The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 08

by Unknown

CHAPTER X. ARAB CIVILISATION

THE KORAN

The Koran is held by the Mohammedans in the greatest veneration. The book must not be touched by anybody but a Moslem; nor even by a believer, except he be free from pollution. Whether the Koran be created or uncreated, has been the subject of a controversy fruitful of the most violent persecutions. The orthodox opinion is that the original has been written from all eternity on the preserved table. Of this, they believe, a complete transcript was brought down to the lower heaven (that of the moon) by the angel Gabriel: and thence taken and shown to Mohammed once every year of his mission; and twice in the last year of his life. They assert however that it was only piecemeal, that the several parts were revealed by the angel to the prophet, and that he immediately dictated what had been revealed to his secretary, who wrote it down. Each part, as soon as it was thus copied out, was communicated to his disciples, to get by heart; and was afterwards deposited in what he called the chest of his apostleship. This chest the prophet left in the custody of his wife Hafsa. The present book was compiled, partly out of these detached scraps, and partly out of the memories of his companions.

When we consider the way in which the Koran was compiled, we cannot wonder that it is so incoherent a piece as we find it; the book is divided into chapters; of these some are very long; others again, especially a few towards the end, very short. Each chapter has a title prefixed, taken from the first word, or from some one particular thing mentioned in it, rarely from the subject-matter of it; for if a chapter be of any length, it usually runs into various subjects that have no connection with each other. A celebrated commentator divides the contents of the Koran into three general heads: (1) Precepts or directions, relating either to religion, as prayers, fasting, pilgrimages; or to civil polity, as marriages, inheritances, judicatures. (2) Histories—whereof some are taken from the Scriptures, but falsified with fabulous additions; others are wholly false, having no foundation in fact. (3) Admonitions: under which head are comprised exhortations to receive Islamism; to fight for it, to practise its precepts, prayer, alms, etc.; the moral duties, such as justice, temperance, etc., promises of everlasting felicity to the obedient, dissuasives from sin, threatenings of the punishments of hell to the unbelieving and disobedient. Many of the threatenings are levelled against particular persons, and those sometimes of Mohammed’s own family, who had opposed him in propagating his religion.

In the Koran, God is brought in, saying, “We have given you a book.” By this it appears that the impostor published early, in writing, some of his principal doctrines, as also some of his historical relations. Thus, in his Life, p. 16, we find his disciples reading the twentieth chapter of the Koran before his flight from Mecca; after which he pretended many of the revelations in other chapters were brought to him. Undoubtedly, all those said to be revealed at Medina must be posterior to what he had then published at Mecca; because he had not yet been at Medina. Many parts of the Koran he declared were brought to him by the angel Gabriel, on special occasions. Accordingly, the commentators on the Koran often explain passages in it by relating the occasion on which they were first revealed. Without such a key, many of them would be perfectly unintelligible.

There are several contradictions in the Koran. To reconcile these, the Moslem doctors have invented the doctrine of abrogation—i.e., that what was revealed at one time was revoked by a new revelation. A great deal of it is so absurd, trifling, and full of tautology, that it requires no little patience to read much of it at a time. Notwithstanding, the Koran is cried up by the Mussulmans as inimitable. Accordingly, when Mohammed was called upon, as he often was, to work miracles in proof of his divine mission, he excused himself by various pretences, and appealed to the Koran as a standing miracle. Each chapter of the Koran is divided into verses, that is, lines of different length, terminated with the same letter, so as to make a different rhyme, but without any regard to the measure of the syllables.

The Mohammedan religion consists of two parts, faith and practice. Faith they divide into six articles: (1) A belief in the unity of God, in opposition to those whom they call associators; by which name they mean not only those who, besides the true God, worship idols or inferior gods or goddesses, but the Christians also, who hold Christ’s divinity and the doctrine of the Trinity. (2) A belief in angels, to whom they attribute various shapes, names, and offices, borrowed from the Jews and Persians. (3) The Scriptures. (4) The prophets; on this head the Koran teaches that God revealed his will to various prophets, in divers ages of the world, and gave it in writing to Adam, Seth, Enoch, Abraham, etc.; but these books are lost; that afterwards he gave the Pentateuch to Moses, the Psalms to David, the Gospel to Jesus, and the Koran to Mohammed. The Koran speaks with great reverence of Moses and Jesus, but says the Scriptures left by them have been greatly mutilated and corrupted. Under this pretence, it adds a great many fabulous relations to the history contained in those sacred books, and charges the Jews and Christians with suppressing many prophecies concerning Mohammed (a calumny easily refuted, the Scriptures having been translated into various languages, long before Mohammed was born). (5) The fifth article of belief is the resurrection and day of judgment, while about the intermediate state Mohammedan divines have various opinions. The happiness promised to the Moslems in paradise is wholly sensual, consisting of fine gardens, rich furniture, sparkling with gems and gold, delicious fruits, and wines that neither cloy nor intoxicate; but above all, affording the fruition of all the delights of love in the society of women having large black eyes, and every trait of exquisite beauty, who shall ever continue young and perfect. Some of their writers speak of these females of paradise in very lofty strains; telling us, for instance, that if one of them were to look down from heaven in the night, she would illuminate the earth as the sun does; and if she did but spit into the ocean, it would be immediately turned as sweet as honey. These delights of paradise were certainly, at first, understood literally; however, Mohammedan divines may have since allegorised them into a spiritual sense. As to the punishments threatened to the wicked, they are hell-fire, breathing hot winds, the drinking of boiling and stinking water, eating briers and thorns, and the bitter fruit of the tree Zakum, which in their bellies will feel like boiling pitch. These punishments are to be everlasting to all except those who embrace Islamism; for the latter, after suffering a number of years, in proportion to their demerits, will then, if they have had but so much faith as is equal to the weight of an ant, be released by the mercy of God, and, upon the intercession of Mohammed, admitted into paradise.

The sixth article of belief is that God decrees everything that is to happen, not only all events, but the actions and thoughts of men, their belief or infidelity; that everything that has or will come to pass has been, from eternity, written in the preserved or secret table, which is a white stone of an immense size, preserved in heaven, near the throne of God. Agreeable to this notion, one of their poets thus expresses himself: “Whatever is written against thee will come to pass, what is written for thee shall not fail; resign thyself to God, and know thy Lord to be powerful, his decrees will certainly take place; his servants ought to be silent.”

Of their four fundamental points of practice, the first is prayer. This duty is to be performed five times in the twenty-four hours: (1) In the morning before sunrise; (2) when noon is past; (3) a little before sunset; (4) a little after sunset; (5) before the first watch of the night. Previous to prayer they are to purify themselves by washing. Some kinds of pollution require the whole body to be immersed in water, but commonly it is enough to wash some parts only, the head, the face and neck, hands and feet. In the latter ablution, called wodhu, fine sand or dust may be used when water cannot be had; in such case, the palm of the hand being first laid upon the sand, is then to be drawn over the part required to be washed. The Mohammedans, out of respect to the divine Majesty before whom they are to appear, are required to be clean and decent when they go to public prayers in their mosques; but are yet forbidden to appear there in sumptuous apparel, particularly clothes trimmed with gold or silver, lest they should make them vain and arrogant. The women are not allowed to be in their mosques at the same time with the men; this they think would make their thoughts wander from their proper business there. On this account they reproach the Christians with the impropriety of the contrary usage.

