"O fool to barter sleep for waking! Blest Is he alone whose eyelids close in rest. Hath Ḥimyar practised treason, yet 'tis plain That God forgiveness owes to Dhú Ru‘ayn.69"
On reading this, ‘Amr recognised that Dhú Ru‘ayn had spoken the truth, and he spared his life.
With ‘Amr the Tubba‘ dynasty comes to an end. The succeeding kings were elected by eight of the most powerful barons, who in reality were independent princes, each ruling in his strong castle over as many vassals and retainers as he could bring into subjection. During this period the Abyssinians conquered at least some part of the country, and Christian viceroys were sent by the Najáshí (Negus) to govern it in his name. At last Dhú Nuwás, a descendant of the Tubba‘ As‘ad Kámil, crushed the rebellious barons and made himself unquestioned monarch of Yemen. A fanatical adherent of Judaism, he resolved to stamp out Christianity in Dhú Nuwás. Najrán, where it is said to have been introduced from Syria by a holy man called Faymiyún (Phemion). The Ḥimyarites flocked to his standard, not so much from religious motives as from hatred of the Abyssinians. The pretended murder of two Jewish children gave Dhú Nuwás a plausible casus belli. He marched against Najrán with an overwhelming force, entered the city, and bade the inhabitants Massacre of the Christians in Najrán (523 a.d.). choose between Judaism and death. Many perished by the sword; the rest were thrown into a trench which the king ordered to be dug and filled with blazing fire. Nearly a hundred years later, when Muḥammad was being sorely persecuted, he consoled and encouraged his followers by the example of the Christians of Najrán, who suffered " for no other reason but that they believed in the mighty, the glorious God."70 Dhú Nuwás paid dearly for his triumph. Daws Dhú Tha‘labán, one of those who escaped from the massacre, fled to the Byzantine emperor and implored him, as the head of Christendom, to assist them in obtaining vengeance. Justinus accordingly wrote a letter to the Najáshí, desiring him to take action, and ere long an Abyssinian army, 70,000 strong, under the command of Aryáṭ, disembarked in Yemen. Dhú Nuwás could not count on the loyalty of the Ḥimyarite nobles; his troops melted away. "When he saw Death of Dhú Nuwás. the fate that had befallen himself and his people, he turned to the sea and setting spurs to his horse, rode through the shallows until he reached the deep water. Then he plunged into the waves and nothing more of him was seen."71
Thus died, or thus at any rate should have died, the last representative of the long line of Ḥimyarite kings. Henceforth Yemen appears in Pre-islamic history only as an Abyssinian dependency or as a Persian protectorate. The events now to be related form the prologue to a new drama in which South Arabia, so far from being the centre of interest, plays an almost insignificant rôle.72
On the death of Dhú Nuwás, the Abyssinian general Aryáṭ continued his march through Yemen. He slaughtered a third part of the males, laid waste a third part of the land, and sent a third part of the women and children to the Yemen under Abyssinian rule. Najáshí as slaves. Having reduced the Yemenites to submission and re-established order, he held the position of viceroy for several years. Then mutiny broke out in the Abyssinian army of occupation, and his authority was disputed by an officer, named Abraha. When the rivals faced each other, Abraha said to Aryáṭ: "What will it avail you to engage the Abyssinians in a civil war that will leave none of them alive? Fight it out with me, and let the troops follow the victor." His challenge being accepted, Abraha stepped forth. He was a short, fleshy man, compactly built, a devout Christian, while Aryáṭ was big, tall, and handsome. When the duel began, Aryáṭ thrust his spear Abraha and Aryáṭ. with the intention of piercing Abraha's brain, but it glanced off his forehead, slitting his eyelid, nose, and lip—hence the name, al-Ashram, by which Abraha was afterwards known; and ere he could repeat the blow, a youth in Abraha's service, called ‘Atwada, who was seated on a hillock behind his master, sprang forward and dealt him a mortal