A Literary History of the Arabs

by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson

"The pulpits and the thrones are empty of them; I bid them, till the hour of death, farewell!"

It seemed as if all Muḥammadan Asia lay at the feet of the pagan conqueror. Resuming his advance, Húlágú occupied Mesopotamia and sacked Aleppo. He then returned to the East, leaving his lieutenant, Ketboghá, to complete the reduction of Syria. Meanwhile, however, an Egyptian army under the Mameluke Sultan Muẓaffar Quṭuz was hastening to oppose the invaders. On Friday, the 25th of Ramaḍán, 658 a.h., a decisive battle was fought at ‘Ayn Jálút (Goliath's Spring), west of the Jordan. Battle of ‘Ayn Jálút (September, 1260 a.d.). The Tartars were routed with immense slaughter, and their subsequent attempts to wrest Syria from the Mamelukes met with no success. The submission of Asia Minor was hardly more than nominal, but in Persia the descendants of Húlágú, the Íl-Kháns, reigned over a great empire, which the conversion of one of their number, Gházán (1295-1304 a.d.), restored to Moslem rule. We are not concerned here with the further history of the Mongols in Persia nor with that of the Persians themselves. Since the days of Húlágú the lands east and west of the Tigris are separated by an ever-widening gulf. The two races—Persians and Arabs—to whose co-operation the mediæval world, from Samarcand to Seville, for a long time owed its highest literary and scientific culture, have now finally dissolved their partnership. It is true that the Arabic ceases to be the language of the whole Moslem world. cleavage began many centuries earlier, and before the fall of Baghdád the Persian genius had already expressed itself in a splendid national literature. But from this date onward the use of Arabic by Persians is practically limited to theological and philosophical writings. The Persian language has driven its rival out of the field. Accordingly Egypt and Syria will now demand the principal share of our attention, more especially as the history of the Arabs of Granada, which properly belongs to this period, has been related in the preceding chapter.

The dynasty of the Mameluke[825] Sultans of Egypt was founded in 1250 a.d. by Aybak, a Turkish slave, who The Mamelukes of Egypt (1250-1517 a.d.). commenced his career in the service of the Ayyúbid, Malik Ṣáliḥ Najmu ’l-Dín. His successors[826] held sway in Egypt and Syria until the conquest of these countries by the Ottomans. The Mamelukes were rough soldiers, who seldom indulged in any useless refinement, but they had a royal taste for architecture, as the visitor to Cairo may still see. Their administration, though disturbed by frequent mutinies and murders, was tolerably prosperous on the whole, and their victories over the Mongol hosts, as well as the crushing blows which they dealt to the Crusaders, gave Islam new prestige. The ablest of them all was Baybars, Sultan Baybars (1260-1277 a.d.). who richly deserved his title Malik al-Ẓáhir, i.e., the Victorious King. His name has passed into the legends of the people, and his warlike exploits into story-tellers to this day.[827] The violent and brutal acts which he sometimes committed—for he shrank from no crime when he suspected danger—made him a terror to the ambitious nobles around him, but did not harm his reputation as a just ruler. Although he held the throne in virtue of having murdered the late monarch with his own hand, he sought to give the appearance of legitimacy to his usurpation. He therefore recognised as Caliph a certain Abu ’l-Qásim Aḥmad, a pretended scion of the ‘Abbásid house, invited him to Cairo, and took the oath of allegiance to him in due form. The Caliph on his part invested the Sultan with sovereignty over Egypt, The ‘Abbásid Caliphs of Egypt. Syria, Arabia, and all the provinces that he might obtain by future conquests. This Aḥmad, entitled al-Mustanṣir, was the first of a long series of mock Caliphs who were appointed by the Mameluke Sultans and generally kept under close surveillance in the citadel of Cairo. There is no authority for the statement, originally made by Mouradgea d'Ohsson in 1787 and often repeated since, that the last of the line bequeathed his rights of succession to the Ottoman Sultan Selím I, thus enabling the Sultans of Turkey to claim the title and dignity of Caliph.[828]

The poets of this period are almost unknown in Europe, and until they have been studied with due attention it would be Arabic poetry after the Mongol Invasion. premature to assert that none of them rises above mediocrity. At the same time my own impression (based, I confess, on a very desultory and imperfect acquaintance with their work) is that the best among them are merely elegant and accomplished artists, playing brilliantly with words and phrases, but doing little else. No doubt extreme artificiality may coexist with poetical genius of a high order, provided that it has behind it Mutanabbí's power, Ma‘arrí's earnestness, or Ibnu ’l-Fáriḍ's enthusiasm. In the absence of these qualities we must be content to admire the technical skill with which the old tunes are varied and revived. Let us take, for example, Ṣafiyyu ’l-Dín al-Ḥillí, who was born at Ḥilla, a large town on the Ṣafiyyu ’l-Dín al-Ḥillí. Euphrates, in 1278 a.d., became laureate of the Urtuqid dynasty at Máridín, and died in Baghdád about 1350. He is described as "the poet of his age absolutely," and to judge from the extracts in Kutubí's Fawátu ’l-Wafayát[829] he combined subtlety of fancy with remarkable ease and sweetness of versification. Many of his pieces, however, are jeux d'esprit, like his ode to the Prophet, in which he employs 151 rhetorical figures, or like another poem where all the nouns are diminutives.[830] The following specimen of his work is too brief to do him justice:—

