Moorish culture

“ In the Moorish university African, Arab, Jew, and European all met, some to give, others to take, in the great exchange of culture. It was possible there to take as it were a bird's-eye view of the most widely separated races of men, each with its characteristic out-look. ”

“ It may be so, but the Moorish style is so imprinted on the tastes of the people that they build age after age with substantially the same models, and it is not safe to affirm that the hands of the Moors laid any of these stones. ”

“ Through this brilliant court, the visitor will proceed or linger as his spirit directs. There are no statues to examine, for the religion of the Moors forbade the representation of living objects; in truth, the exquisitely wrought tracery on every side, upon which the Moorish mind was thus forced to concentrate all its artistic power and skill, is in itself sufficient exclusively to arrest and to enchain the attention. ”

“ Grains, cattle, horses, chariots and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. ”

“ Whatever the material condition of the Highland people, whatever their lack, in many parishes, of elementary education, they possessed, in legends, Märchen, traditional poems, and the living art of popular song, a native culture—rich, dignified, and imaginative—which newspapers merely destroy. ”

“ It is a strange anomaly in a land, the greater portion of which, either through the obduracy of Nature or the indolence of its inhabitants, had been for ages condemned to eternal sterility and isolated by sea and desert from contemporaneous civilization, to encounter a race whose genius was capable of at once adapting itself, with equal facility, to the formation and development of an agricultural system surpassing that of any other people, ancient or modern ”

“ But a taste beyond this, however desirable it may be that every one should possess it, is not to be implanted at once; it must be gradually developed both in nations and individuals. Rocks and mountains, torrents and wide-spread waters, and all those features of nature which go to the composition of such scenes as this part of England is distinguished for, cannot, in their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or opportunities of observation in some degree habitual. ”

“ When the first explorers came into the uncharted spaces of these warm seas, they found a culture totally beyond the understanding of most of them, and abhorrent to state and church, but which a few fine souls glimpsed as an astonishing revelation of the natural development of the human, and, by foil, of the decadence of civilization. ”

“ Sometimes I venture to approach him with a plea for wildness, when he good-naturedly shakes a big mellow apple in my face, reiterating his favorite aphorism, “Culture is an orchard apple; Nature is a crab.” Not all culture, however, is equally destructive and inappreciative. Azure skies and crystal waters find loving recognition, and few there be who would welcome the axe among mountain pines, or would care to apply any correction to the tones and costumes of mountain waterfalls. ”

“ But in the States, with everything grand and beautiful in nature to stimulate the imagination, the refined product of modern culture has found nothing fitter to inscribe upon the newest and fairest page that civilisation has turned than his own unmeaning appellation, nothing more remarkable to call attention to than his own vulgarity, and Jonesvilles, Smithtowns, Robinsonopolises, Brown Cities, and the like, besides similarly denominated mountains and rivers, render the map hideous and the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculous. Curious indeed is the influence of modern culture. ”

“ All the various items of evidence which I have collected, and endeavoured to elucidate by means of survivals, whether in relation to modes of navigation or other branches of industry, appear to me to tend towards establishing a gradual development of culture as we advance northward. Although Buddhism and its concomitant civilization may have come from the north, there has been an earlier and prehistoric flow of culture in the opposite direction—northward—from the primaeval and now submerged cradle of the human family in the southern hemisphere. ”

“ The practical developments of his culture are orchards and clover-fields wearing a smiling, benevolent aspect, truly excellent in their way, though a near view discloses something barbarous in them all. Wildness charms not my friend, charm it never so wisely: and whatsoever may be the character of his heaven, his earth seems only a chaos of agricultural possibilities calling for grubbing-hoes and manures. ”

“ Two occupied the opposite bank of the river; the others encircled the Moorish capital with a girdle of dazzling white villas, interspersed with groves of palms rising amidst a wealth of tropical verdure. For miles in every direction were orange orchards, whose sweetness impregnated the air for many a league. Rivulets and fountains diffused through street and garden a delicious coolness. Blossoms of gaudy hue and overpowering fragrance grew in profusion along the avenues. ”

“ The change being so great,—the phenomenon of savage survivals in culture established, the position of the history and development of culture as an integral part of anthropology vindicated, and the claims of anthropology as a subject of study recognized by the Universities,—the question has naturally been more than once asked,—Is there any further need for the Folk-Lore Society? ”

“ And even to-day the sight of the tropics, green and luxuriant, brings us into touch at once with earlier ideas and habits of the race—makes us more able not only to understand, but also to sympathise with, our ancient ancestors of the naked-and-not-ashamed era of culture. Views formed exclusively in the North tend too much to imitate the reduced gentlewoman's outlook upon life ”

“ The introduction of this civilisation is the starting-point of the history of the present inhabitants of Europe. To the Neolithic peoples we owe the rudiments of the culture which we ourselves enjoy. The arts which they introduced have never been forgotten, and all subsequent progress has been built upon their foundation. Their cereals are still cultivated by the farmer, their domestic animals still minister to us, and the arts of which they only possessed the rudiments, have developed into the industries—spinning, weaving, pottery-making, mining ”

“ Especially hateful to these earnest people was the open gaiety and sensuous refinement of the Moors; their enjoyment of life and all its pleasure, their music and singing, their very learning and science, were abhorrent to these ascetics. Life, to the true believer, meant only scourges and fasts, penances and confessions, purification through suffering, the mortifying of the flesh and sanctifying of the spirit. ”

