The difficulty of the Arabic language has, however, confined the thorough study of it to very few, to the detriment of all Oriental learning. It is with the desire to smooth the path of the student that I have undertaken to translate and annotate the work of the most learned and eloquent of the Arabic authors. A translation may have two objects; it may be either intended to display the translator’s felicity of diction, as when scholars produce English versions of Anacreon or Horace for the amusement of those who are well acquainted with the originals, a pursuit for which I cannot say that I have any high esteem; or it may be intended to facilitate the study of a difficult original, while it gives the translator’s countrymen generally some acquaintance with a foreign author who deserves to be known by them, though they cannot hope to learn his language. The latter has been the object proposed in the present translation. It is a literal prose rendering of the Maḳâmât, intended primarily to help the student in Arabic, and with this view I have always guarded myself from being seduced into paraphrase by the desire of elegance. The text of the author has been rendered throughout as closely as is consistent with intelligibility; but the translation will, I believe, have lost nothing thereby, for readers of true taste will prefer that the idiom of the original, strange and uncouth as it sometimes may be, should pierce through the version, rather than that Ḥarîri’s diction should be, as it were, melted down and remoulded into the current English of the nineteenth century.
In this version there is no attempt to imitate the plays on words, or the rhyme of the original. Such a resemblance in form could only be attained by the abandonment of all accuracy, and the sacrifice of the chief object for which the translation has been undertaken. But the parallelistic rhythm of the original has been sufficiently preserved, and on the whole the reader will be able to gain from this version a fair idea of the form in which Ḥarîri cast his thoughts. If I have adopted at times a somewhat antiquated diction it has been naturally suggested by the work itself. One of the earliest students of the Assemblies, the learned and critical Albert Schultens, perceived the essential character of Ḥarîri’s style. He says, “Hæ faces quicquid tenebrarum stilus Haririi grandisonus ac mille floribus figurisque variegatus offundebat discussere, laborem quem in eo, a capite ad calcem, describendo impen-debam compensante summâ animi voluptate; eo quod hôc in scriptore reperirem id quod spe atque cogitatione præceperam, eminentem et expressam imaginem priscæ illius grandiloquentiæ Orientalis, quâ liber Jobi exaratus est, quæque in Psalmis, in Proverbiis, in reliquo corpore Bibliorum, poetico præsertim, ac prophetico, tam magnificè tamque insignitè se exerit.”
The notes have been primarily designed for the
student, but care has been taken that the allusions in
the text shall be sufficiently explained for the general
reader. The legends of the heroic warriors of the Ignorance,
In writing Arabic names and words with European letters I have desired to combine sufficient accuracy with such a representation of the word as shall not be pedantic or uncouth. The Arabic scholar will soon perceive the system that has been adopted. Fetḥah is represented by a or e, and ḍammah by o or u, kesreh being represented by i. The long syllables are indicated by â, î, û. In non-Arabic names I have generally followed the popular spelling, as it is to be found in European books; some well-known names also, as Basra, Kufa, Medina, Mecca, are written in the same manner. Following high authority I have paid no attention to the i‘râb in composite Arabic names. Notwithstanding all the care that has been bestowed on the proofs, it will be found that the subscribed points and other signs by which the Arabic letters are indicated in English type have been occasionally omitted or misplaced. These inaccuracies are, however, few and trifling.
The present volume contains a long Introduction, which dispenses with the necessity of saying more in this place; it contains also the opening Address of Ḥarîri, and the first twenty-six Assemblies. With the second volume there will be published an Index to the entire work.
Page 12, line 12, for mezdûj read muzdawij. Page 41, line 28, and page 86, line 15, for Muzayḳîah read Muzayḳîyâ. Page 101, line 26, for Laudian read Lord Almoner’s. Page 472, line 22, after any other read than a.
Abû Moḥammed al Ḳâsim ibn ‘Alî ibn Mohammed
ibn ‘Othmân al Ḥarîri was born at Basra, in the year
446 of the Hijra (
The lot of the Arabs subjected to Turkish domination does not, however, seem to have been a hard one. The rulers felt their own barbarism, and had some reverence for the genius and learning of those they governed. These had not been conquered, in the military sense of the term. Their government had fallen to Turkoman administrators, through the weakness of the successors of the Prophet; but the sanctity of the Khalif was still felt, and his supremacy nominally acknowledged. The influence of religion maintained for the Arab-speaking inhabitants of Irak a sufficient, and even an excessive, respect. The Koran, the revealed word of God himself, had existed from eternity in the Arabic language, and to understand and explain it was the privilege of those only who were versed in the mysteries of Arabic grammar and divinity. While to the boldest soldier of the dominant race the sacred book was unintelligible, and served only as an amulet to keep off Jinn and Ghûls, and the like supernatural enemies, the poorest Bedouin who wandered in from the desert could appreciate its doctrine and precepts, its lofty diction, its refined and learned grammar, its entrancing rhythm, and feel the full assurance that such a masterpiece of language could only have been communicated from on high. In accepting Islam, the Turks had also accepted the authority of the Koran, in religious and civil matters, and that authority could be expounded only by Fuḳahâ, or jurisconsults, who had studied the Arabic text, by Mutekellimûn, or scholastic divines, or by the followers of the great Imams, who had fixed the rites of public worship. Nor was the influence of the learned Arabs merely religious. Their literature and science were dominant in the East, and their vocabulary leavened the languages of the races with whom they came in contact. The extent of this influence may be perceived by comparing the Persian of Firdousi with that of Sa‘di. The language of the former, who flourished in the early part of our eleventh century, is tolerably pure, while the Gulistan, which was produced some two hundred and fifty years later, is in some places little more than a piecing together of Arabic words with a cement of the original tongue. It is to be noticed, also, that the latter author introduces continually Arabic verses, as the highest ornaments of his work, and assumes that his readers are acquainted with this classic and sacred tongue. In the time of Ḥarîri this influence was in full power: nor was the political supremacy of the Arabs at an end. Though the Khalifate of Bagdad had fallen on evil days, yet the Arab rule was still vigorous in Spain, and the wide-spread race still asserted a high place in arms and government, as well as in letters. In Asia the Arabs were to the northern invaders all, and more than all, that the Greeks were to the Romans. Melek Shah, the son and successor of Alp Arslan, was, under the guidance of his Wazîr, Niẓâm al Mulk, a patriotic prince. The finances were restored, oppressive taxes were taken off, commerce was facilitated by the construction of roads, canals, and marketplaces; person and property were made securesup>1; palaces, mosques, hospitals, and observatories were built or maintained. But his greatest work was the establishment of a new system of education. Formerly the instruction under the Khalifate had been mainly ecclesiastical. After the boy quitted the schoolmaster, a personage ridiculous from his poverty and ignorance, and the butt of every satirist, he was taken to the mosque, where a higher class of teachers were supposed to instruct him. The teaching was, we may assume, pretty much what it has again became in Mohammedan countries. The master sat leaning against a column, and his pupils were indoctrinated orally with orthodox views on religion. They were taught the names, the periods, and, to some extent, the productions of the multitudinous poets, the traditions of the Prophet and his Companions, the deformed and contradictory annals of the Khalifate, and, perhaps, some legendary lore concerning the Pagan Arabs—their genealogies, their “days,” or battles, their proverbs, and their extempore recitations. Niẓâm al Mulk superseded these institutions by colleges, built and endowed by the State, in which the instruction was of a higher order, though the chief object of the scholar was still to comprehend and to maintain the doctrines of the faith. One of these schools was celebrated for ages as the Niẓâmîyeh, at Bagdad; another was founded at Basra.
There was, therefore, nothing in the state of society in Ḥarîri’s native city, to hinder the employment of such talents as he possessed. After the foundation of Bag-dad, it had partially decayed, and Ḥarîri, in his last Assembly says, in exaggerated phrase, that there remains but a border of it. But it was still a rich and populous, and, compared with many others in those troubled times, a secure place. Political revolutions, and the incursions of the wandering Arabs from the neighbourhood, sometimes harassed it; but the inhabitants, who considered themselves the most cultivated of the Arabs, were not debarred from their accustomed pursuits,—one of the chief of which was the indulgence of a kind of Athenian disputatiousness on all matters of literature and criticism. The grammatical school of Basra was, from early times, the most famous in the Arabic world. In its disputes with the rival school of Kufa, the verdict of succeeding philologers has generally proclaimed that it was in the right. The elaborate science of Arabic grammar was, indeed, founded within the walls of Basra, and was there developed into the most original and philosophical product of the mind of the race. In his last Assembly, Ḥarîri, celebrating the praises of his native city, says: “Of your number was he who originated grammar (or syntaxsup>1), and fixed it; and he who devised the measure of poetry, and invented it.” The former of these was Abû ’l Aswad ad Du’li, who lived in the first century of the Hijra, was a partisan of ‘Ali, and is said to have been present at the battle of Ṣiffîn. This person was, according to the biographer Ibn Khal-likân, led to undertake the grammatical fixing of the language, by observing the errors and solecisms into which the new generation had fallen, through its intermixture with foreigners. Moreover, he was shocked at the mistaken enunciation of the Koran, by those who were ignorant of the Arab desinences, and who consequently perverted its meaning. He applied himself, therefore, to study scientifically the idiom of Ḳoraysh, and reduced to a system the rules which the most eloquent of the Arabs had habitually and unconsciously observed. The other of these worthies was Al Khalîl ibn Ahmed, the founder of the elaborate and artificial system of Arabic prosody. Al Khalîl was not only a grammarian, but a poet of eminence, an eloquent preacher, and well versed in what then was the only history, the genealogies and “Days” of the Arabs. Without doubt he was a man of powerful and original mind. Before him no one had thought of subjecting the versification of the old poets of the Ignorance to rules. Poetry had existed for generations before prosody, as we may conceive that Homer knew not the difference between a dactyl and a spondee. Khalîl discovered the relations between the various metres, and by a masterly analysis, fixed the primitive and secondary feet, dissected them into their constituent parts, and arranged the whole of the known metres into the five Circles which have ever since been taken as the basis of versification. The influence of these men, and others of similar intelligence and originality, gave the educated class of Basra an inclination to literary pursuits, which in course of time was largely mixed with pedantry. Nowhere were there so many commentators, rhetoricians, grammarians,—each seeking to surpass the other in subtlety of analysis; poets, poetasters, anagrammatists, enigmatists, and all the race of those who set learning above genius, and take difficulty of execution for merit. The Assemblies of Ḥarîri are, themselves, the best picture of the society of the city. Wherever he may place the scene of the adventure, it is always Basra that he has in his mind, and the dilettanti of Basra whose taste he shares or reproves. Though the city had no longer the political importance which it possessed in the early days of Islam, when it was the chief focus of intrigue and revolution, it was yet, from its geographical position, a place of wealth and refinement. In the above-mentioned Assembly, the author lauds it as the spot where the ship and the camel meet, the sea fish and the lizard, the camel-leader and the sailor, the fisher and the tiller. In other words it was the port and emporium for all the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris, and its trade with the coasts of Arabia, with India, and even with Africa, enriched it in the worst of times. Ample provision seems to have been made for literary pursuits. Several libraries had been founded, and were open to the public. One of these, established in the previous century, is said to have been the first that had been placed in wakf, or mortmain, since Islam. Into these libraries the learned and the tasteful flocked, to read or to discuss the merits of this or that writer. Ḥarîri, in the second Assembly, gives us a picture of one of these meetings, in which the poorest conceits of a poet meet with high admiration. The habits and tastes of the Basrians had, therefore, doubtless, a great share in directing the genius of their townsman.
Ḥarîri was of good Arab blood. He is said to have descended from Rabî‘at al Faras, the son of Niẓâr, the son of Ma‘add, the son of ‘Adnân, and to have boasted of this lofty ancestry. The sons of Rabí‘ah inhabited Hijâz for some generations, paying tribute to the sovereigns of Yemen. But in course of time they rose against their lords, and in their various tribes carried on a long and bloody war. At last they passed under the authority of the kings of Hira. At a later period Bekr and Taghlib, two of the chief branches of the race of Rabîah, quitted their homes in central Arabia, and migrated to Irak and Baḥrayn. After Islam they settled in the country known still as Diyâr Rabî‘ah. In some verses, addressed to Ḥarîri by an admiring young poet, he is described as a descendant of Khindaf, and the glory of the tribe of Temîm. The name of Khindaf, the wife of Alyas, son of Moḍar, is applied to all the descendants of Moḍar, through Alyas, and the mention of Temîm, who undoubtedly descended from Alyas, would seem to make some discrepancy in the author’s pedigree. It seems, however, reasonable to conclude that Ḥarîri was a descendant of one of the races issuing from Rabî‘ah, and that he represented the old Arab settlers in Irak. He was born, according to Ibn Khallikân, in the street of the Benû Ḥarâm, so called from a tribe of Arabs who had established themselves there. His name of Al Ḥarîri was derived, according to the same biographer, from his having traded in silk (ḥarîr). It is more probable that it was given him on account of his father being engaged in this commerce, for our author does not appear to have had at any time other than official and literary pursuits. He was possessed of a competence, and his family owned several thousand palm trees at Meshân, some distance to the north of Basra. He received a good education, according to the fashion of his age and city, and was well versed in grammar, receiving in this science the teaching of Al Faḍl al Ḳasbâni, one of the most celebrated men of the time. The young Ḥarîri chose the profession which was then most in favour with those who combined literary tastes with political ambition. He became a Munshi, or official writer, and according to ‘Imâd ad dîn, secretary to the Sultan Ṣalâh ad dîn (Saladin), whose book, the Kharîdat al Ḳasr, furnishes many particulars of his life, he was early employed in public duties, and had the official title of Ṣâḥib al Khabar. From this it would seem that his office was to inquire into and report upon the affairs of the province for the information of the central government. The high position to which official persons might rise, and the estimation in which they were held may be learnt from the author’s twenty-second Assembly, in which he compares secretaries of correspondence with secretaries of finance; and after praising both highly, refrains from placing either above the other. Ḥarîri’s official position not only gave him the acquaintance of the great, but also, probably, served him in the troubles of which Basra was for some time the scene. Several specimens of his correspondence have been preserved, and they display the qualities which are remarkable in the Assemblies,—great power over the language, and felicity of expression, but a fondness for far-fetched images, metaphorical phraseology, and those plays on words, which were looked upon as among the chief ornaments of style. He must, however, have devoted himself steadfastly to general literature, and have laid, at an early period, the foundation of the extensive and minute knowledge which is to be found in the Assemblies.
The great object of his literary life became to explore and expound the niceties of the Arab language and history. His mind, though it united poetical with critical power, was narrow; his intellectual vision had little range. He spied out defects with the microscopic eye of an insect, but the merits which he prized were nice and contracted also. His chief works, after the Assemblies, are two treatises on Grammar, one called “The Beauties of the I‘râb (or desinential syntax),” the other “The Pearl of the Diver.” A portion of these has been published by De Sacy in his “Anthologie Grammaticale Arabe.” The former is in verse of the metre called rejez, and is also mezdûj, or methnawi; that is, the second hemistich of each verse rhymes with the first. This metre was also adopted by Ibn Mâlik for his “Alfîyeh,” the most complete and celebrated of the Arabic grammatical poems. Ḥarîri in this work comments on his own lines, and treats questions of syntax with extraordinary subtlety. But a still more characteristic work is “The Pearl of the Diver,” in which the author points out the faults made by people of education in the use of words and phrases. The observation, judgment, and taste displayed in this book are remarkable, and the extract in the “Anthologie” will be frequently referred to in my notes. Every sentence is like a drop of grammatical gold; moreover the authority of the author is so high, that his dicta have never been disputed, and all subsequent writers have avoided the faults which he points out. But neither in these books, nor in the Assemblies themselves, is there any sign of original conceptions, or of the strength to break loose from the traditions of learning which the author had received. His works are in some respects the more valuable for this, since he represents in its most exquisite and refined form the culture of his age. He was content to do best what others were also doing, and to gain the admiration of his countryment by excellence in forms of composition with which they were well acquainted.
As I have not space for a full biography of Ḥarîri, I shall not dwell on those political troubles which unsettled the tenor of his life. He was already of middle age when the Crusaders marched through Asia Minor into Syria. Basra had suffered like the whole East from the convulsions of the Moslem world, but it was at least spared an incursion of the Christian Franks. Yet it is to the campaign of Baldwin in Syria that the composition of the Assemblies is possibly due. The hero of them is represented as an inhabitant of Serûj, a place in the neighbourhood of Edessa, and as having been driven into exile by the infidels who had destroyed the city and killed or despoiled all the Unifiers of God. But before I relate the anecdotes, which have been handed down concerning the origin of our author’s great work, it will be well to describe what the Maḳâmah or Assembly really is, and how such a form of composition took its place in literature.
