Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/150

134 "Slave," called the master of the house, "quickly bring in a bowl of food—a student has come!"

To enter the university one need only know al-lugha sufficiently to be able to read the Koran. This higher institution will give him the rest of his education, imparting this wisdom in the most primitive way. The professor sits on a slightly raised dais and does all his teaching from memory alone, reciting passages from the Koran and from the law, or shariat. The students listen to the words of the professor and endeavor to memorize them, often loudly repeating the verses after him but never making any notes or using the manuscripts or books which lie decaying in the libraries. Thus everything depends upon the memory and industrious attention of the student.

The first step in tire teaching program deals with the theology of Islam and its traditions as set forth in the Hadith, which is in reality an extra-Koran collection of the words of the Prophet that were recorded in the minds of his contemporaries and handed down to posterity as a compendium of the accounts of his life and of his judgments on the phenomena of earthly existence. Following this the students are instructed in the laws of the Koran and of morality, in rhetoric, in the recitation of the ritual, in the grammar of al-lugha, in religious literature and madih, or sacred poetry, in metaphysics, in logic, in astrology, in the magic appertaining to the name sof Allah and to figures, in the mysterious science of the manufacture of talismans, in the influence of good and bad spirits upon the fate of man, in the principles of medicine, in the