SPIRIT AND FLESH
The days pass, and the nights are short, and we ride southward at a brisk pace. Our dromedaries are in excellent shape -they have recently been watered, and the last two days have provided them with abundant pasture. There are still fourteen days between here and Mecca, and even more if, as is probable, we spend some time in the towns of Hail and Medina, both of which lie on our route.
An unusual impatience has taken hold of me: an urgency for which I know no explanation. Hitherto I have been wont to enjoy travelling at leisure, with no particular urge to reach my destination quickly; the days and weeks spent in journey had each of them a fulfilment of its own, and the goal always seemed to be incidental. But now I have begun to feel what I have never felt before in my years in Arabia: an impatience to reach the end of the road. What end? To see Mecca? I have been to the Holy City so often, and know its life so thoroughly, that it no longer holds out any promise of new discoveries. Or is it perhaps a new kind of discovery that I am anticipating? It must be so-for I am being drawn to Mecca by a strange, personal expectancy, as if this spiritual center of the Muslim world, with its multi-national congregation of people from all corners of the earth, were a kind of promise, a gateway to a wider world than the one in which I am now living. Not that I have grown tired of Arabia; no, I love its deserts, its towns, the ways of its people as I have always loved them: that first hint of Arabian life in the Sinai Desert some ten years ago has never been disappointed, and the succeeding years have only confirmed my original expectation: but since my night at the well two days ago, the conviction has grown within me that Arabia has given me all that it had to give.
I am strong, young, healthy I can ride for many hours at a stretch without being unduly tired. I can travel -and have been doing so for years -like a beduin, without a tent and without any of the small comforts which the townspeople of Najd often regard as indispensable on long desert journeys. I am at home in all the little crafts of beduin life, and have adopted, almost imperceptibly, the manners and habits of a Najdi Arab. But is this all there is to be? Have I lived so long in Arabia only to become an Arab? -or was it perhaps a preparation for something that is yet to come?
The impatience which I now feel is somehow akin to the turbulent impatience I experienced when I returned to Europe after my first journey to the Near East: the feeling of having been forced to stop short of a tremendous revelation that could have revealed itself to me if only there had been more time...
The initial impact of crossing from the Arabian world back into Europe had been somewhat softened by the months spent in Turkey after I had left Syria in the autumn of 1923. Mustafa Kemal's Turkey had in those days not yet entered into its 'reformist', imitative phrase; it was still genuinely Turkish in its life and traditions and thus, because of the unifying bond of its Islamic faith, was still related to the general tenor of Arabian life: but Turkey's inner rhythm seemed somehow heavier, less transparent, less airy -and more Occidental. When I travelled overland from Istanbul to Sofia and Belgrade there was no abrupt transition from East to West; the images changed gradually, one element receding and another imperceptibly taking its place the minarets growing fewer and farther between, the long kaftans of the men giving way to belted peasant blouses, the scattered trees and groves of Anatolia merging into Serbian fir forests -until suddenly, at the Italian frontier, I found myself back in Europe.
As I sat in the train that was taking me from Trieste to Vienna, my recent impressions of Turkey began to lose all their vividness and the only reality that remained was the eighteen months I had spent in Arab countries. It almost gave me a shock to realize that I was looking upon the once so familiar European scenery with the eyes of a stranger. The people seemed so ugly, their movements angular and clumsy, with no direct relationship to what they really felt and wanted: and all at once I knew that in spite of the outward appearance of purpose in all they did they were living, without being aware of it, in a world of make believe... Obviously, my contact with the Arabs had utterly, irretrievably changed my approach to what I considered essential in life; and it was with something like astonishment that I remembered that other Europeans had experienced Arabian life before me; how was it possible, then, that they had not experienced this same shock of discovery? Had perhaps one or another of them been as shaken to his depths as I was now...?