"How can I have patience, and thou, mine eye's delight, All the livelong year not one moment in my sight? And with what can I rejoice my heart, when thou that art a joy Unto every human heart, from me hast taken flight? I swear by Him who made thy form the envy of the sun (So graciously He clad thee with lovely beams of light): The day when I behold thy beauty doth appear to me As tho' it gleamed on Time's dull brow a constellation bright. O thou scorner of my passion, for whose sake I count as naught All the woe that I endure, all the injury and despite, Come, regard the ways of God! for never He at life's last gasp Suffereth the weight to perish even of one mite!"[831]

We have already referred to the folk-songs (muwashshaḥ and zajal) which originated in Spain. These simple ballads, Popular poetry. with their novel metres and incorrect language, were despised by the classical school, that is to say, by nearly all Moslems with any pretensions to learning; but their popularity was such that even the court poets occasionally condescended to write in this style. To the zajal and muwashshaḥ we may add the dúbayt, the mawáliyyá, the kánwakán, and the ḥimáq, which together with verse of the regular form made up the 'seven kinds of poetry' (al-funún al-sab‘a). Ṣafiyyu ’l-Dín al-Ḥillí, who wrote a special treatise on the Arabic folk-songs, mentions two other varieties which, he says, were invented by the people of Baghdád to be sung in the early dawn of Ramaḍán, the Moslem Lent.[832] It is interesting to observe that some few literary men attempted, though in a timid fashion, to free Arabic poetry from the benumbing academic system by which it was governed and to pour fresh life into its veins. A notable example of this tendency is the Hazzu ’l-Quḥúf[833] by Shirbíní, who wrote in 1687 a.d. Here we have a poem in the vulgar dialect of Egypt, but what is still more curious, the author, while satirising the uncouth manners and rude language of the peasantry, makes a bitter attack on the learning and morals of the Muḥammadan divines.[834] For this purpose he introduces a typical Fellah named Abú Shádúf, whose rôle corresponds to that of Piers the Plowman in Longland's Vision. Down to the end of the nineteenth century, at any rate, such isolated offshoots had not gone far to found a living school of popular poetry. Only the future can show whether the Arabs are capable of producing a genius who will succeed in doing for the national folk-songs what Burns did for the Scots ballads.

Biography and History were cultivated with ardour by the savants of Egypt and Syria. Among the numerous Ibn Khallikán (1211-1282 a.d.). compositions of this kind we can have no hesitation in awarding the place of honour to the Wafayátu ’l-A‘yán, or 'Obituaries of Eminent Men,' by Shamsu ’l-Dín Ibn Khallikán, a work which has often been quoted in the foregoing pages. The author belonged to a distinguished family descending from Yaḥyá b. Khálid the Barmecide (see p. [259] seq.), and was born at Arbela in 1211 a.d. He received his education at Aleppo and Damascus (1229-1238) and then proceeded to Cairo, where he finished the first draft of his Biographical Dictionary in 1256. Five years later he was appointed by Sultan Baybars to be Chief Cadi of Syria. He retained this high office (with a seven years' interval, which he devoted to literary and biographical studies) until a short time before his death. In the Preface to the Wafayát Ibn Khallikán observes that he has adopted the alphabetical order as more convenient than the chronological. As regards the scope and character of his Dictionary, he says:—

"I have not limited my work to the history of any one particular class of persons, as learned men, princes, emirs, viziers, or poets; His Biographical Dictionary. but I have spoken of all those whose names are familiar to the public, and about whom questions are frequently asked; I have, however, related the facts I could ascertain respecting them in a concise manner, lest my work should become too voluminous; I have fixed with all possible exactness the dates of their birth and death; I have traced up their genealogy as high as I could; I have marked the orthography of those names which are liable to be written incorrectly; and I have cited the traits which may best serve to characterise each individual, such as noble actions, singular anecdotes, verses and letters, so that the reader may derive amusement from my work, and find it not exclusively of such a uniform cast as would prove tiresome; for the most effectual inducement to reading a book arises from the variety of its style."[835]

Ibn Khallikan might have added that he was the first Muḥammadan writer to design a Dictionary of National Biography, since none of his predecessors had thought of comprehending the lives of eminent Moslems of every class in a single work.[836] The merits of the book have been fully recognised by the author's countrymen as well as by European scholars. It is composed in simple and elegant language, it is extremely accurate, and it contains an astonishing quantity of miscellaneous historical and literary information, not drily catalogued but conveyed in the most pleasing fashion by anecdotes and excerpts which illustrate every department of Moslem life. I am inclined to agree with the opinion of Sir William Jones, that it is the best general biography ever written; and allowing for the difference of scale and scope, I think it will bear comparison with a celebrated English work which it resembles in many ways—I mean Boswell's Johnson.[837]