Machine summary:
Under foreign influences, a higher type of civilization developed in the northern tracts of the territory where southern Arabian tribes raised the level of Yathrib, later Madina, whereas the Arabs of Iraq or Mesopotamia were influenced by Iranians.
· THE BEGINNING AND CHARACTER OF ARABIC PoETRY The period of the history of the Arabs prior to the origin of Islam is called al-jahiliyya (barbarism), because of the less developed spiritual and moral life of the Arab tribes in that primitive age.
. The products of Arabic imaginative poetry, that is known as fully developed as early as the jahiliyya, are called qasidas.
· · ; · Arabic tradition attributes the origin of the qasida to Muhalhil ibn Rabi'a, a leader of the tribe of Taghlib who in a poem of this kind mourned the death of his brother Kulayb, which caused a long warfare between the tribes of Bakr and Taghlib.
Ta'abbata sharran was also ranked in the same class; the most famous of" the ravens of the Arabs" was, however, 'An• tara ibn Shaddad of the tribe of' Abs, whose mother was a black slave.
Another great Arab poet of the tribe of' Abs was 'Urwat ibn al-Ward, who lived immediately before Islam.
On the edge of the sea of sand between Dakhul and Haurnal !" We are led back to the time of the war of Basus by Tarafa ibn al• ' Abd, a famous poet of the tribe of Bakr.