(It was years later, in Arabia, that I received an answer to this question: it came from Dr. Van der Meulen, then Dutch Minister at Jidda. A man of wide and many-sided culture, he clung to his Christian faith with a fervor nowadays rare among Westerners and was thus, understandably, not a friend of Islam as a religion. None the less, he confessed to me, he loved Arabia more than any other country he had known, not excepting his own: When his service in the Hijaz was approaching its end, he once said to me: 'I believe no sensitive person can ever remain immune to the enchantment of Arabian life, or pull it out of his heart after living among the Arabs for a time. When one goes away, one will forever carry within oneself the atmosphere of this desert land, and will always look back to it with longing even if one's home is in richer, more beautiful regions...'
I stopped for a few weeks in Vienna and celebrated a reconciliation with my father. By now he had got over his anger at my abandonment of my university studies and the unceremonious manner in which I had left his roof. After all, I was now a correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung -a name that people in Central Europe used to pronounce almost with awe in those days and had thus justified my boastful claim that I would 'come out on top'.
From Vienna I proceeded straight to Frankfurt to present myself in person to the newspaper for which I had been writing for well over a year. I did this with a great deal of self-assurance, for the letters from Frankfurt had made it evident that my work was appreciated; and it was with a feeling of having definitely 'arrived' that I entered the somber, old-fashioned edifice of the Frankfurter Zeitung and sent up my card to the editor-in-chief, the internationally famous Dr. Heinrich Simon. When I came in, he looked at me for a moment in speechless astonishment, almost forgetting to get up from his chair; but soon he regained his composure, rose and shook hands with me: 'Sit down, sit down. I have been expecting you.' But he continued to stare at me in silence until I began to feel uncomfortable. 'Is there anything wrong, Dr. Simon?'
'No, no, nothing is wrong -or, rather, everything is wrong...' And then he laughed and went on: 'I somehow had expected to meet a man of middle age with gold-rimmed spectacles -and now I find a boy... oh, I beg your pardon; how old are you, anyway?'
I suddenly recalled the jovial Dutch merchant in Cairo who had asked me the same question the year before; and I burst out laughing:
'I am over twenty-three, sir -nearly twenty-four.' And then I added: 'Do you find it too young for the Frankfurter Zeitung?'
'No...' replied Simon slowly, 'not for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but for your articles. I somehow took it for granted that only a much older man would be able to overcome his natural desire for self-assertion and leave his own personality, as you have been doing, entirely in the background of his writings. That, as you know, is the secret of mature journalism: to write objectively about what you see and hear and think without relating those experiences directly to your own, personal experiences ... On the other hand, now that I think of it, only a very young man could have written with so much enthusiasm, so much -how shall I say -so much thrill...' Then he sighed: 'I do hope that it doesn't wear off and you don't become as smug and jaded as the rest of them...'
The discovery of my extreme youth seemed to have strengthened Dr. Simon's conviction that he had found in me a highly promising correspondent; and he fully agreed that I should return to the Middle East as soon as possible -the sooner the better.
My work at the Frankfurter Zeitung gave a strong impetus to my conscious thinking. With greater clarity than ever before, I began to relate my Eastern experiences to the Western world of which I was once again a part. Just as some months earlier I had discovered a connection between the emotional security of the Arabs and the faith they professed, it now began to dawn upon me that Europe's lack of inner integration and the chaotic state of its ethics might be an outcome of its loss of contact with the religious faith that had shaped Western civilization.
Here, I saw, was a society in search of a new spiritual orientation after it had abandoned God: but apparently very few Westerners realized what it was all about. The majority seemed to think, consciously or subconsciously, more or less along these lines: 'Since our reason, our scientific experiments and our calculations do not reveal anything definite about the origin of human life and its destinies after bodily death, we ought to concentrate all our energies on the development of our material and intellectual potential and not allow' ourselves to be hampered by transcendental ethics and moral postulates based on assumptions which defy scientific proof.' Thus, while Western society did not expressly deny God, it simply no longer had room for Him in its intellectual system.
