The choice of these two mentors is clearly relevant to the experience of those Palestinian Muslims who found themselves reduced from majority to minority status. For the scepticism and pessimism of Abu'l-'Ala al-Ma'arri reflect an age of social decay and political anarchy in Islam while Iliya Abu Madi who emigrated in 1911 to the U.S.A., represents the capacity of Arabic literature both to survive in and to be enriched by a non-Arab environment.[18]