The first person who composed an Assembly is allowed to have been Abû ’l Faḍl Aḥmad ibn al Ḥasan al Hama-dâni, commonly known as Badî‘ az Zemân, or “The Wonder of the Time.” A short sketch of his life is given in a note to Ḥarîri’s preface. It is only necessary to state here that he was one of those literary prodigies whom it was the fashion of his age and people to admire. The Arabs had long ceased to appreciate the fresh and pure spirit of true poetry. The simple grandeur of the poets of the Ignorance no longer satisfied their tastes. They did, indeed, place these poets above any that had succeeded them, but it was principally as authorities on words, phrases, and grammar, that they valued them, since such ancient poets were held to have possessed the true and chaste language of the Arabs, which had been lost in succeeding ages by literary corruptions and by admixture with foreign peoples. But in their hearts the educated class in Irak and Syria preferred the conceits of Al Boḥtori, Al Mutenebbi, and Abû ’l ‘Ala, to the noble strains of Imr al Ḳays and Ṭarafeh. He was the most successful man of letters, the most likely to receive rich presents from princes and governors, and to be encircled by admiring listeners, who could show his wit by some far-fetched comparison, or his learning by the recitation of an enormous number of lines. Some men could repeat hundreds of ḳaṣîdehs or poems, others could quote verses descriptive of every part of the camel or horse, or in praise or dispraise of the multitudinous tribes. Others professed to tell the origin of all the innumerable proverbs and sayings which had been handed down, what hero of the Ignorance had uttered each, and on what occasion, and the issue of the adventure. A complete acquaintance with the Koran was, of course, highly honoured, and a felicity in applying passages of it in a new and surprising manner to the ordinary concerns of life was looked upon as legitimate wit. The traditions of the founder of Islam, his Companions, and immediate followers, formed a department of knowledge, without which the education of the polite was not complete. Alleged sayings of Mohammed, ‘Âyeshah, Abû Bekr, ‘Omar, ‘Ali, ‘Abd allah ibn ‘Abbâs, and others, increased in number yearly, and the learned in these things pretended to test their authenticity, to examine the testimony in favour of each, and even to decide on the very words and grammatical forms in which each had been uttered. Lexicography was studied with an intentness which probably no other people has devoted to its own language, and the consequence was a sort of literary consciousness in everything that was written, a looking to the form, rather than the substance, which gave an artificial and pedantic character to the productions of the time.
This tendency began soon after the establishment of the Khalifate. In the earlier periods of Islam, before divinity and grammar had been developed so much as to form a large part of the most learned man’s stores, the prodigious memories of the Arabs were exercised on the productions of the poets, which, though individually short, formed, as a whole, a mass of literature of inconceivable magnitude. In the century preceding Mohammed almost every eminent Arab had been a declaimer of verse, and of these compositions many had merit, while all were thought worthy of being retained as the utterances of remarkable persons, and as monuments of a chaste diction which men feared was irrecoverably lost. Hence the ◌ (râwi), or reciter, was in high favour, and his accomplishments were looked upon as almost equal in value to the genius of the poets whom he handed down. The Râwi was indeed the primitive type of the Arab man of learning, and it was to the impression which he made on the people that the tendency of the educated to the accumulation of vast stores of curious learning is for the most part to be attributed. Writing was almost unknown among the Arabs of the Ignorance at the time when their poetical vigour was at its height. The story of the death of Ṭarafeh, the author of one of the Mo‘allaḳât, the most highly prized of the early poems, shows that neither he nor his uncle Mutelemmis, also a poet, could read. It is doubtful whether Imr al Ḳays could read, though he is placed by unanimous consent at the head of all the early poets,— though the Prophet declared, in a complimentary malediction, that he would be the leader of the poets to hell, and though the Khalif ‘Omar, speaking of poets, said, “Imr al Ḳays is he who has precedence of them; he has made the fountain of poetry to well forth to them.” The general opinion is that Mohammed could not read, although the diction of the Koran was held even by the unbelieving Ḳoraysh to be the work of magic, and though a modern critic must allow that the author of the earlier and more impassioned Suras was a great lyric poet.
Much more, then, were the multitude unable to dispense with the services of the Râwi, who was their living library, their only means of communicating with the great spirits of their own time or of the past. The Râwi devoted his life to learning poetry by heart, and to informing himself of the lives of the poets and the incidents to which their compositions referred. Sometimes a Râwi attached himself to a single poet and travelled about reciting his verses and spreading his fame among the tribes. But after Islam, when a great monarchy took the place of the little autonomies of the desert, and the Court of Damascus supplanted the fair of ‘Okâẓ; when also, in the opinion of many, the canon of pure Arabic poetry was closed, the Râwi was transformed into the student of a capital, and often undertook to master the whole body of ancient literature. One of these marvels of memory was Abû ’l Ḳâsim Ḥammâd, who flourished about a century after the Hijra, and enjoyed the favour of the Khalifs Welîd ibn ‘Abd el Melik and Hishâm. The house of Omayyeh has seldom a good word from Moslem writers, but it is impossible to doubt the services to literature of these great Khalifs, particularly in preserving the compositions of the past, which were in danger of being lost through the fall of so many of the reciters in the ceaseless wars. Much did indeed perish, and had it not been for men like Ḥammâd, and his patrons, we should now probably be without a single specimen of the pre-islamic poetry. Welîd asked Ḥammâd on one occasion how much poetry he knew: Ḥammâd replied that for each letter of the alphabet he could recite one hundred long poems rhyming with that letter, all composed by poets of the Ignorance. Welîd resolved to try whether or no this was an idle boast, and bade him begin his recitation. Ḥammâd began and went on until the Khalif was worn out with listening, and withdrew, leaving a trusty person to hear Ḥammâd to the last. At that sitting he recited two thousand nine hundred ḳaṣî-dehs, being one hundred for every letter of the alphabet, all of which had been composed by poets who flourished before Mohammed.
It was not only by repeating great quantities of verse that the Râwi must seek for reputation: he was bound to remember apposite verses in every conceivable circumstance. Many of these feats are recorded, and, though we may doubt whether they were performed impromptu, it is certain that the Râwi would on occasions deliver himself of an immense number of passages illustrative of a single idea. There is a composition extant in which a stranger is represented as knocking at a door, which is opened by a girl. The stranger demands hospitality, and the girl asks him the name of his tribe. He gives it, and the girl at once replies with some satirical verses from a poet on that tribe. The man abashed exclaims, “No, I spoke falsely,” and mentions another tribe, on which the girl repeats satirical verses on that tribe also. The man then mentions another, and another, until the girl has satirized all the tribes of the Arabs by quotations from the poets. This composition is, of course, an exercitation by some Râwi, or some man of letters formed after the same type. The celebrated Aṣma‘î, who sprung, like so many learned man, from Basra, but lived at Bag-dad in the time of Harûn ar Reshîd, not only knew sixteen thousand pieces of verse in the metre called rejez, but performed astonishing feats of quotation, so that there was scarcely an object in nature that he could not illustrate by verses from the ancients. So profound was his learning that, when in old age he returned to Basra, the Khalif Al Ma’mûn used to draw up questions on doubtful points of literature and send them to him to be solved.
Al Hamadâni was a sage of this school, but he had in
addition originality and wit approaching to genius. Like
many of the most illustrious of the Arabic writers, he
lived far from the Arabic peninsula, and may even have
been of foreign origin. He was born at Hamadân, hence
his name, but his life appears to have been passed and
to have closed at Herat. He died in the 398th year of
the Hijra,
The influence of Hamadâni could not but be powerful
on the learned and refined Ḥarîri. The life of the latter
had been passed in scholarship, but he was approaching
his fiftieth year before he devoted himself to the work
on which his fame rests. The origin of the Assemblies
was, according to the general tradition, as follows.
The armies of the Crusade had forced their way into
Syria, and carried on a remorseless war against the
Moslems. Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, took possession
of Edessa, which had been surrendered to him by the
inhabitants, who were mostly of the Armenian race.
According to an Eastern chronicler the following event
took place in the year 494 (
Some time after, Ḥarîri, being in the mosque of the Benû Ḥarâm, in the quarter of Basra where he lived, observed an old man enter in worn garments, and with all the marks of poverty. He had the wallet of a foot traveller, and had evidently come from afar. Abû’l Ḳâsim ‘Abdallah, the son of Ḥarîri, who tells the story, says, “The company asked him whence he came; he answered, ‘From Serûj:’ asked concerning his kinyeh or byename, he answered that it was Abû Zayd.” This wanderer had excited the curiosity of the company by the fluency and eloquence of his address, in which he had related the destruction of his city, the loss of his daughter, and his own exile and beggary. Ḥarîri went home and wrote what is now the forty-eighth Assembly, in which he describes this incident. In this Assembly, which bears the name of Ḥarâmîyeh, the usual order of narration is reversed; for Abû Zayd is his own Râwi, and Ḥârith, son of Hammâm, is introduced incidentally. Abû Zayd is made to say that he had long wished to visit Basra, the city of learning and piety, of mosques and shrines, and that, at last, when fortune had brought him to it, he had made his way one evening to the mosque, where the people were engaged in a grammatical discussion on the ◌, or interchangeable letters. He had entered to ask their bounty, not to learn their opinions on grammar; but, before he had time to test their liberality, the hour of prayer arrived, and the people began their devotions. When these were over, a man of noble mien and great eloquence stood forth and made a pious address to the worshippers, who asked the reason of his zeal, and were informed by him that he was a backslider, who had fallen from the practice of piety into debauchery, and had broken the vow which he had made never to drink wine. The stranger concluded by asking the faithful if they knew of any due atonement. The dialogue between the repentant sinner and the people is of course recited at length by Abû Zayd, who then relates that he had started forward and told the stranger that there was an effectual method of wiping away his guilt, and that was by bestowing alms on him, Abû Zayd, for that he had fallen from high estate to bitter poverty. In plaintive verse Abû Zayd described that he was of the dwellers in Serûj, a people of religion and right guidance; that there he had been wealthy and liberal, his mansion the gathering place of guests, and his substance freely given up to them; that like the Arabs of old he had kindled his fire on the height to attract the traveller, when the niggard let his fire burn low. This prosperity had now passed away, for God had brought the people of Rûm (so the Arabs call the Byzantines, whom Abû Zayd here confounds with the Franks) on the land, and these had spoiled the home of every Unifier of God, that is, every Moslem. He, himself, had been driven forth to exile and poverty, while his daughter remained a captive in their hands, and he had not wherewith to ransom her. If, then, the stranger would pity and relieve him he would find pardon from God for the fault which he deplored. Abû Zayd then goes on to relate that the stranger had given him money and promised him more, and that Al Ḥârith, son of Hammâm, had complimented him on his eloquence and skill in opening men’s purses. But, says Abû Zayd: I laughed exceedingly, and recited without hesitation:—
“Live by beguiling, for thou art in a world (or time) whose sons are as the lions of Bîsheh.
And turn on the stream of craft, so mayest thou make the mill of livelihood go round.
Hunt after the eagle, but if the chase fail, be content if thou but strike off a feather.
Seek to pluck the fruit, but if that escape thee, be satisfied with the leaves.
Ease thy heart from distracting care if fortune be adverse;
For the changing of events gives notice to man of life’s uncertainty.”
Every subsequent Assembly composed by Ḥarîri is but a variation on this theme. His hero, Abû Zayd, is always the same ill-dressed, crafty old man, full of genius and learning, unscrupulous of the artifices which he uses to effect his purpose, reckless in spending in forbidden indulgences the money he has obtained by his wit or deceit, but with veins of true feeling in him, and ever yielding to unfeigned emotion when he remembers his devastated home and his captive child. There can be no doubt that Ḥarîri intends to represent the groundwork of Abû Zayd’s history as true, however much the vagabond improviser may romance on other matters. But it may be as well to mention here a supplement to the tradition concerning the origin of the character. The commentator, Ar Râzi, cited by De Sacy in his commentary to the forty-eighth Assembly, relates as follows: “I was told by the Imâm Al Ḥâfiẓ al Bendehi, who had it from Abû Bekr al Berathîni, who had it from Al Ḥarîri, that the Serûji was a fluent old man, full of eloquence and cleverness, who visited us in Basra, and, standing in the mosque of the Benû Ḥarâm, conversed with the people and asked alms of them. One or more of the magistrates was there, and the mosque was crowded with people of eminence, whom he pleased with the fluency and beauty of his language, describing how his daughter had been made captive by the men of Rûm, as is mentioned in the Assembly called Al Ḥarâmîyeh. “That evening,” continued Ḥarîri, “there were assembled at my house some people of eminence and learning in the city, and I related to them what I had witnessed, describing the eloquence of this mendicant, and his art in effecting his purpose, upon which each one of them told how he had heard the same man discourse in a different mosque, and on a different subject, still more excellently; for he had changed his dress and figure in every mosque, and showed his wit by a variety of artifices. I was filled with wonder, and began that same night the composition of the Assembly Al Ḥarâmîyeh, imitating his style; and when it was finished I read it to a company of the chief people, who admired it exceedingly, and brought it to the knowledge of the Wazîr, Sheref ad Dîn Anûshirwân ibn Khâlid. He pressed me to compose others like it, and I complied.”
There is no reason to doubt the truth of this adventure. The talent for rhetorical and poetical improvisation which had always distinguished the Arabs, even in the most barbarous times, had been so much exercised by the literary fashions of the age, that it was no uncommon thing to find even an obscure and needy person who could pronounce a khoṭbah or moral address in rhymed prose, or could versify on a given theme. The Abû’l Fatḥ of Hamadâni, and the Abû Zayd of Harîri, were not imaginary types, and though we may well suppose that the themes of such strollers were often common-place, and their style unpolished, yet they served to give more gifted persons the idea of a new form of composition. It may even be that the Assemblies of Hamadâni had inspired, here and there, a poor man of letters with the ambition of playing the part of Abû’l Fatḥ, and that Abû Zayd was one of these. However this may be, it is certain that Ḥarîri’s first essay in this kind of writing was received with unbounded applause. The tradition which makes Sheref ad Dîn Abû Naṣr Anûshirwân al Iṣfahani the patron of Ḥarîri is probably correct. He was a man of ability and taste, and became in later years Wazîr to the Khalif Mustarshid billah, and to the Sultan Mas‘ûd. In his Preface Ḥarîri says that the composition of his Assemblies was at the dictation of one whose hint was a command, and to obey whom was a pleasure and advantage. This is generally supposed to refer to Anûshirwân, though Ibn Khallikân, in his life of the author, says, that being at Cairo, in the year 656, he had seen a copy of several of the Assemblies written by the hand of Ḥarîri, and on the cover of them a declaration that he had composed them for the Wazîr Jelâl ad Dîn ‘Amîd ad Dowlat ibn Ṣadaḳah, who was also Wazîr of Mustarshid. But this, which rests only on the doubtful genuineness of a handwriting, cannot outweigh the general tradition that is opposed to it, and Ibn Khallikân himself seems to feel this, for he adds, “God knows the truth.” It is reasonable then to conclude that Anûshirwân, having read the first composed Assembly, and perceiving that Ḥarîri had rivalled in it his predecessor, Badî‘ az Zemân, urged the author to add others to it, and that Ḥarîri obeyed, with less unwillingness and modesty than he pretends. The tradition is, that he composed, from time to time, forty Assemblies, each of them, as we see, recounting an adventure of Abû Zayd, but without any connection with any other. His performances obtained for him the friendship of Anûshirwân, and he frequently visited Bagdad and payed his court to his patron. From a copy of verses preserved by ‘Imâd ad Dîn, it would seem that the author was somewhat importunate in his devotion, for he complains not only of his separation from Anû-shirwân, but also of the latter’s neglect in not answering his letters. But such was the style of the poets of the time, who carried the besetting sins of servility and adulation further than any of their race before or since.
The friendship of Anûshirwân could not, however, prevent Ḥarîri from being endangered both in life and property by the calamities which came upon his city. Wars, predatory inroads of the neighbouring Arabs, political revolutions, followed by merciless executions of men in high position, disturbed many years of the author’s life. But his Assemblies were still given to the world from time to time. As soon as he had composed some ingenious exercise, he fitted it to an adventure of Abû Zayd, named it after some city of Islam, and repairing to the portico of the mosque, read it to the admiring crowd. The learned criticized; some in a friendly spirit, others with less good will, and Ḥarîri never hesitated to correct his work if he found in it an inelegant expression, a word used without authority, a solecism in grammar, a phrase of the Koran or a tradition misapplied, or a proverb wrongly quoted. On the other hand, he maintained his opinion when convinced that he was in the right, explaining his meaning, and refuting his adversaries in commentaries by his own hand, or in lectures to his pupils, whom he instructed in the full meaning of his compositions. His reputation soon surpassed that of the “Wonder of the Time” himself. Nothing so witty, so ingenious, and, what an Arab savant valued above all, so difficult, had ever been produced. Al Hamadâni’s most esteemed compositions were tame when compared with the marvellous rhetoric of his successor. The Assemblies, handed about singly or in groups, made their way to all the cities of the East, and were destined, before the death of their author, to be perused from the Indus to the Guadalquivir.
