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The theory, he thought, was so good that there must be something wrong with it. His work brought him into daily contact with the natives, and, so far as he could judge, Mektoub was only one aspect of their general way of looking at things. It was bound up, for instance, with that idea of impenitence.
Then, to keep the son at home, the mother will hasten to catch a bride for him who shall be, if possible, more incompetent than herself, in order that she, the mother, may retain her ascendency over him. The father, meanwhile, shrugs his shoulders: Mektoub! There is no fighting against such heroic perseverance on a woman's part; besides, was he not brought up on the same lines?
What is this gift, this distinguishing mark? Discipline of the mind, culminating in intellectual chastity in what may be called a horror of perverse or futile reasoning. He mentioned, incidentally, the case of suicides among the natives to prove that the Mektoub doctrine is not wholly pernicious.
The lack of comfort and the need of abrupt action makes them discard gentleness and other external husks of civilization. The mildest of us are liable to become brusque; and harsh ones, brutal. Only the native remains resigned." Thereupon I propounded my hypothesis of the Mektoub or resignation doctrine: the intellectual burnous of the Arabs.
The rain bathed his face. His soul was washed with the waters of the merciful God of Arab men. For, after all, from the beginning, it had been written. All written! "Mektoub!" By TRISTRAM TUPPER From Metropolitan Magazine Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of his burial temptation came to his widow.
Verne's service, and then back across the ocean into this place?" "Mektoub," he vouchsafed, after lowering his eyes so that she should not see the flames in them. "And why not, since none can hope to escape his destiny? We this whole safari are here in the palm of God's hand. None knows what God has prepared for us; yet every footprint that we make has been marked before our feet."
Suicides were quite unusual, he said; the Arabs do not seem to be able to fall in with the idea, preferring to bear the greatest evils rather than take an active part in the undoing of themselves. That was Mektoub: to bow the head, dumbly resisting. And were they not right?
He thought that in the matter of suicides, as in that of remorse, we were too "spectacular and altruistic"; that we lived in a rather unwholesome atmosphere of self-created and foolish ideas concerning honour and duty; that the Mektoub practice of the Arabs pointed to an underlying primitive sanity which we would do well to foster within us. Gafsa, even Gafsa, has its enigmas.
The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, chypre and amber and musk, clogged his senses like the drug of some abominable seduction. He was weary, weary, weary. And in a strange, troubling way he was at rest. "Mektoub! It is written! It is written in the book of the destiny of man!"
But this doctrine of referring everything to the will of Allah takes away all stimulus to independent thought; it makes for apathy, improvidence, and mental fossilification. A creed of everyday use which hampers a man's reasoning in the most ordinary matters of life is it not like a garment that fetters his hands? Mektoub is the intellectual burnous of the Arabs....
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