"Fear not to praise the man whose wives are true to him."
"Woman fattens on what she hears." (flattery)
"Women are the whips of Satan."
"If you would marry a girl, inquire about the traits of her mother."
"Trust neither a king, a horse, nor a woman. For the king is fastidious, the horse prone to run away, and the woman is perfidious."
"My father does the fighting, and my mother the talking about it."
"Our mother forbids us to err and runs into error."
"Alas for the people who are ruled by a woman!"
The position of woman among the Arabs before the times of Mohammed can be easily inferred from what has preceded. But there is another side to the picture. Although despised and abused, woman often asserted her dignity and maintained her rights, not only by physical force, but by intellectual superiority as well. The poetesses of the Arabs are numerous, and some of them hold a high rank. Their poetry was impromptu, impassioned, and chiefly of the elegiac and erotic type. The faculty of improvisation was cultivated even by the most barbarous tribes, and although such of their poetry as has been preserved is mostly a kind of rhymed prose, it often contains striking and beautiful thoughts. They called improvised poetry "the daughter of the hour."