Napoleon was not mistaken; civil wars had indeed exalted the heroic qualities of the Arabs, but they had made all organisation and progress impossible. Had it not been for the advent of Mohammad, these intrepid soldiers would have remained eternally in their deserts, solely absorbed by the obsession of hereditary feuds.
When Islam, abolishing pride of caste, birth, or race, made all Believers really brothers and endowed them with religious and poetical souls, based on equality, there was no exploit that these fiery-minded men, their hearts untamable, were incapable of performing. These treasures of combative energy, accumulated during centuries of civil war, were not the only means by which they overthrew so many peoples, all different and superior to them in culture at that epoch. The Arabs, likewise, had stored dream-treasures in their deserts, and these visions of an unpolished, though young people were about to be imposed on those peoples who, although educated, were old and worn-out.
We advise all those who may have doubts about the genius of the Arabs to look through a collection of photographs showing the edifices erected in every part of the countries they held in subjection. There is nothing more striking than the unity of type distinguishing these monuments from all other monuments in the world; and these buildings, with their remarkable family likeness, were set up in India, Turkestan, Persia, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, Spain, etc., all countries essentially different and so peculiar, by reason of their characteristic genius, that the genius of Greece or Rome was never able to be grafted successfully.
The Arabs borrowed largely from those they conquered, often utilising their talent and even their muscles in order to build palaces and mosques; but Arabic dreams were thus always realised.
The exceptional originality of the Arab style resided in the fact that it was always imperiously guided by an art that was born at the same time as Islam. This art had no predecessors and offers us, as it were, the materialness of the Arabs' ideal. It is the art of calligraphic decoration, applied to the glorification of the word of Allah, otherwise the verses of the Qur'an.
Even reduced to its own resources, this art of Arabic calligraphy is one of the most marvellous forms of decorative skill that has ever sprung from human imagination. It is perhaps the only science of ornament of which it may be said without exaggeration that it possesses a soul, for like the voice, it expresses thought. Owing nothing even to the most cultured parts of the outer world, its independence resembles that of music and seems like the stenography of the innermost beatings of the heart.
Look at the letters which spring swiftly and horizontally from right to left as if acting under the impulse of inward life. Then they whirl on their own axis in discreet or impassioned curves, and are next erect, coming to a sudden halt, fixed in perpendicular pride.... They soon start off again in their frenzied gallop, unrolling their flourishes, bestriding each other in delicious fantasy and causing the imagination to soar in wild dreams.
To follow the impulses of the reed-pen having traced these letters; and in order to enjoy the pure eminence of their form or the intense emotion of their curve, one need not be a past master of Arabic, or a subtile graphologist; any artistic mind can penetrate without any effort the secrets of their soul.
After having expressed the ideal of his nation with such perfection, the Arab calligrapher bent beneath his yoke—almost religious—everything that was destined to support or enframe it: architecture and other systems of embellishment, forcing them to yield to the sway of his shaping skill. Under this yoke, the heavy, hemispherical dome of Byzantium was improved by adopting the pure outline of the Saracen helmet. The curves of the commonplace arcade became those of the graceful ogive, or of the proud, far-extending arch. The vulgar towers were metamorphosed into elegant minarets, leaping towards the peaks of ecstasy.