I
Midway between Asia and Africa lies the giant peninsula of
Arabia--the vast, immutable, resplendently mysterious country that
bridges the Orient and the Occident. Shaped somewhat like a triangle
and somewhat like an oblong, she appears to the vulgar eye more like
a boot with its toe lopped off. Three bodies of water--the Red Sea,
the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf--roll their guardian waves
against her rocky, mountainous coasts, while her northern domain
is staunchly defended by the impassable Syrian Desert.
Perhaps no other country, not even Switzerland, has been so well
protected by nature against the assaults--military, economic or
religious--of the outside world. Before the seventh century, the fury
of the Roman legions and the enthusiasm of martial Christians had
been expended in prodigious but wholly futile efforts to subjugate
her: the one because its soldiers died of heat and thirst in her
almost uninhabitable interior, and the other because its votaries
too often restricted their religious zeal to a general consumption
of alcohol and to an individual union with more than one wife or
concubine. But in any case, inasmuch as the Arabs were fierce and
warlike by nature, and were acquainted with such refinements of
wine and concupiscence as even the most aspiring Christians had not
achieved, the attacks of Pagan Rome and Christian Palestine would
probably have come to naught. Even to this day, indeed, Arabia has
been left almost entirely alone by the outside world. Timeless,
changeless and unromantic save to the capricious imagination of
poets and travelers, her interminable, ocean-like billows of arid
sand have saved her from all conquests. As she was in the dim and
remote beginnings of history, so she largely remains; and the modern
wanderer who penetrates her obscure interior cannot be certain
whether he will be greeted with affluent hospitality or a frowning
hostility that may prove inimical to life itself.
A land of contrasts! Three-fourths surrounded by water, her extensive
interior is a scorched and stony desert; her verdant southern coasts
are soon lost in a lifeless and almost level plateau; her abundantly
fertile province of Yemen, known to romance as Araby the Blest,
fades northward into the ominous wastes of Nejd, or Arabia Deserta,
and northwestward into the precipitous wilds of Hejaz, or Arabia
Petræa. Short rivers hurl their jagged torrents down her sloping
sides, while prolific oases, always placid and unruffled, dot her
deserts. The fragrant breezes that come from the Indian Ocean are
quickly assimilated into the stagnant, oppressive atmosphere of her
centre; her palmy springs may teem with sweet and pure waters, or
with saline, sulphurous scum. The broiling rays of the midday sun
give way nightly to bitter and frosty dews; her long-slumbering sands
are at times whirled violently aloft by sharp, sudden, blinding
storms that often overwhelm caravans and tents, to subside as
suddenly, leaving her surface forever different--and yet forever
the same. A land untouched by time, where time’s oppression is yet
most powerfully felt; a land that never alters, though perpetually
subject to alteration; a land where the new is eternally old, and
the old is eternally new.
Nor does the paradox confine itself to her terrain; her inhabitants
and their social institutions, particularly during the seventh
century, exhibited corresponding discrepancies. Although all
Arabs were ruled by nearly identical codes of honor, morals and
manners, spoke a generic tongue, and were passionately patriotic,
they were yet divided into tribes that bowed before countless
fetishes, conversed in individual dialects, and were ever ready to
fight to the death for the supremacy of their particular clan. At
times of national danger, it is true, they fervently abandoned all
local prejudices in a tumultuous display of chauvinism; but such
contingencies were rare and, since the vague, immemorial inception
of her history, Arabian tribes, on the slightest pretext or on no
pretext at all, had frequently plunged with limitless enthusiasm
into the gratifying job of slitting fraternal throats. All these
various tribes, moreover, were grouped into two fairly distinct
divisions: the city-dwellers and the Bedouins.
From her earliest days, Arabia had depended on caravan trade for her
subsistence. In the times of Abraham, Moses and Solomon, her traders
had carried the fragrant spices and other products of Palestine
and Arabia--cassia, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, gums, leather
and coffee--into Egypt; and, conversely, the “Kings of Arabia” had
also freighted into Judea and their own beloved land the priceless
rarities of the Orient: ivory, ebony and precious gems. For the
dangers of ocean commerce made a land route absolutely essential
for the exchange of merchandise between the East and the West,
and Arabia alone supplied the necessary bridge for this extensive
barter. Caravans from every nation, therefore, had for centuries
passed each other on her sere surface; her oases had thus become
cynosures where rest and refreshment could be had; and so by degrees
these centres of repose became the sites where marts, temples and
sanctuaries sprang indiscriminately up. These nuclei of elementary
civilizations led, little by little, to the development of an urban
population where those Arabs who chanced to be disposed toward peace
and business could lead a moderately serene life. But the instinct
of nomadism was incalculably strong in most of Arabia’s sons, and
myriads of men, yielding to the powerful atavistic impulse, gladly
relinquished the relatively soft environment of urbanism in order
to undergo, with fatalistic indifference, the hazards of a roaming,
marauding, desert life.
