I shall here mention, that the Arabs begun very soon to study letters, and came to be very partial to their own language; Mahomet himself so much so, that he held out his Koran, for its elegance alone, as a greater miracle than that of raising the dead. This was not universally allowed at that time; as there were even then compositions supposed to equal, if not to surpass it. In my time, I have seen in Britain a spirit of enthusiasm for this book in preference to all others, not inferior to that which possessed Mahomet’s followers. Modern unbelievers (Sale and his disciples) have gone every length, but to say directly that it was dictated by the Spirit of God. Excepting the command in Genesis chap. i. ver. 3. “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light;” they defy us to shew in scripture a passage equal in sublimity to many in the Koran. Following, without inquiring, what has been handed down from one to the other, they would cram us with absurdities, which no man of sense can swallow. They say the Koran is composed in a style the most pure, and chaste, and that the tribe of Beni Koreish was the most polite, learned, and noble of all the Arabs.
But to this I answer—The Beni Koreish were from the earliest days, according to their own[348] account, part established at Mecca, and part as robbers on the sea-coast, and they were all children of Ishmael. Whence then came their learning, or their superior nobility? Was it found in the desert, in the temple, or did the robbers bring it from the sea? Soiouthy, one of those most famous then for knowledge in the Arabic, has quoted from the Koran many hundred words, either Abyssinian, Indian, Persian, Ethiopic, Syrian, Hebrew, or Chaldaic, which he brings back to the root, and ascribes them to the nation they came from. Indeed it could not be otherwise; these caravans, continually crowding with their trade to Mecca, must have vitiated the original tongue by an introduction of new terms and new idioms, into a language labouring under a penury of vocabules. But shall any one for this persuade me, that a book is a model of pure, elegant, chaste English, in which there shall be a thousand words of Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, French, Spanish, Malabar Mexican, and Laponian? What would be thought of such a medley? or, at least, could it be recommended as a pattern for writing pure English?
What I say of the Koran may be applied to the language of Arabia in general: when it is called a copious language, and professors wisely tell you, that there are six hundred words for a sword, two hundred for honey, and three hundred that signify a lion, still I must observe, that this is not a copious language, but a confusion of languages: these, instead of distinct names, are only different epithets. For example, a lion in English may be called a young lion, a white lion, a small lion, a big lion: I style him moreover the fierce, the cruel, the enemy to man, the beast of the desert, the king of beasts, the lover of blood. Thus it is in Arabic; and yet it is said that all these are words for a lion. Take another example in a sword; the cutter, the divider, the friend of man, the master of towns, the maker of widows, the sharp, the straight, the crooked; which may be said in English as well as in Arabic.
The Arabs were a people who lived in a country, for the most part, desert; their dwellings were tents, and their principal occupation feeding and breeding cattle, and they married with their own family. The language therefore of such a people should be very poor; there is no variety of images in their whole country. They were always bad poets, as their works will testify; and if, contrary to the general rule, the language of Arabia Deserta became a copious one, it must have been by the mixture of so many nations meeting and trading at Mecca. It must, at the same time, have been the most corrupt, where there was the greatest concourse of strangers, and this was certainly among the Beni Koreish at the Caba. When, therefore, I hear people praising the Koran for the purity of its style, it puts me in mind of the old man in the comedy, whose reason for loving his nephew was, that he could read Greek; and being asked if he understood the Greek so read, he answered, Not a word of it, but the rumbling of the sound pleased him.
The war that had distracted all Arabia, first between the Greeks and Persians, then between Mahomet and the Arabs, in support of his divine mission, had very much hurt the trade carried on by universal consent at the Temple of Mecca. Caravans, when they dared venture out, were surprised upon every road, by the partizans of one side or the other. Both merchants and trade had taken their departure to the southward, and established themselves south of the Arabian Gulf, in places which (in ancient times) had been the markets for commerce, and the rendezvous of merchants. Azab, or Saba, was rebuilt; also Raheeta, Zeyla, Tajoura, Soomaal, in the Arabian Gulf, and a number of other towns on the Indian Ocean. The conquest of the Abyssinian territories in Arabia forced all those that yet remained to take refuge on the African side, in the little districts which now grew into consideration. Adel, Mara, Hadea, Aussa, Wypo, Tarshish, and a number of other states, now assumed the name of kingdoms, and soon obtained power and wealth superior to many older ones.
The Governor of Yemen (or Najashi) converted now to the faith of Mahomet, retired to the African side of the Gulf. His government, long ago, having been shaken to the very foundation by the Arabian war, was at last totally destroyed. But the Indian trade at Adel wore a face of prosperity, that had the features of ancient times.
Without taking notice of every objection, and answering it, which has too polemical an appearance for a work of this kind, I hope I have removed the greatest part of the reader’s difficulties, which have, for a long time, lain in the way, towards his understanding this part of the history. There is one, however, remains, which the Arabian historians have mentioned, viz. that this Najashi, who embraced the faith of Mahomet, was avowedly of the royal family of Abyssinia. To this I answer, he certainly was a person of that rank, and was undoubtedly a nobleman, as there is no nobility in that country but from relationship to the king, and no person can be related to the king by the male line. But the females, even the daughters of those princes who are banished to the mountain, marry whom they please; and all the descendents of that marriage become noble, because they must be allied to the king. So far then they may truly assert, that the Mahometan Governor of Yemen, and his posterity, were this way related to the king of Abyssinia. But the supposition that any heirs male of this family became mussulmen, is, beyond any sort of doubt, without foundation or probability.
Omar, after subduing Egypt, destroyed the valuable library at Alexandria, but his successors thought very differently from him in the article of profane learning. Greek books of all kinds (especially those of Geometry, Astronomy, and Medicine,) were searched for every where and translated. Sciences flourished and were encouraged. Trade at the same time kept pace, and increased with knowledge. Geography and astronomy were every where diligently studied and solidly applied to make the voyages of men from place to place safe and expeditious. The Jews (constant servants of the Arabs) imbibed a considerable share of their taste for earning.
They had, at this time, increased very much in number. By the violence of the Mahometan conquests in Arabia and Egypt, where their sect did principally prevail, they became very powerful in Abyssinia. Arianism, and all the various heresies that distracted the Greek church, were received there in their turn from Egypt; the bonds of Christianity were dissolved, and people in general were much more willing to favour a new religion, than to agree with, or countenance any particular one of their own, if it differed from that which they adopted in the merest trifle. This had destroyed their metropolis in Egypt, just now delivered up to the Saracens; and the disposition of the Abyssinians seemed so very much to resemble their brethren the Cophts, that a revolution in favour of Judaism was thought full as feasible in the country, as it had been in Egypt in favour of the newly-preached, but unequivocal religion of Mahomet.
An independent sovereignty, in one family of Jews, had always been preserved on the mountain of Samen, and the royal residence was upon a high-pointed rock, called the Jews Rock: Several other inaccessible mountains served as natural fortresses for this people, now grown very considerable by frequent accessions of strength from Palestine and Arabia, whence the Jews had been expelled. Gideon and Judith were then king and queen of the Jews, and their daughter Judith (whom in Amhara they call Esther, and sometimes Saat, i. e. fire[349],) was a woman of great beauty, and talents for intrigue; had been married to the governor of a small district called Bugna, in the neighbourhood of Lasta, both which countries were likewise much infected with Judaism.