THE PROBLEMS OF MUHAMMADANISM 521 



and faith. For it is impossible to lay too great weight on the fact 

 that there is not only the question of learning a most complicated 

 and endless language, but that the even slower mastery must be 

 reached of a whole habit and attitude of mind, foreign to us at every 

 turn, though from time to time misleading us with the ignis fatuus 

 of a deceptive similarity to the Old Testament and its ways. 



Again another field. Since the Middle Ages Europe has known, if 

 it has not always acknowledged, its debt to Islam as intermediary of 

 the philosophy of Greece. That general fact stands firm, however it 

 may be modified and limited. Yet, until the very last few years, 

 almost nothing has been done to trace the workings, the develop- 

 ment, and the result of that philosophy in Islam itself. In the current 

 manuals of philosophy and in the encyclopedias a few names of 

 so-called Arabian philosophers have found a place, and a treatment 

 marked in general by extreme ignorance. Every one has heard of 

 Avicenna and Averroes, but who has traced out their systems and 

 read their secrets? A mere handful of Arabists of eccentric tastes 

 have dabbled in such lore. At the present time, two or three extremely 

 well-equipped young men are at serious work upon it. But, in general, 

 philosophy in Islam has been treated either by those w r ho were 

 absolutely ignorant in Arabic or painful amateurs in philosophy. 

 Yet the importance of the subject, both for the history of civiliz- 

 ation and the development of thought, can hardly be overestimated. 

 It is already, for example, becoming evident how barren philosophy, 

 in the strict sense, was in Islam itself; how little, if any, change cr 

 advance was made from the Greek positions. But it is also becoming 

 plain how completely it fell to Islam to carry, in this strangely help- 

 less fashion, the torch of philosophic thought through many dark 

 centuries and kindle anew in Europe the idealistic flame which 

 burns even to our day. It is largely due to the elective affinity of its 

 intellectual fervors that the dead school of Plotinus won the field, 

 and that the simple nominalism of our times was delayed for so 

 many centuries. Little by little, too, as our knowledge spreads, 

 we are discovering strange and close agreements, even to phrases, 

 between Muslim and Christian thinkers. Threads of direct con- 

 nection are being found, running down even to Pascal; and the 

 general trend of development which lead to pragmatism and the 

 position of Mr. William James has its parallel in the theology of 

 Islam. For it is worth noticing that the independent intellectual life 

 of Islam and its only original systems are to be found, though under 

 philosophic stimulus, not among the philosophers themselves, but 

 among the theologians. In that development, paradoxically enough, 

 came all that did not exist already in Aristotle and the neo-Pla- 

 tonists. Here, then, is another field on which hardly more than a 

 beginning has been made, and from which much may be expected. 



