Before the Qur'ân begins, Palmer gives forty pages on pre-Islamic Arabia, and the reader should know they are reading an 1880 English orientalist before they are reading scripture. He opens on the country's inaccessibility: "Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium had each unsuccessfully essayed to penetrate the country and conquer its hardy inhabitants." The argument he is building is that Arabia's isolation preserved something — "the Arabs of the desert preserved almost intact the manners, customs, and primeval simplicity of the early patriarchs."
The Qur'ân, Part I: Chapters I–XVI — SBE Vol. 6 (trans. E. H. Palmer, 1880)
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The translator’s English as printed (E. H. Palmer). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium had each unsuccessfully essayed to penetrate the country and conquer its hardy inhabitants.
The Hig4z consists of the barren ranges of hills which lead up from the lowlands on the Eastern coast of the Red Sea to the highlands of Negd. In its valleys lie the holy cities of Mecca and Medinah, and here was the birthplace of el Islam.
The Arabs of the desert preserved almost intact the manners, customs, and primeval simplicity of the early patriarchs. :
They lived in tents made of hair or woollen cloth, and x THE QUR'AN.
their principal wealth consisted in their camels, horses, and male and female slaves. ;
They were a nomad race, changing their residence to the various places within their own territory, which afforded the best pasturage as the seasons came round.
Brave and chivalrous, the Arab was always ready to defend the stranger who claimed his protection, while he would stand by a member of his own clan and defend him with his life, whether he were right or wrong. This devotion to the tribe was one of the strongest characteristics of the Arabs, and must be borne in mind if we would understand aright the early history of Islam.
They were generous and hospitable to a fault, and many a tale is told of a chief who gave away his last camel, or slew his favourite horse to feed a guest, while he and his family were well-nigh left to starve.
Pride of birth was their passion, and poetry their greatest delight ; their bards recited the noble pedigrees and doughty deeds of their tribes,—as their own proverb has it, ‘the registers of the Arabs are the verses of their bards,’— and in the numerous ancient poems still extant we have invaluable materials for the history of the race.
But their vices were as conspicuous as their virtues, and drunkenness, gambling, and the grossest immorality were very prevalent amongst them: Robbery and murder were their ordinary occupations, for an Arab looked on work or agriculture as beneath his dignity, and thought that he hada prescriptive right to the property of those who condescended to such mean offices. The death of an Arab, however, was revenged with such rigour and vindictiveness by the fierce laws of the blood feud, that a certain check was placed upon their bloodthirsty propensities even in their wars; and these were still further tempered by the institution of certain sacred months, during which it was unlawful to fight or pillage. Cruel, and superstitious too, they were, and amongst the inhuman customs which Mohammed swept away, none is more revolting than that, commonly practised by them, of burying their female children alive.
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INTRODUCTION. x1
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Persia, Egypt, Rome, Byzantium had each unsuccessfully essayed to penetrate the country and conquer its hardy inhabitants.
The Hig4z consists of the barren ranges of hills which lead up from the lowlands on the Eastern coast of the Red Sea to the highlands of Negd. In its valleys lie the holy cities of Mecca and Medinah, and here was the birthplace of el Islam.
The Arabs of the desert preserved almost intact the manners, customs, and primeval simplicity of the early patriarchs. :
They lived in tents made of hair or woollen cloth, and x THE QUR'AN.
their principal wealth consisted in their camels, horses, and male and female slaves. ;
They were a nomad race, changing their residence to the various places within their own territory, which afforded the best pasturage as the seasons came round.
Brave and chivalrous, the Arab was always ready to defend the stranger who claimed his protection, while he would stand by a member of his own clan and defend him with his life, whether he were right or wrong. This devotion to the tribe was one of the strongest characteristics of the Arabs, and must be borne in mind if we would understand aright the early history of Islam.
They were generous and hospitable to a fault, and many a tale is told of a chief who gave away his last camel, or slew his favourite horse to feed a guest, while he and his family were well-nigh left to starve.
Pride of birth was their passion, and poetry their greatest delight ; their bards recited the noble pedigrees and doughty deeds of their tribes,—as their own proverb has it, ‘the registers of the Arabs are the verses of their bards,’— and in the numerous ancient poems still extant we have invaluable materials for the history of the race.
But their vices were as conspicuous as their virtues, and drunkenness, gambling, and the grossest immorality were very prevalent amongst them: Robbery and murder were their ordinary occupations, for an Arab looked on work or agriculture as beneath his dignity, and thought that he hada prescriptive right to the property of those who condescended to such mean offices. The death of an Arab, however, was revenged with such rigour and vindictiveness by the fierce laws of the blood feud, that a certain check was placed upon their bloodthirsty propensities even in their wars; and these were still further tempered by the institution of certain sacred months, during which it was unlawful to fight or pillage. Cruel, and superstitious too, they were, and amongst the inhuman customs which Mohammed swept away, none is more revolting than that, commonly practised by them, of burying their female children alive.
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INTRODUCTION. x1
His register is unmistakably of its moment and is worth naming rather than passing over: "Cruel, and superstitious too, they were." He goes on to describe the killing of infant daughters as the practice "none is more revolting" among those "which Mohammed swept away", and to characterise the position of women as "not an elevated one", allowing that there were "heroines and poetesses" but that women "were for the most part looked on with contempt". These are a Victorian scholar's judgements delivered as findings. The translation that follows is a separate object from the frame around it.
One claim in the introduction is historically substantive and still discussed: that Allah was worshipped in Arabia before Islam as the highest of many. Palmer writes that each tribe "had its patron deity with the cult of which their interests were intimately bound up", and that "the chief god of this vague national cult was Allah, and most tribes set up a shrine for him as well as for their own particular deity." Whatever one makes of the surrounding tone, that sentence is a claim about continuity rather than rupture, and it is doing work in his account of what came after.
Palmer's introduction is the clearest instance in this series of the thing Müller's own preface warned about, turned around. Müller asked readers not to meet a foreign scripture with the assumption that everything unfamiliar in it is "the outcome of human or superhuman ignorance and depravity". Forty pages of Palmer show how hard that was to do in 1880, even for a scholar giving his life to the translation. The two volumes are worth reading against each other, and this archive holds both.
tested by The Upanishads, Part I — SBE Vol. 1 (trans. F. Max Müller, 1879)