You May Give A
Man The Lie, But You Must Lose No Time In Baring Your Sword.
If
involved in dispute with overwhelming numbers, you address some elder,
Dakhil-ak ya Shaykh!—(I am) thy protected, O Sir,—and he will espouse your
quarrel with greater heat and energy, indeed, than if it were his
own.[FN#30] But why multiply instances?
The language of love and war and all excitement is poetry, and here,
again, the Badawi excels. Travellers complain that the wild men have
ceased to sing. This is true if “poet” be limited to a few authors whose
existence
[p.98] everywhere depends upon the accidents of patronage or political
occurrences. A far stronger evidence of poetic feeling is afforded by
the phraseology of the Arab, and the highly imaginative turn of his
commonest expressions. Destitute of the poetic taste, as we define it,
he certainly is: as in the Milesian, wit and fancy, vivacity and
passion, are too strong for reason and judgment, the reins which guide
Apollo’s car.[FN#31] And although the Badawin no longer boast a Labid or
a Maysunah, yet they are passionately fond of their ancient
bards.[FN#32] A man skilful in reading Al-Mutanabbi and the suspended
Poems would be received by them with the honours paid by civilisation
to the travelling millionaire.[FN#33] And their elders have a goodly
store of ancient and modern war songs, legends, and love ditties which
all enjoy.
[p.99]I cannot well explain the effect of Arab poetry to one who has
not visited the Desert.[FN#34] Apart from the pomp of words, and the
music of the sound,[FN#35] there is a dreaminess of idea and a haze
thrown over the object, infinitely attractive, but indescribable.
Description,
[p.100] indeed, would rob the song of indistinctness, its essence. To
borrow a simile from a sister art; the Arab poet sets before the mental
eye, the dim grand outlines of picture,—which must be filled up by the
reader, guided only by a few glorious touches, powerfully standing out,
and by the sentiment which the scene is intended to express;—whereas, we
Europeans and moderns, by stippling and minute touches, produce a
miniature on a large scale so objective as to exhaust rather than to
arouse reflection. As the poet is a creator, the Arab’s is poetry, the
European’s versical description. [FN#36] The language, “like a faithful
wife, following the mind and giving birth to its offspring,” and free
from that “luggage of particles” which clogs our modern tongues, leaves a
mysterious vagueness between the relation of word to word, which
materially assists the sentiment, not the sense, of the poem. When
verbs and nouns have, each one, many different significations, only the
radical or general idea suggests itself.[FN#37] Rich and varied
synonyms, illustrating the finest shades of meaning, are artfully used;
now scattered to startle us by distinctness, now to form as it were a
star about which dimly seen satellites revolve. And, to cut short a
disquisition
[p.101] which might be prolonged indefinitely, there is in the Semitic
dialect a copiousness of rhyme which leaves the poet almost unfettered
to choose the desired expression.[FN#38] Hence it is that a stranger
speaking Arabic becomes poetical as naturally as he would be witty in
French and philosophic in German. Truly spake Mohammed al-Damiri, “Wisdom
hath alighted upon three things—the brain of the Franks, the hands of the
Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs.”
The name of Harami—brigand—is still honourable among the Hijazi Badawin.
Slain in raid or foray, a man is said to die Ghandur, or a brave. He,
on the other hand, who is lucky enough, as we should express it, to die
in his bed, is called Fatis (carrion, the corps creve of the Klephts);
his weeping mother will exclaim, “O that my son had perished of a cut
throat!” and her attendant crones will suggest, with deference, that such
evil came of the will of Allah. It is told of the Lahabah, a sept of
the Auf near Rabigh, that a girl will refuse even her cousin unless, in
the absence of other opportunities, he plunder some article from the
Hajj Caravan in front of the Pasha’s links. Detected twenty years ago,
the delinquent would have been impaled; now he escapes with a
rib-roasting. Fear of the blood-feud, and the certainty of a shut road
to future travellers, prevent the Turks proceeding to extremes. They
conceal their weakness by pretending that
[p.102] the Sultan hesitates to wage a war of extermination with the
thieves of the Holy Land.
It is easy to understand this respect for brigands. Whoso revolts
against society requires an iron mind in an iron body, and these
mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.
Thus, in all imaginative countries, the brigand is a hero; even the
assassin who shoots his victim from behind a hedge appeals to the fancy
in Tipperary or on the Abruzzian hills. Romance invests his loneliness
with grandeur; if he have a wife or a friend’s wife, romance becomes
doubly romantic, and a tithe of the superfluity robbed from the rich
and bestowed upon the poor will win to Gasparoni the hearts of a
people. The true Badawi style of plundering, with its numerous niceties
of honour and gentlemanly manners, gives the robber a consciousness of
moral rectitude. “Strip off that coat, O certain person! and that turband,”
exclaims the highwayman, “they are wanted by the daughter of my paternal
uncle (wife).” You will (of course, if necessary) lend ready ear to an
order thus politely attributed to the wants of the fair sex. If you
will add a few obliging expressions to the bundle, and offer Latro a
cup of coffee and a pipe, you will talk half your toilette back to your
own person; and if you can quote a little poetry, you will part the
best of friends, leaving perhaps only a pair of sandals behind you.
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