The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

It is now current doctrine that "for nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilised and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana.... Art, literature, and science prospered as they prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science; women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study; and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history[?], philosophy and jurisprudence[?] were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors."

See Stanley Lane-Poole, The Moors in Spain, pref. It could be wished that Mr. Lane-Poole had given English readers, as he so well could, a study of Saracen civilisation, instead of a "Story of the Nation" on the old lines. For corroboration of the passage see Dozy, Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, 1861, iii, 109, 110; Prescott, History of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, pp. 186-88, 192, 195-99; Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe, ed. 1875, ii, 30-53; Sismondi, Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe, Eng. tr. i, 50-54, 64-68, 76-84, 89. Cp. Seignobos, Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age, 3e éd. pp. 48-62; Gebhart, Origines de la Renaissance en Italie, 1879, pp. 185-89; Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. pp. 217, 286; Nöldeke, as cited, p. 105; Bouterwek, as cited, i, 3; Baden-Powell, History of Natural Philosophy, 1834, pp. 94-104; U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. 1900, vol. i, ch. 16.

All this being so, the course of deciding that the Arabs retrogressed because "they" were impatient and discontinuous is on a level with the thesis that nature has a horror of a vacuum. The Arab civilisation was arrested and anchylosed by forces which in other civilisations operated in exactly the same modes. The first great trouble was the element of perpetual domestic strife, which was uncured by the monarchic system, since every succession was liable to dispute. Under such conditions just government could not flourish; and Moslem taxation always tended to be suicidally unscrupulous.[387] Disputes of succession, indeed, wrought hardly more strife among the Saracens than has taken place among Greeks and Romans, and Christians of all nations, down to modern times; even the ecclesiastical and feudal doctrine of legitimacy, developed by the Latin and Greek Churches, having failed to prevent dynastic wars in Christendom. But the Saracens, neighboured everywhere by Christians who bore them a twofold hostility, had peculiar need of union, and ran special risks from dissension; and in Spain their disunion was their ruin. At the same time their civilisation was strangled intellectually by a force which, though actually in operation in Christendom also, was there sufficiently countered by a saving condition which the Saracens finally lacked. The force of constriction was the cult of the Sacred Book; the counteracting force in Christendom was diversity and friction of governments and cultures—a condition which passed out of the Saracen equation.

How fatally restrictive the cult of the completed Sacred Book can be is obvious in the history of Byzantium. It was in terms of the claims of the Christian creed that the Eastern Emperors proscribed pagan philosophy and science, reducing the life of the whole Eastern world as far as possible to one rigid and unreasoned code. That the mental life of Italy and France was relatively progressive even in the Middle Ages was substantially due—(1) to Saracen stimulus, and (2) to the friction and ferment set up by the diversity of life in the Italian republics, and the Italian and French and German universities. Byzantium was in comparison a China or an Egypt. The saving elements of political diversity, culture competition, and culture contact have in later Europe completed the frustration of the tendency of church, creed, and Bible to destroy alike science and philosophy. In Islam, on the other hand, the arresting force finally triumphed over the progressive because of the social and political conditions. (1) The political field, though stormy, finally lacked diversity in terms of the universality of the monarchic principle, which was imposed by the military basis and bound up with the creed: uniformity of ideal was thus furthered. (2) There was practically no fresh culture contact possible after the assimilation of the remains of Greek science and the stimulus of Jewish philosophy; for medieval Christendom had no culture to give; and the more thoroughly the Papacy and the Christian monarchy in Spain were organised, the more hostile they grew to the Moors. (3) The economic stimulus among the latter tended to be restricted more and more to the religious class, till that class was able to suppress all independent mental activity.

The last is the salient circumstance. In any society, the special cultivation of serious literature and the arts and sciences depends on one or more of three conditions—(a) the existence of a cultured class living on unearned incomes, as in ancient Athens, middle Rome, and modern England and France; (b) public expenditure on art and culture, as in ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy and modern France, and in the German university system par excellence; or (c) the personal concern of princes and other patrons to encourage ability. In the nature of the case it was mainly on this last and most precarious stimulus that Saracen culture depended. Taking it at its zenith, under such rulers as Haroun Alraschid and El-Mamoun at Bagdad, and Abderrahmān III and Hakam II of Cordova, we find its advance always more or less dependent on the bounty of the caliph; and even if, like Abderrahmān and his son Hakam, he founded all manner of public and free schools, it depended on the bias of his successors rather than on public opinion or municipal custom whether the movement should continue. Abderrahmān's achievement, seen even through Christian eyes, was so manifold as to constitute him one of the great rulers of all history; but the task of making Moorish civilisation permanent was one which no series of such statesmen could have compassed. The natural course of progress would have been through stable monarchy to constitutionalism. But Christian barbarism, with its perpetual assault, kept the Saracens forever at the stage of active militarism, which is the negation of constitutionalism; and their very refinement was a political danger, no less than their dynastic strifes.

