Allah wills it! That is why they patiently bear the extremes of hunger,
and why, if fortune smiles, they gorge like Eskimos, like
boa-constrictors.
I have seen them so distended with food as to be literally incapable of
moving. Only yesterday, there swept past these doors a bright procession,
going half-trot to a lively chant of music: the funeral of a woman. I
enquired of a passer-by the cause of her death.
"She ate too much, and burst."
During the summer months, in the fruit-growing districts, quite a number
of children will "burst" in this fashion every day.
_Mektoub_! the parents then exclaim. It was written.
And no doubt there is such a thing as a noble resignation; to defy fate,
even if one cannot rule it. Many of us northerners would be the better for
a little _mektoub_. But this doctrine of referring everything to the will
of Allah takes away all stimulus to independent thought; it makes for
apathy, improvidence, and mental fossilification. A creed of everyday use
which hampers a man's reasoning in the most ordinary matters of life--is
it not like a garment that fetters his hands?
_Mektoub_ is the intellectual _burnous_ of the Arabs.
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