The Real Turk

The Real Turk, STANYVOOD COBB '03. The Pilgrim Press, Boston, 1914.

The publishers of this book, with an unusual sense of humor, have placed a picture of the author dressed in a Mullah's costume, opposite the title page which reads "The Real Turk"! We shrewdly suspect that the title itself is traceable to the same source and we confess to a prejudice against it. It seems to convey the impression that here and here only is to be found the fount of wisdom, all other attempts of previous writers, e.g., Sir Edwin Pears, Miss Garnett, Sir Wm. Ramsay, etc., have been mistaken, or inaccurate. (A glaring instance of this occurred a few years ago, when a well known writer then penning his first book entitled it "The Real X" after having taken the train through a country of vast extent and having got off at one or more points for a day or two's stay. However, when he came to deliver a lecture on the subject of his book before a well-informed audience his temerity failed him and the paper was announced as "The tale of a journalist's scamper through X!")

The work before us is a pleasant surprise. It is emphatically not the work of a scamperer through Turkey, but of one who has spent three years in that country, content not to thrust the superiority of his own civilization before the wondering Oriental, but to rest by the wayside, absorbing from all available sources the atmosphere, mental, social and religious of a new, or rather an old, world.

"The Real Turk" claims to be an interpretation of the East to the West. Perhaps the reader will fail to reconcile the two aims made in the preface to produce "a true portrait of the Turk" and to present "the good side of the Turk": but we are not inclined to carp at that, for the attempt was well worth the making, and the Turk has certainly not been understood in this country. We need not worry if the picture is a flattering one, for we are too well sup- plied with materials for the opposite kind.

The contrasts in the life and outlook of the Turk and the Occidental are well brought out and in the main attributed to the climate. We may suggest that this factor is overemphasized and that race and the ancestral nomadism— traces of the latter are still discernible in their scantily furnished homes and fatalism in religion—are left out of account. To our author the leisureliness of their life, the want of haste, the love of repose, as well too as the serious penalty to the European who tries to hustle or neglects a cold, are due to the climate which makes Orientals of us all who reside there, at least, if we survive. But how is it that this slow-moving, dignified, kindly Turk, whom we ourselves have met or of whom we hav.e heard from many a one who has mixed with him, is at times swift to cruelty and an unmoved spectator of horrors? Mr. Cobb rejoins that the Turk is still in the Middle Ages and bids us look back to our records of that time of brutality, torture, rackings and burnings, and recognize that the difference is not one of human nature, not of the East and of the West, but merely of stages in civilization.

Happily there are brighter aspects of the Turkish character and conditions, which shine by contrast with our own. Referring us to conditions of work, he says: "Their hours are long, but their labor dignifies instead of degrading them Compare the feverish activity of our modern industrial system, with its soul-racking machines and dehumanizing servitude to work." Slaves to work! Whereas "our Oriental brother is the master of his."

Similarly of the storekeeper, he writes, "When it comes to selling his products, the Oriental is again the master of his business—sitting cross-legged in his little shop waiting patiently for a customer. He is never anxious to sell. If you wish to exchange your money for his goods, he is ready to serve you. Strange as it may seem, to bargain with one of these venerable old Turks for a chain of prayer beads and finally make a purchase is like going away with a benison upon you. You feel an affection, a love, for the old man. He is happy to sell his beads, you are happy to buy them—and the whole transaction has been conducted on the highest level of honor, courtesy, and brotherly feeling. The Turk has no idea of enlarging his business, of buying up the shops around him and erecting a department store. The booth which served his father serves him; he makes a living, he is happy, he lives near to Allah— what more could he want? Ah, the possibilities of automobiles, of steam yachts, and of palaces in town and mountain have not yet appeared to him. Will you go and awake him from his lethargy and dream, American financier? Will you undertake to show him the possibilities of combination, of fierce competition, of ostentatious wealth? Will you take away his soul and give him a few millions in return? Pray do not. Leave us some corner of the earth where we can flee when the shadows of industrialism oppress us; when the soullessness of human faces arouses our despair; when the clutch of the dollar begins to seize upon us and to draw us into the mad vortex of haste for false pleasures and showy rivalry. The East is as yet a land free from nervous desire, a land where one can rest, can seek the eternal solitudes of the spirit—can find something more valuable for humanity than materialistic comforts."

