J. F. Campbell Collection > Koran: or, Alcoran of Mohammed

PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE.
OF THE ARABS BEFORE MOHAMMED, OR, AS THEY EXPRESS IT, IN THE TIME
OF ignorance; their HISTORY, RELIGION, LEARNING, AND CUSTOMS.
The Arabs, and the country they inhabit, which themselves call Jezirat al
Arab, or the Peninsula of the Arabians, but we Arabia, were so named from
Araba, a small territory in the province of Tehama ;' to which Yarab the son of
KahtS,n, the father of the ancient Arabs, gave his name, and where, some
ages after, dwelt Ismael the son of Abraham by Hagar. The Christian
writers for several centuries speak of them under the appellation of Saxons;
the most certain derivation of which word is from sh:irk, the east, where
the descendants of Joctan, the Kahtan of the Arabs, are placed by Moses,"
and in which quarter they dwelt in respect to the Jews.^
The name of Arabia (used in a more extensive sense) sometimes com-
prehends all that large tract of land bounded by the river Euphrates, the
Persian Gulf, the Sindian, Indian, and lied Seas, and part of the Mediter-
ranean : above two-thirds of which country, that is, Arabia properly so
called, the Arabs have possessed almost from the flood; and have made
themselves mastei-s of the rest, either by settlements, or continual in-
cursions; for which reason the Turks and Persians at this day call the
whole Araljistan, or the country of the Arabs.
But the limits of Arabia, in its more usual and proper sense, are much
narrowei-, as reaching no farther northward than the Isthmus, which runs
from Aila to the head of the Persian Gulf, and the borders of the territory
of Cufa; which tract of land the Greeks nearly comprehended under the
name of Arabia the Happy. The eastern geographers make Araljia Petrsea
to belong partly to Egypt, and partly to Sham or Syria, and the Desert
Arabia they call the deserts of Syria.'*
^ Proper Arabia is by the oriental writers generally divided into five pro-
vinces/ viz. Yaman, Hejaz, Tehama, Najd, and Yamama; to which some
add Bahrein, as a sixth, but this pi'ovince the more exact make part of
'- Pocock, Specim. Hist. Arab. 33. » Gen. x. SO. » See Pocoek, Specim.
S3, 34. * Golius ad Alfragan. 78, 79. * Strabo says Arabia Felix was in his
time divided into five kingdoms- lib. 16. p. 1129.