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THE YEAR’S WORK IN
SHOWGIRLS
STUDIES
The Year’s Work:
Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory

Edward P. Dallis-Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, editors

THE YEAR’S WORK IN
SHOWGIRLS
STUDIES

EDITED BY
MELISSA HARDIE,
MEAGHAN MORRIS,
AND KANE RACE

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.org

© 2024 by Indiana University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2024

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-06815-6 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-253-06816-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06817-0 (ebook)
 CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

• INTRODUCTION
MELISSA HARDIE, MEAGHAN MORRIS, AND KANE RACE

• PART I ESSAYS
1 Getting It Just Right: Elizabeth Berkley’s Ways of Knowing in
Showgirls
ANNA BRECKON

2 Self-Shattering in Showgirls and Black Swan

KANE RACE

3 “Ain’t anyone ever been nice to you?”: Discharging the Guilty

Pleasure of Showgirls
KIERYN MCKAY

4 Badness
ADRIAN MARTIN

5 Showgirls, Showgirls 2, and the Fate of the Erotic Thriller

BILLY STEVENSON

6 Fifty Shades of Showgirls: Better Living through Mediation

MELISSA HARDIE
7 The Instability of Evil: Double Trouble and the Working Girl
MEAGHAN MORRIS

• PART II CONVERSATIONS
8 The Accidental Showgirl: Reminiscing with Performer and
Pioneer Feminist Lynne Hutton-Williams
JANE CHI HYUN PARK AND SHAWNA TANG

9 “Fuck you! Pay me”: Stripper Art and Storytelling Speaking Back
from the Stage
ZAHRA STARDUST

10 On Cliché, Camp, and Queer Temporality: Discussing Showgirls

KARA KEELING AND MEAGHAN MORRIS

• PART III ARCHIVE

11 Loose Slots: Figuring the Strip in Showgirls
MELISSA HARDIE

12 Round Table: Showgirls, Film Quarterly 56, No. 3 (Spring

2003): 32–46

• INDEX
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many years in the making, this book has required a lot of love to
bring it to completion from its beginnings in a small conference
organized by Melissa Hardie for the intellectual pleasure of Showgirls
fans in 2015. We must therefore first thank our contributors for their
patient commitment to the project, and we thank Kate Lilley, André
Frankovits, and Stephan Omeros for living through the process with
us. We also express our gratitude for the meticulously caring work of
Gareth Richards, Helena Dodge-Wan, and Eryn Tan of Impress
Creative and Editorial in consolidating our manuscript for
presentation to Indiana University Press.
Given that The Year’s Work in Showgirls Studies is critically
concerned with labor in visual and performance culture, we are
deeply indebted to the generosity of people who have gone out of
their way to provide us with artwork and images that articulate this
concern to broader social contexts. We say thank-you to Exotic
Cancer, Glitta Supernova, Katia Schwartz, Bella Green, Queenie Bon
Bon, Frankie Valentine, and Despo Debby for using their artistic
mediums and creative platforms to build stripper culture, and to
Carol Burman-Jahn, Sylvia Cowen, and Lynne Hutton-Williams for
helping us document some historical links between circus and
showgirl life in the mid-twentieth century. Grateful thanks go to
Shlomo Adam Roth and family for their time and generosity in
facilitating permission to reproduce a precious photograph of a 1995
Showgirls billboard.
Another key concern of this book is the community-building
power of small or local cultural events and the productive longevity
and spread of the conversations these enable. Kane Race is indebted
to Sydney’s long-running film festival Queer Screen for the unique
experience of watching Showgirls with a gay and lesbian Mardi Gras
crowd in Double Bay’s Village Twin Cinema in the late 1990s.1 While
Melissa Hardie and Meaghan Morris first saw the film in the more
mundane context of its 1995 Sydney commercial release in
downtown Sydney’s Village Cinema City, a shared conversation about
it began with BOLD, a Philosophy and Women’s Studies conference
convened in Canberra at the Australian National University’s
Humanities Research Centre by Elizabeth A. Wilson and Helen Keane
in July 1996. On the invitation of Efi Hatzimanolis and Brigitta
Olubas, this event led to the publication of Melissa’s pathbreaking
paper “Loose Slots” (here, chap. 11) in an early feminist refereed
journal, Xtext, based in the School of English at the University of
New South Wales.
The editors wish to thank Derek Covington Smith for allowing us
to reproduce a portion of his artwork “Neon Nomi” for the cover of
this book.
Apparently long gone now, these and other experimental cultural
initiatives created on the boundary between community activism and
academic work in and around the time of Showgirls unleashed
energies that continue to shape our lives and our work today.
Without them, this book would not have come into being.

Note
1. “Queer Screen History,” Queer Screen,
https://queerscreen.org.au/aboutus/history/#_ga=2.9686256.496548770.1666848
795–1796401238.1666848795.
THE YEAR’S WORK IN
SHOWGIRLS
STUDIES
 INTRODUCTION
MELISSA HARDIE, MEAGHAN MORRIS, AND KANE RACE

