The pre-Islamic age was the age of chivalry and poetry. It traced for the Arabs the path of their life, directed their inclinations, formed their character, and left the deepest imprint on their souls. And despite their effort to renew their ideals after leaving the Peninsula and adopting the principles of Islam, their souls remained attached to the desert: they yearned for it, hallowed its traditions, took after its poets, and made it the source of their inspiration. Though they tried to forget the age of polytheism and efface its traces, they departed from its ideals only a little.

It is no wonder that the desert should have this far-reaching effect upon the souls of the Arabs. It was the desert that taught them boldness and endurance in battle, and bred in their souls that hardness which made their great conquests possible. It was the cradle of their poetry and the theater of their raids and of their glorious "days," in which every tribe delighted to boast and take pride. That vast open space which stirs awe and awakens dreams; in which a man roams at his pleasure, free of the fetters of civilization, with no companion but his sword and his she-camel; he eats the herbs of the earth and scorns to beg; when hungry he moves on, or plunders a caravan; he thrills to the call for succor and to giving, and feeds others out of love of it; his tongue breaks into poetry at every occasion, and if he hears what displeases him, he flares up and stirs his sword.

Two qualities of the pre-Islamic Arabs captivated them in particular: their skill in war and the fluency of their tongues; and to these two distinctions they clung. But with their removal from the Peninsula and their inclination toward a life of luxury, they began gradually to lose the warlike distinction under the influence of their surroundings, and nothing remained to them of the old Arabs but verbal brilliance — which likewise lost its magic with the passing of the years, through the tyranny of imitation and the spread of artifice and rigidity. Even so, no one denies the Arabs of today their verbal brilliance, though this brilliance is still stamped with a literary, poetic stamp that does not keep pace with the requirements of the modern age. We observe likewise that the custom of the blood-feud, still rife among us, which makes revenge a sacred duty upon every member of the injured family, is nothing but a relic of pre-Islamic times. Indeed the scholar Weulersse, in his book "The Peasants of Syria and the Near East," goes further than this. He holds that the Arab conquest stamped these lands with their present character, and that the Arab countries were never free of the influence of nomadism at any stage of their history, above all in the ages of decline; and one consequence of this influence was the spread among them of contempt for agriculture and industry, and the preference of commerce over them.

In their pre-Islamic days the Arabs were among the peoples furthest removed from industry, since the materials needed for it were not to be found in their land. Most of them were nomads who paid no heed to agriculture and knew of it nothing but the raising of livestock, on which they depended for their food, their journeys, and their clothing, and for whose sake they wandered in search of water and pasture. But since their country was a passage between two continents, touching the sea on one side and the land on the other, it became a road for caravans and a corridor for the trade routes between India on the one hand and Syria and Egypt on the other. The caravans had trading stations such as Mecca, and the Arabs worked in trade: some as guides of caravans, some as merchants who bought goods and carried them on their camels between the Peninsula and Syria; and Quraysh had its two journeys, of summer and of winter. Thanks to this commercial activity, wealth multiplied among them in the towns and the standing of merchants grew so great that they said: "He who is not a merchant is nothing in their eyes."

Yet if we set commerce beside the other sources of wealth — I mean industry and agriculture — we shall find that preferring it over them is dangerous and short-sighted. Commerce is the pursuit of money by the shortest and least toilsome roads, and it often relies on fraud and deception, on