Friedrich Rueckert called “the greatest love-poet the Arabs have produced.”  A man of the city, the desert had no attractions for him.  But he sang of love as he made love,—­with utter disregard of holy place or high station, in an erotic strain strange to the stern Umayyids.  No wonder they warned their children against reading his compositions.  “The greatest sin committed against Allah are the poems of ’Umar ibn Rabi’a,” they said.

With the rise of the Abbassides (750), that “God-favored dynasty,” Arabic literature entered upon its second great development; a development which may be distinguished from that of the Umayyids (which was Arabian) as, in very truth, Muhammadan.  With Bagdad as the capital, it was rather the non-Arabic Persians who held aloft the torch than the Arabs descended from Kureish.  It was a bold move, this attempt to weld the old Persian civilization with the new Muhammadan.  Yet so great was the power of the new faith that it succeeded.  The Barmecide major-domo ably seconded his Abbasside master; the glory of both rests upon the interest they took in art, literature, and science.  The Arab came in contact with a new world.  Under Mansur (754), Harun al-Rashid (786), and Ma’mun (813), the wisdom of the Greeks in philosophy and science, the charms of Persia and India in wit and satire, were opened up to enlightened eyes.  Upon all of these, whatever their nationality, Islam had imposed the Arab tongue, pride in the faith and in its early history.  ‘Qur’an’ exegesis, philosophy, law, history, and science were cultivated under the very eyes and at the bidding of the Palace.  And, at least for several centuries, Europe was indebted to the culture of Bagdad for what it knew of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.

The Arab muse profited with the rest of this revival.  History and philosophy, as a study, demanded a close acquaintance with the products of early Arab genius.  The great philologian al-Asmai (740-831) collected the songs and tales of the heroic age; and a little later, with other than philological ends in view, Abu Tammam and al-Buchturi (816-913) made the first anthologies of the old Arabic literatures (’Hamasah’).  Poetry was already cultivated:  and amid the hundreds of wits, poets, and singers who thronged the entrance to the court, there are many who claim real poetic genius.  Among them are al-Ahtal (died 713), a Christian; ’Umar ibn Rabi’a (died 728), Jarir al-Farazdak (died 728), and Muslim ibn al-Walid (died 828).  But it is rather the Persian spirit which rules,—­the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—­“charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit.”  In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time.  His themes are wine and love.  Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people.  “I would that all which Religion