The twentieth anniversary of the release and catastrophic box office

failure of Paul Verhoeven’s film Showgirls in 2015 prompted
celebrations, interviews, reappraisals, and reflections as diverse—
and divergent—as the responses elaborated over the preceding two
decades. Proliferating online with a galvanizing force not available to
fan communities in 1995, when Showgirls recouped less than half of
its $45 million budget and scored a record number of Razzie
nominations for “worst of the year” awards, the flow of passionately
thoughtful public engagement with this much-derided film did not
subside with the anniversary year. In 2017, for example, the Film
Society of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York hosted
a screening and a discussion with Verhoeven and actor Gina
Gershon; Adam Nayman’s short monograph It Doesn’t Suck:
Showgirls, first published in 2014, had a special new edition in 2018;
and an archive of critical essays together with Showgirls-related clips
and interviews has expanded online.1 Then, in 2019, Jeffrey McHale
released You Don’t Nomi, a feature-length documentary about the
reception and significance of Showgirls today.2
The form of this reputational controversy is not unique in film
history. In the 1950s, Douglas Sirk’s sumptuous and torrid Hollywood
melodramas were widely dismissed as soapy trash. A general
consensus around their brilliance formed only after some key
interventions, led in the first instance by Jean-Luc Godard and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose essays from 1959 and 1971
respectively were translated into English around the same time as
Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday was published by the
British Film Institute, while Halliday coedited Douglas Sirk with Laura
Mulvey for the Edinburgh Film Festival.3 Perhaps no European auteur
since Sirk, however, has been more misrecognized and rehabilitated
than Verhoeven, whose 1990s Hollywood films Basic Instinct (1992),
Showgirls (1995), and Starship Troopers (1997) were almost
parodically misread and consigned to the trash heap.4 The impulse
to “rescue” Showgirls, Verhoeven’s most infamous work, from the
ignominy of dismissal has followed two tracks, both neatly
reproduced in You Don’t Nomi. One track rehabilitates Showgirls by
asserting the vision of an auteur, tracing its debt to and interaction
with Verhoeven’s pre-Hollywood oeuvre and finding complexity in his
adaptation of genre conventions within that auteurist vision. This is
the Sirkian mode of revision. The other track prosecutes an
argument about the varieties of encounter the film elicits: camp and
cult consumers whose wit and close-reading verve demonstrate the
depths of what can be known about the film. This track of
rehabilitation urges revival rather than revision: not inclusion in a
canon but seclusion as a unique instance whose various parts make
an inimitable whole.
It’s not an accident that scenes of vomiting from a series of
Verhoeven films are spliced together in You Don’t Nomi to make
these points. A montage of vomiting, typically into a toilet bowl,
metaphorizes elements of Showgirls’ narrative that McHale’s film
deftly goes on to narrate: the intrusion of an unpleasant
phenomenon or experience into the everyday, the return of the
unexpected, and a revisiting of earlier pleasures in a distinctly
unwelcome form. It also captures the critical disgust of many early
reviewers of Showgirls as viscerally as they often expressed it at the
time, but then it negotiates this disgust by making its very
representation, in its repetitions, a sign of an auteurist project.
Disgust is often aligned with cult and camp spectatorship and with
the witting deployment of tropes of off-center consumption in camp
and cult cinema.5 Led by Nomi’s vomit scene early in Showgirls, this
physical embodiment of disgust or fear is aligned with other ways in
which Nomi’s body is laden with meaning.
 David Schmader, a promoter of camp reception events,
comments in You Don’t Nomi that on first viewing Showgirls he was
struck by “Nomi having bizarre responses to people who are just
trying to give her a hand,” a comment illustrated by scenes of Nomi
responding aggressively to either physical or verbal approaches from
strangers or, in a couple of cases, her boss. Schmader’s comment
feels awkward both in the context of the film’s diegesis, which
abundantly demonstrates why Nomi fears for her own safety, and in
the context of watching the film today, post #MeToo. It strains
credulity on any watching of the film to understand these strangers
as merely “giving a hand,” as the gentle Good Samaritans they
sometimes purport to be. And that makes it all the more surprising
that Schmader uses Nomi’s physical domination in these scenes as
an index of the bizarre rather than as an assertion of her bodily
strength and autonomy. But it reminds us that a certain strain of
“cult” reading reproduces the reductive logic by which Showgirls
(and Elizabeth Berkley’s performance as Nomi) was minimized as a
feminist icon and fable when the film was released.
For students of fan cultural phenomena, however, a different
dimension for thought is opened up by perhaps the most poignant of
the 2015 anniversary celebrations, the Cinespia screening of
Showgirls in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles, on June
28, with Elizabeth Berkley present for her first viewing in twenty
years of the film that derailed her career. Accessible endlessly for
now on YouTube, the love exchanged between the four thousand
fans who turned up for the screening and Berkley as she blurred into
Nomi onstage manifests itself with an intensity echoing Berkley’s
performance in the film itself.6 In thanking those fans for keeping
faith with the film over the years and giving her the “sweet” moment
she expected but was painfully denied in 1995, Berkley bears
witness not only to the capacity of fan formations over time to affect
critical judgment but to the power of shared popular cultural
pleasures, passions, and sensibilities to transcend a myriad of
personal traumas in communal moments of joy.
 This volume, too, had its genesis in the anniversary year, with a
one-day symposium at the University of Sydney organized by Melissa
Hardie in September 2015, precisely with the communal aim of
sharing intellectual joy. Small-scale and informal, the “Showgirls
1995–2015” event brought some of our contributors together for the
first time and confirmed at the outset our interest not only in the
mutable pleasures the film has provided over the years but also in its
capacity to activate responses connecting with wider social worlds of
sexuality, spectacle, and labor, then and now. This collection leans
toward the view of Showgirls as offering the realistic vision of life
that Verhoeven’s first auteurist champion, Jacques Rivette,
memorably described in 1998 as “surviving in a world populated by
assholes.”7 This is not a simple orientation to adopt, however, since
the filmmaking process itself folded into the “real” of that vision by
putting intimate survival pressure on some of the performers. If all
“backstage” stories reflect in some way on the cultural industries
enabling their creation, Showgirls in 1995 was embedded in a
gendered production economy of intense exploitation, with novice
female stars Berkley, Gershon, and Gina Ravera playing roles devised
by the then Hollywood alpha male team of Verhoeven and writer Joe
Eszterhas, flush with the box office success of Basic Instinct and
testing the power of the NC-17 rating to put “in-your-face sexuality,
copious nudity and over-the-top melodrama” into a mainstream
cinema release.8 The subsequent critical trashing of Berkley’s acting
is well known, but Gina Ravera has only recently described the
“ordeal” of filming the gang rape scene in her role as Nomi’s friend,
Molly Abrams. Unprepared for what it would it be like (“you’ve got
two men holding you down; my wrists were bruised, and my body
was just covered in bruises after it because of what was asked for
the camera”), she was traumatized physically as well as emotionally
by the “exuberance” of Verhoeven’s pursuit of realism: “The [punch]
you see in the film made contact. My jaw was not right for years.”9
In spite of this, for Ravera the experience of making Showgirls
was “mixed; there’s some good stuff,” and she credits Verhoeven
with understanding that she was playing the Hollywood stereotype
of “Black best friend” and giving her freedom to develop the role. In
this collection, we emphasize the labor and the perspectives of
performers, whose “ways of knowing” (as Anna Breckon puts it in
her chapter) have been occluded by the prominence in much
Showgirls appreciation of the figure of the camp spectator.
Accordingly, the problematic “realism” of Showgirls is explored here
not only in critical essays but through documentary, ethnographic,
and archival approaches to those “mixed” experiences that inform
and continue to relay the significance of the film to fans.
In particular, the “Conversations” section provides a thick
documentary context of three dialogues dealing with life experiences
and ideas that may enrich our understanding of the serious social
import of Showgirls. This section situates the showgirl historically
and socially in a series of skilled professions and takes up issues of
race as well as gender and sexuality that were not always well
addressed in the earlier reception life of the film. In the first of these
conversations, Jane Park and Shawna Tang interview Lynne Hutton-
Williams about Lynne’s life as a trapeze artist “accidentally” turned
Las Vegas showgirl some decades before the time in which the film
is set, situating that performance culture in relation to the circus
world familiar to Lynne and tracing her trajectory through to
adventures in British and Australian feminist institution building in
the 1970s. This is followed by a chapter by Zahra Stardust drawing
on her use of autoethnography among strippers, pole dancers,
burlesque artists, queer performers, and sex workers in Sydney
today to document the literature, arts, and storytelling produced by
strippers themselves as they organize and advocate from within the
industry. The third conversation piece takes the form of a dialogue
on race, gender, aesthetics, and the moment of Showgirls in US
social history and popular culture between Meaghan Morris,
speaking from an “outside” as an Australian film critic, and the
American cinema scholar Kara Keeling, whose book Queer Times,
Black Futures provides concepts that enable their cross-cultural
dialogue.10
 These conversations are complemented by an archival section
that serves to complicate our sense of the history of Showgirls’
reception. We introduce this section with Melissa Jane Hardie’s essay
“Loose Slots” from 1996.11 The essay was originally published in an
Australian small press journal, XText, which was devoted to
theoretically and politically informed cultural criticism across
academic and institutional boundaries (the “X” or “cross” of the
journal’s name). We assume from experience that the popularity of
Showgirls among feminist academics in Australia was not
exceptional, although it is rarely represented in traditional histories
of the film’s reception. Hardie presented her essay as a paper at a
feminist conference, BOLD, at the Australian National University in
Canberra. Convened at the Humanities Research Centre by Elizabeth
A. Wilson and Helen Keane in July 1996, under the auspices of the
Australian National University’s Women’s Studies and Philosophy
programs, BOLD proposed that compelling feminist cultural analysis
arose when diverse disciplinary practices were brought together
(coeditor Meaghan Morris also presented on martial arts studies at
BOLD). “Loose Slots” here represents tangible evidence of a
feminist, antihomophobic, theoretically informed fandom for the film
from its release.
A critical moment in the history of Showgirls’ reappraisal was the
2003 publication of a set of short responses to Showgirls in Film
Quarterly, which we reprint. Rather than argue a simple revision of
the film as a lost classic, the round table identified evaluation itself
as a critical vulnerability exposed by the reception of the film. Across
this group of responses, the film complicates popular and academic
versions of film criticism because of its capacity to complicate or blur
distinctions vested in taste culture. For example, Akira Mizuta Lippit’s
contribution (pp. 349–353) dissects the film through an evaluative
apparatus supplied by Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide 2002.
Before IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and other online resources made
evaluative descriptions of films easily available, Maltin’s guides were
exercises in epigrammatic description and assessment of value.
Lippit’s intricate deconstruction of the apparatus of evaluation—star
ratings and Maltin’s version of the “thumbs down,” the BOMB rating
—demonstrates how all varieties of judgment are encapsulated in
this system and its application to Showgirls. Lippit’s hypothesis that
Showgirls concatenates pornography and melodrama as
“pornodrama” signals some of the work the film does to play with
genre; he describes these generic medleys as “immersions” of styles
that never settle into a blend as such but that sit together in a state
of suspense.
Reflecting on one such style, a mode of satire (“the blood that
we do not see”) that does not signpost itself as such and allows only
fleeting glimpses of an underlying moral of redemption, Chon
Noriega sketches a complex critique of its racial foundation in the
subservient roles of the Black characters and of the crushing by a
celebrity production team of the “rank and file actress who did what
she was paid to do” (p. 361). In a different approach to evaluation,
Jeffrey Sconce’s “I Have Grown Weary of Your Tiresome Cinema”
introduces the principle of rewatching as transformative, noting that
it takes precisely “four screenings of the film to transform it from
one of Hollywood’s most notorious flops to absolute transcendence”
(p. 377). This account of sublimity achieved through repetition
introduces a common trope in Showgirls critical history: a narrative
of conversion, one already centered elsewhere by Adrian Martin in
his famous 2000 essay, “The Offended Critic.”12 Appropriately, given
Sconce’s emphasis on the critic whose viewing experiences calibrate
the film’s value, his piece concludes with a call for a wry version of
Barthesian bliss and the liberation of the critic from the dreary role
of “cultural custodian” in favor of the pleasure of being smart about
film.
These and other essays in the archival Film Quarterly round table
offer precedents for the critical chapters of this collection as they
identify key historical and formal contexts for understanding the
reception of Showgirls and its endurance as an object of fascination,
repulsion, and celebration over more than twenty years. These
chapters complicate both auteurist traditions whose efforts to
revalue the film place the director in complete control of the
meanings that can be made of it and camp and cult reading
practices whose pleasures depend on a reassertion of its
categorization as bad. Instead, these essays explore the capacity of
Showgirls to generate new pleasures and insights into the workings
of gender, sexuality, labor, performance, taste, genre, popular
culture, mediation, and media ecologies.
In “Getting It Just Right: Elizabeth Berkley’s Ways of Knowing in
Showgirls,” Anna Breckon opens the essay section by developing a
reoriented epistemology for the film grounded in the figure of the
actor and her identification with the ambitions of her character. This
alignment gives Berkley’s performance an erotic and expressive
agency that defies conventions of taste, objectification, and
directorial intention. Next, in “Self-Shattering in Showgirls and Black
Swan,” Kane Race investigates how women who dance for a living
navigate the demand to deliver authentic performances of
heterosexual desire and stay “classy” in cultural institutions where
investments in class are used to exploit them. Where the protagonist
of Black Swan takes the “suicidal ecstasy” of masochistic desire
literally, Nomi plots a different course that mobilizes another more
situated sense of self-shattering.13
Kieryn McKay’s “‘Ain’t anyone ever been nice to you?’:
Discharging the Guilty Pleasure of Showgirls” tracks the mechanisms
by which MGM/United Artists strategically repurposed their box office
flop as a camp midnight movie and then as a DVD boxed set for cult
home viewing. Repackaging Showgirls for commercial advantage
mobilizes a politics of taste that for McKay precludes the film’s
sincere appreciation. In “Badness,” Adrian Martin suspends the
question of the badness of films in favor of an exploration of the
staging of badness in films. His wide-ranging tour of the mechanism
of the “show within the show” queries feelings of security in matters
of taste and showcases some diverse ways in which the varied tastes
of spectators can be represented, reworked, redefined, and
reclaimed.
Billy Stevenson’s “Showgirls, Showgirls 2, and the Fate of the
Erotic Thriller” situates Showgirls in relation to the changing media
ecologies, historical genres, and visual aesthetics of late millennial
screen culture. If Showgirls makes a case for the cinematic spectacle
as a category of pleasure, it also allegorizes its own displacement by
the postcinematic technologies used to cobble together its unlikely
sequel. For Melissa Hardie in “Fifty Shades of Showgirls: Better
Living through Mediation,” bringing together Showgirls and a more
recent flop, Fifty Shades of Grey, helps to historicize the films’
interest in plots of female rivalry and their embedding of that generic
mainstay in scenarios of libidinal complicity and contracted labor.
Showgirls orients its ingenue through a representation of her
capacity for calculation but more through her “thinkiness,” where
intellectual action joins other kinds of activity in her negotiation of
genre and medium. Finally, in “The Instability of Evil: Double Trouble
and the Working Girl,” Meaghan Morris connects Showgirls to Pitof’s
Catwoman (2004) through the twinning of ethically imperfect female
characters around the issues of women’s labor in creative industries
that structure both films in different ways. Exploring the use these
films make of the motifs of the double and the orphan to model
practices of self-invention for women outside the bonds of family life,
Morris draws on the autobiographies of the singer, actor, and dancer
Eartha Kitt (for whom duality was a key to survival in the
performance worlds she knew) to propose a queer historiography
capable of tracing in temporal depth the diverse experiences and life
struggles of women who labor in cultural industries that then claim
to “represent” them.
The essays that make up this volume are addressed in diverse
ways to the disciplines from which they emerge—film studies,
cultural studies, gender and queer theory, and others. They are also
consciously engaged with the practices and professional identities
that the film investigates and celebrates, finding an amplified
account of the “showgirl” as complex professional identity and
physical and intellectual praxis assists academic engagement with
the film’s dense account of a historic moment in its history. The
collection therefore folds into its fandom and appreciation of the film
the wisdom afforded by a renewed interest in workplace sexual
dynamics, race and ethnic presence, and the insights of
antihomophobic theory alongside the documentation of experiential
and historical presence in the showgirl zone. But they all share one
thing: they are written from outside the zone of equivocation that
has characterized writing on Showgirls in the past. Instead, they
perform the kinds of fandom they explore, putting in plain view
intellectual, affective, and libidinal investments in this extraordinary
film.

