The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yezdi by Richard F. Burton
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Richard F. Burton >> The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yezdi
--Lives
Lived in obedience to the inner law
Which cannot alter.
[1] The Eternal Gardener: so the old inscription saying:--
locatus est in
Homo damnatus est in horto
humatus est in
renatus est in
NOTE II
A few words concerning the Kasidah itself. Our Haji begins with a
_mise-en-scene_; and takes leave of the Caravan setting out for
Mecca. He sees the "Wolf's tail" (_Dum-i-gurg_), the {Greek:
lykauges}, or wolf-gleam, the Diluculum, the Zodiacal dawn-light,
the first faint brushes of white radiating from below the Eastern
horizon. It is accompanied by the morning-breath (_Dam-i-Subh_),
the current of air, almost imperceptible except by the increase
of cold, which Moslem physiologists suppose to be the early
prayer offered by Nature to the First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biyaban
(Desert-Demon) is evidently the personification of man's fears
and of the dangers that surround travelling in the wilds. The
"wold-where-none-save-He (Allah)-can-dwell" is a great and
terrible wilderness (_Dasht-i-la-siwa Hu_); and Allah's Holy Hill
is Arafat, near Mecca, which the Caravan reaches after passing
through Medina. The first section ends with a sore lament that
the "meetings of this world take place upon the highway of
Separation"; and the original also has:--
The chill of sorrow numbs my thought:
methinks I hear the passing knell;
As dies across yon thin blue line
the tinkling of the Camel-bell.
The next section quotes the various aspects under which Life
appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First
comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with
Shab-i-tarik o bim-i-mauj, etc. Hur is the plural of Ahwar, in
full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where
they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly
"Houries." Follows Umar-i-Khayyam, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or
Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualized Moslem
Puritanism. The verses alluded to are:--
You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse
I made a second marriage in my house,
Divorced old barren Reason from my bed
And took the Daughter of the Vine to spouse.
(St. 60, Mr. Fitzgerald's translation.)
Here "Wine" is used in its mystic sense of entranced Love for the
Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly
when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third
quotation has been trained into a likeness of the "Hymn of Life,"
despite the commonplace and the _navrante vulgarite_ which
characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same
has been done to the words of Isa (Jesus); for the author, who is
well-read in the Ingil (Evangel), evidently intended the
allusion. Mansur el-Hallaj (the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned for
crudely uttering the Pantheistic dogma _Ana 'l Hakk_ (I am the
Truth, _i.e._, God), _wa laysa fi-jubbati il' Allah_ (and within
my coat is nought but God). His blood traced on the ground the
first-quoted sentence. Lastly, there is a quotation from
"Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes," etc.: here {Greek: paize}
may mean sport; but the context determines the kind of sport
intended. The Zahid is the literal believer in the letter of the
Law, opposed to the Soofi, who believes in its spirit: hence the
former is called a Zahiri (outsider), and the latter a Batini, an
insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and
punishments. As regards the "two Eternities," Persian and Arab
metaphysicians split Eternity, _i.e._, the negation of Time, into
two halves, _Azal_ (beginninglessness) and _Abad_ (endlessness);
both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective
significance. In English we use "Eternal" (_Aeviternus_,
age-long, life-long) as loosely, by applying it to three distinct
ideas; (1) the habitual, in popular parlance; (2) the exempt from
duration; and (3) the everlasting, which embraces all duration.
"Omniscience-Maker" is the old Roman sceptic's _Homo fecit Deos_.
The next section is one long wail over the contradictions, the
mysteries, the dark end, the infinite sorrowfulness of all
existence, and the arcanum of grief which, Luther said, underlies
all life. As with Euripides "to live is to die, to die is to
live." Haji Abdu borrows the Hindu idea of the human body. "It is
a mansion," says Menu, "with bones for its beams and rafters;
with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for
cement; with skin for its outer covering; filled with no sweet
perfume, but loaded with impurities; a mansion infested by age
and sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed with pains; haunted with
the quality of darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of standing."
