Текст книги "Literary History of the Arabs "

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It is related that he set out to visit Muḥammad for the purpose of reciting to him an ode which he had composed in his honour. When the Quraysh heard of this, they feared lest their adversary's reputation should be increased by the panegyric of a bard so famous and popular. Accordingly, they intercepted him on his way, and asked whither he was bound. "To your kinsman," said he, "that I may accept Islam." "He will forbid and make unlawful to thee certain practices of which thou art fond." "What are these?" said A‘shá. "Fornication," said Abú Sufyán, "I have not abandoned it," he replied, "but it has abandoned me. What else?" "Gambling." "Perhaps I shall obtain from him something to compensate me for the loss of gambling. What else?" "Usury." "I have never borrowed nor lent. What else?" "Wine." "Oh, in that case I will drink the water I have left stored at al-Mihrás." Seeing that A‘shá was not to be deterred, Abú Sufyán offered him a hundred camels on condition that he should return to his home in Yamáma and await the issue of the struggle between Muḥammad and the Quraysh. "I agree," said A‘shá. "O ye Quraysh," cried Abú Sufyán, "this is A‘shá, and by God, if he becomes a follower of Muḥammad, he will inflame the Arabs against you by his poetry. Collect, therefore, a hundred camels for him."249

A‘shá excels in the description of wine and wine-parties. One who visited Manfúḥa in Yamáma, where the poet was buried, relates that revellers used to meet at his grave and pour out beside it the last drops that remained in their cups. As an example of his style in this genreI translate a few lines from the most celebrated of his poems, which is included by some critics among the Mu‘allaqát:—

"Many a time I hastened early to the tavern—while there ranAt my heels a ready cook, a nimble, active serving-man—'Midst a gallant troop, like Indian scimitars, of mettle high;Well they know that every mortal, shod and bare alike, must die.Propped at ease I greet them gaily, them with myrtle-boughs I greet,Pass among them wine that gushes from the jar's mouth bittersweet.Emptying goblet after goblet—but the source may no man drain—Never cease they from carousing save to cry, 'Fill up again!'Briskly runs the page to serve them: on his ears hang pearls: below,Tight the girdle draws his doublet as he bustles to and fro.'Twas the harp, thou mightest fancy, waked the lute's responsive note,When the loose-robed chantress touched it and sang shrill with quavering throat.Here and there among the party damsels fair superbly glide:Each her long white skirt lets trail and swings a wine-skin at her side."250

Very little is known of the life of ‘Alqama b. ‘Abada, who was surnamed al-Faḥl(the Stallion). His most famous poem ‘Alqama. is that which he addressed to the Ghassánid Ḥárith al-A‘raj after the Battle of Ḥalíma, imploring him to set free some prisoners of Tamím—the poet's tribe—among whom was his own brother or nephew, Shás. The following lines have almost become proverbial:—

"Of women do ye ask me? I can spyTheir ailments with a shrewd physician's eye.The man whose head is grey or small his herdsNo favour wins of them but mocking words.Are riches known, to riches they aspire,And youthful bloom is still their heart's desire."251

In view of these slighting verses it is proper to observe that the poetry of Arabian women of the Pre-islamic period is distinctly Elegiac poetry. masculine in character. Their songs are seldom of Love, but often of Death. Elegy ( ritháor marthiya) was regarded as their special province. The oldest form of elegy appears in the verses chanted on the death of Ta’abbaṭa Sharr ^anby his sister:—

"O the good knight ye left low at Rakhmán, Thábit son of Jábir son of Sufyán! He filled the cup for friends and ever slew his man."252

"As a rule the Arabian dirge is very simple. The poetess begins with a description of her grief, of the tears that she cannot quench, and then she shows how worthy to be deeply mourned was he whom death has taken away. He is described as a pattern of the two principal Arabian virtues, bravery and liberality, and the question is anxiously asked, 'Who will now make high resolves, overthrow the enemy, and in time of want feed the poor and entertain the stranger?' If the hero of the dirge died a violent death we find in addition a burning lust of revenge, a thirst for the slayer's blood, expressed with an intensity of feeling of which only women are capable."253

Among Arabian women who have excelled in poetry the place of honour is due to Khansá—her real name was Khansá. Tumáḍir—who flourished in the last years before Islam. By far the most famous of her elegies are those in which she bewailed her valiant brothers, Mu‘áwiya and Ṣakhr, both of whom were struck down by sword or spear. It is impossible to translate the poignant and vivid emotion, the energy of passion and noble simplicity of style which distinguish the poetry of Khansá, but here are a few verses:—