MELISSA HARDIE is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Sydney. Her recent work appears in Australian Humanities
Review, Textual Practice, Film Quarterly, and Angelaki. Her most
recent book chapter (with Amy Villarejo) is on the 1978 Briggs
Initiative and the television drama Family, in Television Studies in
Queer Times. She is editor of the Oxford University Press series
Approaches to the Novel.

MEAGHAN MORRIS is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the

University of Sydney. She is author of The Pirate’s Fiancée:
Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism; Too Soon Too Late: History
in Popular Culture; and Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media
Culture.

KANE RACE is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the

University of Sydney. He is author of Pleasure Consuming
Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs; The Gay Science: Intimate
Experiments with the Problem of HIV; and (with Gay Hawkins
and Emily Potter) Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of
Bottled Water.

References
Alter, Ethan. “‘Showgirls’ at 25: Gina Ravera Discusses the Cult Movie’s Most
Controversial Scene.” Yahoo!Entertainment, September 23, 2020.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
except the protection of his clansmen. The instinct of self-
preservation, the force of public opinion, and the apprehension of
the encroachments of rival tribes were the only motives sufficiently
powerful to effect a temporary union of those whose vital interests
were threatened. The power of the sheik was nominal; his functions
advisory rather than executive. His station was one of more honor
than usefulness; of his own volition he could neither direct military
operations, enforce obedience, reward merit, nor inflict punishment.
The affairs of the tribe were administered by such of its members as
were conspicuous for age, dignity, and wisdom. Even the decision of
such a council was not imperative in cases where the general
welfare was concerned; for, under such circumstances, the judgment
of every personage of wealth, rank, or social distinction was
consulted. Absolutism, so prominent a feature of Asiatic government,
and carried to such an extreme by Mohammed’s successors, was
thus unknown in ancient Arabia. Dominated by the tumultuous
freedom of individual caprice, its isolated communities were not
even subject to the ordinary legal restrictions imposed by the voice
of democracy; and their control approached as near to anarchical
license as was compatible with the bare preservation of society.
Natural obstacles, such as the scarcity of water and the barrenness
of the soil, added to long-inherited prejudice, traditional enmity, and
difficulty of intercommunication, have always prevented the political
and intellectual development of the Arabs in their native land. The
persistence of his original institutions after the mighty revolutions
elsewhere wrought by Islam prove conclusively that national
regeneration of the Arab under the sky of the Desert is a practical
impossibility.
The life of the Bedouin was passed in unremitting hostility. War
was the normal condition of his existence; it supplied the sole
incentives he deemed worthy of attention—the gratification of
revenge, the acquisition of glory, the appropriation of the property of
his neighbor. The indulgence of these passions, and especially of the
ignoble propensity to rapine, and his cruelty, were his most
conspicuous and discreditable characteristics. The occupation of
robbery was in the eyes of the Arab rather honorable than
otherwise, as it was intimately associated with the profession of
arms. In a society without the resources of agriculture,
manufactures, or commerce, violent means must be relied on for the
sustenance of life. In the Desert the only available expedients to this
end were the plunder of enemies and the blackmail of travellers. The
total absence of organized government rendered the possession of
property doubly precarious. Nowhere else was the fickleness of
fortune so apparent. The attack of a hostile tribe might render the
most opulent individual a pauper in a single night. No vigilance could
prevent such a catastrophe in a region affording unlimited
opportunities for surprise and ambuscade, where there was no title
to the soil, where the wealth of a community consisted largely of
flocks of sheep and herds of camels. Under circumstances where a
man’s importance and position among his fellows were dependent
upon his inclination to encounter danger and his capacity to elude
detection in the pursuit of pillage, poverty became disgraceful.
Constant apprehension bred distrust of strangers, until it became a
predominant national trait. Where two parties of Bedouins, unknown
to each other, met in the Desert, the stronger immediately attacked
the weaker. A daring predatory enterprise conferred the highest
popular distinction upon its hero. A great robber, who united the
qualities of courage and duplicity, and who had amassed wealth by
his exploits, was the idol of his tribe. The memory of the famous
brigand Harami is even now cherished in the Hedjaz with an
admiring veneration scarcely inferior to that conferred upon his
countryman Mohammed.
The mental constitution of the ancient Arab presented many
remarkable inconsistencies, most of which are still apparent in the
character of his descendants. Brave even to temerity, he felt no
compunction at the secret assassination of a foe. Professing
reverence for age and relying for guidance upon the advice of the
elders of his tribe, he did not hesitate to drive the old and infirm
from the public feast. While the greatest renown attended the
plunder of an encampment, the commission of a trifling theft made
the perpetrator an object of universal detestation. He assisted the
unfortunate and plundered the defenceless with equal alacrity. The
exercise of a generous and unselfish hospitality was no bar to the
pursuit of a guest after he had left the inviolable precincts of the
camp. In many respects, however, the character of the Bedouin was
eminently worthy of admiration. His courage was undisputed. He
possessed a high sense of personal honor. The fugitive who solicited
his protection, even though he were an enemy, was safe so long as
he remained within the enclosure of his tent, and he espoused the
cause of the unknown suppliant as if it were his own. After sunset,
his blazing watch-fire, like a friendly beacon, guided the course of
the belated wanderer over the desert sea. He disputed with his
neighbors for the honor of entertaining the stranger, and the
deepest reproach he could undergo was the imputation that he was
deficient in the virtue of hospitality. His sense of chivalry, nurtured
amidst the constant perils of an uncertain existence, was
conspicuous in the respect and consideration he afterwards exhibited
in the treatment of woman. His simplicity of manner and gravity of
demeanor imparted an air of dignity to his appearance, which
elicited the respect of those far superior to him in rank, education,
and knowledge. Patient in adversity, he considered the display of
grief as an unpardonable evidence of weakness. His love of liberty
dominated his nature to an extent impossible of appreciation by
those subject to the salutary restraints of civilized communities. The
existence of many noble qualities in the character of the Arab,
however, only rendered its defects the more glaring. His apparent
imperturbability screened from the public gaze many vices and
imperfections. Like all barbarians, his disposition was largely infantile
and capricious, petulant, diverted by trifles, controlled by instinct
rather than by reason, quick to take offence, and relentlessly
vindictive. Of all beings he was pre-eminently the creature of
impulse. His pride was inordinate, his rapacity insatiable. With him
the prosecution of vengeance was a sacred duty, which took
precedence of every moral and social obligation; and such was his
enmity, that he regarded the forgiveness of a serious injury as the
badge of a coward. An incorrigible braggart, he never hesitated to
employ treachery when it would accomplish the purposes of valor.
He practised cannibalism, and like the ferocious Scandinavians drank
from the skulls of slaughtered victims. Participation in these horrid
banquets was not confined to warriors; women also were present at
them, and wore, with savage pride, necklaces and amulets
composed of the ears, noses, and bones of the dead.
Under the pretext of preventing future dishonor, but really with a
view to economy, under conditions of existence involving a perpetual
struggle, he often buried his female children alive. It is said that
Othman was never known to weep except when, at the burial of his
little daughter, she reached up and caressingly wiped the dust of her
grave from his beard. From such unspeakable atrocities as this did
Mohammed deliver his countrymen.
The Arabs practised both polyandry and polygamy to an extent
rarely countenanced by other barbarians. One woman, whose career
would seem to be unique in the history of matrimonial achievement,
was celebrated for having been the wife of forty husbands. In a
society where communal marriage prevailed, the passion of jealousy
was necessarily unknown. The Pagan Arab indulged to the utmost
the vice of drunkenness, and prided himself upon his capacity to
absorb great quantities of liquor—there were some Himyarite princes
who obtained an unenviable immortality by drinking themselves to
death. Gambling was so popular in the Desert that the Bedouin, like
the ancient German, often staked his liberty, his most priceless
possession, on the toss of a pebble. Like the Hebrew patriarchs, he
contracted incestuous marriages. He gloried in the name of brigand,
and regarded the capture of a caravan as the principal object of life.
It was not unusual for him, after plundering the dead, to mutilate
them with a brutal malignity that would disgrace an American
Indian. He tested guilt or innocence by ordeals of fire and water,
which he and his kinsman the Jew had inherited from a remote
antiquity. The practice of licentious gallantry, universally prevalent in
the Peninsula, and celebrated in many an amatory stanza of the
Bedouin poet, was temporarily checked by the austere rule of Islam;
but, reviving ere long, under the congenial skies of Spain and Sicily,
spread northward, and, inseparably associated with deeds of chivalry
and romantic adventure, infected, in time, the rude and
comparatively virtuous barbarians of Europe.
An unusual degree of intelligence, a lively imagination, a vivid
curiosity, a retentive memory, a childish love of the marvellous,
distinguished the Arab of the Age of Ignorance from the other
pastoral nations of Africa and Asia. Feuds between tribe and tribe,
nourished by injuries mutually borne and inflicted for a hundred
generations, intensified the ferocity of a nature which became, under
such provocations, incapable of pity. Everything connected with the
daily life of the warrior had a direct tendency to foster an already too
violent inclination to deeds of blood. The war-horse had his
biography; the sword of every famous chieftain had a name and a
history. The sayings of the successful marauder, often uttered with
epigrammatic terseness, passed into proverbs, and were quoted,
with extravagant admiration, by his most remote descendants; his
exploits, immortalized by the stirring verses of the poet, were
recounted nightly by the camp-fires of his tribe. In case of the
murder of a kinsman, no mourning was tolerated until ample
