The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 85

OCTOBER 24, 1 9 3 7 111 The Swift Rise and Fall of the Arabs BERTRAM THOMAS, DESERT PIONEER, REVIVES A VANISHED GRANDEUR by MARK S. WATSON it i Tiers' rv I I 1 1 1 w.irw I IUI a 1 I I 1 i 4 i Ji i If Us NUT it 2 1 CM ii rm Kf A iter MODERN APARTMENTS? NO, THE ARAB CITY OF SIIIIJAM surprising feats of which the Arab has been capable, little to be guessed from observance of today's desert dwellers, are vividly recited by Bertram Thomas a leading British authority on Arabia and its inhabitants, in a new text which surveys the race's too little known history. Thomas is the only Occidental who has crossed the great South Arabian Desert, a feat which elicited the warm praise of Lawrence; he was political officer in Mesopotamia and the scholarly British representative in Trancjordania and the southern suJtanates, latterly lecturer at Harvard on the subject he knows so well. Inevitably he is cautious in his discussion of the future of Pan-Islam and Pan-Arab movements as they affect Palestine, which just now is at the crossroads, further than to deny "that this little shrine of three world religions should be sacrificed to any one exclusive nationalism." As to what is ahead in the wider Arab world he speaks guardedly, but with a mild reminder that just as Islam brought new ideas to backward Europe ten centuries ago, so now it is Europe's industrialism which is bringing new ideas to the Arabian peninsula today with what results time is to show. it was while Europe was still in its darkest age that Arabia was awakening.

Its people had made up a defiant, barbarian group between the high civilizations of Egypt and Sumer. Here and there in the more fertile Arabia Felix of the south had been cultures of a sort, as in the area which the half-legendary Sheba ruled. Here Cxsar Augustus had sent by land and sea a force of 11,000 to find the fabled gold mines, but with -such poor results that no other expedition followed. Here Abyssinia in its glory had established outposts, and then vanished, leaving the wild Bedouins in full possession, raiding at will the rich Persians to the east, the rich Byzantines to the north. After 600 B.

C. came an extraordinary change. A mild, pacific reformer, strangely out, of place among these roving idol worshipers, advanced his own idea of religion. It was monotheistic, patterned largely after Judaism and Christianity, departing wholly from the latter in its view of Christ as prophet rather than as Son, also in its belief in predestination, from which neither sacrifice nor intercession could effect a change. It urged humane concepts and extensive almsgiving; was centuries ahead of its time in its desire to aid woman's position and to ease the lot of the slaves so very far ahead that modern commentators believe Mohammed, who believed in making progress gradually, aimed ultimately at monogamy in the one case and at slavery's abolition in the other.

To war, this friendly and knowing English interpreter of the Arabs pointed out, Mohammed was opposed, save for defense. Other religions, if they were monotheistic, he tolerated and indeed for many years after his death his successors made no effort to force either Jew or Christian to recant. umphant in the arts of peace as in the arts of war. Moslem laws were superior to Europe's for many centuries. Moslem mercantile customs created models for our own.

Islam's enlightened views had room for bettering woman's estate, affording in some respects such full equality with man's as is not yet attained in the Occident. There was coeducation at Cairo a thousand years ago. Mohammed's ban on portrayal of human or animal forms baffled the development of painting and sculpture, but Moslem architecture soared high, merging Greek and Persian ideas info an extraordinary perfection. Metal work, weaving, illumination of manuscripts, pottery, reached new heights. Arab minstrels gave us measured music and numerous stringed instruments even the word "fret" is taken from the Arabic "fard." Greece's scientific knowledge was revived and advanced, the Arab creating the invaluable concept of zero, plus our numbering devising logarithms, experimenting in the laws governing falling bodies.

The compass they had, less probably from King David, as they thought, than from China. Their canalizing made the desert bloom with the rose. Rhazes wrote studies of measles and smallpox which still were medical gospel in Europe a thousand years later. Laws of optics and varying refraction were explored, and eye diseases treated by methods which Europe used centuries later. There was speculation on the solar system, and estimates that the atmosphere was ten miles deep, and recognition that the earth was round, when Europe refused to believe it.

And it was from Cordova and Toledo and Seville that the universities of Bologna and Paris got their inspiration. all this clory vanished before European pressure on one side and Mongol invasion on the other. The astonishing thing is that so much glory could rise and then so largely vanish in the space of six centuries. It rouses curiosity as to how long our own Occidental glory will last. it Everyman's Proverbs what common PROPERTY among the races of men are our favorite proverbs is made apparent in a study of a fifteenth century French manuscript at the Walters Gallery, apparently the oldest known example of just this type of thing.

It is a group of 136 pen-and-ink drawings, beneath each of which is an eight-lined rhyme in whose last line or two is a succinct "moral" or proverb, after the Esop pattern, itself terse and easily held in memory, but most striking in many instances because of its familiarity in translation. Thus we discover that nearly five centuries ago French readers were learning that "all that glitters is not gold," "what you don't see won't hurt you," "among the blind a one-eyed man is king," "one hand washes another," "look not a gift horse in the mouth," ''the pitcher goes to the well once too often," "he cuts a stick to beat himself" and the like, in language which often is exact translation of what we had thought our exclusive English property. Were these expressions borrowed or were they so homely and fundamental that they sprang up spontaneously in more than one place? the photographic reproduction of the manuscript's illustrations and old French script is accompanied by a luminous introduction, with glossary and notes and other appendices, the work of a scholarly partnership. One of the collaborators is Mrs. Grace Frank, wife of Prof.

