526 MOHAMMEDISM 



After them there enter the Abbasids. They, too, were Arabs by 

 blood; but they, at least their earlier rulers of genius, read aright 

 the signs, and saw that no Arab kingdom could stand by itself. The 

 Constitution of Umar, which regarded the Arab race as a people chosen 

 of Allah to do His will, had broken down after only a few years. The 

 idea of the Umayyads, which regarded the kingdoms of the world as 

 created for the enjoyment of the Arab race, had vanished in tribal 

 strife. The non-Arab Muslims had come to their own again, and by 

 sheer weight of numbers, knowledge, and skill had compelled recog- 

 nition and reckoning. That they had from the Abbasids. Their 

 capital, Baghdad, founded in A.D. 762 by the foresight of al-Mansur, 

 was to draw together and weld into a whole three at least of the 

 Muslim races, the Arabs, the Persians, and the Syrians. The plan of 

 al-Mansur succeeded in great part. The Muslim Empire was founded 

 as a thing not necessarily Arab or Persian or Syrian. Islam, in 

 conception so free, but for long politically so limited, had now broken 

 its national bonds, and become in a true sense a universal religion 

 and a world-power. Then, in astounding outburst, there came the 

 Muslim civilization. 



It is hard to describe this period of culture in terms that will not 

 sound strained and even hysterical. For the first hundred years of the 

 Abbasid Khalifas we have a veritable Golden Age in the intellectual 

 life. These Khalifas held stiffly to Islam, but they fostered, too, the 

 sciences and arts. All the thought of the Greeks, coming in many 

 channels, was accepted eagerly by them. Their people was urged 

 to study, to research, to production; and the books which followed 

 showed that the urging had effect. It was a period of literary earnest- 

 ness and literary productiveness such as has seldom been. For its 

 mate we have to look to the great eras of the world when awakening 

 times seem to have come. After a century or so, it died away, but the 

 intellectual life still went on, though led by fewer and in more isolated 

 fashion. Then there would come another period at some other court 

 - rivaling but hardly equaling the first in brilliancy and originality. 

 Thus the torch has been passed along through a series, at long inter- 

 vals, of such ages of reviving energy. But after that first Abbasid 

 period we find the mass of the people taking little part in these. 



Here, then, we have the first element in our central problem. How 

 are we to condition and explain this outburst? To ascribe it to the 

 Arabs themselves, in any direct sense, is evidently absurd. Even to 

 imagine that they, as a virile element, quickened into life for a time 

 the dying or, at best, comatose races which surrounded them, seems 

 hardly more satisfactory. It would be difficult indeed to find in his- 

 tory a really parallel case to support such a view. Furthermore, we 

 find them at every turn forced back for intellectual aid on these very 

 races. Even their ministers and the officials of their governments were 