On the other hand, the continuous stress of militarism was in ordinary course much more favourable to fanaticism than to free thought; and to fanaticism the Koran, like the Bible, was and is a perpetual stimulant. It was as a militant faith that Islam maintained itself; and in such a civilisation the Sacred Book, which claimed to be the highest of all lore, and was all the while so easy a one, giving to ignorance and conceit the consciousness of supreme knowledge without any mental discipline whatever, was sure of abundant devotees.[388] In an uninstructed community—and of course the mass of the Saracen population was uninstructed[389]—the cult of the Sacred Book needs no special endowment; it can always be depended on to secure revenues for itself, even as may the medicine-man in an African tribe. To this day the propagation of the Koran is subscribed for in Turkey as the Bible Society is subscribed to among ourselves, ignorance earning thus the felicity of prescribing for human welfare in the mass, and at the same time propitiating Omnipotence, at the lowest possible outlay of study and reflection. Enthusiasms which can thus flourish in the twentieth century were of course abundant in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh;[390] and thus we find that when a caliph was suspected by the pietists of caring too little for their lore, he ran the risk of being rebelled against with a speed and zeal in the ratio of their conviction of divine knowledge. Islam, unlike the State churches of Greece, Rome, and England, has democratic rootage in the practice of setting ordinary laymen to recite the prayers and preach the sermons in the mosques: it, in fact, resembles Methodism more than any of the established Christian churches in respect of its blending of clerisy and laity. Such a system, when thoroughly fanaticised, has enormous powers of turbulence; and in Moorish Spain we find them early exercised. Abderrahmān I, whose policy of tolerance towards Jews and Christians transcended all previous Christian practice, and thus won for his realm a great stimulus in the way of variety of culture-elements and of industry, had kept the religious class in due control; but his well-meaning son Hishām was priest-ridden to the last degree; and when his successor Hakam showed an indisposition to patronise pietists to the same extent they raised revolt after revolt (806-815), all put down by massacre.

Mr. Lane-Poole notes (p. 73) the interesting fact that the theologers were largely of Spanish stock, the natives having in general embraced Islam. Thus the fanaticism of the Berbers was reinforced by that of the older population, which, as Buckle showed, was made abnormally devout, not by inheritance of character, but by the constant effect of terrorising environment, in the form of earthquakes.

The elements of the situation remained fundamentally unchanged; and when the Moorish military power began to feel more and more the pressure of the strengthening Christian foe, it lay in the nature of the case that the fanatical species should predominate. The rationalistic and indifferent types would figure as the enemies of their race, very much as such types would have done in Covenanting Scotland. At length, in the eleventh century, the weakened Moorish princes had to call in the aid of the fanatical Almoravides from Barbary; and these, with the full support of the priesthood and the pious, established themselves at the head of affairs, reducing everything as far as possible to the standards of the eighth century.[391] And when the new barbarism in time grew corrupt, as that of the Goths and Vandals had done in earlier ages, the "Unitarian" Almohades in turn (twelfth century) overthrew the Almoravides in Spain as they had already done in Africa, only to be themselves overthrown a hundred years later by the Christians. Thereafter the curtailed Moorish power, pent up in Southern Spain, reverted to the spirit of fanaticism which national failure generates in religious minds; and from the thirteenth century to the final overthrow at the end of the fifteenth the intellectual life of Saracen Spain was but a long stagnation.

A civilisation driven back on superstition and fanaticism[392] thus gave way to a revived barbarism, which itself, after a few centuries of power, was arrested in its progress by the same order of forces, and has ever since remained in the rear of European development. A remarkable exception, indeed, is to be noted in the case of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who in the narrow world of Tunis attained to a grasp of the science of history such as no Christian historian up to his time had remotely approached.[393] Such an intellectual phenomenon sufficiently disposes of the current formulas about the innate incapacities of "the Semitic mind." But whether it were that he dared not say what he thought of the fatal influence of the Sacred Book, or that on that side he was really, as he is ostensibly, quite uncritical, Khaldun fails, in his telling survey of Arab decadence, to set forth the decisive condition of intellectual arrest; and his luminous impeachment of the civilisation of his race failed to enlighten it.

In Persia the same forces wrought closely similar results. The Greek stimulus, after working wonders in science and rational thought, failed to sustain a society that could not politically evolve beyond despotism; and economic evil and intellectual decay together undermined the empire of the Caliphs,[394] till the Turks could overrun it as the Christians did Moorish Spain; they themselves, however, adding no new culture developments, because under them no new culture contacts were possible.