Islam and Christianity

scholars stated that his tafsîr was very valuable, and translated it
into Turkish, giving it the title Mawâkib. The person condemned
in Madras was a heretic, an insidious enemy of Islam whose real
purpose was to defile the Islamic religion. He was condemned
because he attempted to give wrong, heretical meanings to the
Qur’ân al-kerîm. Those who condemned him were great Islamic
scholars who had written religious books in the Persian and Hindi
languages.
Now let us turn our attention to the reflections of another
foreign lady on this subject. The following excerpts have been
paraphrased from Twenty-Six Years on the Bosphorus, written by
a British lady, named Ms. Dorina L. Neave, who lived in Istanbul
between 1881 and 1907 [1325 A.H.].
After praising Muslims for their politeness and giving a few
examples of the open-mindedness that they show to the votaries of
other religions, Ms. Neave also dwells on some culpabilities and
criticizes them. Please read what she says:
“There is a religious rite observed in the name of Muharram [1]
here. I have been staying for years in Istanbul, and I have never
gone to see that religious rite. The people who went to see them
tell us that those Muslim rites are extremely severe and dreadfully
wild. People who perform those rites come forward with the upper
parts of their bodies naked, shout the names of Hasan and Huseyn,
(the names of the Prophet’s two blessed grandsons,) and hit their
naked bodies vehemently with the heavy chains they hold in their
hands, which makes them bloody all over.”
Ms. Neave writes as follows about a rite of Rufâ’îs which her
acquaintances attended: “As my friends told me, dervishes, [or
Rufâ’îs,] naked down to their bellies and yelling, make a line,
saying the (expression called) Shahâdat aloud and rocking their
bodies backwards and forwards. Then, accelerating their
movements gradually, shouting wild cries and yells in a sort of
ecstacy or a fit of epilepsy, they spring in the air until they lose
consciousness. Meanwhile, they stab themselves repeatedly with
the knives they are holding in their hands, so much so that some
of them fall down on the floor, their bodies bleeding all over. On
the other hand, some Turkish women who believe that these men
are fully blessed and sacred in this state of ecstacy bring their
invalid children with them and throw the poor creatures under the
[1] The first Islamic month.
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