Part 2

The feeling lasted even under the debased rule of Muslim despots; for it is related that a governor was once ordering-out some prisoners to execution, when one of them asked for a drink of water, which was immediately given him. He then turned to the governor and said, ‘Wilt thou slay thy guest?’ and was forthwith set free. A pledge of protection was inferred in the giving of hospitality, and to break his word was a thing not to be thought upon by an Arab. He did not care to give an oath; his simple word was enough, for it was known to be inviolable. Hence the priceless worth of the Arab chief’s word of welcome: it meant protection, unswerving fidelity, help, and succour.

There was no bound to this hospitality. It was the pride of the Arab to place everything he possessed at the service of the guest. The last milch-camel must be killed sooner than the duties of hospitality be neglected. The story is told of Ḥátim, a gallant poet-warrior of the tribe of Ṭayyi, which well illustrates the Arab ideal of hostship. Ḥátim was at one time brought to the brink of starvation by the dearth of a rainless season. For a whole day he and his family had eaten nothing, and at night, after soothing the children to sleep by telling them some of those stories in which the Arabs have few rivals, he was trying by his cheerful conversation to make his wife forget her hunger. Just then they heard steps without, and a corner of the tent was raised. ‘Who is there?’ said Ḥátim. A woman’s voice replied, ‘I am such a one, thy neighbour. My children have nothing to eat, and are howling like young wolves, and I have come to beg help of thee.’ ‘Bring them here,’ said Ḥátim. His wife asked him what he would do, for if he could not feed his own children, how should he find food for this woman’s? ‘Do not disturb thyself,’ he answered. Now Ḥátim had a horse renowned far and wide for the purity of his stock and the fleetness and beauty of his paces. He would not kill his favourite for himself nor even for his own children; but now he went out and slew him, and prepared him with fire for the strangers’ need. And when he saw them eating with his wife and children, he exclaimed, ‘It were a shame that you alone should eat whilst all the camp is perishing of hunger;’ and he went and called the neighbours to the meal, and in the morning there remained of the horse nothing but his bones. But as for himself, wrapped in his mantle, he sat apart in a corner of the tent.

This Ḥátim is a type of the Arab nature at its noblest. Though renowned for his courage and skill in war, he never suffered his enmity to overcome his generosity. He had sworn an oath never to take a man’s life, and he strictly observed it, and always withheld the fatal last blow. In spite of his clemency, he was ever successful in the wars of his clan, and brought back from his raids many a rich spoil, only to spend it at once in his princely fashion. His generosity and faithful observance of his word at times placed him in positions of great danger; but the alternative of denying his principles seems never to have occurred to his mind. For instance, he had imposed upon himself as a law never to refuse a gift to him that asked it of him. Once, engaged in single combat, he had disarmed and routed his opponent, who then turned and said, ‘Ḥátim, give me thy spear.’ At once he threw it to him, leaving himself defenceless; and had he not met an adversary worthy of himself, this had been the last of his deeds. Happily Ḥátim was not the only generous warrior of the Arabs, and his foe did not avail himself of his advantage. When Ḥátim’s friends remonstrated with him on the rashness of an act which, in the spirit of shopkeepers, they regarded as quixotic, Ḥátim said, ‘What would you have me to do? He asked of me a gift!’

It was Ḥátim’s practice to buy the liberty of all captives who sought his aid: it was but another application of the Arab virtue of hospitality. Once a captive called to him when he was on a journey and had not with him the means of paying the ransom. But he was not wont to allow any difficulties to baulk him of the exercise of his duty, and he had the prisoner released, stepping meanwhile into his chains until his own clan should send the ransom.

Brave, chivalrous, faithful, and generous beyond the needful of Arab ideal—so that his niggard wife, using the privilege of high dames, repudiated him because he was ever ruining himself and her by his open hand—Ḥátim filled up the measure of Arab virtue by his eloquence, and such of his poems as have come down to us reflect the nobility of his life. As a youth he had shown a strong passion for poetry, and would spare no means of doing honour to poets. His grandfather, in despair at the boy’s extravagance, sent him away from the camp to guard the camels, which were pastured at a distance. Sitting there in a state of solitude little congenial to his nature, Ḥátim lifted his eyes and saw a caravan approaching. It was the caravan of three great poets who were travelling to the court of the King of El-Ḥeereh. Ḥátim begged them to alight and to accept of refreshment after the hot and dreary journey. He killed them a camel each, though one would have more than sufficed for the three; and in return they wrote him verses in praise of himself and his kindred. Overjoyed at the honour, Ḥátim insisted on the poets each accepting a hundred camels; and they departed with their gifts. When the grandfather came to the pasturing and asked where the camels were gone, Ḥátim answered, ‘I have exchanged them for a crown of honour, which will shine for all time on the brow of thy race. The lines in which great poets have celebrated our house will pass from mouth to mouth, and will carry our glory over all Arabia.’ [7]

