The Age of Faith

The Sufi, like the Hindu, believed in a course of discipline as necessary to the mystic revelation of God: purifying exercises of devotion, meditation, and prayer; the full obedience of the novice to a Sufi master or teacher; and the complete abandonment of any personal desire, even the desire for salvation or the mystical union. The perfect Sufi loves God for His own sake, not for any reward; “the Giver,” said Abu’l-Qasim, “is better for you than the gift.”⁸³ Usually, however, the Sufi valued his discipline as a means of reaching a true knowledge of things, sometimes as a curriculum leading to a degree of miraculous power over nature, but almost always as a road to union with God. He who had completely forgotten his individual self in such union was called al-insanu-l-Kamil—the Perfect Man.⁸⁴ Such a man, the Sufis believed, was above all laws, even above the obligation to pilgrimage. Said a Sufi verse: “All eyes toward the Kaaba turn, but ours to the Beloved’s face.”⁸⁵

Until the middle of the eleventh century the Sufis continued to live in the world, sometimes with their families and their children; even the Sufis attached small moral worth to celibacy. “The true saint,” said Abu Said, “goes in and out amongst the people, eats and sleeps with them, buys and sells in the market, marries and takes part in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment.”⁸⁶ Such Sufis were distinguished only by their simplicity of life, their piety and quietism, very much like the early Quakers; and occasionally they gathered around some holy teacher or exemplar, or met in groups for prayer and mutual stimulation to devotion; already in the tenth century those strange dervish dances were taking form which were to play so prominent a part in later Sufism. A few became recluses and tormented themselves, but asceticism was in this period discountenanced and rare. Saints, unknown to early Islam, became numerous in Sufism. One of the earliest was a woman, Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra (717–801). Sold as a slave in youth, she was freed because her master saw a radiance above her head while she prayed. Refusing marriage, she lived a life of self-denial and charity. Asked if she hated Satan, she answered, “My love for God leaves me no room for hating Satan.” Tradition ascribes to her a famous Sufi saying: “O God! Give to Thine enemies whatever Thou hast assigned to me of this world’s goods, and to Thy friends whatever Thou hast assigned to me in the life to come; for Thou Thyself art sufficient for me.”⁸⁷

Let us take, as an example of many Sufis, the saint and poet Abu Said ibn Abi’l-Khayr (967–1049). Born in Mayhana in Khurasan, he knew Avicenna; story has it that he said of the philosopher, “What I see he knows,” and that the philosopher said of him, “What I know he sees.”⁸⁸ In his youth he was fond of profane literature, and claims to have memorized 30,000 verses of pre-Islamic poetry. One day, in his twenty-sixth year, he heard a lecture by Abu Ali, who took as text the ninth verse of the sixth sura of the Koran: “Say Allah! then leave them to amuse themselves in their vain discourse.” “At the moment of hearing this word,” Abu Said relates, “a door in my breast was opened, and I was rapt from myself.” He collected all his books and burned them. “The first step in Sufism,” he would say, “is the breaking of inkpots, the tearing up of books, the forgetting of all kinds of knowledge.” He retired to a niche in a chapel of his home; “there I sat for seven years, saying continually, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’”; such repetition of the Holy Name was, with Moslem mystics, a favorite means of realizing fana—“passing away from self.” He practiced several forms of asceticism: wore the same shirt always, spoke only in dire need, ate nothing till sunset, and then only a piece of bread; never lay down to sleep; made an excavation in the wall of his niche or cell, just high and broad enough to stand in, often closed himself within it, and stuffed his ears to hear no sound. Sometimes at night he would lower himself by a rope into a well, head downward, and recite the entire Koran before emerging—if we were to believe the testimony of his father. He made himself a servant to other Sufis, begged for them, cleaned their cells and privies. “Once, whilst I was seated in the mosque, a woman went up on the roof and bespattered me with filth; and still I heard a voice saying, ‘Is not thy Lord enough for thee?’” At forty he “attained to perfect illumination,” began to preach, and attracted devoted audiences; some of his hearers, he assures us, smeared their faces with his ass’s dung “to gain a blessing.”⁸⁹ He left his mark on Sufism by founding a monastery of dervishes, and formulating for it a set of rules that became a model for similar institutions in later centuries.

Like Augustine, Abu Said taught that only God’s grace, not man’s good works, would bring salvation; but he thought of salvation in terms of a spiritual emancipation independent of any heaven. God opens to man one gate after another. First the gate of repentance, then

the gate of certainty, so that he accepts contumely and endures abasement, and knows for certain by Whom it is brought to pass…. Then God opens to him the gate of love; but still he thinks, “I love.” … Then God opens to him the gate of unity … thereupon he perceives that all is He, all is by Him … he recognizes that he has not the right to say, “I” or “mine” … desires fall away from him, and he becomes free and calm…. Thou wilt never escape from thy self until thou slay it. Thy self, which is keeping thee far from God, and saying “So-and-so has treated me ill… such a one has done well by me”—all this is polytheism; nothing depends upon the creatures, all upon the Creator. This must thou know; and having said it, thou must stand firm…. To stand firm means that when thou hast said “One,” thou must never again say “Two.” …Say “Allah!” and stand firm there.⁹⁰

The same Hindu-Emersonian doctrine appears in one of the many quatrains dubiously ascribed to Abu Said:

Said I, “To whom belongs Thy beauty?” He

Replied, “Since I alone exist, to Me;

Lover, Beloved, and Love am I in one;

Beauty, and Mirror, and the eyes that see.”⁹¹

There being no church to canonize such heroes of ecstasy, they received the informal canonization of popular acclaim; and by the twelfth century the Koranic discouragement of the worship of saints as a form of idolatry had been overwhelmed by the natural sentiments of the people. An early saint was Ibrahim ibn Adham (eighth century?), the Abou ben Adhem of Leigh Hunt. Popular imagination attributed miraculous powers to such saints: they knew the secrets of clairvoyance, thought reading, and telepathy; they could swallow fire or glass unhurt, pass through fire unburnt, walk upon water, fly through the air, and transport themselves over great distances in a moment’s time. Abu Said reports feats of mind reading as startling as any in current mythography.⁹² Day by day the religion that some philosophers supposed to be the product of priests is formed and re-formed by the needs, sentiment, and imagination of the people; and the monotheism of the prophets becomes the polytheism of the populace.

Orthodox Islam accepted Sufism within the Moslem fold, and gave it considerable latitude of expression and belief. But this shrewd policy was refused to heresies that concealed revolutionary politics, or preached an anarchism of morality and law. Of many half-religious half-political revolts the most effective was that of the “Ismaila.” In Shia doctrine, it will be recalled, each generation of Ali’s descendants, to the twelfth, was headed by a divine incarnation or Imam, and each Imam named his successor. The sixth, Jafar al-Sadiq, appointed his eldest son Ismail to succeed him; Ismail, it is alleged, indulged in wine; Jafar rescinded his nomination, and chose another son, Musa, as seventh Imam (c. 760). Some Shi’ites held the appointment of Ismail to be irrevocable, and honored him or his son Muhammad as seventh and last Imam. For a century these “Ismailites” remained a negligible sect; then Abdallah ibn Qaddah made himself their leader, and sent missionaries to preach the doctrine of the “Seveners” throughout Islam. Before initiation into the sect the convert took an oath of secrecy, and pledged absolute obedience to the Dai-d-Duat, or Grand Master of the order. The teaching was divided into exoteric and esoteric: the convert was told that after passing through nine stages of initiation all veils would be removed, the Talim or Secret Doctrine (that God is All) would be revealed to him, and he would then be above every creed and every law. In the eighth degree of initiation the convert was taught that nothing can be known of the Supreme Being, and no worship can be rendered Him.⁹³ Many survivors of old communistic movements were drawn to the Ismaila by the expectation that a Mahdi or Redeemer would come, who would establish a regime of equality, justice, and brotherly love on the earth. This remarkable confraternity became in time a power in Islam. It won North Africa and Egypt, and founded the Fatimid dynasty; and late in the ninth century it gave birth to a movement that almost brought an end to the Abbasid caliphate.

When Abdallah ibn Qaddah died in 874, an Iraqi peasant named Hamdan ibn al-Ashrath, popularly known as Qarmat, became the leader of the Ismaili sect, and gave it such energy that for a time in Asia it was called, after him, Qaramita, the Carmathians. Planning to overthrow the Arabs and restore the Persian Empire, he secretly enlisted thousands of supporters, and persuaded them to contribute a fifth of their property and income to a common treasury. Again an element of social revolution entered into what was ostensibly a form of mystical religion: the Carmathians advocated a communism of both property and women,⁹⁴ organized workmen into guilds, preached universal equality, and adopted an allegorical freethinking interpretation of the Koran. They disregarded the rituals and fasts prescribed by orthodoxy, and laughed at the “asses” who offered worship to shrines and stones.⁹⁵ In 899 they established an independent state on the west shore of the Persian Gulf; in 900 they defeated the caliph’s army, leaving hardly a man of it alive; in 902 they ravaged Syria to the gates of Damascus; in 924 they sacked Basra, then Kufa; in 930 they plundered Mecca, slew 30,000 Moslems, and carried off rich booty, including the veil of the Kaaba and the Black Stone itself.* The movement exhausted itself in its successes and excesses; citizens united against its threat to property and order; but its doctrines and violent ways were passed on in the next century to the Ismaili of Alamut—the hashish-inspired Assassins.