Yet Ḥarîri was not without his literary mortifications. One of these affected him extremely. Having written no less than forty Assemblies, he collected them into a single volume, and repaired to Bagdad, to enjoy the triumph which ought to await the first man of letters of the time. But envy and misrepresentation had preceded him thither. His opponents were not content with asserting that the work was full of faults, they also affected to believe that it was not his own. Al Ha-madâni had been a real improviser, as has been mentioned; he could compose extempore in prose or verse, and in public, at the request of any bystander. But Ḥarîri was not an Abû’l Fatḥ, or an Abû Zayd. He was a slow and painstaking writer, and his exquisite compositions required time and solitude. A part of the public seems to have assumed the principle, that he who describes an improviser must himself be able to improvise, and finding that Ḥarîri did not possess this faculty, to have argued conversely that he was not the author of the Assemblies. When Ḥarîri came to Bagdad he found that his ability and his honesty were doubted. The adventure which followed is thus related by Ibn Khallikân. “Ḥarîri at first composed only forty Assemblies. Coming from Basra to Bagdad, he presented them as his work, but a number of the literary at Bagdad would not believe that he was the author, and said that the book was the work of a rhetorician of the Maghrib (Western Africa) who had died at Bagdad, and whose papers had fallen into Ḥarîri’s hands. The Wazîr sent for Ḥarîri to the Dîwân, and asked him what was his profession; he replied that he was a munshi (an official writer and composer): the Wazîr then bade him compose a risâleh (a kind of ornate letter or address) on a subject which he named. Ḥarîri retired with ink and paper to a corner of the hall, and remained long, but God inspired him with nothing, and he rose up ashamed.” On this occasion, one of the doubters, Abû’l Ḳâsim ‘Ali ibn Aflaḥ, or, as others say, another poet among his opponents, made a satirical couplet on him:
“We have a Shaykh, descended from Rabî‘at al Faras, who plucks the hairs from his beard in his perplexity:
May God send him an utterance at Meshân, as he has struck him with dumbness at court.”
The point of this lies in the circumstance that Meshân was a place of exile for those who displeased the government at Bagdad, while it was also the site of Ḥarîri’s estate, and the district in which he had discharged official duties. According to Ibn Khallikân it was very unhealthy. It appears, also, that Ḥarîri was accustomed to boast of his descent from Rabî‘ah, and that when engaged in thought he plucked at his beard. “On his return to Basra he composed ten more Assemblies, and sent them to Bagdad, excusing himself for his former incapacity, by alleging his reverential fear in the Wazîr’s presence.” The number of the Assemblies was thus raised to fifty.
From Ḥarîri’s preface, from various indications in the Assemblies themselves, and from traditions handed down by the commentators, we can perceive that the author had to meet other objections to his work. If not a plagiary, he was in the opinion of some an incorrect writer; in the opinion of others a person of doubtful piety. The critics spied out defects in his learning or diction; the rigid inveighed against the lightness of his narratives. Long after the Assemblies were completed, the author in his Preface speaks of their origin, and probably referring his present feeling to the epoch when he began to compose, says that he had sought to excuse himself with his patron from such a work, since he knew the envy and opposition that are excited by authorship. He says that he had reminded him of the proverb concerning the man who puts together but two words, or indites merely a couplet of verses, namely, that if he succeeds he is exposed to envy, and if he fails he is brought into contempt. He anticipates any objections of plagiarism, by stating that in his whole book only four lines of poetry are taken from the writings of others, and that these are introduced avowedly as quotations. The rest, he says, is his own, whether it be good or bad. He speaks with a modesty which was, perhaps, hardly sincere, of the superiority of Al Hamadâni, inasmuch as the latter had originated what he, Ḥarîri, could only imitate. But his chief endeavour is to defend himself from the charge of frivolity, and of giving to the world idle compositions of a kind reproved by the Koran. The strict Moslems had always held works of fiction to be, if not blameable, at least unworthy to be written or perused by serious believers. The people had, indeed, always delighted in the narratives of the story-teller, and yet, with the inconsistency of the multitude, they were inclined to join with those who denounced them as disreputable. The Koran undoubtedly gave a sufficient pretext for bigotry. Mohammed’s anger was often roused by the satires which were directed against him by poets, as well as by the histories and tales which Ḳoraysh preferred to his own revelation. The zeal of the reformer was, perhaps, largely mingled with the jealousy of the author. In later years, when he had become a powerful prince, he showed a more tolerant disposition; he listened to and praised the verses of Al Khansâ, lamented that he had never looked upon the warrior-poet ‘Antarah, and even presided at a mufákharah, or poetical contest, as to superior worth and valour, between the poets of his party and those of Temîm, an incident which led to the conversion of that tribe. But in the Koran and the Traditions there was enough to justify those who denounced such vanities. In the thirty-first Sura it is written, “There is one who will buy idle stories to make men wander from the way of God without knowledge, and who takes them for an amusement. To such a one is a debasing punishment. If our ordinances be recited to him he turns away proudly as though he heard them not, as though a weight were on his ears: announce to him a dolorous punishment.” This passage had descended from on high as a denunciation of Naḍr ibn Al Ḥârith, who had bought books of the Persians, and told stories out of them to the Ḳoraysh (see Bayḍâwi in loco), and had said, “If Mohammed tells you of ‘Âd and Thamûd (the wicked tribes destroyed by God), I will tell you of Rustem and Isfendiar and the Chosroes.” This same Naḍr had also incited the Jews to pose Mohammed with questions concerning the Seven Sleepers and Thu’l Ḳarnayn, and had brought on him a temporary humiliation, when the Prophet had undertaken to answer without having added “If it please God,” and had been therefore left without inspiration, until after a time Gabriel descended and revealed the eighteenth Sura, called the “Cavern.” Naḍr had been afterwards taken prisoner at the battle of Bedr and beheaded by the hand of ‘Ali. As there could be no doubt in the mind of any believer concerning Naḍr’s fate in the next world, his career was a terrible warning to future story-tellers, who should put the untrue on a level with the true. God had also denounced (Sura xxiii, v. 68–69) that idle “night-talking,” in which his messages had been ridiculed, and to which Ḥarîri’s Assemblies bore a suspicious resemblance.
The author did not escape annoyance on this subject. It is related that one Abû Ṭâhir, who afterwards commented the Assemblies, came to Basra, attracted by the reputation of Ḥarîri. He repaired to the mosque to see him, and as at that moment several learned men were there, each surrounded by his circle of listeners, he asked which was Ḥarîri. “There he is,” said one, “spreading his follies among the people.” Abû Ṭâhir, surprised to find so distinguished a man unpopular among his own people, retired without another word.
In the Preface, Ḥarîri takes pains to answer these objections. He says, that though the ignorant and prejudiced might detract from him on account of what he had published, and represent it as belonging to a class of writings prohibited by the law, yet whoever looked at the matter intelligently, and with a due regard to principles, would place the Assemblies in the list of useful writings, like the fables which introduce beasts, or inanimate objects, as discoursing. For the Assemblies, he argues, have like these a moral purpose; they are for instruction, not for display, and the fictitious story tends to the improvement of the listener. So that, if good or ill desert are to be measured by intentions, he is not only blameless, but may claim the merit of a moral and religious teacher. This defence was well adapted to satisfy reasonable theologians, since very few ventured to condemn the fable and the parable, a style of composition immemorial among Eastern nations, sanctioned by the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and singularly pleasing to the popular taste. The fables of Æsop had been known to the Arabs of a very early age, and been attributed to Loḳmân the Wise, a mythical personage whom some made contemporary with King David. The Sanscrit “Hitopadesa” had passed into Arabic literature through a Pehlvi translation under the name of “Kalîleh wa Dimneh,” otherwise known as the Fables of Bidpai. It was one of the most esteemed works in the literature, for the translator ‘Abd allah ibn al Moḳaffa‘, though a Persian by birth and a Magian during the greater part of his life, was so excellent a writer of Arabic that he even affected to surpass the style of the Koran, a piece of blasphemous vanity which shocked the public. ‘Abd allah was horribly murdered by order of the Khalif Manṣûr, about the year 140, but “Kalîleh wa Dimneh” had been in Ḥarîri’s time one of the most popular books in the language for more than three centuries. It may be observed that the Persian “Anwâri Sohayli” is another version of the same work. These stories and others of their kind had been generally looked upon as harmless and even profitable. The liberal minded might even quote the Koran ii. 24, “God is not ashamed to use a gnat or what is little larger, as a similitude.”
We must not deny, however, that those inclined to strictness had some ground for their censures. Ḥarîri is not, indeed, an irreligious or, in any way, an immoral writer. In the whole of the Assemblies, there is not a phrase which can justify a suspicion of free-thinking. His mind and temper were not those of a sceptic, still less of one who would endanger fortune and position by questioning the prevalent theology. Indeed the habit of speculation was at this time on the wane in Irak. The weakness of the Khalifate, and the troubles of the time, had made the learned shrink from anything which might bring them into disfavour, either with the local authority or with the multitude. The new ideas which, under the reign of Ar Reshîd and Al Ma’mûn, had penetrated into Islam, through Persian infidels and Syrian Christians, were now stifled, and Bagdad no longer represented the revolt of a civilized and intellectual society against the narrow formularies of the Koran. The Arab intellect was indeed busy, and some of its greatest masters of philosophy were yet to flourish. But this activity was chiefly in Spain, amid a community which had taken up the tradition of a higher culture, when it was passing away in the East. Though Andalusia had had its troubles, though Cordova had been sacked, the palace of the Khalifs overthrown, the remains of the library of Ḥâkim destroyed, yet, in the time of Ḥarîri, philosophical studies had regained their former sway. It was not so in Irak, and least of all in Basra, which was eminently the Moslem city, and devoted to a strictly orthodox culture. So far as we can judge from the Assemblies, Ḥarîri was utterly ignorant of Greek letters. He may, for what we know, have held the prevalent opinion that they were dangerous, and their patrons, like the Khalif Al Ma’mûn, hardly good Moslems. He was versed in the niceties of doctrine and discipline. The thirty-second Assembly, of which a sketch will be found further on, shows his knowledge of the Shâfi‘î rite, to which he belonged, and at every turn the Koran and the Traditions are quoted. Furthermore, there is a real moral excellence in much that he writes. Many of his discourses and his verses, though ill placed in the mouth of Abû Zayd, are without a blemish. But undoubtedly the spirit of the whole composition might well have offended the more scrupulous. Abû Zayd, with his dishonesty and dissoluteness, is made too attractive, and it is plain that in the mind of the author his genius more than compensates for all his faults. Ḥarîri depicts too favourably the witty and cynical improviser with his two wives—one old and weatherbeaten, like himself; the other a handsome, impudent young jade, the ready instrument in her husband’s knaveries. He has too much partiality for the beautiful and graceless son whom Abû Zayd is bringing up to his own wicked ways, for his descriptions altogether to escape censure. Then the appending of discourses, filled with the most lofty devotion, to the adventures of a profligate, the mingling of the sermon with the jest, of the psalm with the Bacchanalian song, will find objectors at all times. It may be argued in defence of the author that the style of composition had been fixed by his predecessor, Al Hamadâni, and that in so artificial a work the characters must not be judged by the laws of matter-of-fact morality. Abû Zayd and his family are but the setting of the pearls of poetry and rhetoric which the author lavishes on the world.
Some of the Assemblies, though very few of them, are not without a graver fault. Whatever be the age or country of a writer, he cannot but lose in reputation by indecency. Ḥarîri has but very little to answer for on this head: almost everything he has written may be read in any assemblage, and this comparative purity has done much to maintain his book as an instrument of education. Only one Assembly is founded on a trick absolutely indecent. In others there are here and there questionable phrases, which may be rendered by euphemisms, without danger to the sense. Whenever the author is led from the path of decorum, it is by his desire to show his wit in the management of double-entente. This figure, if I may call it so, was looked upon by the literary of the time as a sort of philological exercise; and Ḥarîri, however grave and sober might be his own character, addressed himself to it as he would to any other branch of scholarship. To produce a series of sentences which, to the duller listeners, should be common-place, but should excite a smile of admiration from the quick-witted, was an achievement which Ḥarîri had not the moderation to forego. He also mingled sacred things with something like ribaldry, in a manner that must have given deep offence to strict professors. In his description of his dead warrior, in the twentieth Assembly, he quotes the Koran; and in the forty-fifth, the ceremonies of the Pilgrimage—the most sacred act of Moslem worship—are treated with a licence still more audacious. But I must repeat that these faults are few and far between, that they hardly appear, except to the Arabic student, and detract little from the merit of Ḥarîri’s work.
The composition and correction of the Assemblies occupied the last twenty years of the author’s life. As has been mentioned, he died about the year 1122 of our era, at the age of 68. The arrangement of the work, as we now have it, is by himself, and to several of the Assemblies explanatory notes are added by his own hand. As the adventures of Abû Zayd have little connection with each other, there is hardly a trace of order in the sequence of the compositions. The scene is shifted from one city of the Moslem world to another far remote from it, and the hero appears alone or with his family, in poverty or wealth, without any attempt to form a consistent history. The Ḥarâmîyeh, which was the first composed, is placed forty-eighth in order. Only the first and the last two have any special claim to the place they occupy. In the first, Ḥârith is represented as unacquainted with Abû Zayd. In the forty-ninth, Abû Zayd, being in the decline of life, urges his son to live by the noble and profitable art of begging, and in the fiftieth he is shown as a penitent, redeeming, by a religious life, the errors of his past ways, and parting from Ḥârith for ever. At the end of the Assemblies is a paragraph by the author, in the spirit of his apology in the preface. He says that the composition was a task beyond his strength, and undertaken unwillingly—alluding to the instances of his patron, Anûshirwân. He admits the little merit of his work, and affects to believe that it has had but small success. He asks pardon of God for whatever it contains that is frivolous and unedifying, and throws himself on the divine mercy. This literary modesty we may assume to be hardly sincere. Ḥarîri had really a very high opinion of his own powers, and Abû Zayd’s boasts only represent the author’s estimate of the compositions which he places in the mouth of his hero. Although in the preface he speaks reverentially of Al Hamadâni, we cannot but see that he believed himself to have surpassed his model. In the forty-seventh Assembly Abû Zayd is made to say:—“If the Alexandrian (that is Al Hamadâni’s hero Abû’l Fatḥ), did go before me, know that the light rain precedes the shower, yet the excellency is with the shower.” Indeed the praises which Ḥarîri received were enough to exalt him in his own opinion, and to make him careless of unfriendly critics. Complimentary poems, and still more solid proofs of esteem reached him from his admirers. Mention has been made of the verses of Nejm ad Dowleh, celebrating Ḥarîri’s merits, and lauding him as the glory of the tribe of Temîm. In the thirty-ninth Assembly, Ḥarîri had mentioned in terms of honour the Amîr Dobays, the Asadi, son of Sayf ad Dowleh Ṣadaḳah, the Arab prince of Ḥilleh, and in the commentary of Sherîshi it is related that Dobays was so delighted with the compliment that he sent him presents of the most costly kind.
More happy than this benefactor, who was put to death by the Seljûk Sultan Mas‘ûd, or, according to another account, was driven out of the country, and joined the Christian crusaders in Syria, the author of the Assemblies ended his days in peace. He left three sons, who followed the profession of their father, and appear to have been men of ability and learning. One of them, ‘Obayd allah, became chief Kadi of Basra; another, Abû’l Ḳâsim ‘Abd allah, was an official at Bagdad; the third, Abû’l ‘Abbâs Moḥammed, succeeded his father in his post at Meshân. They had been well instructed by Ḥarîri in the Assemblies, in order that they might teach them after his death, and explain their difficulties to the numerous students. Of Abû’l ‘Abbâs it is said that he was a learned and eloquent man, especially versed in the Assemblies and ready with the best explanations. From these and other pupils the first commentators derived their materials. Among the contemporaries of the author, who admired and studied his work, the first place is due to Zamakhshari. He will be found frequently mentioned by the commentators, under this name or that of Jâr allah “the neighbour of God,” which he received from having passed several years at Mecca. In learning he was not inferior to Ḥarîri, and he was especially one of the acutest grammarians of the age. But it is as a commentator on the Koran that he is chiefly famous. His great work, of which an excellent edition has been published at Calcutta, is the foundation of the more commonly used commentary of Bayḍâwi, who has borrowed from it largely. But as Zamakhshari was tainted with the doctrines of the Mu‘tazilûn, his work has never been held as a sound guide, while Bayḍâwi represents the strictest Sunni orthodoxy. Zamakhshari read the Assemblies with admiration, and placed them on a level with the Mo‘al-laḳât. Two verses which he composed upon them have often been prefixed to the manuscript copies, and will be found on the title-page of De Saey’s edition:—
“I swear by God and his wonders, by the place of the pilgrimage and its rite,
Ḥarîri is worthy that his Assemblies should be written in letters of gold.”
