The renown of the clan was closely wrapped up with the Arab chieftain’s personal renown. He was keenly sensitive on the point of honour, and to that notion he attached a breadth of meaning which can scarcely be understood in these days. Honour included all the different virtues that went to make up the ideal Bedawee. To be proved wanting in any of these was to be dishonoured. Above all things, the man who would ‘keep his honour and defile it not’ must be brave and hospitable—
A rushing rain-flood when he gave guerdons:
when he sprang to the onset, a mighty lion.
The Arab warrior was a mighty man of valour. He would spend whole days in the saddle, burdened with heavy armour, in the pursuit of a foe, seeking the life of the slayer of his kin, or sweeping down upon the caravan of rich merchandise which his more peaceful countrymen of the towns were carrying through the deserts. The Arab lived mainly by plunder. His land did not yield him food—unless it were dates, the Bedawee’s bread—and he relied on the success of his foraging expeditions for his support. These he conducted with perfect good-breeding; he used no violence when it could be avoided; he merely relieved the caravan from the trouble of carrying any further the goods that he was himself willing to take charge of, urging, if necessary, the unfair treatment of his forefather Ishmael as an excellent reason for pillaging the sons of Isaac. ‘When a woman is the victim, no Bedouin brigand, however rude, will be ill-mannered enough to lay hands upon her. He begs her to take off the garment on which he has set his heart, and he then retires to a distance and stands with eyes averted, lest he should do violence to her modesty.’
The poems of the early Arabs are full of the deeds of their warriors, the excitement of the pitched battle, the delight of the pursuit, the nightly raid on the camp, the trial of skill between rival chiefs, and the other pictures of a warrior’s triumph. Here we find little of the generosity of war: mercy was rarely exercised and hatred was carried to its extremest limits; quarter was neither asked nor given; to despatch a wounded man was no disgrace; the families of the vanquished were enslaved. Notwithstanding his frank genial nature, the Arab was of a dangerously quick temper, derived, he boasted, from the flesh he lived on of the camel, the surliest and most ill-conditioned of beasts. If he conceived himself insulted, he was bound to revenge himself to the full, or he would have been deemed dishonoured for ever. And since his fiery temper easily took offence, the history of the early Arabs is full of the traditions of slight quarrels and their horrible results—secret assassination and the long-lasting blood-feud.
Many the warriors, noon-journeying, who, when
night fell, journeyed on and halted at dawning—
Keen each one of them, girt with a keen blade
that when one drew it flashed forth like the lightning—
They were tasting of sleep by sips, when, as