The next point of practice is alms-giving, which is frequently enjoined in the Koran, and looked upon as highly meritorious. Many of them have been very exemplary in the performance of this duty. The third point of practical religion is fasting the whole month Ramadhan, during which they are every day to abstain from eating, or drinking, or touching a woman, from daybreak to sunset; after that they are at liberty to enjoy themselves as at other times. From this fast an exception is made in favour of old persons and children; those also that are sick, or on a journey; and women pregnant or nursing are also excused in this month. But then, the person making use of this dispensation must expiate the omission by fasting an equal number of days in some other month, and by giving alms to the poor. There are also some other days of fasting, which are, by the more religious, observed in the manner above described. The last practical duty is going the pilgrimage to Mecca, which every man who is able is obliged to perform once in his life. In the ceremonies of it they strictly copy those observed by Mohammed. A pilgrimage can be made only in the month of Dhul-Hija; but a visitation to Mecca may be made at any other time of the year.[b]

DOZY’S ESTIMATE OF THE KORAN

The book which contains the revelations made to Mohammed, and which is, at the same time, if not the most complete, at least the most trustworthy source of his biography, presents more peculiarities and irregularities than any other. It is a collection of stories, exhortations, laws, etc., placed side by side without attempt at chronological order or any other order. The revelations were seldom long, most frequently they consist of simple verses which were put into writing in Mohammed’s life-time, or simply entrusted to memory; for, as is proved by the genealogies and poems of paganism, which for long were only preserved by oral tradition, Mohammed’s contemporaries had a memory of marvellous power, as is generally the case with people who write little. Mohammed called every complete revelation sura, or “koran.” The former of these two words is Hebrew, and it literally means a series of stones in a wall, and thence the line of a letter or of a book; in the Koran, as we possess it, it has the wider meaning of a chapter. The word koran, properly speaking, is an infinitive, and means “to read, to recite, to expose”; this word is also borrowed from the Jews, who use the verb kara (to read) especially in the sense of to study the Scriptures; but Mohammed himself included under the name Koran not only each separate revelation, but also the union of several or even of all of them.

Specimen of Arabic Writing

(From an old manuscript of the Koran)

However, in the time of Mohammed no complete collection of the texts of the Koran existed; and had it not been for the care of the first three caliphs it would have run a great risk of being forgotten. What reserves are needed in admitting the entire authenticity of the text of the sacred writings of the East! The example of the Jews shows this clearly. Already in the time of Mohammed it was known that the Jews had altered the text of the Old Testament in several places; they have been blamed for doing so, and the fact has been positively proved; at the same time in the history of Judaism itself reasons have been discovered for these alterations, which from a certain point of view appear necessary. The Mohammedans had not the same reason as the Jews for adding and altering; but that does not prove that they had no other reasons.

However that may be, and whatever may be the judgment which posterity will declare as to the greater or lesser authenticity of the Koran, it is quite certain that the arrangement of this book and its division into suras or chapters is entirely arbitrary. And it could not be otherwise; an arrangement according to subject was quite impossible, for Mohammed often spoke in the same revelation of totally different things. Still less could a chronological order be followed: first, because Mohammed himself, in many places, added new revelations to more ancient ones; next, because in those times there was no one still living who knew the exact moment when each verse had been revealed. It was with perfect justice that, at this period, a man who was asked if the fragments of the Koran were arranged in chronological order, replied: “Even if all men and all jinns (demons) attempted it, they could not succeed.” So the length of the suras was taken as a rule of the order to be followed, without keeping too strictly to it; the longest came first, then the one which was nearest in length, and so on; so that the last sura is at the same time the shortest. The consequence is that revelations dating from very different epochs are now mixed without order, so that a similar confusion is found in no other book; and this, above all else, makes the reading of the Koran so difficult and so tedious.

For believing Moslems the Koran, that is to say God’s Word which has not been created, is the most perfect book which exists, both in matter and form, and this opinion is what it should be in the natural order of things; but it is somewhat strange that the prejudice of the Moslems should have had more influence on us than would have been expected. The pompous rhetoric and the so frequently foolish accumulation of metaphors which are to be found in the Meccan suras have been taken seriously for poetry and admired in consequence; the style of the whole book has been considered a model of purity of language. It is difficult to argue on the question of taste; every man has his private opinion on this matter, and he can seldom be persuaded to change it. But if we must give our own, we must confess that, among the more famous of ancient Arab books, we know none so wanting in taste and originality, so exceedingly prolix and wearisome as the Koran.

Mohammed was not able to compose in verse, an art of which nearly all were masters at that time; so he did not speak in verse, and he even had a marked aversion for poetry. His taste was extremely peculiar; he preferred very mediocre poets who could express pious thoughts in bombastic verse, to the greatest Arab poets who were still living or who had only lately died. Generally speaking he was opposed to poetry, and very naturally; for it was the true expression of the former joyous life of paganism. He was therefore forced to employ rhymed prose for his revelations, which consists in using short sentences, two or more of which rhyme together. In the oldest suras Mohammed closely followed the rules of this style of writing so that they resemble the oracles of the old Arab soothsayers; later on however he neglected them more and more, made sentences longer than they should have been, and took many licences with the rhyme which, far from being attractive, are real blemishes. If they were found in any other book than the Word of God, they would have been severely criticised.

Moreover, he was not master of the language, which partly explains the frequent repetitions to be found in the Koran. Mohammed had much trouble in composing; he seldom found at once the right word to express his thought; so he tried all methods, and hence it is that in the Koran the same ideas recur continually and only the expression changes. The Koran is crowded with degenerate words, borrowed from the Jewish, the Syrian, and the Ethiopian languages; the Arab commentators, who knew no other language than their own, wearied their brains in trying to explain them, without succeeding, however, in finding the true meaning. Moreover the Koran contains more than one infraction of the rules of grammar; and if these are less noticeable, it is because Arab grammarians, wishing to justify them, made these errors into rules or exceptions to the rules.

The Koran had, moreover, very little influence on Mohammed’s contemporaries. The Arabs had reached a very high degree of civilisation and of development—I refer to intellectual and not to material civilisation; while Mohammed was a mere enthusiast, like many others elsewhere—a fanatic, who was surpassed in understanding, science, intelligence, and even in morality by more than one of his fellow-citizens. The greater number of his contemporaries were indifferent to his pious effusions. And, in short, to find the Koran fine and sublime, faith must first have stifled common sense. The majority of the nation had not yet reached that stage. So the conversions one reads of which are attributed to certain passages of the Koran belong chiefly to the domain of pious legend and not to history; history, in fact, teaches that the multitude knew little or nothing of the Koran, and that they were moreover not at all anxious to know it.

DOCTRINE OF ISLAMISM

There is no religion less original than Islamism. It has as base Hanifitism and Mosaism as it was developed under the influence of Parseeism, together with facts borrowed from the ancient Arabic religion and Christianity, with the additional dogma that Mohammed is the greatest and the last prophet of God. That was the sum of the system preached by the Meccan prophet.

The Koran contains no deep thoughts, no poetic theories depicted in sublime and moving language. It does not try to resolve great problems by clothing them in a borrowed symbolic form. Islamism is certainly the most prosaic and monotonous of religions, and at the same time the least susceptible of modification and development. How explain this phenomenon? By the very character of the Arab people, who, in effect, hold specially to the positive. They seek even poetry in the form rather than the substance; and, everything taken into consideration, they rather resemble a developed and reasoning people of the nineteenth century than an ancient nation, still animated by the poetry of youth which other religions have produced.

Again, Mohammed counts for much. He was not a profound thinker, but an enthusiast of mediocre talent. Far from aspiring to originality, his great glory was to avoid it, since he never ceased repeating that the doctrine he preached had been announced from all time by prophets of old. There is a third reason still which must not be lost sight of: In other countries religion developed gradually—it was not the founder who wrote, but his disciples; thus each author imprinted more or less his individuality on his book, and this circumstance, which naturally excludes uniformity, imposed on future ages the duty of not keeping to the letter but entering into the very spirit of the text. There was nothing of this kind in Arabia. There, a single man regulated everything—faith, customs, even the law. The Koran is a book made by one man who exposes the immutable will of God. Islamism has thus a great fixity. One knows not how to contest it; but, far from being a cause of satisfaction, this must be deplored; for continual progress is a task imposed on humanity.

The laws of the Koran still flourish and will do so as long as Islamism exists. That they were good for those times, and then constituted real progress, may be admitted without difficulty. But the laws of Charlemagne were just as excellent for their epoch; yet where would now be all the people over whom he reigned, had they been condemned always to preserve and follow these laws? Would not progress have been impossible for western Europe? The legislation of the Koran hardly enters into the scope of our subject, and we will keep to its doctrines. It has been so often analysed, and moreover presents so little originality, that we shall make a very rapid survey of it.

The unity of God is the first article of faith; the second, the divine mission of Mohammed. The God of Mohammed resembles the Allah Taala of the primitive Arabic religion, the Jehovah of Mosaism, and the Ahuramazda of the Parsee monotheist not yet corrupted. The story of creation is borrowed from the Jews. The jinns of primitive religion have been preserved, transformed into angels and demons. That is what Zoroaster did with regard to the Indian divinities, the devas. It is forbidden to honour the angels, they are perishable and will die in the day of judgment. The arch-fiend also has the Hebrew name of Satan and the Greek one of Iblis (Diabolos); but as Ahriman of the duallist Neopardism has never taken his true signification in Judaism, the idea the Koran gives of the arch-fiend and his subjects is more Christian than Jewish. However, Mohammed diverges in one point from church doctrine—the impossibility of converting devils. According to him devils may be converted, and he himself has converted many.

The revelations of God are worked by means of prophets and holy books. Each period has its revelation which God modifies according to the needs of the time, and this idea, beautiful in itself, would be fecund if Mohammed had not given his revelation as the last and most perfect. Adam had already received the gift of prophecy, and the number of prophets was not inconsiderable, seeing they were ordinarily reckoned at 124,000, but the six greatest are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The Koran admits the miraculous birth of Jesus—for brevity’s sake we will not speak of all the others—but he was not the Son of God but a man in the proper sense of the word, and witnessed in speaking of himself that he was only a servant of the Divinity; he declares that not he but God alone is omniscient. On the judgment day, Allah will say: “Oh, Jesus, Son of Mary, hast thou said to men, place my mother and myself as gods by the side of God?” And Jesus will answer, “Far be the thought from me; how can I pretend to a name which does not belong to me?” It is not so clearly seen whether the Koran admits the Ascension. As to miracles, Jesus did a great number, even when his mother was still feeding him, and later he raised the dead, etc. To crown all, it was not he who was crucified, but a man whom they took for him. The principal object of his doctrine was, like that of all prophets, to announce the unity of God.

Man has five great duties to fulfil. He must admit the two principal dogmas of Islamism, pray, fast, give alms, and go on pilgrimage to Mecca. These duties are called the Pillars of Islamism. According to the revelation made to Mohammed when he journeyed to heaven, and which is not noted in the Koran (for this book only orders prayers three times a day), all believers ought, after having gone through the prescribed purifications, to pray at a given time for five minutes each day, by preference at the mosque. Mohammed is a great deal more occupied with the ceremonies of prayer than with the prayer itself, for there are designated passages of the Koran and consecrated formulas to be recited; so there can be no question of spontaneous prayer, and if in the Moslem countries the degenerate cult consists in a mechanical movement of the lips, the fault to a large extent must be attributed to the prophet himself. The attitudes, gestures, inflexions of the head and body are exactly regulated by Mohammed himself, and even more by theologians who came after. On Fridays there is gathering for common prayer, but the day is not a time of repose like the Jewish Sabbath or the Christian Sunday. With the exception of prayer-time, each follows his daily occupation.

Fasting is prescribed for the whole month of Ramadhan. It is only after sunset that eating and drinking are permitted. Mohammed decreed this law at Medina, in a time when the fixed lunar year was still followed—that is, when the solar year was made up by the intercalation of a supplementary month; consequently the month of Ramadhan regularly fell in winter. But when afterwards Mohammed had established the vague lunar year and the month of Ramadhan fell by chance in summer, it was a severe trial not to dare to take a drop of water all through the long and stifling summer day. It is not astonishing, then, that the Moslem is generally morose and bad tempered during the fast and awaits its end with impatience. But, once over, there is celebrated on the first day of the month of Khauwal, the most joyous fête known to Islamism, that of the fast-breaking (aid-al-fitr) or “little fête” (the little bairam of the Turks), which, in certain countries, lasts three days. The fifth great duty, which all Moslems of age and free, and of no matter which sex, have to accomplish once in a life-time is the pilgrimage to Mecca.

THE PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA

This pilgrimage was borrowed from the ancient religion with all the ceremonies which accompany it, although they have been modified in some respects and received a touch of Islamism. In spite of their great antiquity, they were not much observed by Arabs in the time of Mohammed except mechanically. But, as Islamism retained them, it was necessary to justify them.

When Adam had been driven from the terrestrial paradise and sent into the world, he lamented to God: “Alas! I shall hear no more the angels’ voices.” “That,” said God, “is the result of your sin. But build me a temple and walk around it thinking of me as you have seen the angels do around my throne.” Adam arrived in the neighbourhood of Mecca, and laid there the foundations of the holy temple whilst the angels, aiding him, brought large blocks of rock from five mountains. It was on to these foundations that the temple itself descended from heaven. Adam also received from paradise a tent formed of red hyacinth, in which the place of repose was the angular stone. Also a white hyacinth, only blackened because sinners had touched it. This is the famous Black Stone.

At the time of the deluge both temple and tent were taken up to heaven, but the Black Stone was hidden in the mountain of Abu Kobais, which is near Mecca. Afterwards the spot where the temple had stood remained known to men and was visited as a sacred place. It was there, in fact, that Abraham came with Hagar and Ishmael and left them to their fate. The water which Hagar had brought being soon exhausted, she and her son suffered greatly from thirst. As far as her eyes could see there was no living being near. So to get a wider view she climbed Mount Safa, then the Merwa heights which are opposite, but still saw no one. On returning she found her son dying of thirst. Not knowing what to do, she returned in haste to the two hills, and in her misery ran several times from one to the other. When in desperation she returned, there was water bubbling near her son. She hastened to pile sand round that it should not escape before she had filled her pitcher; then she and her son drank. This spring ran in that place where the wells of Zemzem were afterwards dug.

When on a visit to Ishmael, Abraham told him that God had ordered him to build a temple in a certain spot; father and son set immediately to work, and in digging came across the old foundations laid by Adam. Abraham wanted to set in one of the angles a recognisable stone to mark the spot where the procession should begin round the temple; but while Ishmael was seeking a suitable stone the angel Gabriel brought Abraham the Black Stone, which he had been to fetch from Mount Abu Kobais. Abraham took and placed it in the angle. When the wall was too high for him to reach up he mounted on a big stone which Ishmael placed before him and removed when necessary.

The temple finished, both father and son on Gabriel’s order walked round it seven times, carefully touching the four corners each time. Then, bowing twice, they prayed behind the large stone on which Abraham had stood. Gabriel also taught them the rites which they had to accomplish in other sacred spots. First they had to hurry rapidly seven times on the path between the two hills of Safa and Merwa, in memory of the journeys Hagar had made in her agony. Then he led them to the valley of Mina; but on their arrival the devil (Iblis) showed himself. “Throw something at him,” said Gabriel. Abraham obeyed by throwing seven little stones, upon which Iblis went away. In the middle and at the foot of the valley he was seen again, but each time Abraham drove him away with little stones. Thence arose the custom of throwing stones in the Mina valley during the pilgrimage. But when, led by Gabriel, he had also visited Mozdalifa and Arafa and learned what ceremonies there were to be performed he received orders to tell all men they were to go on a pilgrimage to the Kaaba and other sacred spots. “My voice cannot reach to them,” he answered. “Do what I command you,” then said God; “I know what to do so that they may hear.”

Abraham stood up on the big stone, and it rose so high that it was above all the mountains. Turning himself successively to the four cardinal points, he cried, “O men, a pilgrimage to the ancient house is ordered. Obey your Lord.” Then from all countries came the answer: “Labbaika, Allahomma, labbaika;” which means, according to the explanation which the Arabs love to give to this old formula: “We are ready to serve thee, O God, we are ready.” It is in perpetual memory of this fact that the print of Abraham’s feet have remained on this stone. Even to this day it is called Makam Ibrahim or “Abraham’s station.” This is how the theologians, aided by a well-known story in Genesis and a Jewish legend which speaks of Abraham making a journey into Arabia, came to resolve the difficult problem of making very old customs agree with the new religion and explain it. The explanation has not satisfied everyone, but it has sufficed for the majority, and must certainly be praised for its ingenuity. Being acquainted with what the majority think about pilgrimages and the meaning they set on ceremonies, we will here give a brief description of these customs:

First when the boundaries of the sacred territory are crossed and the pilgrim is purified, the ordinary clothes are doffed and the pilgrim’s garment or ihram is put on. This is composed of two pieces of linen, wool, or cotton; one tied round the loins, the other thrown over the neck and shoulders so as to leave bare a part of the right arm. All head-dress is forbidden, save for old men and invalids, who have to purchase this dispensation with alms. Instead of shoes sandals are worn, or the upper part of the boot is cut away so as to form a kind of sandal. The ihram for women is composed of a mantle and veil.