VI. LITERATURE

In Islam life and religion had drama, but literature had none; it is a form apparently alien to the Semitic mind. And as in other medieval literatures, there was here no novel. Most writing was heard rather than silently read; and those who cared for fiction could not rise to the concentration necessary for a complex and continued narrative. Short stories were as old as Islam or Adam; the simpler Moslems listened to them with the ardor and appetite of children, but the scholars never counted them as literature. The most popular of these stories were the Fables of Bidpai and the Thousand Nights and a Night. The Fables were brought to Persia from India in the sixth century, were translated into Pahlavi, and thence, in the eighth century, into Arabic. The Sanskrit original was lost, the Arabic version survived, and was rendered into forty languages.

Al-Masudi (d. 597) speaks in his Meadows of Gold⁹⁶ of a Persian book Hazar Afsana, or Thousand Tales, and of its Arabic translation, Alf Laylah wa Laylah; this is the earliest known mention of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The plan of the book as described by al-Masudi was that of our Arabian Nights; such a framework for a series of stories was already old in India. A great number of these tales circulated in the Oriental world; various collections might differ in their selection, and we are not sure that any story in our present editions appeared in the texts known to al-Masudi. Shortly after 1700 an incomplete Arabic manuscript, not traceable beyond 1536, was sent from Syria to the French Orientalist Antoine Galland. Fascinated by their whimsical fantasy, their glimpses of intimate Moslem life, perhaps by their occasional obscenity, he issued at Paris in 1704 their first European translation—Les mille et une nuits. The book succeeded beyond any expectation; translations were made into every European language; and children of all nations and ages began to talk of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s lamp, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Next to the Bible (itself Oriental), the Fables and the Nights are the most widely read books in the world.

Literary prose, in Islam, is a form of poetry. The Arabic temperament was inclined to strong feeling; Persian manners made for ornate speech; and the Arabian language, then common to both peoples, invited rhyme by the similarity of its inflectional endings. So literary prose usually rhymed; preachers and orators and storytellers used rhymed prose; it was in this medium that Badi al-Hamadhani (d. 1008) wrote his famous Maqamat (Assemblies)—tales told to various gatherings about a wandering rapscallion with less morals than wit. The peoples of the Near East were ear-minded, as were all men before printing; to most Moslems literature was a recited poem or narrative. Poems were written to be read aloud or sung; and everyone in Islam, from peasant to caliph, heard them gladly. Nearly everyone, as in samurai Japan, composed verses; in the educated classes it was a popular game for one person to finish in rhyme a couplet or stanza begun by another, or to compete in forming extempore lyrics or poetic epigrams. Poets rivaled one another in fashioning complex patterns of meter and rhyme; many rhymed the middle as well as the end of a line; a riot of rhyme scurried through Arab verse, and influenced the rise of rhyme in European poetry.

Probably no civilization or period—not even China in the days of Li Po and Tu Fu, nor Weimar when it had “a hundred citizens and ten thousand poets”—ever equaled Abbasid Islam in the number and prosperity of its bards. Abul-Faraj of Isfahan (897–967), toward the end of this age, collected and recorded Arabic poetry in his Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs); its twenty volumes suggest the wealth and variety of Arabic verse. Poets served as propagandists, and were feared as deadly satirists; rich men bought praise by the meter; and caliphs gave high place and fat sums to poets who turned for them a pleasant stanza, or celebrated the glory of their deeds or their tribe. The Caliph Hisham, wishing to recall a poem, sent for the poet Hammad, who luckily remembered it all; Hisham rewarded him with two slave girls and 50,000 dinars ($237,500);⁹⁷ no poet will believe the tale. Arabic poetry, which once had sung to Bedouins, now addressed itself to courts and palaces; much of it became artificial, formal, delicately trivial, politely insincere; and a battle of ancients and moderns ensued in which the critics complained that there were great poets only before Mohammed.⁹⁸

Love and war outbid religion as poetic themes. The poetry of the Arabs (this would not be true of the Persians) was seldom mystical; it preferred songs of battle, passion, or sentiment; and as the century of conquest closed, Eve overcame both Mars and Allah as the inspiration of Arab verse. The poets of Islam thrilled with autointoxication in describing the charms of woman—her fragrant hair, jewel eyes, berry lips, and silver limbs. In the deserts and holy cities of Arabia the troubadour motifs took form; poets and philosophers spoke of adab as, in one phase, the ethic and etiquette of love; this tradition would pass through Egypt and Africa to Sicily and Spain, and thence to Italy and Provence; and hearts would break in rhyme and rhythm and many tongues.

Hasan ibn Hani won the name of Abu Nuwas—“Father of the Curl”—from his abounding locks. Born in Persia, he found his way to Baghdad, became a favorite of Harun, and may have had with him one or two of the adventures ascribed to them in the Thousand Nights and a Night. He loved wine, woman, and his songs; offended the Caliph by too conspicuous toping, agnosticism, and lechery; was often imprisoned and often released; came by leisurely stages to virtue, and ended by carrying beads and the Koran with him everywhere. But the society of the capital liked best the hymns that he had written to wine and sin:

Come, Suleiman! sing to me,

And the wine, quick, bring to me! …

While the flask goes twinkling round,

Pour me a cup that leaves me drowned

With oblivion—ne’er so nigh

Let the shrill muezzin cry!⁹⁹

Accumulate as many sins as thou canst:

The Lord is ready to relax His ire.

When the Day comes, forgiveness thou wilt find

Before a mighty King and gracious Sire;

And gnaw thy fingers, all that joy regretting

Which thou didst leave through terror of hell-fire.¹⁰⁰

The minor courts had their poets too, and Sayfu’l-Dawla provided a place for one who, almost unknown to Europe, is reckoned by the Arabs as their best. His name was Ahmad ibn Husein, but Islam remembers him as al-Mutannabi—“the pretender to prophecy.” Born at Kufa in 915, he studied at Damascus, announced himself as a prophet, was arrested and released, and settled down at the Aleppo court. Like Abu Nuwas, he made his own religion, and notoriously neglected to fast or pray or read the Koran;¹⁰¹ though he denounced life as not quite up to his standards, he enjoyed it too much to think of eternity. He celebrated Sayfu’s victories with such zest and verbal artifice that his poems are as popular in Arabic as they are untranslatable into English. One couplet proved mortal to him:

I am known to the horse-troop, the night, and the desert’s expanse;

Not more to paper and pen than to sword and the lance.

Attacked by robbers, he wished to flee; his slave inopportunely reminded him of these swashbuckling verses; al-Mutannabi resolved to live up to them, fought, and died of his wounds (965).¹⁰²

Eight years later the strangest of all Arab poets, Abu’l-’Ala al-Ma’arri was born at al-Ma‘arratu, near Aleppo. Smallpox left him blind at four; nevertheless he took up the career of a student, learned by heart the manuscripts that he liked in the libraries, traveled widely to hear famous masters, and returned to his village. During the next fifteen years his annual income was thirty dinars, some twelve dollars a month, which he shared with servant and guide; his poems won him fame, but as he refused to write encomiums, he nearly starved. In 1008 he visited Baghdad, was honored by poets and scholars, and perhaps picked up among the freethinkers of the capital some of the skepticism that spices his verse. In 1010 he went back to al-Ma’arratu, became rich, but lived to the end with the simplicity of a sage. He was a vegetarian à l’outrance, avoiding not only flesh and fowl, but milk, eggs, and honey as well; to take any of these from the animal world, he thought, was rank robbery. On the same principle he rejected the use of animal skins, blamed ladies for wearing furs, and recommended wooden shoes.¹⁰³ He died at eighty-four; and a pious pupil relates that 180 poets followed his funeral, and eighty-four savants recited eulogies at his grave.¹⁰⁴

We know him now chiefly through the 1592 short poems called briefly Luzumiyyat (Obligations). Instead of discussing woman and war, like his fellow poets, al-Ma’arri deals boldly with the most basic questions: Should we follow revelation, or reason?—Is life worth living?—Is there a life after death?—Does God exist? … Every now and then the poet professes his orthodoxy; he warns us, however, that this is a legitimate precaution against martyrdom, which was not to his taste: “I lift my voice to utter lies absurd; but speaking truth my hushed tones scarce are heard.”¹⁰⁵ He deprecates indiscriminate honesty: “Do not acquaint rascals with the essence of your religion, for so you expose yourself to ruin.”¹⁰⁶ In simple fact al-Ma’arri is a rationalist agnostic pessimist.

Some hope that an Imam with prophet’s gaze

Will rise and all the silent ranks amaze.

Oh, idle thought! There’s no Imam but Reason

To point the morning and the evening ways….

Shall we in these old tales discover truth,

Or are they worthless fables told to youth?

Our reason swears that they are only lies,

And reason’s tree bears verity for truth….

How oft, when young, my friends I would defame,

If our religious faiths were not the same;

But now my soul has traveled high and low;

Now all save Love, to me, is but a name.¹⁰⁷

He denounces the Moslem divines who “make religion serve the pelf of man,” who “fill the mosque with terror when they preach,” but conduct themselves no better than “some who drink to a tavern tune.” “You have been deceived, honest man, by a cunning knave who preaches to the women.”

To his own sordid ends the pulpit he ascends,

And though he disbelieves in resurrection,

Makes all his hearers quail whilst he unfolds a tale

Of Last Day scenes that stun the recollection.¹⁰⁸

The worst scoundrels, he thinks, are those who manage the holy places in Mecca; they will do anything for money. He advises his hearers not to waste their time in pilgrimage,¹⁰⁹ and to be content with one world.