In earlier years, after I had become disappointed with the religion of my ancestors, I had given some thought to Christianity. In my eyes, the Christian concept of God was infinitely superior to that of the Old Testament in that it did not restrict God's concern to anyone group of people but postulated His Fatherhood of all mankind. There was, however, an element in the Christian religious view that detracted from the universality of its approach: the distinction it made between the soul and the body, the world of faith and the world of practical affairs.
Owing to its early divorce from all tendencies aiming at an affirmation of life and of worldly endeavors, Christianity, I felt, had long ceased to provide a moral impetus to Western civilization. Its adherents had grown accustomed to the idea that it was not the business of religion to 'interfere' with practical life; they were content to regard religious faith as a soothing convention, meant to foster no more than a vague sense of personal morality -especially sexual morality -in individual men and women. In this they were assisted by the age-old attitude of a Church which, in pursuance of the principle of a division between 'that which is God's and that which is Caesar's', had left the entire field of social and economic activities almost untouched -with the result that Christian politics and business had developed in a direction entirely different from all that Christ had envisaged. In not providing its fol1owers with a concrete guidance in worldly affairs, the religion which the Western world professed had failed in what, to me, appeared to have been the true mission of Christ and, indeed, the cardinal task of every religion: to show man not merely how to feel but also how to live rightly. With an instinctive feeling of having been somehow let down by his religion, Western man had, over the centuries, lost all his real faith in Christianity; with the loss of this faith, he had lost the conviction that the universe was an expression of one Planning Mind and thus formed one organic whole; and because he had lost that conviction, he was now living in a spiritual and moral vacuum.
In the West's gradual falling away from Christianity I saw a revolt against the Pauline life-contempt that had so early, and so completely, obscured the teachings of Christ. How, then, could Western society still claim to be a Christian society? And how could it hope, without a concrete faith, to overcome its present moral chaos?
A world in upheaval and convulsion: that was our Western world. Bloodshed, destruction, violence on an unprecedented scale; the breakdown of so many social conventions, a clash of ideologies, an embittered, all-round fight for new ways of life: these were the signs of our time. Out of the smoke and the shambles of a world war, innumerable smaller wars and a host of revolutions and counter-revolutions, out of economic disasters that transcended anything until then recorded: out of all these tremendous happenings emerged the truth that the present-day Western concentration on material, technical progress could never by itself resolve the existing chaos into something resembling order. My instinctive, youthful conviction that 'man does not live by bread alone' crystallized into the intellectual conviction that the current adoration of 'progress' was no more than a weak, shadowy substitute for an earlier faith in absolute values a pseudo-faith devised by people who had lost all inner strength to believe in absolute values and were now deluding themselves with the belief that somehow, by mere evolutionary impulse, man would outgrow his present difficulties... I did not see how any of the new economic systems that stemmed from this illusory faith could possibly constitute more than a palliative for Western society's misery: they could, at best, cure some of its symptoms, but never the cause.
While I worked on the editorial staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung, I paid frequent visits to Berlin, where most of my friends resided.
Ever since man began to think, the desert has been the cradle of all his beliefs in One God. True, even in softer environments and more favorable climes have men had, time and again, an inkling of His existence and oneness, as, for instance, in the ancient Greek concept of Moira, the indefinable Power behind and above the Olympian gods: but such concepts were never more than the outcome of a vague feeling, a divining rather than certain knowledge -until the knowledge broke forth with dazzling certainty to men of the desert and from out of the desert. It was from a burning thorn bush in the desert of Midian that the voice of God rang out to Moses; it was in the wilderness of the Judean desert that Jesus received the message of the Kingdom of God; and it was in the cave of Hira, in the desert hills near Mecca, that the first call came to Muhammad of Arabia.
It came to him in that narrow, dry gorge between rocky hills, that naked valley burnt by the desert sun -an all-embracing Yes to life, both of the spirit and of the flesh: the call that was destined to give form and purpose to a formless nation of tribes and, through it, to spread within a few decades, like a flame and a promise, westward as far as the Atlantic Ocean and eastward to the Great Wall of China: destined to remain a great spiritual power to this day, more than thirteen centuries-later, outliving all political decay, outlasting even the great civilization which it brought into being: the, call that came to the Prophet of Arabia...