“ There is no sudden incoming of a higher culture or higher type of man. The most impressive relics of the Mousterian period, which represent its later epoch, are merely finely chipped implements. There is no art as yet, no pottery, and no agriculture ”

“ The entire body of tradition, combined with facts accumulated by subsequent writers of every race and creed, does not afford such a thorough insight into the public and domestic life, the prevailing sentiments and prejudices, the habits and customs of the inhabitants of the Peninsula, as do the Moallakat. ”

“ That the culture of nomad peoples is lower than that [8] of pastoral tribes; that pastoral tribes advance in culture when they become agricultural; that agriculture, implying settled habits and fixed homes, leads to the foundation of cities and the formation of civic life; that the city-states of the ancient world give way to the nation-states of modern times: are all accepted facts, bridging the apparent chasm between civilisation and savagery, and demonstrating the action of the law of continuity in the evolution of society. ”

“ This is precisely the condition which might be anticipated when a culture too low to take over a higher one in its entirety had borrowed from it here and there, as the Forest peoples undoubtedly have borrowed from Middle America. ”

“ For with the sun come settlers and Maoris from all sides, some brought by boats and canoes upon the river, some galloping on horseback along the beach, others on foot struggling through the woods and across the ranges on either hand, all converging upon the shanty with shouting salutations, that are responded to with loudly demonstrated welcome.
A rough and wild-looking assemblage we are, I make no doubt, yet fitting well into the foreground of the scene, with its rude and incipient civilization insulting the dominant wildness of Nature all around. ”

“ The curse of sterility, and the freezing winds that sweep over this cheerless region, seem to discourage the hope that it will ever regain its former productiveness. The incessant march of the Moorish armies for a quarter of a century obliterated every sign of animal and vegetable life. ”

“ He said:—"The earliest inhabitants of the globe, as they spread themselves over the earth, would carry with them the rudiments of culture which they possessed, and we should naturally expect to find that the most primitive arts were, in the first instance, the most widely disseminated. ”

“ With their arts indigenous and unmixed, and with their institutions pure and homogeneous, the culture of this period, in its range, elements and possibilities, is illustrated by them in the fullest manner. ”

“ I have already stated that communities living for a long lapse of time in the same stratum of culture will naturally develop special details of practice suited to their special needs. A community of fishermen of several centuries' standing brought suddenly into contact with one of nomad herds, or of fixed tillers of the soil, will certainly have a vast number of folklore items to exchange with its newly-found neighbours, but the philosophy under which these items have assumed form will be found to be largely identical. ”

“ Thus, at the close of the Middle Ages, narrative, lyric and dramatic poetry seemed firmly established among the people. Not unmindful of romance, it was grounded in realism and sought to interpret the life of the peasant and the artisan of fifteenth-century England. The Renaissance follows, and a profound change comes over poetry. The popular note grows fainter and fainter, till at last it becomes inaudible. Poetry leaves the farmyard and the craftsman’s bench for the court. ”

“ It is amazing with what profound knowledge of the human heart he not only portrays the passion of jealousy,—first slumbering, then gradually awaking, and ending in madness; but with what wondrous accuracy he catches the Southern nature of the Moor,—the peculiar characteristics of the race, and never for a moment loses sight of them. ”

“ The present chapter will contain notices of such matters as lie much more upon the surface of native life, and are open to the observation of the visitor and traveller; the arts, namely, in which the culture of the people expresses itself, by which they build and decorate canoes and houses, plant and cultivate their gardens, furnish themselves with weapons and implements for war and work, catch fish, prepare their food, furnish themselves with clothing and ornaments, make and use money as a medium of exchange. ”

“ The two great Nations, inhabiting this Part of the Indies, differ widely from each other in their Complexions, Language, Manners, Disposition, and Religion. The Moguls (Moghuls) who are commonly called Moors or Moormen, are a robust, stately, and, in respect to the original Natives, a fair People. They speak what the English in India commonly call the Moors Tongue, which is in truth the Persian, 4or at least a Dialect of the Persian. They are naturally vain, affect Shew and Pomp in every thing, are much addicted to Luxury, fierce, oppressive, and, for the most part, very rapacious. ”

“ You may ask whether I endeavour to raise the islanders to my own level? It is the last thing that I would attempt. Culture they do not need: their dainty hieratic precisions of ritual are a sufficient culture in themselves. ”

“ It must not be assumed that in this land of pancakes and panaceas interest in “culture” is new or that its manifestations are sporadic or ill-directed. The early comers brought with them sufficient cultivation to leaven the lump, and the educational forces and cultural movements now everywhere marked in Western communities are but the fruition of the labors of the pioneers who bore books of worth and a love of learning with them into the wilderness. ”

“ There is a way for the cultured: it is to discover the peasant down beneath their culture, the original elemental soil down under the artificial surface, and to allow the sweetness and richness of that soil to give expression on that surface. True culture is thus achieved ”

“ But the science has gradually increased its scope, till it has, taken almost all human life for its province. Indeed if any one asks how and where Folk-lore differs from anthropology, I am rather at a loss for a reply. When antiquarians such as our own old Aubrey began to examine rural usages and superstitions, like the maypole and the harvest home, they saw—they could hardly help seeing—that the practices of the folk, of the peasant class everywhere, were remains of Gentilism or heathenism. ”