THE PROBLEMS OF MUHAMMADANISM 531 



know only by vague references, or notes on MSS. Many must have 

 gone their way dumb. They were all carriers of a hidden torch, and in 

 themselves could have formed no civilization. That they had to live 

 thus retired and practically to no other purpose than to pass on their 

 speculations to a rare handful of disciples is the significant thing in 

 them for us. 



Thirdly, there was a thread of development still more mysterious 

 to us, because obscured of intention. Just as these solitary thinkers 

 may sometimes have appeared at court, so sometimes they may have 

 had part in that vast philosophical society which, as has been guessed 

 and as I have stated already, lay behind and was one of the weapons 

 of the Fatimid conspiracy. Such bodies were the clearing-houses, the 

 means of exchange and intercourse for the society of their time. On 

 one side they touched the superstitions of the masses, on another the 

 ambitions of would-be founders of empire; on a third all the existing 

 phases of the intellectual life. Of necessity and on all sides they must 

 work underground, and they exploited to the uttermost the doctrine 

 of economy in teaching which all Islam accepts, and which has crystal- 

 lized in the tradition ascribed to AH, " Speak to the people as they can 

 understand." Even when the conspiracy had, on the surface, suc- 

 ceeded and the Fatimid dynasty was established, the Hall of Science 

 which they opened at Cairo had to be managed with great care to 

 avoid an open issue with the believing people. Their culture, just as in 

 the case of the courts and the solitary thinkers, was no true civiliza- 

 tion, for it did not reach the masses. 



We can now state and appreciate more exactly our second problem. 

 In the first century of the Abbasid rule, there came a true intellectual 

 period. It was an outburst, comparable in intensity for the time with 

 the European renaissance. Thereafter came a gradual but persistent 

 decline, varied only by such phases of scientific and philosophical 

 activity as I have already indicated. Above all, the masses of the 

 people had no part in any true culture, seem to have been crippled in 

 some mysterious way for independent thought. Our problem, then, 

 is how this should have been so. The causes usually assigned do not 

 seem to be real or, at least, adequate. Islam itself may have been to 

 blame, but a new analysis of Islam will be necessary to show how it 

 produced such results. Certainly, its fatalism alone is not a sufficient 

 cause. The immediate ancestors of most of us were equally strong 

 predestinarians, but civilization did not suffer greatly at their hands. 

 Nor, to go farther back, was the general position in Europe before 

 the renaissance essentially different from that in the contemporary 

 Islam. Only the renaissance came to Europe and turned it sharply 

 into a new path, and medievalism for it was past, while Islam still 

 lived as in medievalism. That the Muslim countries are yet in the 

 precise condition and hold the precise attitudes of Europe in the 



