the latter exist it is a common mistake to suppose that horses are
plentiful in Central Arabia and that every Arab owns his steed.
Doughty says “there is no breeding or sale of horses at Boreyda or
Aneyza nor any town in Nejd.” Most of the horses shipped from Busrah or
Kuweit to Bombay are not from Nejd, although originally of Nejd-breed,
but come from Jebel Shammar and the Mesopotamian valley. He who would
know all about the beauty of the Nejd horse must visit the Hail stables
with Palgrave who “goes raving mad” about the animals; or he can read
Lady Ann Blunt’s “Pilgrimage to Nejd” in search of horses; better still
let him buy that remarkable book by Colonel Tweedie: THE ARABIAN HORSE,
_His country and His people_. In this volume the horse is the hero and
Arabs are grooms and stable-boys. The Arab is more kind to his horse
than to any other animal. No Arab dreams of tying up a horse by the
neck, a tether replaces the halter, one of the animal’s hind-legs being
encircled about the pastern by a light iron ring or leather strap,
and connected with a chain or rope to an iron peg. Nejdi horses are
specially valuable for great speed and endurance. They are all built
for riding and not for draught, to the unprofessional eye they do not
seem at all superior to the best horses seen in London or New York
City, but I leave the matter to the authorities mentioned.[47]
The government of Nejd indicates what the independent rulers of Arabia
are like. Doughty testifies that the sum of all he could learn from
the mouth of the Arabs themselves of Ibn Rashid’s government (now in
the hands of Abd-el-Aziz bin Mitaab, his nephew) was this: “He makes
sure of them that may be won by gifts, he draws the sword against
his adversaries, he treads down them that fear him and he were no
right ruler, hewed he no heads off!” Some of the nomads consider the
prince of Nejd a tyrant, but the villagers generally are well content.
Forsooth it is better for them to have _one_ tyrant than _many_, as in
the days before the political upheaval that unified central Arabia.
Other of the more religious folk of Nejd cannot forget the bloody path
by which Ibn Rashid gained his seat of power and call him “_Nejis_,
(polluted), a cutter-off of his kinsfolk with the sword.”
Lavish sums in the eyes of the starved Bedouin are spent on hospitality
but all guests are pleased and depart from the pile of rice to praise
God and the Amir of Nejd. Daily, in the guest-room, according to
Doughty, one hundred and eighty messes of barley-bread with rice and
butter are served to the men freely; a camel or smaller animal is
killed for the first-class guests and the total expense of his famous
hospitality is not over £1,500 annually. The revenues are immense and
Ibn Rashid’s private fortune had grown large even when Doughty visited
him in 1877. He has cattle innumerable and “40,000 camels”; some 300
blooded mares and 100 horses; over 100 negro slaves; besides private
riches laid up in silver metal, land at Hail and plantations in Jauf.
Contrasted with the Turkish provinces of Arabia the subjects of the
Amir of Nejd enjoy light taxation and even the Bedouin warriors who are
in the service of the Nejd ruler receive better wages than the regular
troops of the Sultan. From the descrip-
tion of Mr. and Mrs. Blunt and Doughty at Hail, one cannot but feel
that the government of Nejd is much more liberal and less fanatical
than it was in the old days of the Wahabis as described by Palgrave.
The old Wahabi power is now broken forever and Nejd is getting into
touch with the world through commerce. Kasim already resembles the
border-lands and the inhabitants are worldly-wise with the wisdom of
the Bombay horse-dealers. Many of the youth of Nejd visit Bagdad,
Busrah and Bahrein in their commercial ventures. Says Doughty, “all
Nejd Arabia, east of Teyma, appertains to the Persian Gulf traffic and
not to Syria [as does western Nejd]: and therefore the foreign color of
Nejd is Mesopotamian.” He marvelled at the erudition of the Nejd Arabs
in spite of their isolation until he found that even here newspapers
had found their way in recent years. English patent medicines are sold
in the bazaar of Aneyza and the Arabs are somewhat acquainted with the
wonders of Bombay and Calcutta. Palgrave found the inhabitants of Kasim
and southern Nejd far more intelligent than those of the north. Except
for the four large towns of Hail, Riad, Boreyda and Aneyza, Nejd has
no large centres of population. Bedouin tribes are found everywhere
and villagers cultivate the fertile oases even in the desert; but the
population is not as dense as in Oman or Yemen nor even as in Nejran
and Wady Dauasir.
