Nor was Europe less indebted for its song to the Arabs. In the love-songs of Omar and of Baghdad is to be found the original inspiration not less than the original diction and rhythm of the Provençal poetry, and rhyme derived from the Arabs has banished the native alliteration of Northern bards.
Not less do we owe to the same great race the discovery of many highways of commerce along which the Arabs still advance in the van of discovery. In Africa the Arab precedes the European explorer; in Asia a trade with China and with Spain had already been opened by the Khalifs in the ninth century. Thus, while our first navies were timidly coasting the shores of the German Ocean, caravans were already pushing from the great centres of Damascus and Mecca over the whole of the Eastern world. From Basrah they journeyed, in the days of the Prophet, to Merv, Herat, Balkh and Samarkand, to India and Ceylon, to China and Spain, to Constantinople and the Euxine, to the Oxus, and to the shores of Africa.
From the dawn of history, indeed, we find Semitic merchants journeying along the same lines of travel which they follow in our own times, and throughout the history of Asiatic commerce we find the Tartar and the Turk to be the great enemies of peaceful intercourse and trade.
The tolerance of the religion of Islam, as set forth in the Koran and as practised by the early Khalifs, was moreover far in advance of the narrow hatreds of the numerous sects of Eastern Christians. After the conquest of Jerusalem by Omar, we find the holy places left freely accessible to the annual influx of pilgrims, and the monks and priests of the Greek Church still allowed to hold possession of their churches and convents. It was the cruelty not of Arab Moslems, but of the fierce Kharezmian invaders who seized Jerusalem—a race of common origin with the Turk—which roused the fanatical zeal of Europe and gave cause for the first Crusade. The Arab of our own days does indeed hate the idolatrous worship of the Greek Church, but his sentiments in regard to the Protestantism of the English are of a tolerant if somewhat confused nature. The Syrian peasant believes that the English Queen, who rules so many millions of Moslems, is herself a believer in some kind of occidental Mohammedism.
Is such a people, we may ask, without any claim to our consideration? Those who have advocated the colonisation of Palestine by Englishmen, Germans, or Jews, seem to forget that a native Moslem population still exists, or to consider them only fit for the fate of the Red Indian and the Australian, as savages who must disappear before the advance of a superior race. Yet the Arabs were a civilised people when our ancestors were painted with wode, while the vitality of the creed of Islam has been in our own days evinced by the great Wahabi revival. In the faith of Islam the connecting bond may be found which may knit the scattered Arab and Syrian peoples into a nation, and it is not among the degraded sects of Eastern Christians of mixed nationality, but in the sturdy stock of the native Moslem race, that the future hope of Syria is to be found.
If, with the destruction of the Constantinople government, Syria should obtain freedom and native self-administration, a prosperous future must lie before her. A people progressive and apt to learn, naturally prone to commerce, tolerant in religion, and willing to avail themselves of the superior knowledge of other nations and of the assistance of friendly Western powers; a native Moslem government, ruling justly and in accordance with the law of the Koran; an aristocracy of ancient lineage, governing in patriarchal simplicity those districts where the names of their families are household words; a sturdy agricultural peasantry and an energetic trading class, would form a state whose alliance might be of the highest value to England and to Europe generally.
It is for such a future in the Holy Land that we should earnestly hope, and it is to such a future that we may perhaps look forward as not far distant. The religious and sentimental claims of France; the strategical requirements of England; the schemes of philanthropists and engineers, may be best reconciled and rendered practicable, not by annexation or colonisation, but by the building up of a strong friendly intelligent native state, and a wise and honest native government in the place of a decrepid tyranny.