100}

Omar held to the earthly and the material. For him there was no spiritual
world. Chance seemed to rule all the affairs of men. A pitiless destiny
shaped out the course of each human being.

"'Tis all a chequer-board of nights and days
Where destiny with men for pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it."

Neither from earth nor heaven could he find any answer to his cry. With
sages and saints he discussed, and heard, "great argument, but evermore
came out by the same door as in he went." He left the wise to talk, for one
thing alone was certain, and all else was lies,--"the flower that once has
blown for ever dies." Leaving men he turned to nature, but it was all the
same.

"Up from earth's centre through the seventh gate
I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate,
And many knots unravell'd by the road;
But not the knot of human death and fate.

And that inverted bowl we call the sky,
Where under crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to it for help--for it
Rolls impotently on as thou or I."

Omar has with justice been compared to Lucretius. Both were materialists,
both believed not in a future life. "Lucretius built a system for himself
in his poem ... it has a professed practical aim--to explain the world's
self-acting machine to the polytheist, and to disabuse him of all spiritual
ideas." Omar builds up no system, he only shows forth his own doubts and
difficulties, "he loves to balance antitheses of belief, and settle himself
in the equipoise of the sceptic." {101}

The fact that there is no hereafter gives Lucretius no pain, but Omar who,
if only his reason could let him, would believe, records his utter despair
in words of passionate bitterness. He is not glad that there is no help
anywhere.[89] And though he calls for the wine-cup, and listens to the
voice within the tavern cry,

"Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup
Before Life's liquor in its cup be dry,"

yet he also looks back to the time, when he consorted with those who
professed to know, and could say:

"With them the seed of wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand laboured it to grow."

The founder of the Wahhabi sect was Muhammad-ibn-Abd-ul-Wahhab, who was
born