The night is near to morning. The fire has died down entirely. Rolled in his blanket sleeps Zayd; our dromedaries lie motionless, like two mounds of earth. The stars are still visible, and you might think there is still time to sleep: but low on the eastern sky there appears, palely born out of the darkness, a faint streak of light above another, darker streak that lies over the horizon: twin heralds of dawn, time of the morning prayer.
Obliquely over me I see the morning star, which the Arabs call Az-Zuhra, 'The Shining One'. If you ask them about it, they will tell you that The Shining One was once a woman...
There were once two angels, Harut and Marut, who forgot to be humble, as it behoves angels to be, and boasted of their invincible purity: 'We are made of light; we are above all sin and desire, unlike the weak sons of man, sons of a mother's dark womb.' But they forgot that their purity had not come from their own strength, for they were pure only because they knew no desire and had never been called upon to resist it. Their arrogance displeased the Lord, and He said to them: 'Go down to earth and stand your test there.' The proud angels went down to earth and wandered, clothed in human bodies, among the sons of man. And on the very first night they came upon a woman whose beauty was so great that people called her The Shining One. When the two angels looked at her with the human eyes and feelings they now had, they became confused and, just as if they had been sons of man, the desire to possess her arose in them. Each of them said to her: 'Be willing unto me' but the Shining One answered: 'There is a man to whom I belong; if you want me, you must free me of-him.' And they slew the man; and with the unjustly spilt blood still on their hands, they satisfied their burning lust with the woman. But as soon as the desire left them, the two erstwhile angels became aware that on their first night on earth they had sinned twofold -in murder and fornication -and that there had been no sense in their pride ... And the Lord said: 'Choose between punishment in this world and punishment in the Hereafter.' In their bitter remorse, the fallen angels chose punishment in this world: and the Lord ordained that they be suspended on chains between heaven and earth and remain thus suspended until the Day of Judgment as a warning to angels and men that all virtue destroys itself if it loses humility. But as no human eye can see angels, God changed The Shining One into a star in the heavens so that people might always see her and, remembering her story remember the fate of Harut and Marut. The outline of this legend is much older than Islam; it seems to have originated in one of the many myths which the ancient Semites wove around their goddess Ishtar, the Grecian Aphrodite of later days, both of whom were identified with the planet we now call Venus. But in the form. in which I heard it, the story of Harut and Marut is a typical creation of the Muslim mind, an illustration of the idea that abstract purity, or freedom from sin, can have no moral meaning so long as it is based on a mere absence of urges and desires: for is not the recurrent necessity of choosing between right and wrong the premise of all morality?
Poor Harut and Marut did not know this. Because as angels they had never been exposed to temptation, they had considered themselves pure and morally far above man -not realizing that the denial of the 'legitimacy' of bodily urges would indirectly imply a denial of all moral value in human endeavors: for it is only the presence of urges, temptations and conflicts -the possibility of choice -which makes man, and him alone, into a moral being: a being endowed with a soul.
It is on the basis of this conception that Islam, alone among all higher religions, regards the soul of man as one aspect of his 'personality' and not as an independent phenomenon in its own right. Consequently, to the Muslim, man's spiritual growth is inextricably bound up with all the other aspects of his nature. Physical urges are an integral part of this nature: not the result of an 'original sin' -a concept foreign to the ethics of Islam but positive, God-given forces, to be accepted and sensibly used as such: hence, the problem for man is not how to suppress the demands of his body but, rather, how to co-ordinate them with the demands of his spirit in such a way that life might become full and righteous.
