ARABIC LITERATURE
THE "ASSEMBLIES" OF AL HARIRI
"The richness of the style is even more wonderful than the delicate web of the stories."
CLEMENT HUART.
"I composed fifty assemblies, comprising the serious in language and the lively, the delicate and the dignified, the brilliancies of eloquence and its pearls, the beauties of scholarship and its rarities."
AL HARIRI.
THE "ASSEMBLIES" OF AL HARIRI
(INTRODUCTION)
The work of Al Hariri may well stand as our best example of typical Arab prose. With regard to religious writing, a few thoughtful Mohammedans, as we have seen, might travel, and seek new light, and meditate profoundly; but the great mass of the people were merely blindly fanatic. Mohammed was the prophet of God, and any one who failed to shout this with the rest of the world, was to be killed. Popular interest went but little further. But when you turned to the art of stringing words together, every true Arab was immediately attentive. There was an Arab proverb that God had given genius, or true creative ability, to three things, the brain of the Frank, the hand of the Chinaman, and the tongue of the Arab.