Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/270

Rh 250 A II A B I A Orthodox sects. Dart of the Eastern World. Besides the principal mosque, or &quot;iamia&quot; for Friday prayers, indispensable in every town or vilaW, smaller praying-places, or mesjids, are erected in every quarter. These buildings are mere oblong rooms, flat-roo fed, supported on numerous rough pillars placed close to each other, and with no architectural or decorative beauty whatever; but are kept scrupulously clean, and laid down partly with mats, partly gravel In most cases there is no minaret attached, the times of prayer being merely announced by the &quot; miieddin,&quot; or crier, from the roof itself. Punctuality in attendance is enforced by the &quot; niutowwas,&quot; or &quot; ccinpeilers&quot; of &quot; obedience/ a set of self-elected zealots, who parade the towns and villages with sticks in their hands, take note of the defaulters from prayers, or transgressors otherwise of the letter of- the law, and punish them with reproaches or even blows. Marriage, divorce, inheritance, purchase, every detail of life is regulated in exact accordance with the Koran ; even conversation is liable to censure unless thickly interlarded with words of religious import ; while after night-prayers talking is a luxury prohibited altogether. Yet, though these Wahhabee Arabs are bigoted even to fanaticism among themselves and with their fellow-countrymen, they are remarkably tolerant towards strangers, and often unite with the extreme of theoretical exclusiveness a good deal of the practical scepticism and indifference common to their race. These Wahhabees all belong to the orthodox sect of Ebn-Hanbal. and are in fact its most exaggerated expres sion. In the eastern provinces, Hasa, Katee, Bahreyn, and Katar, the Malikee sect is more common; as also, it is said, in Hadramaiit, and in some parts of Yemen. But in Yemen generally, and throughout the Hejaz. the Shafeyee sect, orthodox like the two others, predominates. There are no Hanefees in Arabia, except a few Turks or Indians settled on the western coast. &quot; Shee ah,&quot; too, or votaries of Ali and his family, in the Persian sense of the word, are by no means common in the peninsula, and where found are often of foreign origin. But all along the Persian Gulf, in Hasa, Bahreyn, and Katar, a considerable proportion of the inhabitants are not Mahometans at all, that is, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, but &quot; Khowarij,&quot; or &quot; seceders,&quot; belonging to the Karmathian school already mentioned; while in Oman, the little peninsula or cape of Ras-el-Rheymah excepted, where Wahhabeeism has made good its footing, the bulk of the people belong to the Beyadee or Abadee sect, a Karmathian offshoot nearly allied in doctrines and in practice to the &quot;Ismaileeyah&quot; of Syria. For a detailed account of either the reader may with advantage consult Silvestre de Sacy s admirable treatise on the &quot; Batineeyah,&quot; or secret sects of the Mahometan East, prefixed to his History of the Druses. Somewhat akin to these, but of a less marked divergence from orthodox Islam, are the Zeydees, of whom great numbers exist in Yemen. Lastly, paganism, or rather the fetichism that takes for its scope a stone, tree, or some other natural object, appears to exist in Mahrah, in the southern Jowf, and in various small half-isolated spots on the borders of the great desert, or Dahna. Vestiges of Sabaism, or the worship of the heavenly bodies, are said to linger among the wilder Bedouin tribes, who even yet compute the year from the rising of Soheyl or Canopus, and prostrate themselves to the morning sun. It is also noticeable that even such of the southern Arabs as are professedly Mahometan, are far less zealous and much laxer in their ways than the Arabs of the north: in fact, the Islam of the latter was indigenous, that of the former acquired or compulsory. Except in a few places on the west coast long exposed to Egyptian, Turkish, and Indian influences, no dervishes are to be met with, or are even tolerated, in Arabia proper. Abser.ee of The Wahhabees all hold them in the utmost contempt and sypersti- abhorrence. Nor are Arabs, generally speaking, super stitious in other respects : of dreams and omens they make little account; nor does the apprehension of ghosts, spectres, apparitions, demons, and the like often disquiet their hours of loneliness or darkness ; stories of such a character, though embodied here and there in Arab literature, in the Thousand and One lights for example, are less frequently of Arab than of foreign origin, generally Persian. Nor do Arabs often seek to convert others, except it be their own purchased negro slaves, a facile acquisition, to Mahometan- ism, or molest those of other religions. Jews exist undis turbed in great numbers near Teyma and in the south; Hindoos worship cows and burn their dead without inter ference in Oman; only old ciistom, it would seem, and the memory of long and bitter wars, prohibits the practice of the Christian religion in Arabia proper, Aden alone, of course, where the British flag proclaims absolute tolerance, excepted. Slavery is still, as of old times, a recognised institution Slavery, throughout Arabia ; and an active traffic in blacks is carried on along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the. Red Sea, but especially the former. The slaves themselves are chiefly brought from the east African coast districts down as far as Zanzibar, and from the Galla tribes in the interior; a few Abyssinians, too, are sometimes imported. Slaves are usually employed in Arabia as herdsmen or as domestic servants, rarely in agricultural works ; they also form a considerable portion of the body guards with which Eastern greatness loves to surround itself. Like their countrymen elsewhere, they readily embrace the religion of their masters, and become zealous Mahometans, though rarely according to knowledge. Arab custom enfranchises a slave who has accepted Islam at the end of seven years of bondage ; and when that period has arrived, the master, instead of exacting from his slave the price of freedom, generally, on giving him his liberty, adds the requisite means for supporting himself and a family in comfort. Further, on every important occasion, such as a birth, circumcision, a marriage, or a death, one or more of the household slaves are sure of acquiring their freedom. Hence it comes that Arabia is densely sprinkled with a free black population ; and these again, by intermarriage with the whites around, have filled the land with a mulatto breed of every shade, till, in the eastern and southern pro vinces especially, a white skin is almost an exception. This has taken place all the more readily that in Arabia there exists no prejudice against negro alliances ; no social or political line separates the African from the Arab. A negro may become a sheykh, a kadee, an emeer, or what ever his industry and his talents may render him capable of being. This occurs frequently, particularly in Nejd, Yemen, and Hadramaut ; in the Hejaz and the north, on the contrary, a faint line of demarcation may be observed between the races. Both town and village Arabs are, as a rule, serious in Character, gait and demeanour, and very observant of politeness, not only in the manner, but even in the substance of their conversation. In temper, or at least in the manifestation of it, they are studiously calm : and an Arab rarely so much as raises his voice in a dispute. He prides himself on an unruffled exterior, and will bear much with careful seeming calm that would drive a European to the extreme of impatience and rage. But this outward tranquillity covers feelings alike keen and permanent ; and the remem brance of a rash jest or injurious word, uttered years before, is too often the cause of violence and bloodshed. Besides, however, the individual shades of character, there exist marked tribal or almost semi-national diver-