Arabic Bronze Tap

On the seventh day of the month of Dhul-Hija, the fête is opened by a sermon which the kadi of Mecca delivers after the midday prayer, and in which he reminds the worshippers of the ceremonies they have to accomplish. On the eighth all repair to Mina, arriving there after a slow walk of two hours. The journey continues to Mount Arafa, which is six hours’ march from Mecca. It is on this sacred mountain and in the long valley, that the night is passed, but very few think of sleep. The devout pray aloud, the others sing joyful songs, or pass the time in the cafés. The grand ceremony at Arafa consists in a long preaching which begins on the ninth at three in the afternoon and continues till sunset. This is regarded as so important that those who have not heard it, even if they have visited all the sacred spots in Mecca, cannot pretend to the title of haji (pilgrim). The preacher, who is generally the kadi of Mecca, is seated on a camel and reads his sermon in Arabic. Every four or five minutes he stops and raises his arms to implore the benediction of heaven. During this interval the audience flap the folds of their pilgrim’s garment and make the air resound with their cries of “Labbaika, Allahomma, labbaika.” According to the law the preacher must show visible signs of emotion, so he seldom ceases wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. The audience must also be deeply moved, recognise their deep sinfulness, and shed abundant tears.

When at last the sun has set behind the mountains, the preacher closes his book and the pilgrims run with all their might towards Mozdalifa. A scene of indescribable confusion arises, for everyone runs as hard as he can, and the caravans from different countries make it a point of honour to arrive first at the destination. Foot-travellers, litters, camels are always being knocked over, there is fighting with sticks and other weapons. At night there is a magnificent illumination, “so grand that one might imagine that all the stars from heaven had come down to earth.”

On the tenth is the greatest fête of the year, the “day of sacrifice,” or the great bairam of the Turks. At daybreak the kadi delivers another sermon of the same kind as that of the previous day, except that it is shorter; then the prayers for the fête are read, and when finished all go slowly to the narrow Mina valley, where there is a village. There they begin to throw stones about the size of a kidney bean, which, strictly, ought to have been picked up at Mozdalifa. But many get them in Mina or use them a second time, although this is forbidden by law. The first seven little stones are aimed against a species of pillar or altar of rough stone which is at the entrance of the valley, in the middle of the route, and which measures six or seven feet in height. Then seven stones are thrown in the middle of the valley against a pillar of the same kind, and seven more at the western end against a stone wall. At the same time they cry: “In the name of God! God is great! We throw stones to be safe against the devil and his hosts.”

After this the sacrifices begin. The pilgrims immolate the victims they have brought; and all Mohammedans, in whatsoever part of the world, sacrifice at the same time. That, generally speaking, ends the pilgrimage. The pilgrims’ robes may now be doffed, everyday clothes resumed, and many return to Mecca to make a tour of the Kaaba. But ordinarily a stay of another two days is made at Mina, and stone-throwing is recommenced. The eleventh is the day of rest, and a return to Mecca is made on the twelfth. The pilgrim goes to the Kaaba, which in the interval has received its new veil, says some prayers, stands in front of the Black Stone, touches it with the right hand or kisses it, if not hindered by the crowd, and begins the seven tours, the first three being made rapidly. To each tour belong certain prescribed prayers to be said; at the end of each one he again touches or kisses the stone. Then, asking pardon for his sins, he goes to the station of Abraham, which is quite near, and prays again. Thence he goes to the sacred well of Zemzem, from which he drinks as much as he wishes, or as much as the crowd permits; finally he runs seven times rapidly from the Safa to the Merwa hill. This done, he has accomplished all the ceremonies, which are so regulated as to their least details that few pilgrims know them by heart. The strangeness of these ceremonies has even struck some pious Moslem theologians who do not put very great faith in the legends. They admit that the act of walking round a temple, running swiftly between two hills, throwing little stones, etc., does not increase piety; but they get out of the difficulty by saying the ceremonies are a sign of divine wisdom, impenetrable to our weak understanding, or a trial of man’s submission to the mysterious and incomprehensible will of God.

We can pass over the other moral duties imposed by the Moslem religion, for morals do not vary much in any religion. There is just one peculiar duty, the holy war, of which we will say a few words.

THE HOLY WAR

European opinion for a long time has not been exact. The Koran, if its sequence of ideas is well studied, gives no order relative to this war against all infidels; and Mohammed, to begin with, shows himself extremely tolerant, admitting the possibility of salvation for all those who believe in God and the last judgment and practice virtue, whatever may be their form of worship. But the opposition he met with modified his way of looking at things, and it was then that Islamism became the only religion that could save. Nevertheless the holy war is not imposed as a duty except and only in the case of enemies to Islamism being the aggressors. Only an arbitrary interpretation by theologians can take the orders otherwise.

Another equal error is to think that Islamism has been propagated by force. Political power, certainly, has been extended in that way, not religion. The caliphs, far from seeking to make proselytes, for reasons of pecuniary interest saw with much displeasure the conversion of conquered peoples.

Mohammed also forbade games of chance and wine. As events then stood, he had to ask for all in order to obtain anything. The Arabs were great drinkers and took a certain pride in being so. Even among Mohammed’s disciples at Medina there were those who came drunk to the mosque. It was then necessary to agitate against drunkenness, and as warnings on the subject of this abuse of wine did not produce any effect, he forbade it altogether. Omar sanctioned the prohibition by adding the penalty of the whip. The success has not been great. All the time Islamism has existed wine has been drunk, a great deal of it, indeed; only, out of respect for the law, it has not been done openly. The alimentary laws are much less rigorous than with the Jews. Pork, for which moreover the Arabs had a repugnance, has been forbidden, and as the use of fat generally causes fearful and hideous diseases in hot countries, it must be recognised that the prohibition in question is a very wise law in Eastern religions.[c]

ARAB CULTURE

In the Middle Ages the Arabs were the sole representatives of civilisation. They opposed that barbarism which spread over Europe, shaken as it was by invasions of northern peoples, and went back to “the perennial source of Greek philosophy”; far from resting content with acquired treasures, they enlarged and opened up new ways to the study of nature.

Wars of invasion, scarcely interrupted by civil discord, far-away expeditions, and striking triumphs, filled the first century of the Hegira. Even in 760, after the fall of the Omayyads, there was no evidence that to the tumult of arms would succeed in the caliph empire a period noted only for intellectual progress. But under the Abbasids a noble emulation, and above all the example and protection of the sovereigns, dissipated the ignorance and coarseness with which the disciples of Mohammed were justly charged. Men’s minds were permeated with new ideas, a number of writings of all kinds sprang into existence and in their turn gave birth to an infinity of others, which made Arabic the medium of learning for the East and all the Moslem states. Nearly all these writings are still extant, and form one of the vastest literatures ever known.

To the caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur belongs the credit of the first impulse given to the study of exact science. Among the confused and incomplete traditions that exist concerning the ancient Arabs, one catches a glimpse of notions of practical astronomy. The spectacle of the heavens had attracted their attention, as it does that of all peoples enjoying a mild climate and clear air, although without invariably inspiring to consideration of the celestial laws. All that they had gathered in their intercourse with surrounding nations was a knowledge of the names of planets and certain stars, which they deified, an exact indication of the dwellings in the moon, and purely astrological learning. They went by the lunar year, but it does not appear they had ever tried to mark time by eras and epochs in general usage. Thus it is almost impossible to establish a regular order in the long series of facts which make up the Arabian annals, until that epoch when a timely revolution broke up the various beliefs of its nomad populations, writing them under the law of the Koran and developing new desires.

