Читать книгу Selections from the Kur-an - Various - Страница 6

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

Mekka was the centre of this trading life, the typical Arab city of old times—a stirring little town, with its caravans bringing the silks and woven stuffs of Syria and the far-famed damask, and carrying away the sweet-smelling produce of Arabia, frankincense, cinnamon, sandal-wood, aloe, and myrrh, and the dates and leather and metals of the south, and the goods that come to the Yemen from Africa and even India; its assemblies of merchant-princes in the Council Hall near the Kaạbeh; and again its young poets running over with love and gallantry; its Greek and Persian slave-girls brightening the luxurious banquet with their native songs, when as yet there was no Arab school of music, and the monotonous but not unmelodious chant of the camel-driver was the national song of Arabia; and its club, where busy men spent their idle hours in playing chess and draughts, or in gossiping with their acquaintance. It was a little republic of commerce, too much infected with the luxuries and refinements of the states it traded with, yet retaining enough of the free Arab nature to redeem it from the charge of effeminacy.

Mekka was a great home of music and poetry, and this characteristic lasted into Muslim times. There is a story of a certain stonemason who had a wonderful gift of singing. When he was at work the young men used to come and importune him, and bring him gifts of money and food to induce him to sing. He would then make a stipulation that they should first help him in his work; and forthwith they would strip off their cloaks, and the stones would gather round him rapidly. Then he would mount a rock and begin to sing, whilst the whole hill was coloured red and yellow with the variegated garments of his audience. Singers were then held in the highest admiration, and the greatest chiefs used to pay their court to ladies of the musical profession. One of them used to give receptions, open to the whole city, in which she would appear in great state, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, each dressed magnificently, and wearing ‘an elegant artificial chignon.’ It was in this town-life that the worse qualities of the Arab came out; it was here that his raging passion for dicing and his thirst for wine were most prominent. In the desert there was little opportunity for indulging in either luxury; but in a town which often welcomed a caravan bringing goods to the value of twenty thousand pound, such excesses were to be looked for. Excited by the song of the Greek slave-girl and the fumes of mellow wine, the Mekkan would throw the dice till, like the Germans of Tacitus, he had staked and lost his own liberty.

But Mekka was more than a centre of trade and of song. It was the focus of the religion of the Arabs. Thither the tribes went up every year to kiss the black stone which had fallen from heaven in the primeval days of Adam, and to make the seven circuits of the Kaạbeh naked—for they would not approach God in the garments in which they had done their sins—and to perform the other ceremonies of the pilgrimage. The Kaạbeh, a cubical building in the centre of Mekka, was the most sacred temple in all Arabia, and it gave its sanctity to all the district around. It had been, saith tradition, first built by Adam from a heavenly model, and then rebuilt from time to time by Seth and Abraham and Ishmael, and less reverend persons, and it contained the sacred things of the land. Here was the black stone, here the great god of red agate, Hubal, and the three hundred and sixty idols, one for each day of the year, which Moḥammad afterwards destroyed in one day. Here was Abraham’s stone and that other which marked the tomb of Ishmael, and hard by Zemzem, the god-sent spring which gushed from the sand when the forefather of the Arabs was perishing of thirst.

The religion of the ancient Arabs, little as we know of it, is especially interesting, inasmuch as the Arabs longest retained the original Semitic character, and hence probably the original Semitic religion: and so in the ancient religion of Arabia we see the religion once professed by Chaldeans, Canaanites, Phœnicians. This ancient religion ‘rises little higher than animistic polydaemonism. It is a collection of tribal religions standing side by side, only loosely united, though there are traces of a once closer [Pg xxxiii] connection.’ 11 The great objects of worship were the sun and the stars and the three moon-goddesses—El-Lát the bright moon, Menáh the dark, and El-´Uzzà the union of the two; whilst a lower cultus of trees, stones, and mountains, supposed to be dwelt-in by souls, shows that the religion had not yet quite risen above simple fetishism. At the time of Moḥammad the Arabs worshipped numerous images, which may have been merely a development from the previous stone-worship, or may have been introduced from intercourse with Christians. There are traces of a belief in a supreme God behind this pantheon, and the moon-goddesses and other divinities were regarded as daughters of the most high God (Alláh ta´ála)—a conception also possibly derived from Christianity. The various deities (but not the Supreme Allah) had their fanes, where human sacrifices, though rare, were not unknown; and their cultus was superintended by a hereditary line of seers, who were held in great reverence, but never developed into a priestly caste.

