It is they who pander to all the worst
qualities of the Arabs, improvident and incorrigible loafers, besides
affording an asylum to every criminal; their _zaouiahs_, like our own
mediaeval convents, are often enough mere menageries of deformed minds and
bodies. As for the much-vaunted calm to be found within their walls, it is
there, to be sure, together with certain other things--there and nowhere
else, since the frantic religious passions, of which such monastic
institutions are offshoots, have made peaceable living outside their walls
an impossibility.
In a land where no one reads or writes or thinks or reasons, where dirt
and insanity are regarded as marks of divine favour, how easy it is to
acquire a reputation for holiness--(oral tradition alone can make a
saint)--to turn the god-habit of your fellow-creatures into a profitable
source of revenue: as easy as it was in Europe, in the days when we
cherished such knaves and neurotic dreamers. Some of them are simple
epileptics, verminous and importunate; others, shrewd worldly rogues who,
having run away from home after a fit of discontent or homicide, cruise
vaguely about Islamism for half a lifetime, and at last return, bearded
venerables, to be stared at by their kinsfolk as portents, heaven-sent,
because they have freighted themselves with a cargo of fond maxims such as
"The World is Illusion: all Flesh is Vanity," and similar gnomic
balderdash, the wisdom of the unlettered.
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