It was, say they, to commemorate the miraculous preservation of Ishmael that God commanded Abraham to build the Kaʿbah, and his son to furnish the necessary materials.
Muḥammadan writers give the following account of Ishmael and his descendants:—Ishmael was constituted the prince and first high-priest of Makkah, and, during half a century he preached to the incredulous Arabs. At his death, which happened forty-eight years after that of Abraham, and in the 137th of his age, he was buried in the tomb of his mother Hagar. Between the erection of the Kaʿbah and the birth of their Prophet, the Arabs reckon about 2,740 years. Ishmael was succeeded in the regal and sacerdotal office by his eldest son Nebat, although the pedigree of Muḥammad is traced from Kedar, a younger brother. But his family did not long enjoy this double authority; for, in progress of time, the Jurhumites seized the government and the guardianship of the temple, which they maintained about 300 years. These last, again, having corrupted the true worship, were assailed, as a punishment of their crimes, first by the scimitars of the Ishmaelites, who drove them from Makkah, and then by divers maladies, by which the whole race finally perished. Before quitting Makkah, however, they committed every kind of sacrilege and indignity. They filled up the Zamzam well, after having thrown into it the treasures and sacred utensils of the temple, the black stone, the swords and cuirasses of Qalaʿah, the two golden gazelles presented by one of the kings of Arabia, the sacred image of the ram substituted for Isaac, and all the precious movables, forming at once the object and the workmanship of a superstitious devotion. For several centuries the posterity of Ishmael kept possession of the supreme dignity.
The following is the list of chiefs who are said to have ruled the Ḥijāz, and to have been the lineal ancestors of Muḥammad, as far as ʿAdnān:—
| A.D. | 538 | ʿAbdu ʾllāh, the father of Muḥammad. |
| 505 | ʿAbdu ʾl-Mut̤t̤alib. | |
| 472 | Hāshim. | |
| 439 | ʿAbd Manāf. | |
| 406 | Quṣaiy. | |
| 373 | Kilāb. | |
| 340 | Murrah. | |
| 307 | Kaʿab. | |
| 274 | Luwaiy. | |
| 241 | Ghālib. | |
| 208 | Fihr or Quraish. | |
| 175 | Mālik. | |
| 142 | an-Naẓr. | |
| 109 | Kinānah. | |
| 76 | Khuzaimah. | |
| 43 | Mudrikah. | |
| 10 | al-Yaʾs. | |
| B.C. | 23 | Muẓar. |
| 56 | Nizār. | |
| 89 | Maʿadd. | |
| 122 | ʿAdnān. |
The period between Ishmael and ʿAdnān is variously estimated, some reckoning forty, others only seven, generations. The authority of Abū ʾl-Fidāʾ, who makes it ten, is that generally followed by the Arabs, being founded on a tradition of one of Muḥammad’s wives. Making every allowance, however, for patriarchal longevity, even forty generations are insufficient to extend over a space of nearly 2,500 years. From ʿAdnān to Muḥammad the genealogy is considered certain, comprehending twenty-one generations, and nearly 160 different tribes, all branching off from the same parent stem.
(See Abū ʾl-Fidāʾ; Gagnier’s Vie de Mahomet; Pocock, Specim. Arab. Hist.; Saiyid Ahmad K͟hān’s Essays; Sale’s Koran, Prelim. Dis.; Crichton’s Hist. Arabia.)
ARABIC. Lisānu-ʾl-ʿArab; Lug͟hatu ʾl-ʿArab. The classical language of Arabia is held to be the language of the Qurʾān, and of the Traditions of Muḥammad, and by reason of its incomparable excellence is called اللغة al-lug͟hah, or “the language.” (See Qurʾān, [Sūrah xvi. 105], “They say, Surely a person teacheth him [i.e. Muḥammad]. But the tongue of him at whom they hint is foreign, while this [i.e. the Qurʾān] is plain Arabic.”)
This classical language is often termed, by the Arabians themselves, the language of Maʿadd, and the language of Muẓar, and is a compound of many sister dialects, very often differing among themselves, which were spoken throughout the whole of the Peninsula before the religion of Muḥammad incited the nation to spread its conquering armies over foreign countries. Before that period, feuds among the tribes, throughout the whole extent of their territory, had prevented the blending of their dialects into one uniform language; but this effect of disunion was counteracted in a great measure by the institution of the sacred months, in which all acts of hostility were most strictly interdicted, and by the annual pilgrimage, and the yearly fair held at ʿUkāz̤, at which the poets of the various tribes contended for the meed of general admiration.
Qatādah says that the Quraish tribe used to cull what was most excellent in the dialects of Arabia, so that their dialect became the best of all. This assertion, however, is not altogether correct, for many of the children of the tribe of Quraish, in the time of Muḥammad, were sent into the desert to be there nursed, in order to acquire the utmost chasteness of speech. Muḥammad himself was sent to be brought up among the tribe of Saʿd ibn Bakr ibn Hawāzin, descendants of Muẓar, but not in the line of Quraish; and he is said to have urged the facts of his being a Quraish, and having also grown up among the tribe of Saʿd, as the grounds of his claim to be the most chaste in speech of the Arabs. Certain it is that the language of Maʿadd was characterised by the highest degree of perfection, copiousness, and uniformity, in the time of Muḥammad, although it afterwards declined.
The language of the Qurʾān is universally acknowledged to be the most perfect form of Arabic speech. At the same time we must not forget that the acknowledged claims of the Qurʾān to be the direct utterance of the Divinity have made it impossible for any Muslim to criticise the work, and it has become the standard by which other literary compositions have to be judged. (See Lane’s Introduction to his Arabic Dictionary, and Palmer’s Qurʾān.)