The body nothing feels when soul is flown;

Shall spirit feel, unbodied and alone? …¹¹⁰

We laugh, but inept is our laughter;

We should weep, and weep sore,

Who are shattered like glass, and thereafter

Remolded no more.¹¹¹

And he concludes: “If by God’s decree I shall be made into a clay pot that serves for ablutions, I am thankful and content.”¹¹² He believes in a God omnipotent and wise, and “marveled at a physician who denies the Creator after having studied anatomy.”¹¹³ But here too he raises difficulties. “Our natures did not become evil by our choice, but by the fates’ command….”

Why blame the world? The world is free

Of sin; the blame is yours and mine.

Grapes, wine, and drinker—these are three;

But who was at fault, I wonder—he

That pressed the grapes, or he that sipped the wine?

“I perceive,” he writes with Voltairean sarcasm, “that men are naturally unjust to one another, but there is no doubt of the justice of Him Who created injustice.”¹¹⁴ And he breaks out into the angry dogmatism of a Diderot:

O fool, awake! The rites ye sacred hold

Are but a cheat contrived by men of old,

Who lusted after wealth, and gained their lust,

And died in baseness—and their law is dust.¹¹⁵

Offended by what seemed to him the lies and cruelties of men, al-Ma’arri became a pessimist recluse, the Timon of Islam. Since the evils of society are due to the nature of man, reform is hopeless.¹¹⁶ The best thing is to live apart, to meet only a friend or two, to vegetate like some placid, half-solitary animal.¹¹⁷ Better yet is never to be born, for once born we must bear “torment and tribulation” until death yields us peace.

Life is a malady whose one medicine is death….

All come to die, alike householder and wanderer.

The earth seeketh, even as we, its livelihood day by day

Apportioned; it eats and drinks of human flesh and blood….

Meseemeth the crescent moon, that shines in the firmament

Is death’s curved spear, its point well sharpened,

And splendor of breaking day a sabre unsheathed by the Dawn.

We cannot escape these Reapers ourselves; but we can, like good Schopenhauerians, cheat them of the children we might have begotten.

If ye unto your sons would prove

By act how dearly them ye love,

Then every voice of wisdom joins

To bid you leave them in your loins.¹¹⁸

He obeyed his own counsel, and wrote for himself the pithiest, bitterest epitaph:

My sire brought this on me, but I on none.¹¹⁹*

We do not know how many Moslems shared the skepticism of al-Ma’arri; the revival of orthodoxy after his time served as a conscious or unconscious censor of the literature transmitted to posterity, and, as in Christendom, may mislead us into minimizing medieval doubt. Al-Mutannabi and al-Ma’arri marked the zenith of Arabic poetry; after them the supremacy of theology and the silencing of philosophy drove Arabic verse into the insincerity, artificial passion, and flowering elegance of courtly and trivial lays. But at the same time the resurrection of Persia and its self-liberation from Arab rule were stirring the nation to a veritable renaissance. The Persian tongue had never yielded to Arabic in the speech of the people; gradually, in the tenth century, reflecting the political and cultural independence of the Tabirid, Samanid, and Ghaznevid princes, it reasserted itself as the language of government and letters, and became New or Modern Persian, enriched itself with Arabic words, and adopted the graceful Arabic script. Persia now broke out in magnificent architecture and lordly poetry. To the Arab qasida or ode, qita or fragment, and ghazal or love poem, the poets of Iran added the mathnawi or poetic narrative, and the rubai (pl. rubaiyyat) or quatrain. Everything in Persia—patriotism, passion, philosophy, pederasty, piety—now blossomed into verse.

This efflorescence began with Rudagi (d. 954), who improvised poetry, sang ballads, and played the harp at the Samanid court of Bokhara. There, a generation later, Prince Nuh ibn Mansur asked the poet Daqiqi to put into verse the Khodainama, or Book of Kings, wherein Danishwar (c. 651) had gathered the legends of Persia. Daqiqi had written a thousand lines when he was stabbed to death by his favorite slave. Firdausi completed the task, and became the Homer of Persia.

Abu’l-Qasim Mansur (or Hasan) was born at Tus (near Mashhad) about 934. His father held an administrative post at the Samanid court, and bequeathed to his son a comfortable villa at Bazh, near Tus. Spending his leisure in antiquarian research, Abu’l-Qasim became interested in the Khodainama, and undertook to transform these prose stories into a national epic. He called his work Shahnama—book of the shahs—and, in the fashion of the time, took a pen name, Firdausi (garden), perhaps from the groves of his estate. After twenty-five years of labor he finished the poem in its first form, and set out for Ghazni (999?), hoping to present it to the great and terrible Mahmud.

An early Persian historian assures us that there were then “four hundred poets in constant attendance on Sultan Mahmud.”¹²⁰ It should have been an unsurpassable barrier, but Firdausi succeeded in interesting the vizier, who brought the immense manuscript to the Sultan’s attention. Mahmud (says one account) gave the poet comfortable quarters in the palace, turned over to him reams of historical material, and bade him incorporate these in the epic. All variations of the story agree that Mahmud promised him a gold dinar ($4.70) for each couplet of the revised poem. For an unknown time Firdausi labored; at last (c. 1010) the poem reached its final form in 60,000 couplets, and was sent to the Sultan. When Mahmud was about to remit the promised sum, certain courtiers protested that it was too much, and added that Firdausi was a Shi’ite and Mutazilite heretic. Mahmud sent 60,000 silver dirhems ($30,000). The poet, in anger and scorn, divided the money between a bath attendant and a sherbet seller, and fled to Herat. He hid for six months in a bookseller’s shop till Mahmud’s agents, instructed to arrest him, gave up the search. He found refuge with Shariyar, prince of Shirzad in Tabaristan; there he composed a bitter satire on Mahmud; but Shariyar, fearful of the Sultan, bought the poem for 100,000 dirhems, and destroyed it. If we may believe these figures, and our equivalents, poetry was one of the most lucrative professions in medieval Persia. Firdausi went to Baghdad, and there wrote a long narrative poem, Yusuf and Zuleika, a variant of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. Then, an old man of seventy-six, he returned to Tus. Ten years later Mahmud, struck by the vigor of a couplet that he heard quoted, asked the author’s name; when he learned that it was by Firdausi he regretted his failure to reward the poet as promised. He despatched to Firdausi a caravan carrying 60,000 gold dinars’ worth of indigo, and a letter of apology. As the caravan entered Tus it encountered the poet’s funeral (1020?).

The Shahnama is one of the major works of the world’s literature, if only in size. There is something noble in the picture of a poet putting aside trivial subjects and easy tasks, and giving thirty-five years of his life to telling his country’s story in 120,000 lines—far exceeding the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Here was an old man mad about Persia, enamored of every detail in its records, whether legend or fact; his epic is half finished before it reaches history. He begins with the mythical figures of the Avesta, tells of Gayamurth, the Zoroastrian Adam, and then of Gayamurth’s mighty grandson Jamshid, who “reigned over the land 700 years…. The world was happier because of him; death was unknown, neither sorrow nor pain.” But after a few centuries “his heart was lifted up with pride, and he forgot whence came his weal…. He beheld only himself on the earth, called himself God, and sent forth his image to be worshiped.”¹²¹ At last we come to the hero of the epic, Rustam, son of the feudal noble Zal. When Rustam is 500 years old Zal falls in love with a slave girl, and through her gives Rustam a brother. Rustam serves and saves three kings, and retires from military life at the age of 400. His faithful steed Rakhsh ages as leisurely, is almost as great a hero, and receives from Firdausi the affectionate attention bestowed by any Persian upon a fine horse. There are pretty love stories in the Shahnama, and something of the troubadour’s reverence for woman; there are charming pictures of fair women—one of the Queen Sudaveh, who “was veiled that none might behold her beauty; and she went with the men as the sun marches behind a cloud.”¹²² But in the case of Rustam the love motif plays a minor part; Firdausi recognizes that the dramas of parental and filial love can be more affecting than those of sexual romance. Amid a distant campaign Rustam has an amour with a Turkish lady, Tahmineh, and then loses track of her; she brings up their son Sohrab in sorrow and pride, telling the youth of his great but vanished father; in a war of Turks against Persians son and sire, neither knowing the other, meet spear to spear. Rustam admires the courage of the handsome lad, and offers to spare him; the boy disdainfully refuses, fights bravely, and is mortally wounded. Dying, he mourns that he has never yet seen his father Rustam; the victor perceives that he has slain his son. Sohrab’s horse, riderless, regains the Turkish camp, and the news is brought to Sohrab’s mother in one of the finest scenes of the epic.

The strong emotion choked her panting breath,

Her veins seemed withered by the cold of death.

The trembling matrons hastening round her mourned,

With piercing cries, till fluttering life returned.

Then gazing up, distraught, she wept again,

And frantic, seeing ’midst her pitying train

The favorite steed—now more than ever dear,

Its limbs she kissed, and bathed with many a tear;

Clasping the mail Sohrab in battle wore,

With burning lips she kissed it o’er and o’er;

His martial robes she in her arms compressed,

And like an infant strained them to her breast.¹²³

It is a vivid narrative, moving rapidly from episode to episode, and finding unity only from the unseen presence of the beloved fatherland in every line. We—who have less leisure than men had before so many labor-saving devices were invented—cannot spare the time to read all these couplets and bury all these kings; but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales. After 200 pages we tire of Rustam’s victories over demons, dragons, magicians, Turks. But we are not Persians; we have not heard the sonorous roll of the original verse; we cannot be moved as Persians are, who in a single province have named 300 villages after Rustam. In 1934 the educated world of Asia, Europe, and the Americas joined in commemorating the millennial anniversary of the poet whose massive book has been for a thousand years the bulwark of the Persian soul.