Hail, the present capital of Nejd, may have a population of ten
thousand within its walls. It lies east of Jebel Aja, a granite range
6,000 feet high ending abruptly at this point. The city is on a
table-land 3,500 feet above the sea. The Amir’s castle is a formidable
stronghold occupying a position of immense natural strength in the
Jebel Aja. Blunt visited this place in 1878, but does not give its
exact site, “lest the information might be utilized by the Turks under
possible future contingencies.” We have three pen-pictures of Hail:
that of Palgrave who drew a plan of the city; the description of
Doughty with his plan of the Amir’s residence and
guest-house; and the sketches of Lady Ann Blunt on her pilgrimage. It
is a walled town with several gates, a large market-place, the palaces
overtopping all and mosques sufficient for the worshippers. It is a
clean, well-built town, according to Doughty and pleasant to live in
save for the awe of the tyrant-ruler. Its circuit may be nearly an
hour, in the centre of the walled enclosure stands the palace; near it
the great mosque and directly opposite the principal bazaar. The great
coffee-hall where the Amir gives his audiences is eighty feet long
with lofty walls and of noble proportions. It has long rows of pillars
“upholding the flat roof of ethel timbers and palm-stalk mat-work,
goodly stained and varnished with the smoke of the daily hospitality.
Under the walls are benches of clay overspread with Bagdad carpets.
By the entry stands a mighty copper-tinned basin or ‘sea’ of fresh
water with a chained cup, from thence the coffee-server draws and
he may drink who thirsts. In the upper end of this princely _kahwa_
(coffee-house) are two fire-pits, like shallow graves, where desert
bushes are burned in colder weather; they lack good fuel, and fire is
blown commonly under the giant coffee-pots in a clay hearth like a
smith’s furnace.”
The palace castles are built in Nejd with battled towers of clay-brick
and whitened on the outside with _jiss_ or plaster; this in contrast
with the palm-gardens in the walled-enclosure give the town a bright,
fresh aspect. Outside the walls, the contrast of the Bedouin squalor
and the rusty black basalt rocks lying in rough confusion is intense.
Hail lies in the midst of a barren country and is an oasis not by
nature but by the pluck and perseverance of its founders. The Shammar
Arabs settled here from antiquity and the place is mentioned in the
ancient poem of Antar.
_Er-Riadh_ or Riad (the “gardens-in-the-desert”) was the Wahabi
metropolis of Eastern Nejd and of all the Wahabi empire. The city lies
in the heart of the Aared country, enclosed north and south by Jebel
Toweyk and about 280 miles southeast of Hail. It is a large place
(according to Palgrave of 30,000 population!), but nothing is known
of its present state, as no European traveller has visited it since
Palgrave. The general appearance of Riad, according to our guide is
like that of Damascus. “Before us stretched a wide open valley, and
in its foreground, immediately below the pebbly slope on whose summit
we stood, lay the capital, large and square, crowned by high towers
and strong walls of defence, a mass of roofs and terraces, where,
overtopping all, frowned the huge but irregular pile of Feysul’s royal
castle, and hard by it rose the scarce less conspicuous palace, built
and inhabited by his eldest son, Abdallah. All around for full three
miles over the surrounding plain, but more especially to the west and
south, waved a sea of palm-trees above green fields and well-watered
gardens; while the singing, droning sound of the water-wheels reached
us even where we had halted at a quarter of a mile or more from
the nearest town-walls. On the opposite side southward, the valley
opened out into the great and even more fertile plains of Yemama,
thickly dotted with groves and villages, among which the large town
Manhufah, hardly inferior in size to Riad itself, might be clearly
distinguished.... In all the countries which I have visited, and they
are many, seldom has it been mine to survey a landscape equal to this
in beauty, and in historical meaning, rich and full alike to the eye
and the mind. The mixture of tropical aridity and luxuriant verdure,
of crowded population and desert tracts, is one that Arabia alone
can present, and in comparison with which Syria seems tame and Italy
monotonous.”[48]
Undoubtedly the population of Riad has diminished since the seat of
government was transferred to Hail; at present it has even less trade
and importance than Hofhoof (Hassa) since the Turkish occupation.
JEBEL SHAMMAR and the northwestern desert, remain to be considered.
