Handbook of Universal Literature, From the Best and Latest Authorities

by Anne C. Lynch Botta

In those branches of poetry which they cultivated they displayed surprising subtlety and great refinement of thought, but the fame of their compositions rests, in some degree, on their bold metaphors, their extravagant allegories, and their excessive hyperboles. The Arabs despised the poetry of the Greeks, which appeared to them timid, cold, and constrained, and among all the books, which, with almost superstitious veneration, they borrowed from them, there is scarcely a single poem which they judged worthy of translation. The object of the Arabian poets was to make a brilliant use of the boldest and most gigantic images, and to astonish the reader by the abruptness of their expressions. They burdened their compositions with riches, under the idea that nothing which was beautiful could be superfluous. They neglected natural sentiment, and the more they could multiply the ornaments of art, the more admirable in their eyes did the work appear.

The nations who possessed a classical poetry, in imitating nature, had discovered the use of the epic and the drama, in which the poet endeavors to express the true language of the human heart. The people of the East, with the exception of the Hindus, never made this attempt—their poetry is entirely lyric; but under whatever name it may be known, it is always found to be the language of the passions. The poetry of the Arabians is rhymed like our own, and the rhyming is often carried still farther in the construction of the verse, while the uniformity of sound is frequently echoed throughout the whole expression. The collection made by Aboul Teman (fl. 845 A.D.) containing the Arabian poems of the age anterior to Mohammed, and that of Taoleti, which embraces the poems of the subsequent periods, are considered the richest and most complete anthologies of Arabian poetry. Montanebbi, a poet who lived about 1050, has been compared to the Persian Hafiz.

7. THE ARABIAN TALES.—If the Arabs have neither the epic nor the drama, they have been, on the other hand, the inventors of a style of composition which is related to the epic, and which supplies among them the place of the drama. We owe to them those tales, the conception of which is so brilliant and the imagination so rich and varied: tales which have been the delight of our infancy, and which at a more advanced age we can never read without feeling their enchantment anew. Every one is acquainted with the "Arabian Nights Entertainments;" but in our translation we possess but a very small part of the Arabian collection, which is not confined merely to books, but forms the treasure of a numerous class of men and women, who, throughout the East, find a livelihood in reciting these tales to crowds, who delight to forget the present, in the pleasing dreams of imagination. In the coffee-houses of the Levant, one of these men will gather a silent crowd around him, and picture to his audience those brilliant and fantastic visions which are the patrimony of Eastern imaginations. The public squares abound with men of this class, and their recitations supply the place of our dramatic representations. The physicians frequently recommend them to their patients in order to soothe pain, to calm agitation, or to produce sleep; and these story-tellers, accustomed to sickness, modulate their voices, soften their tones, and gently suspend them as sleep steals over the sufferer.

The imagination of the Arabs in these tales is easily distinguished from that of the chivalric nations. The supernatural world is the same in both, but the moral world is different. The Arabian tales, like the romances of chivalry, convey us to the fairy realms, but the human personages which they introduce are very dissimilar. They had their birth after the Arabians had devoted themselves to commerce, literature, and the arts, and we recognize in them the style of a mercantile people, as we do that of a warlike nation in the romances of chivalry. Valor and military achievements here inspire terror but no enthusiasm, and on this account the Arabian tales are often less noble and heroic than we usually expect in compositions of this nature. But, on the other hand, the Arabians are our masters in the art of producing and sustaining this kind of fiction. They are the creators of that brilliant mythology of fairies and genii which extends the bounds of the world, and carries us into the realms of marvels and prodigies. It is from them that European nations have derived that intoxication of love, that tenderness and delicacy of sentiment, and that reverential awe of women, by turns slaves and divinities, which have operated so powerfully on their chivalrous feelings. We trace their effects in all the literature of the south, which owes to this cause its mental character. Many of these tales had separately found their way into the poetic literature of Europe, long before the translation of the Arabian Nights. Some are to be met with in the old fabliaux, in Boccaccio, and in Ariosto, and these very tales which have charmed our infancy, passing from nation to nation through channels frequently unknown, are now familiar to the memory and form the delight of the imagination of half the inhabitants of the globe.

The author of the original Arabic work is unknown, as is also the period at which it was composed. It was first introduced into Europe from Syria, where it was obtained, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, by Galland, a French traveler, who was sent to the East by the celebrated Colbert, to collect manuscripts, and by him first translated and published.

