Oriental Encounters : Palestine and Seria 1894-5-6

Contents: Introduction. 1. Rashid the fair. 2. A mountain garrison. 3. The Rhinoceros whip. 4. The courteous judge. 5. Nawadir. 6. Nawadir (continued). 7. The sack which clanked. 8. Police work. 9. My countryman. 10. The parting of the ways. 11. The knight errant. 12. The fanatic. 13. Rashid\'s revenge. 14. The hanging dog. 15. Tigers. 16. Pride and a fall. 17. Tragedy. 18. Bastirma. 19. The artist-dragoman. 20. Love and the patriarch. 21. The unpopular land-power. 22. The Caimmacam. 23. Concerning bribes. 24. The battlefield. 25. Murderers. 26. The trees on the land. 27. Buying a house. 28. A disappointment. 29. concerning crime and punishment. 30. The unwalled vineyard. 31. The atheist. 32. The selling of our gun. 33. My benefactor.

"Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall\'s experiences in the twilight of that exotic world may be read in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters. He had found, as he explains, a world of freedom unimaginable to a public schoolboy raised on an almost idolatrous passion for the state. Most Palestinians never set eyes on a policeman, and lived for decades without engaging with government in any way. Islamic Law was administered in its time-honoured fashion, by Qadis who, with the exception of the Sahn and Ayasofya graduates in the cities, were local scholars. Villages chose their own headmen, or inherited them, and the same was true for the Bedouin tribes. The population revered and loved the Sultan-Caliph in faraway Istanbul, but understood that it was not his place to interfere with their lives.

It was this freedom, as much as intellectual assent, which set Marmaduke on the long pilgrimage which was to lead him to Islam. He saw the Muslim world before westernization had contaminated the lives of the masses, and long before it had infected Muslim political thought and produced the modern vision of the Islamic state, with its \'ideology\', its centralized bureaucracy, its secret police, its Pasdaran and its Basij. The deep faith of the Levantine peasantry which so amazed him was sustained by the sincerity that can only come when men are free, not forced, in the practice of religion. For the state to compel compliance is to spread vice and disbelief; as the Arab proverb which he well-knew says; \'If camel-dung were to be prohibited, people would seek it out\'." (jacket)