MOORISH LITERATURE
In the year 1258 Bagdad was stormed and conquered by a Tartar general. It is true that most of the ravaging Tartars finally adopted the religion of the conquered, and so the region continued to obey in religious matters a Mohammedan caliph; but the rule of the Arabs, which had been long undermined by Persian influences, ended definitely with the fall of Bagdad. From the time of that disaster we must look to other lands for the continuation of a semi-Arabic literature.
Chief of the secondary developments from the Arabian stock was the remarkable and justly celebrated civilization of the Moors in Spain. The fame of medieval Arabic scholarship was carried to its climax by these first Mohammedan invaders of Europe. In the first wild onrush of Arabian conquest most of Spain was captured in the year A.D. 712, captured by an army having leaders of pure Arab blood, but with followers mainly of the semi-Arabic, or Moorish, people of North Africa. In the year 756 this Moorish kingdom in Spain broke completely from the Arabian Caliph and set up a priest-king of its own, a caliph whose capital was at Cordova in Spain, and whose connection with the older Arab world was only one of race and religion and not of empire. Our Hebraic volume has already spoken of the remarkable Hebrew writers and philosophers who flourished within the shelter of this Cordova caliphate. The Arabs themselves were not less able than their Hebrew servitors.
Here then, under the sunny skies of Southern Spain, far, far indeed from the first centers of Semitic civilization, was the last brilliant blossoming of distinctively Semitic thought. We have in our previous volumes traced the growth of Semitic thought and of the Semitic religious progress from their earliest home by the Euphrates river, where the Babylonian and the desert Arab warred in unrecognized brotherhood of race. Now we are ready to glance briefly at them in Spain, the last strong kingdom they were to possess, and the last literature of note which the Semites, except as scattered members of other communities, were to give the world.
Among the Arabic writers of Spain the most noted is the scientist and philosopher, Averroes (1126-1198). To Mohammedans he is the religious thinker, who strove to harmonize their faith with the advancing science of a later day, and who opposed his practical, rational spirit to the mysticism of Al Ghazali. To the European world he is the celebrated commentator on that greatest of philosophers, Aristotle. As the voice of Aristotle, Averroes thus became the leading teacher and philosopher of his day; he is the link which connects our present thought and science with the first splendor of independent inquiry under the Greeks. The name of Aristotle, the chief scientific teacher of all the world, is thus united forever with that of the great Arab teacher, Averroes.
Moorish literature was also a shrine of poetry and romance, though most of these lighter writings have only been preserved to us through the Spanish tongue. Our own Washington Irving found in these Moorish tales an inspiration for his genius, and has turned many of them into English. Others will be found included in our volume.
TURKISH LITERATURE
Of the Turkish literature we need speak but briefly. The Turks were not Semites, but a Tartar or East Asiatic stock who, after wandering into Western Asia, accepted the Mohammedan faith about A.D. 1288. At the very moment when the vast Mohammedan empire was crumbling to pieces, assailed by pagan Tartar hordes and crusading Christian armies from without, and withering from spiritual decadence within, the Turks took up the waning faith, and with the energy of new and younger converts carried it onward to the military conquests which built up the Turkish Empire.
This new empire soon included geographically most of the older Arab Empire; but the Turks brought to their new faith only the dubious glory of victory in war. They added little, either to its thought or to its literature. They were, in fact, a nation still semi-barbaric, strong in the natural virtues of faith and honesty and a rude kindliness, but wholly lacking in the subtlety and intellectual keenness which could have advanced Mohammedan thought.
Hence we shall find in their literature, at first, only childish tales, echoes of the childhood of the world, magic stories close akin to those of our own fairyland. Then comes a native poetry, not rising to remarkable heights in any one great poet, but full of a warm human love of romance and justice. Later we come to more thoughtful and elaborate writings, but these incline to deal with the practical world rather than with that of religion and speculative thought. So that we close our Turkish section with what is perhaps the most valuable piece of early Turkish literature, a work of travel, the celebrated autobiography of Sidi Ali Reis.