Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/160

 Again, another poem on Blood-revenge in the same collection ends with the words—

This prominence of communal sentiment should prevent us from picturing the chiefs of an Arab clan as corresponding to the knights of medieval Europe. The Arab's sense of honour has been compared with the feelings of medieval chivalry; Antar has been called the Bayard of Pagan Arabia; and the Arabs of the days of Ignorance (that is, before the Prophet's birth) have been described as the forerunners of our Western chivalry. In all this there is but a grain of truth. No doubt the Arabs in Spain and during the Crusades often supplied models of chivalrous deportment to European knights. But, in the first place, the old clan feelings of the Arabs underwent great changes during the Mohammedan conquests, and under the military organisation such conquests required. Feelings of honour resembling those of the German gefolge towards their military chief were developed and tended more and more to take the place of clan ties. Moreover, without some such loosening of these ties, without some such expansion of Arab sentiments as these conquering hosts brought about, it is hard to see how the common creed of Islâm could have subdued the tribal antipathies with which it had a long and troublesome contest. But these poems of Blood-revenge display feelings of duty and honour altogether older than the chivalry of Christian knight or Moslem soldier, just in this, that clan kinship—not military service, or nationality, or universal religion—is still the bond of social union. In fact, it was military combination for purposes