Note 184 — Chapter III

Ḥamása, 140. Although these verses are not Pre-islamic, and belong in fact to a comparatively late period of Islam, they are sufficiently pagan in feeling to be cited in this connection. The author, Isḥáq b. Khalaf, lived under the Caliph Ma’mún (813-833 a.d.). He survived his adopted daughter—for Umayma was his sister's child—and wrote an elegy on her, which is preserved in the Kámil of al-Mubarrad, p. 715, l. 7 sqq., and has been translated, together with the verses now in question, by Sir Charles Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry, p. 26.