“The Arabs,” says Humboldt,[d] “were admirably adapted to the rôle of mediator and to influence the peoples included in the area between the Euphrates and the Guadalquivir and the southern part of central Africa. They possessed an unexampled activity which marked a distinct epoch in the world’s history, a tendency opposed to the intolerant spirit of the Jews, which led them to mingle with conquered peoples without always abjuring their national character or traditional remembrances of their native country, and this in spite of a perpetual change of land. Whilst the German races did not acquire polish until a long time after their migrations, the Arabs brought with them not only their religion but also a perfected language and a wealth of poetry, which was not to be forever lost but was to be found again among the troubadours and minnesingers of Provence.”

M. Girault de Prangey[e] has studied carefully Arab art, and compared the architectural monuments of Spain and the East. In the peninsula he distinguishes three successive epochs. The first, from the eighth to the tenth century, shows a badly disguised imitation of Christian and Roman buildings. The mosque of Cordova is doubtless in the same style as that of Damascus, which it surpassed in magnificence. There is no doubt that the churches described by Eusebius of Cæsarea,[f] with courts, porticoes, fountains, and priests’ lodgings, served as models for the mosques of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Byzantine mosaics are found in them. But already in 965 a sumptuous Greek ornamentation seemed insufficient. Details were multiplied, arches were complicated with festoons and varied curves, such as one sees at Cordova in the Villaviciosa chapel constructed in the caliphate of Hakim.

The second epoch, from the tenth to the twelfth century, marks the first development of that Moorish architecture encouraged by the Almoravid and Almohad princes. The Arabs then strayed from the beaten path. The ogee arch, porcelain mosaics, fantastic embroideries, ornaments run in stucco, became fashionable. Inscriptions abounded and became part of the decorations.

Finally the third epoch, when Arab art attained its apogee, was contemporary with the splendour of the kingdom of Granada. The Alhambra is the highest expression of it. The exterior of the palace, so simple yet imposing, is in conformity with the Moorish habit of hiding from the eyes of strangers. The entrance is only an immense arch decorated with some emblems and an inscription recording the founder’s name. The walls are of a species of mortar mixed with little pebbles which glint in the sunlight. In the interior, on the contrary, man’s genius has expended its utmost resources. Vast painted and gilded galleries, adorned with arcades of every shape cut up with festoons, in stalactites, and loaded with stucco open-work, the rooms lighted by uncasemented windows, the Ambassadors’ hall, that of the Two Sisters, the Infantes room, the Comares tower, the court and fountain of Lions, the Alberca court, below which are baths modelled in the ancient style—all offer admirable effects. Here water gushes among millions of beautiful little columns isolated or grouped picturesquely, there it flows in marble trenches, now forming cascades, now jets thrown in spray to feed the basins in the patios surrounded by shrubs and flowers. Everywhere inscriptions skilfully combined with sculptures express noble and elevated sentiments, adding fresh charm to the marvel of a palace which Christian kings partly destroyed.

The interior ornaments of the principal halls of this ancient residence of Moorish kings are in plaster. The fashion of the relief is geometrical, and although constantly repeated has none the less beauty and delicacy. The paintings, artfully distributed and protected by the Andalusian climate, are to-day as they were in the times of the Abencerrages. In some of the halls which surround the court of Lions the colours put on by the Arabs still retain their lustre. They are very pure, composed only of reds, blues, yellows, and greens. In a recent analysis the blue and red matter was found to be of ultramarine and vermilion or sulphate of mercury.

It is, moreover, to be regretted that a general study has not been made of the Arabic buildings in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and even India, of the different epochs of Arabic rule. It would offer peculiar characters useful in an exact determination of style. We have reason to hope that skilful artists will soon supply this want.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY

The empire of the caliphs, in its extent, its rich soil, varied climate, people, and regulated condition of its provinces, naturally excited commercial speculation. The productions of Spain, Barbary, Egypt, Abyssinia, Arabia, Persia, and Russia, those of countries bordering on the Caspian Sea, as well as all Indian and China merchandise, came to Mecca, Medina, Cufa, Bassorah, Damascus, Baghdad, Mosul, and Madain (Modein). The founding of colonies had created new business centres and opened up important routes.

The Arabs were, moreover, devoted to industry by that same law which made of work a duty, and commended commerce and agriculture as meritorious and pleasing to God. Merchants and their callings elicited equal respect. Governors of provinces, generals, and servants did not blush to be known as Khayat the tailor, Atari the druggist, Jauhari the jeweller, etc. Free passage for merchandise through armies and the safety of the high-roads were maintained at all points. Wells and cisterns were dug in the desert, caravanseries were built at certain distances where travellers could find necessary help at a moderate cost.

Relations existed between Spain and the limits of eastern Asia; an Arab fleet had gone through the Straits of Gibraltar, and a tempest which drove them ashore hindered the possible honour of discovering the Azores, and perhaps America. But though restricted to the old world, the Moslems gave a strong impulse to every kind of human industry. Spain enriched herself with the products of Arabian agriculture and manufactures. Cane sugar, rice, cotton, saffron, ginger, myrrh, ambergris, pistachio, bananas, henna for dyeing, mohaleb to promote plumpness, were objects of exchange in the peninsula; tapestry of Cordova leather, Toledo blades, Murcia cloth made from beautiful wool, Granadan, Almerian, and Sevillian silks, and gun-cotton were sought in all parts of the world. Sulphur, mercury, copper, iron were exploited successfully; the finely tempered Spanish steel caused the helmets and cuirasses coming from its foundries to be quickly bought up. The environs of Seville were covered with olive trees, and contained one hundred thousand oil farms or oil-mills. The province of Valencia gave to Europe southern fruits. From the ports of Malaga, Cartagena, Barcelona, and Cadiz there were large exportations; and Christian nations patterned their maritime regulations upon those of the Arabs.

Under the Moors, as M. Darny has said, Toledo had 200,000 inhabitants and Seville 300,000; to-day the population is rated at 21,000 for the one, and 143,000 for the other. Cordova was eight leagues in circumference, had 60,000 palaces, and 283,000 houses. To-day she has scarcely 56,000 inhabitants. The diocese of Salamanca then included 125 towns or boroughs; this number is now reduced to 13. Seville had 6000 workers on silk alone, yet in 1742 only 10,000 could be counted in the peninsula among both silk and wool factories.

The geographer Edrisi, who visited Spain in the middle of the eleventh century, assures us there were in the royal kingdom of Jaen more than 600 towns and hamlets working in silk. The expulsion of the Moors had for Spain as disastrous results as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had for French commerce; and Cardinal Ximenes, desiring that even the remembrance of the service they had rendered should be destroyed, ordered in a decree worthy of barbarous times 84,000 Arabian manuscripts to be burned in the public squares of Granada.

The northerly coasts of Africa had also shown great commercial development. Numerous factories arose, and the Mauretanian Tingitana rivalled the peninsula in its manufacturing and rural activity. The country of Sous recalled Andalusia in its fertility and in the intelligence of its inhabitants. The East caught the infection of this general industry; at Siraf and Aden there was an exchange of goods between China, India, Persia, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Nubian slaves and Habasch, tiger skins, silk, cotton, ivory, and gold-dust from Zanzibar came from Ethiopia. India and China sent stuffs, saddles, sandalwood, spices, ebony, lead, tin, pearls, and precious stones. From Aden these goods were transported to Jiddah, then to Suez, and shared among Egyptian ports and Syrian coast towns. Countries bordering on the Caspian Sea bought stores at the Cabul fair; caravans from Samarcand to Aleppo distributed Chinese silks, cashmere cloth, musk, and medicinal drugs of Turkestan.

We have set forth the causes and principal effects of the great wave of civilisation poured forth in the Middle Ages by the Arabs, which rolled from the columns of Hercules to the confines of Asia. It remains, to complete this vast picture, only to say a few words on certain Arabian discoveries, which altered the literary, political, and military conditions of the entire world. These were paper, the compass, and gunpowder.

PAPER, COMPASS, AND GUNPOWDER

One has already seen how many useful and important inventions have been transmitted to us by the Arabs, and even although they were not perhaps the originators they must not be refused the glory of having brought them to the light and of having propagated them from one end of the world to the other. This is really what they did with paper, the compass, and gunpowder.

A belief, founded on certain apocryphal writing, that the Chinese knew the use thereof at a far distant epoch, has been considered sufficient to rob the Arabs of the honour of having bequeathed these inventions to Europe, but this is an injustice. It might be said that printing existed in China from the eighth century; yet the names of Gutenberg, Faust, and Schoeffer are not less illustrious. Would not the Arabs, if they had taken tissue paper from them, have also borrowed the art of printing had it then been known? Would those of the Celestial Empire ever practically have used chance discoveries? What use have they made of the compass, they who still believed in 1850 that there was a burning furnace at the South Pole; and have they ever applied gunpowder and utilized its power in as many ways as the Arabs?

It must be remembered that at the siege of Mecca in 690 a kind of bomb was already in use, and that in Egypt in the thirteenth century powdered nitre was used to throw projectiles to a great distance with a noise like thunder. It is also mentioned on the occasion of a naval battle between the king of Tunis and the emir of Seville in the eleventh century, in 1308 at the siege of Gibraltar, in 1324 at that of Baeza; also as used by Ismail, king of Granada in 1340 and by Algeciras in 1342, and Ferreras says positively that the balls were shot by means of powder. The Spanish thenceforth made use of it, and one sees the European armies little by little provided with cannon, while no mention is made of their trials and attempts which would necessarily have preceded the organisation of artillery if the actual invention of gunpowder had originated with Christian nations as some writers and historians have long claimed.

Early Bronze Cannon

With regard to the compass, nothing proves that the Chinese used it for navigation, while we find the Arabs using it in the eleventh century, not only for sea voyages, but in caravan journeys through the desert, and to determine the azimuth of the Kiblah, that is the direction of the Moslem oratories towards Mecca. It was the same with paper. Towards the year 650 silk paper was already being made at Samarcand and Bokhara. In 706 Jusuf Amron at Mecca thought of substituting cotton for silk; hence the “damask paper,” of which Greek historians speak. In Spain, where linen and hemp were more common, arose factories for linen paper. “The Xativa paper,” says the geographer Edrisi, “is excellent and incomparable.” Valencia and Catalonia soon afterwards proved formidable rivals to Xativa (Jativa). In the thirteenth century Arabian paper was used at Castile, whence it penetrated into France, Italy, England, and Germany. But Arabian manuscripts always led in the fineness and glossiness of their paper, as well as in the choice of ornamentation in lively and brilliant colours.

It was thus that the influence exercised by the Arabs manifested itself in every branch of modern civilisation. From the ninth to the fifteenth century the most voluminous literature extant was formed, productions were multiplied; valuable inventions attested the wonderful activity of men’s minds at this epoch; and their influence, felt throughout Christian Europe, justified the opinion that the Arabs have led us in all things. On the one hand we find inestimable material for a history of the Middle Ages—narratives of voyages, the happy idea of the biographical dictionary; on the other, unequalled industry, buildings grandiose in thought and execution, important discoveries in the arts. Does not all this reveal the work of a people too long disdained?[g]

INFLUENCE OF THE ARABS ON EUROPEAN CIVILISATION

“The nations of Europe,” says Bailly in one of his letters to Voltaire, “after having grown old in barbarism, were only enlightened by the invasion of the Moors and the arrival of the Greeks.” We venture to add—and far more by the invasion of the Moors, or of those to whom Bailly gives the name, than by the arrival of the Greeks of the Lower Empire. And, indeed, one of the distinctive and prominent characteristics of the influence which the Arabs exercised on all branches of modern civilisation, is precisely that of having restored to Europe a knowledge of the ancient Greek authors, whose language, works, and even names, were completely forgotten.

It may be boldly asserted that the numerous translations and still more numerous commentaries which the Arabs wrote on all the works of Ancient Greece, and which makes their literature the second daughter of Greek literature, served to give the modern peoples their first notions of the sciences and letters of antiquity. It was only after having known them through the versions of the Arabs that the desire to possess and understand the original writers took shape, and that the language of Homer and Plato found several diligent interpreters. Indeed, “The greater part of Greek erudition,” according to Hyde,

h “which we have to-day from those sources, we received first from the hands of the Arabs.”

In order to justify this assertion, which may seem a little paradoxical, it will be sufficient to call attention to the fact that the Arabs had transmitted to Europe, without disguising its origin, the knowledge they borrowed from the Greeks, long before Boccaccio’s guest, Leontius Pilatus, had started a course on the Greek language at Florence (about 1360), and the dispersal of the inhabitants of Constantinople, after the taking of that town by Muhammed II (1453), had rendered their idiom a common study in Europe. Indeed many Greek books, and notably those which treated of the sciences, were originally translated from Arab into Latin. Among others may be cited the earliest versions of Euclid and Ptolemy.

A not less certain proof that Greek letters first received an asylum from the Arabs, is that several works of Ancient Greece have been preserved by them, and discovered in their own works. Mathematicians, for instance, would never have possessed the Sphericals of the geometrician Menelaus of Alexandria, who was antecedent to Ptolemy, but for the Arab translation (Kitab al-Okar), which was afterwards translated into Latin, nor the eight books of Apollonius of Perga’s Conic Sections, if the Maronite, Abraham Ecchellensis, had not copied and translated (1661) the missing fifth and sixth and seventh books from an Arab manuscript in the Medici library in Florence; neither would the doctors have been able to complete Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’ Epidemics without the Arab translation discovered in the Escurial, and the naturalists would not even possess an abridgement of Aristotle’s Treatise on Stones but for the Arab manuscript in our (the French) National library.

If we trace the whole history of human knowledge, and recall the fact that Greece survived Rome in Alexandria, we may well assign the Arabs the position of guardians to that sacred depôt between Greece and the Renaissance. “They merit,” says M. Libri,

i “eternal gratitude for having been the preservers of the learning of the Greeks and Hindus, when those people were no longer producing anything and Europe was still too ignorant to undertake the charge of the precious deposit. Efface the Arabs from history and the Renaissance of letters will be retarded in Europe by several centuries.”

Bronze Cannon and Mounting

In the matter of science especially, and far more than their forerunners the Romans, the Arabs were the heirs of the Greeks. If they far preferred Aristotle’s philosophy to that of Plato, it may have been because they saw in Plato what he actually was, namely one of the fathers of the Christian church, but it was certainly because Aristotle mingled the positive sciences with metaphysical speculation. Nevertheless Plato (Aflathoun), as well as Aristotle (Aristhathlis or Aristou), received from them the surname of Al-Elahi, or the Divine. It was not only on the masters, principes Scriptores, on Aristotle, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Euclid, Ptolemy, Strabo, that their studies were directed and concentrated; there is no grammarian so mediocre, no rhetorician so poor, no sophist so subtle, that the Arabs have not translated and commented on him.

SCHOLASTICISM

It was in passing through their hands that the peripatetic doctrine engendered scholasticism. It is certain that, in the interminable wrangle between Realists and Nominalists the former leaned on the authority of Avicenna, the others on that of Averrhoës; it is certain, according to the observation of M. Hauréau,[j] that the philosopher Al-Kendi is often quoted by Alexander of Hales, Henry of Ghent and St. Bonaventura, whilst Al-Farabi furnished his aphorisms to William d’Auvergne, Vincent de Beauvais, and Albertus Magnus; and that this same William d’Auvergne prefers the Arabs far above the Greeks, finding the Greeks too much of philosophers and the Arabs more of theologians. Doubtless scholasticism was a vain and regrettable learning, for the schools of the Middle Ages, as Condillac says, resembled the knights’ tournaments, but, all the same, it produced some free thinkers, such as Johannes Scotus Erigena, Berengarius, Abélard, and William of Occam; and it was from it that, in after time, proceeded John Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Bruno, and Campanella.