VII. ART*

When the Arabs invaded Syria their sole art was poetry. Mohammed was believed to have forbidden sculpture and painting as accomplices of idolatry—and music, rich silks, gold and silver ornaments as epicurean degeneracy; and though all these prohibitions were gradually overcome, they almost confined Moslem art in this period to architecture, pottery, and decoration. The Arabs themselves, so recently nomads or merchants, had no mature facility in art; they recognized their limitations, and employed the artists and artisans—adapted the art forms and traditions—of Byzantium, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, and India. The Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem and the Mosque of Walid II at Damascus were purely Byzantine, even in their decoration. Farther east the old Assyrian and Babylonian tile decoration, and current Armenian and Nestorian church forms, were adopted; and in Persia, after much destruction of Sasanian literature and art, Islam saw the advantages of the column cluster, the pointed arch, the vault, and those styles of floral and geometrical ornament which finally flowered into the arabesque. The result was no mere imitation, but a brilliant synthesis that justified all borrowing. From the Alhambra in Spain to the Taj Mahal in India, Islamic art overrode all limits of place and time, laughed at distinctions of race and blood, developed a unique and yet varied character, and expressed the human spirit with a profuse delicacy never surpassed.

Moslem architecture, like most architecture in the Age of Faith, was almost entirely religious; the dwellings of men were designed for brief mortality, but the house of God was to be, at least internally, a thing of beauty forever. Nevertheless, though the remains are scant, we hear of bridges, aqueducts, fountains, reservoirs, public baths, fortresses, and turreted walls built by engineer-architects who in the first centuries after the Arab conquest were in many cases Christian, but in after centuries were predominantly Moslem. The Crusaders found excellent military architecture at Aleppo, Baalbek, and elsewhere in the Islamic East, learned there the uses of machicolated walls, and took from their foes many an idea for their own incomparable castles and forts. The Alcazar at Seville and the Alhambra at Granada were fortresses and palaces combined.

Of Umayyad palaces little survives except a country house at Qusayr Amra in the desert east of the Dead Sea, where the ruins show vaulted baths and frescoed walls. The palace of Adud ad-Dawla at Shiraz, we are assured, had 360 rooms, one for each day in the year, each painted in a unique color combination; one of its largest rooms was a library two stories high, arcaded and vaulted; “there was no book on any subject,” says an enthusiastic Moslem, “of which there was not here a copy.”¹²⁴ Scheherazade’s descriptions of Baghdad mansions are fiction, but suggest an ornate magnificence of internal decoration.¹²⁵ Rich men had villas in the country as well as homes in the city; even in the city they had formal gardens; but around their villas these gardens became “paradises”—parks with springs, brooks, fountains, tiled pool, rare flowers, shade, fruit, and nut trees, and usually a pavilion for enjoying the open air without the glare of the sun. In Persia there was a religion of flowers; rose festivals were celebrated with sumptuous displays; the roses of Shiraz and Firuzabad were world famous; roses with a hundred petals were gifts grateful to a caliph or a king.¹²⁶

The houses of the poor were then, as they are now, rectangles of sun-dried brick cemented with mud, and roofed with a mixture of mud, stalks, branches, palm leaves, and straw. Better homes had an interior court with a water basin, perhaps a tree; sometimes a wooden colonnade and cloister between court and rooms. Houses rarely faced or opened upon the street; they were citadels of privacy, built for security and peace. Some had secret doors for sudden escape from arrest or attack, or for the inconspicuous entry of a paramour.¹²⁷ In all but the poorest houses there were separate quarters for the women, occasionally with their own court. Rich houses had a complicated suite of bathrooms, but most dwellings had no plumbing; water was carried in, waste was carried out. Fashionable homes might have two stories, with a central living room rising to a dome, and a second-story balcony facing the court. All except the poorest houses had at least one window grille (mashrabiyyah), a lattice of woodwork to let in light without heat, and allow the occupants to look out unseen; these grilles were often elegantly carved, and served as models for the stone or metal screens that adorned the palace or the mosque. There was no fireplace; heat was provided by charcoal-burning portable braziers. Walls were of plaster, usually painted in many colors. Floors were covered with hand-woven rugs. There might be a chair or two, but the Moslem preferred to squat. Near the wall, on three sides of the room, the floor was raised a foot or so, forming a diwan, and was furnished with cushions. There were no specific bedrooms; the bed was a mattress which, during the day, was rolled up and placed in a closet, as in modern Japan. Furniture was simple: some vases, utensils, lamps, and perhaps a niche for books. The Oriental is rich in the simplicity of his needs.

For the poor and pious Moslem it was enough that the mosque itself should be beautiful. It was built with his labor and dirhems; it gathered up his arts and crafts and laid them like a rich carpet at Allah’s feet; and that beauty and splendor all men might enjoy. Usually the mosque was situated near the market place, easily accessible. It was not always impressive from without; except for its façade it might be indistinguishable from—even physically attached to—the neighboring structures; and it was rarely built of any more lordly material than stucco-faced brick. Its functions determined its forms: a rectangular court to hold the congregation; a central basin and fountain for ablutions; a surrounding arcaded portico for shelter, shade, and schools; and, on the side of the court facing Mecca, the mosque proper, usually an enclosed section of the portico. It too was rectangular, allowing the worshipers to stand in long lines, again facing Mecca. The edifice might be crowned with a dome, almost always built of bricks, each layer projecting a bit inward beyond the layer beneath, with a surface of plaster to conceal the deviations.¹²⁸ As in Sasanian and Byzantine architecture, the transition from rectangular base to circular dome was mediated by pendentives or squinches. More characteristic of mosque architecture was the minaret (manara, a lighthouse); probably the Syrian Moslems developed it from the Babylonian ziggurat and the bell tower of Christian churches, the Persian Moslems took the cylindrical form from India, and the African Moslems were influenced in its design by the four-cornered Pharos or lighthouse of Alexandria;¹²⁹ perhaps the four corner towers of the old temple area at Damascus influenced the form.¹³⁰ In this early period the minaret was simple and mostly unadorned; only in the following centuries would it achieve the lofty slenderness, fragile balconies, decorative arcades, and faïence surfaces that would lead Fergusson to call it “the most graceful form of tower architecture in the world.”¹³¹

The most brilliant and varied decoration was reserved for the interior of the mosque: mosaics and brilliant tiles on floor and mihrab; exquisite shapes and hues of glass in windows and lamps; rich carpets and prayer rugs on the pavement; facings of colored marble for the lower panels of the walls; lovely friezes of Arabic script running round mihrabs or cornices; delicate carvings of wood or ivory, or graceful molding of metal, in doors, ceilings, pulpits, and screens…. The pulpit itself, or minbar, was of wood carefully carved, and inlaid with ebony or ivory. Near it was the diqqa, a reading desk supported by small columns and holding the Koran; the book itself, of course, was a work of calligraphic and miniaturist art. To show the qibla or direction of Mecca, a niche was cut into the wall, possibly in imitation of the Christian apse. This mihrab was elaborated until it became almost an altar or chapel, and all the skill of Moslem artists was deployed to make it beautiful with faïence or mosaic, floral or scriptural moldings or reliefs, and colorful patterns in brick, stucco, marble, terra cotta, or tile.

We probably owe this splendor of ornament to the Semitic prohibition of human or animal forms in art: as if in compensation, the Moslem artist invented or adopted an overflowing abundance of non-representational forms. He sought an outlet first in geometrical figures—line, angle, square, cube, polygon, cone, spiral, ellipse, circle, sphere; he repeated these in a hundred combinations, and developed them into swirls, guilloches, reticulations, entrelacs, and stars; passing to floral forms, he designed, in many materials, wreaths, vines, or rosettes of lotus, acanthus, or palm tendrils or leaves; in the tenth century he merged all these in the arabesque; and to them all, as a unique and major ornament, he added the Arabic script. Taking usually the Kufic characters, he lifted them vertically, or expanded them laterally, or dressed them in flourishes and points, and turned the alphabet into a work of art. As religious prohibitions slackened, he introduced new motifs of decoration by representing the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, or strange composite animals that dwelt only in his whimsical fantasy. His flair for adornment enriched every form of art—mosaic, miniature, pottery, textiles, rugs; and in nearly every case the design had the disciplined unity of a dominant form or motif developed from center to border, or from beginning to end, as in the elaboration of a musical theme. No material was thought too obdurate for such ornament; wood, metal, brick, stucco, stone, terra cotta, glass, tile, and faïence became the vehicles of such a poetry of abstract forms as no art, not even the Chinese, had ever achieved before.

So illuminated, Islamic architecture raised in Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Transoxiana, India, Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, Morocco, and Spain an endless chain of mosques in which masculine strength of outward form was always balanced by feminine grace and delicacy of interior ornament. The mosques of Medina, Mecca, Jerusalem, Ramleh, Damascus, Kufa, Basra, Shiraz, Nishapur, and Ardebil; the Mosque of Jafar at Baghdad, the Great Mosque of Samarra, the Zakariyah Mosque of Aleppo, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun and the el-Azhar in old Cairo, the Great Mosque of Tunis, the Sidi Oqba Mosque of Qairuan, the Blue Mosque of Cordova—we can do no less, and no more, than name them, for of the hundreds such that were built in this period only a dozen remain distinguishable; indiscriminate time has leveled the rest through earthquake, negligence, or war.