The root of this almost monistic life-assertion is to be found in the Islamic view that man's original nature is essentially good. Contrary to the Christian idea that man is born sinful, or the teaching of Hinduism that he is originally low and impure and must painfully stagger through a long chain of incarnations toward the ultimate goal of perfection, the Koran says: Verily, We create man in a perfect state -a state of purity that play be destroyed only by subsequent wrong behavior –and thereupon We reduce him to the lowest of low, with the exception of those who have faith in God and do good works.
3THE PALM ORCHARDS of Hail lie before us.
We halt by the side of an old, ruined watchtower to prepare ourselves for our entry into the town; for old Arabian custom, always concerned with personal aesthetics, demands of the traveler that he enter a town in his best attire, fresh and clean as if he had just mounted his dromedary. And so we utilize our remaining water for washing our hands and faces, clip our neglected beards and pull our whitest tunics from the saddlebags. We brush the weeks of desert dust from our abayas and from the gaily-colored tassels of our saddlebags, and dress our camels in their best finery; and now we are ready to present ourselves in Hail.
This town is far more Arabian than, say, Baghdad or Medina; it does not contain any elements from non-Arab countries and peoples; it is pure and unadulterated like a bowl of freshly drawn milk. No foreign dress is visible in the bazaar, only loose Arabian abayas, kufiyyas and igals. The streets are much cleaner than those in any other city of the Middle East -cleaner, even, than any other town in Najd, which is noted for its un-Eastern cleanliness (probably because the people of this land, having always been free, have retained a greater measure of self-respect than elsewhere in the East). The houses, built of horizontal layers of packed mud, are in good repair -with the exception of the demolished city walls which bear witness to the last war between Ibn Saud and the House of Ibn Rashid and of Ibn Saud's conquest of the town in 1921.
The hammers of the coppersmiths pound into shape all manner of vessels, the saws of the carpenters bite shriekingly into wood, shoemakers tap the soles of sandals. Camels loaded with fuel and skins full of butter make their way through the crowds; other camels, brought in by beduins for sale, fill the air with their bellowing. Gaudy saddlebags from Al-Hasa are being fingered by experienced hands. The auctioneers, an ever-recurring fixture in any Arabian town, move up and down the bazaar and, with loud cries, offer their goods for sale. Here and there you can see hunting falcons jumping up and down on their wooden perches, tethered by thin leather thongs. Honey-colored saluqi hounds stretch their graceful Limbs lazily-in the sun. Thin beduins in worn abayas, well-dressed servants and bodyguards of the amir-almost all of them from the southern provinces mingle with traders from Baghdad, Basra and Kuwayt and the natives of Hail. These natives -that is, the men, for of the women you see hardly more than .the black abaya which conceals head and body -belong to one of the most handsome races in the world. All the grace of appearance and movement to which the Arab nation has ever attained seems to be embodied in this tribe of Shammar, of which the pre-Islamic poets sang: 'In the highlands live the men of steel and the proud, chaste women.'
When we arrive before the amir's castle, where we intend to spend the next two days, we find our host holding court in the open outside the castle gates. Amir Ibn Musaad belongs to the Jiluwi branch of the House of Ibn Saud and is a brother-in-law of the King. One of the most powerful of the King's governors, he is called 'Amir of the North' because he holds sway not only over the Jabal Shammar province but over the whole of northern Najd up to the confines of Syria and Iraq -an area almost as large as France.
The amir (who is an old friend of mine) and a few beduin shaykhs from the steppes are sitting on the long, narrow brick bench built along the castle wall. In a long row at their feet crouch Ibn Musaad's rajajil, the men-at-arms with rifles and silver-sheathed scimitars who never leave him throughout the day, not so much for protection as for prestige; next to them, the falconers with their birds perched on gloved fists, lower servants, beduins, a throng of retainers, great and small, down to the stable boys -all feeling equal to one another as men in spite of the differences in their stations. And how could it be otherwise in this land where you never address anyone as 'my lord,' except God in prayer? Facing them in a large semicircle squat the many beduins and townspeople who are bringing their complaints and quarrels before the amir for settlement.