8. HISTORY AND SCIENCE.—As early as the eighth century A.D., history became an important department in Arabian literature. At later periods, historians who wrote on all subjects were numerous. Several authors wrote universal history from the beginning of the world to their own time; every state, province, and city possessed its individual chronicle, Many, in imitation of Plutarch, wrote the lives of distinguished men; and there was such a passion for every species of composition, and such a desire to leave no subject untouched, that there was a serious history written of celebrated horses, and another of camels that had risen to distinction. They possessed historical dictionaries, and made use of all those inventions which curtail labor and dispense with the necessity of research. Every art and science had its history, and of these this nation possessed a more complete collection than any other, either ancient or modern. The style of the Arabian historians is simple and unadorned.

Philosophy was passionately cultivated by the Arabians, and upon it was founded the fame of many ingenious and sagacious men, whose names are still revered in Europe. Among them were Averrhoes of Cordova (d. 1198), the great commentator on the works of Aristotle, and Avicenna (d. 1037), a profound philosopher as well as a celebrated writer on medicine. Arabian philosophy penetrated rapidly into the West, and had greater influence on the schools of Europe than any branch of Arabic literature; and yet it was the one in which the progress was, in fact, the least real. The Arabians, more ingenious than profound, attached themselves rather to the subtleties than to the connection of ideas; their object was more to dazzle than to instruct, and they exhausted their imaginations in search of mysteries. Aristotle was worshiped by them, as a sort of divinity. In their opinion all philosophy was to be found in his writings, and they explained every metaphysical question according to the scholastic standard.

The interpretation of the Koran formed another important part of their speculative studies, and their literature abounds with exegetic works on their sacred book, as well as with commentaries on Mohammedan law. The learned Arabians did not confine themselves to the studies which they could only prosecute in their closets; they undertook, for the advancement of science, the most perilous journeys, and we owe to Aboul Feda (1273- 1331) and other Arabian travelers the best works on geography written in the Middle Ages.

The natural sciences were cultivated by them with great ardor, and many naturalists among them merit the gratitude of posterity. Botany and chemistry, of which they were in some sort the inventors, gave them a better acquaintance with nature than the Greeks or Romans ever possessed, and the latter science was applied by them to all the necessary arts of life. Above all, agriculture was studied by them with a perfect knowledge of the climate, soil, and growth of plants. From the eighth to the eleventh century, they established medical schools in the principal cities of their dominions, and published valuable works on medical science. They introduced more simple principles into mathematics, and extended the use and application of that science. They added to arithmetic the decimal system, and the Arabic numerals, which, however, are of Hindu origin; they simplified the trigonometry of the Greeks, and gave algebra more useful and general applications. Bagdad and Cordova had celebrated schools of astronomy, and observatories, and their astronomers made important discoveries; a great number of scientific words are evidently Arabic, such as algebra, alcohol, zenith, nadir, etc., and many of the inventions, which at the present day add to the comforts of life, are due to the Arabians. Paper, now so necessary to the progress of intellect, was brought by them from Asia. In China, from all antiquity, it had been manufactured from silk, but about the year 30 of the Hegira (649 A.D.) the manufacture of it was introduced at Samarcand, and when that city was conquered by the Arabians, they first employed cotton in the place of silk, and the invention spread with rapidity throughout their dominions. The Spaniards, in fabricating paper, substituted flax for cotton, which was more scarce and dear; but it was not till the end of the thirteenth century that paper mills were established in the Christian states of Spain, from whence the invention passed, in the fourteenth century only, to Treviso and Padua. Tournaments were first instituted among the Arabians, from whom they were introduced into Italy and France. Gunpowder, the discovery of which is generally attributed to a German chemist, was known to the Arabians at least a century before any trace of it appeared in European history. The compass, also, the invention of which has been given alternately to the Italians and French in the thirteenth century, was known to the Arabians in the eleventh. The number of Arabic inventions, of which we enjoy the benefit without suspecting it, is prodigious.

Such, then, was the brilliant light which literature and science displayed from the ninth to the fourteenth century of our era in those vast countries which had submitted to the yoke of Islamism. In this immense extent of territory, twice or thrice as large as Europe, nothing is now found but ignorance, slavery, terror, and death. Few men are there capable of reading the works of their illustrious ancestors, and few who could comprehend them are able to procure them. The prodigious literary riches of the Arabians no longer exist in any of the countries where the Arabians or Mussulmans rule. It is not there that we must seek for the fame of their great men or for their writings. What has been preserved is in the hands of their enemies, in the convents of the monks, or in the royal libraries of Europe.