THE SARACENS

While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation for a time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium possessed, if it could not employ, the treasures of old Hellenic science and philosophy. The fact that such a fructification of an alien civilisation could take place while the transmitting community showed no similar gain, is tolerably decisive as to (a) the constrictive force of religious systems under certain conditions, and (b) the nullity of the theory of race genius. Yet these very circumstances have been made the ground of a preposterous impeachment of the "Semitic" character in general, and of the Arab in particular.

Concerning no "race" save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after another[374] has explained Semitic "faculty" in terms of Semitic experience, always to the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming what it becomes, but only when it has become so, since what it does not do it has, by implication, no faculty for doing.[375] The learned Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the antiquities of Iran, inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to sculpture as a matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to which the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or why the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with architecture, he pronounces the Semites averse to that also; and as regards the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues that we know not "how far entirely alien models were imitated by the Semites."[377] Only for music does he admit them to have any independent inclination; and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not by the virtual inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in their Sacred Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by primordial lack of faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of imaginative fiction in the Arabian Nights is credited bodily to the "Indo-Germanic" account, because it has Hindu affinities, and took place in Persia; and, of course, the Semites are denied a mythology, as by M. Renan, no question being raised as to what is redacted myth in the Sacred Books. For the rest, "the Semite" is not fitted to shine in science, being in all his branches "almost totally devoid of intellectual curiosity," so that what philosophy and science he has are not "his own"; and he is equally ill-fitted for politics, wherein, having no political idea save that of the family, he oscillates between "unlimited despotism and complete anarchy."[378] Apart from music, his one special faculty is for religion.

Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set up a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists contrive to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history of civilisation without learning wherein the process of civilisation consists. On Spiegel's method—which is that of Mommsen in dealing with the early culture-history of Rome—the Germanic nations must be adjudged to be naturally devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama, philosophy, science, law, and order, since they had none of those things till they got them in the Middle Ages through the reviving civilisation of the Mediterranean and France. And as the Greeks certainly received their first impulse to philosophy and science through contact with the survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in Ionia, they in turn must be pronounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a science of their own"; while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all faculty for the epic and the drama. It is the method of MoliÈre's doctors, with their virtus dormitivus of opium, applied to sociology.

The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely applied to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of imperfect development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some edifying results as regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:—

The method by which Arab defects are here demonstrated from the arrest of Arab civilisation is a simple extension of that by which Spiegel demonstrates the original deficiencies of the ancient Semites, and Mommsen the incapacity of the Latins to do what they did not do. A certain race or nation, having at one time attained a considerable degree of civilisation, and afterwards lost it, is held to have thus shown a collective incapacity for remembering what "it" or "they" had learned. The "they" here is the correlative of M. Taine's "we"—a pseud-entity, entirely self-determining and strictly homogeneous. The racial misfortune is set down to a fault pervading the whole national character or intellect, and peculiar to it in comparison with other national characters. Conditions count for nothing; totality of inherited character, acting in vacuo, is at once the summary and the judgment. Anyone who has followed the present argument with any assent thus far will at once grant the futility of such doctrine. "The Arabs" had neither more nor less collective faculty of appreciation and oblivion than any other equally homogeneous people at the same culture-stage. It is quite true that they had not an "original medical science." But neither have any other historical "they" ever had such. The Greeks certainly had not. The beginnings of medical knowledge for all mankind lay of necessity in the primeval lore of the savage; and the nations which carried it furthest in antiquity were just those who learned what others had to give, and improved upon it. The Greeks must have learned from Asia, from Egypt,[380] from Phoenicia; and the Romans learned from the Greeks. The Arabs, coming late into the sphere of the higher civilisation, and crossing their stock in the East with those of Persia, in the West with the already much-mixed stocks of Spain, passed quite as rapidly as the Greeks had done from the stage of primitive thought in all things to one of comparative rationality as regards medicine and the exact sciences; and this not in virtue of any special "enthusiasm" for new ideas, but by the normal way of gradual collection of observations and reflection upon them, in communities kept alert by variety of intercourse, and sufficiently free on the side of the intellectual life. Such was the state of the Saracens in Persia and Spain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and their social evolution before and after is all a matter of natural sequence, not proceeding upon any peculiarity of collective character, but representing the normal reactions of character at a given culture-stage in special political circumstances.

What is peculiar to the Saracen civilisation is its sudden origin (taking Islam as a history by itself)[381] under conditions reached elsewhere only as climax in a long evolution. The rise of Islam has the twofold aspect of a barbarian campaign of plunder and a crusade of fanaticism; and though the prospect and the getting of plunder were needed to ripen the fanaticism to full bloom,[382] the latter was ultimately a part of the cementing force that turned a horde into a community. The great facilitating conditions for both were the feeble centralised system maintained by the Christianised Empire, and the disintegrating force of Christianity as a sectarian ferment. In Egypt, for instance, the hatred between rival schools of Christian metaphysic secured for the Arabs an unresisted entrance into Alexandria.[383] It needed only a few generations of contact with higher culture in a richer environment to put the Saracens, as regards art and science, very much on a level with the stagnating Byzantines; and where the latter, possessed of their scientific and philosophical classics, but imprisoned by their religion, made no intellectual progress whatever, the former, on the same stimulus, progressed to a remarkable degree. There has been much dispute as to the exact measure of their achievements; but three things are clear: (1) that they carried the mathematics of astronomy beyond the point at which it had been left by the Greeks; (2) that they laid the foundations of chemistry; and(3) that they intelligently carried on surgery and medicine when the Byzantines, having early in the Christian period destroyed the Asklepions, which were in some degree the schools of the medicine of antiquity, had sunk to the level of using prayers and incantations and relics as their regular means of cure. Curiously enough, too, the Saracens had the merit, claimed for the Byzantines, of letting their women share rather freely in their culture of all kinds.[384] What is more, the later Saracens of Spain, whatever the measure of their own scientific progress, were without question a great seminal force in the civilisation of Western Christendom, which drew from them its beginnings in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and to some extent even in literature[385] and architecture,[386] to say nothing of the effect on the useful arts of the contact of the Crusaders with the Saracens of the East.

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."

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 Abderrahman 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 Abderrahman 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. Abderrahman'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. Abderrahman 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 Hisham 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.

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.

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 factitious 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 attitude 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]

[374] Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in Buckle and his Critics, p. 509.