Such was the judgment of contemporaries: of his posthumous fame I shall have to speak in connection with his imitators and commentators.
Ibn Khallikân tells us that Ḥarîri was of mean aspect, and extremely ugly. A stranger who came to visit him, and to study under him, did not sufficiently conceal his dislike of the master’s appearance. Ḥarîri addressed him in some verses, the purport of which was that,—
“I am a man to be heard of, not to be seen.”
The reader will have already gathered that the Assembly is a kind of dramatic anecdote in the telling of which the author’s object is to display his poetry, his eloquence, or his learning, and that with this view the subject is continually subordinated to the treatment of it, the substance to the form. But a full understanding of these compositions and of the two elements of which they consist, namely the rhymed prose and the verse, cannot be obtained without a consideration of the earlier Arabic literature. The origin of poetry among the Arabs, as among other peoples, is lost in obscurity; but there is a general consent that in primitive times there was no poetry save the verses which each man uttered as he had occasion. A singular aptitude for poetical expression, and an impulse towards it, distinguished both sexes from the earliest ages. The feelings of love or hate, of pride, defiance, ridicule, or pity, found utterance in verse, and this faculty of improvisation was, it would seem, cultivated assiduously even by the most barbarous tribes. The warrior defying his opponent in the field, the lover imploring his mistress, the herald in presence of a hostile band, would declaim a distich, or more; and these utterances, if they contained some striking thought or phrase, were handed down, and inseparably associated with his name. This was the origin of Arab poetry, and it is well to bear in mind its chief characteristic, for it is one which runs through the literature from first to last. From the earliest recorded versicles down to the artificial pastiches produced at Cairo or Beyrout in the present day, the form of the Arab poem is that of an allocution. The dramatic and the epic elements are almost wanting. It is the poet who addresses his friend, or his patron, or the world, and makes known the feelings of his own soul, just as did the unlettered chieftain of pagan Arabia. His personality always pierces through the composition, as also does for the most part the personality of him who is addressed. The poet never effaces himself, he is always present, telling us what he thinks and feels, and bidding us notice that it is his panegyric, and his satire, and his moral observations that we are reading.
It is worth while to give some specimens of these traditionary versicles in order that the reader may view the earliest and least developed form, the palæ-ozoic life, of Arabic poetry. For the purpose of illustration it does not matter whether the lines were actually spoken by the legendary personages to whom they are attributed: in some cases we know this to be impossible, in most it is very doubtful. But it is certain that the verses are of considerable antiquity, that they have come down from days when the regular poem, the ḳaṣîdeh, had not yet been developed, and that they do actually represent that kind of improvised poetical utterance to which each man had recourse on occasion.
Ẓarîfeh, the wife of ‘Amr ibn ‘Âmir Muzayḳîyâh, had a dream which presaged the breaking of the dyke of Mareb, the event known in Arab tradition as the Sayl al ‘Arim (see note to 17th Assembly). Horror-stricken she addressed her husband,—
“Nought have I seen, O king, like to-day:sup>1
I have seen a cloud that banished sleep,
A cloud that lightened long,
That thundered and its bolt burst forth.
It set in flames all on which it fell,
Nor remained ought but it was o’erwhelmed.”
To the questions of her husband Ẓarîfeh returns poetical answers of the same kind, and succeeds in persuading ‘Amr to quit the country. Of a similar character is the dialogue between Jathîmet al Abrash, king of Hira, and his sister Raḳâsh, when the latter hastily married ‘Adî ibn Naṣr, after the king’s consent had been obtained during a fit of drunkenness,—
“Tell me, O Raḳâsh, and deceive me not,
Hast thou given thyself to a free man, or to a base born?
Or to one lower, for thou art fit for one lower?
Or to a slave, for thou art fit for a slave?”
Raḳâsh answered,—
“Thou gavest me in marriage, and I knew it not
Till the women came to adorn me.
This is from thy drinking the strong unmixed wine,
And thy continuing in thy folly.”
The early legends are full of such lines, which, whether or not we admit their authenticity in each case, bear testimony to the habit of the Arabs to use such poetical discourse. Now there are two forms which the poetical diction of the race has taken for itself. The first of these is the rhymed prose, such as makes up the greater part of the Assemblies of Ḥarîri, the other is metrical verse such as Abû Zayd declaims here and there. It is worth while to consider the origin of these two dissimilar forms of poetical expression, and how it comes to pass that each should have so permanent a popularity, and be united with the other in the same composition.
It is impossible to become acquainted with Arabic literature without perceiving that there is a fundamental relationship between the poetry of the Hebrew and that of the desert tribes, whose intellect was first awakened fifteen hundred years later. On the resemblance, or we might rather say the identity, of the vocabulary of the two languages it is needless to speak. It is said that six-sevenths of the Hebrew roots are to be found in the Arabic Lexicon, and whole classes of the most familiar words, such for instance as the parts of the body, are the same in both languages. Such a radical identity of speech not only proves a community of race, but justifies us in believing that the intellectual tendencies and the forms in which they would arrange themselves would be similar. Both the Hebrew and the Arabic poetical literature were built up, we may assume, on the common foundation of the Semitic life, and they certainly amid all their diversity, bear traces of this primitive union. On this point it is interesting to compare the versicles which we find attributed to the early heroes and heroines of Arabia with those which are imbedded in the most ancient narratives of the Old Testament. Of these the one which comes to us as absolutely primeval, and which probably has a very high antiquity, is the address of Lamech to his two wives, which in our version runs as follows:—
“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice,
Ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech:
For I have slain a man to my wounding,
And a young man to my hurt.
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,
Truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.”
The origin and meaning of this strange composition are lost to us. But to whomsoever it is to be attributed, it undoubtedly belongs to that kind of poetical utterance on occasion which existed among the early Arabs. It may be noticed here that the first four lines of Lamech’s song have a species of rhyme in the uniform desinence of the affixed pronoun. The curse and blessing of Noah on his sons, though less poetical in form, may be considered as belonging to the same class. Compare also the answer of Jehovah to Rebekah when she inquires concerning the struggling of the children in her womb, and the blessings of Isaac upon Jacob and Esau. Compare also the blessings pronounced upon Israel by Balaam, the curse on Moab at Numbers xxi. 27, and the song of Israel at the digging of the well, verse 17. With the age in which these compositions were produced we are not concerned. It may be that some of them express the patriotic pride of Israel after the triumphant establishment of the tribes in Canaan. But neither the popular tradition nor the historical compilation would have attributed such a diction to patriarchal times unless the habit of poetical expression in important circumstances of life had been known among the people. In fact, the original type of Hebrew poetry is ever the ode, or song, inspired by some great event, and showing forth the joy or sorrow, the thankfulness or supplications, of the poet. Such are the songs of Moses in Exodus and Deuteronomy, the song of Deborah, the lamentation of David over Jonathan, and the Book of Psalms generally. Like the Arab poetry, they are the expression of individual feeling in which the personality of the bard is never lost, and it is reasonable to believe that the original type of them was a species of improvised utterance common to both these branches of the Semitic race.
A further similarity is to be found in the form of
Hebrew poetry. The reader of the English translation of
the Bible can comprehend, as well as the scholar, the prevailing
characteristic of a great part of its poetical language.
This is what is called parallelism, which consists
in making the second clause of a sentence answer to the
first, either in the way of antithesis, or by the expression
of the same idea in different words, or by the amplification
of the idea. It is, as it were, a rhyme of the sense, and not
of the sound. This peculiar structure of Hebrew poetry
has rendered it especially fitted for translation, since
it is independent of the tongue in which it is expressed,
and can only be destroyed by gross want of taste in the
interpreter. Whoever will content himself with a literal
rendering of those sublime thoughts, may transfer the
Bible to his own language essentially unharmed. The
loose paraphraser may dissipate the spirit of the Psalms,
or the Book of Job; nothing that is grand or beautiful
can survive his incapacity; but the experience of ages
has proved that the power of the Hebrew writers has
been hardly diminished in the translations which have
made them known to the Christian world. This parallelism
is the chief though not the only formal rule of Hebrew
poetry. Where it is absent we find its place supplied by
strophic arrangements of the versicles, by refrains of
words, by alliteration, and to some extent even by rhyme.
But whatever rhythmical aids the Hebrew poetry may
have adopted, we must hold as established that it was
not subjected to the laws of what we call prosody. For
centuries this has been doubted, and writers of succeeding
ages, both Jews and Christians, have sought to discover
in the poetical books of the Bible certain rules of versification.
The vain efforts of European scholars have been
mainly incited by the declarations of Josephus. That so
famous and so learned a writer should have erred, is not to
be admitted without manifest proof, yet the barrenness of
the labours of so many ingenious men seems to leave no
doubt that the author of the Antiquities of the Jews misunderstood
or misrepresented the genius of what had in
his time already become an archaic language. Desirous,
apparently, to give the Hebrew literature importance by
showing that it was formed on models similar to those of
Greece and Rome, Josephus speaks of the hexameter,
pentameter, and trimeter measures that are to be found
in the Bible. Of the song of Exodus xv. he says:
Nor ought the Arabic scholar to wonder at its absence. Josephus and Jerome were prepossessed by the analogy of the classic languages; the scholars of modern Europe, who came to the study of Hebrew with tastes formed on classic canons, may have thought poetry without metre to be impossible, and hoped that the key which should unlock the secrets of Hebrew prosody would be yielded to persevering ingenuity. But the Arabic scholar is aware that the most ancient, the most popular, the most sublime, and powerful order of poetry in the Arabic language is as little metrical as Isaiah or Job. Among both races the original and primeval type of poetry is the old Semitic unmetrical accordance. Among both the simplest element of poetical speech, the primitive literary unit, is the Versicle, a short and serried sentence vigorously expressing a single idea, and detached from what goes before and comes after it. This, in its original form, as it exists in Hebrew and in a large department of Arabic poetry, is without metre. All poetry in both languages is made up by the agglutination of these versicles to one another; but the Arab type differs from the Hebrew in this, that whereas the Hebrew chiefly confines itself to parallelism, that is to a polarity or dualism between two versicles, the Arabic possesses this dualism, combined with the principle of continuity. The dualism appears in the parallelistic speech, as it was uttered by the orators of the desert, and as it exists in the Assemblies of Ḥarîri. The continuity is more conspicuous in the semi-metrical verse, called rejez, while both are combined in those compositions of a stricter prosody which alone the Arabs dignify with the name of poetry.
When we examine the most ancient legends that have come down to us we find that they contain poetical utterances in the unmetrical form. Ẓarîfeh, of whom we have already spoken, prophesies the bursting of the dyke of Mareb in rhymed prose:—
“By the light and the dark; by the earth and the heaven;
Surely the trees shall perish; and the waters shall return as in the time of old.”
In each of these lines the first and second parts rhyme in their last word, while the whole is unmetrical. In the ensuing dialogue the answers of Ẓarîfeh are in a similar strain and rhythm, and whoever may have been the author of them, they undoubtedly represent the oldest form of Arab poetical speech.
I would, therefore, place the rhymed prose of the Arabs as the analogue of the Hebrew poetry, and refer the origin of both to the primeval ages of the Semitic race. To utter one versicle, and attach to it another with an antithetic correspondence in sense or sound, formed the germ of all poetical composition. This parallelism, which among the Pagan Arabs was generally applied to a discourse in this style, perhaps existed before rhyme was introduced, for it is said that in ancient times the khoṭbah, or oratorical address, was not rhymed. But rhyme was at a later period universal, and the rhymed prose to which the Arabs gave the name of ◌, from a fancied resemblance between its rhythm and the cooing of a dove, is the peculiar diction of the race. It may almost be said that there can be no narration or oratory of the highest order except in rhymed prose. It is beyond a doubt that it was cultivated among the tribes long before regular poetry was known, and was used almost in common conversation. Whenever the speaker wished to be emphatic and impressive he supplemented the proposition he uttered by another of similar tenor, which should rhyme with it in the last word. This will be sufficiently comprehended by whoever reads the present translation of the Assemblies. Women and even children learned to throw their thoughts into this rhythmical form, which gave an epigrammatic piquancy to their addresses or retorts. The rhymed diction of ordinary life was doubtless of the most simple kind, consisting of but two or three short sentences of similar desinence; but on greater occasions long orations in this style were uttered. The chief of a tribe addressing his followers, the herald claiming satisfaction or hurling defiance, the plaintiff before the judge, the rivals contending for superiority of pedigree or achievements spoke with rhyme. Eloquence was looked upon as tame and powerless without this symbol of elevated style. The history of rhymed prose is the history of the Arabic literature. It was the earliest, and has been the most enduring form of poetical eloquence. From the orators of the Ignorance it was adopted by the preachers of Islam, and the name ◌ was applied to the weekly exhortations of the mosque, which are commonly in rhymed prose. Works of the highest character have been written throughout with rhyme, among which I may mention, on account of its extraordinary merits, the History of Timur or Tamer-lane by Ibn ‘Arabshah. This composition, which approaches nearer to the epic poem than anything in the language, is one of the latest productions of the great ages of Arabian literature. Sir W. Jones bears witness to the genius of the author. “Equidem inter poemata heroica Timuri historiam, quam composuit scriptor admirabilis Ebn Arabshah, non vereor recensere: ita pulchris enim abundat imaginibus, ita jucundis narra-tionibus, et descriptionibus naturæ, morum, affectuum; ita magnificis illuminatur figuris, tam dulci numerorum varietate, tantâ elegantiarum copiâ conspergitur ut nihil cogitari possit accommodatius ad lectorem vel delectan-dum, vel docendum, vel etiam permovendum. (Poeseos Asiaticæ Comentarii.)”
In this work rhyme and assonance abound with a luxuriance that almost oppresses the reader, and the employment of such a style by an author of originality and genius, who had before him the greatest productions of his predecessors, shows how deeply rooted in the nature of the people was the sentiment for unmetrical cadence. In almost all Arabic works the Invocation and Preface with which the book begins are also in rhymed sentences: in the ordinary prose of the most sober narratives rhyme continually appears when the writer is describing anything which excites admiration or astonishment. So independent of a metrical prosody is poetry among the Arabs.
The reasons for the prevalence of rhyme, and for the undoubted fact that it has existed anterior to and independent of metre, may be found in the structure of the Arabic language, and the mathematical precision of its forms. If the root letters of a word be represented by white counters, and the ten augmentative letters— those contained in the words ◌—be represented by coloured counters, every strictly Arabic word, whether primitive or derived, can be expressed to the mind so that we can say whether the counters mean that the action indicated by the root is past or present, is performed by male or female, or whether they signify him who does the action, or who suffers it, or who is of a capacity to do it, and so on of a multitude of notions related to the root. The derivative idea is always expressed by the same derivative form, and a form of one root is necessarily assonant to the same form of another. Here then is a connexion between the sound and the signification of words which would naturally suggest the use of rhyme: and we may conclude that it made its appearance not merely in obedience to a rhythmical impulse of the soul, but as representing a real connexion and responsion of ideas.
I have said that the Arab poetical speech not only makes use of parallelism as in the simplest form of rhymed prose, but also expresses itself in a sequence of corresponding versicles. These, whether metrical or not, have a continuous rhyme, and such a sequence of continuously rhymed periods is the germ of the Arabic poem. The unmetrical sequence is to be found in its highest perfection in the earlier and more poetical Suras of the Koran, when Mohammed, first touched with the prophetic afflatus, poured forth his warnings and denunciations among the Ḳoraysh. It is related of Mohammed that he was ignorant of the laws of versification, as they were employed by the great poets of the century which preceded him; and that when by chance he quoted a verse he often destroyed the metre by changing the order of the words. Thus, when ‘Abbâs, son of Merdâs, and of Khansâ, the poetess, dissatisfied with a division of spoil, addressed the Prophet in some verses, among which was the line:—
“My booty and the booty of my horse ‘Obayd has been given to ‘Onaynah and Al Aḳra‘.”
