It is in the most subtle expressions that the quarrel between the two philosophies appears. Continually Islam presses upon us without our knowing it. It made the Albigenses, it is raising here and there throughout European literature at this moment notes of determinism, just as that other influence from the Further East is raising notes of cruelty or of despair.
|The Gothic|
There is one point in which the contact between these master-enemies and ourselves is best apparent. They gave us the Gothic, and yet under our hands the Gothic became the most essentially European of all European things. Consider these two tiers of one Arabian building founded in Africa, while yet the vigour of that civilisation was strong. True, the work is not in stone but in plaster, for to work stone they needed an older civilisation than their own. But see how it is the origin of, or rather identical with, our ogive. By what is it that we recognise these intersecting segments (which are of the perfect 60° like our own) to be something foreign? And how is it that we know that no Christian could have built these things? Venice has windows like these: by just so much she is not of the West, and by just that innoculation perhaps she perished. The ecstasy of height, the self-development of form into further form, the grotesque, the sublime and the enthusiastic—all these things the Arab arch lacks as utterly as did the Arab spirit; yet the form is theirs and we obtained it from them. In this similarity and in these differences are contained and presented visibly the whole story of our contact with them and of our antagonism.
In the presence of the doom or message which the Arabians communicated to our race in Africa, one is compelled to something of the awe with which one would regard a tomb from which great miracles proceeded, or a dead hero who, though dead, might not be disturbed. The thing we have to combat, or which we refrain and dread from combating, is not tangible, and is the more difficult to remove. It has sunk into the Atlas and into the desert, it has filled the mind of every man from the Soudan which it controls up northwards to Atlas and throughout this land.
|The Touaregs|
Roaming in the Sahara are bands of men famous for their courage and their isolation. They are called the Touaregs. They are of the same race and the same language as those original Berbers who yet maintain themselves apart in the heights of Aurès or of the Djurdjura. They are the enemies of all outside their tribes, especially of the Arab merchants, upon whose caravans they live by pillage. Yet even these Islam has thoroughly possessed and would seem to have conquered for ever. Their language has escaped; their tiny literature (for they have letters of their own, and their alphabet is indigenous) has survived every external influence, but even there the God of the Mohammedans has appeared.
One taken captive some years since wrote back from Europe to his tribe in his own stiff characters a very charming letter in which he ended by recommending himself to the young women of his home, for he himself was a fighter, courteous, and in his thirtieth year. But when he had written “Salute the Little Queens from me,” he was careful to add an invocation to Allah. And if in their long forays it is necessary to bury hastily some companion who has fallen in the retreat, his shallow grave in the sand is carefully designed according to the custom of religion. They leave him upon his right side in an attitude which they hold as sacred, his face turned to the east and towards Mecca. In this posture he awaits the Great Day.
|The Lack of an Opposing Faith|