Arabs Quotes

“Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks,
for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume.
—Arabic saying ~800 AD”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“The Levant, the land to the east of the Mediterranean, is almost without doubt the region in which the ‘Semitic’ family of tongues originated, and Arabic has preserved, pristine, many of the earliest features of those tongues.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“This, the ’arabiyyah, was not everyday speech but a ‘mystical tongue’ used for ‘oracle giving and recitation of poetry’. Those who could command this special tongue – above all the sha’ir, later on a ‘poet’, but in its oldest sense probably more like a seer or a shaman – could attract followers. In time of raids, the sha’ir also played the role of Whitman’s poet, ‘the most deadly force of the war . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood’.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“By Allah! Never have I seen the discipline I’ve seen this day, and in men who have come from here, there and everywhere . . . No, not among the noble Persians, nor the Byzantines with their braided locks!”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“In Arabic ‘the written symbol is considered to be identical with the sound indicated by it’. Letters are not just phonetic; they are phonic, acoustic,’… script that fills the ears of him that sees it’, as poet al-Mutanabbi was to call them.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires