with their blood, and the very names of Sipahees, Segbans, Akinjees, Le- wends, and Gunellees are almost forgotten, now that the breech-loader and the rifled cannon have sup- planted the horse-tails and lances of Varna and Mohacs ; while annual conscription and the European discipline of the Nizam, or standing army, have re- placed the fierce charge of the irregular cavalry, and the fantastic varieties of tributary and ])rovincial troops ; not even now has the Osmanlee sabre wholly lost its edge, or is it less than of old the ready servant of the ' Ghazoo,' the Holy War of Islam. During and after the Crimean war it was a common fashion to speak slightingly, sneeringly even, of the Turkish army and soldiery, and of the part they took 1.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 21 in the great struggle ; and although this tone was more marked in the leaders and among the corre- spondents of the European Daily Press than among those actively present on the scene, yet even in many of the Europeans there concerned, some of them high iu rank and command, there was a fixed disposition to consider the Osmanlee troops, army or navy, as mere cannon's meat, a half-organised, poor-spirited, unsoldierly rabble, deficient alike in discipline and courage. How far such an idea was true, or rather how far it was from all truth. Admiral Slade's faithful and unprejudiced narrative might alone suffice to show. And we may safely add, that not only they who, like the gallant admiral, were themselves art and part of the Turkish force, but those also who, present under other colours, had the best opportunities for observing with eyes undazzled by national self-glorification, and of hearing with ears undeafened by national self-ap- plause, came to no dissimilar conclusion from his. And, perhaps, should a veracious account, not one cooked up by Greek dragomans and Levantine consular agents, of the late Cretan war, ever find its way to Europe, it might prove a fair appendix to Slade's Crimean War, in spite of Mr. Skinner and the Pirsean tele- graph. But, meanwhile, leaving the historical field, where party spirit too often fights the battles o'er again in ink, with scarce less animosity than they were first fought in blood, we will have recourse to present observation ; and in the study of the materials which compose the existing Turkish army, seek a clue to a tolerable estimate of the military class itself, officers and soldiers ; after which we may judge what are the justifiable hopes or fears of Islam in this quarter. Born and bred on some green hill-side, in a wretched 22 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. single-roomed cottage, our Turkish lad, after years of hoeing and reaping, sheep-tending, donkey-driving, wood-cutting, or charcoal-burning, as the case may be, arrives at the age of twenty, or near it. One day he is summoned from his village, along with a dozen other youths of his class, to the ballot-urn of the conscription, and his lot is cast with the army for the next five years at least, probably more. Finding himself thus suddenly on the point of being separated, perhaps without hope of return, from the almost des- titute family of which he is the principal if not the only stay, our raw recruit mingles his tears and entreaties for exemption with those of his younger brothers and sisters, his aged mother, and his anxious, almost despairing relatives. But all is of no avail ; so he and his say in joint resignation theu* 'kismet' or ' God's allotment,' and Ahmed takes his place among the ragged crowd of his fellow recruits, in accoutre- ment and guise more scarecrow than any of Falstaff's corps at Coventry ; in warlike spirit, a chance observer might tliink, a fit companion for a Mouldy or a Eullcalf. Six months later we enquire in the 101st Regiment after our tattered, weeping peasant. Summoned by the ' cha'oush,' or sergeant, Ahmed answers the call ; but how different from his former self on the ballot day ! Light work, good food, comfortable lodgings — all these, relatively, of course, to what he was ac- customed to in his koilee or peasant stage of existence, have reddened his cheeks, filled out his limbs, and lighted up his once-dull eye ; a system of drill that would hardly, perhaps, pass muster at Aldershot, but which has all the practical advantages that even a R. H. Commander-in-Chief should take into account ; a practical though coarse uniform, sadly deficient, we I.] MAEOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. 23 allow, in the ingenious Western devices of bear-skins, slioiilder-straps, and heart-disease, but not, perhaps, the worse for that after all, have done their work, and transformed every movement, gait, and bearing of the clown into those of the soldier. Add, that his drill and discipline have, so far as they go, been acquired under the tutorage of a corporal whose demeanour towards him has been that of an elder to a younger brother, and beneath the eye of officers with whom kindness to their men is the rule, harsh- ness the occasional and rare exception. Democratic, communistic, as is by nature every Turk, he is doubly so in military life — round, in the old Osmanlee phrase, one caldron, under, in the more refined language of our time, one standard. Hence throughout the Turk- ish army distinctions of rank are, when off duty, frequently laid aside to a degree that would startle, and justly so, a European officer, who would, for his part, have good reason to fear the contempt bred of familiarity. Of this, however, among Eastern soldiery the danger, unless provoked by intrinsically degrading conduct, is very slight. The professional fellow-feehng which binds soldiers most of all men together is here not only broad but deep, and not only pervades rank and file, but passes upwards and downwards alike, from the general to the bandsman. But to return to our recruit. If sick he has been tended in a good bed by doctors, less learned, perhaps, than those of a Paris hospital, but also, it may be, less often unfeeling or negligent, while his hours of illness have been cheered by the easily-admitted visits of his comrades, possibly more than once of his lieutenant or captain. In barrack-quarters he has learnt orderly and cleanly habits, not, indeed, of pipeclay severity, but amply sufficient to the service and the climate, while at 24 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. all times the camp discipline, however strict in essen- tials, has been what in Europe would be called easy- going, almost to laxness in details. In a word, the man has been made comfortable mentally no less than physically, and he requites those who have made him. so by willing obedience, and a respect no less real because tempered by the confidence of attachment. At any rate, no Turkish guard-room rings to the sound of a musket discharged against an officer's head, or through the bearer's own heart ; no sergeant need fear the finding himself at a lonely corner with any private of the regiment, however armed ; and no soldier leaves behind him the ' in memoriam ' that the conduct of his captain or his colonel has driven him to despair. To this fortunate equilibrium of individual freedom, and regimental subordination, or rather to the formation of the temperament which allows and maintains it, many causes have concurred, but none more so than that one dictum of the Prophet's, ' Surely fermented liquor is a snare of the devil ; avoid it if you hope to prosper.' Pity almost that our Western code should be less stringent in this particular ; its observance would ma- terially benefit our soldiers, and our soldiers' wives and children too, let alone others. In fact, how much evil and misery this single prohibitory warning, attended to in the main, has averted from lands which would else have been very wretched, those are well aware who have have had the opportunity of contrasting an East- end Christmas or a Liverpool Saturday-night with a Mahometan ' Beyram ' or festival-day at Damascus, for example, or in Stambool itself (Pera and Galata always excepted). But it is in the army, above all, that the ill effects of strong drink, and, l)y contrast, the good effects of its absence, are most clearly seen, and justify the fore- sight of him who sought above all to ti'ain up a nation I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 25 of fighting-men ; and the temperance precept of the Koran is in general as faithfully observed by the Ma- hometan soldier as it is habitually violated by the black-coated Effendee. But with the military jacket the Osmanlee puts on also the mantle of zeal dropped by the Prophet on his best followers ; and in this zeal, whether we stigmatize it under the name of fanaticism, or decorate it as patriotic enthusiasm, lies the true secret of the strength of that young-old army ; hence its endurance, its stubborn courage ; hence its daring when worthily led, its amazing patience when neglected and thrown away. The fire of Islam may have been covered, seemingly choked, under the ashes of poverty and care, while the future soldiers were yet in their village homes ; once within roll-call the ashes are blown away, and the flame bursts forth bright as ever. Witness the annals of the army of the Danube in 1854 and 1855 ; witness what gleams of military truth have pierced the veil cast by partisanship and misrepresentation over the campaigns of Montenegro and Candia ; we oiurselves may yet live to witness more. Sober, patient, obedient, cheerful, indifferent to danger, ready for death, and a thorough-going Mahome- tan in heart and practice, such is the average Turkish private. And the officers'? It was till lately a common saying that in the Ottoman army the men were better than the officers by as much as in the Russian army the officers were better than the men. With all due allow- ance for the inaccuracy of generalisations, there is even now some truth in this one — there was formerly much more. Nor could it, indeed, be otherwise, in what concerns the Turks at least. To form an officer, still more to form a corps of officers, possessing the requisite amount of technical knowledge, perfected by apt ex- perience and animated by the true military spirit, is a 26 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. much slower work tlian to call together a body of recruits and equip them with kit and musket. IMah- mood II. could do the latter by an act of his will ; he could not do the former ; time alone could. And time is already fast doing it. Forty years since the shameful treaty of Adrianople, thirteen years of comparative leisure since the equivocal advantages of the Paris settlement, have indeed been little better than thrown away on the self-satisfied, French-phraseologising, in-e- sponsible, irreformable 'Kalam' or civil service. They have not been thrown away on the ' Kileej,' the sword, the army. Even now we recognise the hope -giving results of preliminary instruction and examination, of promotion accorded more to merit and seniority, and less to backstairs intrigue and vizierial favour; of active service in the case of some, of long camp life with others, and, in all, the energetic rivalry natural to men who, while filling a post to which they feel belong of right the highest honours of the empire, yet find themselves sunk by the present order of things into a second and subordinate category ; men capable of command, born soldiers and trained officers ; men too, with but few ex- ceptions, rarer and more anomalous every day, staunch Islam as any of the soldiers in their ranks. Closely connected with this is another feature of the Ottoman army, which, rightly considered, bears strong witness to the intensity of its Mahometanism, we mean the general absence of that systematic peculation and corruption which so widely pervade the civil service. Since the day when the Vizier Shemsoe Pasha avenged, such was his spiteful boast, the downfall of his ancestors, the Kizil-Ahmedlees, on the Ottoman dynasty, by in- oculating the latter with the corruption which he himself derived, if traditicni says true, from his great but greedy forefather Khalid Ebn-Walecd, bribery I.] MAHOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. 27 and peculation, now direct and barefaced, now disguised under the decent names of ' Bakhsheesh,' i.e. present, or 'Iltimas,' i.e. favour, have been the dry rot of the Tuikish fabric in its ahnost every joist and beam. In the military, and in the military service alone, they rarely find place. True, the minute overhauling of accounts, regimental or other, which has wisely been established in the Ottoman army, renders dishonest dealing less facile there than elsewhere ; but no control could long be efficacious were it not sustained and verified by a general spirit above unworthy doings, an honour dis- dainful of profitable stain. This spirit was that of 'Omar, of Aboo-Bikr, of Mahomet himself. The 'proud Moslem,' the ' bearded Turk that rarely deigns to speak,' and many similar phrases have become in a manner stereotyped from frequent use, and to a certain extent they represent a truth. ' No higher nobility than Islam,' says the three-foot character inscription over the main entrance of our chief mosque at Fatimahpolis ; and it is when enrolled in the ranks of the army that the MusHm thoroughly feels himself a Muslim, and acts accordingly. In the bureau and on the market-place his associations are different, and so, but too often, are his dealings also. But be he Turk or Arab, Negro or Circassian, his normal standing-ground is the camp, his truest name a soldier, and the whole honour of his heart and being is in each. ' My foot is on my native heath, and my name is MacGregor,' is but a feeble counterjjart of the ' Allaho- Akbar,' ' God and victory,' of the Mahometan onslaught. Meanwhile, earnestness gives stability, and in time of peace no men can be more orderly, more amenable, not to military discipline only, but to the customary re- straints of law and society, than Turkish soldiers. The fact, from its very generality, passes without comment. Thus it is only a few weeks since that we have seen 28 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. four thousand men who, after many weary weeks of hot autumn march from the interior across mountams rivalling the Pyrenees in height, were shipped off much after the fashion of cattle from Hamburg, or negroes from Zanzibar, to make part of the imperial holiday for the crowned quidnuncs of Europe on the Bosporus, and have now been once more disembarked in this our road- stead of Fatimahpolis, here to wait days and weeks till the intervals of winter-storm may permit them to recross the mountain wall home again. Market, street, lane, square, beach, fountain-head — all Turkish towns abound in fountain-heads, often tastefully sculptured — every place, in short, is thronged by soldiers, each with the gratuity that French and Austrian liberality or decency has bestowed, no insignificant sum for a peasant youngster to carry about with him at his own disposal. Yet not a single extra case is brought before the police courts, not a voice of quarrel or complaint is to be heard in the street; the few officers who accompany the men may sit unanxious and undisturbed in the coffee-houses ; evening after evening passes off quiet and orderly into the unbroken silence of an Eastern night ; morning dawns, and if the shops and baths are crowded, the mosques are not less so ; not one of the four thousand but turns to Mecca five times a day, in witness to the unity of God and the mission of the Prophet. The Kussian soldiers before Silistria, or beleaguered in Sebastopol, were undoubtedly devoted to their Em- peror, and zealous for the great orthodox faith. Yet their zeal and devotion required to be moistened with extra libations of Vodka, and fostered in the hot-house atmosphere of fictitious weeping Theotokoi, and under- ground communications affirmed and believed in with Petersburg and Paradise. Tlie French army adored Napoleon the Conqueror, and was jealous even to slaying I.] MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. 29 for the honour of 'la grande nation;' but for them, too, the stimulant of forty ages had to be invoked from the top of the Pyramids, and promised plunder did much before Moscow. The British troops stood their ground heroically at Waterloo, but then they had a WeUington at their head. Unliquored, unstimulated, unharangued, too often it has been unofficered, the Otto- man soldier has gone unhesitating to the death which gave new life to his empire in the days of Catherine and of Nicholas. And the sword of Islam, though rusted, has not lost its virtue. So far of the Turkish uniform, civil and military, and of the hopes thereby given to Mahometanism ; much from the military, little, if truth must be said, from the civil. Yet the future, after all, lies in the great masses, Arab, Koorde, Turk, Turkoman, and Syrian, of the Eastern empire. These masses are chiefly agricultural, owners or cultivators of the soil, and it is for that reason that we have assigned to the landed proprietors, taken in con- junction with the peasants around them, the priority of order over the two remaining classes, namely, the commercial and the learned, or legal. Manufacturing interest, properly speaking, is, our readers know, none in Turkey ; whatever manufacturing skill formerly ex- isted and even, to a certain extent, flourished, having been long since smothered well-nigh to death under the bales of printed IManchesters and other products of European machinery tha^t every steamer throws on these coasts. The artificers and craftsmen who yet survive will find place along with other townsmen in general, when we call before us, in due place, the com- mercial or trading class. But the deep and wide base of the Mahometan Levant is agricultural industiy, and it merits attentive consideration. 30 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. Landowners in all countries and at all times have been, as a rule, and still are, conservative, the earth they are possessors of seeming on its side to impart something of its own immobility to their character. Besides, men who inherit a position titled for genera- tions, and dwellings and domains Avhere their 'fore- gangers' have kinged it, perhaps for centuries, are, and not unnaturally, inclined to look down with a certain contempt, if not dislike, on recent dignities and acquisitions of comparatively ephemeral date. Such men when assumed into the body of a government give it a special solidity of character, for good as for evil. When they alone form a government it speedily passes, by petrifactive degeneration, into a Spartan oligarchy, or a Hohen Eulen-Schreckenstein