THE ORIENT AND ORIENTAL LANDS

New Zealand Tablet, 29 March 1917, Page 7

THE ORIENT AND ORIENTAL LANDS

(lienzige r's Magazine.)

The Orient ' as a word charms and attracts. East ' and ' Far East ' are names known to the many and understood by the few. ' The East !' cries an enthusiastic traveloguer, ' the mystical, poetical, sunful, and colorful East, where men are seers and customs have not changed in thousands of years!' ' The East!' says another, who has seen little of it and thought not enough, ' where poverty is rampant, vice and ignorance rife, filth and loathsome disease hidden by flowers and aching sunlight ; where men are animals and slaves, and women chattels of the harems or beasts of the fields ! In the East, men write backward and think upside down, art has little or no perspective, sculpture is unspeakably uglv. and religion is a thing of grotesque idolatry and fear !' Thus is much information thoughtlessly disseminated. With relief I quote a gentle and learned Jesuit who tells me that ' East' and ' Far East' must be differentiated, since the one is that oriental field we have known for centuries and the other is the real, the unqualified Orient of which we, as occidentals, can only scratch the surface of understanding and sympathy. But in both are men like us who need God and may be taught with patience to know Him.'

Just What Is the Orient

is a question often asked. Where does East end and Far East begin ? If we speak of the Orient do we mean all Asia and Asia Minor ? Or the Asias and parts of Africa as well Or is it only China, Japan, and India ? If one chooses, besides those three, Persia and Palestine, must one also include Armenia and Syria and Arabia, as well as Egypt and Turkey of Europe and Asia, too ?

Philologists divide the Orient into the two main classifications indicated above—East and Far East.

The Far East is China, Japan, and India, with jtheir .contiguous small neighbors and islands —Afghanis-

tan, Tibet, Burma, 'Siam, Ceylon, the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Under the head of ' East' come all the rest of those countries that are obviously not occidental. Geographically speaking, the scholar has little to help him • and while it may be simple enough to dispose of China, Japan, and Hindostan under one head, assembling countries as East or Near East is another matter. What to include in the list is not so hard as determining what to exclude !

There can be no question, for instance, that Arabians, Turks, Syrians, Armenians, and Jews are orientals. Still, the Turkish and Arabian characters differ so radically from the Syrian and Armenian that one pauses in setting them down under one classification. On the other hand, when one thinks of the Turks as one with Hindoos and Chinese, one remembers that they are so utterly alike in many particulars that Turkey might well be Far East, but in another breath conies the realisation that they are so unlike in other points that they can not all three be arranged under one substratum.

Authorities Class Turkey and Persia

with the rest of Asia Minor, Egypt, and northern Africa as Near East. They do not, generally, call Russia oriental. Yet, Russians resemble orientals so closely that writers and travellers declare that Russia belongs to the East, not to . the West: and Siberia, Russia's vast tract in northern Asia, is an oriental country. Despite her geographical situation, however, she lacks something indefinable that China, Japan, and India has, and therefore she is not called ' the Far East.'

But geography doesn't help the scholar, as marked above. Persia, farthest east of the Near East array, strikes diplomats, consuls, and travellers with her occidental aspects, temj>eraments, mental processes, and the western and familiar outlook on life and eternity held by her people. The average Persian is far less of an oriental than the Jew ; even than the Jew who has lived entirely under occidental skies for several generations. On the other hand, Lapland, a country of northwestern Europe, far from the Orient, has by some freak of migration become the seat of an oriental race ; and some parts of the Balkans, though west of Turkey, are more oriental than the Ottomans. Albania, for instance—of whose settlement;' there is no legend, so far back does it go, but whose first men are popularly supposed to have been the earliest Aryan nomads from the Far East—is entirely oriental, more so than its late Turkish rulers. The same thing is true of parts of Bulgaria ; but not so much from the Turkish strain left by Turkey's invasion and conquest of Bulgaria as by the inherent characteristics of the natives themselves.

