Moḥammed himself, extends his preference for nomadism even to the mode of giving names. The nomad calls himself by the name of the tribe to which he belongs; the townsman, in whom all memory of tribal life is already extinct, receives a name from his birth-place, or that of his ancestors, or from his occupation. 'Learn your genealogies,' said ‘Omar, 'and be not as the Nabateans of al-Sawâd; if you ask one of them where he comes from, he says he is from this or that town.' This trait of glorification of the old-fashioned Beduin-life, to the disparagement of the free urbanity of the townsmen, runs through a considerable section of Arabic literature, which gladly encircled the rough manners of the sons of the desert with a romantic nimbus of transfiguration. In this connexion a passage in a work falsely ascribed to Wâḳidî[1] should be noticed, which describes the Bedâwî Rifâ‘a b. Zuheir at the court of Byzantium, and after putting a satire against nomadism in the mouth of the emperor, gives a brilliant victory over this attack to the 'mouse-eating'[2] Bedâwî. This preference for nomadism, and the view that, although, having fewer wants, it be a simpler and more uniform stage of human development than city-life, it nevertheless surpasses the latter in nobility and purity, still live on in the system of the talented Arabian historian Ibn Chaldûn. He devotes several sections of his historical 'Introduction' to the glorification of the Bedâwî against the townsmen.'[3] What was thus established theoretically is presented in
- ↑ Futuh as-Shâm, being an account of the Moslem conquests in Syria, ed. Nassau Lees, Calcutta 1854, I. 9 et seq.
- ↑ This satirical reproach of the Bedâwî often occurs, e.g. sometimes in the Romance of ‘Antar in passages which are not accessible to me at the present moment. We meet with it also in the Persian king Yezdegird's satire on the Arabs (Chroniques de Tabari, transl. by Zotenberg, III. 387). Later also, in Ibn Baṭûṭâ, Voyages, III. 282, where the Indian Prince describes his Beduin brother-in-law Seif al-Diu Ġada, who had at first charmed him, but afterwards been disgraced for his want of manners, by the epithet mûsh châr, i.e. 'field-rat-eater;' 'for,' adds the traveller, 'the Arabs of the Desert eat field-rats.' See also Aġânî, III. 33, l. 4 from below, where Bashshâr b. Burd accuses a Bedâwî of hunting mice (ṣeydu fa'rin).
- ↑ Prolégomènes, trad. par de Slane, pp. 255–273.
