Part 18 (1/2)

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 superst.i.tion 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.

Of the Moslem civilisation as a whole, it must be said that on the material side, in Spain and the East, it was such a success as had not been attained under the Romans previously (though it was exceeded in Egypt by the Lagids), and has not been reached in Christian Spain since the fall of Boabdil. Economically, the Moorish regimen was sound and stable in comparison with that of imperial Spain, which, like Rome, merely set up a fact.i.tious civilisation on the basis of imported bullion and provincial tribute, and decayed industrially while nominally growing in empire and power. When the history of Spain from the seventeenth century onward is compared with that of the Saracens up to their overthrow, the nullity of explanations in terms of race qualities becomes sufficiently plain--unless, indeed, it is argued that Moorish blood is the secret of Spanish decadence. But that surmise too is folly.

Spanish decadence is a perfectly simple sociological sequence;[395] and a Spanish renascence is not only conceivable, but likely, under conditions of free science and free thought. Nor is it on the whole less likely that the Arab stock will in time to come contribute afresh and largely to civilisation. The one element which can finally distinguish one race from another--acquired physiological adaptation to a given climate--marks the Arab races as best fitted for the recovery of great southern and eastern regions which, once enormously productive, have since the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires been reduced to sterility and poverty. The Greeks in their recovered fatherland, and the French in Algeria, have not thus far been much more successful than the Turks in developing material prosperity. If North Africa, Syria, and Mesopotamia are again to be rich and fruitful lands, it must be in the hands of an acclimatised race; and the Arab stocks are in this regard among the most eligible.

But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a renascence.[396] Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race character than the decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the Spaniards: it is the enforced result of the att.i.tude of special enmity taken up towards the Turkish intruders from the first by all their Christian neighbours. By sheer force of outside pressure, co-operating with the sinister sway of the Sacred Book, Turkey has been kept fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly militarist, and therefore financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of the long-oppressed Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was till lately proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military force as against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all endowment of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or prudence should so modify the system of government as to give freer course to industry and ideas; that the military system should be restricted; and that European knowledge should be brought to bear on education, till the fettering force of religion is frustrated, as in the progressive countries of Christendom. For Turkey and Spain, for Moslems and for Christians, the laws of progress and decadence are the same; and if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to help instead of hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course of things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the closest students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict such a transformation.[397]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 374: Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in _Buckle and his Critics_, p. 509.]

[Footnote 375: Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is ”the highest, it should seem, _attainable_ by the Asiatic _type of mind_” (_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 222). This in the century which was to witness the renascence of j.a.pan.]

[Footnote 376: _Eranische Alterthumskunde_, 1871, i, 387.]

[Footnote 377: _Id._ p. 388.]

[Footnote 378: _Eranische Alterthumskunde_, p. 389.]

[Footnote 379: Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, ”Impressions medicales,”

in the _Journal des Debats_, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K.

Bikelas, as cited, tr. p. 100. Cp. Renan's language as to ”l'_esprit_ semitique, sans etendue, sans diversite, sans arts plastiques, sans philosophie, sans mythologie, sans _vie politique_, sans progres”

(_etudes d'histoire religieuse_, 1862, p. 67).]

[Footnote 380: This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, _Origin of the Healing Art_, 1893, p.72; Withington, _Medical History from the Earliest Times_, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the Greeks could hardly have resorted to the Egyptians so much as they admittedly did for mathematical and astronomical teaching in the early period without learning something of their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick, _Ancient Egypt_, 1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The pa.s.sage in the _Odyssey_, iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it was stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and Egyptian medicine found ”neue Bedeutung” in Greek hands, after the fresh contacts made under Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (_Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen_, 3te Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.]

[Footnote 381: As to the inferred development of pre-Islamic civilisation in Arabia, see Deutsch, _Literary Remains_, pp. 91, 123, 124, 313, 314; and Noldeke, _Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr.

pp. 18, 19.]

[Footnote 382: The first Islamites, apart from the inner circle, were the least religious. See Renan, _etudes d'histoire religieuse_, pp.

257-65; and Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_, Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 1, 2, 4, 7. Noldeke (p. 15) speaks in the conventional way of the ”wonderful intellectual outburst” which made possible the early triumphs of Islam. The case is really on all fours with that of the French Revolution--”_la carriere ouverte aux talens_.” Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 204, as to the readiness with which the followers of Moseilama turned to Mahommedanism.]

[Footnote 383: See above, p. 97, _note_ 1.]

[Footnote 384: Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed.

1889, pp. 187, 188.]

[Footnote 385: Cp. Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 4, and Sismondi, _Literature of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 61, 64, 68, 80-90. As to Arabic study of linguistics, cp. Noldeke, p. 17.]

[Footnote 386: Cp. Testa, _History of the War of Frederick I. upon the Communes of Lombardy_, Eng. tr. p. 100.]

[Footnote 387: Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_, Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 7-12.]

[Footnote 388: As to the religious zeal of the Berbers in the way of Moslem dissent, on all fours with the phenomena of Protestantism, see Lane-Poole, as cited, p. 53.]

[Footnote 389: Dozy (_Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109) decides that ”in Andalusia nearly everyone could read and write”; but even if this were true, which is very doubtful (seeing that on the same page the historian tells how Hakam founded twenty-three free schools for the children of the poor in Cordova), the reading would be almost solely confined to the Koran.]