Death's messenger cried aloud the loss of the generous one,So loud cried he, by my life, that far he was heard and wide.Then rose I, and scarce my soul could follow to meet the news,For anguish and sore dismay and horror that Ṣakhr had died.In my misery and despair I seemed as a drunken man,Upstanding awhile—then soon his tottering limbs subside."254

Yudhakkiruní ṭulú‘u ’l-shamsi Ṣakhr ^an wa-adhkuruhú likulli ghurúbi shamsi.

"Sunrise awakes in me the sad remembrance Of Ṣakhr, and I recall him at every sunset."

To the poets who have been enumerated many might be added– e.g., Ḥassán b. Thábit, who was 'retained' by the The last poets born in the Age of Paganism. Prophet and did useful work on his behalf; Ka‘b b. Zuhayr, author or the famous panegyric on Muḥammad beginning " Bánat Su‘ád" (Su‘ád has departed); Mutammim b. Nuwayra, who, like Khansá, mourned the loss of a brother; Abú Miḥjan, the singer of wine, whose devotion to the forbidden beverage was punished by the Caliph ‘Umar with imprisonment and exile; and al-Ḥuṭay’a (the Dwarf), who was unrivalled in satire. All these belonged to the class of Mukhaḍramún, i.e., they were born in the Pagan Age but died, if not Moslems, at any rate after the proclamation of Islam.

The grammarians of Baṣra and Kúfa, by whom the remains of ancient Arabian poetry were rescued from oblivion, arranged Collections of ancient poetry. and collected their material according to various principles. Either the poems of an individual or those of a number of individuals belonging to the same tribe or class were brought together—such a collection was called Díwán, plural Dawáwín; or, again, the compiler edited a certain number of qaṣídas chosen for their fame or excellence or on other grounds, or he formed an anthology of shorter pieces or fragments, which were arranged under different heads according to their subject-matter.

Among Díwánsmention may be made of The Díwáns of the Six Poets, viz. Nábigha, ‘Antara, Ṭarafa, Zuhayr, ‘Alqama, Díwáns. and Imru’u ’l-Qays, edited with a full commentary by the Spanish philologist al-A‘lam (õ 1083 a.d.) and published in 1870 by Ahlwardt; and of The Poems of the Hudhaylites( Ash‘áru ’l-Hudhaliyyín) collected by al-Sukkarí (õ 888 a.d.), which have been published by Kosegarten and Wellhausen.

The chief Anthologies, taken in the order of their composition, are:—

1. The Mu‘allaqát, which is the title given to a collection of seven odes by Imru’u ’l-Qays, Ṭarafa, Zuhayr, Labíd, Anthologies. 1. The Mu‘allaqát. ‘Antara, ‘Amr b. Kulthúm, and Ḥárith b. Ḥilliza; to these two odes by Nábigha and A‘shá are sometimes added. The compiler was probably Ḥammád al-Ráwiya, a famous rhapsodist of Persian descent, who flourished under the Umayyads and died in the second half of the eighth century of our era. As the Mu‘allaqáthave been discussed above, we may pass on directly to a much larger, though less celebrated, collection dating from the same period, viz.:—

2. The Mufaḍḍaliyyát,255 by which title it is generally known after its compiler, Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbí (õ  circa786 a.d.), who 2. The Mufaḍḍaliyyát. made it at the instance of the Caliph Manṣúr for the instruction of his son and successor, Mahdí. It comprises 128 odes and is extant in two recensions, that of Anbárí (õ 916 a.d.), which derives from Ibnu ’l-A‘rábí, the stepson of Mufaḍḍal, and that of Marzúqí (õ 1030 a.d.). About a third of the Mufaḍḍaliyyátwas published in 1885 by Thorbecke, and Sir Charles Lyall has recently edited the complete text with Arabic commentary and English translation and notes.256

