Shu’Abin. 12.

Daraysh, 2000. [p.123] 13.

Benu Sufyan, 15,000. 14. Al-Hullad, 3000. It is evident that the numbers given by this traveller include the women, and probably the children of the tribes. Some exaggeration will also be suspected.

The principal clans which practise the pagan Salkh, or excoriation, are, in Al-Hijaz, the Huzayl and the Benu Sufyan, together with the following families in Al-Tahamah:

1. Juhadilah. 2. Kabakah. 3. Benu Fahm. 4. Benu Mahmud. 5. Saramu (?) 6. Majarish. 7. Benu Yazid. I now take leave of a subject which cannot but be most uninteresting to English readers.

[FN#1] In Holy Writ, as the indigens are not alluded to—only the Noachian race being described—we find two divisions: 1 The children of Joktan (great grandson of Shem), Mesopotamians settled in Southern Arabia, “from Mesha (Musa or Meccah?) to Sephar” (Zafar), a “Mount of the East,”—Genesis, x. 30: that is to say, they occupied the lands from Al-Tahamah to Mahrah. 2. The children of Ishmael, and his Egyptian wife; they peopled only the Wilderness of Paran in the Sinaitic Peninsula and the parts adjacent. Dr. Aloys Sprenger (Life of Mohammed, p. 18), throws philosophic doubt upon the Ishmaelitish descent of Mohammed, who in personal appearance was a pure Caucasian, without any mingling of Egyptian blood. And the Ishmaelitish origin of the whole Arab race is an utterly untenable theory. Years ago, our great historian sensibly remarked that “the name (Saracens), used by Ptolemy and Pliny in a more confined, by Ammianus and Procopius in a larger sense, has been derived ridiculously from Sarah the wife of Abraham.” In Gibbon’s observation, the erudite Interpreter of the One Primaeval Language,—the acute bibliologist who metamorphoses the quail of the wilderness into a “ruddy goose,”—detects “insidiousness” and “a spirit of restless and rancorous hostility” against revealed religion.

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