Later in the book he reverses the picture and gives the negative of the American and the positive of the Turk in these words, "How little time our business men have for meditation on the nature of existence! How seldom when they are together does their conversation turn on spiritual themes; the nature of the Ultimate—man's position in the universe—his relation to the Divine. The typical American has no cosmic view; his mind does not scan the universe, nor find for him any relation to the mysterious All of which the world where he breathes and lives is but an infinitesimal part. He bothers little with such idle speculations! To the Oriental, however, this is the one absorbing theme. He is ever pondering on the nature of existence as a whole. Other things, the practical things of everyday life, are "out passing shows from which he is glad to withdraw whenever possible in order to be face to face with the Divine—to feel that mystic sense of union with the Whole which is peculiarly Oriental."

A minor matter in which we might learn from the Orient, and indeed from most unsophisticated peasant peoples, is the custom of wearing good, honest, lasting material and of refus- ing to be led by the nose by Dame Fashion. Mr. Cobb has hopes for us. He writes, "In one respect the East stands at a point to which we may hope to progress after a few centuries of effort and struggle for common sense in clothes; it has no change of styles— that tyranny of tailors which devours so large a portion of our attention, time, patience and money."

He makes a suggestion of current practicability. It is that instruction in our schools should be orientated towards a better understanding of foreign peoples. Too often our geographers emphasize the peculiarities of foreigners and not the underlying sameness of human nature. Customs which appear at first sight strange may be "intrinsically better than our own" and the attitude we should seek to engender should find expression in not "How odd!" but, "There must be some reason for this. What is it?"

The work of the missionaries is spoken of with full appreciation, but the author does not flinch from telling us quite plainly that the Turk is not being converted to the Christian religion. He writes, "When the first missionaries started work in Constantinople and Smyrna, some fifty years ago, efforts were made to convert Mohammedans. The success was not large. I enquired of one missionary who had just finished a service of fifty years in Constantinople how many Mohammedans had been converted there within his memory. He thought of one. This one later turned out to be a rascal, and the missionaries were therefore not inclined to boast of him. When Abdul Hamid came to the throne, in 1873, he pledged the missionaries not to attempt to proselyte among the Mohammedan population of his Empire." Hence their energies are focussed on work among the Christian sects, the Armenians, Bulgarians, Copts, Syrians, etc., and they have been in most cases instrumental in bringing to them for the first time the benefits of modern education. With the Revolution a new opportunity has opened to Robert College, the Syrian Protestant College at Beirut, and others to aid the Turk himself.

The book deals also with Islam, its rites and ceremonies, and inner life, but the burden of the work is an interpretation of the East to the West. Like most other thoughtful travellers in the Orient, he has come back impressed with the need of mutual understanding. The first step is for the West to throw off its garment of righteous superiority and to recognize that the Orient with its life of unhaste, of mediation, and of vivid realization of the presence of God has something to teach us. The East has need of the West and knows it, the West has need of the East and has yet to learn it. To sum up in the author's own words, "They can teach us the secret of happiness: true simplicity of heart; spirituality which is not quenched by material things; and the vision of infinitude which has grown into their minds and souls. We have much, and yet are not contented; they have little, and are satisfied. Somewhere between our restless discontent, which leads to progress, and their lethargic satisfaction, which leads to stagnation, lies the golden mean—a calm activity, and a striving for the best which has in it no bitterness, no feverish intensity nor disappointment, because upheld by a large faith in the universe."

H. A. Miller '99 contributes "America and the Foreign Student" to the Cosmopolitan Student for February, 1915. This is an address delivered December 27, 1914, at the eighth annual convention of the Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs. The "Perils of Pauline,' the much talked of movingpicture play by Charles W. Goddard '02, has just been published by Hearst's International Library Co.

Two books to be reviewed later are "In Christ's Own Country" by Rev. Francis E. Clark, 1873, and "The Congregational Churches of Vermont and their Ministry, 1762-1914," by Johin M. Comstock, 1877.