All students of Arabian poetry are familiar with—

3. The Ḥamásaof Abú Tammám Ḥabíb b. Aws, himself a distinguished poet, who flourished under the Caliphs Ma’mún 3. The Ḥamásaof Abú Tammám. and Mu‘taṣim, and died about 850 a.d. Towards the end of his life he visited ‘Abdulláh b. Ṭáhir, the powerful governor of Khurásán, who was virtually an independent sovereign. It was on this journey, as Ibn Khallikán relates, that Abú Tammám composed the Ḥamása; for on arriving at Hamadhán (Ecbatana) the winter had set in, and as the cold was excessively severe in that country, the snow blocked up the road and obliged him to stop and await the thaw. During his stay he resided with one of the most eminent men of the place, who possessed a library in which were some collections of poems composed by the Arabs of the desert and other authors. Having then sufficient leisure, he perused those works and selected from them the passages out of which he formed his Ḥamása.257 The work is divided into ten sections of unequal length, the first, from which it received its name, occupying (together with the commentary) 360 pages in Freytag's edition, while the seventh and eighth require only thirteen pages between them. These sections or chapters bear the following titles:—

I. The Chapter of Fortitude ( Bábu ’l-Ḥamása).

II. The Chapter of Dirges ( Bábu ’l-Maráthí).

III. The Chapter of Good Manners ( Bábu ’l-Adab).

IV. The Chapter of Love-Songs ( Bábu ’l-Nasíb).

V. The Chapter of Satire ( Bábu ’l-Hijá).

VI. The Chapter of Guests (Hospitality) and Panegyric ( Bábu ’l-Aḍyáf wa ’l-Madíh).

VII. The Chapter of Descriptions ( Bábu ’l-Ṣifát).

VIII. The Chapter of Travel and Repose ( Bábu ’l-Sayr wa ’l-Nu‘ás.

IX. The Chapter of Facetiæ ( Bábu ’l-Mulaḥ).

X. The Chapter of Vituperation of Women ( Bábu Madhammati ’l-Nisá).

The contents of the Ḥamásainclude short poems complete in themselves as well as passages extracted from longer poems; of the poets represented, some of whom belong to the Pre-islamic and others to the early Islamic period, comparatively few are celebrated, while many are anonymous or only known by the verses attached to their names. If the high level of excellence attained by these obscure singers shows, on the one hand, that a natural genius for poetry was widely diffused and that the art was successfully cultivated among all ranks of Arabian society, we must not forget how much is due to the fine taste of Abú Tammám, who, as the commentator Tibrízí has remarked, "is a better poet in his Ḥamásathan in his poetry."

4. The Ḥamásaof Buḥturí (õ 897 a.d.), a younger contemporary 4. The Ḥamásaof Buḥturí. of Abú Tammám, is inferior to its model.258 However convenient from a practical standpoint, the division into a great number of sections, each illustrating a narrowly defined topic, seriously impairs the artistic value of the work; moreover, Buḥturí seems to have had a less catholic appreciation of the beauties of poetry—he admired, it is said, only what was in harmony with his own style and ideas.

5. The Jamharatu Ash‘ári ’l-‘Arab, a collection of forty-nine 5. The Jamhara. odes, was put together probably about 1000 a.d. by Abú Zayd Muḥammad al-Qurashí, of whom we find no mention elsewhere.

Apart from the Díwánsand anthologies, numerous Pre-islamic Prose sources. verses are cited in biographical, philological, and other works, e.g., the Kitábu ’l-Agháníby Abu ’l-Faraj of Iṣfahán (õ 967 a.d.), the Kitábu ’l-Amálíby Abú ‘Alí al-Qálí (õ 967 a.d.), the Kámilof Mubarrad (õ 898 a.d.), and the Khizánatu ’l-Adabof ‘Abdu ’l-Qádir of Baghdád (õ 1682 a.d.).

