Arabs

“ The Arabs have developed in the most healthy and marked manner the characteristic features of the Semitic race. Their roving life in the deserts under the burning sun and amid tempests and whirlwinds of sand has strengthened and hardened them. Surrounded in pathless isolation by beasts of prey and hostile tribes, every one was dependent on his own watchfulness and keenness, on his courage and resolution, on his horse and his lance. ”

“ And so it is that the poetic feeling of the Arabs has idealized these sand-grouse in luxuriant fancy and flowery words, for their beauty fascinates the eye, and their marvellous swiftness awakens longing in the heart of mortals who are bound to the earth. ”

“ The Arabs have all these things, skins, money, cattle, so I call my Sheikhs together, and tell them what I want, and they get it: what do I care how? and then people wonder that the Arabs rob in their turn! I tell you, Madame, that the Arab is unfairly treated in every way, and that those who treat him so will suffer for it hereafter. He would assimilate with us if we would only let him. To-day, for instance, I met a friend of mine, an Arab who lives in Tclemcen, and I told him that I would bring some English travellers to see his pretty Moorish house. ”

“ The Arabs now told us that they were going to take us to a beautiful oasis, where there were water and dates in plenty, and flocks of sheep and goats, and warm houses to shelter us in. Why they told us this I have never been able to make out. Possibly to make us forget our ever-empty stomachs; more likely because Arabs are incapable of telling the truth even when they want to. At any rate, we never reached the paradise that our captors persistently dangled before us like the carrot on a donkey's nose. ”

“ The Arabs of the northern desert, during the revolution of centuries, have changed little more than their religion. Distinguished from all their neighbours by their sinewy limbs, and their dark and fiery eye, they roved in the conscious pride of personal independence, with "no dwelling but the tent, no intrenchment but the sword, no law but the traditionary song of their bards." ”

“ One thing is certain, that they cannot lie more than the Arabs do, but then the Arabs lie so prettily, with so much circumstance, and such nice choice of words, that it all comes to be a matter of individual taste, for there are those who had rather be deceived with civil manners by an Italian, than be cheated brutally by a North Briton, for the love of God. ”

“ The Arabs furnish a striking illustration of the successive phases of national life. They first come before us as fetich worshippers, having their age of credulity, their object of superstition being the black stone in the temple at Mecca. They pass through an age of inquiry, rendering possible the advent of Mohammed. Then follows their age of faith, the blind fanaticism of which quickly led them to overspread all adjoining countries ”

“ The Arabs to-day occupy, besides Arabia, a part of Mesopotamia, the western shores of the Red Sea, the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf and the north of Africa. The finest type of the race is found in south Arabia among the Ariba Arabs, among the mountaineers of Hadramut and Yemen and among the Bedouin tribes roaming over the interior of central and northern Arabia. The Arabs of the coasts and those of Mesopotamia are hybrids, showing Turkish, Negroid and Hamitic crossings. The people of Syria and Palestine are hybrids of Arab, Phoenician and Jewish descent. ”

“ INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT.—The Arabs, or Saracens, who are now about to play their surprising part in history, are, after the Hebrews, the most important people of the Semitic race. Secure in their inaccessible deserts, the Arabs have never as a people bowed their necks to a foreign conqueror, although portions of the Arabian peninsula have been repeatedly subjugated by different races. ”

“ The Arabic peoples first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point. There was a language called Arabic; and in it lay the test. It was the current tongue of Syria and Palestine, of Mesopotamia, and of the great peninsula called Arabia on the map. Before the Moslem conquest, these areas were inhabited by diverse peoples, speaking languages of the Arabic family. ”

“ The Arabs were a people who lived in a country, for the most part, desert; their dwellings were tents, and their principal occupation feeding and breeding cattle, and they married with their own family. The language therefore of such a people should be very poor; there is no variety of images in their whole country. They were always bad poets, as their works will testify; and if, contrary to the general rule, the language of Arabia Deserta became a copious one, it must have been by the mixture of so many nations meeting and trading at Mecca. ”

“ The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian, combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events, characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the test of historical criticism. ”

“ The faithfulness of a guide is a virtue innate amongst the Arabs.”—Carette.
[100] “If any people can be justly called happy, the Arabs on the borders of the Sahara are so. Confident in the power of their religion to gain them paradise, creating for themselves no artificial wants, and perfectly satisfied with what nature provides for them, they calmly resign themselves to the will of Providence, and are strangers to all cares. They are more wild in their appearance, but far more cultivated than the Arabs of Asia: nearly all of them can read, and a great many write.”—Davidson’s Journal. ”

“ Know then, O Commander of the Faithful, that I am a very Arab of the Arabs, the noblest of those that are beneath the skies. I grew up in the dwellings of the desert, till evil and hostile times fell upon my tribe, when I came to the utterward of this town, with my children and good and household. ”

“ I see before me distinguished representatives of the Arab race, one of the great races of the world, which has played a mighty part in history — and not only in the history of Asia and Africa, but of Europe also, for scholars cannot forget that there was a time when the Arabs, carrying their conquests along the northern shores of Africa, crossed into Spain, where they remained hundreds of years, and where they founded the Universities of Seville and Cordova, and were the masters of learning for Western Europe. ”

“ Making every allowance for prejudice and superstition, it is clear that the Arabs are fond of dark and decided colours, while they look upon light and faded colours, as well as white spots upon the head, carcase, and limbs, if broad or long, as signs of weakness and degeneracy of race. Every Arab has his own favourite coat. ”

