Deterioration of social and domestic life.
Of the state of Mahometan society at this period we have not the materials for judging closely. Constant employment in the field, no doubt, tended to arrest the action of the depraving influences which, in times of ease and luxury, began to relax the sanctions and taint the purity of Bedouin life. But there is ample indication that the relations between the sexes were already rapidly deteriorating. The baneful influence of polygamy, especially now that it was intensified by the husband’s power of arbitrary divorce and the unlimited licence of servile concubinage, was quickened by the vast multitudes of slave-girls taken by the army, and distributed or sold, both among the soldiers and the community at large. The wife of noble blood held, under the old chivalrous code of the Arabs, a position of honour and supremacy in the household, from which she could be ousted by no base-born rival, however fair or fruitful. She was now to be, in the estimation of her husband, but one amongst many, to whose level she was gradually being lowered. If his slave-girls bore him children, they became at once, as Omm Walad, free;[410] and in point of legitimacy and inheritance the offspring was equal to the children of the free and noble wife. Beauty and blandishment began to outshine birth and breeding, and the favourite of the hour too often displaced her noble mistress.
Story of the Princess Leila.
With the coarse sensualist, revelling like Moghîra in a harem well stocked with Greek and Persian captives, this might have been expected. But it was not the less the case in many a household of greater refinement and repute. Some lady, ravished, it may have been, from a noble home, and endowed with the charms and graces of a courtly life, would captivate her master, and for the moment rule supreme. The story of the Princess Leila will afford a sample. This beautiful daughter of Judi, the Ghassanide chief slain at Dûma, was bought by the victorious Khâlid from the common prize. The fame of her charms had already reached Medîna, and kindled a romantic flame in the breast of Abd al Rahmân, son of Abu Bekr. He was wild in his passion for her, and sang his grief in verses still preserved.[411] At last he became her happy master, and she was despatched from the camp to his home. At once he freed her, and took her to wife. His love for this lady was so great that, forsaking all other, he kept him only to her—so long as her beauty lasted. She was the queen of his household. But after a time she fell sick and began to waste away. The beauty went, and with it her master’s love; and so her turn, too, came to be forsaken. Then his comrades said to him: ‘Why thus keep her on, neglected and forsaken here? Suffer her to go back to her people and her home.’ So he suffered her. Leila’s fate was happy compared with that of others. Tired of his toy, the owner would sell her to become, if still young and beautiful, the plaything of another; or if, like Leila, disease or years had fretted her beauty, to eke out the weary, wistless, hopeless lot of a household slave.
The use of wine.
Relaxation of manners is significantly marked by the frequent notice of punishment for drunkenness. There are not wanting instances of even governors deposed for the offence. Omar was rigorous in imposing the legal penalty. He did not shrink from commanding that stripes should be inflicted, even upon his own son and his boon companions, for the use of wine. At Damascus, the scandal grew to such a height that Abu Obeida had to summon a band of the citizens, with the heroes Dhirâr and Abu Jandal at their head, for the offence. Hesitating in such a case to enforce the law, he acquainted Omar with the circumstances, and begged that the offenders, being penitent, might be forgiven. An angry answer came: ‘Gather an assembly,’ he wrote in the stern language of his early days;—‘gather an assembly, and bring them forth. Then ask, ‘Is wine lawful, or is it forbidden? If they say forbidden, lay eighty stripes upon each one of them; if they say lawful, then behead them every one.’ They confessed that it was forbidden, and submitted themselves to the ignominious punishment.[412]
Influence of female slavery in the family.
The weakness for wine may have been a relic of ‘the days of Ignorance,’ when the poet sang ‘Bury me under the roots of the juicy vine.’ But there were influences altogether new at work in the vast accession to the households of believers everywhere of captive women from other lands. Greek, Persian, and Egyptian maidens abounded in every harem. The Jews and Christians amongst them might retain their ancestral faith, whether in freedom or bondage, whether as concubines or married to their masters; and with their ancestral faith retain much also of the habits of their fatherland; and the same may be said of the heathen bondmaids from Africa and the Parsee slave-girls from Persia, even if outwardly converted to the Moslem faith. The countless progeny of such alliances, though ostensibly bred in the creed and practice of Islam, must have inherited much of the nationality of the mothers by whom they were nursed and brought up. The crowded harem, with its Divine sanction of servile concubinage, was also an evil school for the rising generation. Wealth, luxury, and idleness were under such circumstances provocative of a licence and indulgence which too often degenerated into debauchery.
Intemperance, dissipation, and depravity.
For, apart from the field of war and the strife of faction, Moslem life was idle and inactive. There was nothing to relieve its sanctimonious voluptuousness. The hours not spent in the harem were divided between listless conversation in the city knots and clubs, and formal prayers in the Mosque five times a day. Ladies no longer appeared in public excepting as they flitted along shrouded beneath ‘the veil.’ The light and grace, the charm and delicacy, which their presence imparted to Arab society before Islam, was gone. The soft warm colouring of nature, so beautifully portrayed in ancient Arabian song, was chilled and overcast. Games of chance, and such like amusements, common to mankind, were forbidden by law as stigmatised in the Corân; even speculation was checked by the ban put upon interest for money lent. And so, Mussulman life, cut off, beyond the threshold of the harem, from the ameliorating influences of the gentler sex, began to assume that dreary, morose, and cheerless aspect which it has ever since retained.[413] But nature is not thus to be pent up and trifled with; the rebound must come; and with the rebound, humanity, in casting off its shackles, burst likewise through the barriers of the Faith. The gay youth of Islam, cloyed with the dull delights of the sequestered harem, were tempted when they went abroad to evade the restrictions of their creed, and to seek in the cup, in music, games, and dissipation the excitement which the young and the light-hearted will demand. In the greater cities, intemperance and libertinism were rife. The canker spread, oftentimes the worse because concealed. The more serious classes of believers were scandalised not only by amusements, luxuries, and voluptuous living, held to be inconsistent with their creed, but with immoralities of a kind which may not even be named. The development of this evil came later on, but the tares were already being sown even under the strict and puritanical Caliphate of Omar.[414]