Tenney Frank, of Johns Hopkins, and herself professor of old French philology at Bryn Mawr and former visiting professor at Hopkins; the other is Miss Dorothy Miner, research associate at the Walters. They explain that there were many rhymed-proverb manuscripts put out in the fifteenth PROVERBES EN RIMES, FROM A WALTERS' GALLERY MASUSCRIPT. By Grace Frank and Dorothy Miner. $2.75. Johns Hoplins Frets.

127 pages. 1S6 plates. fornia and Sonora with a gang of desperadoes with whom he tried to transform those two Mexican states into an independent republic. Cut off from supplies, and losing most of his men through bad leadership, he led the ragged, starved and wounded remnants of his ridiculous little army back to the American frontier and a jail yawning for men who had violated our neutrality laws. next time he exhibited a letter inviting him to Nicaragua and, thus proving that he was ndt a raider on a friendly nation (if its scrambled condition could let one call it either friendly or a nation), he set sail with a larger and better armed force of thugs, and put himself at the disposal of one of Nicaragua's rebel patriots.

His generalship continued bad, but the enemy's was worse, and Walker soon found himself, as he had hoped, not merely a general on the winning side but very much more potent than the statesman under whom, nominally, he was serving. It took neither time nor effort to seize power, proclaim himself President, nfake himself the hero of the South (this was in the decade when slavery was at issue in the United States) by announcing his esteem for slavery as an institution and at the same time the hero of an element in the North by the mere fact of conquering a sizable area with his "American Thalanx." vnfortunately, besides fighting somewhat more than half of Nicaragua and all of Honduras and Costa Rica, he bad irritated old Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose ship line was supplying him with all he needed, including cash. This was a mistake. Also the commander of Walker's one tiny gunboat had defied a large British armed ship which was trying to keep the sun from setting on Britain's empire at that point. The shocked but amused British captain said that if Walker had two schooners he probably would have declared war on the British Navy.

Altogether, Walker was stretching too far, and even his unlimited daring, plus real military skill by some of his subalterns, could not accomplish everything. He wa3 driven out and back to America, where the crowds gave him such a feverish welcome as America habitually gives to conquerors, whether of armies, navies, channel swims, golf links, movie audiences or anything else. Then in a few months he was, like the others, forgotten. He went back to Central America, defied the rong men, was taken out and shot. His story, with its variegated and almost unbelievable background, its follies and horrors and its fleeting moments of glory, is recounted by Laurence Greene, of The Sun staff, in a full-length biography, lately published, annotated with many exhibits from contemporary records, and surprising one anew with its evidence of what a madman can do in this curious world.

century, and offer evidence that this was doubtless one of a number put out by a commercial atelier of thaf. time. A British Museum exhibit and others seem clearly to have been the work of the same artists and let-terers. Yet these curiosities, in wide use in their day, naturally were not preserved as faithfully as were the elegantly illuminated contemporary manuscripts in which today's collectors take pride. It is the authors' belief that too little attention has been paid to these humbler, more popular items of reading, which extol the virtues and condemn the vices (or most of them) with all the zeal of the New England Trimer, but more gaiety.

how is the manuscript dated by the authors? By study of the styles in the drawings, which have none of the long-pointed shoes of the early fifteenth century, nor the spatulate toes of the early sixteenth, but the blunt shoes which came between. By the pointed fore-peaks of the caps. By the jackets. By the tendency toward longer hair on the depicted males. The water marks and the quality of paper are also helpful guides, so that the authors think of 14S0 as about the time, and Lyons as possibly the place where a group of scriveners put out this combination of education and amusement and encouragement to both wisdom and virtue.

But who can tell whether the readers followed this advice? Our Filibuster No. 1 or all the American adventurers who have packed their guns into the mosquito jungles of Central America on filibustering expeditions, none has surpassed the slim, defiant, unsmiling little man who for a brief time was not only the "President of Nicaragua" and "commander-in-chief" of its armies, but the hero of sentimental America and (perhaps for that reason) favorably regarded during two administrations at Washington. This was William a Tennesseean transplanted to California, who found even California in gold-rush times too dull for him He had graduated from the University of Nashville at 14 (this was in 183S), studied medicine and in five years won a degree at Pennsylvania, studied abroad another year and, practicing back in Nashville, was highly regarded as a surgeon. A promising career in that work he quit abruptly. Going to New Orleans, he studied law and was admitted to the bar, then quit that profession, too, founded a newspaper and ran it for a time, and then, at 25, this swiftly aging young man pulled up stakes and went to California.

Before California was well acquainted with him he was off again, this time to lower Cali- THE FILIBUSTER; THE CAREER OF WILLIAM WALKER. 350 pages. By Laurence Greene. Bolls-Merrill, $3.50. the change in Mohammedanism came after the Trophet was The early wars, Thomas holds, were neither religious nor political, but economic.

The Bedouin saw a chance to get tribute from rich neighbors and joyously took it Both Persia and Byzantium were in decline and easy victims, and within twelve years of Mohammed's death his two successors had transformed a minor revolt ia Medina and Mecca into a startling cause which had swept over Syria, over western Persia, over Egypt In few more years it had raced across northern Africa and leaped the straits into decadent Spain, later to invade France and fail only before the stout Franks. Now it gained sea power and beat Byzantine fleets and almost transformed the Mediterranean into an Arab lake. The piratical Moors sacked Rome. And then, because the Arab is an individualist, these far-flung possessions declared their independence of Mecca and Damascus and Bagdad. In its glory the Arab power was as tri- TJIE ARABS.

By Bertram Thtmat. fanes. Doubleday. $3.50..