“And who built Mâr Behnâm?” said I, anxious to prolong the recital.
“My daughter,” he replied, “the house of Mâr Behnâm was built by Isḥâk the merchant. For Isḥâk was journeying to Baghdâd, and upon the road he fell ill, and Mâr Behnâm appeared to him and healed him. Verily the Assyrians were idolaters, but they came to know the true God. So the world changes.” The bishop broke off abruptly at this confusing point in the narrative, for even he felt that it would be an anachronism to assert that the Assyrian empire was Christian. But the historical sequence of events was nothing to ’Abdullah.
“God is great,” he assented. “The world changes.” And he rolled another cigarette.[159]
We ran down the path in the dusk and found my dinner-table spread under the moon. Round the camp-fire sat ’al ins w’al jins w’al jami’ and watched the boiling of Ḥâjj ’Amr’s rice-pot.
However many countries there may be in the world there are none so rich in faiths as the mountain frontiers of eastern Turkey. Beliefs which have been driven out with obloquy by a new-found truth, the half-apprehended mysticism of the East, echoes of Western metaphysics and philosophy, illusive memories of paganism--all have been swept together into these hills, where creeds that were outlined in the childhood of the world are formulated still in terms as old as themselves. Islâm, with the lash of its simple, clear-cut doctrine, has herded them into remote places. Cowering there under centuries of persecution they have hidden their sacred things from the eyes of the spoiler, in silence they endure the reproach which dogs the most innocent practices of a secret cult, and each sect awaits, through ages of misery, the reward and the redeemer which its peculiar revelation has promised. These outcast communities make a potent appeal to the imagination and to the sympathy. I have no desire to pry into that which they choose to conceal, neither have they any wish to take me into their special confidence; but their hospitality is unfailing, and whenever I find myself among them I find myself among friends.
We were now entering the country which is the head-quarters of the Yezîdîs, who, from their desire to conciliate or to propitiate the Spirit of Evil, are known to Moslem and Christian as Devil Worshippers. By Moslem and by Christian they have been placed beyond the bounds of human kindness, and while the Mohammadan has been unremitting in his efforts to bring them, by methods familiar to dominant creeds, to a sense of their short-comings, the Christian has regarded the wholesale butchery which has overtaken them from time to time as a punishment justified by their tenets. I had journeyed before among Yezîdî villages, in the mountains of north Syria, and had been struck by the clean and well-ordered look of the houses, and by the open-handed friendliness of the people, as well as by their courage and industry. The Mesopotamian Yezîdîs I knew only through the descriptions contained in Layard’s enchanting books, but I carried a letter to ’Alî Beg, the head of the sect, and proposed to visit him in his village of Bâ’adrî and to see, if he would permit, the most sacred of all Yezîdî shrines, Sheikh ’Adi. ’Abdullah, when he learnt my intention, expressed his entire approval of ’Alî Beg as a man, but he would hear nothing of his religious convictions because they were not founded upon a book.