The chief characteristics of this region are the extensive _Nefuds_ or
sandy-deserts and the nomad population. Jebel Shammar more than any
part of Arabia is the tenting ground for the sons of Kedar. Everywhere
are the black-worsted booths—the houses of goat-hair, so celebrated in
Arabic poetry and song. Place-names on the map of this country are not
villages or cities but watering-places for cattle and encampments of
the tribes from year to year. From the Gulf of Akaba to the Euphrates,
and as far north as their flocks can find pasture, the nomads call the
land their own. Many of them are subject to the government of Nejd and
pay a small annual tribute; some are nominally under Turkish rule and
others know no ruler save their Sheikh and have no law save that of
immemorial Bedouin custom.
Burckhardt discourses of these people like one who has dwelt among
them, tasting the sweet and bitter of their hungry, homely life. He
describes their tents and their simple furniture, arms, utensils, diet,
arts, industry, sciences, diseases, religion, matrimony, government,
and warfare. He tells of their hospitality to the stranger; their
robbery of the traveller; their blood-revenge and blood-covenants;
their slaves and servants; their feasts and rejoicings; their domestic
relations and public functions; their salutations and language; and
how at last they bury their dead in a single garment, scraping out a
shallow grave in hard-burned soil and heaping on a few rough stones to
keep away the foul hyenas.
Burckhardt devotes a considerable portion of his book to an enumeration
of the Bedouin-tribes and their numerous subdivisions. These will prove
of great service to those who visit or cross the northern part of the
Peninsula. The most important tribe is that of the _Anaeze_. They are
nomads in the strictest acceptation of the word, for they continue
during the whole year in almost constant motion. Their summer quarters
are near the Syrian frontiers and in winter they retire into the heart
of the desert or toward the Euphrates. When the tents are few they are
pitched in a circle and called _dowar_, in greater numbers, they encamp
in rows, one behind the other, especially along a rivulet or wady-bed;
such encampments are called _Nezel_. The Sheikh’s or chief’s tent has
the principal place generally toward the direction whence guests or
foes may be expected. The Anaeze tents are always of black goat’s-hair;
some other tribes have stuff striped white and black. Even the richest
among them never have more than one tent unless he happen to have a
second wife who cannot live on good terms with the first; he then
pitches a smaller tent near his own. But polygamy is very unusual among
the Bedouin Arabs, although divorce is common. The tent furniture is
simplicity itself; camel-saddles and cooking utensils with carpets and
provision skins, are all the Arab housewife has to look after.
Since the days of Job the Bedouin have been a nation of robbers. “The
oxen were plowing and the asses feeding beside them; and the Sabeans
fell upon them and took them away, yea they have slain the servants
with the edge of the sword.” (Job i. 14.) The Bedouin’s hand is
against every man in all Jebel Shammar to this day. The tribes are in
a state of almost perpetual war against each other; it seldom happens,
according to Burckhardt, that a tribe enjoys a moment of general peace
with all its neighbors, yet the war between two tribes is not of long
duration. Peace is easily made and easily broken. In Bedouin parlance
a salt covenant is only binding while the salt is in their stomachs.
General battles are rarely fought, and few lives are lost; to surprise
an enemy by sudden attack, or to plunder a camp, are the chief objects
of both parties. The dreadful effects of “blood-revenge” (by which
law the kindred of the slain are in duty bound to slay the murderer
or his kin) prevent many sanguinary conflicts. Whatever the Arabs
take in their predatory excursions is shared according to previous
agreement. Sometimes the whole spoil is equally divided by the Sheikh
among his followers; at other times each one plunders for himself. A
Bedouin raid is called a _ghazu_, and it is worthy of remark that the
earliest biographer of Mohammed, Ibn Ishak, so designates the wars of
the prophet of God with the Koreish. The Anaeze Bedouin never attack
by night, for during the confusion of a nocturnal assault the women’s
apartments might be entered, and this they regard as treachery. The
female sex is respected even among the most inveterate enemies whenever
a camp is plundered, and neither men, women nor slaves are ever taken
prisoners. It is war only for booty. The Arabs are robbers, seldom
murderers; to ask protection or _dakheil_ is sure quarter, even when
the spear is lifted. Peace is concluded generally by arbitration in
the tent of the Sheikh of a third tribe friendly to both combating
tribes. The most frequent cause of war is quarrels over wells or
watering-places and pasture grounds, just as in the days of the
patriarchs.