Mohammed quoting the line said, “Al Aḳra‘ and ‘Onay-nah,” which destroyed the metre. Abû Bekr corrected him, and observed, “Truly has God said in the Koran, ‘We have not taught him poetry and it suits him not,’” Koran, xxxvi. 69. But Mohammed had a poetic style of his own, which was consonant with the deepest feelings of his race. In his transports of zeal or devotion he uttered his unmetrical rhythms and awed even his most determined enemies. The shortest and simplest, but not the least powerful of these, are the Suras which are placed at the end of the Koran, and consist of but a few versicles, as the Ikhlâṣ, in which he clears or quits himself of believing in any but God; the Suras called Al Falaḳ and An Nâs, in which he invokes the divine assistance against calamity; and that in which he curses Abû Lahab and his wife. The most poetical Suras are somewhat longer, but present the same characteristics. According to tradition, the first revelation received by the Prophet was the 96th Sura, called Al ‘Alak. In this the rhyme is four times changed, the versicles of each paragraph being marked by a different desinence. The two first versicles have one desinence, the three next another, the nine next a third, the four next a fourth, while the last, according to a caprice which is to be met with more than once, rhymes to no other.
One of the noblest compositions in the Koran is the 81st Sura, called At Tekwîr, descriptive of the day of judgment. It begins as follows:—
“When the sun shall be enwrapped;
When the stars shall shoot down;
When the mountains shall be moved;
When the brood camels shall be abandoned;
When the wild beasts shall troop together;
When the seas shall boil;
When the souls shall join the bodies;
When the maid buried alive shall be asked
For what crime she was slain;
When the leaves of the Book shall be opened;
When the heaven shall be drawn aside;
When the blaze of hell shall be kindled;
When the Garden shall be brought near,
The soul shall know its work.”
These fourteen versicles have the same desinence; then the Prophet takes another, to which he gives four versicles; and lastly, a third, to which he gives eleven. This last paragraph is marked by the peculiarity that in the rhyme it makes no distinction between the letters Mîm and Nûn, owing, doubtless, to the close relation between their sounds. I might multiply examples, but shall content myself with drawing the student’s attention to the 87th and 92nd Suras, which have a continuous rhyme throughout, one of nineteen and the other of twenty-one verses, and requesting him to compare them with the 20th Sura, in which the same rule is observed with longer and more prosaic sentences.
These rhymed but unmetrical utterances of Mohammed make a nearer approach to versification than the ordinary rhymed prose, which consists of but two ḳari-netân , or corresponding sentences, rhyming with each other, inasmuch as the former have the continuous rhyme, which is a chief characteristic of the regular poetry. But a still further advance is represented by the semi-metrical rejez. This is the oldest and simplest form of versification known among the Arabs, and vast numbers of lines belonging to it were handed down from the pre-Islamic period. It was the favourite vehicle for the poetical or sententious utterances of chiefs and warriors, sages and diviners. When poetry was more seriously cultivated, its composers aspired to a more harmonious and dignified measure, and placed themselves under the restrictions of a more elaborate prosody; but the early declaimers, who improvised in obedience to the feelings of the moment, and were probably unconscious that they were uttering poetry at all, contented themselves with the rude measure which reminded the hearer of the weak and trembling trot of the sickly she-camel. The rejez in its normal form consists of a foot, ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯, twice or three times repeated, but as each of the first three syllables may be made long or short, the structure is simple to baldness, and the tone undignified. Khalîl ibn Aḥmed, though he gave the rejez a place in his Circles, would not admit that lines composed in it were ◌ or poetry, since they wanted the peculiar property of the Arabic ◌ or verse, which consists invariably of two hemistiches. Yet the rejez, though superseded in ambitious compositions by more perfect metres, has never been neglected by the literary. It has always received a kind of respect as a primitive form of versification, descended from the heroic ages, and still adapted to short and pithy compositions. Ḥarîri makes much use of it in his work, and for excellent specimens of it the student may be referred to the Third and Fifth Assemblies. The Arabic prosodists seem to have detected the relationship of the rejez to rhymed prose, for Al Akhfash held that the two-footed rejez was only prose. The first who composed a regular poem, or ḳaṣideh, in rejez, is said to have been Al Aghlab al ‘Ajili, in the time of Mohammed. After him came Al ‘Ajâj; but I believe that no long poem of conspicuous merit has been written in this measure. The grammatical treatise, called the Alfîyeh, by Ibn Mâlik, which is often cited in the notes to this translation, is in rejez muzdawij; that is, the second hemistich of each verse rhymes with the first, and each rhyme is limited to a single verse. So also are the “Beauties of Syntax,” by Ḥarîri.
Verse, or poetry proper, was a development of rejez. As poetical culture was extended, the Arabs felt the want of more harmonious and stately measures, and gradually formed for themselves a more varied and yet a more severe versification. Throughout the Arab prosody we may, however, trace the primitive and rudimentary rejez in the iambic and anapæstic character of the lines. The taste and scholarship of Ḥarîri have enabled him to diversify his work by introducing most the metres which were in use in his time; but among the older poets only four or five of these were commonly employed. In the celebrated collection of Arab verses, called the Ḥamâseh of Abû Temmâm, more than five hundred of the pieces are in the metre ṭawîl; the kâmil, wâfir, and basîṭ follow at a great distance, each having less than a hundred, while the others are but sparingly used. Of the seven Mo‘allaḳât, as generally given, those of Imr al Ḳays, Ṭarafeh, and Zohayr ibn Abi Sulmè are of the metre ṭawîl, those of Lebîd and ‘Antarah are kâmil, that of ‘Amr ibn Kulthûm is wâfir, and that of Ḥârith ibn Ḥillizeh is khafîf. The favourite metre of the early poets, the ṭawîl, is remarkable for its grave and sonorous character—it may be called the heroic measure of the Arabs. In some verses, addressed by Abû ’l ‘Ala to a man of letters, the poet, excusing his own deficiencies, says, by way of illustration, “Do you not know that the metre which is the most complete of metres, is sometimes modified by a weak letter.” This epithet of “complete” is explained to refer to the ṭawîl, because a verse of this metre may consist of forty-eight letters, while in the medîd and basîṭ the longest verse can only contain forty-two. This property from which it takes its name, and also the prevalence of long syllables, made it especially suitable to the loftier class of poetry, whether descriptive or elegiac. The kâmil is in its structure the most closely related to the rejez. Indeed, a kâmil line may become pure rejez by the employment of permissible licences, though if the peculiarity of the kâmil, the use of two short syllables at the beginning of the foot appear even once, the poem is considered to be in kâmil, and not in rejez. It would, therefore, seem that kâmil and the closely related metre wâfir represent the first developments of the rejez, and mark the transition to a more elaborate versification.
Ḥarîri, one of whose aims was to exhibit the classic
metres, uses for the most part those for which there is
high authority; but, long before his time, the poets of
Islam had added to the number which had been known
during the Ignorance. Although the metres of the old
time were looked upon as the best and noblest, and
justly so, since they sprang from the original poetical life
of the people, yet the craving for variety, and, perhaps,
the intercourse with other nations, led poets to seek new
forms of versification. One of the first who did this
was the celebrated Ḥabîb ibn ‘Ows, commonly known
as Abû Temmâm. He was born about the year 190
(
It will thus be seen that in the Assemblies the highest literary forms of the language are united. Abû Zayd’s harangues and sermons are those of the pagan orator or the Moslem preacher; Ḥârith’s descriptions are in the rhetorical style which the most accomplished writers imitated from them; the diversified poetry of the Arabs, from the simple rejez to the most ornate diction of the ḳaṣîdeh, is represented in Abû Zayd’s verses, and we have a compendium of all that had established itself in popular favour during many centuries. European readers will perhaps wonder that the author, who was master of such resources, should have restricted himself to two or three characters, and to such a monotony of adventure. He has evidently fancy and originality: how is it then that, having advanced so far to the dramatic form, he should not have been led to improve on his type, to place Abû Zayd in more varied circumstances, and surround him with more interesting people? We have all through the same adventurer, making gain by tricks which resemble each other; we have always the circle of dilettanti, or the Kadi generous, or foolish, or stingy, as the case may be. Yet the author, whatever may be his apprehensions of other demerits, never excuses himself for his repetitions. One explanation of this is that the adventure is always treated as subordinate to the poetical or rhetorical display, that the audience did not care how Abû Zayd was brought on the stage so long as he discoursed with sentiment and wit. But it must also be observed that this uniformity of type is one of the characteristics of Arabic literature. The East has never been studious of novelty, and if a thing was good, an audience would not weary of it any more than of the striped mantle, or the turban which had been worn from time immemorial. We modern followers of fashion, who cannot read the same authors, follow the same amusements, or wear the same shaped clothes two years together, have an impatience of monotony unknown even to our own European race in former ages. The comedy of the ancients had but a limited range of character and incident. The two old men, and the “cultus adulter, stultus vir, callida nupta” were reproduced in a manner which in modern times would weary the most indulgent audience. The popular Italian comedy with its harlequin and scaramouch carried sameness to the extreme. The people in its unsophisticated state loves to recur to familiar types, as a child will sooner hear Jack the Giant Killer, or Tom Thumb, for the tenth time than be told a new story. This clinging to established forms is especially remarkable among the people of the Semitic race. Successive generations of writers are content to produce variations upon a single theme. To fear the reproach of imitation never enters the mind of those to whom the prevalent usage has almost the sanctity of a law. They follow the manner, and even repeat the phrases of compositions consecrated by antiquity, or popular esteem; for their countrymen, far from desiring originality of style, would probably resent it. So we find some of the later Hebrew Psalms to be almost a repetition of those of an earlier age, and as if pieced together from their fragments. The diction of prophecy is fixed by Joel, or by some predecessor whose compositions have not reached us, and through five centuries the strain of promise and malediction never varies. The spirit, the style, the images, the rhetoric, are everywhere identical. We can see that each prophet is inspired, not only by his own fervent genius, but by the utterances of those who have gone before, and that he adopts instinctively and, it may be, unconsciously, the traditional sacred language of his order. We have even direct imitations of particular passages, as, for instance, the prophecy against Moab at Jeremiah xlviii., which is plainly taken from Isaiah xv. and xvi.; also the curse of Jeremiah on his birth at xx. 14, which is identical with the opening verses of the third chapter of Job.
In Arabic literature the same character is manifest. The poet never hesitates to fashion his composition after a prevailing type, and to repeat this continually without any striving for originality. To mould his production on any other than the traditional form would be to expose himself to the charge of bad taste, and what was worse, of want of learning. The ḳaṣîdeh, the finished poem of the Arabs, was subjected to arbitrary laws, which, though perfectly needless, were observed by numberless writers as if sacred and inviolable. The first ḳaṣîdeh is attributed to Mohalhil Ibn Rabî‘ah, who composed it on his brother Kolayb Wâ’il, one of the most celebrated persons of antiquity; but the poet who impressed on the ḳaṣîdeh the type which it retained for ages was the celebrated Imr al Ḳays, the son of Mohal-hil’s sister Fâṭimeh. The judgment of Mohammed and ‘Omar upon this prince of Arab bards has been already mentioned. The Khalif ‘Ali, a man of taste and culture, was also full of admiration for the great poet of the Ignorance. These three founders of Islam only followed the opinion of the most illustrious people of their age, and transmitted it to posterity. Imr al Ḳays had introduced, or first made popular, a certain opening of the ḳaṣîdeh, which consisted of an address of the poet to two friends, who were supposed to have halted with him at a spot where at some past time the tribe of the poet’s mistress had dwelt. The poet points out the traces of the encampment, the ashes of the extinguished fires, the deserted pen of the camels, entertains them with the story of his loves, and then passes, by an abrupt transition, to the proper subject of his poem. This capricious overture caught the fancy of contemporary poets, and to introduce a subject by the two boon companions, the mistress, and the deserted encampment, became a favourite device. Each of the seven Mo‘allaḳât opens in this manner, and what was originally only the caprice of a single poet became an almost inviolable law. Even Ḥârith, son of Ḥillizeh, who was a hundred years old when he improvised his Mo‘allaḳah before ‘Amr ibn Hind, and so leprous that he stood behind a veil till the king, delighted with his poetry, bade him come forth and sit by his side, laments his separation from an imaginary beauty. Succeeding poets followed the same fashion. Whatever the occasion of the ḳaṣîdeh, the writer intrc-duced his mistress, praising her beauty, and lamenting her absence, before he turned to his subject, which was generally the eulogy of some great man. Mutenebbi’s mistress figures in some of his poems, but he is said to have been the first to have discontinued this nasîb, or mention of the beloved one, and to have begun with the eulogy of the patron. Such a poem was, however, not judged to be complete according to poetical laws, and was described by the words ◌ and ◌, as if docked or truncated. It is needless to dwell upon the general uniformity of the Arab ḳaṣîdehs in other respects. The poet praises himself, his race, his camel, his horse, his martial exploits, his sword and spear, and, in later times, the prince whose favour he desires to win. For centuries every composition of this class was constructed on the same type, and limited to the same narrow range of ideas. The poet’s merits were judged by the skill with which he reproduced and varied the thoughts of antiquity. We need not wonder, then, that Ḥarîri neglected to change the character of the Assemblies as received by him from Hamadâni. Not only did the traditional improviser and râwi suffice for his contemporaries, but even succeeding imitators have never thought it necessary to add to the persons of the drama. The Assemblies of Naṣîf al Yazaji, composed within the last few years, are as rigidly simple in their structure as the productions of eight hundred years ago.sup>1
It now remains for me to speak of those qualities of Ḥarîri’s work which give it so great a linguistic value, and have made it, wherever the Arabic language is studied, the text-book of those who would obtain a profound and scientific knowledge. It is not too much to say that whoever has read the Assemblies and their commentators, will have formed a notion of every department of purely Arabic and Moslem culture. Grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, poetry, history, antiquities, biography, popular customs and sayings, theology, religious traditions, civil and ecclesiastical law,—all enter into the work; which is, as it were, a compendium of “leading cases,” in all sorts of studies. The student is placed on the track of almost every kind of learning, and if he follows the indications of the author, and seeks, with the help of the commentators, to explain his allusions, penetrate his intentional obscurities, overcome his cunningly-devised difficulties, verify his endless quotations, and keep in memory the multifarious information on language and grammar, he will have been initiated into all the learning of the author’s age, and in his subsequent studies will have only to build on a foundation which has been solidly and securely laid.
The first peculiarity of the Assemblies is the use of words which are rare but ancient, classical, and remarkable in the eyes of the learned, from their having been found in some esteemed composition, and become the subject of doubt or contention. In the time of the author the language was much corrupted among the people, by long intermixture with foreign races. The Arabs had always held the belief that seclusion from the rest of mankind was necessary to preserve the purity of their language. The undefiled speech of the race was only to be found among those tribes of Ḥijâz or Nejd which had lived remote from Persian or Greek influence, and developed the Semitic tongue into the matchless idiom of the Mo‘allaḳât and the Koran. Ibn Khaldûn, an acute and reflecting writer, and in critical power above most of his countrymen, speaks in a well-known passage of the corruption of the Arab language. He says that the descendants of Moḍar, who used the classical language, lost the faculty of speaking it in purity by dwelling among people of other races, since they borrowed of them forms and words. And for this reason, he continues, the speech of Ḳoraysh was the most eloquent and pure, since they were most remote from the abodes of foreigners. Next in excellence was the speech of Thaḳîf and Hothayl and Khozâ‘ah, and the Benû Kinâneh and Ghaṭafân and the Benû Asad, and the Benû Temîm. But as for the tribes more remote from Ḳoraysh—as Rabî‘ah, and Lakham, and Jothâm, and Ghassân, and Iyyâd, and Ḳoḍâ‘ah, and the Arabs of Yemen, their speech was imperfect, through their mixture with the Persians and the Abyssinians; and thus, in the opinion of Arabic linguists, the greater or less distance of a tribe from Ḳoraysh was the measure of its deflection from the pure language of Moḍar. It may be noticed here that this opinion concerning the conservation of the language in the heart of the peninsula has acquired an irresistible argument from the travels of Mr. Palgrave, who has satisfied scholars that the language of the Koran, with all its inflections and syntax, is still the dialect of the secluded Nejd. But in the days of Ḥarîri, and in the city of Basra, the chaste speech of the Arabs was the possession of only a few. The unlettered Bedouin, who came with camels or horses from the desert was, for the use of words and their precise pronunciation, a greater authority than the most learned grammarian. For the corruption that had set in immediately after the first conquests of Islam, had so transformed the speech of Irak and Syria, that the classic language, in its refinement, was obsolescent, and had become the artificial study of the lecture-room and the mosque. Even so early as the close of the first century of the Hijra, the great Khalif, Welîd ibn ‘Abd el Melik, spoke so corrupt a dialect that he could not make himself understood by the Arabs of the desert.sup>1 Great scholars like Sîbawayh and Zamakhshari, are said to have possessed in perfection the idiom of Moḍar, though not even of Arab blood, but Ibn Khaldûn relates that they had acquired this by mingling from infancy with men of the tribes who spoke a chaste language. To the great number, even of the educated, the speech of Ḳoraysh and of the great poets was almost a dead language, not only as regarded its desinences and constructions, but even as to the use of individual words. Now this ancient speech, which every day became less understood of the people, was the principal study of the learned. Grammatical researches began in the first century of Islam, through the necessity of explaining doubtful passages of the Koran. It was then that the diacritical points were added to certain letters, the Arabs having originally, in the little that they wrote, expressed more than one sound by the same character,—a practice which filled the sacred text with ambiguity. The tyrant Ḥajjâj ibn Yûsuf was, according to Ibn Khallikân, the first who attempted to remedy this defect, but his system differed from that which was afterwards introduced by Abû ’l Aswad. As the vocabulary of the language increased, through a sort of fusion of the dialects of the tribes, which took place in the non-Arabian provinces; as various forms of the same word, of greater or less authority, came to be indiscriminately used; and as the multitude borrowed from the Persian, the Syriac, or the Greek, so much more did the learned think it incumbent upon them to separate the chaste idiom from the corrupt, to show what was Arab and what was A‘jamî or foreign; to determine the most genuine form of any word that was spelt or pronounced in more than one manner, to declare whether ◌ or ◌ or ◌ or ◌ or ◌ was correct, to decide on the presence or absence of hamzeh, and to fulfil for the people the functions of an Academy of Letters.
