20 
[No. 1, 
C. J. Lyall —The Mo l allaqali of Zuheyr. 
It is worth remarking- that this line seems to contradict the assertion of et-Tebrizi, 
in his commentary on the Hamasch, p. 107, that the young camels (seven or eight 
months old) called ’ifdl (plural of ’afil) were not given in payment of bloodwits. 
Perhaps there was an exception in the case of the better breeds. The passage, how¬ 
ever, on which et-Tebrizi makes this remark does not necessarily bear him out. 
v. 26. “ Tribesmen together leagued,” el-Ahldf , plural of hi If. The commen¬ 
tary says that those confederates were Ghatafan, Asad and Tayyi’ ; other authorities 
quoted by Lane (s. v. hilfj restrict the appellation to Asad and Ghatafan, Asad and 
Tayyi’, or Fezarah (a branch of Buby&n) and Asad. Since Bubyan, a division of 
Ghatafan, is named separately from the Ahldf it would seem probable that the word 
here means only Asad and Tayyi’. I do not, however, find that these confederates 
took any part in the War of Bahis, except at the battle of Slirb Jebcleh, when Asad 
joined Bubyan and Temim against ‘Amir and ‘Abs; their presence at the oath-taking 
between the various branches of Ghatafan would, however, render the engagement 
more formal and solemn : they were a sort of “ Guaranteeing Power.” 
vv. 27-28. Herr von Kremer (Culturgeschichte dcs Orients unter den Chalifcn, 
Yol. ii., p. 358, note*) regards these verses as interpolated, and alien fx-om the spirit of 
the poetry of the Ignoi-ance. He says, moreover, that they are inconsistent with v. 48, 
which expresses the true feeling of that age, that of the Future no man knows any¬ 
thing. Certainly their spirit is more religious than is usual in the old poetry, and the 
mention of the Book and the Reckoning Bay points to a body of doctrine which we 
arc accustomed to think was first planted among the Arabs by Mohammed. But it is 
to be remarked that the passage where the verses come (vv. 26-33) seems thoroughly 
consecutive and complete in sense : that the same number of verses is given, in the 
same order, in all the recensions of the poem ; and that v. 28 exhibits a very curious 
construction, easily intelligible indeed, but unlikely to be used in an interpolation : 
this is the carrying on of the mejzum imperfect from the apodosis of the conditional 
sentence in v. 27 b into the unconditional pi’oposition of v. 28. 
As regards the possibility of such an exhoi’tation being addressed to the tx-ibes 
settled in the counti-y East of Yethrib and South of the mountains of Tayyi’ in 610 
A. B., I do not think that it should be hastily rejected. Few subjects are more obscure 
than the real nature of the religion of the pagan Arabs. It would seem that at the 
time when the Prophet arose there was extremely little religious faith in the people of 
any sort: that their old divinities were held by them in much the same estimation as 
that in which our own forefathers in Norway and Iceland held Odin and Thor when 
Christianity first overspread the North. But beyond the reverence, such as it was, paid to 
* His words are—“ Bas Gedicht, Zohair XYI, wird man wegen v. 27 (28), der von 
der Abrechnung am jiingsten Tage spricht, fur unecht oder interpolirt erklaren miissen. 
Ich entscheide mich fur das Letztere, denn v. 49 (48) spricht die echte, alte Idee aus, 
dass man von dem Zukiinftigen nichts wisse.” In the same note, H. von Kremer sees 
traces of Mohammedan recension in the name ‘Abd-allah in a poem of ‘Antarah’s. I 
presume that he considers the occurrence of that name as belonging to the father of 
Mohammed, the son of Jud‘an, and the brother of Dureyd son of es-Simmeh, as well 
as to the tribe-fathers ‘Abd-allah ibn el-Azd (Ma‘arif, p. 54), ‘Abd-allah ibn Ghatafan 
{id. p. 39), and ‘Abd-allah ibn Ka‘b and ‘Abd-allah ibn Kilab, sub-divisions of ‘Amir ibn 
Sa‘sa‘ali (id. pp. 42 and 43), to be insufficiently vouched for. 
