by René Basset
No bank so strong as to hold him in check.
"He spurred to the right,
The bridges which could not sustain his shock fell
Under his added weight;
His fury filled the country with fear, and he
Crushed the barrier that would retain him."
As to the class of declamatory poems, one in particular is popular in Algiers, for it celebrates the conquest of the Maghreb in the eleventh century by the divers branches of the Beni-Hilal, from whom descend almost the whole of the Arabs who now are living in the northwest of Africa. This veritable poem is old enough, perhaps under its present form, for the historian, Ten Khaldoun, who wrote at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, has preserved the resumé of the episode of Djazza, the heroine who abandoned her children and husband to follow her brothers to the conquest of Thrgya Hajoute. To him are attributed verses which do not lack regularity, nor a certain rhythm, and also a facility of expression, but which abound in interpolations and faults of grammar. The city people could not bear to hear them nor to read them. In our days, for their taste has changed--at least in that which touches the masses--the recital of the deeds of the Helals is much liked in the Arab cafés in Algeria and also in Tunis. Still more, these recitals have penetrated to the Berbers, and if they have not preserved the indigenous songs of the second Arab invasion, they have borrowed the traditions of their conquerors, as we can see in the episode of Ali el Hilalien and of Er-Redah.
The names of the invading chiefs have been preserved in the declamatory songs: Abou Zeid, Hassan ben Serhan, and, above all, Dyab ben Ghanum, in the mouth of whom the poet puts at the end of the epic the recital of the exploits of his race:
"Since the day when we quitted the soil and territory of the Medjid, I have not opened my heart to joy;
We came to the homes of Chokir and Cherif ben Hachem who pours upon thee (Djazzah) a rain of tears;
We have marched against Ed-Dabis ben Monime and we have overrun his cities and plains.
We went to Koufat and have bought merchandise from the tradesmen who come to us by caravan.
We arrived at Ras el Ain in all our brave attire and we mastered all the villages and their inhabitants.
We came to Haleb, whose territory we had overrun, borne by our swift, magnificent steeds.
We entered the country of the Khazi Mohammed who wore a coat of mail, with long, floating ends,
We traversed Syria, going toward Ghaza, and reached Egypt, belonging to the son of Yakoub, Yousof, and found the Turks with their swift steeds.
We reached the land of Raqin al Hoonara, and drowned him in a deluge of blood.
We came to the country of the Mahdi, whom we rolled on the earth and as to his nobles their blood flowed in streams.
We came to the iron house of Boraih, and found that the Jewish was the established religion.
We arrived at the home of the warrior, El Hashais:
The night was dark, he fell upon us while we slept without anxiety,
He took from us our delicate and honored young girls, beauties whose eyes were darkened with kohol.
Abou Zeid marched against him with his sharp sword and left him lying on the ground.
Abou So'dah Khalifah the Zemati, made an expedition against us, and pursued us with the sword from all sides.
I killed Abou So'dah Khalifah the Zemati, and I have put you in possession of all his estates.
They gave me three provinces and So'dah, this is the exact truth that I am telling here.
Then came an old woman of evil augur and she threw dissension among us, and the Helals left for a distant land.
Then Abou Ali said to me: 'Dyab, you are but a fool,'
I marched against him under the wing of the night, and flames were lighted in the sheepfolds.
He sent against me Hassan the Hilali, I went to meet him and said, 'Seize this wretched dog.
These are the words of the Zoght Dyab ben Ghanem and the fire of illness was lighted in his breast."40
The second style of modern Arabic poetry is the "Kelamel hazel." It comprises the pieces which treat of wine, women, and pleasures; and, in general, on all subjects considered light and unworthy of a serious mind. One may find an example in the piece of "Said and Hyza," and in different works of Mr. Stemme cited above. It is particularly among the nomad Arabs that this style is found, even more than the dwellers in cities, on whom rests the reproach of composing verses where the study and sometimes the singularity of expression cannot replace the inspiration, the energy, and even the delicacy of sentiment often found among the nomads:
"The country remains a desert, the days of heat are ended, the trees of our land have borne the attack of Summer, that is my grief.
After it was so magnificent to behold, its leaves are fallen, one by one, before my eyes.
But I do not covet the verdure of a cypress; my sorrow has for its cause a woman, whose heart has captivated mine.
I will describe her clearly; you will know who she is; since she has gone my heart fails me.
Cheika of the eye constantly veiled, daughter of Mouloud, thy love has exhausted me.
I have reached a point where I walk dizzily like one who has drunken and is drunk; still am I fasting; my heart has abandoned me.
Thy thick hair is like the ostrich's plumes, the male ostrich, feeding in the depressions of the dunes; thy eyebrows are like two nouns [Arab letters] of a Tlemcen writing.
Thy eyes, my beautiful, are like two gleaming gun barrels, made at Stamboul, city defiant of Christians.
The cheek of Cherikha is like the rose and the poppy when they open under the showers.
Thy mouth insults the emerald and the diamond; thy saliva is a remedy against the malady; without doubt it is that which has cured me41."