vengeance had been taken for the crime. The execution of the
savage law of blood-feud, while it contributed to stifle every
sentiment of humanity where an hereditary foe was the offender,
does not appear to have had any marked effect in increasing the
fierceness of the character of the Arab in his contests with those
against whom he had no special cause of enmity. Where tribal
hostility was, however, a point of honor as well as a religious duty,
the vendetta was prosecuted with implacable severity. No
circumstance of gratitude or chivalric attachment, neither the
memory of past favors nor the hope of future distinction, was
permitted to interfere with its rigid enforcement. The right of
revenge, originally descending to the fifth generation, passed by
inheritance, and was, in fact, never lost, and seldom relinquished. A
regular schedule of fines was recognized, dependent upon the age,
rank, and social position of the person murdered; but no family that
entertained a becoming idea of its own importance and of the
dignity of its tribe would condescend to accept the stated number of
camels which ancient prescription and common consent had
established as the equivalent of a homicide. This barbarous custom
applied to every soldier slain in honorable warfare, as fully as to the
victim of the assassin’s dagger; and the wholesome dread of the
consequences of a hard-fought conflict, where a score of lives might
be exacted in return for every fallen enemy, usually rendered the
encounters of the Arab comparatively bloodless. An extraordinary
value therefore attached to human life in the Desert, where the
killing of an individual might entail the extermination of a clan.
Considering the bitter hostility evinced by many tribes towards one
another, the consequences of animosity inherited for ages, and the
continual opportunities for mutual destruction, with their insignificant
results, we may, without hesitation, conclude that the law of blood-
revenge, despite the idea of ferocity it conveys, has, in reality, been
powerfully instrumental in the preservation of the Arab race.
The habits of the Arab were necessarily abstemious. The
requirement of constant exertion to obtain the necessaries of life,
the uncertain tenure of property, the menacing presence of danger,
the poverty of the soil, the national prejudice against industrial
occupations, were not conducive to indulgence in those vices which
flourish most vigorously under the artificial conditions of an
established civilization. The scanty harvests of the South were
insufficient to maintain even the population of those thinly settled
provinces. Among the products of the vegetable kingdom, the date
was the principal reliance of the nomadic people of Arabia. Of this
most valuable fruit a hundred varieties grew in the neighborhood of
Medina alone. Its highly nutritious properties, its easy preservation,
the convenience with which it could be transported for great
distances, rendered it an article of food especially adapted to the
denizen of those arid and unproductive regions in which it flourished,
and which, without it, would have been depopulated. Even its seeds
were an object of traffic, and were fed to horses and camels. With
the Arabs, as with other nomadic races, a vegetable diet was
resorted to only in case of necessity. The quantity of meat served at
a repast was an index to the host’s importance as well as the
measure of his hospitality. A brass caldron was considered as of only
ordinary size when it would easily hold a sheep, and some were so
large that a horseman could, without difficulty, eat from them
without dismounting. The morsels served from these seething
receptacles were proportioned to the vessels in which they were
cooked and to the voracious appetites of those who consumed them.
The belief, prevalent among barbarians, that the characteristics of an
animal are transmitted with undiminished vigor to all who feed upon
its flesh, was shared by the Arabs. As their favorite meat was that of
the camel, they attributed to its use their irascible temper, a trait
which is prominently developed in that beast, also noted among
quadrupeds for its dogged obstinacy. In a land where barrenness so
discouraged the labors of the husbandman and the shepherd, no
object affording nutrition could be neglected, and even the insect
world was called upon to contribute its share to the urgent
necessities of humanity. Locusts, dried and salted, have always
formed a staple article of diet among the poorer classes of Arabia,
and, an important part of the larder of every camp, are sold in vast
quantities in the markets of the Peninsula.
The differences and the prejudices of caste, the most serious
impediments to progress, were unknown to the proud rovers of the
Desert, where individual merit was the highest title to respect. The
authority of the chief was founded on the consideration he had
obtained among the members of his tribe rather than on the
illustrious circumstances of his birth or the antiquity of his lineage.
Age was an essential requisite to the attainment of official dignity, as
indicative of the wisdom supposed to be the result of long
experience. With the Bedouin, there was none of that greed of
power whose indulgence so often disturbs the peace, and inflames
the passions of societies in an advanced state of civilization. The
sheik governed through the respect entertained for his character,
through the influence of his manners, above all, through his
relationship with his clansmen. The paternal sentiment was
paramount among the Arabian people. They cherished the memory
of their forefathers with peculiar respect. The right of sanctuary
attached to their sepulchre; the tribal organization and domestic
traditions of the Bedouin were derived from this feeling of ancestral
veneration. Like other Asiatics, they considered a numerous family
the greatest of distinctions; the father of ten sons was ennobled by a
title of honor; and no nation attached more importance to the
possession of phenomenal virility. In their treatment of women, a
striking contrast exists, in numerous instances, between the Pagan
and the later Arabians. With both, it is true, woman was generally a
slave. Yet sometimes, in the Age of Ignorance, she was raised to
official dignities, even to the throne itself; her opinion was solicited
in momentous affairs of state; and in the rôle of diviner and
sorceress she wielded a power, unlimited for good or evil, over her
superstitious followers. Often gifted with rare poetic talent, she
competed, not without distinction, for the coveted palm of literary
excellence. Tradition has also handed down the names and
achievements of certain intrepid amazons, who fought by the side of
their husbands and brothers; and whose determined courage
contributed, in a marked degree, to change the fortunes of more
than one doubtful battle. But, as a rule, both before and after
Mohammed, the advancement of the sex from a condition of
servitude was resolutely discountenanced by the Arabs. In the Age
of Ignorance, it was stigmatized by the ungallant epithet of “Nets of
the Demon.” The sacred ties of blood, and the fact that with
marriage woman did not renounce her hereditary privileges, could
always command the assistance of her kinsmen, seek refuge among
them, and be avenged by their valor in case of grievous personal
injury, gave her a considerable degree of importance in the social
system of Arabia. It is very evident that in early times polyandry
prevailed everywhere in that country, an indication of a scarcity of
females, and a custom always incident to a certain stage in the
formation and development of society. Its prior existence is
demonstrated by the vestiges of communal marriage to be traced to-
day in remote portions of the Peninsula, and in the well
authenticated tradition that female kinship was originally the rule in
the Desert, the child belonging to the tribe and following the
fortunes of the mother. Among the Bedouins, the only recognized
methods of obtaining a wife were those of capture and purchase.
The former was thoroughly congenial with the warlike instincts of a
race whose possessions acquired an especial value as the result of
martial prowess; the latter represented an indemnity for the possible
loss of sons who, under other circumstances, would have become
warriors of the maternal tribe. There was, however, no real
difference between the lot of the bride who, as the prize of victory,
was dragged shrieking from the folds of her tent, and that of the
smiling victim whose beauty had been bartered for a hundred
camels. Both were regarded as chattels, and descended with other
personal property to the heir. As the population increased, and the
means of livelihood became more difficult to procure, the
appearance of a female child was looked upon as a calamity;
infanticide grew common; and nothing but the hope of being able,
at some future day, to add to his herd the camels of some
prospective suitor, ever reconciled the mercenary Bedouin to the
birth of a daughter.
The attainment to a high degree of civilization with all its
demoralizing influence was not able to destroy the native politeness,
the air of conscious dignity, the noble hospitality, and the courtly
graces of manner which distinguished the fierce and untaught
tribesman of the Desert. His sense of independence was not
hampered by invidious distinctions of rank or inconvenient
regulations of property. His intuitive knowledge of human nature, his
rare susceptibility to every impression which can improve and
develop the mind, his capacity to deal with the most difficult
questions of policy, his willingness to encounter the most appalling
dangers, were qualities which insured his success in the most distant
countries and under the most adverse and discouraging conditions.
Despite his readiness to profit by the superior knowledge of his
adversaries, he entertained the most extravagant ideas of his own
importance, and looked down upon all who were of different
manners, religious faith, or nationality. His inordinate family pride
preserved for the astonishment of subsequent generations the
endless nomenclature of his progenitors; and, at the birth of
Mohammed, the most obscure and poverty-stricken individual could
name, with a fluency born of long practice and traditional
inheritance, his ancestors for six hundred years. His language,
wonderfully complex but flexible, offering to the purposes of the
poet and the orator—by reason of its prodigal richness and
inexhaustible variety—every resource of sentiment, pathos, and
eloquence, yet so easily acquired that it was spoken by young
children with grammatical correctness and fluency, he justly boasted
as one of the most perfect idioms ever invented by man. In short,
the Arab regarded himself as the highest exemplar of humanity; his
arrogance revolted at the idea of matrimonial connections with races
which he deemed inferior to his own; and the pre-eminence he
claimed for himself and his countrymen was indicated by the
prerogatives which he asserted Allah had vouchsafed to them alone
of all nations; “that their turbans should be their diadems, their tents
their houses, their swords their intrenchments, and their poems their
laws.”
The pre-Islamitic religion of the Arabs was mainly a debasing
idolatry polluted by human sacrifices, and ascending, by ill-defined
gradations, from the lowest forms of fetichism to the adoration of
the stars. Their faith was far from uniform, and almost every tribe
had special objects of veneration and peculiar modes of worship.