We make our camels lie down outside the circle, hand them over to the care of a couple of retainers who have rushed over to us and proceed toward the amir. He rises; and all who havebeen sitting by his side on the bench and on the ground before him rise with him. He stretches his hand toward us:
"Ahlan wa-sahlan -and may God grant you life!'
I kiss the amir on the tip of his nose and his forehead, and he kisses me on both cheeks and pulls me to the bench by his side.
Zayd finds a place among the rajajil. Ibn Musaad introduces me to his other guests; some of the faces are new to me and some are familiar from previous years. Among these is Ghadhban ibn Rimal, supreme shaykh of the Sinjara Shammar -that delightful old warrior whom I always call 'uncle'. Nobody would guess from his almost tattered appearance that he is one of the mightiest chieftains of the North, and has so loaded his young wife with gold and jewels that, according to popular belief, two slave maidens have to support her when she wants to leave her huge tent which rests on sixteen poles. His eyes twinkle as he embraces me and whispers into mv ear:
'No new wife yet?' -to which I can only reply with a smile and a shrug. Amir Ibn Musaad must have overheard this quip, for he laughs aloud and says: 'It is coffee and not wives that a tired traveler needs' -and calls out, 'Qahwa I'
'Qahwal' repeats the servant nearest the amir; and the one at the farthest end of the row takes up the call, 'Qahwa I' -and so on until the ceremonious command reaches the castle gate and re-echoes from within. In no time a servant appears bearing the traditional brass coffeepot in his left hand and several small cups in his right hand, pours out the first for the amir, the second for me, and then serves the other guests in the order of their rank. The cup is refilled once or twice, and when a guest indicates he has had enough, it is filled again and passed on to the next man.
The amir is apparently curious to know the results of my journey to the frontier of Iraq, but he betrays his interest only in brief questions as to what befell me on the way, reserving a fuller enquiry until we are alone. Then he resumes the judicial hearing which my arrival has interrupted.
Such an informal court of justice would be inconceivable in the West. The amir, as ruler and judge, is of course assured of all respect -but there is no trace of subservience in the respect which the beduins show him. Each of the plaintiffs and defendants proudly rests in the consciousness of his free humanity; their gestures are not hesitant, their voices are often loud and assertive and everyone speaks to the amir as to an elder brother, calling him -as is beduin custom with the King himself -by his first name and not by his title. There is no trace of haughtiness in Ibn Musaad's bearing. His handsome face with its short, black beard, his middle-sized, somewhat stocky figure speak of that unstudied self-restraint and easy dignity which in Arabia so often goes hand-in-hand with great power. He is grave and curt. With authoritative words he immediately decides the simpler cases and refers the more complicated-ones, which require learned jurisprudence, to the qadi of the district.
It is not easy to be the supreme authority in a great beduin region. An intimate knowledge of the various tribes, family relationships, leading personalities, tribal grazing areas, past history and present idiosyncrasies is needed to hit upon the correct solution in the excited complexity of a beduin plaint. Tact of heart is as important here as sharpness of intellect, and both must work together with needle-point precision in order to avoid a mistake: for in the same way as beduins never forget a favour done to them, they never forget a judicial decision which they consider unjust. On the other hand, a just decision is almost always accepted with good grace even by those against whom it has gone. Ibn Musaad measures up to these requirements probably better than any other of Ibn Saud's amirs; he is so rounded, so quiet and so without inner contradictions that his instinct almost always shows him the right way whenever his reason reaches a dead end. He is a swimmer in life; he lets himself be borne by the waters and masters them by adapting himself to them.