The Pot and Potter began with the ancient Egyptians. "Sitting as
a potter at the wheel, Cneph (at Philae) moulds clay, and gives
the spirit of life to the nostrils of Osiris." Hence the
Genesitic "breath." Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being "by
whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is
fabricated." We find him next in Jeremiah's "Arise and go down
unto the Potter's house," etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans
(ix. 20), "Hath not the potter power over the clay?" No wonder
that the first Hand who moulded the man-mud is a _lieu commun_ in
Eastern thought. The "waste of agony" is Buddhism, or
Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have moulded "Earth on Earth"
upon "Seint Ysidre"'s well-known rhymes (A.D. 1440):--
Erthe out of Erthe is wondirli wrouzt,
Erthe out of Erthe hath gete a dignity of nouzt,
Erthe upon Erthe hath sett all his thouzt
How that Erthe upon Erthe may be his brouzt, etc.
The "Camel-rider," suggests Ossian, "yet a few years and the
blast of the desert comes." The dromedary was chosen as Death's
vehicle by the Arabs, probably because it bears the Bedouin's
corpse to the distant burial-ground, where he will lie among his
kith and kin. The end of this section reminds us of:--
How poor, how rich; how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is Man!
The Haji now passes to the results of his long and anxious
thoughts: I have purposely twisted his exordium into an echo of
Milton:--
Till old experience doth attain
To something of prophetic strain.
He boldly declares that there is no God as man has created his
Creator. Here he is at one with modern thought:--"En general les
croyants font le Dieu comme ils sont eux-memes," (says J. J.
Rousseau, "Confessions," I. 6): "les bons le font bon: les
mechants le font mechant: les devots haineux et bilieux, ne
voient que l'enfer, parce qu'ils voudraient damner tout le monde;
les ames aimantes et douces n'y croient guere; et l'un des
etonnements dont je ne reviens pas est de voir le bon Fenelon en
parler dans son Telemaque comme s'il y croyoit tout de bon: mais
j'espere qu'il mentoit alors; car enfin quelque veridique qu'on
soit, il faut bien mentir quelquefois quand on est eveque." "Man
depicts himself in his gods," says Schiller. Hence the
_Naturgott_, the deity of all ancient peoples, and with which
every system began, allowed and approved of actions distinctly
immoral, often diabolical. Belief became moralized only when the
conscience of the community, and with it of the individual items,
began aspiring to its golden age,--Perfection. "Dieu est le
superlatif, dont le positif est l'homme," says Carl Vogt;
meaning, that the popular idea of a _numen_ is that of a
magnified and non-natural man.
He then quotes his authorities. Buddha, whom the Catholic Church
converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the
deity), on account of the mystery of the "cruelty of things."
Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbe's model pessimist, who at the humblest
distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found
the vision of man's unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so
overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent,
"heartless, cowardly, and arrogant." Confucius, the "Throneless
king, more powerful than all kings," denied a personal deity. The
Epicurean idea rules the China of the present day. "God is great,
but he lives too far off," say the Turanian Santals in Aryan
India; and this is the general language of man in the Turanian
East.
Haji Abdu evidently holds that idolatry begins with a personal
deity. And let us note that the latter is deliberately denied by
the "Thirty-nine Articles." With them God is "a Being without
Parts (personality) or Passions." He professes a vague
Agnosticism, and attributes popular faith to the fact that Timor
fecit Deos; "every religion being, without exception, the child
of fear and ignorance" (Carl Vogt). He now speaks as the "Drawer
of the Wine," the "Ancient Taverner," the "Old Magus," the
"Patron of the Mughan or Magians"; all titles applied to the
Soofi as opposed to the Zahid. His "idols" are the eidola
(illusions) of Bacon, "having their foundations in the very
constitution of man," and therefore appropriately called
_fabulae_. That "Nature's Common Course" is subject to various
interpretation, may be easily proved. Aristotle was as great a
subverter as Alexander; but the quasi-prophetical Stagyrite of
the Dark Ages, who ruled the world till the end of the thirteenth
century, became the "twice execrable" of Martin Luther; and was
finally abolished by Galileo and Newton. Here I have excised two
stanzas. The first is:--
Theories for truths, fable for fact;
system for science vex the thought
Life's one great lesson you despise--
to know that all we know is nought.