This story well illustrates the Arab’s passionate love of poetry. He conceived his language to be the finest in the world, and he prized eloquence and poetry as the goodliest gifts of the gods. There were three great events in Arab life, when the clan was called together and great feastings and rejoicings ensued. One was the birth of a son to a chief; another the foaling of a generous mare; the third was the discovery that a great poet had risen up among them. The advent of the poet meant the immortality of the deeds of the clansmen and the everlasting contumely of their foes; it meant the raising up of the glory of the tribe over all the clans of Arabia, and the winning of triumphs by bitterer weapons than sword and spear—the weapons of stinging satire and scurrilous squib. No man might dare withstand the power of the poets among a people who were keenly alive to the point of an epigram, and who never forgot an ill-natured jibe if it were borne upon musical verse. Most of the great heroes of the desert were poets as well as warriors, and their poesy was deemed the chiefest gem in their crown, and, like their courage, was counted a proof of generous birth. The Khalif ´Omar said well, ‘The kings of the Arabs are their orators and poets, those who practise and who celebrate all the virtues of the Bedawee.’

This ancient poetry of the Arabs is the reflection of the people’s life. Far away from the trouble of the world, barred by wild wastes from the stranger, the Bedawee lived his happy child’s life, enjoying to the uttermost the good the gods had sent him, delighting in the face that Nature showed him, inspired by the glorious breath of the deserts that were his home. His poetry rings of that desert life. It is emotional, passionate, seldom reflective. Not the end of life, the whence and the whither, but the actual present joy of existence, was the subject of his song. Vivid painting of nature is the characteristic of this poetry: it is natural, unpolished, unlaboured. The scenes of the desert—the terrors of the nightly ride through the hill-girdled valley where the Ghools and the Jinn have their haunts; the gloom of the barren plain, where the wolf, ‘like a ruined gamester,’ roams ululating; the weariness of the journey under the noonday sun; the stifling of the sand-storm, the delusions of the mirage; or again, the solace of the palm-tree’s shade, and the delights of the cool well;—such are the pictures of the Arab poet. The people’s life is another frequent theme: the daily doings of the herdsman, the quiet pastoral life, on the one hand; on the other, the deeds of the chiefs—war, plunder, the chase, wassail, revenge, friendship, love. There were satires on rival tribes, panegyrics on chiefs, laments for the dead. This poetry is wholly objective, artless, childlike; it is the outcome of a people still in the freshness of youth, whom the mysteries and complications of life have not yet set a-thinking. ‘Just as his language knows but the present and the past, so the ancient Arab lived but in to-day and yesterday. The future is nought to him; he seizes the present with too thorough abandonment to have an emotion left for anything beyond. He troubles himself not with what fate the morrow may bring forth, he dreams not of a beautiful future,—only he revels in the present, and his glance looks backward alone. Rich in ideas and impressions, he is poor in thought. He drains hastily the foaming cup of life; he feels deeply and passionately; but it is as if he were never conscious of the coming of the thoughtful age which, while it surveys the past, as often turns an anxious look to the unknown future.’

It is very difficult for a Western mind to enter into the real beauty of the old Arab poetry. The life it depicts is so unlike any we can now witness, that it is almost removed beyond the pale of our sympathies. The poetry is loaded with metaphors and similes, which to us seem far-fetched, though they are drawn from the simplest daily sights of the Bedawee. Moreover, it is only in fragments that we can read it; for the change in the whole character of Arab life and in the current of Arab ideas which followed the conquests of Islám extinguished the old songs, which were no longer suitable to the new conditions of things; and as they were seldom recorded in writing, we possess but a little remnant of them.[8] Yet ‘these fragments may be broken, defaced, dimmed, and obscured by fanaticism, ignorance, and neglect; but out of them there arises anew all the freshness, bloom, and glory of desert-song, as out of Homer’s epics rise the glowing spring-time of humanity and the deep blue heavens of Hellas. It is not a transcendental poetry, rich in deep and thoughtful legend and lore, or glittering in the many-coloured prisms of fancy, but a poetry the chief task of which is to paint life and nature as they really are; and within its narrow bounds it is magnificent. It is chiefly and characteristically full of manliness, of vigour, and of a chivalrous spirit, doubly striking when compared with the spirit of abjectness and slavery found in some other Asiatic nations. It is wild and vast and monotonous as the yellow seas of its desert solitudes; it is daring and noble, tender and true.’ [9]