Some were absolutely destitute of the idea of a God; some grovelled
before roughly-hewn blocks of stone; others worshipped trees and
springs,—the most grateful gifts of nature in a parched and thirsty
land; others, again, greeted with praise the rising sun as its beams
illuminated the purple mists of the Desert, or bowed reverently at
night before the glittering majesty of the heavens. The members of
certain tribes were materialists; not a few accepted the
metempsychosis; many were familiar with the philosophical creed of
the Buddhist, which regarded death as the irrevocable end of all
spiritual activity, the beginning of a state of absolute quiescence, of
eternal and immutable rest. The majority of the Arab races, however,
looked upon their idols as mediators between the Supreme Being
and man. Hence they erected temples in their honor, named their
children for them, made pilgrimages to their shrines, and solicited
their good offices with precious gifts and offerings. The heavenly
bodies were placed in the same category. Their intercession with the
Deity was also invoked by frequent applications; and to their power,
thus indirectly exercised, were attributed the most important as well
as the most trivial occurrences of life, the benefits of fortune, the
infliction of calamities, the mysterious and terrifying effects of
natural phenomena. It is a superstition as old as the human race to
imagine the universe to be peopled with mysterious beings, and the
lives of men to be moulded by the beneficent or malignant influence
of the stars. The worship of the Sun, the genial dispenser of light, of
warmth, of health, in whose train follow the increase of flocks, the
bursting of buds, the welcome sight of refreshing verdure, the
author of all that is useful and attractive in every species of organic
life, a worship which in ages of primeval simplicity has always most
strongly appealed to the gratitude and veneration of man, was
highly popular in Pagan Arabia. Classic historians have established
the fact that it was at one time almost universal in the Peninsula,
where the idol which was the terrestrial manifestation of that great
luminary was designated by the appellation Nur-Allah, “The Light of
God.” His authority was everywhere paramount, whether openly
worshipped, represented by fire the great purifying agent, or
exhibited under various symbols of force and power, which all
nations, however separated, and differing in physical and mental
characteristics, have, with wonderful unanimity, adopted as his
peculiar emblems. Temples were also raised to the Moon, Sirius,
Canopus, the Hyades, Mercury, and Jupiter. But of all the starry
bodies none enjoyed greater favor, or was worshipped with more
splendor, than Saturn. His attributes were often confounded by his
votaries with those of his kindred divinities Mars and the Sun. It has
been proved by the learned researches of Dozy, that the famous
Kaaba was originally a shrine dedicated to that deity. He was the
Baal of the Hebrews, and once their tutelary god as well as that of
the Phœnicians—carried by the former during their sojourn in the
wilderness, venerated by the latter in the magnificent temples of
Sidon and Tyre. The extent of his worship in the East was, it might
be said, coincident with the view of the brilliant planet by which he
was represented in the tropical heavens. The giver of all material
blessings, he was, in this capacity, invoked as the creator and
preserver of terrestrial life; but he was also propitiated as the
avenger of sacrilege and crime. Among different peoples he was
adored under innumerable manifestations. The familiar word Israel is
a synonym of Saturn; the Hebrew priests knew him as Sabbathai—
whence is derived our Sabbath; and in Judea, as in Egypt, the first
day of the week was dedicated to and named for him. In Arabia, this
popular divinity was known as Hobal, a word indisputably derived
from the Hebrew language. Occupying the most exalted position in
the Arabic Pantheon, while his image was anthropomorphic, he was,
in reality, a representative of the monotheistic principle. His name
and his worship in the Peninsula were alike of Jewish origin.
Antiquarian ingenuity and research have traced his various
migrations from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean to the
province of Hedjaz, and have elucidated certain obscure Scriptural
texts relative to his shrine, his worship, and his festivals. Among the
multitudinous divinities which claimed the reverence of the ancient
Arabians was also the Hebrew Jehovah, adored under the form of a
he-goat, sculptured in gold, as well as the profligate Venus, known
to the Babylonians as Mylitta, and to the Phœnicians as Astarte. As a
tribute to their eminence in the Christian world, the Virgin and the
Child occupied a post of honor among the three hundred and sixty
idols which crowded the sanctuary of Mecca. In the religious system
of the Peninsula there was no mythology, a fact which perhaps
contributed not a little to its speedy overthrow. But, though
polytheistic to the last degree, the Arabs recognized a Supreme
Being whose majesty was confined to no particular locality, to whom
no altar was dedicated, and who, too awful to be directly addressed,
could be approached only through his celestial ministers the stars.
This was the great Al-Lah, whose name, corresponding to the El and
the Elohim of the Jews, was pre-eminent in honor and dignity, both
in the Age of Ignorance and in the Age of Islam. The most
superstitious races of men, and those that are the highest in
intelligence among the most civilized, have and require no shrines.
In Arabia the whole Desert was the temple of the Supreme God.
Associated with the most exalted ideas of divine power were to be
found superstitions usually encountered only in the primitive epochs
of society. The wide-spread worship of the generative forces of
nature, whose remaining monuments seem to the uninstructed
sense of our cavilling age mere evidences of a depraved imagination,
had its share of public favor in Arabia, where the male and female
principles were adored under various symbolical forms. Many of
these have survived in the monoliths scattered throughout the
Peninsula, whose towering masses are regarded, even by devout
Moslems, with no small degree of superstitious awe. The stone-
circles and menhirs mentioned by travellers as existing in Oman and
Nedjd are evidently of the same general type as those of Carnac and
Stonehenge, and, from the descriptions given of them, of scarcely
inferior dimensions, and perhaps of still higher antiquity. It is a
singular circumstance, that gigantic structures, bearing such a
common resemblance as to suggest that they were erected by the
same race of builders and designed for similar purposes, should be
found in countries so different in physical features, climate,
inhabitants, religious traditions, language, and history, as Central
Arabia and Western Europe.
Like other nations of ancient times, the Arabs invested certain
trees with a sacred character, a custom indicative of the lingering
influence of phallicism; a worship whose original principles, long
forgotten in the Peninsula, survived only in the exhibition of its
peculiar emblems and in the practice of a gross and shameless
immorality. Among the Pagan Arabs, no form of superstition was too
debasing to claim its votaries. They raised altars to fire. They
attributed supernatural powers to the crocodile and the serpent.
Each tent had its image; every hovel of sun-dried bricks was filled
with tutelary deities. Shapeless masses of stone, which tradition had
associated with remarkable events or endowed with celestial origin,
were approached with a reverence not vouchsafed to idols of the
most costly materials and elaborate workmanship. Of these blocks,
which partook of the nature of the fetich, the black were sacred to
the Sun, the white to the Moon. In the Pagan world two of the
former were especially famous; over one was erected a splendid
temple on the mountain near Emesa in Syria, whence the infamous
Roman emperor Heliogabalus derived his name; the other was built
into the wall of the Kaaba of Mecca. The latter was the most
remarkable object of the kind known to antiquity. A plain fragment
of basalt, seven inches in diameter, whose composition is apparently
identical with that of a neighboring mountain, it had acquired, in the
eyes of the people of Arabia, a sanctity not shared by any other
emblem of idolatrous worship. It was probably, in its origin, a phallic
symbol, and stood alone in an open square of the city, ages
preceding the building of the Kaaba, an event which tradition has
assigned to a date four hundred years before the foundation of the
temple of Solomon. Thus invested with the sanction of immemorial
prescription and the virtues of a miraculous relic, it has received the
reverent homage of millions upon millions of idolaters and Moslems.
It has survived the accidents of conquest, of iconoclasm, of
conflagration. The silver bands which unite its fragments bear
witness to the vicissitudes and rough usage to which it has been
subjected. The healing power it was supposed to possess attracted
the sick and the disabled from regions far beyond the limits of
Arabia. It was the starting-point of ceremonial and pilgrimage. It
imparted its virtues to the Kaaba, that temple where alone, in all the
Peninsula, hereditary feuds were suspended; where violence was
forgotten; where rudeness gave way to courtesy; where the
temporary surrender of individual freedom, and the voluntary
relinquishment of tribal animosity, seemed to announce the
existence of national sentiment and the possibility of national union.
The recognition by Mohammed of the claims of the Black Stone and
the Kaaba—the ancient temple of Saturn—to public veneration, in a
creed otherwise uncompromisingly hostile to idolatry, demonstrated
the high estimation in which they were held by the Arabs. The latter,
with their numerous shrines, their swarms of deities, their elaborate
paraphernalia of worship and imposture, were, however, far from
being a religious people. They evinced a decided aversion to
metaphysics. Their ideas of personal liberty were not consistent with
unquestioning submission to the tyranny of a priesthood. Their
native intelligence rendered them. skeptical; their nomadic habits
were unfavorable to the maintenance of a permanent ecclesiastical
establishment. The multiplicity of deities had, as is invariably the
case, weakened the faith of the masses in any. The genuine piety of
a people is always in an inverse ratio to the number of its gods.
The early Arabians practised magic and divination, had recourse
to oracles, maintained wizards and sorcerers—charlatans whose
ascendency was largely due to the narcotics they made use of to
open a pretended communication with the spirit world. Amulets were
universally worn as a protection against the baneful consequences of
the evil eye. Hand in hand with presages and magical arts, auguries,
and incantations, came the incipient doctrine of the influence of the
planets upon mineral substances, as well as a belief in their power to
affect the destiny and welfare of man; theories which, eventually
developing into the vain pursuits of alchemy and judicial astrology,
indicate an acquaintance with the principles of science only acquired
by much study and repeated experiments. The practice of these
rites, so severely reprobated in the Koran, was associated in the
minds of the people with the ceremonies of public worship during