Persia alone—a fraction of Islam—has yielded to recent research such unsuspected architectural splendor as marks a major event in our rediscovery of the past.* The revelation was too long delayed; already many masterpieces of Persian architecture had crumbled to earth. Muqaddasi ranked the mosque of Fasa with that of Medina, and the mosque of Turshiz with the Great Mosque of Damascus; the mosque of Nishapur, with its marble columns, gold tiles, and richly carved walls, was one of the wonders of the time; and “no mosque in Khurasan or Sistan equaled in beauty” the mosque of Herat.¹³² We may vaguely judge the exuberance and quality of Persian architecture in the ninth and tenth centuries from the stucco reliefs and carved columns and capitals of the mihrab in the Congregational Mosque at Nayin, now mostly destroyed, and the two lovely minarets that survive at Damghan. The Friday Mosque at Ardistan (1055) still shows a handsome mihrab and portal, and many elements that were to appear later in Gothic: pointed arches, groined pendentives, cross vaults, and ribbed dome.¹³³ In these and most Persian mosques and palaces the building material was brick, as in Sumerian and Mesopotamian antiquity; stone was rare and costly, clay and heat were plentiful; yet the Persian artist transformed brick layers with light and shade, novel patterns, and divers attitudes into such variety of decoration as that modest substance had never known before. Over the brick, in special places like portals, minbars, and mihrabs, the Persian potter laid varicolored mosaics and the most brilliant tiles; and in the eleventh century he made bright surfaces more resplendent still with luster-painted faïence. So every art in Islam humbly and proudly served the mosque.

Sculpture, forbidden to make statues lest idolatry return, devoted itself to decorative reliefs. Stone was skillfully carved, and stucco, before it hardened, was shaped by hand into a rich diversity of designs. One impressive sample remains. At Mshatta, in the Syrian desert east of the Jordan, Walid II began (c. 743), and left unfinished, a winter palace; along the lower surface of the façade ran a sculptured stone frieze of extraordinary excellence—triangles, rosettes, and borders intricately carved with flowers, fruits, birds, beasts, and trailing arabesques; this chef-d’oeuvre, transferred to Berlin in 1904, has survived the Second World War. Woodworkers beautified windows, doors, screens, balconies, ceilings, tables, lecterns, pulpits, and mihrabs with such exquisite carving as may be seen in a panel from Takrit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Workers in ivory and bone adorned mosques, Korans, furniture, utensils, and persons with carvings and inlays; from this age only one piece has come to us—an elephant rook (in the National Museum at Florence) precariously ascribed to the ninth century and to a chess set allegedly sent by Harun to Charlemagne.¹³⁴ The metalworkers of Islam acquired Sasanian techniques, made great bronze, brass, or copper lamps, ewers, bowls, jugs, mugs, cups, basins, and braziers; cast them playfully into the forms of lions, dragons, sphinxes, peacocks, and doves; and sometimes incised them with exquisite patterns, as in a lacelike lamp in the Art Institute of Chicago. Some craftsmen filled incised designs with silver or gold, and made “damascened” metal—an art practiced, but not originated, at Damascus.¹³⁵ The swords of Damascus were of highly tempered steel, adorned with reliefs or inlaid with arabesques, scripts, or other patterns in gold or silver threads. The metalworkers of Islam stood at the very top of their art.

When the Moslem conquest settled down to cultural absorption, Mohammedan pottery found itself heir, in Asia, Africa, and Spain, to five ceramic traditions: Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Mesopotamian, Persian, Chinese. Sarre discovered at Samarra some Tang pottery, including porcelain; and early Islamic-Persian wares were frankly copied from Chinese prototypes. Pottery centers developed at Baghdad, Samarra, Rayy, and many other towns. By the tenth century Persian potters were making almost every kind of pottery except porcelain, in every form from hand spittoons to monstrous vases “large enough to hold at least one of the Forty Thieves.”¹³⁶ At its best Persian pottery showed a subtlety of conception, a splendor of color, a refinement of workmanship, second only to the Chinese and Japanese; for six centuries it had no rival this side of the Pamirs.¹³⁷ It was a favorite and congenial art with the Persians; aristocrats collected its masterpieces jealously, and poets like al-Ma’arri and Omar Khayyam found in it many a metaphor for their philosophy. We hear of a ninth-century banquet at which poems were composed and dedicated to the bowls that adorned the board.¹³⁸

In that century the potters of Samarra and Baghdad distinguished themselves by making—perhaps inventing—lustered pottery: the decoration was painted in a metallic oxide upon the glazed coating of the clay, and the vessel was then submitted to a smoky and subdued second firing, which reduced the pigment to a thin layer of metal, and gave the glaze an iridescent glow. Lovely monochromes were produced in this manner, and still lovelier polychromes in gold, green, brown, yellow, and red, in a hundred almost fluid tints. The luster technique was applied also to the ancient Mesopotamian art of decorative tiles. The rich colors of these squares, and their harmonious combinations, gave unique splendor to the portals or mihrabs of a hundred mosques, and to many a palace wall. In the allied art of working glass the Moslems inherited all the skill of Egypt and Syria. Brilliant lamp shades were made in glass adorned with medallions, inscriptions, or floral designs; and perhaps in this period Syria inaugurated the art of enameled glass, which would reach its peak of excellence in the thirteenth century.

When we recall the exuberant and omnipresent use of painting and sculpture in Catholic cathedrals, and its importance as a vehicle of Christian creed and story, we are struck by the absence of the representative arts in Islam. The Koran had forbidden sculpture (v, 92), but it had said nothing about painting. However, a tradition ascribed to Aisha reported the Prophet as condemning pictures too.¹³⁹ Moslem law, Shi’ite as well as Sunnite, enforced the double prohibition. Doubtless Mohammed had been influenced by the Second Commandment and Judaic teaching, and partly by the notion that the artist, in giving form to living things, usurped the function of the Creator. Some theologians relaxed the prohibition, permitting pictures of inanimate things; some winked at the portrayal of animal or human figures on objects intended only for secular use. Certain Umayyad caliphs ignored the prohibitions; about 712 Walid I adorned his summer palace at Qusayr Amra with Hellenistic frescoes depicting hunters, dancing girls, women bathing, and himself on his throne.¹⁴⁰ The Abbasid caliphs professed piety, but had murals in their private chambers; al-Mutasim hired artists, probably Christian, to paint hunting scenes, priests, and naked dancing girls on the walls of his palace at Samarra; and al-Mutawakkil, who persecuted heretics, permitted Byzantine painters to add to these frescoes one that represented Christian monks and a Christian church.¹⁴¹ Mahmud of Ghazni decorated his palace with pictures of himself, his armies, and his elephants; and his son Masud, shortly before being deposed by the Seljuq Turks, covered the walls of his chambers at Herat with scenes based on Persian or Indian manuals of erotic techniques.¹⁴² A story tells how, at the home of a vizier, two artists vied with each other in realistic representation: Ibn Aziz proposed to paint a dancing girl so that she would seem to be coming out of the wall; al-Qasir undertook a harder task—to paint her so that she would seem to be going into the wall. Each succeeded so well that the vizier gave them robes of honor, and much gold.¹⁴³ Many other violations of the interdict could be listed; in Persia particularly we find living things pictured in joyous abundance, and in every form of pictorial art. Nevertheless the prohibition—supported by the people to the point of occasionally mutilating or destroying works of art—delayed the development of Islamic painting, largely restricted it to abstract ornament, almost excluded portraiture (yet we hear of forty portraits of Avicenna), and left the artists completely dependent upon royal or aristocratic patronage.

From this age no Moslem murals survive save those of Qusayr Amra and Samarra; they reveal a strange and barren marriage of Byzantine techniques with Sasanian designs. As if in compensation, Islamic miniatures are among the finest in history. Here fruition came to a varied heritage—Byzantine, Sasanian, and Chinese; and zealous hands carried on an art so intimately beautiful that one almost resents Gutenberg. Like chamber music in modern Europe, so in medieval Islam the illumination of manuscripts with miniature paintings was an art for the aristocratic few; only the rich could maintain an artist in the devoted poverty that produced these patient masterpieces. Here again decoration subordinated representation; perspective and modeling were deliberately ignored; a central motif or form—perhaps a geometrical figure or a single flower—was extended in a hundred variations, until nearly every inch, and even the border, of the page was filled with lines as carefully drawn as if incised. In secular works men, women, and animals might be introduced, in scenes of hunting, humor, or love; but always the ornament was the thing, the fanciful play of delicate line, the liquid flow of harmonious colors, the cool perfection of abstract beauty, intended for a mind at peace. Art is significance rendered with feeling through form; but the feeling must accept discipline, and the form must have structure and meaning, even if the meaning outreach the realm of words. This is the art of illumination, as of the profoundest music.

