1893."] H. S. Jarrett — Customs among the Bedouins of the Hawdn. 49 



of tlie grammar of classical Arabic, otherwise than by being bred among 

 those who preserved it un corrupt. Muhammad himself was sent to the 

 desert to be nursed by the tribe of Saad Ibn Bekr Ibn Hawazin, 

 descendants of Mudar though not in the direct line of the Kuraysh, 

 and from this teaching he claimed to be the most chaste among the 

 Arabs in speech. Even the famous lexicologist, Al Asmai, and the 

 equally famous grammarian his contemporary, Sibawaih, were reckoned 

 by some purists to have erred in grammar. This classical language 

 of Maad or Mudar, as it is termed by the Arabs, is said ,to linger 

 in some remote parts of Arabia. One of these is held to be Akad, near 

 Zebid on the western sea-board of El Yemen, the people of which 

 suffer no stranger to remain with them more than three days, the 

 prescribed legal period of hospitality, for fear of the corruption of their 

 speech. The writer of thi 3 account has evidently not visited this for- 

 tunate spot even within the tolerated limits of a traveller's sojourn, but 

 though his language fails to attain even the ordinary level of journalis- 

 tic writing and its interest lies exclusively in its subject, there is 

 nevertheless, in spite of grammatical defects, a simplicity of narrative 

 which recommends it as the evidence of a straight-forward, unaffected, 

 though not very intelligent eye-witness. Whether he has correctly 

 quoted the two specimens of verse sung by the girls at the marriage- 

 festivities is perhaps doubtful, and it would have been more to the utility 

 of his description had he explained the meaning of the first of these 

 which is much in need of a gloss. Its metre appears to be a rude form 

 of hazaj, depending more upon accent than prosodial rule, resembling in 

 its character the class of ballad first in vogue among the Umayyads of 

 Spain about the ninth century, of which specimens are given by Ibn 

 Khaldun in his Prolegomena. The province of Hauran, situate on the 

 frontiers of Irak and Syria, is expressly mentioned by him as occupied by 

 nomad Arabs who had roamed over its plains and continued to encamp 

 there even in his day and who apparently still make it their annual 

 pasturage. The province has given its name to the poems, or Kasidas 

 composed by the Eastern Arabs which commonly begin with the name 

 of the writer and pass on to the praise of the poet's mistress. These 

 poems were termed Baddwiyah or Bedouin, and HaurdniyaJi or of Hauran, 

 and Kaisiyah after the tribe of Kais ordinarily dwelling in that country. 

 They were chanted to some simple airs which paid little regard to the 

 canons of harmony and were known as Hauraniyali. The Western Arabs 

 styled this class of poems Asmgiat after Asmai, the celebrated 

 philologer and collector of the disjecta membra ypoetarum, who was a 

 complete master of the idiom of the desert Arabs, and a living treasury 

 of their verse, and who was said to have known by heart sixteen 



