Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.
CREDULITY IN ALL RELIGIOUS MATTER.
“The high sententious fantasy of the ignorant Arabs, the same that will not trust the heart of man, is full of infantile credulity in all religious matter.”[34]
MISERIES OF THE HAJ.
“Infinite are the miseries of the Haj; religion is a promise of good things to come, to poor folk, and many among them are half destitute persons. This pain, the words of that fatal Arabian [Prophet Muhammad], professing himself to be messenger of Ullah [Allah], have imposed upon ten thousands every year of afflicted mankind!”[35]
“The heart of their dispersed religion is always Mecca, from whence the Moslems of so many lands every year return fanaticized….The nations of Islam, of a barbarous fox-like understanding, and persuaded in their religion, that ‘knowledge is only of the koran’, cannot now come upon any way that is good.”[36]
ALCOHOL, DRUGS, RIBALD LIVING IN MEDINA.
“In Medina there is much tippling in arrak [distilled alcoholic drink] brutish hemp smoking and excess of ribald living.”[37]
We shall have other witnesses to this aspect of debauchery in both Mecca and Medina, a little later, when the nature of “ribald living” becomes clearer.
ARAB FATALISM.
“I thought to begin here the vaccination and my practice of medicine. But no parents brought me their children, only few sick persons visited me, and those were nearly desperate cases, to enquire for medicines ; even such went back again when they understood they must spend for the remedies, though it were but two or three groats. If I said. Are not medicines the gift of Ullah? they answered, “ We are trusting in Ullah.” — “ But, when another day the disease is amongst you and your children dying before your faces ? ” — “ There can happen nothing but by the appointment of Ullah.” This is the supine nature of Arabs, that negligence of themselves, and expectation of heaven to do all for them, which they take for a pious acquiescence in the true faith: this fond humour passed into their religion we have named the fatalism of Mohammedans. “[38]
DANGERS OF REMAINING TOO LONG IN A FOREIGN LAND.
“Commonly the longer one lives in a fabulous time or country, the weaker will become his judgment. Certainly I have heard fables worthy of Arabs from the lips of excellent Europeans too long remaining in the East.”[39]
WOMAN’S LOT A WEARY SERVITUDE
The woman’s lot is here unequal concubinage, and in this necessitous life a weary servitude…Few then are the nomad wives whose years can be long happy in marriage! they are few indeed or nearly none that continue in their first husband’s house….The Arabs are contrary to womankind, upon whom they would have God’s curse; ‘some (say the Beduw) are poisoners of husbands, and there are many adulteresses.’ “.[40]
IMPOSSIBILITY OF CONFORMING TO A BARBARIC RELIGION.
“The Fukara are of the fanatical tribes; but they are nearly all thus in Arabia…. For the benefit of vaccination, the Beduw would have almost pardoned my misbelief; and I might have lived thereby competently in a country where it is peril of death to be accounted the bearer of a little silver. No more than a sick camel now remained to me, and little gold in my purse, and I began to think of quitting this tedious soil, where henceforth without a pretext, I must needs appear as a spy intruded among them ; and — since it were impossible for me to conform to their barbaric religion — where my neck would be for every lawless and fanatic wretch’s knife ; and in what part soever I should pass, with great extremities, every soul would curse me.”[41]
Here there is no danger of Mr. Doughty converting to Islam [Emphasis added].
ABHORRED VOICE OF A BARBARIC RELIGION.
Many may find the Muslim summons to prayer romantic and quintessentially Oriental, Doughty has another opinion:
“Whilst I sat upon a clay bench, in the little moon-light, I was startled from my weariness by the abhorred voice of their barbaric religion! the muéthin [muezzin or more pedantically, mu’dhdhin] crying from the minaret to the latter prayer.”[42]
ARAB HOSPITALITY?
