THE PROBLEMS OF MUHAMMADANISM 529 



bizarre concretenesses sprung from the brain of Muhammad and his 

 immediate constructive followers, drop easily away from them. Yet, 

 in contrast with the asserted experience of Christendom, it is Islam 

 which has survived and not the Muslim civilizations. The worship of 

 the black stone in the Ka'ba, a fetish of the simplest type, has tri- 

 umphed over the exalted aspirations and visions of the thinker and 

 the mystic. 



Islam, then, understood in this sense of the dogma, ritual, institu- 

 tions and laws established by Muhammad and developed by his suc- 

 cessors, is one of the most absolutely permanent things in the world. 

 In spite of its lack of elasticity, its grasp once taken has never been 

 broken nor relaxed. Peoples which had accepted Christianity have 

 again thrown it off; but no people has yet turned from Islam to 

 another faith. The soil, even, with one great exception, which has 

 once become Muslim, remains so to this day, in religion at least, if not 

 in government. That exception was the Spanish Peninsula and the 

 islands which went with it, an exception so exceptional in every way 

 as to stand by itself. Islam, then, is permanent. 



But the Muslim civilization is impermanent to a singular degree 

 and in a singular way. The civilizations have always had their tides, 

 their ebbs and flows. Europe has had its dark age, and again its 

 renaissance. But taking the European civilization in the broadest 

 sense, following it for centuries from the brilliant period of Greek 

 thought and letters to the present equally brilliant development of 

 material things, the trend has been a gaining one, the steps and hearts 

 have been upwards, and if there have come periods of silence and 

 rest, the silence has been a brooding and the rest has been a recov- 

 ery of strength. Far otherwise in Islam. There the silences have ever 

 grown longer and deeper; the periods of life and speech have grown 

 fewer and shorter. The bearers of the torch have kept dwindling in 

 numbers and certainly shrinking more and more from public view. 

 Their periods cease to belong to, cease to be identifiable with, the 

 Muslim peoples; the leaders die in obscurity and fear and leave no 

 followers; the abortive great age is over and the old, abiding Islam 

 reigns on. 



Hardly anything can be more melancholy than to trace through 

 Muslim history this unviolated law. The thread there of intellectual 

 life leaving out of account, of course, the sciences professional and 

 ancillary to Islam itself may be said to have run threefold. This 

 analysis is rough, and depends, in part, on our ignorance, but will be 

 found suggestive and fairly faithful. Outside of it may be placed the 

 great intellectual movement in the first years of the Abbasids. That 

 seems, in truth, to have been a movement of the whole people; such 

 a one, in fact, as the Elizabethan period in England or the renaissance 

 in Italy. But after this century or less had passed, the intellectual life 



