The Diwan of Abul-Ala | Page 3

was not a vague opinion, because he knew it was exactly
five-and-twenty times more valuable than private prayer. It is related of
al-Muzani that when he missed being present in the mosque he repeated
his prayers twenty-five times. "He was a diver for subtle ideas," said
the biographer Ibn Khallikan. And although our poet, quoting the
Carmathians, here deprecates the common worship, he remarks in one
of his letters that he would have gone to mosque on Fridays if he had
not fallen victim to an unmentionable complaint. . . . The pre-Islamic
Arabs were accustomed to sacrifice sheep (quatrain 1) and other
animals in Mecca and elsewhere, at various stones which were regarded
as idols or as altars of the gods.[1] Sometimes they killed a human
being, such as the four hundred captive nuns of whom we read that they

were sacrificed by al-Mundhir to the goddess Aphrodite. Sheep are
offered up to-day in Palestine: for instance, if the first wife of a man is
barren and the second wife has children, then the former vows that in
return for a son she will give a lamb. Apparently when it was thought
desirable to be particularly solemn a horse was sacrificed, and this we
hear of with the Persians, Indians, and more western people. White was
held to be the favourable colour, so we read in Herodotus (i. 189) that
the Persians sacrificed white horses. In Sweden it was thought that a
black lamb must be dedicated to the water sprite before he would teach
any one to play the harp. As for the subsequent fate of the victim,
Burton tells us that the Moslems do not look with favour on its being
eaten. Unlike them, Siberian Buriats will sacrifice a sheep and boil the
mutton and hoist it on a scaffold for the gods, and chant a song and
then consume the meat. So, too, the zealous devil-worshippers of
Travancore, whose diet is the putrid flesh of cattle and tigers, together
with arrak and toddy and rice, which they have previously offered to
their deities.
The words of Abu'l-Ala concerning day and night (quatrain 2) may be
compared with what he says elsewhere:
These two, young for ever, Speed into the West-- Our life in their
clutches-- And give us no rest.
"Generation goeth and generation cometh," says Ecclesiastes, "while
for ever the earth abideth. The sun riseth also and the sun goeth down
and cometh panting back to his place where he riseth." . . . The early
dawn, the time of scarlet eyes, was also when the caravan would be
attacked. However, to this day the rising sun is worshipped by the
Bedawi, despite the prohibition of Mahomet and despite the Moslem
dictum that the sun rises between the devil's horns. Now the divinity of
the stars (quatrain 4) had been affirmed by Plato and Aristotle; it was
said that in the heavenly bodies dwelt a ruling intelligence superior to
man's, and more lasting.[2] And in Islam, whose holy house, the Kaaba,
had traditionally been a temple of Saturn, we notice that the rationalists
invariably connect their faith with the worship of Venus and other
heavenly bodies. We are told by ash-Shahrastani, in his Book of
Religious and Philosophical Sects, that the Indians hold Saturn for the
greatest luck, on account of his height and the size of his body. But
such was not Abu'l-Ala's opinion. "As numb as Saturn," he writes in

one of his letters,[3] "and as dumb as a crab has every one been struck
by you." Elsewhere he says in verse:
If dark the night, old Saturn is a flash Of eyes which threaten from a
face of ash.
And the worship of Saturn, with other deities, is about a hundred years
later resented by Clotilda, says Gregory of Tours, when she is moving
Chlodovich her husband to have their son baptized. When the little boy
dies soon after baptism, the husband does not fail to draw a moral. But
misfortunes, in the language of an Arab poet, cling about the wretched
even as a coat of mail (quatrain 6) is on the warrior. This image was a
favourite among the Arabs, and when Ibn Khallikan wants to praise the
verses of one As Suli, he informs us that they have the reputation of
delivering from sudden evil any person who recites them frequently.
When this evil is complete, with rings strongly riven, it passes away
while he thinks that nothing can dispel it. . . . We have mention in this
quatrain of a winding-sheet, and that could be of linen or of damask.
The Caliph Solaiman was so fond of damask that every one, even the
cook, was forced to wear it in his presence, and it clothed him in the
grave.