After having laid hands on the various branches of the knowledge possessed by the ancient Greeks, who had remained superior to the Latins, in the sciences even more than in letters and not less than in the arts, and after having enlarged its domain in all directions, the Arabs laid it open to the nations of Europe, all of whom they had outdistanced. Spain was naturally the first to receive and spread their gifts. In the tenth century, in the most profound darkness of the Middle Ages, that country “to which,” says Haller,

o “the humanities fled together,” was the only one which accepted and welcomed those solid studies, which were everywhere else repelled and destroyed, even in Constantinople, since the time of Leo the Isaurian (717). Indeed, as early as the tenth century, when the Muzarab, John of Seville, translated the Holy Scriptures into Arabic, and when another Muzarab, Alvaro of Cordova, reproached his compatriots with forgetting their language and their law (legem suam nesciunt christiani et linguam propriam non advertunt Latini), in order to train themselves in the Arab doctrine (Arabico eloquio sublimati), Spain counted several illustrious scholars, Ayton, bishop of Vich, a Lupit of Barcelona, and a Joseph, who instructed Adalbero, archbishop of Rheims, all versed in mathematics and astronomy.

MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE

To Spain then came the small number of foreigners who were tormented by the desire to know. Gerbert (born in Auvergne about 930, elected pope in 999, under the name of Silvester II, died in 1003), so celebrated for his adventures, his learning, and his labours, after going through all the schools of France, Italy, and Germany without being able to satisfy the passion for instruction which possessed him, came finally to Spain to seek that physical and mathematical knowledge which raised such admiration in France, Germany, and Italy, whither he returned to spread them, that the prodigies of his learning could only be explained by the accusation of having delivered himself over to the devil.

Gerbert is unanimously credited with having been the first to introduce the use of Arabic figures into these countries, and with having added some elementary notions of algebra to the calculations of arithmetic. He also passes as the first constructor of clocks. Whether, as most of his biographers affirm, Gerbert pursued his studies as far as the homes of the Arabs in Cordova and Seville, or whether he only made a long sojourn in Catalonia and associated with the scholars of that country, as is witnessed to by his collection of Epistles, addressed in great part to Catalans like Borrell, count of Barcelona, Ayton, Joseph, and Lupit, it is none the less certain that Gerbert learned all he knew from the Arabs, and that that knowledge, so prodigious as to appear supernatural, was, as William of Malmesbury says, “stolen from the Saracens.”

His example and his success roused other foreigners to come and glean, where he had made so ample a harvest. The German Hermannus-Contractus (who died in 1054), author of the book, De Compositione Astrolabii; the English Adelard, who translated the first Arabic Euclid into Latin (about 1130); the Italian Campano of Novara, who published a Theory of the Planets; Daniel Morley; Otto of Freising; with Hermann the German; Plato of Tivoli; Gerard of Cremona, who translated at Toledo itself, Alhazen; Avicenna, Rhazes, Albucasis, and even Ptolemy’s Almagest, not from the Greek, but from the Arabic—that Gerard of Cremona of whom it was said: “At Toledo he lived, Toledo he raised to the stars”—all went in succession to gather in Spain the elements of mathematics, physics, and astronomy, which they carried thence to their compatriots.

Montucla[k] not only says that “the Arabs were long the sole depositaries of learning, and that it is to their commerce that we owe the first rays of light which came to chase away the darkness of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries”; he adds that “during this period, all who obtained the greatest reputation in mathematics had been to acquire their knowledge amongst the Arabs.” It is asserted that all the authors who wrote on the exact sciences before the fifteenth century did nothing but copy the Arabs, or, at the most, enlarge upon their lessons. Such were the Italian Leonardo da Pisa, the Polish Vitellio, the Spaniard Raymond Lully, the English Roger Bacon, and finally the French Arnauld de Villeneuve, who is credited with having discovered spirits of wine, oil of turpentine, and other chemical preparations.

During the same period, the whole of European geography was limited to the Seven Climates of Edrisi, and, in the seventeenth century, when correcting by Abu Ishak Ibrahim ben Yahya certain geographical errors, Abraham Hinckelmann was able to say: “The greatest assistance and illumination for posterity we owe to Arabism.” As to the famous Astronomical Tables of Alfonso X, they, like his book on Armillaries or celebrated spheres, only sum up the discoveries of the Arabs previous to the thirteenth century. It was from their works that all his learning was drawn by that celebrated monarch, who received the surname of the Wise (or learned), and who did indeed effect some advancement in science, between the system of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus. The Alphonsine Tables are borrowed from the various Ziji or tables of the Arab astronomers, and reproduce their form and substance.

When Louis XIV had a degree of the meridian measured geometrically, in order to determine the size of the earth, he doubtless did not know that five centuries before, the caliph Al-Mamun had ordered the same operation to be performed by his astronomers at Baghdad. In the Middle Ages, according to Bailly,[l] “the first step taken towards the revival of learning was the translation of Alfergan’s Elements of Astronomy.” That famous Spanish rabbi, Aben-hezra (or Esdra), who was surnamed the Great, the Wise, the Admirable, on account of his book on The Sphere, was born at Toledo, in 1119, and had been a disciple of the Arabs in astronomy. He spread his masters’ lessons throughout Europe. It was from Albategnius, more than from Ptolemy, that Sacrobosco (John of Holywood) had drawn the materials for his book De Sphera Mundi; it was in Albategnius, too, that the commentator on that great astronomer, Regiomontanus (Johann Müller, of Königsberg, Regius Mons), had found the first notion of tangents. It was from Alhazen’s Twilight that the illustrious Kepler took his ideas of atmospheric refraction; and it may be that Newton himself owes to the Arabs, rather than to the apple in his orchard at Woolsthorpe, the first apperception of the system of the universe; for Muhammed ben Musa (quoted in the Bibliot. arab. Philosophorum) seems, when writing his books on The Movement of the Celestial Bodies and on The Force of Attraction, to have had an inkling of the great law of general harmony.

MEDICINE

The influence of the Arabs on all the natural sciences, chemical or medical, is not less incontestable than their influence on the mathematical sciences. Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully were as much their pupils in the attempted science of alchemy, the “grand art,” as in the actual science of numerical calculations. It was by them also that Albertus Magnus (Albrecht Grotus or Gross, born in Swabia in 1193), that universal scholar, the eminent master of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom, like Gerbert, men called “the magician,” was initiated into all the learning of the Aristotelian school. And even after the year 1600, Fabricius Acquapendente could say, “Celsus amongst the Latins, Paulus Ægineta amongst the Greeks, and Albucasis amongst the Arabs, form a triumvirate to whom I confess that I am under the greatest obligations.”

Even as the astronomer Albategnius in the domain of heaven, or the geographer Edrisi in that of the earth, so Avicenna and Averrhoës reigned supreme over medicine, during six hundred years, down to the sixteenth century. At Montpellier and Louvain, commentaries on Avicenna were still being made in the last century. Both Boerhaave and Haller concede this long predominance to Arab medicine, and Brucker could say with perfect truth: “Until the renascence of literature, not only among the Arabs, but also indeed among the Christians, Avicenna rules all but alone.” When, in the very beginning of the thirteenth century, the Portuguese doctor Pedro Juan, who was archbishop of Braga and then pope under the title of John XXI, wrote his Treasury of the Poor, or Remedies for all Maladies, his Treatise on Hygiene, and his Treatise on the Formation of Man, he was copying the Arabs.

It was from Spain then that all the doctors of Europe came, and that, through them, the taste for science and letters was extended. “The Spanish doctors,” says Haller, “while their people were gradually recovering the country, communicated the love of letters to the Italians.” It was to Spain, at all events, that the Jews, then so renowned for their healing art, went to study, to afterwards scatter, like young doctors leaving the university, through the various countries of Europe. Kings and popes took their doctors from the Jews. To cite only a few famous instances, we call attention to the fact that the physician of Alfonso the Fighter, king of Aragon, Pedro Alfonso, author of some Latin tales, part of which were translated in Francesco Sansovino’s Cento Novelle Antiche, was a converted Jew; and Paul Ricius, physician to the emperor Maximilian I, was a Jew who remained a Jew. The latter had studied in Spain, where he translated the at-Takrif of Albucasis, the book which Haller calls the “common fountain” of modern medicine. We have seen that the Arabs practised a multitude of surgical operations, unknown to the ancients, and in like manner enriched pharmacy by a multitude of new medicaments.

