CHAPTER IX 



BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE AMONG THE ARABIANS 



The Arabian conquest of the East 



WHEN MOHAMMED DIED, iH 63X, the religion he founded had already 

 spread throughout Arabia, and his successors, the first caliphs, 

 managed in the course of a few decades to bring under their do- 

 minion the old civilized countries of Babylon, Persia, Syria, and Egypt, to 

 which were later added North Africa and Spain. War against the unfaithful 

 was indeed the prophet's first commandment, and according to his injunction 

 the heathen had a choice between death and conversion; such of the unfaith- 

 ful, again, as possessed religious writings — Christians, Jews, and Persians — 

 had their lives spared, but were subject to impositions and personal humilia- 

 tion. The bedouins of the desert, who thus at one blow became the rulers of 

 the most ancient civilized countries in the world, were themselves nothing 

 but barbarians, it is true, but they were intelligent and susceptible to cultural 

 influence, all the more so as in the course of the wandering life they led, they 

 had already come into contact with their civilized neighbours. Their new re- 

 ligion was favourable for rapid cultural progress in that it was a legal doc- 

 trine with few and easily comprehensible rules, without, to be sure, the lofty 

 ethical claims of Christianity, but also without the theological subtleties of 

 the different ecclesiastical formulas. And as, besides, the Arabs troubled them- 

 selves but little about social and political questions — they permitted the 

 institutions of conquered nations to survive and contented themselves with 

 appointing governors who collected taxes from them — they had ample time 

 to devote themselves to purely intellectual interests. Indeed, they grasped the 

 elements of the culture of the period with a rapidity which has been com- 

 pared to that of the Japanese in our own day, and were able in many respects 

 to build higher upon the foundations they found prepared for them. These 

 foundations were Greek science, as the subject peoples produced it in Syrian 

 and Persian translations; it was not until later that the Arabs learnt to read 

 Greek writings in the original. They developed this material and thus created 

 a science representing at the same time a direct continuation of the Greek 

 and a reconstruction of it to suit the conditions which the peculiar Arabian 

 view of the world required. According to Mohammed's theory, the Koran 

 is the source of all learning and contains all the knowledge that man requires; 

 but this claim, which would have rendered all research impossible, was 



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