Perhaps the most difficult phase of classifying orientals has to do with the nomadic and savage tribes that must be included in any list—the Arabs, Tatars (more commonly though less correctly called Tartars), Cossacks, Moors, Berbers, Kurds, gypsies. Generally speaking, these are tribes of the Near East wandering over great tracts of desert land in northern Africa and Asia Minor. Indeed, the silences, barrenness, immense dignity, and uselessness of the deserts and steppes of the East are a pretty accurate reflection of oriental character! The nomadic tribes of Tibetans are essentially Far East.

Our Lack of Knowledge of Asiatic Countries, and our loose application of whatever knowledge comes to us, account for our misconceptions of the East. Still, we are beginning to make sure of points. For a long time the words ' Asiatic' and ' Oriental ' were used to designate human groups that are on a higher level than the natives of southern and central Africa, or our own American Indians, but who have not reached the material progress and civilisation of western Europe. Negatively put, the oriental has not the same craving for independence and freedom as have occidentals and he is a member of a family, a state

or a religion rather than an individual, so that his politics are autocratic and his beliefs fatalistic. Our conception of him has become solidified, and we have added to it a realisation that his history—that is, the history of all oriental or Asiatic countries, as well as the centuries' record of the Orient proper — is far longer chronologically than ours, and he can and does, v/ith few exceptions, claim a more ancient civilisation. But history and civilisation alike are less eventful and less diversified and offer fewer high lights of interest, because individualism is subordinated and initiative subdued.

Nevertheless, an individual once developed dominates without frequent change in the East. Thus, the Mongolian emperor Genghis Khan (1164-1227) and the oriental conqueror Timour or Tamerlane (1336-1495) achieved more and endured longer than Napoleon, from their own very natures and from the temperaments of those about them; while no European can conceivably have the same vitiating effect upon the world as had Mohammed, nor any>western philosopher get and retain the influence that Confucius exerts.

A Fact Arrests Us Here.

Not only did Christ and His Faith come to us out of the East, but oddly enough other religions have had their origin there too —Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Brahmauism and the tenets of Confucius, still religious if primarily philosophical. Believers and followers of Mohammed, Confucius, Brahma, aiid Buddha are comprehensible as arising in the East because of the very character of the oriental. The Easterner is a thinker, not a doer. He is looking inward ever, and nothing seems worth while to him except the spirit, the inner sensibility. He has, invariably, been cruelly and despotically governed; he really does not care about that if only he can sit by the hour, gazing into space and revelling in the art of introspection. His religious observances are more to him than anything else. Leave him his rights and his freedom to carry on those observances and it does not matter what you do with his civil privileges. Occidentals heard and understood the Jew, Prophet of the One Religion, because It Was Written. But Christ Himself mingled deeds with prayer and revelation, and His teaching was comprehensible to occidental minds. It has been said, again and again and with truth, that Christianity will spread over the East as the West dominates in act and word, since the oriental character is such that only individually is he able to grasp the importance of Christian deeds. The Yellow Peril so often spoken of, idly, is a more terrible possibility than any one now living realises. The Mongolian is the extreme end of the oriental trend of mind, farthest from occidental perspective. The dominance of East over West would not stamp out Christianity, for Truth never dies, but oriental thought and method imposed could not be made compatible with occidental and Christian dominance and would conceivably turn back the hands of the clock thousands of years.

What Was and Was Not the Orient,

was a question long before the beginnings of present peoples and their immediate forbears. The earlier Romans called it 'Syria and perhaps Egypt, and let it go at that; later, the Romans knew no difference between East and West, and hence, to them, there was no Orient.

During the -Classical Age, Roman conquest so spread that all southern Europe and south-western Asia were one under Roman dominion, and the Roman capital was moved to Byzantium, hereafter named Constantinople, from Constantine the emperor and founder, in 330 A.D., where it endured as such till 1453. Throughout the period, there was ostensibly as much Roman territory east of Constantinople as there was west, and no differentiation was made between East and West. The Far East was a term unknown. The culture of the West or of Rome merged so quietly into the barbarisms of those peoples that had lain beyond the new seat of government that, undoubtedly, the process was hardly discernible to all those living during the change.

The wars between Rome and Persia, from 527 to 627 A.D., while they weakened both empires irretrievably and left them fit prey for later disasters, helped in extremest measure to spread Rome's culture and civilisation farther and still farther eastward.