Calligraphy was an integral part of illumination; one must go as far as China to find again so fraternal a union of writing and design. From Kufa had come the Kufic letters, clumsily angular, crudely sharp; the calligraphers clothed these meager bones with vowel, inflectional, prosodic, diacritical marks, and little floral flourishes; so redeemed, the Kufic script became a frequent feature of architectural decoration. For cursive writing, however, the Naskhi form of the Arabic alphabet proved more attractive; its rounded characters and sinuous horizontal flow were of themselves a decoration; in all the world is no writing or print that equals it in beauty. By the tenth century it had gained the upper hand over Kufic in all but monumental or ceramic lettering; most of the Moslem books that have reached us from the Middle Ages are in Naskhi script. The majority of these surviving volumes are Korans. Merely to copy the holy book was a work of piety sure of divine reward; to illustrate it with pictures was accounted sacrilege; but to lavish beautiful handwriting upon it was deemed the noblest of the arts. Whereas miniaturists were hired artisans poorly paid, calligraphers were sought and honored with royal gifts, and numbered kings and statesmen in their ranks. A scrap of writing by a master’s hand was a priceless treasure; already in the tenth century there were bibliophiles who lived and moved and had their being in their collections of fine manuscripts, written on parchment with inks of black, blue, violet, red, and gold. Only a few such volumes have reached us from this age; the oldest is a Koran in the Cairo Library, dated 784. When we add that such works were bound in the softest, strongest leather, tooled or stamped with unexcelled artistry, and the cover itself in many instances adorned with an elegant design, we may without hyperbole rank Islamic books of the ninth to the eighteenth century as the finest ever issued. Which of us can be published in such splendor today?

In the embellishment of Islamic life all the arts mingled like the interlaces of a decorative theme. So the patterns of illumination and calligraphy were woven into textiles, burned into pottery, and mounted on portals and mihrabs. If medieval civilization made little distinction between artist and artisan it was not to belittle the artist but to ennoble the artisan; the goal of every industry was to become an art. The weaver, like the potter, made undistinguished products for ephemeral use; but sometimes his skill and patience found expression, his dream found form, in robes or hangings, rugs or coverings, embroideries or brocades, woven for many lifetimes, designed with the finesse of a miniature, and dyed in the gorgeous colors so favored of the East. Byzantine, Coptic, Sasanian, Chinese textiles were already famous when the Moslems conquered Syria, Persia, Egypt, and Transoxiana; Islam was quick to learn; and though the Prophet had proscribed silk, Moslem factories soon issued the sinful substance in bold abundance for men and women who sought forgiveness for their bodies as well as their souls. A “robe of honor” was the most precious present a caliph could offer his servitors. The Moslems became the leading silk merchants of the medieval world. Persian silk taftah was bought for European ladies as taffeta. Shiraz was famous for its woolen cloths, Baghdad for its baldachin* hangings and tabby silks; Khuzistan for fabrics of camel’s or goat’s hair; Khurasan for its sofa (Arabic suffah) covers, Tyre for its carpets, Bokhara for its prayer rugs, Herat for its gold brocades. No samples of these products from this period have survived the wear and tear of time; we can only surmise their excellence from later work, and the witness of the writers of their age. An entry in the archives of Harun al-Rashid notes “400,000 pieces of gold, the price of a robe of honor for Jafar, the son of Yahya the Vizier.”¹⁴⁴

VIII. MUSIC

Music, like sculpture, was at first a sin in Islam.¹⁴⁵ It was not forbidden in the Koran; but, if we may believe a dubious tradition, the Prophet, fearful of the songs and dances of promiscuous women, denounced musical instruments as the devil’s muezzin call to damnation. The theologians, and all the four schools of orthodox law, frowned upon music as raising the winds of passion; but some generously conceded that it was not sinful in itself. The people, always healthier in their conduct than in their creeds, held it as a proverb that “wine is as the body, music is as the soul, joy is their offspring.”¹⁴⁶ Music accompanied every stage of Moslem life, and filled a thousand and one Arabian nights with songs of love and war and death. Every palace, and many mansions, engaged minstrels to sing the songs of the poets, or their own. In the startling judgment of an historian fully competent to judge, “the cultivation of music by the Arabs in all its branches reduces to insignificance the recognition of the art in the history of any other country.”¹⁴⁷ No Western ear, except after long training, can quite appreciate the quality of Arabian music—its preference of melodic elaboration (arabesques of sound) to harmony and counterpoint, its division of tones not into halves but into thirds, its florid Oriental patterns of structure and rhythm. To us it seems repetitiously simple, monotonously mournful, formlessly weird; to the Arabs European music seems deficient in the number and subtlety of its tones, and vulgarly addicted to useless complexity and monumental noise. The meditative tenderness of Arabian music deeply affects the Moslem soul. Sa’di speaks of a boy “singing such a plaintive melody as would arrest a bird in its flight”;¹⁴⁸ al-Ghazali defined ecstasy as “the state that comes from listening to music”;¹⁴⁹ one Arabic book gives a chapter to those who fainted or died while listening to Moslem music; and religion, which at first denounced it, later adopted music for the intoxicating dervish ritual.

Moslem music began with ancient Semitic forms and tunes; developed in contact with Greek “modes” that were themselves of Asiatic origin; and felt strong influences from Persia and India. A musical notation, and much musical theory, were taken from the Greeks; al-Kindi, Avicenna, and the Brethren of Sincerity wrote at length on the subject; al-Farabi’s Grand Book on Music is the outstanding medieval production on the theory of music—“equal, if not superior, to anything that has come down to us from Greek sources.”¹⁵⁰ As early as the seventh century the Moslems wrote mensurable music (apparently unknown to Europe before 1190)¹⁵¹—their notation indicated the duration, as well as the pitch, of each note.

Among a hundred musical instruments the chief were the lute, lyre, pandore, psaltery, and flute, occasionally reinforced by horn, cymbals, tambourine, castanets, and drum. The lyre was a small harp. The lute was like our mandolin, with a long neck and a curved sounding board made of small glued segments of maple wood; the strings, of catgut, were plucked by the fingers. There were a dozen sizes and varieties of lute. The large lute was called qitara from the Greek kithara; our words guitar and lute (Arabic al-ud) are from the Arabic. Some string instruments were played with a bow, and the organ was known in both its pneumatic and its hydraulic forms. Certain Moslem cities, like Seville, were celebrated for making fine musical instruments, far superior to anything produced in contemporary Islam.¹⁵² Nearly all instrumental music was intended to accompany or introduce song. Performances were usually confined to four or five instruments at a time, but we also read of large orchestras;¹⁵³ and tradition ascribes to the Medina musician Surayj the first use of the baton.¹⁵⁴

Despite the Moslem madness for music, the status of musicians, except for renowned virtuosos, was low. Few men of the higher classes condescended to study the intoxicating art. The music of a rich household was provided by female slaves; and a school of law held that the testimony of a musician could not be accepted in court.¹⁵⁵ Dancing likewise was almost confined to slaves trained and hired; it was often erotic, often artistic; the Caliph Amin personally directed an all-night ballet in which a large number of girls danced and sang. Contact of the Arabs with Greeks and Persians raised the status of the musician. Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs showered largess upon the great performers of their time. Suleiman I offered prizes as high as 20,000 pieces of silver ($10,000) for a competition among the musicians of Mecca; Walid II held song tournaments, at one of which the first prize was 300,000 pieces of silver ($150,000);¹⁵⁶ these figures are presumably Oriental exaggerations. Mahdi invited to his court the Meccan singer Siyat, “whose soul warmed and chilled more than a hot bath”; and Harun al-Rashid took into his service Siyat’s pupil Ibrahim al-Mawsili (i.e., of Mosul), gave him 150,000 dirhems ($75,000), 10,000 more per month, and 100,000 for a single song.¹⁵⁷ Harun so loved music that—against the wont of his class—he encouraged the talent of his young half brother, Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi, who had a voice of tremendous power and three octaves’ range; time seems an impish circle when we hear that he led a kind of Romantic movement in Arabian music against the classical school of Ishaq, son of Ibrahim al-Mawsili.¹⁵⁸ Ishaq was by general consent the greatest musician ever produced by Islam. Al-Mamun used to say of him: “He never sang to me but what I felt that my possessions were increased.”¹⁵⁹

We get a pleasant picture of Moslem society, and of the stir made by music in the Moslem soul, in a story told by Ibrahim al-Mawsili’s pupil Mukhariq; we need not believe it to feel its significance:

After drinking with the Caliph a whole night, I asked his permission to take the air,… which he granted. While I was walking I saw a damsel who appeared as if the rising sun beamed from her face. She had a basket, and I followed her. She stopped at a fruiterer’s, and bought some fruit; and observing that I was following her, she looked back and abused me several times; but still I followed her until she arrived at a great door…. When she had entered, and the door was closed behind her, I sat down opposite to it, deprived of my reason by her beauty…. The sun went down upon me while I sat there; and at length there came two handsome young men on asses, and they knocked at the door, and when they were admitted, I entered with them; the master of the house thinking that I was their companion, and they imagining that I was one of his friends. A repast was brought us, and we ate, and washed our hands, and were perfumed. The master of the house then said to the two young men, “Have ye any desire that I should call such a one?” (mentioning a woman’s name). They answered: “If thou wilt grant us the favor, well.” So he called for her, and she came, and lo, she was the maiden whom I had seen…. A servant maid preceded her, bearing her lute, which she placed in her lap. Wine was then brought, and she sang, while we drank and shook with delight. “Whose air is that?” they asked. She answered, “My master Mukhariq’s.” She then sang another air, which she said was also mine, while they drank by pints; she looking aside doubtfully at me until I lost my patience, and called out to her to do her best; but in attempting to do so, singing a third air, she overstrained her voice, and I said, “Thou hast made a mistake”; upon which she threw the lute from her lap in anger, saying … “Take it thyself, and let us hear thee.” I answered, “Well”; and having taken it and tuned it perfectly, I sang the first of the airs which she had sung before me; whereupon all of them sprang to their feet and kissed my head. I then sang the second air, and the third; and their reason almost fled with ecstasy.

