The Historians' History of the World 08

By the year 600, and probably a considerable time before, the Koreish of Mecca had attained a curious and exceptional position. There, in an absolutely barren valley and near a spring of brackish water, a sanctuary stood. Some families of the Fihr clan, which belonged to the Bedouin tribe of Kinana, had settled round about it and established, under the name of Koreish, a lax commonwealth of the kind frequently found in Arabia. A considerable area in the immediate vicinity of their sanctuary may possibly have been respected as holy ground, in which no blood was to be shed, long before the Koreish took possession of it. Thus secured from harm, and held in high esteem as the guardians of the Kaaba (a small, square primitive house enclosed within a building open to the sky), the Koreish had turned their attention to commerce. They sent forth their caravans far and wide, as the Ishmaelites and Sabæans had done of old.[14] Koreishites travelled as merchants to Gaza, Jerusalem, and Damascus, to Hira on the Euphrates, to Sana in Yemen, and even crossed the Red Sea to Abyssinia. By these means they not only acquired considerable wealth according to Arab standards, but what was of much greater value—a wider mental horizon than the Bedouins and the inhabitants of the oases, and a knowledge of men and affairs. Although they never quite attained a regular political organisation, yet Wellhausen is right when he says, “We note something of an aristocratic hereditary wisdom, as in the case of ancient Rome and Venice.”[15]

One consequence, it must be owned, of the practical temper and sober-mindedness of the Koreish was that they produced no poet of any note, while each and all of the poverty-stricken tribes of Bedouins about them had great achievements in this field to show. Better fed than the Bedouins (though by no means luxuriously) and not decimated by conflicts, they increased more rapidly in numbers, and in Arabia the numerical strength of a tribe has much to do with the esteem in which it is held. Their prosperity allowed them to exercise a liberal hospitality, and the hungry Bedouin appreciates highly the host who lets him for once eat his fill. We may well conjecture that it was the Koreish who established the connection between the annual pilgrimage to the mountain of Arafat, which lay just beyond their holy ground and the valley of Mina, with the temple of Mecca, which lay within it. Thus Mecca became the place where Arabs of the most diverse tribes met together from far and near every year. Even before the days of Islam the Koreish tribe was held in high esteem far and wide. But, however much we may study the causes which raised them above other Arabs, it still remains something of an enigma that this torrid and barren eyrie should at that time have brought forth so large a number of men, exclusive of the prophet, who, when their turn came to be placed in circumstances wholly unfamiliar, acquitted themselves magnificently as generals and statesmen. History sets us several problems of a similar nature in the sudden appearance of many notable men at the same spot.

At that time there were many survivals of barbarism among the inhabitants of central Arabia. For instance, the practice of burying newborn daughters alive was very general. The cost of feeding and bringing up girls in that inhospitable country was a burden unwillingly borne; probably the horrible manner in which they were got rid of had originally some connection with religious ideas. In remote antiquity the Semites, like many other nations, reckoned consanguinity only by the surest guarantee, that of a common mother. Among the Arabs and other peoples we find a relic of this view, otherwise abandoned long since, in the fact that a man might regard his stepmother as part of his inheritance and take her to wife. The father of the great Omar was the issue of such a marriage.

ARAB POETRY