Literature of the world : an introductory study . to the great daysof Bagdad, Cairo, and Cor-dova ; visions of the crowdedbazaars, the mosques, Arabsheiks, veiled women, andHaroun al-Rashid beset we breathe an air of mys-tery and enchantment. The classic period of Arabicpoetry was just beforeand dur-ing the time of Mohammed(seventh century). A fixedpoetic form and content of ahigh order of merit becameprevalent. The poets told ofthe Arab life—the stretchesof desert, the oases, the camelsand antelopes, the joys of thechase, the life of the poems were passed frommouth to mouth a
Literature of the world : an introductory study . to the great daysof Bagdad, Cairo, and Cor-dova ; visions of the crowdedbazaars, the mosques, Arabsheiks, veiled women, andHaroun al-Rashid beset we breathe an air of mys-tery and enchantment. The classic period of Arabicpoetry was just beforeand dur-ing the time of Mohammed(seventh century). A fixedpoetic form and content of ahigh order of merit becameprevalent. The poets told ofthe Arab life—the stretchesof desert, the oases, the camelsand antelopes, the joys of thechase, the life of the poems were passed frommouth to mouth and became the common possession of the Arabs. The succeeding period wit-nessed the development of city life and the characteristic Moslemculture in such centers as Bagdad and Cairo. Arab Spain pro-duced an enormous amount of poetry, as an anthology of twentythousand verses collected in the tenth century bears , the patron of literature, collected in Cordova a library saidto contain four hundred thousand volumes. As the Arab poetic. A PAGE (chapter FIRST) OF A MANU-SCRIPT COPY OF THE KORAN, THE BIBLEOF THE MOSLEMS 26 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD spirit died out other branches of literature flourished, more par-ticularly anecdote and tale and a vast body of religious interpreta-tion and commentary. Arabia was the home of the Koran, and theKoran dominated the whole Moslem world. We have such excel-lent translations as Sales and Lanes, but whatever interest theKoran may have for us exists more in the field of religion thanof literature. The Arabian Nights. To the Western reader the strange, allur-ing, exotic life of the East is embodied for all time in the ArabianNights. This famous collection of tales first became known toEurope through the French translation by Galland in the earlyeigtheenth century. Since that time the characters of the Nights—Haroun al-Rashid, Scheherazade, the calenders, Ali Baba, Sindbad,Aladdin, and a host of others—have given delight to all th
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