There was one place where, above all others, the Ḳaṣeedehs of the ancient Arabs were recited: this was ´Okáḍh, the Olympia of Arabia, where there was held a great annual Fair, to which not merely the merchants of Mekka and the south, but the poet-heroes of all the land resorted. The Fair of ´Okáḍh was held during the sacred months,—a sort of ‘God’s Truce,’ when blood could not be shed without a violation of the ancient customs and faiths of the Bedawees. Thither went the poets of rival clans, who had as often locked spears as hurled rhythmical curses. There was little fear of a bloody ending to the poetic contest, for those heroes who might meet there with enemies or blood-avengers are said to have worn masks or veils, and their poems were recited by a public orator at their dictation. That these precautions and the sacredness of the time could not always prevent the ill-feeling evoked by the pointed personalities of rival singers leading to a fray and bloodshed is proved by recorded instances; but such results were uncommon, and as a rule the customs of the time and place were respected. In spite of occasional broils on the spot, and the lasting feuds which these poetic contests must have excited, the Fair of ´Okáḍh was a grand institution. It served as a focus for the literature of all Arabia: every one with any pretensions to poetic power came, and if he could not himself gain the applause of the assembled people, at least he could form one of the critical audience on whose verdict rested the fame or the shame of every poet. The Fair of ´Okáḍh was a literary congress, without formal judges, but with unbounded influence. It was here that the polished heroes of the desert determined points of grammar and prosody; here the seven Golden Songs were recited, although (alas for the charming legend!) they were _not_ afterwards ‘suspended’ on the Kaạbeh; and here ‘a magical language, the language of the Ḥijáz,’ was built out of the dialects of Arabia, and was made ready to the skilful hand of Moḥammad, that he might conquer the world with his Ḳur-án.

The Fair of ´Okáḍh was not merely a centre of emulation for Arab poets: it was also an annual review of Bedawee virtues. It was there that the Arab nation once-a-year inspected itself, so to say, and brought forth and criticised its ideals of the noble and the beautiful in life and in poetry. For it was in poetry that the Arab—and for that matter each man all the world over—expressed his highest thoughts, and it was at ´Okáḍh that these thoughts were measured by the standard of the Bedawee ideal. The Fair not only maintained the highest standard of poetry that the Arabic language has ever reached: it also upheld the noblest idea of life and duty that the Arab nation has yet set forth and obeyed. ´Okáḍh was the press, the stage, the pulpit, the Parliament, and the Académie Française of the Arab people; and when, in his fear of the infidel poets (whom Imra-el-Ḳeys was to usher to hell), Moḥammad abolished the Fair, he destroyed the Arab nation even whilst he created his own new nation of Muslims;—and the Muslims cannot sit in the places of the old pagan Arabs.

It is very difficult for the Western mind to dissociate the idea of Oriental poetry from the notion of amatory odes, and sonnets to the lady’s eyebrow: but even the few extracts that have been given in this chapter show that the Arab had many other subjects besides love to sing about, and though the divine theme has its place in almost every poem, it seldom rivals the prominence of war and nature-painting, and it is treated from a much less sensual point of view than that of later Arab poets. Many writers have drawn a gloomy picture of the condition of women in Arabia before the coming of Moḥammad, and there is no doubt that in many cases their lot was a miserable one. There are ancient Arabic proverbs that point to the contempt in which woman’s judgment and character were held by the Arabs of ‘the Time of Ignorance,’ and Moḥammad must have derived his mean opinion of women from a too general impression among his countrymen. The marriage tie was certainly very loose among the ancient Arabs. The ceremony itself was of the briefest. The man said _khiṭb_ (_i.e._ I am an asker-in-marriage), and the giver-away answered _nikḥ_ (_i.e._, I am a giver-in-marriage), and the knot was thus tied, only to be undone with equal facility and brevity. The frequency of divorce among the Arabs does not speak well for their constancy, and must have had a degrading effect upon the women. Hence it is argued that women were the objects of contempt rather than of respect among the ancient Arabs.

Yet there is reason to believe that the evidence upon which this conclusion is founded is partial and one-sided. There was a wide gulf between the Bedawee and the town Arab. It is not impossible that the view commonly entertained as to the state of women in preïslamic times is based mainly on what Moḥammad saw around him in Mekka, and not on the ordinary life of the desert. To such a conjecture a curiously uniform support is lent by the ancient poetry of the desert; and though the poets were then—as they always are—men of finer mould than the rest, yet their example, and still more their poems passing from mouth to mouth, must have created a widespread belief in their principles. It is certain that the roaming Bedawee, like the mediæval knight, entertained a chivalrous reverence for women, although he, too, like the knight, was not always above a career of promiscuous gallantry; but there was always a certain glamour of romance about the intrigues of the Bedawee. He did not regard the object of his love as a chattel to be possessed, but as a divinity to be assiduously worshipped. The poems are full of instances of the courtly respect displayed by the heroes of the desert toward defenceless maidens, and the mere existence of so general an ideal of conduct in the poems is a strong argument for Arab chivalry: for with the Arabs the abyss between the ideal accepted of the mind and the attaining thereof in action was narrower than it is among ‘more advanced’ nations.