Theirs was no easy task. The European, who launches out into the vast ocean of the Arabic language, knows how long and weary is the voyage, and yet he has to guide him the grammatical luminaries of a thousand years. The doctor of Basra or Kufa did, indeed, speak the language which he commented, but this very familiarity in some respects increased his difficulties. He dwelt amid a Babel of conflicting forms and vocables, and had to decide—from a Koran of imperfect orthography, from poems which, for the most part, were only orally transmitted, or from the diverse utterances of various tribes—what was the pure Arabic form of this or that noun or verb. It is impossible for one who has not perused the writings of these acute and indefatigable scholars to imagine the labour they expended in the determination of the classic tongue. For the proper form and signification of a word they looked primarily to the Koran as the absolutely perfect standard of speech, and then to the productions of the early poets. In this they had the sanction of the Prophet himself, who, according to a tradition, had said, that when a man was in doubt as to the language of God’s word, he would do well to take the poets to counsel. Poetry was especially fitted to fix the form of a word, since the sacnsion of a line would depend on the vowelling and on the inflection of the words of which it was composed, and thus insure an approximation to exactness. The shawâhid, or proofs of lexicography and grammar, were therefore chiefly verses of the poets, and these are to be found imbedded in endless numbers in all commentaries and grammatical treatises. But only the earlier poets were of high authority. Within a century of Mohammed’s flight from Mecca, the Moslem empire stretched from Kashgar and Moultan to Morocco and the Pyrenees, and the Arab man of letters was exposed to the corrupting propinquity of men of many different races. Only a poet of the Ignorance, that is, one who had died before the preaching of Islam; or a Mukhaḍram, that is, one who was contemporary with it, was looked upon as of paramount and unquestionable authority. An Islâmi, that is one who was born after the rise of Islam, was of less consideration, and after the first century, the poets are called Muwelledûn, and are only quoted for their literary beauties, and not as authorities for the Arab tongue.
It was among the designs of Ḥarîri to exhibit in their right form, or signification, a number of these words about which there was, or had been, doubt. With this view he introduces them into verses in such places that the metre determines their structure, or the rhyme their orthography. Where two similar forms may both be correctly used, he contrives to bring them together, and to make it evident from the sense that they have the same meaning. Where two words are derivatives from the same root, but differ in form, or where they are identical in orthography, but are derived from different roots, or where they have the same letters, but a different vowelling, the juxtaposition serves also to awaken the reader to a nice discrimination between them. It must not, however, be supposed from this that Ḥarîri’s intention was strictly to write a philological treatise. That is a notion which has prevailed among some crities, who would make the Assemblies merely an ingenious and pedantic puzzle, but no real Arabic scholar will hold such an opinion. The Assemblies were written, primarily, to amuse and entertain, and they were listened to with pleasure by numbers who cared nothing for their hidden learning. But the author, having been accustomed to philological discussions all his life, and having audiences equally zealous, was led naturally and almost unconsciously to insinuate into his work the subtleties which were uppermost in his mind.
In the same way the use of rare expressions, which forms one of the chief difficulties of the work, may be conceived to be more spontaneous than it at first sight appears. The doubtful words and phrases of the early time, and particularly those derived from the Koran, had been often the subjects of debate for generations, and the author might well be tempted to rouse the attention of his audience by throwing among them one of these apples of discord. In a translation the learned vocabulary of Ḥarîri is lost, and yet it will be perceived that his compositions do not lack vigour or pathos. May we not then acquit him of having merely digested an antiquarian glossary into a dramatic form.
The Assemblies, indeed, are far from restricted to antique words and phrases; on the contrary, they are in some respects extremely unclassical, inasmuch as the author delights to introduce the provincial expressions, and to refer to the manners of Irak. There is a singular mixture of old and new in the work; strange and obsolete words, rough with gutturals, such as are met with in the proverbs of Maydâni, or in the earliest poets, stand side by side with others that have been borrowed from the Persians and the Greeks. There is more of this foreign element than the purist quite approves. Words of exotic origin are indeed to be found even in the Koran, as ◌; but strict Moslems have made excuses for them, even to the point of denying their foreign extraction, and of asserting that they are common to Arabic and to other languages. Their dictum was plausible, since undoubtedly they could show that those words and many others had existed in Arabic speech before the advent of Islam; nor can it fairly be denied that terms which were in use among the Arabic-speaking Jews, such as ◌, might be fairly taken to be Arabic. But Ḥarîri’s employment of non-Arabic words is capricious and sometimes excessive: they are introduced unnecessarily, as if his purpose were to give liveliness to his composition, and to suit himself to a popular whim. The Andalusian Sherîshi is obliged to confess his ignorance of some of them, and as we are told that even in the author’s own time and city he was accused of incorrect expression, we may assume that some of the learned in Irak objected to his too liberal vocabulary.
The use of rare phrases, the origin and meaning of which were doubtful, is of constant occurrence in this work. The explanation of these, according to the best lights I have been able to obtain, makes up a large part of the notes which are appended to this translation. Some of them are interpreted by the author himself, in short commentaries which he has added to some of the Assemblies, others are left unnoticed; but Ḥarîri lectured on them to his sons and pupils, and his judgments are recorded by the commentators. An immense number of sayings, proverbs, and idiomatic phrases were current, all supposed to have originated with the eloquent Arabs of the desert, and consecrated in the eyes of the scholars of the time. Some of these had become the trivial expressions of the vulgar, and it is difficult for Englishment to understand the literary taste which attached such importance to them. It is as if in this country the most intellectual and learned men of the day devoted themselves to elucidating such phrases as “he cut his stick,” “he kicked the bucket,” “he hopped the twig,” “mind your P’s and Q’s,” “we were all at sixes and sevens,” “no mistake;” and as if the most gifted author of the time were to produce a composition containing all these expressions, and append an interpretation to the effect that “he cut his stick” was a phrase derived from the backwoods, and signified to depart, since a man in the forest when about to go on a journey cut a stick from a tree to aid him in walking; that to “kick the bucket” and “hop the twig” were seamen’s phrases, signifying to commit suicide by hanging, or by jumping from the yard arm; that “mind your P’s and Q’s” was originally a theatrical phrase, “mind your cues,” the addition of “P’s” being an unintelligent corruption; that “no mistake” had its origin in the answer of the Duke of Wellington to Mr. Huskisson: “There is no mistake, there can be no mistake;” and that as for the phrase “sixes and sevens,” God alone knew what it meant. This is scarcely an exaggeration of the purport of much of the Assemblies, with the difference that the phrases which Ḥarîri embodies in his writings were supposed to be idioms of a classic tongue, and to have first passed from the lips of a heroic race. The favour with which such compositions were received, bears witness to the zeal and almost Massoretic diligence with which the educated class studied the records of their language and history.
The grammatical questions are of hardly less importance in the author’s eyes. His other works show the subtlety of his intellect and the fastidiousness of his taste, and many of the precepts which he utters in them he enforces by examples in the Assemblies. Yet there is a peculiarity in his art which is worth noticing. Where a question is doubtful, and two men of eminence whose opinions are probable, have differed, Ḥarîri will make use of a form which there is reason to believe he disapproves, as if his object were rather to continue the controversy than decide it. A conspicuous instance of this occurs in the thirty-fifth Assembly, in the phrase ◌, of which the nearest rendering in English is “Behold he was him!” that is, the person I looked at was Abû Zayd. Now a controversy had been carried on between the schools of Basra and Kufa on this matter; the Basrians held the phrase to be incorrect, and that one ought to say ◌, “Behold he was he.” The grammatical question is discussed in the notes to the twenty-fourth Assembly, and need not be dwelt upon here; but a commentator expresses his wonder that Ḥarîri, who was a Basrian, should use a phrase condemned by the grammarians of his city, and one which most people looked upon as faulty. This controversy, however, was classic, inasmuch as it had been originated by one of the greatest of the grammarians, Sîbawayh, and was said to have been the cause of his death. The story is as follows:—Sîbawayh was one day in the presence of Harûn ar Reshîd, or as others say of Yaḥya ibn Khâlid the Bermeki, when they were discussing grammatical questions, and he asked Al Kisâ’î, which is right, “I thought that the scorpion was different from the zenbûr, and behold ◌,” or “behold ◌.” “The latter,” said Al Kisâ’î. Sîbawayh contradicted him, and the Khalif resolved to refer to some native Arabs. Al Kisâ’î then contrived that he should refer to a tribe who were not of pure speech, and these said that Sîbawayh was in the wrong. The great grammarian angrily departed from court, and retired to Khorasan, where he soon died. Ḥarîri seeks to awaken in his hearers the memory of this anecdote by using the condemned form, which would bring to their minds the celebrated controversy. So in the thirty-seventh Assembly the expression ◌, imitated from Koran vii. 148, gives to the impersonal verb of the original a faulty construction, though Ḥarîri has himself noticed this very error in his book called the “Pearl.” But a controversy had taken place on this subject involving even the proper reading of the verb in the Koran; and Ḥarîri, by making use of what he does not approve, shows that he is not ignorant of the discussion. Several instances of a similar kind will be found in the notes, and I will notice but one more. In the thirty-sixth Assembly ◌ is used where, from Ḥarîri’s own explanation in the “Pearl,” it is plain that accuracy requires ◌. The author’s design may have been to claim for this particular word a licence derived from popular use.
From these examples the reader will be able to judge how intimate a knowledge of the niceties of the tongue may be obtained from the study of Ḥarîri and his commentators. An acquaintance with the pagan antiquity also necessarily follows an examination of his incessant allusions. These, for the most part, occur in the form of proverbs, and of such popular sayings as have been already mentioned. The Arabic word ◌ does indeed comprise any phrase current among the people, or any sententious utterance of the past time, and is not confined to moral apophthegms. The Arabs, in imitation of the Greeks, began at an early time to make collections of the multudinous proverbs of their language. The collection of Maydâni is invaluable, as preserving for us some of the oldest forms of Arab speech,—perhaps the most primitive utterances of the race. There is hardly a celebrated occurrence in early Arab story that is not illustrated by one or more of these phrases, which were attributed to the heroes and heroines of the old time; and whether authentic or not have, undoubtedly, for the most part, come down from the times of purely oral tradition. A whole series of proverbs connects itself with the history of Jathîmet al Abrash, Queen Zebbâ, and Ḳoṣayr. Another belongs to the story of Kolayb Wâ’il and the war of Basûs. When the poet ‘Obayd ibn al Abraṣ was sacrificed by the king of Hira at the tomb of his boon companions, ‘Obayd uttered sentences which became proverbial. Many of these proverbs indicate an archaic state of the language, and the combinations of letters are less euphonious than in the dialect of Ḳoraysh. Every page of Ḥarîri’s work contains some of these relics of a past time, and they are imbedded in the Assemblies like the stones of a Roman ruin in the walls of a modern Italian villa. Whole passages are but a cento of primeval phrases, mingled with sentences of the Koran or the Traditions, and remarkable idioms from poets of repute. The proverb served to call the hearer’s attention to the incident from which it was said to have arisen; and if he were a pupil, he that recited the composition to him would take care to examine him respecting the origin of the saying, and the precise form in which it had been most authoritatively handed down. An instance of the exactitude with which the purists required these proverbs to be used is given in the work of Maydâni, where it is said that the proverb ◌: “Thou (a woman) didst lose the milk in the summer,” should be used in the feminine singular, even though it be addressed to a male or to more than one person, since it was first uttered by ‘Amr ibn ‘Odas to his wife Dakhtenûs.”sup>1
The Koran is exemplified by continual quotations, and these are full of instruction for the foreign scholar. But the sacred book was so well known to those for whom the Assemblies were composed, that I cannot think the author had in view the inculcation of any special knowledge. Moreover he does not appear to quote difficult passages, or those which require special interpretation; he rather endeavours to show his wit by the use of it in a strange and unexpected manner, as, for instance, at the end of the third Assembly.
Before proceeding to consider other peculiarities of this work, and especially the artificial character of so many of the pieces, it will be as well to give a short summary of the Assemblies which do not appear in this volume, so that the book may be considered as a whole. The preface and the first twenty-six are here translated, and as each has a short argument or introduction, there needs no further mention of them. The remaining twenty-four are not inferior in merit, though the repetition of similar adventures and similar rhetoric becomes monotonous. They are also, if possible, more elaborate than those which are placed earlier in the work, and two or three of them are of exceeding difficulty. In the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, the author produces compositions resembling those of the sixth and twenty-sixth. In the sixth is given an address, the words of which are alternately with and without pointed letters. In the twenty-sixth the artifice is varied, and each alternate letter is pointed, the others being unpointed. In the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth the orthographical feat is again changed, for they contain compositions in which every letter is destitute of points. In the former, Abû Zayd preaches an eloquent sermon on the certainty and the terrors of death; in the latter, after describing a loaf of bread and a flint in enigmatical language, somewhat after the style of the eighth, he indites a benediction at a wedding, into which he had inveigled Ḥârith. Both of these addresses are composed of letters without a single point. The thirtieth is remarkable for the use of what are called Sâsâni phrases, that is, the cant of beggars, mountebanks, prestigiators, and the like. Ḥârith enters by chance into a house hung with rags, which he discovers to be a place of call for such people. A wedding is going on, and the beggar bridegroom, in gaudy apparel, takes his seat with the dignity of king Munthir ibn Mâ as Semâ. Then steps forward an old man, who, of course, turns out to be Abû Zayd, and delivers himself of a wedding sermon, with the regular exordium of the mosque. In this address the Koran is mixed up with the metaphorical jargon of vagabonds after the strangest fashion, and at the close Abû Zayd performs the marriage ceremony. This argot appears to have been thought not unworthy of study, for one Abû Dulaf wrote a ḳaṣîdeh in it, setting forth the habits and ways of life of such people, and their singular dialect.sup>1
The thirty-first Assembly is a composition of exquisite beauty. Ḥârith makes the pilgrimage to Mecca, and there finds Abû Zayd, who addresses the worshippers first in the usual rhymed prose, and then in verse, on the duties of true religion. The Ḥajj, he tells them, does not consist in hastening on camels to the holy city, or wearying the body, or parting from home and children, but in adding to these performances abstinence from sin, purity of intention, and the practice of virtue; for “washing in fonts cleanses not from immersion in sins, the baring of the body compensates not for the laying up of guilt, nor will the donning of the pilgrim’s garb avail him who clothes himself with the forbidden.” The verses which follow are inspired by the loftiest morality. When he has concluded Ḥârith approaches him, but Abû Zayd declares that he has a vow not to associate with any one during his pilgrimage, nor to make gain, nor to recite his pedigree, nor to ask alms. As the pilgrims pass by on their journey he again addresses them in edifying verse.
The thirty-second is of a very different character, and is, perhaps, the strangest and most difficult in the work. Indeed, without plentiful commentary, it would be perfectly unintelligible. It is that which the author alludes to in the preface when he speaks of “legal decisions dependent on the use of words.” Abû Zayd is discovered playing the part of a mufti, or jurisconsult, amid a tribe of Arabs, and bidding them ask questions of him. One of them steps forward, and says that he has gathered a hundred questions from people learned in the law, and he propounds them one by one to Abû Zayd. The peculiarity of these questions is that each contains a word which may be understood in two senses, the design of the questioner being to test not only Abû Zayd’s knowledge of the Moslem canon law, but also his acquaintance with the niceties of the language. Abû Zayd is represented as discerning the hidden meaning of each question, and as returning an answer which, while directly contrary to that which might be expected, is yet correct if the ambiguous word be taken in its less popular signification. For instance, it is asked, “Does a man ill who neglects to wash his ◌ (hatchet)?” Abû Zayd replies, “Yes, it is as though he washed not his head:” for ◌ signifies not only a hatchet, but also the upper part of the back of the head. Again, it is asked, “May a man say his prayers after he has been carrying ◌ (puppies)?” which are unclean animals. The answer is, “Yes; it is no more than if he had carried beans.” ◌ signifies a puppy, or the whelp of a beast of prey, and also the young cucumber, or the pomegranate. And so of the whole hundred questions. Similar puzzles were not unknown in Europe, as the question, “Num peccatum est occidere patrem suum,” where not “one’s own father,” but “the father of swine,” is meant. This Assembly is an elaborate exercise on the synonyms of the language. It may be noticed that the decisions are according to the rite of Ash Shâfi‘î, to which Ḥarîri belonged.
