Their foolish customs when they rise in the morning, the way they prepare themselves for prayer and meals, their superstitious washings, and how they prepare for their Sabbath and other festivals, weddings, burials, and so on.

Lastly, their expectation of the Messiah, and the fictions, miracles and empty splendour that will attend him: how he will terrify the Gentiles and overcome them with new diseases; how the archangel Michael will sound his trumpet; how he will gather all the scattered Jews into the Holy Land and prepare a great banquet for them, containing all the birds, beasts and fish that God ever made, and a cup of wine grown in Paradise and kept in Adam’s cellar ever since.

The first course will include that great ox in Job 4:10, which feeds every day on a thousand hills, Psalm 50:10, the great Leviathan, and a great bird that laid an egg so large that, accidentally falling from its nest, it knocked down three hundred tall cedars, then broke and flooded one hundred and sixty villages.

This bird stood knee-deep in the sea, yet the sea was so deep that a hatchet could not reach the bottom in seven years. Then there are accounts of their Messiah’s wives and children; of Adam and Eve, and so on.

And among the rest there is that one astonishing fiction: when a Roman prince asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah why the Jews’ God was compared to a lion, the rabbi answered that he compared himself to no ordinary lion, but to one in the forest of Ela. When the prince wished to see it, the rabbi prayed to God that he might, and the lion immediately set out.

But when it was four hundred miles from Rome, it roared so loudly that all the pregnant women in Rome miscarried and the city walls collapsed. When it came a hundred miles nearer and roared a second time, their teeth fell from their mouths, the emperor himself fell down dead, and so the lion went back.

With countless such lies and fabrications, which they truly believe, they feed themselves on empty hope. Meanwhile no persuasion will turn them aside: they continually torment their souls with a host of idle ceremonies, live like slaves and wanderers, and will neither accept relief nor be reconciled.

Muslims are a mixture of Gentiles, Jews and Christians, and so absurd in their ceremonies that they seem to have taken the most foolish elements from each. Their superstitious law is full of idle fables; their Quran itself is a jumble of lies, tales, ceremonies, traditions and precepts stolen from other sects and heaped together in confusion to deceive a crowd of ignorant, barbarous rustics.

For example, how birds, beasts and stones greeted Muhammad when he came from Mecca, how the moon came down from heaven to visit him, how God sent for him and spoke to him, and a host of astonishing inventions about angels, the sun, moon and stars, and so on.

Their account of the Day of Judgment, with three trumpet blasts to prepare for it and its duration of fifty thousand years; of Paradise, consisting wholly in “the pleasure of intercourse and eating,” and “written for brutish people, a beastlike blessedness”—is so ridiculous that Virgil, Dante, Lucian or any poet could invent nothing more fabulous.

Their rites and ceremonies are utterly vain and superstitious. Their law absolutely forbids wine and pork; they must pray five times a day, always towards the south, and wash their whole bodies before and afterwards, with many similar observances. In fasting, vows, religious orders and pilgrimages they far surpass any Papists.

They often fast for a month together and must not eat a morsel until sunset. Their Qalandars, dervishes and Torlachers, and so on, are in some cases more abstemious than Carthusians, Franciscans and anchorites: they give up everything, live alone, eat sparingly and go naked.

They make pilgrimages as far as the River Ganges—as the Gentiles of those regions also do—to wash themselves. They hold that the river has a supreme power to cleanse them of all sins, and that no one can be saved without washing in it. For this reason they come from near and far throughout India: “there is a vast gathering of people of every nation,” and countless numbers visit it every year.

Others go as far as Mecca to Muhammad’s tomb, a journey both miraculous and meritorious. Their ceremonies of throwing stones to stone the Devil, of eating a camel at Cairo on the way, their fasts, their running until they sweat, their long prayers, Muhammad’s temple and tomb and how it was built—these would take a whole volume to describe.

For the trouble they take in this holy pilgrimage, all their sins are forgiven and they are regarded as saints. Several of them, when they return, put out their eyes with hot bricks so that they may never again see anything profane, and bite out their tongues, and so on. They look for their prophet Muhammad as Jews do for their Messiah.

Read more about their customs, rites and ceremonies in Lonicer’s Turkish History, volume 1, chapters 10–24; Bredenbach, chapters 4–6; Leo Africanus, book 1; Busbecq; Sabellicus; Purchas, book 3, chapters 3, 4 and 5; Theodor Bibliander; and others. You will find many foolish ceremonies among them. Most lamentably, the people are generally so scrupulous in observing them that, if the smallest detail is omitted, they think they will be damned: it is an unforgivable offence and can scarcely be pardoned.

“I kept in my house among my attendants,” says Busbecq, formerly the Turkish ambassador in Constantinople, “a Turkish boy who happened to eat shellfish, food forbidden by their law. The next day, when he learned what he had done, he was not merely sick and vomiting but deeply distressed. He wept and grieved for many days afterwards, tormenting himself over his foul offence.”