“The Bedouins have reduced robbery,” says Burckhardt, “in all
its branches to a complete and regular system, which offers many
interesting details.” These details are very numerous, and the stories
of robbery and escape given by the Arabian chroniclers, or told at the
camp-fires, would fill a volume. One example will suffice us. Three
robbers plan an attack on an encampment. One of them stations himself
behind the tent that is to be robbed, and endeavors to excite the
attention of the nearest watch-dogs. These immediately attack him; he
flies, and they pursue him to a great distance from the camp, which is
thus cleared of those dangerous guardians. The second robber goes to
the camels, cuts the strings that confine their legs and makes as many
rise as he wishes. He then leads one of the she-camels out of the camp,
the others following as usual, while the third robber has all this time
been standing with lifted club before the tent-door to strike down any
one who might awake and venture forth. If the robbers succeed they then
join their companion, each seizes the tail of a strong leading-camel
and pulls it with all his might; the camels set up a gallop into the
desert and the men are dragged along by their booty until safe distance
separates them from the scene of robbery. They then mount their prey
and make haste to their own encampment.
Before we lightly condemn the robber we must realize his sore need.
According to Doughty and other travellers three-fourths of the
Bedouin of Northwestern Arabia suffer continual famine and seldom
have enough to eat. In the long summer drought when pastures fail and
the gaunt camel-herds give no milk they are in a sorry plight; then
it is that the housewife cooks her slender mess of rice secretly,
lest some would-be guest should smell the pot. The hungry gnawing of
the Arab’s stomach is lessened by the coffee-cup and the ceaseless
“tobacco-drinking” from the nomad’s precious pipe. The women suffer
most and children languish away. When one of these sons-of-desert
heard from Doughty’s lips of a land where “we had an abundance of the
blessings of Allah, bread and clothing and peace, and, how, if any
wanted, the law succored him—he began to be full of melancholy, and to
lament the everlasting infelicity of the Arabs, whose lack of clothing
is a cause to them of many diseases, who have not daily food nor
water enough, and wandering in the empty wilderness, are never at any
stay—and these miseries to last as long as their lives. And when his
heart was full, he cried up to heaven, ‘Have mercy, ah Lord God, upon
Thy creature which Thou createdst—pity the sighing of the poor, the
hungry, the naked—have mercy—have mercy upon them, O Allah!’”
As we bid farewell to the tents of Kedar and the deserts of North
Arabia let us say amen to the nomad’s prayer and judge them not harshly
in their misery lest we be judged.
XVI
“THE TIME OF IGNORANCE”
“The religious decay in Arabia shortly before Islam may well be taken
in a negative sense, in the sense of the tribes losing the feeling
of kinship with the tribal gods. We may express this more concretely
by saying that the gods had become gradually more and more nebulous
through the destructive influence exercised, for about two hundred
years, by Jewish and Christian ideas, upon Arabian heathenism “—_H.
Hirschfeld_, in the “Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.”
In order to understand the genesis of Islam we must know something of
the condition of Arabia before the advent of Mohammed. We shall then
be able to discover the factors that influenced the hero-prophet and
made it possible for him so powerfully to sway the destinies of his own
generation and those that were to follow.
Mohammedan writers call the centuries before the birth of their Prophet
_wakt-el-jahiliyeh_—“the time of ignorance”—since the Arabs were then
ignorant of the true religion. These writers naturally chose to paint
the picture of heathen Arabia as dark as possible, in order that the
“Light of God,” as the prophet is called, might appear more bright in
contrast. Following these authorities Sale and others have left an
altogether wrong impression of the state of Arabia when Mohammed first
appeared. The commonly accepted idea that he preached entirely new
truth and uplifted the Arabs to a higher plane of civilization is only
half true.[49]
No part of Arabia has ever reached the high stage of civilization under
the rule of Islam which Yemen enjoyed under its Christian or even its
Jewish dynasties of the Himyarites. Early Christianity in Arabia, with
all its weakness, had been a power for good. The Jews had penetrated to
nearly every portion of the peninsula long before Mohammed came on the
scene.[50]
In the “Time of Ignorance” the Arabs throughout the peninsula were
divided into numerous local tribes or clans which were bound together
by no political organization but only by a traditional sentiment
of unity which they believed, or feigned to believe, a unity of
blood. Each group was a unit and opposed to all the other clans.
Some were pastoral and some nomadic; others like those at Mecca and
Taif were traders. For many centuries Yemen had been enriched by the
incense-trade and by its position as the emporium of Eastern commerce.
Sprenger in his ancient geography of the peninsula says that: “The
history of the earliest commerce is the history of incense and the
land of incense was Arabia.” The immense caravan trade which brought
all the wealth of Ormuz and Ind to the West, must have been a means of
civilization to the desert. The tanks of Marib spread fertility around
and the region north of Sana was intersected by busy caravan-routes.
