“Passing oneself off for a wandering Darweesh, as some European explorers have attempted to do in the East, is for more reasons than one a very bad plan.  It is unnecessary to dilate on that moral aspect of the proceeding which will always first strike unsophisticated minds.  To feign a religion which the adventurer himself does not believe, to perform with scrupulous exactitude, as of the highest and holiest import, practices which he inwardly ridicules, and which he intends on his return to hold up to the ridicule of others, to turn for weeks and months together the most sacred and awful bearings of man towards his Creator into a deliberate and truthless mummery, not to mention other and yet darker touches,-all this seems hardly compatible with the character of a European gentleman, let alone that of a Christian.”

This comes admirably a propos from a traveller who, born a Protestant, of Jewish descent, placed himself “in connection with,” in plain words took the vows of, “the order of the Jesuits,” an order “well-known in the annals of philanthropic daring”; a popular preacher who declaimed openly at Bayrut and elsewhere against his own nation, till the proceedings of a certain Father Michael

[p.xxii]Cohen were made the subject of an official report by Mr. Consul-General Moore (Bayrut, November 11, 1857); an Englishman by birth who accepted French protection, a secret mission, and the “liberality of the present Emperor of the French”; a military officer travelling in the garb of what he calls a native (Syrian) “quack” with a comrade who “by a slight but necessary fiction passed for his brother-in-law[FN#2]”; a gentleman who by return to Protestantism violated his vows, and a traveller who was proved by the experiment of Colonel (now Sir Lewis) Pelly to have brought upon himself all the perils and adventures that have caused his charming work to be considered so little worthy of trust.  Truly such attack argues a sublime daring.  It is the principle of “vieille coquette, nouvelle devote”; it is Satan preaching against Sin.  Both writers certainly lack the “giftie” to see themselves as others see them.

In noticing these extracts my object is not to defend myself:  I recognize no man’s right to interfere between a human being and his conscience.  But what is there, I would ask, in the Moslem Pilgrimage so offensive to Christians-what makes it a subject of “inward ridicule”?  Do they not also venerate Abraham, the Father of the Faithful?  Did not Locke, and even greater names, hold Mohammedans to be heterodox Christians, in fact Arians who, till the end of the fourth century, represented the mass of North-European Christianity?  Did Mr. Lane neverconform by praying at a Mosque in Cairo? did he ever fear to confess it? has he been called an apostate for so doing?  Did not Father Michael Cohen prove himself an excellent Moslem at Wahhabi-land?

The fact is, there are honest men who hold that Al-Islam,