These Bedouins, “dwellers in the open land” or “people of the tent,”
were at once independent and servile, patriotic and anarchistic,
friendly and hostile, thievish and chivalric. A contemptuous
impatience of restraints and bonds of any kind made each one of them
look upon himself as a king; at the same time each one willingly
bowed the knee to the precepts of the most powerful ruler, or
sheik, who, through the prestige of inherent or acquired power,
automatically guided the shifting destinies of each clan. Their
strongest institution was the blood-feud--quickly abandoned, to
be sure, when a common enemy appeared on the horizon--and tribal
warfare or personal strife was an every-day affair; nevertheless,
the centralizing power arising from perpetual traditions of a mutual
fraternalism of interests held these roving hordes in an elastic
coalescence. The stranger who sought the hospitality of their
tents might be greeted by a flashing scimitar or a handclasp and a
hearty dinner--he could never tell which fate would be his, except
by experiment. If he were successful, he was naturally pleased;
whereas, if he failed, his opinion and his life were soon of no
moment to anyone save the Bedouins who took his booty. Equally
sensitive to insults or compliments, they guarded above all else
the honor of their beards and their women: to shake the one was to
invite immediate death, and to cast the smallest aspersion on the
other was to embrace a corresponding doom. And still, despite the
obeisance paid to women, the birth of a daughter was looked upon as a
horrible misfortune. The burial alive of female infants was a common
custom, and the natural death of one brought hearty congratulations
to the fortunate parents; while such girls as managed to remain
alive until their seventh or eighth year were summarily disposed
of at that tender age to the first suitor who appeared. Women, in
brief, were mere chattel: the eldest son commonly inherited his
father’s wives as a logical and desirable portion of the parental
estate.
Their livelihood was won principally by the robbing of caravans. The
plundering of them, in fact, was justly held by the Bedouins to be
merely a righteous method of exacting the customs that were levied
everywhere; for the land, they maintained, was exclusively theirs
by right of domain, and trespassers thereon must pay an appropriate
penalty. Mounted upon their swift and spirited horses, sprung from
the purest pedigree through many generations of careful selection
and trained to respond instantly to the slightest touch of the rein,
the Bedouins rarely failed to overtake their fleeing prey. Since the
loot of caravans supplied them with all the necessities of life,
they naturally worshiped their horses and camels--in particular
the ones they had stolen--with a superstitious reverence. Their
dromedaries, indeed, offered an escape from every contingency: they
furnished transportation, food (both tender flesh and milk), long
hair for tent-building, and, in case of a pinch, the water in their
capacious reservoirs could be used for drink and their dung for
fuel. The supreme height of generosity for a Bedouin was attained
on those very rare occasions when he slaughtered his own cherished
camel to feed and warm the stranger of a night.
In some respects the most striking and potent social institution
among the Arabs, urbanites and nomads alike, was the annual fair.
Every year, during certain months that were supposed to be inviolably
sacred--so sacred, in fact, that even personal and tribal broils
were taboo--a series of pageants was held throughout the whole
country; but the most populous and successful of them all was
celebrated at Ukaz, near Mecca. To that place came Arabia’s best and
fairest: opulent merchants, actors garbed in masks or veils, poets
of the desert, sheiks notorious for their proficiency in war and
love, dancing girls, and maidens whose alluring sensuousness was
subtly dissembled in languorous modesty, met on a common footing.
