530 MOHAMMEDISM 



continued for a time in three different ways. First there appeared, 

 from time to time, a culture consisting of a circle of men of science 

 and letters gathered round a patronizing monarch at his court. Such 

 a one was Sayf ad-Da wla at Aleppo; such Mahmud the Iconoclast at 

 Ghazna; such many of the Fatimid princes at Cairo; many small 

 dynasties in Spain, and perhaps the last of any meaning, were found 

 in the Muwahhid dynasty in Spain and North Africa. In all these 

 cases, the essential thing was a protector and fosterer strong enough 

 to be able to neglect popular disapproval. This is culture on a court 

 footing, imitating in a fashion the first great Abbasid encouragement 

 of science, but existing essentially for the amusement, edification, and 

 praise of the protecting prince. It did not spring from the people, 

 and from it no popular life could spring. Its existence was strictly 

 dependent on the existence of a prince with enlightened tastes. And 

 even such princes gradually found it advisable to draw a cordon 

 round the speculations of their court philosophers, and to fence off 

 freedom of thought from the mass of the people. On one side, they 

 feared the effects of that thought on the simple faith of the multitude, 

 and on another, they feared the wrath of the multitude against them- 

 selves and the freethinkers of their courts. Naturally, under such 

 conditions, genuine freedom of thought ceased to exist. Literature 

 might flourish after a fashion and for a time, but even it could not, in 

 the long run, reach beyond the constructing of panegyrics and jests. 

 Such circles stood to true Augustan ages as the imitations of Ver- 

 sailles by petty German princes to the actual court of the Grand 

 Monarque. As exponents of civilization, they, in their final develop- 

 ment, may safely be neglected. Yet it is always to be remembered 

 that al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, three of the greatest names 

 in Arabic philosophy, were products of such conditions. 



This, which I have just described, w r as the public, visible thread of 

 the intellectual life in Islam. It had no contact with the body of the 

 people; it was of its nature to be abrupt and non-continuous, a suc- 

 cession of dwindling points and not a line. But there must have 

 existed also a second and more continuous thread of tradition, consist- 

 ing of private and solitary students and thinkers. Their lives, of 

 necessity, were passed in quietness, apart from the throng, seeking 

 safety from it and failing to affect it. We therefore know little of them 

 in detail. Some stand out, as al-Ma'arri, the satirist, in one way, or as 

 Umar Khayyam in another, or, as Nasir ibn Khusraw, who finally 

 sought peace in ascetic mysticism, in yet a third. Almost all we can 

 say is that there was undoubtedly perhaps still is, to some slight 

 extent a small number of exceptional men who lived apart and 

 pursued philosophy and science along paths which led them often to 

 mysticism and alchemy. Some had genius, as the three whom I have 

 just mentioned, and their names have come down to us. Some we 