the age of polytheism. The words altar and talisman are practically
synonymous in Arabic, a fact which discloses the intimate alliance
originally existing between divination, sorcery, and religion in the
Peninsula.
Human sacrifices, so repugnant to all our ideas of piety and
justice, but common to nations of Semitic origin, were of frequent
occurrence among the Arabs before Mohammed. The mode of death
was by fire, which removed every earthly impurity; but it was only in
the fulfilment of a solemn vow, on an occasion of national rejoicing,
or to avert some impending calamity, that such a costly expiation
was exacted. The Israelites, allied to the Arabs by the ties of
consanguinity, and by similar religious conceptions, had also long
been familiar with these revolting and cruel rites; instances of whose
observance will at once suggest themselves to all who are familiar
with the Pentateuch.
The Hebrew has always exerted a remarkable influence upon the
public sentiment, the religious faith, and the foreign and domestic
relations of the inhabitants of Arabia. A great analogy exists between
the languages of the two nations, and the Hebrew alphabet was
used by the prehistoric Arabs. It is believed by many Oriental
scholars that Israel was not the founder of the people who bear his
name; that the twelve tribes have a mystic relation to certain of the
heavenly bodies or to the months of the year; and it is known that
the word Keturah means simply “frankincense.” No doubt now exists
that the Jew and the Arab are of common ancestry. For a period of
twenty-five hundred years before the Hegira the former had been
established in Yemen. The trade of that kingdom, with all its vast
ramifications, was in his hands. His power enabled him constantly to
dictate the policy of its sovereigns.
His worship, equally idolatrous with that of the Bedouin—for he
was the descendant of the Simeonites, against whom, among
others, the anathemas of the Bible were directed—surpassed the
latter in the splendor of its appointments and the insolence of its
priests. In a land where toleration was otherwise universal, he was
enabled to persecute, with implacable enmity, Christian exiles, whom
even the rapacity of the desert freebooter had spared. The rich
settlements of northwestern Arabia were, to all intents and
purposes, Jewish colonies. In the barren and inhospitable region of
the Hedjaz, the Jew founded the towns of Medina and Mecca. In
such a congenial atmosphere, the superstitions of Asia Minor
obtained a ready acceptance. He established the worship of Baal,
the most renowned of the Phœnician divinities. He introduced the
rite of circumcision, hitherto unknown in Arabia. He communicated
his idolatrous observances to the population of the country which
had offered him a refuge. He gave a name to its principal city, for
the word Mecca is Hebrew, signifying “Great Field of Battle;” the
Pagan ceremonial of the Hedjaz can be traced to Palestine, and the
Kaaba was originally known as Beth-El, “The House of God.” Quick to
recognize the advantages to be derived by commerce from religious
pilgrimage, he made that city the centre of national devotion as well
as the chief distributing point of the vast trade of Europe, Asia Minor,
Ethiopia, and India. The excellent commercial situation of Mecca,
near the Red Sea and on the great caravan highway connecting
Syria and Yemen, could scarcely compensate, however, for the
serious physical disadvantages which unfriendly nature had imposed
upon it. Its houses were crowded into a narrow valley two miles long
by only nine hundred feet wide. The rays of a vertical sun beat
pitilessly down upon a landscape destitute of verdure. Water, the
most priceless of blessings in the Desert, was scarce and
unpalatable. A salt effervescence covered the neighboring plains.
The seasons were irregular; storms were violent; the coast of the
Hedjaz possessed the unenviable reputation of being one of the
most pestilential in the world. The city was dependent upon trade for
the necessaries of life, and the unexpected delay of the caravan
often menaced the population with famine. Yet, with all these
drawbacks, the commerce of Mecca flourished almost beyond
precedent. Caravans of more than two thousand camels were no
uncommon sight in its narrow streets. Each of these beasts of
burden carried a load of four hundred pounds of rare and costly
commodities,—silks, spices, ivory, gold-dust, and perfumes. The
annual exports of the town in the closing days of Pagan ascendency
reached the enormous sum of fifteen million dollars, half of which
was profit. Not the least of the sources of gain to the people of
Mecca were the valuable offerings left by pilgrims and merchants in
their temples. For a distance of leagues the ground was holy, and all
who trod upon it could claim the right of sanctuary. The blood of
neither man nor beast could be shed within these sacred precincts
without incurring the imputation of sacrilege and the punishment of
death. There was no traveller, from whatever country he came, who
could not find, among the innumerable idols of the Kaaba, a familiar
divinity upon whom to bestow the tribute of his devotion or
gratitude. Of the immense profits resulting from the politic
combination of traffic and superstition, the Hebrew exacted the lion’s
share. His rulers met each day at the Kaaba to exchange views on
finance and theology. The heathen legends of Palestine were
incorporated into the new system, with the astral worship of the
Sabeans and the polytheism of the aboriginal inhabitants of the
Desert, itself derived from a thousand different and uncertain
sources. The monotheism of Israel was not recognized by the tribe
of Simeon, which had been driven into exile long before the
Pentateuch was written. Ideas thus blended in the popular mind for
centuries might, under favorable conditions, be modified, but never
obliterated. There is no question that Islam is largely Hebrew in
origin, although a considerable number of its ceremonies can be
deduced from the customs of Pagan Arabia. In their migrations,
which closed with the settlement of the Hedjaz, the Jews, while
wandering far, had at last returned to the cradle of their race.
The arbitrary rules of ceremonial cleanliness; the exclusion of
blood from the precincts of the temple; the classification of certain
animals as “holy,” which an error of the translator has transformed
into “unclean;” the penalties for many offences; the adoration of
Phœnician divinities; the nomenclature disclosed by family
genealogies; the correspondence in meaning of many terms used in
their languages—peculiarities common to both the Arab and the Jew
—go farther to prove an intimate relationship between the two races
than the uncertainties of tradition or the association of neighborhood
would tend to establish. The antipathy to the Hebrew, subsequently
so bitter among Mohammedans, did not exist in ancient Arabia. The
Jew served with distinction in the armies of Khaled and Amru.
Mutual aversion, however great in subsequent times, was never
sufficient to induce the Israelite to destroy those whom he regarded
as his kinsmen. As his myths had formed the basis of a new religion,
his enterprise and assistance contributed, in no insignificant degree,
to the foundation of a new and magnificent empire. He guided the
councils of the most renowned Mohammedan princes. Without the
dogmas he furnished, the history of Islam would never have been
written. Without the suggestions he voluntarily offered, and the
treasure he poured into the Moslem camps, the conquest of Spain
could never have been achieved. The fairest of Mussulman writers
have rarely failed to acknowledge the obligations of their
countrymen to an unfortunate race which the prejudices of nearly
twenty centuries have subjected to universal proscription.
Christianity made no progress in Arabia until after its political
alliance with Constantine had imparted such a tremendous impulse
to the dissemination of its doctrines. The latter do not seem to be
adapted to the Asiatic mind, and have never been able either to
appeal to the reason or to arouse the enthusiasm of nations of
Semitic blood. It offered little that was congenial with, and much
that was abhorrent to, the lax and tolerant code of the independent
and polytheistic rovers of the Desert. At the birth of Mohammed it
had already, for four centuries, been established in the Peninsula,
and still, in the very shadow of its temples, the mocking Arab bowed
before his thousand gods. The principles of the Ebionite sect, which
prevailed in the Arabian churches, so far from attracting the curiosity
or awakening the reverence of the sarcastic Bedouin, only served to
excite his ridicule. The sublime truths of the religion of the Bible, the
eloquence of its teachers, the piety of its saints, the pomp of its
ritual, the promises and threats of its revelation, were lost upon the
reckless freebooters, devoted to sensual pleasures, to escapades of
gallantry, to the generous rivalry of poesy, to daring feats of arms.
The only mark of attention its adherents received was their
classification with the despised Hebrew as Ahl-al-Kitab, “The People
of the Book.” In its adaptability to the requirements and the mental
capacity of the multitude, it was ill-fitted to cope with the religion
that eventually supplanted it. On one side were the
incomprehensible dogmas of a debased Christianity, indispensable to
its acceptance; on the other, the simplicity of the profession of
Islam, which even a child could understand. For these reasons it
made comparatively few proselytes in the Peninsula, and at no time
was acknowledged over any considerable area, except during the
short period which intervened between the Abyssinian conquest of
Yemen and the rise of Mohammedanism.
Many of the rites and customs adopted by the great Lawgiver, or
preserved by his followers and generally regarded as peculiar to
Islam, antedated the Koran by centuries. The Mohammedan
attitudes of worship are the same as those depicted upon the eternal
monuments of the Pharaohs. The heathen pilgrims, clad in the
Ihram, or sacred garment, seven times made the circuit of the
Kaaba; embraced the Black Stone; ran the courses between the holy
stations of Al-Safa and Al-Marwa; cast stones in the valley of Mina;
performed the ancient duties of sacrifice and local pilgrimage, and
were systematically plundered by the greedy and scoffing Meccans,
just as all good Moslem pilgrims are to-day. The primitive Arabs
inculcated the duty of personal cleanliness by frequent ablution.
They shaved their heads, and used the depilatory for the removal of
superfluous hair from the body. Like the Egyptians, they stained
their hands and feet with henna, and blackened their eyelids with
antimony. They removed their sandals, as Moses did, when they
stood on holy ground. They scrupulously abstained from certain
kinds of food, and their actions were often governed by regulations
practically identical, in their general character, with those prescribed
by the canons of Jewish and Moslem law.
The spirit of Arabian genius, destined in subsequent ages to effect
such a revolution in the literary and scientific history of the world,
had in the sixth century of the Christian era disclosed no indications
of its gigantic powers. No condition of existence could be less
suggestive of a capacity for intellectual achievement than that whose
main dependence was violence and plunder. The Arab of that epoch
had no written records save a few obscure inscriptions in the
Himyarite dialect, which have been deciphered by the plodding
