Journal of theological studies Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A little before the time of Mohammed, the poet al-Aswad ibn Ya'fur composed an ode, in which he saysl:— ' There was a time when I would betake me in the eveni... more »ng to the wine-merchants, with my hair well combed, lavish of my substance, before my neck had been stiffened by age ; ' And there I delighted myself—for youth is keen to enjoy—with choicest wine mingled with water that fell from the morning clouds, ' Wine furnished by one adorned with ear-rings, sweet-voiced, and wearing a girdle, wine which he brought for silver coins : ' It is carried round by an attendant having a pearl on each ear, clad in a tunic, the tips of his fingers stained with red dye : ' And the fair women walk past, resembling full moons or graven images, while gentle maidens bear the goblets : 1 And the hearts are smitten by the fair ones, who are even as the eggs of the ostrich lying between a belt of sand and a stony ridge.' Another point of interest, in this connexion, is that the word hur3, which occurs several times in the Koran as an epithet of the female inhabitants of Paradise, is one of the ordinary epithets of women in the old poets. Many other instances might be cited to show how largely Mohammed's conception of the future life was affected by the poetry of the heathen Arabs. But it must be remembered that these resemblances are confined to matters I of detail; the idea of the future life itself, as a state of retribution, was essentially non-Arabian, and hence it must always be regarded as one of the most astonishing facts in religious history that so large a proportion of the Arabs should have been led, in the course of a few years, to adopt a belief which at first appeared to them the height of absurdity. When we consider the conditions under which the Prophet lived, his...« less