But one fact sums up in itself all the proofs of the influence which the Arabs exerted on the medical art, and that is that the famous school of Salerno, whose laws were once followed throughout Europe, owes its origin to the Arabs. When (about 1000) the Norman, Robert Guiscard, took Salerno from the people called Saracens, who had occupied the south of Italy for more than two centuries, he found a school of medicine established there by these infidels. He had the wisdom to preserve it, enrich it, and to give it Constantine Africanus as chief. This man was a Moor from Carthage, whom travels and adventures flung, like Edrisi, into the power of the Normans of Sicily; who took the cowl at the monastery of Monte Cassino under the celebrated abbot Desiderius, afterwards Pope Victor III; and, in his retreat, translated into Latin all his compatriots’ works on the healing art. He thus ended by founding the school of Salerno, for it was from his works that all the aphorisms of the Medicina Salertina were taken. As the University of Montpellier had for founders (about 1200) the Aragonese, to whom that town, which was then almost modern and had not yet inherited the bishopric of Maguelonne, at that time belonged, it may be asserted, according to the generally received tradition, that its faculty of medicine was founded at least indirectly by the Arabs, and that it was in that sense grounded on their teaching—the sole adopted, the sole reigning one, the most enlightened and scientific of the age.

ARCHITECTURE

As to the influence of Arabs on architecture, the only one of the fine arts which religion permitted Moslems to cultivate, it seems that it cannot be set in doubt that it appears with as much certainty as distinction. The question has often been asked: Whence came it that the architecture of the close of the Middle Ages, that which passed from the round to the pointed arch, and from basilicas to cathedrals, was called Gothic? As this name, if it implied a northern origin, would be in flagrant contradiction with the facts, the question has remained unanswered.

But we must remind ourselves that the name Gothic has not been given only to the architecture which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw prevailing. The handwriting and the missal, which in the year 1091 were replaced in Spain by the Latin (then called French) characters, and by the Roman ritual, were also called Gothic. They had received and preserved this name of Gothic because their use dated from the time when Spain was the domain of the Goths. Might it not also be because the first lessons in the new architecture came to Europe through Spain, that this architecture, e.g., like the Spanish handwriting and liturgy, was named Gothic?

This perfectly simple and natural explanation is, moreover, in complete accordance with history. The conjectures of men versed in the matter are agreed on this point—that modern architecture had its birth at Byzantium, that second Rome where the arts took refuge when they were driven out of Italy. The Byzantine architects, who were the first to mingle the capricious and flowery style of the East with the sober and regular style of ancient Greece, had two sorts of pupils—the Arabs and the Germanic peoples. The former first founded the architecture called Moorish or Saracen; and afterwards the latter, that which later on was called Gothic. Starting from the same point the two architectures remain analogous, almost similar, during two centuries, both preserving, with the differences imposed by the climate, the traditions of their common origin. Thus the mosque of Cordova, raised by a prince of Syria, and the old basilicas of Germany are equally sprung from the Byzantine style. Then they separate, to take each a style of its own. The Moslem architecture preserves the system of surbased naves, and takes as its special characteristic the horseshoe arch, that is to say, one narrowing at its base, and having the form of an inverted crescent.

Christian architecture adopts the system of high, pointed naves, and its distinctive characteristic becomes the pointed arch, substituted for the pagan round arch. But it must be noticed that the Arabs had employed the pointed arch before the Christians; that, in Spain especially, a multitude of monuments prove their use of this form which was unknown to antiquity; and that it is doubtless because the pointed arch, now become the striking and characteristic feature of Christian architecture, had passed from Spain into Europe, that the whole system was named Gothic. Finally, these two architectures derived from Byzantium, the Arab and the Germanic, becoming ever more and more assimilated, end by merging, at the close of eight centuries, into the style called Renaissance. No one denies, no one disputes, the striking resemblance which exists between the Arab monuments and those of Europe in the Middle Ages. This resemblance is not only found in the great edifices of the capitals, for the construction of which Saracen architects were sometimes called in, as happened in the case of Notre Dame de Paris itself. It can be traced even in the humblest buildings of the little towns.

“Thus,” says Viardot,[m] “I have found the multilobar arch of the Mezquita at Cordova in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, and the delicate colonnette of the Alhambra in the church of Notre Dame at Dijon. This resemblance was, then, not merely casual and fortuitous; it was general and permanent. Nothing further is needed to prove the thesis. If Christian and Arab art resembled each other, and if one preceded the other, it is evident that of the two one was imitated and the other the imitator. Was it the Arab art which imitated the Christian art? No; for the priority of its works is manifest and incontestable; for Europe, in the Middle Ages, received all its knowledge from the Arabs, and must also have received from them the only art whose cultivation the law of religion permitted.”

MUSIC

The impossibility which exists, in spite of the efforts of all modern scholars, of our having an acquaintance, even an imperfect and approximate one, with the music of the Greeks, must teach and give a conception of the great difficulty of procuring proofs of the state of this art, or discovering and understanding monuments of it, once the traditions are interrupted. It is a dead language in which none can now read. In the preceding section we have had to limit ourselves to demonstrating that the Arabs cultivated music as a very important and very advanced art. In the archives of the chapter of Toledo, there exists a precious monument of the influence which they exercised on modern music. This is a manuscript, annotated in the hand of Alfonso the Wise himself, and including the canticles (cantigas) composed by that prince, with the music to which they were sung. In it we find not only the six notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, invented, towards 1030, by the monk Guido of Arezzo, but also the seventh note, the five lines, and the keys, whose discovery was subsequent, and even the upward and downward tails of the notes, the use of which was not introduced into the musical writing of the rest of Europe until much later. Up till then music had served only for the psalmodies of the church, for the plain chant of hymns and antiphons. This manuscript, copied and cited in the Paleographia Castellana is, according to all appearance, the most ancient monument of the regular application of music to ordinary and profane poetry.

As Alfonso X owes his prodigious learning chiefly to the study of the Arabs, it would be scarcely possible to doubt that, for this book as for all his works, he borrowed from them a science already formed and even then committed to writing by Al-Farabi, Abul-Faraj, etc., and which Alfonso might very well have understood with the help of the Muzarabs of Seville. This supposition, which would attribute to the Arabs a notable share in the creation of modern music, has all the more the appearance of truth since the first instruments adopted by the Spaniards, the French, and the other nations of Europe were named moresques in all languages. To this day the chirimia and dulzaina of the Moors, so often mentioned by Cervantes and his contemporaries, are still used in the country of Valencia. As to the modern stringed instruments, they all had as model the lute (al-aoud, whence laud in Spanish) of the Arabs, who have also given Spain the kitara (guitarra), since become the national instrument of the people whose masters they were in all things.

Several theorists, J. J. Rousseau amongst others, have proposed to write music in figures, assuredly without suspecting that the Arabs had already practised that mode of notation. Kiesewetter[n] calls attention to the fact that, the Arab scale having seventeen intervals, the Arabs were able to write and actually did write music with their figures, employing the numbers one to eighteen for the first octave, one to thirty-five for two octaves, and so on. May it not be from this ancient use of the Arab figures in musical writing that the employment of the same figures for the figured bass, in which a simple number denotes a chord, came into vogue? It is possible and very probable.

The old Spanish music, that which is preserved in Andalusia under the name of cañas, rondeñas, playeras, etc., differing greatly from the boleros of comic operas and eluding the modern notation, is certainly of Arab origin. Who are they who have preserved it in the tradition of this country? An eastern race, a nomadic race, that of those Bohemians who, coming from Egypt about the fourteenth century, and perhaps before that from India, spread themselves throughout Europe and were called gitanos in Spain, zingari in Italy, gipsies in England, zigeuner in Germany, and tzigani in Russia, whilst naming themselves pharaons.

These nomads, with their immutable customs, who are still to-day not only in Spain but in Russia the same in physique and moral character as Cervantes has depicted them, have carried and retained everywhere the ancient songs of their problematic country. As the musicians of the people, formed into troupes of singers and dancers, they have everywhere spread the form and sentiment of their antique melodies. “It was through them,” concludes Viardot, “that, in Russia as in Spain, popular music took or kept the oriental character; it was from them that in Moscow, at the foot of the towers of the Kremlin, I listened to the same songs as in the gardens of the Alhambra of Granada. In both places I had heard from their lips a living echo of the Arab music.”[m]

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