Cultural Achievements of the Arabs in Syria

The Arabs in Syria were the cultural heirs of the Hellenistic civilization that had preceded them. Indeed, at the time of the Arab-Muslim conquest, there was no decisive break with that civilization. The Greek language continued to be employed in the court for some fifty years after that conquest, and even after that time it was still widely used. Byzantine artisans and architects planned and built the major buildings used by the Arabs, such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (formerly the Church of St. John), and the desert castles. Among these desert castles is the magnificent complex at Qasr al-Khayr al-Sharqi (to the north of Palmyra), where, on a large cultivated region, a palace was constructed. Although, in the past, these desert castles have been seen as locations for pleasure and for enjoying the desert life, today it is more common to see them as agricultural centers, as the Arabs continued the practice of dry farming in the marginal areas of the Negev and eastern Syria. Other locations, such as at Jericho, are more obviously palaces and contain magnificent mosaics.

The other major cultural achievement of the Arabs in Syria was poetry. Poetry was already a major factor in pre-Islamic Arabia, where it was used to express the gamut of emotions from love to vengeance to loss, as well as to commemorate important events and to praise or pillory important personalities. Because of the wealth and power of the Umayyads, their patronage was widely sought, and first class poets flourished at their various courts. Among these, the best known was al-Akhtal (d. c. AD 710), a Christian Arab whose diwan (collection of poems) is considered one of the finest. Many of his poems celebrate wine-bibbing, and are decidedly non-Islamic:

We drank, and then we died the death of the Jahiliyya [pre-Islamic times], whose people have gone; they never knew Muhammad.

Three days and when we returned to ourselves, it [the soul] came back to us. (al-Akhtal, nd.: 384)

Poems like this exist in abundance and demonstrate the blending of cultures at the nexus between Muslim, Arab, and Christian, since al-Akhtal had prestige among all three groups.