He avoids the too obvious temptations of indiscriminate praise (to which he would naturally be led by the antagonism between Islam and Catholicism), and he gives a lucid, well-proportioned account of those famous ten years, their immediate preparation and their astonishing sequel.
He illustrates the vast sudden sweep of Islam in the best possible fashion by two accurate, plain and good sketch maps (on successive pages, 383 and 384), and, what is perhaps best of all, he fully appreciates and distinctly states the capital point that the success of Islam in the East was in the nature of a social revolution rather than of a conquest. There he is perfectly right, and the point is of great value to the proper appreciation of all our history.
Very few historians have—in the past—seized the fact that the appeal of Islam was to the slave and small-holder caught in the net of Roman Law and enfranchised by the new subversive movement.
Mr. Wells sees that clearly and it is a good example of historical judgment.
Moreover, in the whole of these thirteen pages he admits only two sneers at Catholic doctrine; one in which he remarks that the plain man cannot make head or tail of it (on p. 379); the other a few lines further on, where he discovers a new and strange Catholic tenet to the effect that Priests and Kings have a place in heaven equal to the great saints, and superior to the common herd! (What fun it would be to put Mr. Wells through an elementary examination on that philosophy which the whole of our civilization once held, and which the more intelligent of us still hold!)
He emphasizes quite rightly and very strongly the strength of simplicity in the Arab enthusiasm, and the solvent effect of this upon the first societies which it approached.
But there is one bad unhistorical note running through the whole description which spoils it: he does not understand the greatness of his own people, of Europe: the European religion: the Græco-Roman culture, even in its material decline. He does understand that its complexity of social rank, of bureaucratic administration in the East, and of minute legal regulations everywhere (a complexity inseparable from the heights it had reached) subjected it to a heavy strain, and that the new enthusiasm out of the desert relaxed that strain; but he does not appreciate that the relaxation was also a general breakdown. Nor does he appreciate the strength and majesty, the toughness and dignity, of this age-long structure of European civilization now faced with so sudden and overwhelming an attack of “levellers.”
But there is a worse failure: he does not grasp the fact that Islam, being but a reaction against the highly developed Christian system of society, law, and religion, therefore proceeded from that system. Islam started more as a heresy than anything else, and was talked and felt about as a sort of heresy. It is a modern error, due to our long separation from it, which makes it look like a new religion. It is a pity Mr. Wells has got this fundamental point wrong; but for that essential misunderstanding of the situation and for his inability to keep his text quite clean from insults against the Catholic Church—usually dragged in by the hair—these pages might have had a permanent value and might have been reckoned among the best pieces of generalization of our time.
All the doctrines preached by Mohammed are discoverable in the great body of Catholic theology. Not one came from outside. The Fatherhood of God, the truth that God is Personal, that He is the Creator of all things; that He is supremely good; that the human soul is immortal; that it may attain eternal beatitude or sink to eternal wretchedness; that the souls of men are equal in the sight of God; and that a man should regard all other men as his brethren: such a complete “corpus” of doctrine Mohammed did not find among the Jews (for they were exclusive—Immortality was not an original tenet with them let alone the dual fate of man); he did not find it taught in Buddhism, which despairs and knows nothing of God, let alone of the Immortal individual soul.
Mohammedanism drew of necessity from our culture. There was nothing else for it to draw from. The Græco-Roman world overshadowed all its origins. It is the failure to appreciate the magnitude of his own ancestry, which thus makes Mr. Wells misunderstand the nature of the first amazing growth of Islam. Or, rather, he understands one-half of that magnitude, its burdensome complexity; but he does not understand the wealth of mind out of which alone such complexity could come. That is why he does not know that Islam submerged and degraded a higher thing. We have the ruins of column and capital to prove it; but I do not think that Mr. Wells would understand, say, Timgad. We have the Veni Creator Spiritus and the Vexilla Regis and all that comes between them; but I doubt whether Mr. Wells would understand what that great poetry is or the profound theology that nourished it. He exaggerated (though it is difficult to exaggerate) the material decline of the early Dark Ages. For instance, they kept up their roads. Islam could never make a road.