culturist condemned by a curse. 'The countries inhabited by savages,' as Montesquieu makes his Persian Usbek write,[1] 'are generally sparsely peopled, through the distaste which almost all of them have for labour and the tillage of the soil. This unfortunate aversion is so strong that when they make an imprecation against one of their enemies, they wish him nothing worse than that he may be reduced to field-labour,[2] deeming no exercise noble and worthy of them except hunting and fishing.' This contempt of a sedentary life and its usage is by the Bedâwî directed also especially against the practice of arts and manufactures. Hence it comes that such peoples as the Arabs, which even in a sedentary condition regard nomadic life as a nobler stage of manners than the agricultural life to which they have fallen, neglect manufactures and seldom attain to any perfection in them. This is especially true of the inhabitants of the holy cities of the Arabian peninsula, who give a practical proof of their preference for Beduinism by the fact that the Sherîf-families let their sons pass their childhood in the tents of the desert for the sake of a nobler education. 'I am inclined to think,' says the credible traveller Burckhardt in his description of the inhabitants of Medina,[3] 'that the want of artisans here is to be attributed to the very low estimation in which they are held by the Arabians, whose pride often proves stronger than their cupidity, and prevents a father from educating his sons in any craft. This aversion they probably inherit from the ancient inhabitants, the Bedouins, who, as I have remarked, exclude to this day all handicraftsmen from their tribes, and consider those who settle in their encampment as of an inferior cast, with whom they neither associate nor intermarry.'[4]
- ↑ Lettres persanes, Lettre CXXI.
- ↑ See Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, Vienna 1549, p. 61, where a Tatar formula of execration is said to be 'ut eodem in loco perpetuo tamquam Christianus haereas.'
- ↑ Travels in Arabia, ed. Ouseley, 1829, p. 381.
- ↑ A notable illustration of this relation is presented by the Arabic proverb,