The thirty-third presents nothing worthy of especial notice. Abû Zayd, feigning to be palsied, recites verses which obtain for him the alms of the people, and when discovered by Ḥârith, confesses his imposture. In the thirty-fourth, Abû Zayd sells his son to Ḥârith as a slave, taking care, however, that the boy shall exclaim to him, “I am Joseph, I am Joseph,” words taken from Koran xii, 90. Ḥârith thinks that the boy is only telling his name, whereas he was indicating that he was free born, and ought not to be sold any more than Joseph, the son of Jacob, ought to have been sold by his brethren. The boy obtains his liberty, and Ḥârith loses his money. The thirty-fifth is a composition in the style of the eighth, and the earlier part of the twenty-ninth. Abû Zayd describes a wine-cask metaphorically under the name of a maiden, for whom, as he tells the people, he desires to purchase wedding attire. They give him money, and it turns out that by the wedding attire is meant a flagon and a cup, which were necessary to wed, as it were, the wine-cask to the drinker.
The thirty-sixth contains twenty conundrums, all of the same form: “What word signifies so and so?” For instance, what word signifies “Receive a thousand de-nars.” The answer is, ◌ (she that guides aright): for ◌ means “take,” and ◌ is the fine or blood-wit for killing a man, which was fixed at a thousand denars. It is needless to give any further specimens of the author’s ingenuity. The answers to these conundrums, and to the legal questions in the thirty-second, are given by Ḥarîri himself, at the end of the respective Assemblies.
The thirty-seventh exhibits Abû Zayd and his son before the Kadi of Ṣa‘dah, obtaining money from him, as usual, by trickery. The father accuses the son of disobedience, and the son declares that his father had sought to degrade him by making him a beggar. The son recites some lines against beggary which he says his father had once taught him, and which justified him in disobeying the paternal commands; and the father retorts with others, which the son had recited to him, in praise of making gain in every way possible. The dialogue is kept up with great spirit, and the adventure ends by the Kadi bestowing his bounty on both.
In the thirty-eighth, Abû Zayd addresses the governor of a town in some fine verses in praise of liberality to men of genius, and is rewarded as usual. In the thirty-ninth, the adventure is somewhat after the fashion of the twelfth. Ḥârith is on ship-board, about to make a voyage, when a voice is heard from the shore, in the darkness, begging a passage. The stranger is taken on board, and soon informs the travellers that he has a talisman, a form of words handed down from the prophets, which would guard them from all dangers. He repeats it, and they think it futile; but, at a port whither they are forced to put in through a storm that overtakes them, Abû Zayd finds great lamentation among the servants of a noble family on account of the long labour of their mistress in childbirth, and he writes for them a copy of verses in which the child is warned of the miseries of the world, and recommended not to come into it. This, which seems the very contrary of what the lady’s case demanded, is hung round her neck, and her safe delivery follows. Abû Zayd is handsomely rewarded.
The fortieth is a quarrel between Abû Zayd and his handsome young wife, who go before the stingy judge of Tebrîz, he to complain of her contumacy, she of his abuse of his conjugal rights. The contention is remarkable, not only for the fury with which they rail at each other, but for the learning they display. “I married thee,” says Abû Zayd, “and found thee all that was bad. But I concealed thy faults, though if Shîrîn had given thee her beauty, and Zobaydeh her riches, and Bilḳîs her throne, and Bûrân her bed, and Az Zebbâ her kingdom, and Râbi‘ah her piety, and Khindaf her glory, and Al Khansâ her poetry on her Ṣakhr, I would have hated thee to be my wife.” She answers, “O thou baser than Mâdir, with more vices than Abû Dulâmeh’s mule, know that if thou wert Al Ḥasan in utterance and admonition, Ash Sha‘bi in learning and memory, Al Khalîl in prosody and grammar, Jerîr in love song and satire, Ḳoss in purity of speech and in discoursing, ‘Abd al Ḥamîd in eloquence and writing, Abû ‘Amr in Koran-reading and inflection, Ibn Ḳorayb in recitations from the Arabs, I would not keep thee.” The quarrel is, of course, a feigned one, and the wife’s address supplied by Abû Zayd himself. The rest of the adventure is of the usual kind.
The forty-first contains a sermon of Abû Zayd, by means of which he and his son extract money from the public. The forty-second contains riddles, not necessarily dependent like the conundrums of the thirty-sixth on the play of words, but indicating a thing by the description of it, as:—
What is he, who weds two sisters, both openly and secretly, but none accuses him for it?
When he visits the one, he visits also the other; and though husbands may be partial, he is not so.
He increases his visits as his wives grow gray: now, this is an affection rare among husbands.
The answer to this is, the pencil used to place the koḥl, or ointment, on the eyes: the two eyelids are the wives, each of which it anoints at the same time, without partiality, and as they grow old, the necessity for anointing them increases.
The forty-third has an adventure too long to relate, and bears the name of the “Virgin and Matron,” because it contains the reasons for and against marrying either of these classes of ladies. The forty-fourth introduces us to more riddles, which this time, however, depend for their solution, like the legal questions of the thirty-second, on the various significations of the same word. Thus:—
“I have seen Arabs in a barren year roast a rag for food, and it satisfied them.” ◌ which signifies a rag, signifies also a swarm of locusts.
“I have seen scribes, whose fingers never wrote a letter, and who read not what is written in books.” ◌ which signifies scribes, signifies also cobblers.
The forty-fifth like the fortieth is a quarrel between Abû Zayd and his wife, before a judge, with the intention of attracting his bounty. The forty-sixth is one of the most elaborate in the work. Ḥârith being at Ḥimṣ (Emessa), a place noted for the stupidity of its inhabitants, like Abdera among the Greeks, sees a schoolmaster, one of a class especially famous for their dulness, instructing his pupils; he approaches, thinking to be entertained by the poor man’s blunders, but finds to his astonishment that the children were able to accomplish the most surprising feats. One of them recites a poem consisting entirely of unpointed letters; the next writes out some which not only have every letter pointed, but are full of assonances and alliterations; a third produces lines of which the words consist alternately of pointed and unpointed letters; a fourth gives verses in which there is tejnis or homogeneity in sound or in letters between each two successive words; the next produces a couplet, each line of which begins and ends with the same syllables. Then the nature of the exercises changes, and some lines are given containing words which ought to be written with the letter ◌, but about which some Arabs are doubtful. Then come the words which should be written with ◌, then those that may be written with either. At last one pupil gives in verse the rules for writing the verb whose last letter is weak. Another repeats a poem comprising all the words in the language which contain ◌; this table is especially useful, since a common mistake among the Arabs was to confound ◌ with ◌; the old Semitic language having a less variety of sounds than the cultivated Arabic, as may be seen by a comparison with the Hebrew. It need not be said that the schoolmaster is Abû Zayd. In the forty-seventh, Abû Zayd is discovered following the despised calling of a cupper or bleeder, but the adventure does not call for notice. The forty-eighth, called Ḥarâmîyeh, the first composed, has been already described. In the forty-ninth, Abû Zayd, in his old age, lauds the name and calling of Sâsân, the prince of the beggars, and urges his son to follow the noble and lucrative art of mendicancy. This Assembly is one of the finest pieces of rhetoric in the work. But perhaps the first place in regard of merit should be given to the fiftieth and last Assembly, called “of Basra.” In this composition, to which I have already referred, Ḥârith exhibits his hero as penitent and reformed. In it is introduced a most eloquent eulogium of the city of Basra; the hymn of Abû Zayd breathes the purest spirit of devotion. Ḥârith weeps in sympathy with his repentance, as he had formerly wept for his misdeeds, and in the end they part to meet no more.
It remains that I should say something concerning the style of this singular work, which, as the reader is now aware, is a continuous display of rhetorical artifices, and is full, from beginning to end, of alliteration, assonance, rhyme, paronomasia, and what Europeans are apt to consider merely verbal conceits. These caprices, so alien from our taste, have since pervaded not only the Arabic literature, but the literatures which, like the Persian, the Hindustani, and the Turkish, have accepted the rhetoric of the Arab scholars, and have followed their canons. We find the authors, not of one age and nation, but of all the Moslem world, for many centuries, delighting in what seem to us the poorest artifices of composition, cursed by a vitiated and pestilent taste, and degrading their genius by mingling the loftiest themes with displays of verbal cleverness, in no way above the level of the pun and the conundrum. If the Persians borrowed their conceits from the Arabs, they bettered the instruction, and the reaction of their literary influence tended to confirm the taste of their masters. But it would be a narrow view of the subject to regard such compositions as the Assemblies as the result of literary fashion or scholastic pedantry. The Arabic student cannot but perceive that the language lends itself with singular readiness to responsiveness and parallelism of sound, and that assonance and paronomasia offer themselves almost unbidden. The triliterity of the root, and the ramification from it of a vast number of forms, each of which has an accordance of sound with the same form of other roots, give a natural and inevitable similitude to Arabic words, which forces itself on the attention of the orator and his audience. Then the development of almost every abstract idea from a root which signifies a strictly material action; the primitive meaning being ever dimly visible to the mind’s eye of the people behind the derivative meaning, and not, as in our words of Latin and Greek provenance, wholly lost, tended to suggest comparisons between the multitudinous ideas associated with a single root, which gave an involuntary impulse towards paronomasia. We do, indeed, find a tendency towards these rhetorical figures in the very earliest productions of the Semitic race. The alliterations, the assonances, the antitheses of sound, the evident paronomasia, and, above all, the strange etymologies of the Bible, bear witness that, even in the most remote times, the most simple and noble of composers were not without a kind of verbal consciousness; repressed, indeed, in them by the pure and classic spirit of their genius, but still the germ from which in later times were developed the puerilities of the Rabbins and the artificial rhetoric of the Arabic authors.
The instinct to gratify the ear—or something deeper than the ear—by accordance of words, and to create a similitude between the sound and the sense, is common to every race, and, if regarded philosophically, will not be found worthy of contempt or reprobation. It has been especially strong in our Teutonic branch of the human family, which not only has had an alliterative and assonant poetry in former ages, but still fondly clinges to phrases and proverbs which recal the ancient rhythm. No one would wish such expressions as “to have and to hold,” “bed and board,” “kith and kin,” “last not least,” to be banished by a pseudo-classic taste from the use of the nation. In Hebrew such combinations appear with frequency, and the alliterative accordance which they exemplify appears to have almost stood in the place of metre as a poetical instrument. From these to paronomasia, and play on words, there is but a step. Of this figure, a few examples may be given. At Psalm xl. 3, and lii. 6, according to the numbering of our version, there is a play on words between “see” and “fear,” which occurs also elsewhere. Compare also Isaiah v. 7, lvii. 6, and lxi. 3; also on the same word as this last Job xxx. 19, and xlii. 6; also Psalm xviii. 7, Ecclesiastes, vii. 6. To these may be added the chant of Samson at Judges xv. 16, and perhaps the account of the sons of Jair at x. 4.
But it is in connection with proper names that this tendency is most manifest. We may either see in the etymologies of the Pentateuch the ingenious labours of Hebrew priests and scholars, anxious to give an applicability to names the origin of which was lost, just as Ya‘rob is made by the Arabs to have been the first man who spoke Arabic, and Muzayḳîyâh is said to have been so called because he tore up his clothes every evening; or we may suppose that the etymologies were framed at a very early period, almost unconsciously, by the people themselves, who, being accustomed to name their children, their habitations, and remarkable places by apposite terms, and being hardly able to conceive an appellation without a meaning, instinctively sought the signification of the patriarchal names, and sometimes moulded the legend in accordance with the supposed etymology. It is reasonable to conclude that both these sources have contributed to the large stock of derivations which we find in the Pentateuch. Some of them seem too artificial to have arisen spontaneously among the people: they resemble rather the laboured comparisons of scholars than the similarities which would strike the popular ear. But the greater part are probably derived from remote and unlettered tradition. It is unreasonable to doubt the antiquity of the speech of Lamech, at Genesis v. 29, which contains a play upon the name of Noah; or of Noah’s curse and blessing, at ix. 25, in which the name of Japhet is similarly treated. Furthermore, the name in some cases has evidently influenced the narrative, as where Abraham and Sarah successively laugh in connection with the birth of Isaac, (Genesis xvii. 17, and xviii. 12; compare also xxi. 6.); as also in the unholy ancestry attributed by Israel to its enemies, Moab and Ammon. We may also fairly allow a popular origin to the etymology of the word Manna, suggested at Exodus xvi. 15. But whether originating with the people or the learned, we find at a very early period in Hebrew history a tendency, which cannot be mistaken, to reflect upon names and significations, to play and refine upon them. In the later writers, this spirit is still more manifest. A proper name frequently suggests paronomasia, and the instinctive tendency towards this figure throws a light on the formation of the etymologies of which I have spoken. Compare Isaiah xxi. 2, with regard to the name of Elam; Jer. vi. 1, with regard to Tekoah; Ezekiel xxv. 16, to Cherithim; Jer. xlviii. 2, to Heshbon; Nehemiah ix. 24, to Canaan. A number of others may be discovered by an attentive reading of the prophetical books. But enough has been said to show that the germ of those literary tendencies, which were in after ages developed in the Arabic literature, existed from the earliest times among their Semitic brethren.
A still more striking example of artificiality in composition is afforded by those alphabetical pieces, which have raised so much curiosity and discussion among scholars. The Hebrew literature did not escape the fate which condemns nations to lose much of their poetical vigour and spontaneity by a long continued culture, especially when they restrict themselves, as did the ancient nations for the most part, to a traditional range of ideas. From Athens to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Constantinople, we may trace the decline of Greek letters—ever more learned, ever more laborious, and ever more feeble. The later ages of the Hebrew literature were, indeed, illustrated by compositions of surpassing grandeur and beauty, such as the pieces appended to the Book of Isaiah (chapter xl. to the end); the Lamentations, of which the greater part are in the alphabetical form; and the Book of Daniel, which, composed probably as late as the second century before Christ, opened the magnificent series of apocalyptic writings, the germ of which may be found in the prophecies of Ezekiel. But it is not the less evident that, even before the Captivity, composition had become more the task of a literary class, prone to imitate rather than originate, and to look for inspiration in the works of its predecessors rather than in nature and human life. Among these arose the alphabetical poem, in which the compiler seems to have sought to add freshness to his groupings of ancient thoughts by a new and striking literary device. The success of this kind of composition bears witness to the taste of the Jews and the nations related to them. Similar compositions appeared among the Syrians and the Samaritans, and the neo-Hebrew, or Rabbinical literature, is full of them.sup>1 The Biblical poems, which belong to this order, are Psalms xxv., xxxiv., xxxvii., cxi., cxii., cxix., cxlv.; the description of the virtuous woman, at Proverbs xxxi. 10–31, and the Book of Lamentations, with the exception of the last chapter. In Psalms cxi. and cxii. the artifice is carried so far that not each verse, but each member of the verse, is alphabetical. In Lamentations iii., the verses are divided into twenty-two triplets, the verses of the triplets beginning with the twenty-two letters of the alphabet in succession. The hundred and nineteenth Psalm shows a still further elaboration of the same idea, and in its structure and purport bears a visible analogy to such productions as the Assemblies of Ḥarîri. In this lengthy composition the hundred and seventy-six verses are divided into twenty-two groups of eight verses each, and the verses of the groups begin with the twenty-two letters in alphabetical succession; that is, the eight verses of the first group begin with Aleph, the eight of the second group with Beth, the eight of the third group with Gimel, and so on. This Psalm has, however, a more remarkable peculiarity, inasmuch as the author strives in the true spirit of an Eastern scholar to attract the fancy to his theme, by introducing into every verse, without exception, a synonym for the word or commandment of God.
Before quitting this part of the subject, I will venture to suggest a comparison between the gnomic and sententious character of the Arabic poetry, as exhibited in the Assemblies, and some portions of the Old Testament— as the books of Job and Ecclesiastes—in which the pure Semitic spirit breathes, uncontrolled by national patriotism or Mosaic traditions. This, however, is a matter which must be left to the preception of the reader. Yet I cannot but think that in the figurative description of old age, in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, I recognise a tendency to obscure poetical metaphor, which, transmitted through many generations, darkens the work of the learned Basrian.