industry of modern scholars, and are, for the most part, epitaphs.
Traditions, modified or corrupted by the vanity or the prejudice of
each successive generation, were the sole and uncertain reliance of
the chronicler. The power of memory by which these were retained
and transmitted from an unknown antiquity seems absolutely
miraculous and incredible.
Although destitute of authentic history, and even unskilled in the
common arts by which a nation’s glory may be perpetuated, the
early Arab excelled in a species of literary composition in which
barbarian races have always exhibited the greatest proficiency. A
talent for poetry, which invariably attains its highest development
among those least exposed to the practical ideas and refined vices of
civilization, was considered by the Bedouin as the most noble of
human accomplishments. His temperament, his situation, his
pursuits, rendered him peculiarly susceptible to the charms of the
Muse. His spirit was impetuous, his invention inexhaustible, his
imagination riotous, his enthusiasm unbounded. From an abnormally
sensitive nervous organization which nature had bestowed upon
him, on occasions of prolonged mental excitement often proceeded
an hysterical frenzy, a state declared by the most renowned of poets
to be indispensable for perfection in his art. The scenery of the
Desert; its impressive solitudes; the enchanting illusions of the
mirage; the magnificent constellations of the tropical heavens; the
life of incessant peril; the exploits of romantic gallantry; the
nocturnal excursion,—the surprise, the battle, the retreat, the
rescue,—these all stimulated the imaginative faculty of the Arab, and
urged him to the cultivation of a talent which might transmit to
posterity events whose immortality was at once his personal title to
honor, the pastime of his camp-fire, and the glory of his tribe. In the
means at his disposal the poet enjoyed a rare, almost a unique
advantage. The energy and softness of the Arabian language, its
melodious character, the abundance and variety of its metaphors,
render it peculiarly available as the vehicle of poetic sentiment.
There is perhaps no idiom which lends itself with such facility to the
construction of rhyme; for its very prose is frequently musical. The
researches of modern philology have brought to the notice of Europe
the complexity and perfection of its grammatical construction, the
richness of its vocabulary, its boundless scope and graceful imagery.
Most appropriately did the old philosopher, Mohammed-al-Damiri,
referring to the native eloquence and exuberant diction of his
countrymen, exclaim: “Wisdom hath lighted on three things,—the
brain of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of
the Arabs.”
 The poetry of the Arabs is even more obscure in its origin than
the primitive history of their race. Without the assistance of writing,
no literature, however popular, can maintain its integrity for even a
single generation. Even the phenomenal memory of that people—a
gift so universal as not to elicit comment among them, and which
was strengthened by the daily rehearsal of favorite compositions—
could only imperfectly supply the place of permanent and authentic
records. The matter of the Arabian poems was therefore constantly
changing, while the subjects and versification remained the same.
Their form was generally that of the dramatic pastoral; sometimes
the elegiac ode, which offered an opportunity for the enumeration of
the virtues of the deceased and, incidentally, of the achievements of
his tribe, was adopted. The genius of the pre-Islamitic poet never
attempted the epic, which so often profits by the inexhaustible
resources of the fabulous; and, although surrounded by an
atmosphere eminently favorable to the inspiration of such
productions, it does not seem to have had an adequate conception
of them. Its representations exhibited to the enraptured listener the
stirring events of his adventurous life, which his pride taught him to
regard as vastly superior, in all that promotes the dignity of
humanity, to the corrupt and inert existence of civilization. The
universal possession of the poetic faculty was one of the peculiarities
of the Arab nation. Old and young alike seemed gifted with it. The
rules of prosody, and even the simplest canons of metrical
composition, were unknown. Yet such was the instinctive perception
of rhythmical correctness, that the versification of the most humble
was characterized by propriety and elegance, qualities which tended
to enhance the fierce enthusiasm, the sublimity of thought, the
touching pathos, the burning passion, which pervade the noble
poems of the Desert. Many of the latter bear a striking resemblance
to the Song of Solomon; some are remarkable for their rhapsodies;
others for their weighty and sententious wisdom; others again for
their sparkling wit and pointed epigrams. The seven poems called
Moallakat, “The Suspended,”—a word of doubtful significance so far
as its relation to these productions is concerned—have always been
considered the masterpieces of the ancient Arabs, and form the
principal source from which our ideas of their attainments in the art
of poetry must be derived. Popular credulity ascribed the name of
these compositions to their presumed suspension in the Kaaba as
evidence of the triumphs of their authors over all competitors; the
more rational conjecture, however, connects the title of Moallakat
with a necklace or pendant, of which each poem formed a jewel, a
figurative mode of designating literary works among Orientals, and
one especially affected by poets and historians. The entire body of
tradition, combined with facts accumulated by subsequent writers of
every race and creed, does not afford such a thorough insight into
the public and domestic life, the prevailing sentiments and
prejudices, the habits and customs of the inhabitants of the
Peninsula, as do the Moallakat. They enable us partially to
reconstruct the political and religious systems of the early Arabians,
and to establish, by comparison, their identity with the conditions of
modern existence, in localities where the sword of Islam has never
been able to exterminate the detested practice of idolatry. They
place before us, in all its impressiveness, the silent majesty of the
Desert, its dazzling sky, its waves of quivering vapor, its interminable
waste of sand; they pass in review the indolent life of the camp,
varied only by a nocturnal alarm or by some daring intrigue; they
relate the exciting scenes of the foray; they delineate with erotic
freedom the charms of the lovely Bedouin maid; they describe the
fate of the female prisoner whose captivity was often the result of
artifice or barter; they rehearse the midnight march under the starry
firmament, which in the florid language of the East “appeared like
the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems.” Nor is the
excellence of the Moallakat confined to mere description. The proud
boast of exploits not unworthy of the Age of Chivalry, which, in fact,
received its inspiration from this source; the sacred duties of a lavish
hospitality; the rare qualities of a favorite horse or camel; the
absorbing passion of love, its perils and its pleasures; the Herculean
feats of virile manhood,—these were the chosen themes of the Arab
poet. His verses abound in moral precepts and philosophical
apothegms, conveying lessons of worldly wisdom which recall, in
both their phraseology and their profound acquaintance with human
nature, the Suras of the Koran and the Proverbs of Solomon. In
addition to maxims of a moral tone, scattered through these
productions, they exhibit, on the other hand, much that is repulsive,
cruel, and barbarous. Epicureanism is, however, the prominent
characteristic of the Moallakat, as, indeed, it is of all primitive Arabic
poems which have descended to us. The charms of wine and
women, and an indulgence in the pleasures of the banquet to the
extreme limit of bacchanalian revelry, are everywhere celebrated
with a license worthy of the grossest couplets of Catullus and
Martial. In the relation of scenes of intrigue and midnight
assignation, often laid in the camp of a hostile tribe, where discovery
would have led to instant death, the adventurous spirit of the lover
is deemed worthy to rank with that which sustains the hero in the
front of battle. The most fulsome adulation characterizes the
homage tendered by the ardent lover to the object of his idolatry.
Modern fastidiousness would not tolerate the descriptions given by
the poet of the physical perfections of his lady-love in all their
circumstantial details; though translations exist, they are mere
paraphrases; and the voluptuous images of the poet’s fancy still
remain discreetly hidden in the obscurity of the original idiom.
There is much similarity and repetition in Arab poetry, which the
interpolations and substitutions inevitable among a people
dependent for the preservation of their literature upon oral tradition
will hardly account for.
The existence of the Bedouin was bounded by a narrow horizon,
the Desert was his world. Its familiar objects and localities, which
never changed; the deeds which they recalled; the hopes which they
inspired; the memory of ancestral renown with which they were
associated, suggested the topics of his song. The haughtiness which
was one of his most offensive characteristics, and forbade his
permanent alliance or his intermarriage with other races,
strengthened the feelings of reserve which had been a national
peculiarity for countless generations. His ideas, his aspirations, his
joys, his sorrows, evoked by the monotonous circumstances of his
environment, were little subject to deviation during the course of
centuries. While his religion was a compound of all degrees of
fetichism, idolatry, and astral worship, his poetry was original, pure,
artless, and natural. His aptitude for versification was disclosed by
the most trivial occurrences of life. A rhyming stanza, which set forth
an appropriate sentiment, was often the reply to an ordinary
question. Where allusion was made to an historical incident, the
speaker was often challenged to confirm his statement by the
recitation of an original verse, or by an apt poetical quotation, as the
most reliable authority. The quick perception of the Arab was shown
by his ability to finish instantly a couplet corresponding in sense and
measure with a line repeated by a competitor. Its general similarity
to all others renders the assignment of any Arabic poem to a certain
epoch impossible, for the natural taste has never varied, and a
composition that was popular three hundred years before the Hegira
would be equally acceptable to-day to the mountain tribes of Central
Arabia.
In the opening lines of most Arabic poems, and in those of the
Moallakat especially, there is a dearth of individuality, and a common
resemblance which would almost suggest that they had been written
by the same person. The purity of style which characterizes the
latter was, however, universally admitted; they were the recognized
standards of grammatical correctness; they were consulted
whenever a dispute arose concerning the meaning of a word or the
construction of a sentence in later authors was in doubt; and among
Mohammedans the authority of those Pagan compositions was never
entirely superseded even by that of the Koran, whose sublimity of
thought and elegance of diction were reverently ascribed to the
direct inspiration of God.
We owe the survival of the Moallakat to the capricious taste of
some self-appointed critic, who selected them from a number of