W. Robertson Smith goes so far as to say that “In this period the name
of Arab was associated to Western writers with ideas of effeminate
indolence and peaceful opulence ... the golden age of Yemen.”
The Arabs had enjoyed for several thousand years, an almost absolute
freedom from foreign dominion or occupation. Neither the Egyptians, the
Assyrians, the Babylonians, the ancient Persians nor the Macedonians
in their march of conquest ever subjugated or held any part of Arabia.
But before the coming of the Prophet the proud freemen of the desert
were compelled to bend their necks repeatedly to the yoke of Roman,
Abyssinian and Persian rulers. In A. D. 105, Trajan sent his general,
Cornelius Palma, and subdued the Nabathean kingdom of North Arabia.
Mesopotamia was conquered and the eastern coast of the peninsula was
completely devastated by the Romans in A. D. 116. Hira yielded to the
monarchs of Persia as Ghassan did to the generals of Rome. Sir William
Muir writes, “It is remarked even by a Mohammedan writer that the
decadence of the race of Ghassan was preparing the way for the glories
of the Arabian prophet.” In other words Arabia was being invaded by
foreign powers and the Arabs were ready for a political leader to break
these yokes and restore the old-time independence. Roman domination
invaded even Mecca itself not long before the Hegira. “For shortly
after his accession to the throne, A. D. 610, the Emperor Heraclius
nominated Othman, then a convert to Christianity, ... as governor
of Mecca, recommending him to the Koreishites in an authoritative
letter.”[51] The Abyssinian wars and invasions of Arabia during the
century preceding Mohammed are better known. Their dominion in Yemen,
says Ibn Ishak, lasted seventy-two years, and they were finally driven
out by the Persians, at the request of the Arabs.
Arabia was thus the centre of political schemes and plots just at the
time when Mohammed came to manhood, the whole peninsula was awake to
the touch of the Romans, Abyssinians and Persians, and ready to rally
around any banner that led to a national deliverance.
As to the position of women in this “Time of Ignorance” the cruel
custom of female infanticide prevailed in many parts of heathen Arabia.
This was probably due, in the first instance, to poverty or famine, and
afterward became a social custom to limit population. Professor Wilken
suggests as a further reason that wars had tended to an excess of
females over males. An Arab poet tells of a niece who refused to leave
the husband to whom she had been assigned after capture. Her uncle was
so enraged that he buried all his daughters alive and never allowed
another one to live. Even one beautiful girl who had been saved alive
by her mother was ruthlessly placed in a grave by the father and her
cries stifled with earth. This horrible custom however was not usual.
We are told of one distinguished Arab, named _Saa-Saa_, who tried to
put down the practice of “digging a grave by the side of the bed on
which daughters were born.”
Mohammed improved on the barbaric method and discovered a way by
which not some but _all_ females could be buried alive without
being murdered—namely, the veil. Its origin was one of the marriage
affairs of the prophet with its appropriate revelation from Allah.
_The veil was unknown in Arabia before that time._ It was Islam
that forever withdrew from Oriental society the bright, refining,
elevating influence of women. Keene says that the veil “lies at the
root of all the most important features that differentiate progress
from stagnation.” The harem-system did not prevail in the days of
idolatry. Women had rights and were respected. In two instances,
beside that of Zenobia, we read of Arabian _queens_ ruling over their
tribes. Freytag in his Arabian Proverbs gives a list of female judges
who exercised their office in the “time of ignorance.” According to
Nöldeke, the Nabathean inscriptions and coins prove that women held an
independent and honorable position in North Arabia long before Islam;
they constructed expensive family graves, owned large estates, and were
independent traders. The heathen Arabs jealously watched over their
women as their most valued possession and defended them with their
lives. A woman was never given away by her father in an unequal match
nor against her consent. “If you cannot find an equal match,” said
Ibn Zohair to the Namir, “the best marriage for them is the grave.”
Professor G. A. Wilken[52] adduces many proofs to show that women had a
right in every case to choose their own husbands and cites the case of
Khadijah who offered her hand to Mohammed. Even captive women were not
kept in slavery, as is evident from the verses of Hatim:
“They did not give us Taites, their daughters in marriage;
But we wooed them against their will with our swords.
And with us captivity brought no abasement.
They neither toiled making bread nor made the pot boil;
But we mingled them with our women, the noblest,
And bare us fair sons, white of face.”