A Persian lady sent for an English missionary to extract an aching tooth. The missionary found her in great pain, but she said she could not have the tooth out as the beads were against it, but she had sent to the mosque and was hoping for a favourable answer from there. However, all methods gave an unfavourable answer, so she put off the extraction to another day.
“It would be much better for me to have it out,” she said, “but it is not God’s Will.”
The Wise Men from the East looked for God’s guidance among the stars, and there God sent them a message. And here and there where a Muhammadan earnestly seeks God’s guidance, because he is trying to really live as God’s servant, who shall say that he does not receive it where he has been taught to look for it.
But taken as a system, how trivial, how childish, how irreverent it all is. They use God’s name, but they take His name in vain. They profess to seek God’s will, and profess to receive an answer from Him, and often try the next moment to set it aside and force or coax an opposite answer out of Him.
The Muhammadans think that through their beads they can _use_ God for settling the every-day matters of this world in a lucky way, while they are disobeying Him in the greater matter of godly living.
A great many things are topsy-turvy in Persia, but perhaps reading is as topsy-turvy as anything. It is not only that the lines, and indeed the whole book, begin at the wrong end, but the lessons begin at the wrong end too.
An English boy learns to read his own language first, and does not always go on to a foreign language. A Persian boy learns to read a foreign language first, and does not always go on to his own language.
When a little Persian boy goes to school he is given a big Arabic book, with a great many long words in it, and he is not taught how the words are spelt, but is told what they are, and made to repeat them from memory, pointing to each word in the book as he says it, and gradually he gets some idea of which word is which.
The boys sit on the floor round the room, all reading at the top of their voices at the same time in different parts of the book. They read in a monotonous sing-song voice, swaying their bodies in time to the sound.