the Arabs

The Arabs say, among their proverbs on recklessness:

And one of the sages of the Arabs said:

the ruler is a man of aggression and of caprice.

Among the things it is not well to pass over is that the Arabs cannot soundly be measured, in their circumstances and their genealogies, against the people of the totem among the savage nations — the Indians of Australia and America and the Negroes of Africa — because the Arabs are among the nations most advanced in mind and in soul, and are a people of an ancient civilisation like the civilisatio …

There is in the proofs of Smith, or of any other, for mother-right among the Arabs no explicit statement nor established proof;

But Professor Smith's saying has already been given, that the Arabs, the Hebrews and the Aramaeans in their most ancient times were living together in the Arabian peninsula, and then the Hebrews and the Aramaeans went forth and the Arabs remained in their place.

I say, then, that there is no benefit to these light-armed men, not even if they become peltasts, toward justice and true temperance and prudence, not even if they strip still more and run about naked in winter or take the dress of the Medes and Arabs, just as they will not be able to play the flute by putting on the dress of flute-players.

Do you reflect that all these peoples—I mean the Celts and Indians and Iberians and Arabs and Babylonians—receive tribute from us, not for their land or their flocks, but for our folly?

Do you, then, consider that all these—I mean the Celts and Indians and Iberians and Arabs and Babylonians—exact tribute from us, not of land nor of cattle, but of our folly?

The doctrines (*madhāhib*) of the Arabs have been followed by what is transmitted from the imāms on this question only as a passage over into what is serious in its investigations, since the first aim is more like repose and diversion, on account of the sleights (*makhārīq*) and illusions that are mingled with what is serious in it.

As for *the first aim*, it is on the doctrines of the Arabs and their claims concerning the jinn, and it has taken in twenty-one investigations (*mabḥath*):

this is a book that investigates the doctrines (*madhāhib*) of the Arabs (*aʻrāb*) concerning the jinn, and what the philosophers of Islam said about them — a question that has not ceased, and does not cease, to be a subject for investigators in every religious community and every sect.

Arabes autem et Sinenses a saeculis aliquot ad hunc usque diem perpetuo cum Indis negotiantur.

or were you to verify that some of the Arab authors have muddled matters in their books, then do not judge that all the books of the Arabs are muddle and idle talk.

And how sweet is what the Arab poet Abū al-Shīṣ said:

It is enough to mention the Celts of the dimly discerned heroic age — the days to which the legendary disputes of Ossian and Patrick were assigned — and the Arabs of the time before Islam.

We can force them to co-operate with us by admitting their contention for the sake of argument, and then asking whether the Russians are ready for absolute freedom, and if so, whether the Hindoos are ready, or the Chinese, or the Arabs, or the Hottentots, or the tree-dwarfs?