This is in fact:--
Well didst thou say, Athena's noblest son,
The most we know is nothing can be known.
The next is:--
Essence and substance, sequence, cause,
beginning, ending, space and time,
These be the toys of manhood's mind,
at once ridiculous and sublime.
He is not the only one who so regards "bothering Time and Space."
A late definition of the "infinitely great," viz., that the idea
arises from denying form to any figure; of the "infinitely
small," from refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair specimen
of the "dismal science"--metaphysics.
Another omitted stanza reads:--
How canst thou, Phenomen! pretend
the Noumenon to mete and span?
Say which were easier probed and proved,
Absolute Being or mortal man?
One would think that he had read Kant on the "Knowable and the
Unknowable," or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could
"differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite." It is a
common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that
Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena,
the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the
"residuum of a bad metaphysic," which deforms the system of
Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are,
or can be conceived, things in themselves (_i.e._, unrelated to
thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that
we cannot know what they are. But who dares say "cannot"? Who can
measure man's work when he shall be as superior to our present
selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?
The "Chain of Universe" alludes to the Jain idea that the whole,
consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles,
existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to
endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of
nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the
intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the "non-human,"
_i.e._, the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and
consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the
contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the
other for nothing (_e.g._, ourselves and not-ourselves), with the
contraries (_e.g._, rich and not-rich = poor), in which both
terms express a something. So the positive-negative "infinite" is
not the complement of "finite," but its negation. The Western man
derides the process by making "not-horse" the complementary
entity of "horse." The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi
tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human
knowledge, and that no form of man, incarnation of the deity,
prophet, apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea not conceived
within his brain by the sole operation of these vulgar material
agents. Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor idealist.
He then proceeds to show that man depicts himself in his God, and
that "God is the racial expression"; a pedagogue on the Nile, an
abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldaea; where
Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, Sec. 2, and II. 9,
Sec. 2) was "skilful in the celestial science." He notices the
Akarana-Zaman (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working
dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands the God of the Hebrews with
pugnacity and cruelty. He has heard of the beautiful creations of
Greek fancy which, not attributing a moral nature to the deity,
included Theology in Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall,
seemed to consider all matter everywhere alive. We have adopted a
very different Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Creator;
Pantheism with its "one Spirit's plastic stress"; and Science
with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its "trinal
God": I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} = a riddle),
although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical
to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other
objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of
Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and
its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between
these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant or
exclusive care for the practice of right, is represented by
Semitic and Arab influence, Koranic and Hadisic. The latter, the
religion of humanity, a passion for life and light, for culture
and intelligence; for art, poetry and science, is represented in
Islamism by the fondly and impiously-cherished memory of the old
Guebre kings and heroes, beauties, bards and sages. Hence the
mention of Zal and his son Rostam; of Cyrus and of the
Jam-i-Jamshid, which may be translated either grail (cup) or
mirror: it showed the whole world within its rim; and hence it
was called Jam-i-Jehan-numa (universe-exposing). The contemptuous
expressions about the diet of camel's milk and the meat of the
Susmar, or green lizard, are evidently quoted from Firdausi's
famous lines beginning:--
Arab-ra be-jai rasid'est kar.
The Haji is severe upon those who make of the Deity a
Khwan-i-yaghma (or tray of plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He
looks upon the shepherds as men,
--Who rob the sheep themselves to clothe.
So Schopenhauer (Leben, etc., by Wilhelm Gewinner) furiously
shows how the "English nation ought to treat that set of
hypocrites, imposters and money-graspers, the clergy, that
annually devours 3,500,000 pounds."
The Haji broadly asserts that there is no Good and no Evil in the
absolute sense as man has made them. Here he is one with Pope:--
And spite of pride, in erring nature's spite
One truth is clear--whatever is, is right.
