Between the civilizations of Christendom and Islam there is a gulf which no human genius, no concourse of events, can entirely bridge over. The most celebrated Orientals, whether in war or policy, in literature or learning, are little more than names for Europeans. A student here and there, weary of the beaten track of Greek and Roman antiquity, may wander into the paths of Eastern knowledge, but to the great number of educated men they appear but an impassable jungle, into which it is wearisome and useless to penetrate. The transcendant difficulty of the chief language of the Mohammedan world, and the belief that it repre­sents only an arrested civilization and a decaying re­ligion, are sufficient to turn the intelligence of the West to what appear to be more open and more profit­able fields. For these reasons it is necessary that even the most esteemed and famous of Arabic writers should be introduced by an English translator as if they were almost unknown to his countrymen. I may assume without danger that this is the case with Al Ḥarîri, of Basra. This eminent man of letters has been rewarded with a fame such as few have ever obtained. For more than seven centuries his work has been esteemed as, next to the Koran, the chief treasure of the Arabic tongue. Contemporaries and posterity have vied in their praises of him. His “As­semblies” have been commented with infinite learning and labour in Andalusia, and on the banks of the Oxus. His poetry has been sung at the feasts of the great, and by the camel-drivers in the desert. To appreciate his marvellous eloquence, to fathom his profound learning, to understand his varied and end­less allusions, have always been the highest object of the literary, not only among the Arabic-speaking peo­ples, but wherever the Arabic language has been scien­tifically studied. But the very qualities which have procured him this extraordinary reputation among his countrymen and co-religionists, have hindered the exten­sion of it elsewhere. His genius is, by its nature, so bound up with the structure and traditions of the Arabic language, of which his chief work may be said to be a compendium, that the Orientalists of Europe have shrunk from the difficulties of translation, and have even been unwilling to dwell upon merits which it is impossible that those whom they addressed should ever understand. One important exception is, however, to be noticed. German literature has been enriched with a brilliant imitation of the Assemblies, by the gifted Rückert. But in spite of this great service to Ḥarîri’s reputation, he may be said to be almost unknown to the Western world. I propose, therefore, to devote a few pages to his life and times, to the character of the work which I have undertaken to translate, and annotate, and to the class of literature of which it is the most eminent example.*

Abû Moḥammed al Ḳâsim ibn ‘Alî ibn Mohammed ibn ‘Othmân al Ḥarîri was born at Basra, in the year 446 of the Hijra (a.d. 1054 or 1055), and he died in 515 (1121–2), or 516 (1122–3), in his native city. His life was, therefore, contemporary with the first Crusade, and the irruptions of the Christian hosts added much to the political troubles amid which his lot was cast. The whole aspect of the Mohammedan world had changed since the days when Basra, with its sister and rival city Kufa, had been founded by the victorious Arabs of ‘Omar’s Khalifate. Power had passed away from the Arab race in Syria and Irak; military enterprise had decayed, or existed only in the primitive form of the ghazw or foray. The intellectual vigour, as well as the political su­premacy, of the Arabs was waning in those regions. The Abbasside Khalifs of the eleventh century were almost as much the shadows of former power as the Emperors of the East; they retained little more than their reli­gious supremacy. In the boyhood of Ḥarîri, Toghril Beg, the grandson of Seljuk, had been confirmed by the powerless Khalif Al Ḳa ’im bi-amr allah, in all his con­quests, loaded with honours, saluted as King of the East and West, and endowed with the hand of the Khalif’s daughter. In the next reign, that of Al Muḳtadi, the Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem, and by their outrages against the Christian pilgrims, excited the Western nations to the Crusade. At the time when the young Ḥarîri was imbuing his mind with the learning of his forefathers, his race had in Irak and Syria been subjected to a foreign domination, and the power of the Turks had been extended from the Bosphorus to the Persian Gulf and the Indus.

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 secure*; 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 syntax*), 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.