The Romance of Antar

Antar is no imaginary personage. He was the son of an Arab prince of the tribe of Abs, by a black woman, whom his father had made captive in a predatory excursion: and he raised himself by the heroic qualities which he displayed from his earliest youth, and by his extraordinary genius for poetry, from the state of slavery in which he was born, to the confidence of his king, and to a preeminence above all the Chiefs of Arabia. He flourished during the close of the sixth, and the early part of the seventh century, of the pre-Islamic era; there is, consequently, little or no allusion to the customs or institutions of Islamism... Edasi