Unfortunately the converse is just as true:--whatever is, is
wrong. Khizr is the Elijah who puzzled Milman. He represents the
Soofi, the Batini, while Musa (Moses) is the Zahid, the Zahiri;
and the strange adventures of the twain, invented by the Jews,
have been appropriated by the Moslems. He derides the Freewill of
man; and, like Diderot, he detects "pantaloon in a prelate, a
satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in a
minister, and a goose in a chief clerk." He holds to Fortune, the
{Greek: Tuxae} of Alcman, which is, {Greek: Eunomias te kai
Peithous adelpha kai Promatheias thugataer},--Chance, the sister
of Order and Trust, and the daughter of Forethought. The
Scandinavian Spinners of Fate were Urd (the Was, the Past),
Verdandi (the Becoming, or Present), and Skuld (the To-be, or
Future). He alludes to Plato, who made the Demiourgos create the
worlds by the Logos (the Hebrew Dabar) or Creative Word, through
the Aeons. These {Greek: Aiwnes} of the Mystics were spiritual
emanations from {Greek: Aiwn}, lit. a wave of influx, an age,
period, or day; hence the Latin _aevum_, and the Welsh Awen, the
stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. Basilides, the
Egypto-Christian, made the Creator evolve seven Aeons or
Pteromata (fulnesses); from two of whom, Wisdom and Power,
proceeded the 365 degrees of Angels. All were subject to a Prince
of Heaven, called Abraxas, who was himself under guidance of the
chief Aeon, Wisdom. Others represent the first Cause to have
produced an Aeon or Pure Intelligence; the first a second, and so
forth till the tenth. This was material enough to affect Hyle,
which thereby assumed a spiritual form. Thus the two
incompatibles combined in the Scheme of Creation.
He denies the three ages of the Buddhists: the wholly happy; the
happy mixed with misery, and the miserable tinged with
happiness,--the present. The Zoroastrians had four, each of 3,000
years. In the first, Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then
Ahriman, the bad-god, began to rule subserviently: in the third
both ruled equally; and in the last, now current, Ahriman has
gained the day.
Against the popular idea that man has caused the misery of this
world, he cites the ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred
gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites produced the mighty
reptile tyrants of air, earth, and sea; and when the monsters of
the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the ground with their
ponderous tread. And the world of waters is still a hideous scene
of cruelty, carnage, and destruction.
He declares Conscience to be a geographical and chronological
accident. Thus he answers the modern philosopher whose soul was
overwhelmed by the marvel and the awe of two things, "the starry
heaven above and the moral law within." He makes the latter sense
a development of the gregarious and social instincts; and so
travellers have observed that the moral is the last step in
mental progress. His Moors are the savage Dankali and other
negroid tribes, who offer a cup of milk with one hand and stab
with the other. He translates literally the Indian word Hathi (an
elephant), the animal with the Hath (hand, or trunk). Finally he
alludes to the age of active volcanoes, the present, which is
merely temporary, the shifting of the Pole, and the spectacle to
be seen from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter.
The Haji again asks the old, old question, What is Truth? And he
answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China,
"Truth hath not an unchanging name." A modern English writer
says: "I have long been convinced by the experience of my life,
as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming
orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or
given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and
inquiry do little more than feed temperament." Our poet seems to
mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey
objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and
the Sentiments, the working of the moral region, or the middle
lobe of the phrenologists, supplies only subjective truth,
personal and individual. Thus to one man the axiom, _Opes
irritamenta malorum_, represents a distinct fact; while another
holds wealth to be an incentive for good. Evidently both are
right, according to their lights.
Haji Abdu cites Plato and Aristotle, as usual with Eastern
songsters, who delight in Mantik (logic). Here he appears to mean
that a false proposition is as real a proposition as one that is
true. "Faith moves mountains" and "Manet immota fides" are
evidently quotations. He derides the teaching of the "First
Council of the Vatican" (cap. v.), "all the faithful are little
children listening to the voice of Saint Peter," who is the
"Prince of the Apostles." He glances at the fancy of certain
modern physicists, "devotion is a definite molecular change in
the convolution of grey pulp." He notices with contumely the
riddle of which Milton speaks so glibly, where the Dialoguists,
--reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.
