Muslim Studies

these did not rise to the level of principles that might have exerted a determining influence on their entire worldview—a worldview which, despite a few pious flourishes, essentially remained at the level of ordinary ancient Arab life.

A fundamentally different situation exists regarding the religious sense revealed to us in the monuments of other Arab circles, such as the civilized lands of Southern Arabia Southern Arabia, particularly modern-day Yemen, was home to settled kingdoms like Saba (Sheba) and Himyar, which left behind many stone inscriptions, unlike the nomadic North.. In these, the dominance of religious perspectives is unmistakable, and in comparison to them, the absence of religious feeling among the Arab tribes dwelling in the North is all the more striking. Even the language of the Southern Arabs offers a greater abundance of religious nomenclature than the otherwise rich but, in this regard, meager language of the Northern Arabs.¹ The South Arabian prince, in his dedicatory inscriptions, thanks the gods who granted him victory over his enemies, and the warriors erect votive monuments A votive monument is an object offered to a deity in fulfillment of a vow or as a sign of gratitude. to their divine protector "because he favored them with the proper killings and so that he may continue to grant them booty," and for allowing them to emerge unscathed from military raids. Indeed, a sense of grateful submission to the gods² forms the keynote of the surviving South Arabian monuments.³

The Central Arabian warrior, by contrast, boasts of his own heroic courage and the bravery of his companions; it does not occur to him to be grateful to higher powers—even if he does not entirely exclude the recognition of their might—for his successes. Only the thought of the necessity of death, the result of daily experience which he could not ignore, occasionally inspires in him the bitter thought of the Manâjâ or Manûna,⁴ These terms refer to the "apportioned" fates or the powers of destiny that bring about death. that is, the powers of fate. These powers, acting entirely blindly and unconscious of their goal,⁵ yet working inevitably, can frustrate all the plans of mortals;⁶ fortune merely increases his egoism, raises his self-esteem, and is ultimately suited to [make] him

1. Halévy, Journal asiatique 1872. I, p. 544. Much from the religious nomenclature of the Southern Arabs also entered Northern Arabic as loanwords.
2. e.g., Mordtmann and Müller, Sabaean Monuments p. 29 and elsewhere.
3. A fine example among many that could be cited is the inscription Osiander no. 4; see Prideaux in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology V (1877), p. 409.
4. I also believe in manawât; P. Aelius Theimes invokes the Manawât in a Latin inscription found in Várhely (Hungary) and published by Prof. Torma in the Archaeological-Epigraphic Communications from Austria (Vienna 1882) VI, p. 110.
5. Zuhayr, Mu'allaqa The Mu'allaqat are a collection of seven prized pre-Islamic Arabic poems. verse 49.
6. How personally the Manâjâ were envisioned can still be seen in the Islamic period in Al-Farazdaq (Dîwân ed. Boucher p. 12, last line). W. L. Schrameier has dealt extensively with the Manâjâ in his doctoral thesis On the Fatalism of the Arabs, Bonn 1881.