'A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English; with a Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations' [‎38v] (81/1826)

lx
DISSERTATION.
manuscripts at Ispahan, some of which were
brought into Europe, and placed in the library of
Louis XIV. by his Oriental interpreter, M. Petit
Le Croix.—The great men in the East have been
always fond of music. Though prohibited by the
Muhammadan religion, it in general makes part
of every public or private entertainment. Female
slaves are generally kept to amuse them, and the
ladies of their harams. Female strolling musicians
are also very common ; and the Persian khanya-
garah seems nearly to have resembled our old
English minstrel; as he generally accompanied
his barbut or lute with heroic songs.—Their
musicians appear, like old Timotheus, to have
known the art of moving the passions, and to have
generally directed their music to the heart; I shall
mention one instance. AlfarabI, who died about
the middle of the tenth century, was a philosopher
of uncommon genius, and, amongst other accom
plishments, he excelled in music. On his return
from the pilgrimage to Mecca, he introduced
himself, though a stranger, at the court of Say-
fu d dawla, Sultan of Syria. Musicians were ac
cidentally performing, and he joined them. The
piince admired him, and wished to hear something
of his own ; he pulled a composition from his
pocket, and distributing the parts amongst the
band, the first movement threw the prince and
his courtiers into violent and incessant laughter,
the next melted all into tears, and the last lulled
even the performers asleep. 111
A vaiiety of customs, we may here observe,
prevailed amongst the independent tribes of Pagan
Aiabians and Tartars, which were either abolished
01 modified, when they became united under
princes of ability and power. One of these was the
destructive system of private war. In every state
where the arm of the civil magistrate has been too
feeble to check or chastise the crimes of men,private
revenge seems naturally to have usurped the place
of legal punishment. We find it in full vigour in
the middle ages, and universally adopted in every
European state. And so forcible is the prejudice
of ancient habit, that even where sovereigns
gained strength sufficient, to substitute the laws
of reason for the practices of barbarity, they found
it not prudent to overturn at once this pernicious
offspring of uncultivated minds ; but, by loading
it with expensive compositions, they endeavour to
make its ravages hurtful to society. Similar but
more savage principles appear to have regulated
those Eastern nations. If an Arabian had lost a
near relation, a wife, or even a slave, he singled
out from among the captives, when victorious, a
freeman for each, and sacrificed them in cold
blood. This was not considered as barbarous : it
was rather a point of honour, which avarice alone
appears to have mitigated; the husband, relations,
or master of the deceased, being permitted to dis
pense with their sanguinary vengeance, in consi
deration of a mulct. We accordingly find, about
the birth of Muhammad, that ten camels were the
compensation for a slaughtered man, without any
apparent distinction between the freeman and the
slave. Muhammad, powerful as he was, durst
not, any more than the lawgivers of Europe, so
far oppose the general genius of the people, as
entirely to abolish this brutal custom ; but he
endeavoured to mitigate or regulate it by several
passages in the Kur’an, in which, among other
circumstances, a distinction is made of rank and
sex. In after times, the composition of ten camels
was found inadequate to check the prevalence of
private vengeance ; and, in the Sunna, it was ac
cordingly raised to a hundred; probably for the
same reasons which dictated an increase of the
sanguinary fines among the Lombards and other
European nations; because those fines having been
originally fixed when the people were poor, they
were found too trifling, when, by the extent of
their conquests, they had become powerful and
rich. It does not, however, appear that any thing
similar to the European Jrecfum, or proportion paid
to the public treasury, subsisted among the East
ern nations, the whole of the compensation being
received by the relations or masters of the slaugh-
teied person. In the East, as well as in Europe,
the relations of the principals in a quarrel seem to
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