h, in whose Muhammad all the glories of Arabia had centred, with
one exception,--the gift of poetry. And now "this Don Juan of Mecca,
this Ovid of Arabia," was to wipe away that stain. He was the Arabian
Minnesinger, whom Friedrich Rueckert called "the greatest love-poet the
Arabs have produced." A man of the city, the desert had no attractions
for him. But he sang of love as he made love,--with utter disregard of
holy place or high station, in an erotic strain strange to the stern
Umayyids. No wonder they warned their children against reading his
compositions. "The greatest sin committed against Allah are the poems of
'Umar ibn Rabi'a," they said.

With the rise of the Abbassides (750), that "God-favored dynasty,"
Arabic literature entered upon its second great development; a
development which may be distinguished from that of the Umayyids (which
was Arabian) as, in very truth, Muhammadan. With Bagdad as the capital,
it was rather the non-Arabic Persians who held aloft the torch than the
Arabs descended from Kureish. It was a bold move, this attempt to weld
the old Persian civilization with the new Muhammadan. Yet so great was
the power of the new faith that it succeeded. The Barmecide major-domo
ably seconded his Abbasside master; the glory of both rests upon the
interest they took in art, literature, and science. The Arab came in
contact with a new world. Under Mansur (754), Harun al-Rashid (786), and
Ma'mun (813), the wisdom of the Greeks in philosophy and science, the
charms of Persia and India in wit and satire, were opened up to
enlightened eyes. Upon all of these, whatever their nationality, Islam
had imposed the Arab tongue, pride in the faith and in its early
history. 'Qur'an' exegesis, philosophy, law, history, and science were
cultivated under the very eyes and at the bidding of the Palace. And, at
least for several centuries, Europe was indebted to the culture of
Bagdad for what it knew of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.

The Arab muse profited with the rest of this revival. History and
philosophy, as a study, demanded a close acquaintance with the products
of early Arab genius. The great philologian al-Asmai (740-831) collected
the songs and tales of the heroic age; and a little later, with other
than philological ends in view, Abu Tammam and al-Buchturi (816-913)
made the first anthologies of the old Arabic literatures ('Hamasah').
Poetry was already cultivated: and amid the hundreds of wits, poet