poems with which he was familiar; and, through his arbitrary choice,
we are deprived of the opportunity of forming an opinion of the
others which his rejection has tacitly pronounced inferior. We know
nothing of his qualifications for such a task, and are even ignorant of
his name; but, from the remaining fragments of these productions,
we may safely conclude that some of them, at least, were as fully
entitled to preservation as the seven more fortunate ones which
have descended to posterity.
It is a remarkable fact that no Arabic poem shows traces of
Hebrew influence or contains ideas borrowed from either the
Scriptures or the Talmud. The wealth and political power of the
Jews; their intimate association with the nomadic tribes of the
Peninsula; a close similarity of traditions, customs, and language,
produced no perceptible effect upon the prehistoric literature of the
Arabs. The Hebrews of Arabia, nevertheless, had their poets, whose
productions, on the other hand, exhibit a marked coincidence of
thought and style with those of their Arab kinsmen. Their sentiments
are lofty and admirable, their language pure, and their merit, while
inferior to that of the Moallakat, is still far from contemptible. The
Book of Job, which has no apparent connection with the rest of the
Scriptures, has been pronounced by competent critics a translation
of an Arabic poem.
Improvisation, a talent possessed only by those endowed with
unusual readiness of perception, a lively imagination, and an
inexhaustible command of language, was practised with great
success by the itinerant poets of Arabia. From their auditors, a
couplet happily applied, by the inspiration of the moment, to some
well-known event, elicited far more applause than efforts, however
meritorious, which had cost days of arduous labor. This art of
extemporaneous composition, which, when thoroughly developed,
implies the possession of extraordinary mental ability, carried into
Europe by the Moslems, and long employed by the troubadours, now
survives only among the lowest class of the Italian peasantry. It is,
in our day, most difficult to determine what degree of authenticity
may properly be ascribed to the poetry of the ancient Arabs, none of
which ascends to a higher antiquity than two hundred years before
the Hegira. The unreliability of oral tradition, the variety of dialects,
the frequent substitutions of modern phraseology, the bad faith,
interpolations, and mistakes of unscrupulous commentators, the
corruption and suppression of passages through tribal prejudice—all
of these causes have had their share in effecting the gradual
deterioration of the grand and stirring poems of Arabia.
It is impossible for us to appreciate the influence exercised by
those who had attained to eminence in the poetic art over their
imaginative and passionate countrymen. The Arab bard was without
exception the most important personage of his tribe. Wealth, rank,
beauty, personal popularity, military distinction alike paid tribute to
his genius. To his talent for improvisation and versification, he often
united the threefold character of statesman, warrior, and knight-
errant, and thus became the model of his associates, the idol of the
fair sex, and the terror of his enemies, who were as sensitive to the
poisoned shafts of his satire as to the keenness of his sword. The
most famous of these rhyming paladins, and the author of one of
the Moallakat, whose life and achievements have been made the
subject of a romance which approaches more nearly to the nature of
an epic than any other production in the Arabic language, was Antar.
By instinct and training a Bedouin, he was, however, of Arab blood
only on his father’s side, his mother having been an Abyssinian
slave. According to the custom of his country, he shared her lot until
his bravery in battle induced his father to emancipate him. His
amatory exploits, as well as his daring enterprises against the
enemy, made him the admiration of the fiery Arabian youth. It was
the regret of Mohammed, often expressed, that he had never seen
this knight-errant of the Desert, who shrank from no danger,
however appalling, who redressed the wrongs of woman, who
restored the property of the plundered, and whose favorite maxim
was, “Bear not malice, for of malice good never came.”
The unbridled license of the Arabian poet offers a curious
commentary on national manners. The most exalted dignity, the
sacred attributes of the gods, the pride of opulence, the delicacy of
the sex, were not exempt from the attacks of his venom and
sarcasm. He exposed with relentless severity the frailties of the wife
and daughters of the sheik. He boasted of his own intrigues with a
shameless audacity which, under more refined social conditions,
could only be atoned for with blood. The immunity he enjoyed was
one of the prerogatives of his calling. A certain sacredness of
character was believed to attach to the latter by reason of the
demoniac possession to which was popularly attributed the
inspiration of the poetic faculty. His verses abounded in chivalrous
sentiments, but uniformly ignored the claims of religion to the
veneration of mankind. No beautiful mythology, like that of ancient
Greece, was at hand to prompt the efforts of his muse. The maxims
of the luxurious Epicurean were those that exerted the greatest
power over his imagination and his life. An idea may be formed of
the influence of poetry. on the public mind when we remember that
the Koreish in vain attempted to bribe the pagan bard Ascha to
deliver a panegyric on Mohammed at the commencement of the
latter’s career, and, unable to secure his compliance, succeeded with
much difficulty in purchasing his neutrality and silence at the
expense of a hundred camels. The Prophet was so sensitive to the
keen thrusts of the satirist, that when Mecca was captured and a
general amnesty proclaimed, one of the four unfortunates whom he
expressly excluded from this act of clemency was an obscure poet,
Habbar-Ibn-Aswad by name, who had published a lampoon against
him. The Arabian bard, like his literary descendant the troubadour,
was attended by minstrels who chanted his verses, often to the
accompaniment of musical instruments. The latter vocation,
regarded as degrading by the Bedouin, was always exercised by a
slave.
Islamism, while in other directions it zealously promoted the
intellectual development of its adherents, fell like a blight upon the
poetic taste and genius of Arabia. The dreams of the poet
disappeared before the stern fanaticism of the soldier, who had no
time for rhapsodies, and cared for nothing save indulgence in rapine,
the acquisition of empire, and the extension of the Faith.
It is now generally admitted that the literary contests said to have
taken place during the annual fair at Okhad, where, from poems
read before an immense concourse, the one to be suspended in the
Kaaba was selected, are apocryphal. Tribes of vagrant robbers who
passed ten months of the year in plundering their neighbors would
hardly consent to spend the other two in an orderly assembly,
composed mainly of their enemies, in determining by a popular vote
the comparative merit of their respective poets. The settlement of
such rival claims for intellectual precedency by the voice of the
people implies a degree of culture and critical acumen certainly not
possessed by the Arabs of that age. This idle tale has doubtless
been suggested by the literary exhibitions of the Olympian games,
and is perhaps indebted to the imagination of some garrulous and
mendacious Greek for its origin. It is, however, unquestionable that
the poet, as well as the story-teller—that other important personage
in the East—was in high favor at all the fairs and assemblies of
Arabia. The mixed multitude which, impelled by motives partly
mercenary, partly religious, collected on these occasions, and in its
hours of leisure listened to the verses of the poet, constantly
promoted his inspiration and refined his lays by the hope of
applause, the fear of censure, the collision with foreigners, and the
powerful influence of tribal emulation.
The later history of the Arabs is decked with all the gorgeous
imagery of the East. The fascinations of romance invest and
embellish it. With the commonplace facts incident to the various
stages of national progress are interwoven narratives of indisputable
truth, but which, in their demands upon human credulity, almost
surpass the fabulous legends of chivalry or the enchanting tales of
Scheherezade. The primitive life of the Arabian people previous to
the advent of Mohammed offered no indication of their extraordinary
capability for improvement. Commercial intercourse with other
nations for ages had, however, enlarged their experience, expanded
their faculties, and aroused their ambition. The caravan winding
amidst the lonely sand-hills of the Desert—the precursor of those
great expeditions which subsequently interchanged the commodities
of Asia Minor, Egypt, Andalusia, and India—was also the more
important agent of science, of refinement, of civilization. It increased
the sum of geographical and historical knowledge. It familiarized the
trader and his customers with the manners, the laws, the social
systems, the mechanical skill, the arts, and the inventions of the
most enterprising nations of the globe. These associations assisted
in no small degree to generate the practical utility which, the most
important feature of Arab learning, afterwards conferred such
substantial blessings on mankind. The phenomenal advance of the
race to maturity, impossible without previous preparation, was
stimulated by perpetual wars and excitement. Less than one
hundred and twenty years intervened between the vagabondage and
ignorance of the Desert and the stability and intellectual culture of
the great Abbaside and Ommeyade capitals. The career of the Arab
was too rapid to be permanent. In four generations it had covered
the ground ordinarily traversed in twenty. Its delusive splendor
concealed the decay which was coincident with the era of its
greatest prosperity. The same causes which facilitated the
foundation and advancement of his power and culture were active
during their decline, and contributed to their ultimate destruction.
The statement may appear paradoxical, in view of the
acknowledged influence of mercantile associations upon the faculties
of the human mind; but a certain degree of isolation seems to be
necessary, at least in tropical and semi-tropical regions, for the
complete development of the arts of civilization; and these arts have
usually attained their highest perfection among nations which inhabit
peninsulas. Egypt and China, whose reliance was entirely upon their
own resources, were the most exclusive of nations in the ancient
world, as were Mexico and Peru in the modern. The vast majority of
the populations of India, Japan, and Spain had but little intercourse
with those outside their boundaries, which were defended by stormy
and mysterious seas. In no other countries have the powers of the
human intellect, in the creation of all that is grand and imposing, of
all that is beautiful, of all that is artistic, of all that contributes to the
benefit, the cultivation, and the material improvement of mankind,
been manifested as in Greece and Italy. And Arabia, although denied
by Nature the advantages of soil and climate enjoyed by more
favored lands, yet possessed what, in the crisis of her fate, rendered
her superior to all her adversaries,—a race of bold and hardy
warriors inured to hardship by the privations of an abstemious life,