THE PROBLEMS OF MUHAMMADANISM 525 



wave ebbed again, the old civilization, the old states were gone, and 

 another civilization, new and' very strange, had come in their place. 

 True, the leaders of the raid knew what they would have; knew that 

 they had come permanently and tried to hold the tribesmen to that 

 knowledge. But that could not be. There were too few of them, 

 enough to conquer but not enough to swamp the conquered peoples. 

 They died away among those peoples and left there some tinge of 

 Arab blood; or, being nomads of the desert, they yearned for their 

 sands and drifted back to their own land, or whatever other North 

 African wastes they could find. But how was the civilization which 

 arose the Muslim civilization akin to them? What did they 

 give to it, and what part had they in it? For one thing, they gave 

 to it their language, that tongue of the Arabs which may well compare 

 in dignity, elaboration, and flexibility with that of the Greeks. 

 The language carried with it certain literary forms in which part, at 

 least, of the Muslim world was long cramped. Thanks to it, for 

 example, the Egyptians forgot the lessons of the Greek poets and 

 came to believe that a story could not be told in verse, while the 

 Persians, who revived their own language again to literary use, had 

 no such scruples. To the Muslim civilization the Arabs gave also 

 the great conception of Islam and the traditions of the character and 

 teaching of Muhammad as contained in the Qur'an and in the stories 

 of his sayings and doings. Certain conceptions, modes of life and 

 thought, of social relationships and ideals they may also have given, 

 but all these, too, could be entered perfectly under the fact of Muham- 

 mad and his teaching. That seems to have been the sum of the Arab 

 contribution. We hear often of Arabian science, of Arabian philosophy, 

 of Arabian art. There was never any Arabian science, philosophy, 

 or art. These arose in the civilization which followed the great 

 Arab raid; they never flourished on Arabian soil; they were never 

 led or advanced by Arabs. The most of culture which the Arabs 

 themselves produced was the Umayyad court at Damascus, and 

 when the Umayyads fell before the Abbasids in A.D. 750, after a 

 rule of more than a century, the Arab period closed for Islam. 

 But that court was only a glorified revival of the pre-Muhammadan 

 courts at al-Hira and Ghassan, and fostered only the civilization of 

 the desert. There we hear the last strains of the old poetry, and 

 hear little but such strains. The theologians, it is true, were at work; 

 the system of the great doctor of the Greek church, John of Damascus, 

 was making itself felt; the things of religion were silently but surely 

 developing. But of that rich blossoming time of prose literature 

 and of the newer poetry, of science, philosophy, and art, which 

 followed under the Abbasids, we have no trace. With all that, the 

 genius of the Arab race had no kinship, and now the Arab race was 

 to fade from the scene. 