We have seen that the oldest existing poems date from the beginning of the sixth century of our era, whereas the art of writing did not come into general use among the The tradition of Pre-islamic poetry. Arabs until some two hundred years afterwards. Pre-islamic poetry, therefore, was preserved by oral tradition alone, and the question arises, How was this possible? What guarantee have we that songs living on men's lips for so long a period have retained their original form, even approximately? No doubt many verses, e.g., those which glorified the poet's tribe or satirised their enemies, were constantly being recited by his kin, and in this way short occasional poems or fragments of longer ones might be perpetuated. Of whole qaṣídas like the Mu‘allaqát, however, none or very few would have reached us if their survival had depended solely on their popularity. What actually saved them in the first place was an institution resembling that of the Rhapsodists in Greece. Every professed poet The Ráwís. had his Ráwí(reciter), who accompanied him everywhere, committed his poems to memory, and handed them down, as well as the circumstances connected with them, to others. The characters of poet and ráwíwere often combined; thus Zuhayr was the ráwíof his stepfather, Aws b. Ḥajar, while his own ráwíwas al-Ḥuṭay’a. If the tradition of poetry was at first a labour of love, it afterwards became a lucrative business, and the Ráwís, instead of being attached to individual poets, began to form an independent class, carrying in their memories a prodigious stock of ancient verse and miscellaneous learning. It is related, for example, that Ḥammád once said to the Caliph Walíd b. Yazíd: "I can recite to you, for each letter of the alphabet, one hundred long poems rhyming in that letter, without taking into count the short pieces, and all that composed exclusively by poets who lived before the promulgation of Islamism." He commenced and continued until the Caliph, having grown fatigued, withdrew, after leaving a person in his place to verify the assertion and hear him to the last. In that sitting he recited two thousand nine hundred qaṣídas by poets who flourished before Muḥammad. Walíd, on being informed of the fact, ordered him a present of one hundred thousand dirhems.259 Thus, towards the end of the first century after the Hijra, i.e., about 700 a.d., when the custom of writingpoetry began, there was much of Pre-islamic origin still in circulation, although it is probable that far more had already been irretrievably lost. Numbers of Ráwísperished in the wars, or passed away in the course of nature, without leaving any one to continue their tradition. New times had brought new interests and other ways of life. The great majority of Moslems had no sympathy whatever with the ancient poetry, which represented in their eyes the unregenerate spirit of heathendom. They wanted nothing beyond the Koran and the Ḥadíth. But for reasons which will be stated in another chapter the language of the Koran and the Ḥadíth was rapidly becoming obsolete as a spoken idiom outside of the Arabian peninsula: the 'perspicuous Arabic' on which Muḥammad prided himself had ceased to be fully intelligible to the Moslems settled in ‘Iráq and Khurásán, in Syria, and in Egypt. It was essential that the Sacred Text should be explained, and this necessity gave birth to the sciences of Grammar and Lexicography. The Philologists, or, as they have been aptly designated, the Humanists of Baṣra and Kúfa, where these studies were prosecuted with peculiar zeal, naturally found their best material in the Pre-islamic The Humanists. poems—a well of Arabic undefiled. At first the ancient poetry merely formed a basis for philological research, but in process of time a literary enthusiasm was awakened. The surviving Ráwíswere eagerly sought out and induced to yield up their stores, the compositions of famous poets were collected, arranged, and committed to writing, and as the demand increased, so did the supply.260

In these circumstances a certain amount of error was inevitable. Apart from unconscious failings of memory, there Corrupt tradition of the old poetry. can be no doubt that in many cases the Ráwísacted with intent to deceive. The temptation to father their own verses, or centos which they pieced together from sources known only to themselves, upon some poet of antiquity was all the stronger because they ran little risk of detection. In knowledge of poetry and in poetical talent they were generally far more than a match for the philologists, who seldom possessed any critical ability, but readily took whatever came to hand. The stories which are told of Ḥammád al-Ráwiya, Ḥammád al-Ráwiya. clearly show how unscrupulous he was in his methods, though we have reason to suppose that he was not a typical example of his class. His contemporary, Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbí, is reported to have said that the corruption which poetry suffered through Ḥammád could never be repaired, "for," he added, "Ḥammád is a man skilled in the language and poesy of the Arabs and in the styles and ideas of the poets, and he is always making verses in imitation of some one and introducing them into genuine compositions by the same author, so that the copy passes everywhere for part of the original, and cannot be distinguished from it except by critical scholars—and where are such to be found?"261 This art of forgery was brought to perfection by Khalaf Khalaf al-Aḥmar. al-Aḥmar (õ about 800 a.d.), who learned it in the school of Ḥammád. If he really composed the famous Lámiyyaascribed to Shanfará, his own poetical endowments must have been of the highest order. In his old age he repented and confessed that he was the author of several poems which the scholars of Baṣra and Kúfa had accepted as genuine, but they laughed him to scorn, saying, "What you said then seems to us more trustworthy than your present assertion."

