edan,
as it is to wash the skin of a negro white. But the earlier caliphs were
not moulded into true Mussulmans; they had been witnesses to the making
of their religion; and, when they forsook the rude superstitions of
their forefathers of the desert, they had admitted some gleams of common
sense and sound reason into their minds, along with the sermons of
Mohammed.

And in the early ages of the caliphate, Syria and Egypt were inhabited
by a numerous Christian population of the Nestorian and Jacobite
heresies, firmly attached to the Saracen power, on their hatred to the
orthodox Roman emperors at Constantinople. The importance of the canal
of Suez to the well-being of these useful subjects of the Arab empire,
could not escape the attention of the caliphs. The native population of
Egypt had, with the greatest unanimity, joined the Saracens against the
Romans; and the Caliph Omar would have been led by policy to restore the
canal, in order to enrich these devoted partisans, as he was induced to
burn the library of Alexandria to diminish the moral influence of the
Greeks.

The Arabian historians and geographers contain numerous passages
relating to the re-opening of the canal, and many of these will be found
translated at the end of the _Memoire sur le Canal des Deux Mers_. They
state that Omar ordered the canal of Trajan to be cleared out in its
whole extent. The necessity of securing a greatly increased supply of
grain for the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, whose population had been
suddenly augmented by their becoming the capitals of all Arabia, and the
centres of the Mohammedan power, could not be overlooked. But the mind
of Omar was particularly directed to the subject, in consequence of a
famine which prevailed in Arabia in the eighteenth year of the Hegira,
(A.D. 639,) which was afterwards called the year of the mortality. In
that year, the caliph's attention was also more especially called to the
fertility of Egypt, as Amron, at his pressing demand for provisions,
sent such an immense caravan, that the Arabian writers, with their usual
exaggeration, declare, that the convoy was so numerous as to extend the
whole way from Medina to Cairo; the first camel of the train entering
the Holy City with its load, as the last of the uninterrupted line
quitted Misr. The descriptions of the abundance this supply spread among
the Arabs are indeed less miraculous, though such eloquence is displayed
in painting the gastronomic