“ Men who wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the rush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. ”

“ There are three classes of Arabs, namely, those who have settled down in one place and become town Arabs, such as the inhabitants of Mosul: the wandering tribes of the desert or Bedouins, who live in tents and whose occupation is sheep farming: a third class of Arabs are the robbers of the desert, who subsist solely by plunder, and roam the desert seeking for a livelihood by any means that may come to their hand. ”

“ But even to this day aristocratic ideas prevail among the Arabs of the desert, and also among the sedentary Arabs in remoter regions. The genuine Arab has in connection with his aristocratic notions a sense of chivalry, a fine feeling for points of honour (not necessarily the same as we ourselves take) , but also a strong propensity to vanity and boasting. ”

“ If the true Arabs only represent a fraction of the total Mohammedan population, variously estimated at a third and a sixth, they have imposed on the remainder their 33language, their religion, their institutions, and their customs, with the result that in a sense all are Arabs, though not of race. The pure-bred Arab is of an aristocratic type—tall, thin, muscular, and of dignified carriage. ”

“ The Arabs are, beyond question, one of the most ancient races of men in existence; [3] and {22} have, of all others, perhaps, best preserved their national independence, and their distinctive character and manners. Divided from the most remote times into tribes that either wandered in the desert or were collected together in cities, and obedient to chiefs who in the same person united the warrior and the magistrate, they have never been subjected to foreign domination. ”

“ During the period that marks the rise, the maturity, and decline of the empire of the Arabs, or from the ninth to the thirteenth century, geography was assiduously cultivated by them as a science, especially in Bagdad, the capital of the Caliphs, and for a part of that period in Spain. It is to the Arabians that we owe the preservation of the work of Ptolemy, which they translated into Arabic and annotated. ”

“ The modern Arabs classify themselves into Bedouins and town-dwellers; or, in their own poetic way, ahl el beit and ahl el h’eit, “the people of the tent,” and “the people of the wall.” But this classification is hardly sufficient, although it has been generally adopted by writers on Arabia. Edson L. Clark, in his book, The Arabs and the Turks, gives five classes: “Beginning at the lowest round of the ladder we have first the sedentary or settled Arabs. .. who though still many of them dwelling in tents have become cultivators of the soil. ”

“ In the south of Arabia and along the sea-shore, where the land is fertile and inviting, they live much as other nations do, and when, a thousand years ago, Arabs conquered vast and wealthy countries both in Europe and Asia, and in Africa too, they not only became model husbandmen, but built some of the finest cities in the world, had wise and strictly enforced laws and took the lead in literature and science. Very different are the scattered nomadic tribes which still roam the steppes of Eastern Russia, of Siberia and Central Asia. ”

“ The language of these little angels and the grown-up ones in Arabia is very poetical. The Arabs, because they live in the desert and look up into the big, blue sky and far out to the horizon where the mirage paints desert pictures every day, are full of imagination and live in an atmosphere of poetry. They love jingling words and proverbs and pretty sayings and figures of speech.
[72]
A mosquito has only a sting in New Jersey. In Arabia they call him aboo fas, which means “father-of-an-ax”! In America a tramp is a tramp, but the Arabs call him a son-of-the-road. ”

“ The real Arabs, indeed, are those who encamp in the desert, who live in complete liberty, and only acknowledge as their superiors the chiefs of their tribes. Those likewise are real Arabs, who live habitually in a state of war, who kill for the sake of robbing their victims, and who steal whatever comes in their way ”

“ Travellers are afraid of passing through Arabia, lest the Arabs should rob and murder them; and no one has ever been able to conquer the Arabs. The Arabs are very proud, and will not bear the least affront. Sometimes one man says to another, "The wrong side of your turban is out." ”

“ Pliny observes: "Strange to say, the Arabs live about equally on plunder and on trade; what they get from their forests (by which is meant the products of the date-palms and the fruit-trees of South Arabia) and from the sea they sell; but they purchase nothing in return." [433] "The Arabs," says Ammianus Marcellinus, "extend from the Euphrates to Egypt. They are half-naked, with only a coloured apron round the body reaching to the middle. Every man is a warrior. On their swift fine-limbed horses and their camels they ride in every direction. ”

“ We now come to some of the manners and customs of the Arabs, which are not restricted to certain tribes, but are characteristic of the Arab nature. Some of them are remarkable for the fact that they have survived through many centuries, and have resisted the influence of a comparatively new religion, and the encroachments of a gradually advancing civilization. ”

“ From very early times the Arabs had great delight in verses and tales, and the development of their language was certainly much influenced by this fact. In ancient times story-tellers and singers found their subjects in the doughty deeds of the tribe on its forays, in the merits of horse or camel, in hunting adventures and love complaints, and sometimes in contests with foreign powers and in the impression produced by the wealth and might of the sovereigns of Persia and Constantinople. ”

“ Under the despotic government of the khalifs the Arabs might be more celebrated for their learning, for their skill in astrology, in grammar, in geography, or in the more abstruse science of geometry and numbers, but taste and purity of language belonged only to their free ancestors of the ages which preceded the reign of Islam. ”

“ The Arabs are gifted with remarkable dexterity in steering without compass, recognising a footstep imperceptible to the common eye, scenting the water at a distance, and finding their way by marks which would escape the most observant European. ”