The literature of the Arabs is either pre-Islamic or post-Islamic; the former has as its chief classics the Muallakat or seven suspended poems, the latter finds its centre and apex as well as its origin and inspiration in the Koran. The seven ancient poems, still extant, are also called Muthahabat or the “golden poems,” and it is generally admitted by Arabic scholars that this was indeed the golden age of Arab literature. Zuhair, Zarafah, Imru-l-Kais, Amru-ibn-Kulsum, Al Harith, ’Antar and Labid were the authors of these poems and all but the last were idolaters, and belong to what the conceit of Islam calls “the Time of Ignorance.” These poems furnished the model ever afterward for later writers and, according to Baron de Slane, are remarkable for their perfection of form and exhibit a high degree of linguistic culture.

But the Koran has eclipsed all that ever went before it or came after it in the eyes of the Arabs. It is the paragon of literary perfection as well as of moral beauty. Its style is inimitable because it is Divine in the highest sense of the word. To criticise its diction is to be guilty of blasphemy and to compare it with other literature is to commit sacrilege. There is no doubt that the chief charm of the Koran from a literary standpoint is its musical jingle and cadence. It is such as the Arabs, the earliest masters of rhyme, love, and servilely imitate in all their later prose works. Our English translations of the Koran, although accurate, (and even idiomatic, as Palmer’s) cannot reproduce this; in consequence the book appears vapid, monotonous and to the last degree wearisome and uninteresting. Attempts have been made by Burton and others to acquaint English readers with this element of beauty in Mohammed’s revelation. The following[89] is almost equal to the Arabic itself, and, to say the least, sounds more interesting than Sale’s prose version of the same passage:

It is not to be expected that all the transcendant excellencies and miraculous beauties which Moslem commentators find in the Koran should unveil themselves to cold, unsympathizing western gaze, but that the book has a certain literary beauty no one can deny who has read it in the original. As Penrice says in his preface to his Dictionary of the Koran, “Beauties there are many and great; ideas highly poetical are clothed in rich and appropriate language, which not unfrequently rises to a sublimity far beyond the reach of any translation; but it is unfortunately the case that many of those graces which present themselves to the admiration of the finished scholar are but so many stumbling-blocks in the way of the beginner; the marvellous conciseness which adds so greatly to the force and energy of its expressions cannot fail to perplex him while the frequent use of the ellipse leaves in his mind a feeling of vagueness not altogether out of character in a work of its oracular and soi-disant prophetic nature.”

The greatest literary treasure of the Arabs next to the Koran is the Makamat of Al Hariri. No one of polite scholarship would dare profess ignorance of this great classic, and the reader of these “Assemblies” is introduced to every branch of Mohammedan learning—poetry, history, antiquities, theology and law. Recently Hariri has been translated into English by Chenery and an earlier translation by Preston has also been printed. Stanley Lane-Poole reviewing these translations thus characterizes this Shakespeare of the Arabic world:

“It is difficult, no doubt, for most Westerns to appreciate the beauties of this celebrated classic. There is no cohesion, no connecting idea, between the fifty separate ‘Assemblies,’ beyond the regular reappearance of an egregious Tartufe, called Abu-Zeyd, a Bohemian of brilliant parts and absolutely no conscience, who consistently extracts alms from assemblies of people in various cities, by preaching eloquent discourses of the highest piety and morality, and then goes off with his spoils to indulge secretly in triumphant and unhallowed revels. Even in this framework there is no attempt at originality; it is borrowed from HamadÂni, the ‘Wonder of the Age.’ The excellence lies in the perfect finish: the matter is nothing; the charm consists in the form alone. Yet this form is, to English readers, exotic and artificial. Among its special merits, in the eyes of Easterns, is the perpetual employment of rimed prose. To us this is apt to seem at once monotonous and strained, with its antithetic balance in sense, and jingle of sound; but to the Arabs, as to many primitive peoples, either riming or assonant prose was from early times a natural mode of impassioned and impressive speech. It is the mode adopted constantly and without strain in the Koran, and it is the mode into which an historian, such as Ibn-el-AthÎr, falls naturally when he waxes eloquent over a great victory or a famous deed....

