"When God repulsed the Abyssinians from Mecca and smote them with His vengeance, the Arabs held the Quraysh in high respect and said, 'They are God's people: God hath fought for them and hath defended them against their enemy;' and made poems on this matter."[134] The following verses, according to Ibn Isḥáq, are by Abu ’l-Ṣalt b. Abí Rabí‘a of Thaqíf; others more reasonably ascribe them to his son Umayya, a well-known poet and monotheist (Ḥaníf) contemporary with Muḥammad:—
"Lo, the signs of our Lord are everlasting, None disputes them except the unbeliever. He created Day and Night: unto all men Is their Reckoning ordained, clear and certain. Gracious Lord! He illumines the daytime Verses by Umayya b. Abi ’l-Ṣalt. With a sun widely scattering radiance. He the Elephant stayed at Mughammas So that sore it limped as though it were hamstrung, Cleaving close to its halter, and down dropped, As one falls from the crag of a mountain. Gathered round it were princes of Kinda, Noble heroes, fierce hawks in the mellay. There they left it: they all fled together, Every man with his shank-bone broken. Vain before God is every religion, When the dead rise, except the Ḥanífite.[135]"
The patriotic feelings aroused in the Arabs of the Ḥijáz by the Abyssinian invasion—feelings which must have been shared to some extent by the Bedouins generally—received a fresh stimulus through events which occurred about forty years after this time on the other side of the peninsula. It will be remembered that the Lakhmite dynasty at Ḥíra came to an end with Nu‘mán III, who was cruelly executed by Khusraw Parwéz (602 or 607 a.d.).[136] Before his death he had deposited his arms and other property with Háni’, a chieftain of the Banú Bakr. These were claimed by Khusraw, and as Háni’ refused to give them up, a Persian army was sent to Dhú Qár, a place near Kúfa abounding in water and consequently a favourite resort of the Bakrites during the dry season. A desperate conflict ensued, in which the Persians Battle of Dhú Qár (circa 610 a.d.). were completely routed.[137] Although the forces engaged were comparatively small,[138] this victory was justly regarded by the Arabs as marking the commencement of a new order of things; e.g., it is related that Muḥammad said when the tidings reached him: "This is the first day on which the Arabs have obtained satisfaction from the Persians." The desert tribes, hitherto overshadowed by the Sásánian Empire and held in check by the powerful dynasty of Ḥíra, were now confident and aggressive. They began to hate and despise the Colossus which they no longer feared, and which, before many years had elapsed, they trampled in the dust.
CHAPTER III
PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY, MANNERS, AND RELIGION
"When there appeared a poet in a family of the Arabs, the other tribes round about would gather together to that family and wish them joy of their good luck. Feasts would be got ready, the women of the tribe would join together in bands, playing upon lutes, as they were wont to do at bridals, and the men and boys would congratulate one another; for a poet was a defence to the honour of them all, a weapon to ward off insult from their good name, and a means of perpetuating their glorious deeds and of establishing their fame for ever. And they used not to wish one another joy but for three things—the birth of a boy, the coming to light of a poet, and the foaling of a noble mare."[139]
As far as extant literature is concerned—and at this time there was only a spoken literature, which was preserved by oral tradition, and first committed to writing long afterwards—the Jáhiliyya or Pre-islamic Age covers scarcely more than a century, from about 500 a.d., when the oldest poems of which we have any record were composed, to the year of Muḥammad's Flight to Medína (622 a.d.), which is the starting-point of a new era in Arabian history. The influence of these hundred and twenty years was great and lasting. They saw the rise and incipient decline of a poetry which most Arabic-speaking Moslems have always regarded as a model of unapproachable excellence; a poetry rooted in the life of the people, that insensibly moulded their minds and fixed their character and made them morally and spiritually a nation long before Muḥammad welded the various conflicting groups into a single organism, animated, for some time at least, by a common purpose. In those days poetry was no luxury for the cultured few, but the sole medium of literary expression. Every tribe had its poets, who freely uttered what they felt and thought. Their unwritten words "flew across the desert faster than arrows," and came home to the hearts and bosoms of all who heard them. Thus in the midst of outward strife and disintegration a unifying principle was at work. Poetry gave life and currency to an ideal of Arabian virtue (muruwwa), which, though based on tribal community of blood and insisting that only ties of blood were sacred, nevertheless became an invisible bond between diverse clans, and formed, whether consciously or not, the basis of a national community of sentiment.
In the following pages I propose to trace the origins of Origins of Arabian PoetryArabian poetry, to describe its form, contents, and general features, to give some account of the most celebrated Pre-islamic poets and collections of Pre-islamic verse, and finally to show in what manner it was preserved and handed down.