Love for a good name and leadership and fear of poets'...

Love for a good name and leadership and fear of poets' criticism and wish to avoid being called misers and mean persons led Arabs to show great signs of generosity and protection towards those in trouble.[^89] Ignorance and Superstition The nomadic Arab of Hijaz who lived mostly in the desert lacked true civilization; he was dominated by extreme fanatics and incapable of comprehending the relations of nature.

He could not analyze the phenomena in nature critically and was unable to understand cause and effect relations. When a sick man received some drugs, he was incapable of analyzing critically the relationship between pain and disease. The only thing he knew was the fact that his clan-mates used to take this medicine under similar conditions. For instance, he naively accepted that the tribal chief's blood would remedy the disease of rabies, which was the result of a dog's bite.

In the same way, he was under the illusion that the cause of sickness was a malicious spirit which entered the sick man's body. For this reason, attempts were made to expel this intruder from the sick man's body. In the case of mental sickness, they used to put the dead men's stones over the ill person’s body so that illness might be cured. They strongly believed in spirits; they believed these creatures loomed in deserted places at night or they trouble travelers at night.

When cows were taken to the river to drink water and a cow refused to drink, they thought the reason for her refusal was the presence of a devil inside the bull’s horns. In order to drive the devil away, they used to strike the head of the bull.[^90] Such funny events were very common among them. The Arabs would not show any sign of doubt regarding these superstitious acts so far as they were carried out by others, because the source of doubt and skepticism lies in one's critical thinking.

They lacked such sophistications in those days. Of course, at times some bright signs of clear thinking and bright ideas could be observed in their poems, proverbs and tales. However, even these lacked deep thought or analytic aspects.

This inability of analysis of phenomena was the root of all sorts of superstitions in which they strongly believed and books of the history of the Arabs contain a lot of them.[^91] Arab Sciences and Arts Some scholars have tried to prove that the nomadic Arabs were in command of such sciences as medicine, astronomy and physiognomy.[^92] However, this is an exaggeration.