To finish with the modern literature of the northwest of Africa, I should mention a style of writings which played a grand rôle some five centuries ago, but that sort is too closely connected with those composing the poems on the Spanish Moors, and of them I shall speak later. It remains now to but enumerate the enigmas found in all popular literature, and the satiric sayings attributed to holy persons of the fifteenth century, who, for having been virtuous and having possessed the gift of miracles, were none the less men, and as such bore anger and spite. The most celebrated of all was Sidi Ahmed ben Yousuf, who was buried at Miliana. By reason of the axiom, "They lend but to the rich," they attributed to him all the satirical sayings which are heard in the villages and among the tribes of Algeria, of which, perhaps, he did pronounce some. Praises are rare:
"He whom you see, wild and tall,
Know him for a child of Algiers,"
"Beni Menaur, son of the dispersed,
Has many soldiers,
And a false heart."
"Some are going to call you Blida (little village),
But I have called you Ourida (little rose)."
"Cherchel is but shame,
Avarice, and flight from society,
His face is that of a sheep,
His heart is the heart of a wolf;
Be either sailor or forge worker,
Or else leave the city."42
"He who stands there on a low hill
All dressed in a small mantle,
Holding in his hand a small stick
And calling to sorrow, 'Come and find me,'
Know him for a son of Medea."
"Miliana; Error and evil renown,
Of water and of wood,
People are jealous of it,
Women are Viziers there,
And men the captives."
"Ténès; built upon a dunghill,
Its water is blood,
Its air is poison,
By the Eternal! Sidi Ahmed will not pass the night here,
Get out of the house, O cat!"
"People of Bon Speur,
Women and men,
That they throw into the sea."
"From the Or
ient and Occident,
I gathered the scamps,
I brought them to Sidi Mohammed ben Djellal.
There they escaped me,
One part went to Morocco,
And the rest went down into Eghrès."
"Oran the depraved,
I sold thee at a reasonable price;
The Christians have come there,
Until the day of the resurrection."
"Tlemcen: Glory of the chevaliers;
Her water, her air,
And the way her women veil themselves
Are found in no other land."
"Tunis: Land of hypocrisy and deceit,
In the day there is abundance of vagabonds,
At night their number is multiplied,
God grant that I be not buried in its soil."
Another no less celebrated in Morocco, Sidi Abdan Rahman el Medjidont, is, they say, the author of sentences in four verses, in which he curses the vices of his time and satirizes the tribes, and attacks the women with a bitterness worthy of Juvenal:
"Morocco is the land of treason;
Accursed be its habitants;
They make guests sleep outside,
And steal their provisions."43
"Deceptive women are deceivers ever,
I hastened to escape them.
They girdle themselves with vipers,
And fasten their gowns with scorpions."
"Let not thyself fall victim to a widow,
Even if her cheeks are bouquets,
For though you are the best of husbands,
She will repeat ceaselessly, 'God, be merciful to the dead.'"
"No river on the mountains,
No warm nights in the winter,
No women doing kind actions,
No generous-hearted enemies."
The battle of the Guadalete, where sank the Visigoth empire, delivered Spain almost defenceless to the Arab and Berber conquest. There developed then a civilization and an intellectual culture far superior to those of the barbarous Christian refugees in the Asturias, where they led a rude and coarse life which but seasoned them for future struggles. Of their literary monuments, there remain to us but mediocre Latin chronicles. The court of the Omayades at Cordova saw a literature blossom which did not disappear even after the fall of the Khalifate. On the contrary, it seemed to regain a new vigor in the small states which surged up about the Iberian Peninsula. The Christians, under the domination of the Mussulmans, allowed themselves to be seduced by the Arabian literature. "They loved to read their poems and romances. They went to great expense and built immense libraries. They scarcely knew how to express themselves in Latin, but when it was necessary to write in Arabic, they found crowds of people who understood that language, wrote it with the greatest elegance, and composed poems even preferable in point of view to the art of the Arab poets themselves."44
In spite of the complaints of fanatics like Euloge and Alvaro, the literary history of that time was filled with Christian names, either those of Spanish who had remained faithful to the ancient faith, or renegades, or children of renegades. By the side of the Arab names, like that of the Bishop Arib ben Said of Cordova, are found those of Ibn Guzman (Son of Guzman), Ibn el Goutya (son of Gothe), Ibn Loyon (son of Leon), Ibn er Roumaye (son of the Greek), Ibn Konbaret (son of Comparatus), Ibn Baschkoual (son of Paschal), and all have left a name among letters.
One magnificent period in literature unfolded itself in the eleventh century A.D., in the little courts of Seville, of Murcie, of Malaga, Valence, Toledo, and Badajos. The kings, like El Nis Sasim, El Mo'hadhid, El Mishamed, Hbn Razin, rank among the best poets, and even the women answered with talent to the verses which they inspired. They have preserved the names and the pieces of some of them: Aicha, Rhadia, Fatima, Maryam, Touna, and the Princess Ouallada. Greek antiquity has not left us more elegant verses, nor elegies more passionate, than these, of which but a small portion has been saved from forgetfulness in the anthologies of Hbn Khayan, Hbn el Abbar, Hbn Bassam de Turad-eddin, and Ibn el Khatib el Maggari. They needed the arrival of the Berbers to turn them into Almoran. Those Berbers hastened there from the middle of Sahara and the borders of Senegal to help the cause of Islamism against Spanish rule, as it was menaced through the victories of Alfonso of Castile. The result would have been to stifle those free manifestations of the literary art under a rigorous piety which was almost always but the thin varnish of hypocrisy.