How far such a work as the Assemblies is to be ascribed to any influence of Byzantine scholarship is a question of some difficulty. There is no reason to believe that Ḥarîri took directly any ideas from the Greeks. He probably knew no language but his own, and all that he produced is to be traced to exclusively Arabic, or, at least, Moslem sources. But indirectly he, and the rest of his countrymen, could not fail to be influenced by the pedantry of Constantinople, which came to confirm and increase their own. In almost every age of the world we find a certain similarity between the pursuits of existing nations, as if the same informing spirit possessed them all, in spite of diversities of race, position, and history. In the time of Ḥarîri, Greek, Jew, Syrian and Arab had become grammarians, lexicographers, archæologists; the race of translators and commentators abounded in the east, and to the furthest limits of the Moslem west. Each race, except perhaps the haughty and exclusive Greeks, did indeed learn something from the others. The Syrians took their notions of grammar from the Greeks. All that the Arabs knew of Greek philosophy and science was from translations made into their language by Syrians, either from the Greek originals, or from former Syriac translations. On the other hand the Jews, in the tenth century, founded or re-cast their grammar under Arab influence, and even adopted the word ◌ as their paradigm, though, from its containing a medical guttural, it insufficiently expresses the changes of the Hebrew verb. We find the philologers of the various languages vying with each other in industry; we find Maydâni, the contemporary of Ḥarîri, collecting and explaining the national proverbs precisely in the manner of Suidas. No one can pretend to say that such an influence as this may not have extended from Constantinople to Basra, but of direct imitation of Greek authors there is nothing. The work with which the Assemblies will be most readily compared is the Cassandra , or Alexandra, of Lycophron. That was a poem composed in an age when the demon of pedantry had entered into poets and orators; when even the exquisite genius of Theocritus did not disdain to produce a poem in the form of a Syrinx. The Cassandra is an iambic poem of fourteen hundred and seventy lines, very famous in antiquity, though utterly neglected now. It is an almost unintelligible rhapsody, supposed to be uttered by the prophetical daughter of Priam, who from the top of a tower, where she is confined by her father’s order, sees the fleet of Paris depart, and knows that it is to bring destruction on Troy. In her sacred fury, she pours forth a torrent of obscure and oracular verse. The epithets are gigantic and monstrous compounds, the language is ransacked for rare words, metaphor is heaped on metaphor, every person and every place are described, not by their ordinary names, but by some accidental relation, or by allusion to some obscure event; the prophetess passes from calamity to calamity with a Pythian enthusiasm which scorns the distinctions of paragraphs, and ends by lamenting that mankind will not believe the predictions she has uttered. This poem, if it can be called so, is but a linguistic and geographical puzzle. The war of Troy, the return of the Greek heroes, their dispersion over the shores of the Mediterranean, the planting of Greek and Trojan colonies, the settlement of Æneas in Italy, the foundation of Rome, the wars between Europe and Asia, the expedition of Xerxes, and the conquests of Alexander, the descendant of Æacus and Dardanus, give opportunity for the display of boundless but useless learning. This production, which gained for the author the epithet of the “dark” Lycophron from the despairing scholars of antiquity, was not fully elucidated till the time of the brothers Tzetzes,sup>1 whose labours on it are a remarkable proof of the learning and industry of the Byzantines. Except in the display of erudition, there is no resemblance between Lycophron and Ḥarîri, nor do we find in the latter that impenetrable and perverse obscurity which distinguished the Greek. But it is possible that the fame of this work, at which successive generations of schoolboys had been made to labour, may have reached Arabic writers, and encouraged their tendency to learned display.
If we allow some share in the formation of such a taste to the predispositions of race and language, and something to the influence of foreign culture, we must also trace some elements of it to the peculiar studies of Islam. A strange feature in Ḥarîri’s work is the number of compositions in which the merit is supposed to consist in the alternation of pointed and unpointed letters, or the exclusive use of one of these two kinds. It is not difficult to see how any tendency to these caprices which may have been innate in the learned Arabs must have been increased by the long controversies which had been held on the orthography of the Koran. On the proper use of the diacritical points, on the question whether a letter should be with or without a point, whether it should be pointed above or below, depended the meaning of many passages of God’s word. The early copies of the Koran were in a character singularly incomplete. There was hardly a chapter in which doubts were not raised as to the meaning of important passages. In the lifetime of the Prophet, when the sacred fragments were read publicly at Medina by those who knew their purport accurately, and were committed to memory by numbers of the faithful, these deficiencies were unnoticed; but as early as the time of Abû Bekr many of those who knew the Koran by heart were slain in the campaign against Musaylimeh the Liar, and ‘Omar counselled the Khalif to cause a standard copy to be written.
This task was executed by Zayd ibn Thâbit, who first collected the Koran into a book. But great varieties of readings made the sense doubtful, and in the year 30 the Khalif ‘Othmân undertook the recension which has ever since been the sacred text of the Moslems. He committed the work to Zayd ibn Thâbit, ‘Abd Allah ibn Az Zobayr, and other distinguished persons, with orders to choose the best reading of each passage, and not to give the various conflicting readings, as appears to have been done in the first edition. All who could throw any light on the Prophet’s meaning were consulted, and ‘Âyisheh in particular had great influence in determining the text; her testimony as to the Prophet’s oral recitations being respectfully received as conclusive. The Koran was brought more completely into accord with the dialect of Ḳoraysh, since the Khalif commanded that in doubtful cases the language of the Prophet’s family and countrymen should be preferred. Hence there remain very few dialectical peculiarities in the present Koran. But, when all was done, the text still remained very uncertain; and the difficulties of the Moslems were increased by the sudden corruption of the pure Arabic speech after the first conquests. Ḳoraysh or Temîm might have been able to detect the precise form and pronunciation of a word under its obscure orthography, but the settlers of the conquered lands, who in fifty years after the Hijra had almost lost the use of the classic desinences, required a clearer guidance. The efforts of Ḥajjâj ibn Yûsuf to settle the text of the Koran have been already referred to. Ibn Khallikân, in his life of the enlightened tyrant, says that the people used ‘Othmân’s copy for forty years, but in the days of ‘Abd al Melik ibn Merwân erroneous readings had become numerous in Irak, so that Ḥajjâj bade his scribes set distinctive marks on the words of uncertain pronunciation, and Naṣr ibn ‘Aṣim placed single or double dots to certain words. But as this did not give sufficient accuracy, the ◌, or system of diacritical pointing now in use, was invented. The honour of giving fixity of meaning to the Koran belongs chiefly to Abû ’l Aswad and Khalîl ibn Aḥmed, though the latter is said to have superseded the system of pointing adopted by his predecessor, as well as that of the scribes of Ḥajjâj.sup>1 Abû ’l Aswad is said to have marked the vowels and the tanwîn, Khalîl ibn Aḥmed the hamzeh and teshdîd, the rowm and ishmâm. Thus the science of pointing, or determining which of two or more letters, similarly formed in ancient writing, was to be preferred, became of the highest interest. In our languages such accuracy is not needed, but in the Arabic, where every letter has and must have a value, where a change in a root letter is sufficient to transform one word into another, and a change in an augmentative letter may affect gender, number, and the other accidents of the root, the scholar was obliged to employ himself on the primary elements of speech. The formation of passives and plurals by internal vowel change, unexpressed in the usual orthography, must have tended still further to promote this minute scholarship. The compositions of pointed or unpointed letters, such as Ḥarîri delights in, may have been suggested, or at least encouraged, by a desire to embody the correct orthography of doubtful words. The author would fix them with their right pointing in a poem or address, of which the artifice would insure that they should not be misspelt.
There was, furthermore, a religious sanction for this careful study of the alphabet. One of the most mysterious attributes of the Koran was its essential and eternal connection with the Arabic language. In that language it had not only been revealed, but had existed before the world and time. “This (the Koran),” said Mohammed, “is a clear Arab tongue.” Koran xvi. 105 (compare xxvi. 195). If a confirmation of this unity of the sacred book and the sacred language were needed, it would be found in the prefixion to some of the Suras of isolated letters, whose meaning no man knew, but which had undoubtedly a divine quality. If Arabic words, which have equivalents in foreign tongues, had alone been revealed, it might be held that there was no essential connection between the revelation and the language; but when separate letters, having no idea affixed to them, were brought down from on high, it could not be doubted that the ineffable sanctity of the Arabic language was thereby figured. In course of time a mystic interpretation was given to these letters, which is carried to the extreme in the commentary of Bayḍâwi. At the beginning of the second Sura he comments the letters elif, lâm, mîm, which are prefixed to it, and takes occasion to show that the presence of these monograms in the Koran is plainly miraculous. He points out that the letters are used in such a manner as to indicate a profound knowledge of scientific grammar. As Mohammed was uninstructed, such a knowledge could only have come from God himself. For instance, there are fourteen letters thus prefixed to Suras of the Koran, and fourteen is just the half of twenty-eight, the total of the letters when elif is not distinguished from hamzeh. These fourteen letters, moreover, are to be found in twenty-nine Suras, which is just the whole number of letters in the alphabet, if elif be reckoned. Again, the half of each of the different classes of letters are thus employed. Of the ten weakly articulated letters, namely those which make up the words ◌, five are to be found in these monograms; while of the other eighteen, which are strongly articulated, nine are to be so found. The grammatical forms which take an augment never exceed in length the number of seven letters, hence the Almighty has introduced into these monograms seven out of the ten augmentative letters. These are but a few of the discoveries which in the time of Bayḍâwi had been made concerning the monograms of the Koran, and which the orthodox commentator explains with undoubting faith. In the age of Ḥarîri these interpretations were in high favour; indeed, Bayḍâwi does little but reproduce the comments of Zamakhshari in the Keshshâf, who himself followed other doctors of an earlier time. Zamakhshari tells us in his preface that being asked by his admirers to produce a commentary on the Koran, his first care was to write something on these monograms, as a specimen of the loftiness and the difficulty of the enterprise. It will thus easily be perceived that exercises in the arrangement of letters had not among the Arabs that character of futility which they bear with us.
The imitations of Ḥarîri have been numerous. Sylvestre de Sacy gives, in his edition, a Hebrew version of the third Assembly by the Rabbin Jehuda, son of Al Khâriji, and mentions in his Introduction that Jehuda also wrote an independent work in the same style. It is curious to see the sober majesty of the Hebrew tongue condescend to such an imitation, and to observe that the Bible takes the place of the Koran in the allusions with which the piece abounds. De Sacy also mentions an imitation in Arabic, composed by Abû ‘ṭ Ṭâhir ibn Moḥammed ibn Yûsuf of Cordova. The writer produced fifty Assemblies to correspond with his model, and in the title to the work lays stress upon the pains they cost him (Chrest: Arabe iii. 180). An imitation was also produced in Syriac towards the close of the thirteenth century. The limpid, richly vowelled, and graceful Arabic must, however, have been indifferently represented in the clumsy and rugged dialect of the north.
Yet the influence of Ḥarîri is not to be measured merely by the number of professed imitations that have been produced. His style has more or less modified the style of all the more ambitious writing that has appeared in the Arabic language since his time. In the Timur of Ibn ‘Arabshah, who wrote in the first half of the fifteenth century, we find the influence of Ḥarîri as strong as it had been in his own age, and among his own people. Nor does it even now show any sign of extinction. Every man in the East who seeks the reputation of a scholar and a gentleman endeavours to understand the Assemblies. Among the few works of merit which men of Arab tongue have produced in recent times are the Assemblies of Naṣîf al Yazaji of Beyrout, which are here and there cited in my notes. This book is a perfect imitation of Ḥarîri, whose diction and manner are reproduced with surprising skill. Naṣîf certainly has little of the poetical power of his great original, but in curious learning he almost equals him. As, perhaps, the chief living representative of the ancient culture this author deserves our notice. He is a native of the Lebanon, has never quitted his own country, knows no language but his own, and is said to contemn European knowledge as worthless. Though a Christian he has devoted his life to a profound study of the language, history, literature, and grammar of the Arabs. Many years ago he published a letter to De Sacy on some minute faults which he discovered in that learned orientalist’s Commentary on Ḥarîri. He is the author of a treatise on grammar on the model of the Alfîyeh of Ibn Mâlik. It consists of more than a thousand verses of rejez muzdawij, in which the whole system of the Arab grammarians is condensed with wonderful ability, and it is accompanied by a commentary written by himself. No more complete exposition of the subject has ever been brought into a volume of the same size. The labours of his predecessors during many centuries have given the author the means of producing a treatise at once comprehensive and minute, and for the advanced student who has mastered the commentary of Ibn ‘Aḳîl on Ibn Mâlik, there is, I think, no work that might be more profitably taken in hand than the grammar of Naṣîf al Yazaji.sup>1 Another work of this author is a concise treatise on rhetoric, on the system of the Talkhîs al Miftâḥ of Jelâl ad dîn Moḥammed, as commented by Sa‘d at Taftâzâni. The work of Naṣîf seems to be in a great measure an abstract of the Mukhtaṣar, or shorter commentary of the last named author, which has been printed at Calcutta, and it carries concision to such a point as to be almost unintelligible without the help of some more detailed and explanatory treatise. But as a manual to aid the memory, it is, no doubt, excellent. The most important work of Naṣîf, is, however, undoubtedly the volume of Assemblies. The hero is called Maymûn ibn Khizâm and the râwi is Sohayl ibn ‘Abbâd; the work itself bears the title Mejma‘ al Baḥrayn, the confluence of the two seas, an allusion to an obscure passage at Koran xviii. 59, which it is useless to discuss here. The Assemblies of Naṣîf are even more full of proverbs and traditionary sayings than those of Ḥarîri, which they have been written to supplement. The author, living entirely in the past, has brought together an immense number of phrases illustrative of Arabic life and language, both before and after Islam. But the original feature in his compositions is the introduction of Arab art and science, and the treatment of every subject with a direct scholastic purpose. It need hardly be said that the author never profanes his text by admitting a Frankish idea, or accepts any scientific principle that is not recommended by the orthodox tradition of centuries. Thus in the fourth Assembly we have a medical question concerning the proportion of the four ◌, or humours of man, and are told that in properly constituted bodies the phlegm is a sixth of the blood, the yellow gall a sixth of the phlegm, and the black gall three-fourths of the yellow. The sixth Assembly is full of curious information concerning the special names of banquets according to their occasion, as a birth, a circumcision, a wedding: the fires that were traditional among the pagan Arabs, as the fire by which they conjured rain, the fire by which they swore confederacy, the fire which they lighted when one hated by them departed as an enchantment against his return. It must be remembered that these compositions are intended to be read with a master, or to be copiously commented, so that every line may be made the subject of a lecture on antiquities. The traditional names for the hours of the day and night, for the winds, the epithets applied to horses, according to their order in a race, are collected in pithy verses intended to be committed to memory. The eleventh contains an exposition of the Arabic prosody, the twenty-eighth treats of astronomy. In the fifteenth is a copy of verses in which no letter is pointed, and then one in which every letter is pointed, also verses in which the alternate letters, or the alternate words, have points. The twentieth has verses which are the same whether read forward or backward, and others which when read one way are laudatory, but, when read the other way, are satirical. In short, all Ḥarîri’s artifices are imitated, and even surpassed, by his laborious imitator. The Assemblies of Naṣîf should not be neglected by the Arabic student, for they are full of instruction; all that they require is a fuller commentary to explain their ambiguities and their references to obscure traditions. This could best be supplied by the author himself. My best thanks are due to Professor Ameuney, of King’s College, London, for calling my attention to the works of this remarkable contemporary scholar, as well as for many other inestimable services.
From the time of Schultens, versions of parts of Ḥarîri’s work have been made into Latin or modern European tongues with more or less success. Schultens translated six Assemblies; De Sacy in his Chrestomathie has given two with his usual accuracy. Other partial attempts have been made by different scholars, but the renderings are said to be extremely defective. A Latin version of the greater part of the work was published by C. R. S. Peiper, in 1832, but the translator was either not fully competent for his task, or else did not take the pains to obtain and study the best edition of the original, for his book abounds with errors. It is, moreover, written in the worst style of professorial Latin, and conveys in its form and spirit no idea of the original. A more worthy rendering is that of Mr. Preston, Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, who has published an English version of twenty of the Assemblies. Mr. Preston’s translation is throughout accurate and scholarly, and its only fault is excessive amplification, in which the rhythm and diction of Ḥarîri are almost dissipated. The book which is now offered to the public is, I believe, the first attempt at a complete translation of Ḥarîri’s work with such annotations as shall both instruct the general reader and aid the student to acquire a knowledge of the original. How far the object has been achieved, it is for others than myself to determine.