In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

Every knowledge, every kind of wisdom and class of literature has its own reason that calls for collecting its scattered parts, and it has its own significance which provokes the gathering of its dispersed elements.

When literateurs and scholars failed to distinguish the events and to bring out the noteworthy happenings as well as to unite every valuable jewel to its counterpart and to join every rare bit of wisdom with something else of its kind, wisdom vanished, knowledge was lost, literature dead and the secret of each marvel wiped out.

And if scholars would not have registered their thoughts for eternity and if they would not have engraved the noteworthy accomplishments of the ancients upon rocks, knowledge would have vanished from beginning to end.

This is the reason why it has been said: Mankind will always be well off as long as the later generations learn from the former.””

The reason why I gathered some bits of information of the Arabs about their yearning for their native land, about their longing for their earth and cities and about the way how they described in their poems the burning fire in their hearts, is that in a conversation which I had with a displaced king about one’s recollection of home and affection for the native land, I heard him say that he went from a country to one more cheerful, more populated and more prosperous than his native land;

He always enjoyed a high position and much authority. The lords and the (noble) young men of the Arab tribes obeyed him; and so did the bold and brave men of the non- Arab nations.

He commanded armies and led wars. All those in his court wanted some favor from him or were afraid of him.

Yet, when he remembered his land and his native country, he yearned for it as camels yearn for their watering places.

He fitted the description of the poet;
Whenever I remember the home, my eyes are full of tears
and my heart becomes a prey to anxieties,
Because of my yearning for a land where I grew up to manhood
and where the strings of amulets were taken off from me.
The nicest people for a youth to have are his countrymen,
the ones who most respect the man’s right of his past.

As well as the description of another poet:
It cools my eye to see, on the spot,
the summits of the undulations of the plain Abrag
And to descend to the water spring from which Sulayma has drunk,
after all fast striding (men) had enough of the night journey.
And to press my belly to the coolness of its soil,
even if it is infected with the poison of the large black snakes.

So I said: If so you speak, the Persians said before: It is a sign of straightforwardness that one yearns for one’s birth-place, and that one sighs for one’s home.””