s, and
singers who thronged the entrance to the court, there are many who claim
real poetic genius. Among them are al-Ahtal (died 713), a Christian;
'Umar ibn Rabi'a (died 728), Jarir al-Farazdak (died 728), and Muslim
ibn al-Walid (died 828). But it is rather the Persian spirit which
rules,--the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,--"charming elegance,
servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the
characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate
of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love.
Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart,
Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of
his people. "I would that all which Religion and Law forbids were
permitted me; and if I had only two years to live, that God would change
me into a dog at the Temple in Mecca, so that I might bite every pilgrim
in the leg," he is reported to have said. When he himself did once make
the required pilgrimage, he did so in order to carry his loves up to the
very walls of the sacred house. "Jovial, adventure-loving,
devil-may-care," irreligious in all he did, yet neither the Khalif nor
the whole Muhammadan world were incensed. In spite of all, they petted
him and pronounced his wine-songs the finest ever written; full of
thought and replete with pictures, rich in language and true to every
touch of nature. "There are no poems on wine equal to my own, and to my
amatory compositions all others must yield," he himself has said. He was
poor and had to live by his talents. But wherever he went he was richly
rewarded. He was content only to be able to live in shameless revelry
and to sing. As he lived, so he died,--in a half-drunken group, cut to
pieces by those who thought themselves offended by his lampoons.

At the other end of the Muslim world, the star of the Umayyids, which
had set at Damascus, rose again at Cordova. The union of two
civilizations--Indo-Germanic and Semitic--was as advantageous in the
West as in the East. The influence of the spirit of learning which
reigned at Bagdad reached over to Spain, and the two dynasties vied with
each other in the patronage of all that was beautiful in literature and
learned in science. Poetry was cultivated and poets cherished with a
like regard: the Spanish innate love of the Muse joined hands with that
of the Arabic. It was the same kind of poetry in Umayyid Spain as in
Abbasside Bagdad: po