المعلقات السبع (The Seven Suspended Odes — Arabic text with English)

Their literary supremacy was, however, the result of a long working of the schools, established by Cicero, Virgil, and Livy, on the lines of the learning they had inherited from that defunct Grecian world which had long given way to the sway of the triumphant Roman arms. The Roman Poetry, Oratory and Rhetoric were merely offshoots engrafted on those of Homer, Demosthenes and Aristotle. Much credit is certainly due to the Romans for the great improvement they made on the teachings of their mother-school, which elevated them to a high pitch of literary fame, and placed them at the top of the category of the civilized and refined nations of the time. But their achievements, though very noble and excellent in themselves, were merely parasitic, and had little originality to boast of.

About this time we find a new nation rushing upon the scene, and steadily progressing with long strides to the front of the literary world, neither by means of any learning, borrowed from other nations, nor by any set examples to guide them, but solely by dint of the growth of their own natural faculties. This was the Arabian nation, which, living obscurely in a solitary peninsula, was cut off from the chief seats of learning and debarred by its own seclusion from all the advantages of a close contact with the civilized nations of the day, who regarded it merely as a degraded and barbarous nation. Notwithstanding its starting with such local and social disadvantages, this nation, which was destined by God to rise to a great importance later on, and to succeed the Romans in presiding over the destinies of a great part of the world, bravely stemming the tide of adverse circumstances, deserves all praise for the high state of culture, civilization and advancement which its people attained by means of self-development of those superior literary faculties with which it had pleased God to endow them.

Although the Arabic language was as old as any of the noble languages of the world, yet its literary fame was kept...