Two ragged beduins are now presenting their quarrel before him with excited words and gestures. Beduins are, as a rule, difficult to deal with; there is always something unpredictable in them, a sensitive excitability which knows no compromise -always heaven and hell close to each other. But now I can see how Ibn Musaad parts their seething passions and smoothes them with his quiet words. One might think he would order the one to be silent while the other pleads for what he claims to be his right: but no -he lets them talk both at the same time, outshout each other, and only occasionally steps in with a little word here and a question there -to be immediately submerged in their passionate arguments; he gives in, and seemingly retreats, only to cut inagain a little later with an appropriate remark. It is an entrancing spectacle, this adaptation of the judge's own mind to a reality so conflictingly interpreted by two angry men: not so much a search for truthinajuridicalsenseas the slowunveiling ofahidden, objective reality. The amir approaches this goal by fits and starts, draws out the truth, as if by a thin string, slowly and patiently, almostimperceptiblyto bothplaintiffanddefendantuntil they suddenly stop, look at each other in puzzlement, and .realize: judgment has been delivered -a judgment so obviously just that it requires no further explanation ... Whereupon one of the two stands up hesitantly, straightens his abaya and tugs his erstwhile opponent by the sleeve in an almost friendly manner: 'Come' -and both retreat, still somewhat bewildered and at the same time relieved, mumbling the blessing of peace over the amir,
The scene is wonderful, a real piece of att: a prototype, it
seemsto me, of thatfruitful collaborationbetweenjurisprudence
and justice which in Western courts and parliaments is still in its
infancy -but stands here in all its perfection in the dusty market
square before the castle of an Arab amir ...
Ibn Musaad, reclining indolently against the mud wall, takes up the next case. His face, strong, furrowed, looking out of deepset eyes which warm and pierce, is the face of a real leader of men, a masterly representative of the greatest quality of his race: common sense of the heart.
Some of the others present obviously feel a similar admiration. A man sitting on the ground before me -he is a beduin of the tribe of Harb and one of the amir's men-at-arms -cranes his neck up toward me with a smile on his face:
'Is he not like that sultan of whom Mutannabi says,
I met him when his gleaming sword was sheathed, I saw him when it streamed with blood, And always found him best of all mankind: But best ofall in him was still his noble mind . .. ?
It does not strike me as incongruous to hear an unlettered beduin quote verses of a great Arabian poet who lived in the tenth century -certainly not as incongruous as it would have been to hear a Bavarian peasant quote Goethe or an English stevedore SPIRIT AND FLESH 153
William Blake or Shelley. For, despite the more general spread of education in the West, the highlights of Western culture are not really shared by the average European or American -while, on the other hand, very wide segments of uneducated and sometimes even illiterate Muslims do share consciously, daily, in the cultural achievements of their past. Just as this beduin here has been able to call to mind an appropriate verse from Mutannabi to illustrate a situation of which he was a witness, many a ragged Persian without schooling -a water carrier, a porter in a bazaar, a soldier in an outlying frontier post -carries in his memory innumerable verses of Hafiz or Jami or Firdawsi and weaves them with evident enjoyment into his everyday conversation. Although they have largely lost that creativeness which made their cultural heritage so great, these Muslim people have even now a direct, living contact with its summits.
I STILL REMEMBER THE DAY when I made this discovery in the bazaar of Damascus. I was holding in my hands a vessel, a large bowl of baked clay. It had a strangely solemn shape: big and round, like a somewhat flattened sphere of almost musical proportions; out of the roundness of its wall, which had in it the tenderness of a woman's cheek, two handles bent outward in perfect curves that would have done honor to a Greek amphora. They had been kneaded by hand; I could still discern the fingerprints of a humble potter in the clay. Around the vessel's inward turned rim he had etched with swift, sure strokes of his stylus a delicate arabesque like the hint of a 'rose garden in bloom. He had been working quickly, almost negligently when he created this splendid simplicity which bought to mind all the glories of Saljuk and Persian pottery one so admires in the museums of Europe: for he had not intended to create a work of art. All that he was making was a cooking-pot -nothing but a cooking-pot, such as a fellah or beduin can buy any day in any bazaar for a few copper coins...
I knew the Greeks had created similar or even greater perfection, probably in cooking-pots as well: for they, too -water carrier and market porter, soldier and potter -had truly shared in a culture that
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