principality. Now it is a peculiar feature of modern Tiurkey, and one Avhich essentially distinguishes it from its former self, that the landed classes, once so intimately blended with the militai-y, and together all-powerful in the empire, are now carefully and systematically excluded from any share whatsoever in the government. Read over the long muster list of pashas and effendees, viziers and musheers of the present day, and you will hardly find among them one in thirty who owes a name, an acre of land, or any title of recognised exist- ence to his grandfather. With exceptions far too few to be of any weight, these officials are all men of yester- day, writers, Chibookjees, ' id genus onnie,' raised by favour, by money, by intrigue, by what you will (birtli and hereditary estate excepted) to their present posi- tion. The son of a grand-vizier or of a musheer-pasha, who was himself, perhaps, the son of a house-servant or a coffee-shop keeper, is a very Stanley or Vere de Vera among them. And this, to give the tribe a retrospec- tive glance, is one reason, and not the least either, why 1.] MAHOMETANISM IN THE LEVANT. 31 conservative principles are so rare among them. As well expect sucli from the speculators of the Bourse, or the managers of the Suez Canal. This is the work of tlie too-famous reforms, or ' Tan- zeemat,' which, under the Sultans Malimood II. and 'Abdul-Mejeed, levelled in the dust the old aristocracy of Turkey, and made of the empire a tabula rasa whereon Harem-Sultans and irresponsible ministers might inscribe at will their caprices, to the multiplica- tion of Bosporus palaces and the desolation of villages and provinces. ' The Sultan has laid waste an empire to raise himself a town,' said not long since a Persian envoy at the Porte, and, though a Persian, said true. For fifty years the French-imported word 'centralisa- tion' has been the motto of Stambool policy, and the first letter in its alphabet is the suppression of pro- vincial existence by the weakening and abasement of the landed proprietors. Excluded from the official circles where government means gambling, with a weathercock for its banner, the conservative spirit has taken refuge among the agricultural population, landowners and peasants, much as what is sometimes called the fanatical, and might more properly be entitled the national or imperial, spirit has concentrated itself in the military and learned classes, the Begs and the 'Ulemah. Though not iden- tical, the conservative and the national spirit are here in close connection, and together constitute a force that, gathering intensity from the very fact of long repres- sion, may some day culminate in an earthquake that — But we are venturing into the bottomless gulf of future and prophecy ; let us make haste and draw back our foot to the solid ground of fact and present. So to horse, to horse, since Asiatic raih'oads exist as yet in concessions only, and carriage-ways are repre- 32 MAHOMETAN ISM IN THE LEVANT. [i. sented by the shortest possible 'stria' from the coast inland, and, with an outrider in front, and a baggage- horse with a servant or two behind, let us set out on our country visits for the interior of Syria, Anatolia, 'Irak, or where you will, from the murky waters of the Black Sea (odious pool !) to the glittering sands of Ghazzeh and the Syro-Egyptian frontier. Let the season of our rovings be the late spring or the early autumn. Winter travelling is always unpleasant, and we had rather, with all respect, be excused the honour of being thy companion here, British reader, when the suns of July and August are overhead. Spring, then, be it, or autumn. We have already made some hours of road, and, after the noon-day bait, under the shelter of a tree, or nestling up against the narrow strip of shadow afforded by chance wall or rock, we remount our beasts and gaze forward over a wide horizon of plain and valley, winding river-line, and endless mountain cham, unable to distmguish among the grey dust-haze of the distance even the faintest indication of the resting-place promised us by our guides and attendants for the evening. After repeated enquiry and much straining of eyesight, a darkish speck on the third, at nearest, of three bluish ridges will pro- bably be pointed out, with the further indication of a name that, after hearing half-a-dozen times repeated, we give up in despair. But the gist of the matter is, that in the village with the unpronounceable niime, or close by it, lives some Tahir-Oghloo Beg, Kara- Ibraheem-Oghloo Beg, Hasan Agha es-Soweydanee Adhem Beg, as the case may be. Of this gentleman, whatever be his personal designation, we next joyfully learn that he is a ' /i7