The master of the house, after asking his guests and being told by them that they knew me not, came to me, and kissing my hand, said, “By Allah, my master, who art thou?” I answered, “By Allah, I am the singer Mukhariq.” “And for what purpose,” said he, kissing both my hands, “earnest thou hither?” I replied, “As a sponger”—and I related what had happened with respect to the maiden. Thereupon he looked toward his two companions and said to them: “Tell me, by Allah, do ye not know that I gave for that girl 30,000 dirhems ($15,000), and have refused to sell her?” They answered, “It is so.” Then, said he, “I take you as witnesses that I have given her to him.” “And we,” said the two friends, “will pay thee two-thirds of her price.” So he put me in possession of the girl; and in the evening, when I departed, he presented me also with rich robes and other gifts, with all of which I went away. And as I passed the places where the maiden had abused me, I said to her, “Repeat thy words to me”; but she would not for shame. Holding the girl’s hand, I went with her to the Caliph, whom I found in anger at my long absence; but when I related my story to him he was surprised, and laughed, and ordered that the master of the house and his two friends should be brought before him, that he might requite them; to the former he gave 40,000 dirhems; to each of his two friends 30,000; and to me 100,000; and I kissed his feet and departed.¹⁶⁰

CHAPTER XIII

Western Islam

641–1086

I. THE CONQUEST OF AFRICA

THE Near East was but a part of the Islamic world. Egypt under the Moslems resurrected her Pharaonic glory; Tunis, Sicily, and Morocco recovered orderly government under Arab leadership, and a passing brilliance illuminated Qairwan, Palermo, and Fez; Moorish Spain was a peak in the history of civilization; and later the Moslem Moguls, ruling India, would “build like giants and finish like jewelers.”

While Khalid and other conquerors subdued the East, Amr ibn al-As, only seven years after Mohammed’s death, set out from Gaza in Palestine, captured Pelusium and Memphis, and marched upon Alexandria. Egypt had ports and naval bases, and Arab power needed a fleet; Egypt exported corn to Constantinople, and Arabia needed corn. The Byzantine government in Egypt had for centuries used Arab mercenaries as police; these were no hindrance to the conquerors. The Monophysite Christians of Egypt had suffered Byzantine persecution; they received the Moslems with open arms, helped them to take Memphis, guided them into Alexandria. When it fell to Amr after a siege of twenty-three months (641), he wrote to the Caliph Omar: “It is impossible to enumerate the riches of this great city, or to describe its beauty; I shall content myself with observing that it contains 4000 palaces, 400 baths, 400 theaters.”¹ Amr prevented pillage, preferring taxation. Unable to understand the theological differences among the Christian sects, he forbade his Monophysite allies to revenge themselves upon their orthodox foes, and upset the custom of centuries by proclaiming freedom of worship for all.

Did Amr destroy the Alexandrian Library? The earliest mention of this story is found in Abd al-Latif (1162–1231), a Moslem scientist;² it is more fully given in Bar-Hebraeus (1226–86), a Christianized Jew of eastern Syria, who wrote in Arabic, under the name of Abu-’l-Faraj, an epitome of world history. In his account an Alexandrian grammarian, John Philoponus, asked Amr to give him the manuscripts of the library; Amr wrote to Omar for permission; the Caliph, we are told, replied: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious, and should be destroyed”; legend shortens this probably legendary answer to “Burn the libraries, for they are contained in one book”—the Koran. According to Bar-Hebraeus, Amr distributed the contents of the library among the city’s public baths, whose 4000 furnaces were fueled for six months with the papyrus and parchment rolls (642). Against this story it should be noted that (1) a large part of the library had been destroyed by Christian ardor under the Patriarch Theophilus in 392;³ (2) the remainder had suffered such hostility and neglect that “most of the collection had disappeared by 642”;⁴ and (3) in the 500 years between the supposed event and its first reporter no Christian historian mentions it, though one of them, Eutychius, Archbishop of Alexandria in 933, described the Arab conquest of Alexandria in great detail.⁵ The story is now generally rejected as a fable. In any case the gradual dissolution of the Alexandrian Library was a tragedy of some moment, for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Æschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy.

Amr administered Egypt competently. Part of the oppressive taxation financed the repair of canals and dikes, and the reopening of an eighty-mile canal between the Nile and the Red Sea; ships could now sail from the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean.⁶ (This canal was again choked with sand in 723, and was abandoned.) Amr built a new capital on the site where he had pitched his camp in 641; it was called al-Fustat, apparently from the Arabic for tent; it was the first form of Cairo. There for two centuries (661–868) Moslem governors ruled Egypt for the caliphs of Damascus or Baghdad.

Every conquest creates a new frontier, which, being exposed to danger, suggests further conquest. To protect Moslem Egypt from flank attack by Byzantine Cyrene, an army of 40,000 Moslems advanced through the desert to Barca, took it, and marched to the neighborhood of Carthage. The Moslem general planted his spear in the sand some eighty miles south of the modern Tunis, built a camp, and so founded (670) one of Islam’s major cities, Qairwan—“the resting place.” Realizing that the capture of Carthage would give the Moslems control of the Mediterranean and an open road to Spain, the Greek emperor sent troops and a fleet; the Berbers, forgetting for a moment their hatred of Rome, joined in defending the city; and it was not till 698 that Carthage was subdued. Soon thereafter Africa was conquered to the Atlantic’s shores. The Berbers were persuaded, almost on their own terms, to accept Moslem rule, and presently the Moslem faith. Africa was divided into three provinces: Egypt with its capital at al-Fustat, Ifriqiya with its capital at Qairwan, Maghreb (Morocco) with its capital at Fez.

For a century even these provinces acknowledged the Eastern caliphs as their sovereigns. But the difficulties of communication and transport were increased by the removal of the caliphate to Baghdad; and one by one the African provinces became independent kingdoms. An Idrisid dynasty (789–974) ruled at Fez, an Aghlabid dynasty (800–909) at Qairwan, and a Tulunid dynasty (869–905) in Egypt. That ancient granary, no longer robbed of its product by foreign masters, entered upon a minor renaissance. Ahmad ibn Tulun (869–84) conquered Syria for Egypt, built a new capital at Qatai (a suburb of al-Fustat), promoted learning and art, raised palaces, public baths, a hospital, and the great mosque that still stands as his monument. His son Khumarawayh (884–95) transmuted this energy into luxury, walled his palace with gold, and taxed his people to provide himself with a pool of quicksilver on which his bed of inflated leather cushions might gently float to win him sleep. Forty years after his death the Tulunids were replaced by another Turkish dynasty, the Ikshidid (935–69). These African monarchies, having no roots in the blood or traditions of the people, had to base their rule on military force and leadership; and when wealth weakened their martial ardor their power melted away.

The greatest of the African dynasties reinforced its military supremacy by associating itself with an almost fanatical religious belief. About 905 Abu Abdallah appeared in Tunisia, preached the Ismaili doctrine of the seven Imams, proclaimed the early coming of the Mahdi or Savior, and won such a following among the Berbers that he was able to overthrow the Aghlabid rule in Qairwan. To meet the expectations he had aroused he summoned from Arabia Obeidallah ibn Muhammad, alleged grandson of the Ismaili prophet Abdallah, hailed him as the Mahdi, made him king (909), and was soon put to death by his king’s command. Obeidallah claimed descent from Fatima, and gave her name to his dynasty.

Under the Aghlabids and Fatimids North Africa renewed the prosperity it had known in the heyday of Carthage and under imperial Rome. In the youth of their vigor the Moslem conquerors in the ninth century opened three routes, 1500 to 2000 miles long, across the Sahara to Lake Chad and Timbuctu; northward and westward they established ports at Bône, Oran, Ceuta, and Tangier; a fructifying commerce bound the Sudan with the Mediterranean, and Eastern Islam with Morocco and Spain. Spanish Moslem refugees brought to Morocco the art of leather; Fez flourished as a center of exchange with Spain, and became famous for its dyes, perfumes, and rimless cylindrical red hats.

In 969 the Fatimids wrested Egypt from the Ikshidids, and soon thereafter spread their rule over Arabia and Syria. The Fatimid Caliph Muizz transferred his capital to Qahira (Cairo): as Qatai had been a northeastern extension of Fustat, so Qahira (“the victorious”) was a northeastern prolongation of Qatai, and, like its predecessors, began as a military camp. Under Muizz (953–75) and his son Aziz (975–96), the vizier Yaqub ibn Qillis, a Baghdad Jew converted to Islam, reorganized the administration of Egypt, and made the Fatimids the richest rulers of their time. When Muizz’ sister Rashida died she left 2,700,000 dinars ($12,825,000), and 12,000 robes; when his sister Abda died she left 3,000 silver vases, 400 swords damascened in gold, 30,000 pieces of Sicilian textiles, and a hoard of jewelry.⁷ But nothing fails like success. The next caliph, al-Hakim (996–1021), went half mad with wealth and power. He arranged the assassination of several viziers, persecuted Christians and Jews, burned many churches and synagogues, and ordered the demolition of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem; the execution of this order was a contributory cause of the Crusades. As if to repeat the career of Caligula, he proclaimed himself a god, and sent missionaries to establish his cult among the people; when some of these preachers were killed he took Christians and Jews back into favor, and rebuilt their shrines. He was assassinated at the age of thirty-six.