Not until 633 A.D., when the wild riders of the Arabian desert under the green banner of Islam (the name given to the religion of the orthodox Mohammedan) began to swoop down upon Persia, were East and West thrown apart by barriers that were raised up, unfortunately, to endure. It is interesting, this feat of a few barbarian troops from Mecca. The victories of Alexander the Great have been wiped clean from the slate of Time, but the conquest of the Arab has been lasting. He put the stamp of Mohammed and darkness upon Persia, and there it remains.

The Christian Byzantines

were driven out of Persia until, bv 641, practically none were left. The conquerors spread Islam beliefs and lowered, step by step, the civilisation of the subjugated Persian people. In this they were aided by invading Berber tribes from northern Africa.

The writer recently read a very interesting but unconvincing declaration that one of the fundamental facts of physical geography was, that a fusion of certain physical and geographical aspects must and does originate definite types of men and activities. The article went on to say that when the lands of southern Europe and the Asiatic Orient, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean came under one domain, ' that of Rome,' commerce, traffic, and a cultural growth of all the inhabitants of those regions resulted—one might add 'automatically'—due to the inlets and the islands, the dee]) and frequent harbors of the dominating part of the realm. Any inland country conquered by a maritime race or included in its trade schemes is bound to prosper and its subjects expand and improve as did oriental nations under Rome. The coast of Africa, from which the conquerors of Persia and the East came, after Rome, is poverty poor in harbor facilities, as is Asia Minor (in ancient geography called Anatolia), where, on its west coast, the uEgean plays only a small, unimportant role. Beyond the ./Egean, the land stretches away in vast distances. There can, of necessity, be but poor transport possibilities in such an inland extent without gigantic invasion front more progressive countries that make commerce their existence and are ingenuous in overcoming obstacles of transportation.

The Interior of Asia Minor

is dry, vegetation scant, the desert the characteristic land vista. Interior trade is inconsistent with physical conditions.

And so, when northern Africa superseded Rome in ascendency over the Near East, the wonderful advantages of southern Europe's and Rome's harbors and trade activity were exchanged for barren wastes and roaming, marauding masters. Persia sank into oblivion," her adjacent countries shared in her commercial degeneration. Admitting the premise of this argument, we account for iSpain in a large measure. The Moors, as oriental as Arabs and Berbers, overran Spain and endured for centuries there. They left a lasting influence on the country and the race, but Spain had her commercial facilities and her commercial neighbors. It was impossible to cut her off from outside communication, and the oriental mind could not dominate. Hence, Spain to-day is Catholic.

Russia, as we have said, is more oriental than occidental. Not her harbor facilities, but her nearness to nations that trade and have crossed her boundaries has caused the Greek church rather than the Mohammedan mosque to rear its emblems on her lands. We often speak of Russia's illimitable possibilities and tell one another that she will be the coming country 'once her interior is open to us.' We mean that, with more harbors and commercial transportation introduced by Western nations, the occidental world and Russia will come into closer trade relations and the latter will

receive our culture, as did Persia in the days of Roman connection.

Japan, with her coast line and her commercial instincts, will become more imbued with occidental atmosphere each century. Sh6\must take the initiative to exist, which is toward occidental trend.

But Being Mongolian, she has oriental vision and perspective; her religion, manners, and customs are derived from her racial beginnings and were inevitable. How far she can undergo a kind of metamorphosis into occidental character it is impossible to guess. But she can and will g» farther than China, because China has such a vast interior region hidden in the darkness of superstition and tradelessness. As China need not take the initiative to exist, her Mongolian trend of thought can not be altered from within. It will l)e a question whether oriental mental processes can be influenced from without. The great political upheavals of recent years have made China rather an uncertain quantity. The change from the monarchial to the republican form of government is an indication of dissatisfaction existing beneath the surface, which will doubtless be provocative of racial and far-reaching changes, influencing not only the politics of the country, but also its civil and commercial life. Though China and Japan should be considered separately, still, when discussinq- the possible development of China, it is quite advisable, if not necessary, to take note of the fact that Japan is beginning to exert a large influence on the economic development of its neighbor. The immense concessions which the Mikado has obtained from the Chinese Republic are too recent in the public mind to require enumeration, but it is quite evident that the power of Japan must not be forgotten when the future of China is a matter of discussion.