Plus ça change
amongst the children of Abraham…
Guns, gin, powder, and shoddy cloths, dishonest dealing only too frequently, and flimsy manufactures which displace the fabrics woven by the women; new wants, new ways, and discontent with what they know, and no attempt to teach a proper comprehension of what they introduce; these are the blessings Europeans take to Eastern lands. Example certainly they do set, for ask a native what he thinks of us, and if he has the chance to answer without fear, ’tis ten to one he says, Christian and cheat are terms synonymous. Who that has lived in Arab countries, and does now know that fear, and fear alone, makes the position of the Christian tolerable. Christ and Mohammed never will be friends; their teaching, lives, and the conditions of the different peoples amongst whom they preached make it impossible; even the truce they keep is from the teeth outwards, and their respective followers misunderstand each other quite as thoroughly as when a thousand years ago they came across each other’s path for the first time. But if the Arabs constitute a stony vineyard, the Jews are worse, and years ago when first the missionaries appeared in the coast towns of southern Barbary, they fleshed their maiden weapons on the Jews. It struck the chosen people that the best weapon to employ against their new tormentors was that of irony, and so they cast about to find a nickname calculated at the same time to ridicule and wound, and found it, made it stick and rankle, so that today every new missionary on landing has to accommodate his shoulders to the burden of a peculiarly comic cross.
Almost all Europeans in Morocco must of necessity be merchants, if not they must be consuls, for there is hardly any other industry open to them to choose. The missionaries bought and sold nothing, they were not consuls; still they ate and drank, lived in good houses, and though not rich, yet passed their lives in what the Jews called luxury. So they agreed to call them followers of Epicurus, for, as they said, “this Epicurus was a devil who did naught but eat and drink.” The nickname stuck, and changed into “Bikouros” by the Moors, who thought it was a title of respect, became the name throughout Morocco for a missionary. One asks as naturally for the house of Epicurus on coming to a town as one asks for the “Checquers” or the “Bells” in rural England. Are you “Bikouros”? says a Moor, and thinks he does you honour by the inquiry; but the recipients of the name are fit to burst when they reflect on their laborious days spent in the surgery, their sowing seed upon the marble quarries of the people’s hearts, and that the Jews in their malignity should charge upon them by this cursed name, that they live in Morocco to escape hard work, and pass their time in eating and quaffing healths a thousand fathoms deep.
Often at night, awake and looking at the stars and trying to remember which was which, I have broken into laughter when I thought upon the name, and laughed until the Arabs all sat up alarmed, for he who laughs at night laughs at his hidden wickedness, or else because a devil has possessed his soul.
—R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Mogreb-el-Acksa (1898)