“Nejm had received me well, a western man; but commonly it were to put their tolerance to a dangerous proof, to return upon any Moslemin: then the alien in religion may find with confusion of heart, that those which were before his friends, are fallen out of charity with him, to the insane inhumanity of religious fanaticism! “[43]
“The people of Kasīm are not lovers of hospitality: the poor Aarab [sic](that are passengers without purses) say despitefully, ‘There is nothing there but for thy penny!’- this is true.”[44]
KORAN
“…I could never find better than a headache in the farrago of the koran[45]….”[46]
SIR RICHARD BURTON
Sir Richard Burton [1821-1890] the Victorian explorer, translator, cultural anthropologist, was indeed fascinated by the Orient and Islam, but according to one account he was an atheist; his earliest biographer, Thomas Wright, tells us: “ ‘Some three months before Sir Richard’s death,’ writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, ‘I was seated at Sir Richard’s tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, ‘I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.’”[47] Should we take him literally, or is he simply trying to shock the clergyman present?
*****
There were many Victorians who indeed were seduced by the Orient and even Islam. But the Victorian Era was also a period of religious skepticism, doubt, and there was said to be “a crisis of faith”, part, no doubt, brought on by the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”, in 1859. Furthermore, as Robert Blake [1916-2003] the distinguished biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, said, “….[F]or the Turks, unlike the other barbarian invaders of Europe, had never either assimilated or been assimilated by the peoples they had conquered. Between their European subjects and them there was the impenetrable barrier of creed. In the nineteenth century, outside observers came to believe that a religion so obscurantist, as they thought Islam to be, must gradually decline into an eccentric anachronism, under the solvent effects of Christianity on the one hand and secularism on the other [Emphasis added]. This was an optimistic view, as events in Iran if nowhere else have recently shown”. [Blake was writing in 1981, though book itself was published in 1982, and referring to the Iranian Revolution of 1979].[48]
*****
The final piece of dishonesty in the article in The Independent dated December 2014, is the following statement: “The letter, discovered by a history research fellow at Cambridge University, Warren Dockter, was written by Lady Gwendoline Bertie who married Churchill’s brother Jack.”[49]
Now it is possible that it was the interviewer who chose to express herself in this manner, and Dr Dockter is innocent of any false claims, that is, that he “discovered” this letter, but the fact of the matter is that Dr Dockter did no such thing. He did not discover this letter, in the sense that he was the first person ever to lay his eyes on it and make it known to the unsuspecting outside world, as this letter has been available to the public since 1969. It was published by Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph in the official biography of his father: Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume II, Part 1. 1901-1907, London: Heinemann, 1969, p. 672.
To his credit. Dr Dockter makes no such claim in his book.[50]
This article is the epilogue of Ibn Warraq’s new book on Churchill and Islam. The quote given by Hugh Fitzgerald forms the Frontispiece to the book, and within the book itself there is a careful examination of the quote and why it is so important.
[34] Ibid., p.136.
[35] Ibid., p.139
[36]Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Vol I, pp. 141-142.
[37] Ibid.,p.193.
[38] Ibid.,p.197.
[39] Ibid.,p.216.
[40] Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Vol I, pp.277-280.
[41] Ibid.,pp.294-295.
[42] Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Vol.II, p.341.
[43] Ibid., pp.404-405.
[44] Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Vol II, p.337
[45] Doughty always spells the Muslims’ Holy Book with a lower case “k”.
[46] Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Vol II. p.66
[47] Thomas Wright, (1906). The Life of Sir Richard Burton. Vol. 1 and 2. Burton’s Religion, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906, p. 145.
[48] Robert Blake, Disraeli’s Grand Tour. Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land 1830-31, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p.50
[49] The Independent, published on 28 December 2014
[50] Warren Dockter, Churchill and the Islamic World, London: I.B.Tauris, p.12 where he mentions Lady Gwendeline’s letter, but without any claim that he made a new discovery after deep research among the archives.
Kosh's Shadow says
“Whilst I sat upon a clay bench, in the little moon-light, I was startled from my weariness by the abhorred voice of their barbaric religion! the muéthin [muezzin or more pedantically, mu’dhdhin] crying from the minaret to the latter prayer.”
But Obama said that is the most beautiful sound in the world.
Hmmmm….
Wellington says
Churchill, down to the core of his being, knew that Western Civilization was the greatest of civilizations and that the English-speaking world was a superlative representative of this magnificent civilization. All this is being lost, I fear, in a new kind of dark age in which we live whereby fools or worse in the West who are not Muslim are doing their damnedest, wittingly or unwittingly, to wreck the West beyond repair. Churchill would be appalled and then some were he still here.
Santa says
When you publish one article divided in to multiple sections, could you please list the dares for all the sections at the End.