|The Arabic Influence|
If this pre-eminence of Rome in the process of her conversion is the lesson of all travel it is especially the lesson of Africa; and nowhere is that lesson taught more clear than in Guelma. Here also you may perceive how it was that the particular cause which ruined the spirit of the Roman town also saved its stones, and you may feel, like an atmosphere, the lightness, the permeation, as it were, without pressure:—the perpetual fluid influence which overflowed the province upon the arrival of the Arabs. So that the bone of Rome remain, caught in a drift of ideas which, like fine desert sand, could preserve them for ever.
For the Arab did in Calama what he did throughout Barbary: he cast a spell. He did not destroy with savagery, he rather neglected all that he could afford to neglect. Here also he cut down timber, but he did not replant. Here also he let the water-pipes of the Romans run dry. Here also the Arab, who apparently achieved nothing material, imposed a command more powerful than the compulsion of any government or the fear of any conqueror: he sowed broadcast his religion and his language; his harvest grew at once; first it hid and at last it stifled the religion and the language he had found. The speech, and the faith which renders that speech sacred, transformed the soul of Barbary: they oppose between them a barrier to the reconquest more formidable by far than were the steppes and the nomads to the first advance of Rome. Of this impalpable veil which is spread between the native population and the new settlers the traveller is more readily aware in the little cities of the hills than in the larger towns of the coast. The external change of the last generation is apparent: the houses about him are European houses; the roads might be roads in France or Northern Italy. The general aspect of Guelma confirms that impression of modernity, nor is there much save the low loop-holed walls which surround the town, to remind one of Africa; but from the midst of its roofs rises the evidence of that religion which still holds and will continue to hold all its people. The only building upon which the efforts of an indolent creed have fastened is the mosque, and the minaret stands alone, conspicuous and central over all the European attempt, and mocks us.
Far off, where the walls and the barracks are confused into a general band of white, and no outline is salient enough to distinguish the modern from the ancient work of the place, this wholly Mohammedan shaft of stone marks the place for Mohammedan. It is an enduring challenge.
There is a triumph of influence which all of us have known and against which many of us have struggled. It is certainly not a force which one can resist, still less is it effected by (though it often accompanies) the success of armies. It is the pressure and at last the conquest of ideas when they have this three-fold power: first, that they are novel and attack those parts of the mind still sensitive; secondly, that they are expounded with conviction (conviction necessary to the conveyance of doctrine); and, thirdly, that they form a system and are final. Such was the triumph of the Arab.
Our jaded day, which must for ever be taking some drug or tickling itself with unaccustomed emotion, has pretended to discover in Islam, as it has pretended to discover in twenty other alien things, the plan of happiness; and a stupid northern admiration for whatever has excited the wonder or the curiosity of the traveller has made Mohammedism, as it has made Buddhism and God knows what other inferiorities or aberrations of human philosophy, the talk of drawing-rooms and the satisfaction of lethargic men. It is not in this spirit that a worthy tribute can be paid to the enormous invasion of the seventh century.
|The Arabic Invasion|
That invasion as a whole has failed. Christendom, for ever criticised, (for it is in its own nature to criticise itself,) has emerged; but if one would comprehend how sharp was the issue, one should read again all that was written between Charlemagne and the death of St. Louis. In the Song of Roland, in the “Gesta Francorum,” in Joinville, this new attack of Asia is present—formidable, and greater than ourselves; something which we hardly dared to conquer, which we thought we could not conquer, which the greatest of us thought he had failed in conquering. Islam was far more learned than we were, it was better equipped in arms and nevertheless more civic and more tolerant. When the last efforts of the crusades dragged back to Europe an evil memory of defeat, there was perhaps no doubt in those who despaired, still less in those who secretly delighted that such fantasies were ended—there was no doubt, I say, in their minds that the full re-establishment of our civilisation was impossible, and that the two rivals were destined to stand for ever one against the other: the invader checked and the invaded prudent; for, throughout the struggle we had always looked upon our rivals at least as equals and usually as superiors.
|Its Continued Influence|