Labid loves a camel less favored in appearance

Labid loves a camel less favored in appearance:

. . . with a lean camel to ride on, that many journeyings

have refined to a bare thinness of spine and shrunken hump,

one that, when her flesh is fallen away and her strength is spent

and her ankle-thongs are worn to ribbons of long fatigue,

yet rejoices in her bridle, and runs still as if she were

a roseate cloud, rain-emptied, that flies with the south wind,

or a great-uddered she-ass, pregnant of a white-bellied sire worn lean

by the stampeding and kicking and biting of fellow-stallions.

The poet Tarafah was himself ambitious but realistic:

Had my Lord willed, I’d have been another Kais bin Khdlid, and had my Lord willed, I’d have been another Amr bin Marthad; then I’d have been a man of much substance, visited by all the sprigs of the nobility, chiefs and sons of chiefs.

I’m the lean, hard-bitten warrior you know of old, intrepid, lively as the darting head of a serpent;

I have vowed my loins cease not to furnish a lining

for an Indian scimitar sharp as to both its edges,

trenchant—when I stand forth to take my revenge with it

its first blow suffices; I need no repeat stroke; it’s no pruning-hook-

a trusty blade, recoiling not from its target.

In another ode, ascribed to Zuhayr, we see lovely ladies borne along in litters on their journey:

Kainite camels

Their howdahs hung with costly cloths, and fine-spun veils whose fringes are rose-red, the very hue of dragon’s blood; issuing from Es-Soobdn, they have threaded its twisting course mounted on Kainite camels sleek and excellently nourished, swerved through hollow Es-Soobdn, ascended its rugged ridge wearing the sweet coyness of the luxuriously nurtured.

It is as though the thrums of dyed wool littering every spot where they alighted were uncrushed berries of the red fand.

With the dawn they arose, and sunrise saw them stirring, then into Wadi Er-Rass they plunged like hand into mouth, and when they came to the waters blue in the brimming well they cast down their sticks, as one who pitches his tent to stay; a sweet diversion are they to the gentle, a pretty sight well worth the scrutiny of those who like looking at beauty.

Islam is, among other things, what Abraham made of that magnificent world when Muhammad gave him the chance. In Arabia as in Judaea and all up and along the eastern frontiers, life could take its own course in these communities, barely touched by the twitches on the strings of au¬thority that ran back to Constantinople.