Besides the corruptions due to the Ráwís, others have been accumulated by the philologists themselves. As the Koran and the Ḥadíth were, of course, spoken and Other causes of corruption. afterwards written in the dialect of Quraysh, to whom Muḥammad belonged, this dialect was regarded as the classical standard;262 consequently the variations therefrom which occurred in the ancient poems were, for the most part, 'emended' and harmonised with it. Many changes were made under the influence of Islam, e.g., 'Allah' was probably often substituted for the pagan goddess 'al-Lát.' Moreover, the structure of the qaṣída, its disconnectedness and want of logical cohesion, favoured the omission and transposition of whole passages or single verses. All these modes of depravation might be illustrated in detail, but from what has been said the reader can judge for himself how far the poems, as they now stand, are likely to have retained the form in which they were first uttered to the wild Arabs of the Pre-islamic Age.

Religion had so little influence on the lives of the Pre-islamic Arabs that we cannot expect to find much trace Religion. of it in their poetry. They believed vaguely in a supreme God, Allah, and more definitely in his three daughters—al-Lát, Manát, and al-‘Uzzá—who were venerated all over Arabia and whose intercession was graciously accepted by Allah. There were also numerous idols enjoying high favour while they continued to bring good luck to their worshippers. Of real piety the ordinary Bedouin knew nothing. He felt no call to pray to his gods, although he often found them convenient to swear by. He might invoke Allah in the hour of need, as a drowning man will clutch at a straw; but his faith in superstitious ceremonies was stronger. He did not take his religion too seriously. Its practical advantages he was quick to appreciate. Not to mention baser pleasures, it gave him rest and security during the four sacred months, in which war was forbidden, while the institution of the Meccan Pilgrimage enabled him to take part in a national fête. The Fair of ‘Ukáẓ.Commerce went hand in hand with religion. Great fairs were held, the most famous being that of ‘Ukáẓ, which lasted for twenty days. These fairs were in some sort the centre of old Arabian social, political, and literary life. It was the only occasion on which free and fearless intercourse was possible between the members of different clans.263

Plenty of excitement was provided by poetical and oratorical displays—not by athletic sports, as in ancient Greece and modern England. Here rival poets declaimed their verses and submitted them to the judgment of an acknowledged master. Nowhere else had rising talents such an opportunity of gaining wide reputation: what ‘Ukáẓ said to-day all Arabia would repeat to-morrow. At ‘Ukáẓ, we are told, the youthful Muḥammad listened, as though spellbound, to the persuasive eloquence of Quss b. Sá‘ida, Bishop of Najrán; and he may have contrasted the discourse of the Christian preacher with the brilliant odes chanted by heathen bards.

The Bedouin view of life was thoroughly hedonistic. Love, wine, gambling, hunting, the pleasures of song and romance, the brief, pointed, and elegant expression of wit and wisdom—these things he knew to be good. Beyond them he saw only the grave.

"Roast meat and wine: the swinging rideOn a camel sure and tried,Which her master speeds amainO'er low dale and level plain:Women marble-white and fairTrailing gold-fringed raiment rare:Opulence, luxurious ease,With the lute's soft melodies—Such delights hath our brief span;Time is Change, Time's fool is Man.Wealth or want, great store or small,All is one since Death's are all."264

It would be a mistake to suppose that these men always, or even generally, passed their lives in the aimless pursuit of pleasure. Some goal they had—earthly, no doubt—such as the accumulation of wealth or the winning of glory or the fulfilment of blood-revenge. " God forbid" says one, " that I should die while a grievous longing, as it were a mountain, weighs on my breast!"265 A deeper chord is touched by Imru’u ’l-Qays: " If I strove for a bare livelihood, scanty means would suffice me and I would seek no more. But I strive for lasting renown, and 'tis men like me that sometimes attain lasting renown. Never, while life endures, does a man reach the summit of his ambition or cease from toil."266

