United States or Bermuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the Aryan Hindu cults stars were revered, and by the non-Aryan Gonds were worshiped, but there is no star-god proper. The early Hebrews may have practiced some sort of star-worship; there are traces of such a cult among their neighbors the Arabs. It has been supposed that the pre-Islamic Arabs worshiped the planet Venus under the name Al-Uzza, but this is not certain.
The Iban culture presents also certain features not common to other peoples of Borneo and not found among the Malays; and all or most are such as must have been exterminated among the Malays on their conversion to Islam, if they had formed part of their culture in their pre-Islamic period.
The principal value of Tabari's compilation consists in the extremely exhaustive presentation of the history of Islam from the first appearance of the Prophet; no other Arabic work in this respect can compare with his. The pre-Islamic history comprises, may be, a twentieth portion of the whole work and gives a very groat deal of what we would rather be without.
The Arabs were too nearly akin to Negroes to draw an absolute color line. Antar, one of the great pre-Islamic poets of Arabia, was the son of a black woman, and one of the great poets at the court of Haroun al Raschid was black.
Chivalry, a notion purely Bedouin, is hardly yet extinct among us. Romance, the offspring of pre-Islamic Arabia, is still a common motive of our action, and our poets express it still, to the neglect of classic models, in the rhymed verse of Yemen. The mass of our people still pray to the God of Abraham, and turn eastwards towards that land which is Arabia's half-sister, the Holy Land of the Jews.
Enthusiastic partisans of the Persian element, these circles as a counterblast to the poverty of civilizing factors of the pre-Islamic Arab nation, turned to the glories of Persia, principally of the Sasanian past. Iranophile writers had no need for inventions, since historical truth was on their side. The effectiveness of their method was indisputable.
To the first category belong all those Turcoman, Avshar, Yuruk, and other Turki tribes, which filtered over the Euphrates into unoccupied or sparsely inhabited parts of Syria and Asia Minor from the seventh century onwards, and survive to this day in isolated patches, distinguished from the mass of the local populations, partly by an ineradicable instinct for nomadic life, partly by retention of the pre-Islamic beliefs and practices of the first immigrants.
Word Of The Day