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and several others contained in the old version, give some idea of the licence of the time, and examples are still more abundant and circumstantial in the tales that compose the comparatively unknown portion of the collection.
As may well be supposed, under these circumstances, the upper classes of the time were not characterised by any especial fervour of religious devotion. Notwithstanding the fanatical orthodoxy of the Khalif and of his chief wife and cousin, Zubeideh, a woman as superstitious, as cruel and as cultivated as himself,[1] the general religious sentiment of the Court of Baghdad appears to have been a sort of refined atheism, borrowed from Persia and having in all probability some affinity with Soufi quietism, which, whilst conforming in outward matters to Muslim observances, was yet, in the spirit of the Persian usage expressed by the word ketman (concealment), perfectly well understood and recognised. This tendency had apparently its origin with the illustrious Barmecide (properly Bermeki) family; and their opinions, whilst not interfering with a professed conformity to the tenets of Islam, appear to have been shared by most of the great officers and nobles of the kingdom, in the same manner as the religious doctrine known as Bâbism is said at the present day to underlie the higher ranks of modern Persian society. Nevertheless, the lower
- ↑ She is reported to have owned a hundred slave-girls, each of whom knew the Koran by heart and had the task of repeating a tenth part thereof daily, so that her palace resounded with a perpetual humming, like that of bees. It is said that the report of this princess’s piety and munificence still lingers among the Bedouins, by whom her name is even now held in reverence as that of a saint.
