148 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



everything else to futility in their eyes. Now, for the first time in 

 the history of the world, Semitic religion and Greek knowledge 

 actually combined in the minds of many people. Nor was that 

 integration restricted to a single city or country; the new culture 

 spread like a prairie fire from Baghdad eastward to India, Trans- 

 oxiana and further still, and westward to the very edge of the 

 world. 



Muslim culture was at once deeply unified and very diversified. 

 The peoples of Islam were kept together and separated from the 

 rest of the world by the two strongest bonds which can bind a 

 human community, religion and language. One of the few duties 

 of a learned Muslim is the reading of the Qur'an (their Bible), 

 and it must be read in Arabic. Thanks to this religious obligation, 

 Arabic, which before Muhammad had no more than a tribal 

 importance, became a world language. After the eleventh century 

 it lost its hegemony, but remained very important; it is still one 

 of the languages most widely used at the present time. It has 

 gradually been split into a number of dialectal forms, even as 

 Latin disintegrated into the various Romance languages; but 

 with these radical distinctions that, up to this day, every literate 

 Muslim must have some knowledge of classical Arabic to read the 

 Qur'an, and that the written language — e.g., that used in the news- 

 papers — continues to approximate more or less the classical stand- 

 ards. While each Romance language has its own written form, its 

 own standards of perfection, one may say that there is for the 

 Arabic writer all over the world but one model of excellence, 

 that given by the Qur'an and by the best authors of the classical 

 age. Because of their single language and of their common faith,* 

 ideas traveled with astounding regularity and speed from one end 

 of the Dar al-Islam to the other. 



The universal extension of that culture caused necessarily many 



* To be sure, Islam was soon divided into a number of sects and schools, and one finds in 

 it the same gamut of religious forms as in Christianity — from the extreme fundamentalism 

 and the strangest mystical aberrations at the right to the purist unitarianism at the left; yet, 

 however different, these were all forms of the same Muslim faith. Every Muslim read the 

 same Scriptures. 