Besides the tribal gods, individual households had their special Penates, to whom was due the first and the last salám of the returning or outgoing host. But in spite of all this superstitious apparatus the Arabs were never a religious people. In the old days, as now, they were reckless, skeptical, materialistic. They had their gods and their divining-arrows, but they were ready to demolish both if the responses proved contrary to their wishes. A great majority believed in no future life nor in a reckoning-day of good and evil. If a few tied camels to the graves of the dead that the corpse might ride mounted to the judgment-seat, it must have been the exception; and if there are some doubtful traces of the doctrine of metempsychosis, this again must have been the creed of the very few.

Christianity and Judaism had made but small impress upon the Arabs. There were Jewish tribes in the north, and there is evidence in the Ḳur-án and elsewhere that the traditions and rites of Judaism were widely known in Arabia. But the creed was too narrow and too exclusively national to commend itself to the majority of the people. Christianity fared even worse. Whether or not St. Paul went there, it is at least certain that very little effect was produced by the preaching of Christianity in Arabia. We hear of Christians on the borders, and even two or three among the Mekkans, and bishops and churches are spoken of at Dhafár and Nejrán. But the Christianity that the Arabs knew was, like the Judaism of the northern tribes, a very imperfect reflection of the faith it professed to set forth. It had become a thing of the head instead of the heart, and the refinements of monophysite and monothelite doctrines gained no hold upon the Arab mind.

Thus Judaism and Christianity, though they were well known, and furnished many ideas and ceremonies to Islám, were never able to effect any general settlement in Arabia. The common Arabs did not care much about any religion, and the finer spirits found the wrangling dogmatism of the Christian and the narrow isolation of the Jew little to their mind. For there were before the time of Moḥammad men who were dissatisfied with the low fetishism in which their countrymen were plunged, and who protested emphatically against the idle and often cruel superstitions of the Arabs. Not to refer to the prophets, who, as the Ḳur-án relates, were sent in old time to the tribes of ´Ád and Thamood to convert them, there was, immediately before the preaching of Moḥammad, a general feeling that a change was at hand; a prophet was expected, and women were anxiously hoping for male children if so be they might mother the Apostle of God; and the more thoughtful minds, tinged with traditions of Judaism, were seeking for what they called ‘the religion of Abraham.’ These men were called ‘Ḥaneefs,’ or skeptics, and their religion seems to have consisted chiefly in a negative position, in denying the superstition of the Arabs, and in only asserting the existence of one sole-ruling God whose absolute slaves are all mankind, without being able to decide on any minor doctrines, or to determine in what manner this one God was to be worshipped. So long as the Ḥaneefs could give their countrymen no more definite creed than this, their influence was limited to a few inquiring and doubting minds. It was reserved for Moḥammad to formulate the faith of the Ḥaneefs in the dogmas of Islám. For the leader of these few ‘skeptics’ was Zeyd ibn ´Amr, to whom Moḥammad often resorted, and another, Waraḳah, was the cousin of the Prophet and his near neighbour: and thus the Ḥaneefs were the forerunners of the man who was to change the destinies of the Arabs.

We can no longer see the true Arab as he was in ‘the Time of Ignorance,’ and we cannot but regret our loss; for the Pagan Arab is a noble type of man, though there be nobler. There is much that is admirable in his high mettle, his fine sense of honour, his knightliness, his ‘open-handed, both-handed,’ generosity, his frank friendship, and his manly independent spirit; and the faults of this wild reckless nature are not to be weighed against its many excellencies. When Moḥammad turned abroad the current of Arab life, he changed the character of the people. The mixture with foreign nations, and the quiet town-life that succeeded to the tumult of conquest, gradually effaced many of the leading ideas of the old Arab nature, and the remnant that still dwell in the land of their fathers have lost much of that nobleness of character which in their ancestors covered a multitude of sins. Moḥammad in part destroyed the Arab and created the Muslim. The last is no amends for the first. The modern Bedawee is neither the one nor the other; he has lost the greatness of the old type without gaining that of the new. As far as the Arabs alone are concerned, Moḥammad effected a temporary good and a lasting harm. As to the world at large, that is matter for another chapter.

[Pg xxxvii]