These are noble sentiments nobly expressed. Yet one hears the sigh of weariness, as if the speaker were struggling against the conviction that his cause is already lost, and would welcome the final stroke of destiny. It was a time of wild uproar and confusion. Tribal and family feuds filled the land, as Zuhayr says, with evil fumes. No wonder that earnest and thoughtful minds asked themselves—What worth has our life, what meaning? Whither does it lead? Such questions paganism could not answer, but Arabia in the century before Muḥammad was not wholly abandoned to paganism. Jewish colonists had long been settled in the Ḥijáz. Probably the earliest settlements date from the conquest of Palestine by Titus or Hadrian. In their new home the refugees, through contact Judaism and Christianity in Arabia. with a people nearly akin to themselves, became fully Arabicised, as the few extant specimens of their poetry bear witness. They remained Jews, however, not only in their cultivation of trade and various industries, but also in the most vital particular—their religion. This, and the fact that they lived in isolated communities among the surrounding population, marked them out as the salt of the desert. In the Ḥijáz their spiritual predominance was not seriously challenged. It was otherwise in Yemen. We may leave out of account the legend according to which Judaism was introduced into that country from the Ḥijáz by the Tubba‘ As‘ad Kámil. What is certain is that towards the beginning of the sixth century it was firmly planted there side by side with Christianity, and that in the person of the Ḥimyarite monarch Dhú Nuwás, who adopted the Jewish faith, it won a short-lived but sanguinary triumph over its rival. But in Yemen, except among the highlanders of Najrán, Christianity does not appear to have flourished as it did in the extreme north and north-east, where the Roman and Persian frontiers were guarded by the Arab levies of Ghassán and Ḥíra. We have seen that the latter city contained a large Christian population who were called distinctively The ‘Ibád of Ḥíra. ‘Ibád, i.e., Servants (of God). Through them the Aramaic culture of Babylonia was transmitted to all parts of the peninsula. They had learned the art of writing long before it was generally practised in Arabia, as is shown by the story of Ṭarafa and Mutalammis, and they produced the oldest writtenpoetry in the Arabic language—a poetry very different in character from that which forms the main subject of this chapter. Unfortunately the bulk of it has perished, since the rhapsodists, to whom we owe the preservation of so much Pre-islamic verse, were devoted to the traditional models and would not burden their memories with anything new-fashioned. The most famous of the ‘Ibádí poets is ‘Adí b. Zayd, whose adventurous career as a politician has been sketched above. He is not reckoned by Muḥammadan critics among the Fuḥúl or poets of the first rank, because he was a townsman ( qarawí). In this connection ‘Adí b. Zayd. the following anecdote is instructive. The poet al-‘Ajjáj (õ about 709 a.d.) said of his contemporaries al-Ṭirimmáḥ and al-Kumayt: "They used to ask me concerning rare expressions in the language of poetry, and I informed them, but afterwards I found the same expressions wrongly applied in their poems, the reason being that they were townsmen who described what they had not seen and misapplied it, whereas I who am a Bedouin describe what I have seen and apply it properly."267 ‘Adí is chiefly remembered for his wine-songs. Oriental Christianity has always been associated with the drinking and selling of wine. Christian ideas were carried into the heart of Arabia by ‘Ibádí wine merchants, who are said to have taught their religion to the celebrated A‘shá. ‘Adí drank and was merry like the rest, but the underlying thought, 'for to-morrow we die,' repeatedly makes itself heard. He walks beside a cemetery, and the voices of the dead call to him—268

"Thou who seest us unto thyself shalt say,'Soon upon me comes the season of decay.'Can the solid mountains evermore sustainTime's vicissitudes and all they bring in train?Many a traveller lighted near us and abode,Quaffing wine wherein the purest water flowed—Strainers on each flagon's mouth to clear the wine,Noble steeds that paw the earth in trappings fine!For a while they lived in lap of luxury,Fearing no misfortune, dallying lazily.Then, behold, Time swept them all, like chaff, away:Thus it is men fall to whirling Time a prey.Thus it is Time keeps the bravest and the bestNight and day still plunged in Pleasure's fatal quest."

It is said that the recitation of these verses induced Nu‘mán al-Akbar, one of the mythical pagan kings of Ḥíra, to accept Christianity and become an anchorite. Although the story involves an absurd anachronism, it is ben trovatoin so far as it records the impression which the graver sort of Christian poetry was likely to make on heathen minds.

