Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/213

 184 Relaxation of manners is significantly marked by frequent notices of drunkenness. There are not wanting instances even of Governors deposed because of it. ʿOmar was rigorous in imposing the legal penalty. He did not shrink from commanding stripes to be inflicted, even on his own son and his boon companions, for the use of wine. At Damascus, the scandal grew to such a height that Abu ʿObeida had to summon a band of citizens, with the hero Ḍirār at their head, for the offence. Hesitating to enforce the law, he begged of ʿOmar that the penitent offenders might be forgiven. An angry answer came: "Gather an assembly," he wrote in the stern language of his early days, "and bring them forth. Then ask, Is wine lawful or forbidden? If they shall say forbidden, lay eighty stripes on each; if lawful, behead them every one." They confessed that it was forbidden, and submitted to the ignominious punishment.

Weakness for wine may have been a relic of the days when the poet sang, "Bury me under the roots of the juicy vine." But there were domestic influences altogether new at work in the vast accession of captive women, Greek, Persian, and Egyptian, to the Muslim ḥarīms. The Jews and Christians might retain their ancestral faith, whether as concubines, or married to their masters. With their ancestral faith they, no doubt, retained much also of the habits of their fatherland; and the same may be said both of them and of the Heathen and Parsee slave-girls, even when adopting outwardly the Muslim faith. The countless progeny of these alliances, though ostensibly bred in the creed and practice of Islām, must have inherited much of the mother's life and nationality who nursed and brought them up. The crowded ḥarīm, with its sanction of servile concubinage, was also an evil school for the rising generation. Wealth, luxury, and idleness were under such circumstances provocative of licence and indulgence, which too often degenerated into intemperance and debauchery.

For, apart from war and faction, Muslim life was idle and inactive. There was little else to relieve its sanctimonious voluptuousness. The hours not spent in the ḥarīm were divided between listless converse in the City