One consequence, it must be owned, of the practical temper and sober-mindedness of the Koreish was that they produced no poet of any note, while each and all of the poverty-stricken tribes of Bedouins about them had great achievements in this field to show. Better fed than the Bedouins (though by no means luxuriously) and not decimated by conflicts, they increased more rapidly in numbers, and in Arabia the numerical strength of a tribe has much to do with the esteem in which it is held. Their prosperity allowed them to exercise a liberal hospitality, and the hungry Bedouin appreciates highly the host who lets him for once eat his fill. We may well conjecture that it was the Koreish who established the connection between the annual pilgrimage to the mountain of Arafat, which lay just beyond their holy ground and the valley of Mina, with the temple of Mecca, which lay within it. Thus Mecca became the place where Arabs of the most diverse tribes met together from far and near every year. Even before the days of Islam the Koreish tribe was held in high esteem far and wide. But, however much we may study the causes which raised them above other Arabs, it still remains something of an enigma that this torrid and barren eyrie should at that time have brought forth so large a number of men, exclusive of the prophet, who, when their turn came to be placed in circumstances wholly unfamiliar, acquitted themselves magnificently as generals and statesmen. History sets us several problems of a similar nature in the sudden appearance of many notable men at the same spot.
At that time there were many survivals of barbarism among the inhabitants of central Arabia. For instance, the practice of burying newborn daughters alive was very general. The cost of feeding and bringing up girls in that inhospitable country was a burden unwillingly borne; probably the horrible manner in which they were got rid of had originally some connection with religious ideas. In remote antiquity the Semites, like many other nations, reckoned consanguinity only by the surest guarantee, that of a common mother. Among the Arabs and other peoples we find a relic of this view, otherwise abandoned long since, in the fact that a man might regard his stepmother as part of his inheritance and take her to wife. The father of the great Omar was the issue of such a marriage.
ARAB POETRY
Nevertheless we cannot but observe a distinct intellectual advance among the Arabs of the period we are now considering. This is specially marked in the efflorescence of poetry. It is of a purely national character and differs wholly from the poetry of northern Semitic races both in structure and substance. We know it only in its fully developed form, the oldest poems which have come down to us in tolerable preservation are of precisely the same character as the later ones, but even they only date back to the first half of the sixth century at farthest. All Arabic poetry is rhymed, and rhyme predominates even in certain solemn modes of speech not subject to strict metrical rule, such as the apothegms of soothsayers. Now, seeing that this form of poetry, up to that time everywhere unknown, springs into prominence in Latin and Greek poems of a popular and devotional character after the fourth century, we are led to conjecture that there may be a connection of some sort with occidental poetry in the employment of this artistic method, which may very well have come into use among the Arabs about the same time. The point of common origin might be Palestine or Syria. Rhymed prose was probably the original form. The whole matter is, however, beyond proof.
The acceptance of this conjecture would not impair the originality of Arabic poetry. Among its great merits is the extremely fine feeling for rhythm which the entirely illiterate Arab authors of these poems and of the rhapsodies which were handed down orally display, by the careful observance of metres which carry out the principle of quantity far more strictly than those of Greek and Latin poetry. In substance these poems generally turn upon the ordinary subjects and interests of Bedouin life, though frequently idealising them; and loftier thoughts are not seldom conspicuous. Some famous poets who took long journeys, sometimes living among Christian surroundings at the courts of Arab vassal kings, sometimes going as far as to Yemen, prepared the way for Islam by disseminating ideas tinged with Christian thought. The spirit that animates the noble tales of Arab heroes and worthies which originated at this time points to an advance in culture. One singular institution appears to have had very advantageous results; during certain months all heathen Arabs observed a truce of God, in which arms were laid aside and no blood was shed. During this period friends and foes met together at certain times and places, originally, no doubt, to celebrate religious rites. By degrees, however, the latter receded into the background; negotiations were carried on, treaties concluded, the poets found an audience, merriment and brisk traffic were the order of the day. Even in the festival at Mecca, which retained more of its religious character, the varied programme ran its round.[16]
RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT ARABS
Concerning the religion of the ancient Arabs we have no great amount of knowledge. Wellhausen rightly entitles his admirable work on the subject Reste arabischen Heidenthums. Nevertheless we can make certain of some points of special importance with regard to our present consideration. The heathen Arabs possessed many holy places and many ceremonial rites, but very little earnest religious conviction. Excessively conservative by nature, the people observed the customs of their fathers without troubling their minds about their original significance, offered sacrifices to the gods (rude stone fetiches for the most part), and marched in procession round their sanctuaries, without counting much upon their aid or standing in any great awe of them; they cried to the dead, “Be not far from us,” without associating with the cry the idea of a future life which alone gave it meaning. In the north the savage king Mundhir ben Ma-assama (505-554) still sacrificed multitudes of Christian captives in honour of the goddess of the planet Venus, even as the Israelites had done long ago in honour of their God.[17] The Arabs of the Sinaitic peninsula likewise offered human sacrifices to the planet Venus,[18] and we have other accounts of similar human sacrifices among the Arabs of the north. Possibly their close contact with Christians and the adherents of other superior religions may have to some extent revived the old Semitic religious zeal and fanaticism among the Arabs there. Farther south we find only faint traces of human sacrifice and we may regard it as practically extinct by the time of Mohammed.
In the meantime, however, the Arabs who had entered into closer relations with the Roman Empire, and the majority of those who occupied a like position towards Persia, had adopted at least a superficial form of Christianity. There were also some Christians in the interior of Arabia, while in the south Christianity had long since gained a considerable following. It had been persecuted for a while by a Jewish ruler; it was ultimately delivered by the Abyssinian conquest, but had made small progress since then. Christianity as practised by the Syrians, or, worse still, the Abyssinians, was not well adapted to win proselytes among the Arabs. If only the disciplined strength of Rome had acted upon these regions the case would probably have been different. There were Jews here and there in Arabia, and like the Jews of Abyssinia most of them seem not to have been genuine children of Israel, but native converts to Judaism. The Arab Jews, though possessed of no great theological knowledge, adhered strictly to their religion. The majority of Arabs was composed of heathen who had outgrown their religion. There were probably men who were conscious of the defects of this state of things, and recognised that the Christians had in many points an advantage over the heathen. We are told of certain persons from Mecca and its vicinity who adopted, and even preached, a monotheistic faith more or less Christian, but the details are very obscure. Certainly at the beginning of the seventh century not even the profoundest and acutest observer could have foreseen that in the heart of Arabia a religion was soon to arise and to result in the establishment of an Arab empire destined to give new shape to vast regions of the world, including the countries which had been the homes of the oldest civilisations.
MOHAMMED
The man whose energy gave clear and practical expression to the obscure impulse towards a purer religion arose amidst the worldly-wise Koreish. Flouted at first by his sober-minded fellow tribesmen, he gradually won the victory for his faith, and died the temporal and spiritual ruler of Arabia. To the very combination of qualities to some extent contradictory in his character, he owed his success with such a race as this. He firmly believed in his mission and was unscrupulous in his choice of means; he was a cataleptic visionary, and a great statesman; steadfast in his fundamental convictions and often weak and vacillating in details, he had great practical sagacity and was incapable of keen logical abstraction; he had a bias towards asceticism and a temperament strongly sensuous.