“But if we do not care for rimed prose, there is plenty besides in Hariri to minister to varied tastes. In these wonderful ‘Assemblies,’ we shall find every kind of literary form, except the shambling and the vulgar. Pagan rhetoric, Moslem exhortation, simple verse, elaborate ode, everything that the immeasurable flexibility of the Arabic tongue and the curious art of a fastidious scholar could achieve—all is here, and we may take our choice.”

What is said by this scholarly critic of Hariri holds true of most Arabic poetry, it lacks unity of idea and sobriety of expression. All is intense. Every beautiful eye is a narcissus; tears are pearls; teeth are pearls or hail-stones; lips are rubies; the gums, pomegranate blossoms; piercing eyes are swords, and the eyelids, scabbards; a mole is an ant creeping to suck the honey from the lips; a handsome face is a full-moon; an erect form is the letter alif as penned by Wazir Muhammed; black hair is night; the waist is a willow-branch or a lance, and love is always passion. Far-fetched allusions abound and the sense at every turn must do homage to the sound. In the judgment of Baron de Slane the two notable exceptions to the rule are Al Mutanabbi and Ibn El Farid who exhibit a daring and surprising originality often approaching the sublime and, in the case of the latter, mystic reveries and spiritual beauties of no mean order.

The influence of the Arabic language on other tongues and peoples has also been great, ever since the rise of Islam. The Persian language adopted the Arabic alphabet and a large number of Arabic words and phrases; so that, as Renan remarks, in some Persian books all the words are Arabic and only the grammar remains in the vernacular. As for Hindustani, three-fourths of its vocabulary consists of Arabic words or Arabic words derived through the Persian. The Turkish language also is indebted for many words taken from the Arabic and uses the Arabic alphabet. The Malay language, with the Moslem conquest, was also touched by Arabic influence and likewise adopted its alphabet. In Africa its influence was yet more strongly felt. The language extended over all the northern half of the continent and is still growing in use to-day. The geographical nomenclature of the interior is Arabic and Arabs preceded Livingstone, Stanley and Speke in all their journeys. The languages of the southern Sudan, the Hausa, and even those of Guinea borrowed largely from the Arabic. Europe itself did not escape the influence of the conquering Semitic tongue. Spanish and Portuguese betray a vast number of Arabic words and idioms. French and English are also indebted to Arabic in no small degree for many scientific and technical words introduced at the time of the crusades and even earlier. Here is a partial list of those which we received directly or indirectly from the Arab tongue, as given in Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary and arranged into sentences; every word in italics is of Arabic origin.

Most of these words came from the Arabic through other languages such as French and Spanish; others were directly transferred from the Arabic to English; and still others have passed the long journey from Arabic to Greek, to Latin, to Italian, to French and thence to English. The word magazine is perhaps the best example of how an Arabic-root found shelter in the soil of all the European languages and grew into manifold significations from its original meaning with the Arabs, ghazana = to collect or store.

In modern days, especially since the opening of the Suez canal, the English language is beginning to exert its influence on Arabic. In Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf many English commercial terms are being adopted into the language and the newspapers spread their use everywhere.

Last, but not least, there is the immense, incalculable influence on the Arabic-tongue for all time exerted by the toil and sacrifice of the early missionaries to Syria through their college and press in giving to the world a modern Christian and scientific literature and that crowning work of Drs. Eli Smith and C. V. A. Van Dyck—the Arabic Bible. The mission press at Beirut has four hundred and eighty three volumes on its catalogue and prints about twenty-five million pages annually.[90] The Arabic Bible “one of the noblest literally monuments of the age” will yet prove a mighty influence in purifying and ennobling the language and preserving its classical diction to the utmost bounds of the Arab-world. There was only one Koran and there will be only one Arabic Bible—the finished product of American scholarship and her best gift to the Mohammedan world.