After returning from Al-Hijaz, he taught Tajwid (Koran chaunting) in the Azhar Mosque, where the learned, suspecting him to be at heart an infidel, examined his person, and found the formula of the Mohammedan faith written in token of abhorrence upon the soles of his feet.  Thereupon, the principal of the Mosque, in a transport of holy indignation, did decapitate him with one blow of the sword.  It only remains to be observed, that nothing can be more ridiculous than the popular belief, except it be our hesitating to offend the prejudices of such believers. [FN#23] A Takiyah is a place where Darwayshes have rooms, and perform their devotions. [FN#24] Certain forms of worship peculiar to Darwayshes.  For a description see Lane (Modern Egyptians, ch. 24). [FN#25] Shahbandar, Harbour-King, is here equivalent to our “Consul.” [FN#26] Written “Ghalayun.” [FN#27] See Lane (Modern Egyptians, chap. 24).

[p.90]Chapter VI.

The mosque.

Then the Byzantine Christians, after overthrowing the temples of Paganism, meditated re-building and re-modelling them, poverty of invention and artistic impotence reduced them to group the spoils in a heterogeneous mass.[FN#1] The sea-ports of Egypt and the plains and mountains of Syria abounding in pillars of granite, syenite and precious marbles, in Pharaonic, Grecian, and Roman statuary, and in all manner of structural ornaments, the architects were at no loss for material.  Their Syncretism, the result of chance and precipitancy, of extravagance and incuriousness, fell under eyes too ignorant to be hurt by the hybrid irregularity:  it was perpetuated in the so-called Saracenic style, a plagiarism from the Byzantine,[FN#2] and it was reiterated in the Gothic, an offshoot from the Saracenic.[FN#3] This fact accounts in the Gothic style for its manifold incongruities of architecture, and for the phenomenon,-not solely attributable to the buildings

[p.91]having been erected piecemeal,-of its most classic period being that of its greatest irregularity.

Such “architectural lawlessness,” such disregard for symmetry,-the result, I believe, of an imperfect “amalgamation and enrichment,"-may doubtless be defended upon the grounds both of cause and of effect.  Architecture is of the imitative arts, and Nature, the Myriomorphous, everywhere delighting in variety, appears to abhor nothing so much as perfect similarity and precise uniformity.  To copy her exactly we must therefore seek that general analogy compatible with individual variety; in fact, we should avoid the over-display of order and regularity.  And again, it may be asserted that, however incongruous these disorderly forms may appear to the conventional eye, we find it easy to surmount our first antipathy.  Perhaps we end in admiring them the more, as we love those faces in which irregularity of feature is compensated for by diversity and piquancy of expression.

There is nothing, I believe, new in the Arab Mosque; it is an unconscious revival of the forms used from the earliest ages to denote by symbolism the worship of the generative and the creative gods.  The reader will excuse me if I only glance at a subject of which the investigation would require a volume, and which, discussed at greater length, would be out of place in such a narrative as this.