Specimens of trade and primitive art abounded in many booths; the
violent contortions of the corybantes, as they whirled dizzily
from tent to tent, excited the reckless Bedouins to such a pitch
that drunken orgies occasionally followed, during which the sacred
season was momentarily forgotten and resolutions of peace and
chastity conveniently overlooked. The pious devotions of pilgrims,
the piteous moans of beggars for alms, and the quiet exchange of
talk between traders, sightseers and friends, was often disturbed
by hilarious shrieks of applause for the bacchantes, by the clang
of the cymbal, and the clash of the scimitar. If shrines for prayer
were open all day, gambling houses did a flourishing business at
night; and if poetic and histrionic contests delighted the onlookers,
unfortunate results frequently followed. For the poets, chanting
a rudely rhythmical verse, incontinently boasted their individual
excellence in the manufacture of stanzas; and not seldom did they
caustically satirize the members of some other clan, meanwhile
boundlessly extolling the bravery of their own warriors and the
surpassing beauty and chastity of their women. All this bloated
braggadocio paved the way to feuds between different tribes, and
thus the fairs, which were supposed to allay hatreds and inculcate
friendships, often led to results that were precisely opposite.
Thus, for weeks and even months, the glittering, gorgeously colored
spectacle went on--a dazzling drama that, in its violent contrasts
of mystical adoration and wanton lechery, of humility and gross
egotism, of entrancing beauty and fetid squalor, furnishes perhaps
the best clue to the complex and divergent character of Arabia’s
children.
Her religion was an all-pervading form of indigenous and manifold
idolatry, tinctured with faint traces of Judaism and Christianity.
The worship of the stars, that furnished a nightly quota of detached
beauty and--what was more important--utility as a never-failing
compass, is easily understandable; but just why she should have
reverenced the blazing tropical sun and the tons upon tons of
stones that were sprinkled over her parched surface, tempts to a
metaphysical speculation which--as certain learned dissertations
prove--is more fascinating than illuminating. Perhaps the most
original and poetic element in this idol-worship was a vague belief
in the Jinn: those vast, inchoate, awe-inspiring creatures,
now friendly and now inimical, that--so every devout Arab
believed--brooded like gigantic birds in the illimitable heavens
that canopied Arabia. Judaism had made some effort to proselytize
the Arabs, but had wisely given up the attempt after it realized
what fascinating opportunities existed for the profits of trade.
Christian Abyssinia, too, had manifested a laudable desire to
turn her Pagan neighbor to the right way; but proud and impetuous
Arabs were not particularly susceptible to the pleas of negroes,
even though they chanced to be Christian negroes; and besides, the
dialectical hair-splittings which so enthralled the followers of
Arius and Athanasius could hardly be expected to offer much interest
to minds that unfortunately had never been given an opportunity
to become enraptured by the intricate charms of theology. But, in
common with the devotees of Moses and Christ, the Arabs exalted
ancestor-worship, and they even claimed, with a faith as touching
as it was irrelevant, that Abraham himself was one of their most
distinguished forefathers.
Here, then, was a land of marvelous opportunity for the right man.
Ruled by rigid taboos and certain patriarchs of exceptional prowess,
yet actually without a ruler; devoutly religious as religion goes,
yet without a unifying religion; containing an enormous amount
of military valor, yet wasting her strength in inter-tribal
battles--Arabia, in the seventh century, stood in dire dearth of
some commanding personality. The consecutive dominions of Egypt,
Assyria, Persia and Greece--nations that had once been supreme in
regal splendor--had disintegrated in rapid succession; and Rome,
the mightiest of them all, was now nearing her eclipse. Neither
Syria nor Persia was of much account any longer, Africa was weak,
the Christians had forgotten Christ in their absorption in the
more thrilling pursuit of schismatic squabbling, and the Jews
too often bartered their sacred phylacteries for the products of
Pagan ingenuity. Meanwhile, during the kaleidoscopic evolution and
disruption of world-conquering empires, Arabia had dragged out
only a ghostly existence; she was a nation that had either been
carelessly forgotten or contemptuously disregarded; she had won
no place in the sun. The general decadence of nations and faiths
at this time offered an unparallelled chance to the mythical Arab
who, by evolving a religious and political system based upon the
common elements that formed the solid foundation of every Arabian
tribe, should fuse the emotional and economic strength of the
land into an indivisible unity, and--who knew?--perhaps carry on
the torch recently dropped by the expiring Roman Empire. Now, as
careful students of history are well aware, great men, whether
warriors, statesmen or prophets, have a way of bobbing up at the
precise moment when they are most needed. So it happened that, in
the city of Mecca, probably in August in the year 570, Mohammed,
the Prophet of Allah, was born.