In opposition to the orthodox Mohammedan tenets which make Man's
soul his percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Soofi considers
it a fancy, opposed to body, which is a fact; at most a state of
things, not a thing; a consensus of faculties whereof our frames
are but the phenomena. This is not contrary to Genesitic legend.
The Hebrew Ruach and Arabic Ruh, now perverted to mean soul or
spirit, simply signify wind or breath, the outward and visible
sign of life. Their later schools are even more explicit. "For
that which befalls man befalls beasts; as the one dies, so does
the other; they have all one death; all go unto one place"
(Eccles. iii. 19). But the modern soul, a nothing, a string of
negations, a negative in chief, is thus described in the
Mahabharat: "It is indivisible, inconceivable, inconceptible: it
is eternal, universal, permanent, immovable: it is invisible and
unalterable." Hence the modern spiritualism which, rejecting
materialism, can use only material language.
These, says the Haji, are mere sounds. He would not assert "Verba
gignunt verba," but "Verba gignunt res," a step further. The idea
is Bacon's "idola fori, omnium molestissima," the twofold
illusions of language; either the names of things that have no
existence in fact, or the names of things whose idea is confused
and ill-defined.
He derives the Soul-idea from the "savage ghost" which Dr.
Johnson defined to be a "kind of shadowy being." He justly
remarks that it arose (perhaps) in Egypt; and was not invented by
the "People of the Book." By this term Moslems denote Jews and
Christians who have a recognized revelation, while their
ignorance refuses it to Guebres, Hindus, and Confucians.
He evidently holds to the doctrine of progress. With him
protoplasm is the Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word matter
is derived from the Sanskrit {Sanskrit} (matra), which, however,
signifies properly the invisible type of visible matter; in
modern language, the substance distinct from the sum of its
physical and chemical properties. Thus, Matra exists only in
thought, and is not recognizable by the action of the five
senses. His "Chain of Being" reminds us of Prof. Huxley's
Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, Mesohippus, Meiohippus,
Protohippus, Pleiohippus, and Equus. He has evidently heard of
modern biology, or Hylozoism, which holds its quarter-million
species of living beings, animal and vegetable, to be progressive
modifications of one great fundamental unity, an unity of
so-called "mental faculties" as well as of bodily structure. And
this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea that man
is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like
marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which,
strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the
microscope. As man is of recent origin, and may end at an early
epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth all things revolved
round nothing, and may continue to do so after his death.
The Haji, who elsewhere denounces "compound ignorance," holds
that all evil comes from error; and that all knowledge has been
developed by overthrowing error, the ordinary channel of human
thought. He ends this section with a great truth. There are
things which human Reason or Instinct matured, in its undeveloped
state, cannot master; but Reason is a Law to itself. Therefore we
are not bound to believe, or to attempt belief in, any thing
which is contrary or contradictory to Reason. Here he is
diametrically opposed to Rome, who says, "Do not appeal to
History; that is private judgment. Do not appeal to Holy Writ;
that is heresy. Do not appeal to Reason; that is Rationalism."
He holds with the Patriarchs of Hebrew Holy Writ, that the
present life is all-sufficient for an intellectual (not a
sentimental) being; and, therefore, that there is no want of a
Heaven or a Hell. With far more contradiction the Western poet
sings:--
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self-place; but when we are in hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be,
And, to be short, when all this world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell which are not heaven.
For what want is there of a Hell when all are pure? He enlarges
upon the ancient Buddhist theory, that Happiness and Misery are
equally distributed among men and beasts; some enjoy much and
suffer much; others the reverse. Hence Diderot declares, "Sober
passions produce only the commonplace . . . the man of moderate
passion lives and dies like a brute." And again we have the half
truth:--
That the mark of rank in nature
Is capacity for pain.
The latter implies an equal capacity for pleasure, and thus the
balance is kept.