The Women of the Arabs. Henry Harris Jessup
Dr. and Mrs. De Forest, and speaks of them with enthusiastic interest. Her husband failed in business some years ago, and she is in a constant struggle with want, but her old friends and loving sisters, Raheel and Lulu, who are among her nearest neighbors, are unremitting in their kind attentions to her.
What a difference between the faithful Christian nurture her little children are receiving at home, and the worse than no training received by the children of her Druze relatives at Ras Beirût, who are still under the shadow of their old superstitions. She never curses her children nor invokes the wrath of God upon them. She is never beaten and spit upon and tortured and threatened with death by her husband. It is worth much to have rescued a Khozma and an Abla from the degradation of Druze superstition! These two good women, with Abdullah in Beirût, and Hassan, Hassein, Asaad and Ali, in Lebanon, are among the living witnesses to the preciousness of the love of Christ, who have come forth from the Druze community. They have been persecuted, and may be again, but they stand firm in Christ. Not a few Druze girls are gathered in our schools in Beirût, Lebanon, and the vicinity of Hermon, as well as in other schools in Damascus, Hasbeiya and elsewhere, and some of their young men are receiving a Christian education.
CHAPTER IV.
NUSAIRIYEH.
To the North of Mount Lebanon, and along the low range of mountains extending from Antioch to Tripoli, and from the Mediterranean on the West to Hums on the East, live a strange, wild, blood-thirsty race called the Nusairîyeh numbering about 200,000 souls, and now for the first time in their history coming within the range of Missionary effort.
The Druzes admit women to the Akkal or initiated class, but not so the Nusairîyeh. The great secret of the Sacrament is administered in a secluded place, the women being shut up in a house, or kept away from the mysteries. In these assemblies the Sheikh reads prayers, and then all join in cursing Abubekr, Omar, Othman, Sheikh et-Turkoman and the Christians and others. Then he gives a spoonful of wine, first to the Sheikhs present, and then to all the rest. They then eat fruit, offer other prayers, and the assembly breaks up. The rites of initiation are frightful in the extreme, attended by threats, imprecations and blasphemous oaths, declaring their lives forfeited if they expose the secrets of the order.
They use given signs and questions, by which they salute each other, and ascertain whether a stranger is one of them or not. In their books they employ the double interlacing triangle or seal of Solomon. They call each other brethren, and enjoin love and truthfulness, but only to the brethren. In this they are like the Druzes. So little do they regard all outside their own sect, that they pray to God to take out of the hearts of all others than themselves, what little light of knowledge and certainty they may possess! The effect of this secret, exclusive, and selfish system is shown in the conduct of the Nusairîyeh in robbing and murdering Moslems and Christians without compunction.
As it has been said, the Nusairîyeh women are entirely excluded from all participation in religious ceremonies and prayers, and from all religious teaching. The reason given, is two-fold; the first being that women cannot be trusted to keep a secret, and the second because they are considered by the Nusairîyeh as something unclean. They believe that the soul of a wicked man may pass at death into a brute, or he may be punished for his sins in this life by being born in a woman's form in the next generation. And so, if a woman live in virtue and obedience, there is hope of her again being born into the world as a man, and becoming one of the illuminati and possessors of the secret. It is a long time for the poor things to wait, but it is a convenient reward for their husbands to hold out before them.
Yet the women are so religiously inclined by nature that they will have some object of worship, and while their husbands, fathers and sons are talking and praying about the celestial hierarchies, and the unfathomable mysteries, the wives, mothers and daughters will throng the "zeyarehs," or holy visiting shrines, on the hill tops, and among the groves of green trees, to propitiate the favor of the reputed saints of ancient days. These shrines are supposed to have miraculous powers, but Friday is the day when the prophets are more especially "at home," to receive visitors. On other days they may be "on a journey," or asleep. Whenever a Nuisairiyeh woman is in sorrow or trouble or fear, she goes to the zeyareh and cries in a piteous tone, "zeyareh, hear me!"
Their women do not veil themselves, and consequently there is more of freedom among them than among Moslems and Druzes, and in their great festivals, men and women all dance together.
When a young man sees a girl who pleases him, he bargains with her father, agreeing to pay from twenty dollars to two hundred, according to the dignity of her family; of which sum she receives but four dollars, unless her father should choose to give her a red bridal box and bedding for her outfit. She rides in great state to the bridegroom's house amid the firing of guns and shouts of the women, and on dismounting, the bridegroom gives her a present of from one to three dollars, called the "dismounting money."
Divorce needs only the will of the man, and polygamy is common. Lane says in speaking of Egypt, "The depraving effects of this freedom of divorce upon both sexes, may be easily imagined. There are many men in this country who, in the course of ten years, have married as many as twenty, thirty or more wives; and women, not far advanced in age, who have been wives to a dozen or more men successively."
The Nusairîyeh women smoke, swear, and use the most vile and unclean language, and even go beyond the men in these respects. Swearing and lying are universal not only among the Nusairîyeh, but among the most of the Syrian people. You never receive a direct reply from a Nusaîry. He will answer your question by asking another, in order, if possible, to ascertain your object in asking it and to conceal the true state of the case. Their Moslem and nominal Christian neighbors are not much better. They all lie, and swear, and deceive. Mr. Lyde illustrates the ignorance of the Greek clergy in Latakiah by the following incident. A ploughman who had learned something of the Bible, heard a Greek priest cursing the father of a little child. He said, "My father, is it right to curse?" "Oh," said he, "it was only from my lips." "But does not the psalmist say, Keep the door of my lips?" "That," replied the priest, "is only in the English Bible."
Walpole says of the Nusairîyeh women, "when young, they are handsome, often fair, with light hair and jet-black eyes; or the rarer beauty of fair eyes and coal-black hair or eyebrows."
When a fight takes place between the tribes, the women, like the women of the Druzes, enter into the spirit of it with demoniacal fury. During the battle they bring jars of water, shout, sing, and encourage the men, and at the close carry off the booty, such as pots, pans, chickens, quilts, wooden doors, trays, etc. In the Druze war of 1860, I saw the Druze women running with the men through Aitath, on their way to the scene of hostilities in the Metn. The Bedawin women likewise aid their husbands in the commissariat of their nomad warfare.
The Rev. Mr. Lyde was the first to undertake direct missionary labors among the Nusairîyeh, and his work has been carried on by the Reformed Presbyterian Mission in Latakiah. The Rev. J. Beattie sends me the following facts with regard to the work now going on among the women and girls.
The first convert under the labors of Mr. Lyde was Hammûd, of the village of Merj, a young man of fine mind and most lovely character, who gave promise of great usefulness. After he became a Christian, his mother, finding that no Nusaîry girl would marry a Christian, determined to secure a young girl and have her educated for Hammûd. So she paid four Turkish pounds for a little Nusaîry girl named Zahara or Venus, whose widowed mother had removed to her village. This payment was in accordance with Nusaîry customs, and constituted the girl's dowry. After the betrothal in 1863, Hammûd sent her to Latakiah, where she was taken into the family of the late Dr. Dodds for instruction and training. She gladly received the truth, and Hammûd labored earnestly for her enlightenment. Everything seemed bright and promising, until suddenly all their earthly hopes were dashed by the early death of Hammûd in December, 1864. He died in the triumphs of the Christian faith, and from that time she gave herself to the Lord. In August, 1865, she with several others was baptized and received into the