wound. Thus Abraha found himself commander-in-chief of the Abyssinian army, but the Najáshí was enraged and swore not to rest until he set foot on the soil of Yemen and cut off the rebel's forelock. On hearing this, Abraha wrote to the Najáshí: "O King, Aryáṭ was thy servant even as I am. We quarrelled over thy command, both of us owing allegiance to thee, but I had more strength than he to command the Abyssinians and keep discipline and exert authority. When I heard of the king's oath, I shore my head, and now I send him a sack of the earth of Yemen that he may put it under his feet and fulfil his oath." The Najáshí answered this act of submission by appointing Abraha to be his viceroy.... Then Abraha built the church ( al-Qalís) at San‘á, the like of which was not to be seen at that time in the whole world, and wrote to the Najáshí that he would not be content until he had diverted thither every pilgrim in Arabia. This letter made much talk, and a man of the Banú Fuqaym, one of those who arranged the calendar, was angered by what he learned of Abraha's purpose; so he went into the church and defiled it. When Abraha heard that the author of the outrage belonged to the people of the Temple in Mecca, and that he meant to show thereby his scorn and contempt for the new foundation, he waxed wroth and swore that he would march against the Temple and lay it in ruins.
The disastrous failure of this expedition, which took place in the year of the Elephant (570 a.d.), did not at once free Yemen from the Abyssinian yoke. The sons of Abraha, Yaksum and Masrúq, bore heavily on the Arabs. Seeing no help among his own people, a noble Ḥimyarite named Sayf b. Dhí Yazan resolved to seek foreign intervention. His choice lay between the Byzantine and Persian empires, Sayf b. Dhí Yazan. and he first betook himself to Constantinople. Disappointed there, he induced the Arab king of Ḥíra, who was under Persian suzerainty, to present him at the court of Madá’in (Ctesiphon). How he won audience of the Sásánian monarch, Núshírwán, surnamed the Just, and tempted him by an ingenious trick to raise a force of eight hundred condemned felons, who were set free and shipped to Yemen under the command of an aged general; how they literally 'burned their boats' and, drawing courage from despair, routed the Abyssinian host and made Yemen a satrapy The Persians in Yemen ( circa572 a.d.). of Persia73—this forms an almost epic narrative, which I have omitted here (apart from considerations of space) because it belongs to Persian rather than to Arabian literary history, being probably based, as Nöldeke has suggested, on traditions handed down by the Persian conquerors who settled in Yemen to their aristocratic descendants whom the Arabs called al-Abná(the Sons) or Banu ’l-Aḥrár(Sons of the Noble).
Leaving the once mighty kingdom of Yemen thus pitiably and for ever fallen from its high estate, we turn northward into the main stream of Arabian history.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY AND LEGENDS OF THE PAGAN ARABS
Muḥammadans include the whole period of Arabian history from the earliest times down to the establishment of Islam in the term al-Jáhiliyya, which was used by The Age of Barbarism (al-Jáhiliyya). Muḥammad in four passages of the Koran and is generally translated 'the state or ignorance' or simply 'the Ignorance.' Goldziher, however, has shown conclusively that the meaning attached to jahl(whence Jáhiliyyais derived) by the Pre-islamic poets is not so much 'ignorance' as 'wildness,' 'savagery,' and that its true antithesis is not ‘ilm(knowledge), but rather ḥilm, which denotes the moral reasonableness of a civilised man. "When Muḥammadans say that Islam put an end to the manners and customs of the Jáhiliyya, they have in view those barbarous practices, that savage temper, by which Arabian heathendom is distinguished from Islam and by the abolition of which Muḥammad sought to work a moral reformation in his countrymen: the haughty spirit of the Jáhiliyya( ḥamiyyatu ’l-Jáhiliyya), the tribal pride and the endless tribal feuds, the cult of revenge, the implacability and all the other pagan characteristics which Islam was destined to overcome."74