In the Land of Mosques & Minarets. Mansfield Milburg Francisco

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      One of the greatest Mussulman saints, and the one who is the most frequently invoked, was Sidi-el-Hadji-Abd-el-Kader-el-Djilali. His tomb is at Bagdad, but all Algeria is strewn with koubas in his honour. He is particularly the patron saint of the blind, but the lame and the halt invoke his aid as well, for he has the reputation of being the most potent and efficacious of all Mussulman saints. A marabout is generally in charge of these koubas, as he is with the proper tombs of other holy men. The marabout tombs, the koubas and the mosques are all Mussulman shrines of the same rank so far as their being holy, sanctified places is concerned.

      The pilgrimage to Mecca from all Mohammedan lands is the event of their lives for the faithful who participate therein. The pilgrims going from Algeria and Tunisia are yearly becoming greater in numbers. It is as queer a composite caravan as one has ever seen which lines up at the wharves of Bona or Sfax, there to take ship for the East. By this time it has ceased to be a caravan, and has become a personally conducted excursion. The return is quite as impressive as the departure. It is then that a sort of cantata is sung or chanted, running something like the following: —

      First the waiting folk on shore shout out, —

      Then the pilgrims reply: —

      Then the pilgrims reply: —

      The marabouts then endorse it all, —

      The memory of a Mussulman who has departed this life is not put lightly aside with the rising of the next day’s sun, but a real devotion, if a silent one, goes out towards the departed for many months, and perhaps years, after his corpse is first laid out on its mat of straw in the courtyard of his domicile or before his tent.

      At this moment the vague, rigid form compels the devotion of all who were near and dear to him in life. In soft cadence they bewail his death, and prayers of the utmost fervour are sent upward on his behalf. All is calm, solemn, and well-ordered, there is no hysterical excitement, no wailing clamour, and no jealous quarrellings among the heirs.

      Above all others one voice cries out a sad voluminous chant. It is the “Borda,” the funeral elegy of a departed soul.

      An Arab funeral is a solemn affair, though not necessarily imposing. A little group of indeterminate numbers lead off, then four others carrying a litter, covered with a flowing white cloth, on their shoulders. All this is usually in the first hour after sunrise. On a little plateau of desert sand, just above the deep-dug grave, the corpse is finally placed, the company ranged about in a semicircle for one last, long, lingering prayer. The face of the corpse is turned always towards the holy city, Mecca, and when the body has been lowered into its eternal sandy cradle, and covered with a layer of sun-baked clay, and then more sand, three tiny palms are planted above. They soon wither and die, or they live, accordingly as chance favours or not, but the thing is that they be planted.

      This is the end; nothing remains but for the women to come along after a decent interval and weep, never by any chance missing a Friday.

      CHAPTER VI

      ARCHITECTURE OF THE MOSQUES

      GOTHIC architecture is expressive of much that a mixed or transitory style lacks, but again the Roman, or Lombard, or the later architecture of the Renaissance, have their own particular cachet quite as recognizable and quite as well defined.

      Mohammedan architecture, so different in motif and treatment, is quite as expressive and, in many ways, quite as civilized as the architectural forms of Europe, and possesses in addition a certain feeling which baked clay and plaster suggests better than all other materials. A feeling which is often entirely wanting in cut stone when used to reproduce animal and plant forms.

      Saracenic, Assyrian, Persian and Byzantine architectural details are all of them beautiful, if bizarre, but the Mohammedan architecture of the Moors outranks them all for sheer appeal, fantastic and less consistent though it be. Fantastic it is, but often in a simple, suggestive way, depending upon design and proportion rather than profuse decoration. This is why the mosques of Kairouan in Tunisia, or those of Tlemcen in Algeria are even more interesting than the great Mosque of Saint Sophia, or the palace corridors of the Alhambra itself, which are, in fact, but a mixture of several styles. Terra-cotta and baked clay are all right in their way, but their way is the Mohammedan builders’ way, not that of the modern school architects who simulate cut stone in the same plastic products, and build up Turkish baths in palatial twenty-story Broadway hotels with the pagan decorations of ancient Rome, when what they had in mind all the time was the fountained courtyard of a Mohammedan mosque – not by any means a symbolism of paganism. Our new-school architects of the Western world sadly muddle things at times. Moorish arabesques do not mingle well with the palmer’s shells of the Italian Renaissance and the English fan-lights of the brothers Adam.

      The word mosque comes properly from the word mesgid, signifying place of adoration. The Italians make of the word, moscheta; the Spaniards, meschita; and the French, mosquée. All these variations are met with in North Africa. It is well to recognize them, for both Algeria and Tunisia are more “mixed” in their language and institutions than any other lands yet become affected of twentieth-century tourists. The mixture is perhaps the more likable because of its catholicity. It is certainly more interesting; but school-board and self-taught linguists will need all their wits about them to make the most of the soft, sweet tongue of a desert Arab who lisps first in French, then in Spanish and then in Italian, with perhaps an “Oh, yes!” or an “All right!” here and there. He modestly reserves his own Arabic for an exclusive harangue among his intimates.

      The conventional type of mosque is undoubtedly reminiscent of the Greek basilica, but in every way more amply disposed. The plan herewith is the accepted conventional type of great mosque before it got crowded up in the cities. To-day in most large towns and cities the mosque has been shorn of many of its attributes, leaving only the inner sanctuaries remaining.

      The plainness of the exterior of the mosques of North Africa is no indication of the gorgeousness of their interiors. An imposing sobriety of exterior, of all the mosques of Islam in the Moghreb, from Tlemcen to Kairouan, invariably clothes dentelled sculpture and mouldings, fine rugs and hangings, and a labyrinth of architectural fantasies possessed by no other class of civil or religious edifices extant.

      The architecture of the mosques of Algeria and Tunisia, as of those of Constantinople and Cairo, is the apotheosis of a mysterious symbolism, at which the infidel can but wonder and speculate. He will never understand it, at least he will never feel it as does the Mussulman himself. It is unfortunate that we outsiders are thought of as unbelievers, but so it is. One does not forget that even twentieth-century Arab gamins at Suez and Port Saïd revile the Christian with their guttural:

      This venerable abuse means nothing more or less than: