ever reach has more of value
than the praying of a rich man through a thousand years." And in
connection with this quatrain we may quote Blunt's rendering of
Zohair:

I have learned that he who giveth nothing, deaf to his
friends' begging,
loosed shall be to the world's tooth-strokes: fools'
feet shall tread on him.

As for the power of the weak, we have some instances from
Abbaside history. One of the caliphs wanted to do deeds of
violence in Baghdad. Scornfully he asked of his opponents if they
could prevent him. "Yes," they answered, "we will fight you with
the arrows of the night." And he desisted from his plans.
Prayers, complaints, and execrations which the guiltless,
fighting his oppressor, sends up to heaven are called the arrows
of the night and are, the Arabs tell us, invariably successful.
This belief may solace you for the foundation of suffering
(_quatrain_ 71), which, by the way, is also in the philosophic
system of Zeno the Stoic. Taking the four elements of Empedocles,
he says that three of them are passive, or suffering, elements
while only fire is active, and that not wholly. It was Zeno's
opinion that everything must be active or must suffer. . . . An
explanation for our suffering is given by Soame Jenyns, who
flourished in the days when, as his editor could write, referring
to his father Sir Roger Jenyns, "the order of knighthood was
received by gentlemen with the profoundest gratitude." Soame's
thesis is his "Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil,"
that human sufferings are compensated by the enjoyment possibly
experienced by some higher order of beings which inflict them, is
ridiculed by Samuel Johnson. We have Jenyns's assurance that

To all inferior animals 'tis given
To enjoy the state allotted them by Heav'n.

And (_quatrain_ 75) we may profitably turn to Coleridge:

Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death!
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep;
Babes, children, youths and men,
Night following night, for threescore years and ten.

We should be reconciled, says Abu'l-Ala (_quatrain_ 76), even to
the Christian kings of Ghassan, in the Hauran. These were the
hereditary enemies of the kings of Hirah. On behalf of the Greek
emperors of Constantinople they controlled the Syrian Arabs. But
they disappeared before the triumphant Moslems, the last of their
kings being Jabalah II., who