To the Almoravides succeeded the Almohades coming from the Atlas of Morocco. To the Almohades, the Merias coming from Sahara in Algeria, but in dying out each of these dynasties left each time a little more ground under the hands of the Christians, who, since the time in Telage, when they were tracked into the caverns of Covadonga, had not ceased, in spite of ill fortune of all sorts, to follow the work of deliverance. It would have been accomplished centuries before if the internal struggle in Christian Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had not accorded some years of respite to the kingdom which was being founded at Granada, and revived, although with less brilliancy, the splendor of the times before the twelfth century.
In the course of the long struggle the independent Christians had not been able to avoid feeling in a certain measure something of the influence of their neighbors, now their most civilized subjects. They translated into prose imitations of the tales such as those of the book of Patronis, borrowing from the general chronicles or in translations like the "Kalila and traditions, legendary or historic, as they found them in the Dimna," or the book of "The Ruses of Women," in verse.
In their oldest romances--for instance, that of the "Children of Sara,"45 and in those to which they have given the name of romances fronterizos, or romances of the frontier--they give the facts of the war between the Mussulmans and the Christians.
But they gave the name of Mauresques to another and different class of romances, of which the heroes are chevaliers, who have nothing of the Mussulman but the name. The talent of certain littérateurs of the sixteenth century exercised itself in that class where the persons are all conventional, or the descriptions are all imaginative, and made a portrait of the Mussulman society so exact that the romances of Esplandian, Amadis de Gaul, and others, which evoked the delicious knight-errantry of Don Quixote, can present a picture of the veritable chivalry of the Middle Ages. We possess but few verses of the Mussulmans of Granada. Argot de Moll preserved them in Arabic, transcribed in Latin characters, one piece being attributed to Mouley Abou Abdallah:
"The charming Alhambra and its palaces weep
Over their loss, Muley Boabdil (Bon Abdallah),
Bring me my horse and my white buckler,
That I may fight to retake the Alhambra;
Bring me my horse and my buckler blue,
That I may go to fight to retake my children.
"My children are at Guadia, my wife at Jolfata;
Thou hast caused my ruin, O Setti Omm el Fata.
My children are at Guadia, my wife at Jolfata,
Thou hast caused my ruin, O Setti Omm el Fata!"46
As may be seen, these verses have no resemblance to those called Moorish. These are of a purely Spanish diction.47
Some romances, but not of these last-named, have kept traces of the real legends of the Arabs. There is among them one which treats of the adventures of Don Rodrigues, the last king of the Visigoths--"The Closed House of Toledo."48 "The Seduction of la Cava," "The Vengeance of Count Julien," "The Battle of Guadalete," are brought back in the same fashion by the historians and writers of Mussulman romances.
The romance on the construction of the Alhambra has preserved the character of an Arabic legend which dates from before the prophet.49 There is also a romance on the conquest of Spain, attributed to an Arab writer, the same man whom Cervantes somewhat later feigned to present as the author of Don Quixote, the Moor, Cid Hamet ben Engels.50
It is another style of writing, less seductive, perhaps, than that of the Moorish romances, in spite of thei
r lack of vivacity and their bad taste. But why mark this as the expression of the Mussulman sentiment under Christian domination? Conquered by the Castilians, the Aragons, and the Portuguese, the Moors had lost the use of Arabic, but they had preserved the exterior sign-writing, just as their new converts retained their usages and their national costumes. We possess a complete literature composed in Spanish, but written in Arabic characters. They called it by the name of Aljaniado. Its chief characteristic is that it treats of the principal legends of the Mussulmans; those of Solomon and Moses, of Jesus; the birth, childhood, and the marriage of Mohammed; Temins ed Daria, the war of the king El Mohallal, the miracle of the moon, the ascension of Mohammed to heaven, the conversion of Omar, the battle of Yarmouk, the golden castle, the marvels that God showed to Abraham, Ali and the forty young girls, the anti-Christ and the day of judgment51 etc.; the legend of Joseph, son of Jacob; that of Alexander the Great,52 to which could be added the story of the princess Zoraida,53 without speaking of the pious exhortations, magic formulas, conjurations, and charms.54
The Moors held to these documents all the more that they were written in Arabic, and that the fury of the Inquisition was let loose upon them. To save them from the flames, their owners hid them with the greatest care, and but recently, at El Monacid, they found a whole library in Arabic and Aljamiado, hidden more than two centuries between the double walls of an old house.55 The Mussulman proprietor of these books and his descendants were dead, or had emigrated to Africa, abandoning the treasure which was to see the light in a more tolerant epoch.