Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/212

 638–44] wife of noble blood held, under the old and chivalrous code of the Bedawīn, a position of honour and supremacy in the household, from which she could be ousted by no base-born rival, however fair or fruitful. She was now to be, in the estimation of her husband, but one amongst many. A slave-girl bearing children, became at once, as Um Weled, free; and in point of legitimacy her offspring ranked with the children of the free and noble wife. Beauty and blandishment thus too often outshone birth and breeding, and the favourite of the hour displaced her noble mistress.

With the coarse sensualist, revelling like Al-Moghīra in a ḥarīm stocked with Greek and Persian bond-maids, this might have been expected. But it was not less the case in many a house of greater refinement and repute. Some lady, ravished, it may have been, from a noble home, and endowed with the charms and graces of a courtly life, would captivate her master, and for the moment rule supreme. The story of Leila affords a sample. That beautiful Ghassānid princess was bought at Dūma by Khālid from the common prize. The fame of her charms reached Medīna, and kindled a romantic flame in the breast of ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān, son of Abu Bekr. The disconsolate lover ceased not singing his mistress's praises, and his own unhappiness, in verses still preserved. At last he became her master, and she was despatched from the camp to his home. At once he took her to wife. His love was so great that, forsaking all other, he kept only to her, so long as her beauty lasted. She was the queen of his household. After a time she fell sick and began to waste away. The beauty went, and with it the master's love, and her turn came to be forsaken. His comrades said to him: "Why keep her forsaken and neglected thus? Suffer her to go back to her people and her home." So he suffered her. Leila's fate was happy compared with that of most. Tired of his toy, the owner would sell her, if still young and beautiful, to be the plaything of another; or if disease or years had fretted her beauty, leave her to eke out the forlorn, weary, hopeless, lot of a household slave.