ITS ORIGIN, ITS STRENGTH, AND ITS WEAKNESS. 173 
arts, commerce, engineering,* science,f and kindred subjects 
there is no need for me to speak. Slaveryt is sanctioned for 
all time in the Qur'an, and servile§ conecubinage with all its 
concomitant evils is not only tolerated but authorized for all 
Muslims by the example of their “ Prophet” himself. The 
position of woman among the Muslims may not be lower 
than it was among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic times, but it is 
certainly far more degraded than that held by Jewish and 
Christian women in Eastern lands. Woman is regarded as 
man’s slave and his plaything. The idea of her having been 
created by Gop to be man’s help-meet, the sharer of his joys, 
the partner of his sorrows, seems never to have entered 
Muhammad's mind, though he might have learnt it from the 
Jews, had he so chosen. It is not too much to say that such 
a principle is hostile to the genius of Islam. Even to the 
present time, whereyer the precepts of the “ Prophet” are 
* In most Muhammadan countries even wheeled carriages are either 
anknown or are imported from other lands. This is the case, eg., in 
Persia at the present day. 
+ Dr. Draper and others have lavished epithets of praise upon the 
Muslims of the past for their services in the cause of Science. But where 
is all this Muhammadan Science now? Why (if it is due to Islam) did it 
never rise upon purely Muhammadan ground? The lands where Muslim ~ 
culture reared itself most proudly in the past were precisely those, like 
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Spain, that had long been the seats of learning 
and civilisation. ‘Their philosophy and science came almost exclusively 
from the Greeks, nor could the Muslims even render the works of the 
literati of Greece into their own tongue. This was done for them by 
Syrian Christians. (Renan, “ Langues Sémitiques.”) Gibbon admits that 
the Arabs made no advance in Geometry beyond Euclid, and that they 
confess that they learnt Algebra (in spite of its Arabic name—from 
PC “US -s 
dal) from the Greek Diophantus. They still hold to the Ptolemaic 
system in Astronomy, as the Qur’An indeed compels them to do. Such 
- attainments as they made were not the result, moreoyer, of Orthodox 
Islam. This has always been hostile to progress. Science flourished at 
Baghdad under the House of ‘Abbas, all of whom were infideis, and 
perished when an orthodox Muhammadan revival took place, See on the 
subject Osburn’s “ Islam under the Khalifs of Baghdad.” 
t The difference between the spirit of the Gospel and that of the 
Qur’4n in this respect is well illustrated by the fact that, although as 
early as Justinian’s time the Gospel doctrine of the Fatherhood of Gop 
and the brotherhood of men had so leavened the Roman world and 
affected the stern conservatism of Roman law, that in the “ Institutes” 
(Just. Instit., Lib. I, tit. iii, § 2), slavery is defined as something “con- 
trary to nature,” yet up to the present time no Muhammadan legislator 
has done as much. 
§ Cf, e.g., Sirah XXXII, 52. 