The courts of Ḥíra and Ghassán were well known to the wandering minstrels of the time before Muḥammad, who flocked thither in eager search of patronage and remuneration. We may be sure that men like Nábigha, Labíd, and A‘shá did not remain unaffected by the culture around them, even if it seldom entered very deeply into their lives. That considerable traces of religious feeling are to be found in Pre-islamic poetry admits of no denial, but the passages in question were formerly explained as due to interpolation. This view no longer prevails. Thanks mainly to the arguments of Von Pre-Islamic poetry not exclusively pagan in sentiment. Kremer, Sir Charles Lyall, and Wellhausen, it has come to be recognised (1) that in many cases the above-mentioned religious feeling is not Islamic in tone; (2) that the passages in which it occurs are not of Islamic origin; and (3) that it is the natural and necessary result of the widely spread, though on the whole superficial, influence of Judaism, and especially of Christianity.269 It shows itself not only in frequent allusions, e.g., to the monk in his solitary cell, whose lamp serves to light belated travellers on their way, and in more significant references, such as that of Zuhayr already quoted, to the Heavenly Book in which evil actions are enscrolled for the Day of Reckoning, but also in the tendency to moralise, to look within, to meditate on death, and to value the life of the individual rather than the continued existence of the family. These things are not characteristic of old Arabian poetry, but the fact that they do appear at times is quite in accord with the other facts which have been stated, and justifies the conclusion that during the sixth century religion and culture were imperceptibly extending their sphere of influence in Arabia, leavening the pagan masses, and gradually preparing the way for Islam.

CHAPTER IV

THE PROPHET AND THE KORAN

With the appearance of Muḥammad the almost impenetrable veil thrown over the preceding age is suddenly lifted and we find ourselves on the solid ground of historical tradition. In order that the reasons for this change may be understood, it is necessary to give some account of the principal sources from which our knowledge of the Prophet's life and teaching is derived.

There is first, of course, the Koran,270 consisting "exclusively Sources of information: I. The Koran. of the revelations or commands which Muḥammad professed, from time to time, to receive through Gabriel as a message direct from God; and which, under an alleged Divine direction, he delivered to those about him. At the time of pretended inspiration, or shortly after, each passage was recited by Muḥammad before the Companions or followers who happened to be present, and was generally committed to writing by some one amongst them upon palm-leaves, leather, stones, or such other rude material as conveniently came to hand. These Divine messages continued throughout the three-and-twenty years of his prophetical life, so that the last portion did not appear till the year of his death. The canon was then closed; but the contents were never, during the Prophet's lifetime, systematically arranged, or even collected together."271 They were preserved, however, in fragmentary copies and, especially, by oral How it was preserved. recitation until the sanguinary wars which followed Muḥammad's death had greatly diminished the number of those who could repeat them by heart. Accordingly, after the battle of Yamáma (633 a.d.) ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭáb came to Abú Bakr, who was then Caliph, and said: "I fear that slaughter may wax hot among the Reciters on other battle-fields, and that much of the Koran may be lost; so in my opinion it should be collected without delay." Abú Bakr agreed, and entrusted the task to Zayd b. Thábit, one of the Prophet's amanuenses, who collected the fragments with great difficulty "from bits of parchment, thin white stones, leafless palm-branches, and the bosoms of men." The manuscript thus compiled was deposited with Abú Bakr during the remainder of his life, then with ‘Umar, on whose death it passed to his daughter Ḥafṣa. Afterwards, in the Caliphate of ‘Uthmán, Ḥudhayfa b. al-Yamán, observing that the Koran as read in Syria was seriously at variance with the text current in ‘Iráq, warned the Caliph to interfere, lest the Sacred Book of the Moslems should become a subject of dispute, like the Jewish and Christian scriptures. In the year 651 a.d. ‘Uthmán ordered Zayd b. Thábit to prepare a Revised Version with the assistance of three Qurayshites, saying to the latter, "If ye differ from Zayd regarding any word of the Koran, write it in the dialect of Quraysh; for it was revealed in their dialect."272 This has ever since remained the final and standard recension of the Koran. "Transcripts were multiplied and forwarded to the chief cities in the empire, and all previously existing copies were, by the Caliph's command, committed to the flames."273 In the text as it has come down to us the various readings are few and unimportant, and its genuineness is above suspicion. We shall see, Value of the Koran as an authority. moreover, that the Koran is an exceedingly human document, reflecting every phase of Muḥammad's personality and standing in close relation to the outward events of his life, so that here we have materials of unique and incontestable authority for tracing the origin and early development of Islam—such materials as do not exist in the case of Buddhism or Christianity or any other ancient religion. Unfortunately the arrangement of the Koran can only be described as chaotic. No chronological sequence is observed in the order of the Súras (chapters), which is determined simply by their length, the longest being placed first.274 Again, the chapters themselves are sometimes made up of disconnected fragments having nothing in common except the rhyme; whence it is often impossible to discover the original context of the words actually spoken by the Prophet, the occasion on which they were revealed, or the period to which they belong. In these circumstances the Koran must be supplemented by reference to our second main source of information, namely, Tradition.