Whatever was the condition of women in the trading cities and villages, it is certain that in the desert woman was regarded as she has never since been among Muslims. The modern ḥareem system was there as yet undreamt of; the maid of the desert was unfettered by the ruinous restrictions of modern life in the East. She was free to choose her own husband, and to bind him to have no other wife than herself. She might receive male visitors, even strangers, without suspicion: for her virtue was too dear to her and too well assured to need the keeper. It was the bitterest taunt of all to say to a hostile clan that their men had not the heart to give nor their women to deny; for the chastity of the women of the clan was reckoned only next to the valour and generosity of the men. In those days bastardy was an indelible stain. It was the wife who inspired the hero to deeds of glory, and it was her praise that he most valued when he returned triumphant. The hero of desert song thought himself happy to die in guarding some women from their pursuers. Wounded to the death, ´Antarah halted alone in a narrow pass, and bade the women press on to a place of safety. Planting his spear in the ground, he supported himself on his horse, so that when the pursuers came up they knew not he was dead, and dared not approach within reach of his dreaded arm. At length the horse moved, and the body fell to the ground, and the enemies saw that it was but the corpse of the hero that had held the pass. In death, as in a life _sans peur et sans reproche_, ´Antarah was true to the chivalry of his race.

There are many instances like this of the knightly courtesy of the Arab chief in ‘the Time of Ignorance.’ In the old days, as an ancient writer says, the true Arab had but one love, and her he loved till death, and she him. Even when polygamy became commoner, especially in the towns, it was not what is meant by polygamy in a modern Muslim state: it was rather the patriarchal system of Abram and Sarai.

There is much in the fragments of the ancient poetry which reflects this fine spirit. It is ofttimes ‘tender and true,’ and even Islám could not wholly root out the real Arab sentiment, which reappears in Muslim times in the poems of Aboo-Firás. Especially valuable is the evidence of the old poetry with regard to the love of a father for his daughters. Infanticide, which is commonly attributed to the whole Arab nation of every age before Islám, was in reality exceedingly rare in the desert, and after almost dying out only revived about the time of Moḥammad. It was probably adopted by poor and weak clans, either from inability to support their children, or in order to protect themselves from the stain of having their children dishonoured by stronger tribes, and the occasional practice of this barbarous and suicidal custom affords no ground for assuming an unnatural hatred and contempt for girls among the ancient Arabs. These verses of a father to his daughter tell a different story:—

If no Umeymeh were there, no want would trouble my soul, no labour call me to toil for bread through pitchiest night; What moves my longing to live is but that well do I know how low the fatherless lies, how hard the kindness of kin. I quake before loss of wealth lest lacking fall upon her, and leave her shieldless and bare as flesh set forth on a board. My life she prays for, and I from mere love pray for her death— yea death, the gentlest and kindest guest to visit a maid. I fear an uncle’s rebuke, a brother’s harshness for her; my chiefest end was to spare her heart the grief of a word.

Once more, the following lines do not breathe the spirit of infanticide:—

Fortune has brought me down (her wonted way) from station great and high to low estate; Fortune has rent away my plenteous store: of all my wealth, honour alone is left. Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft did Fortune make me laugh with what she gave! But for these girls, the Ḳaṭa’s downy brood, unkindly thrust from door to door as hard, Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread in earth that has no lack of breadth and length; Nay, but our children in our midst, what else but our hearts are they walking on the ground? If but the wind blow harsh on one of them, mine eye says no to slumber all night long.

Hitherto we have been looking at but one side of Arab life. The Bedawees were indeed the bulk of the race, and furnished the swords of the Muslim conquests; but there was also a vigorous town-life in Arabia, and the citizens waxed rich with the gains of their trafficking. For through Arabia ran the trade-route between East and West: it was the Arab traders who carried the produce of the Yemen to the markets of Syria; and how ancient was their commerce one may divine from the words of a poet of Judæa spoken more than a thousand years before the coming of Moḥammad.

Wedan and Javan from San´a paid for thy produce: sword-blades, cassia, and calamus were in thy trafficking. Dedan was thy merchant in saddle-cloths for riding; Arabia and all the merchants of Kedar, they were the merchants of thy hand: in lambs and rams and goats, in these were they thy merchants. The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants, with the chief of all spices, and with every precious stone, and gold, they paid for thy produce. Haran, Aden, and Canneh, the merchants of Sheba, Asshur and Chilmad were thy merchants; They were thy merchants in excellent wares, in cloth of blue and broidered work, in chests of cloth of divers colours, bound with cords and made fast among thy merchandize.[10]