Despite these royal prerogatives Egypt prospered as the commercial link between Europe and Asia. Increasingly the merchants of India and China sailed past the Persian Gulf and up the Red Sea and the Nile into Egypt; the wealth and power of Baghdad declined, those of Cairo grew. Nasir-i-Khosru, visiting the new capital in 1047, described it as having 20,000 houses, mostly of brick, rising to five or six stories, and 20,000 shops “so filled with gold, jewelry, embroideries, and satins that there was no room to sit down.”⁸ The main streets were protected against the sun, and were lighted at night by lamps. Prices were fixed by the government, and anyone caught charging more was paraded through the city on a camel, ringing a bell and confessing his crime.⁹ Millionaires were numerous; one merchant, a Christian, fed the whole population at his own expense during five years of famine caused by the low level of the Nile; and Yaqub ibn Qillis left an estate of some $30,000,000.¹⁰ Such men joined with the Fatimid caliphs in building mosques, libraries, and colleges, and fostering the sciences and the arts. Despite occasional cruelties, wasteful luxuries, the usual exploitation of labor, and the proper number of wars, the rule of the Fatimids was in general beneficent and liberal, and could compare, in prosperity and culture, with any age in Egyptian history.¹¹

The wealth of the Fatimids reached its peak in the long reign of Mustansir (1036–94), the son of a Sudanese slave. He built for himself a pleasure pavilion, and lived a life of music, wine, and ease; “this,” he said, “is more pleasant than staring at the Black Stone, listening to the muezzin’s drone, and drinking impure water” (from Mecca’s holy well of Zemzem).¹² In 1067 his Turkish troops rebelled, raided his palace, and carried away, as loot, priceless treasures of art, great quantities of jewelry, and twenty-five camel-loads of manuscripts; some of these served the Turkish officers as fuel to heat their homes, while exquisite leather bindings mended the shoes of their slaves. When Mustansir died the Fatimid empire fell to pieces; its once powerful army broke into quarreling factions of Berbers, Sudanese, and Turks; Ifriqiya and Morocco had already seceded, Palestine revolted, Syria was lost. When, in 1171, Saladin dethroned the last Fatimid caliph, one more Egyptian dynasty had followed its predecessors through power and pleasure to decay.

II. ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA: 641–1058

The courts of Cairo, Qairwan, and Fez rivaled one another in the support of architecture, painting, music, poetry, and philosophy. But nearly all the surviving manuscripts of Islamic Africa in this period are hidden in libraries which Western scholarship is just beginning to explore; much of the art has perished, and only the mosques proclaim the vigor and spirit of the age. At Qairwan stands the mosque of Sidi Oqba, originally built in 670, seven times restored, and mostly dating from 838; its cloisters of round arches are upheld by hundreds of Corinthian columns from the ruins of Carthage; its pulpit is a masterpiece of wood carving, its mihrab a splendor of porphyry and faïence; its square and massive minaret—the oldest in the world¹³—set a Syrian style for the minarets of the West. This mosque made Qairwan the fourth holy city of Islam, one of “the four gates to Paradise.” Only less sacred and magnificent were the mosques of Fez and Marraqesh, of Tunis and Tripoli.

In Cairo the mosques were many and immense; 300 still adorn that charming capital. The mosque of Amr, begun in 642, was rebuilt in the tenth century; nothing remains of its early constituents except the fine Corinthian columns judiciously rescued from Roman and Byzantine ruins. The mosque of Ibn Tulun (878) precariously preserves its first form and ornament. A high crenellated wall surrounds its roomy court; within are pointed arches older than any others in Egypt except the arch of the Nilometer (865)—a structure built on an island in the Nile to measure the rise of the river; possibly this graceful and convenient form of the arch passed from Egypt through Sicily and the Normans to Gothic Europe.¹⁴ In the zigguratlike minaret, and in the domed tomb of Ibn Tulun, are horseshoe arches—one of the less pleasing features of Moslem art. It is told of Ibn Tulun that he had intended to raise the arches on 300 columns; but when he learned that these could be secured only by dismantling Roman or Christian edifices, he decided, instead, to support the arches with massive piers of brick;¹⁵ here again this mosque may have suggested a characteristic element of the Gothic style. Finally, as if to make the building a steppingstone to Chartres, some of the windows were filled with colored glass, some with grilles of stone in rosette or stellar or other geometrical designs; these, however, are of uncertain date.

In 970–2 Jauhar, the converted Christian slave who had conquered Egypt for the Fatimids, built the mosque of el-Azhar (“the brilliant”); some of the original structure is still in place; here too are pointed arches, rising on 380 columns of marble, granite, or porphyry. The mosque of al-Hakim (990–1012) was built of stone, and most of it survives, though in disuse and decay; some conception of its medieval splendor may be gathered from its elegant stucco arabesques, and the fine Kufic inscription of the frieze. Once these mosques, now as forbidding as fortresses (and doubtless so designed) were glorified with exquisite carving and lettering, mosaic, and tiled mihrabs, and chandeliers that have become museum rarities. The mosque of Ibn Tulun had 18,000 lamps, many of varicolored enameled glass.¹⁶

The minor arts were practiced in Islamic Africa with Moslem patience and finesse. Lustered tiles appear in the Qairwan mosque. Nasir-i-Khosru (1050) described Cairene pottery “so delicate and translucent that the hand placed on the outside can be seen from within.”¹⁷ Egyptian and Syrian glass continued their ancient excellence. Fatimid rock-crystal wares, preserved intact through a thousand years, are treasured in Venice, Florence, and the Louvre. Wood carvers delighted the eye with their work on mosque doors, pulpit panels, mihrabs, and window lattices. From their Coptic subjects the Egyptian Moslems took the art of decorating boxes, chests, tables, and other objects with inlay or marquetry of wood, ivory, bone, or mother-of-pearl. Jewelry abounded. When Turkish mercenaries raided the chambers of al-Mustansir they came away with thousands of articles in gold—inkstands, chessmen, vases, birds, artificial trees set with precious stones….¹⁸ Among the spoils were curtains of silk brocade worked with gold thread, and bearing the pictures and biographies of famous kings. From the Copts, again, the Moslems learned to stamp and print patterns upon textiles with wooden blocks; this technique was apparently carried from Islamic Egypt to Europe by Crusaders, and may have shared in the development of printing. European merchants rated Fatimid textiles above all others, and told with awe of Cairene and Alexandrian fabrics so fine that a robe could be drawn through a finger ring.¹⁹ We hear of luxurious Fatimid rugs, and of tents made of velvet, satin, damask, silk, and cloth of gold, and decorated with paintings; a tent made for Yazuri, al-Mustansir’s vizier, required the labor of 150 men over nine years, cost 30,000 dinars ($142,500), and claimed to picture all the known animal species of the world except homo lupus. All that remains of Fatimid paintings is some fragmentary frescoes in the Arab Museum at Cairo. No miniatures survive from Fatimid Egypt, but Maqrizi—who in the fifteenth century wrote a history of painting—tells us that the library of the Fatimid caliphs contained hundreds of richly illuminated manuscripts, including 2400 Korans.

In the days of al-Hakim the caliphal library at Cairo had 100,000 volumes; in al-Mustansir’s time, 200,000. We are told that the manuscripts were lent without charge to all responsible students. In 988 the vizier Yaqub ibn Qillis persuaded the Caliph Aziz to provide tuition and maintenance for thirty-five students in the mosque of el-Azhar; thus began the oldest existing university. As this madrasah developed it drew pupils from all the Moslem world, as the University of Paris, a century later, would draw them from all Europe. Caliphs, viziers, and rich individuals added year by year to the scholarships, until in our time el-Azhar has some 10,000 students and 300 professors.²⁰ One of the most pleasant sights of world travel is the assemblage of students in the cloisters of this thousand-year-old mosque, each group squatting in a semicircle at the base of a pillar before a seated savant. Famous scholars from all Islam came here to teach grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, poetry, logic, theology, Hadith, Koranic exegesis, and law. The students paid no fees, the teachers received no salaries. Dependent upon governmental subsidy and private philanthropy, the famous university tended to ever more zealous orthodoxy, and its directing ulemas or learned men had a discouraging effect upon Fatimid literature, philosophy, and science. We hear of no great poets under this dynasty.

Al-Hakim set up in Cairo a Dar al-Hikmah (“Hall of Wisdom”); its main function was to teach Ismaili Shi’ite theology; but its curriculum included astronomy and medicine. Al-Hakim financed an observatory, and helped Ali ibn Yunus (d. 1009), perhaps the greatest of Moslem astronomers. After seventeen years of observations Yunus completed the “Hakimite tables” of astral movements and periods, and gave more precise values than before to the inclination of the ecliptic, the precession of the equinoxes, and solar parallax.

The brightest name in Moslem Egyptian science is that of Muhammad ibn al-Haitham, known to medieval Europe as Alhazen. Born at Basra in 965, he won repute there as a mathematician and engineer. Hearing that al-Haitham had a plan for regulating the annual inundation of the Nile, al-Hakim invited him to Cairo. The plan proved impracticable, and al-Haitham had to hide in obscurity from the incalculable Caliph. Fascinated, like all medieval thinkers, by Aristotle’s attempt to formulate a rational synthesis of knowledge, he composed several commentaries on the works of the philosopher; none of these commentaries has reached us. We know al-Haitham chiefly by his Kitab al-Manazir, or Book of Optics; of all medieval productions this is probably the most thoroughly scientific in its method and thought. Al-Haitham studied the refraction of light through transparent mediums like air and water, and came so close to discovering the magnifying lens that Roger Bacon, Witelo, and other Europeans three centuries later based upon his work their own advances toward the microscope and the telescope. He rejected the theory of Euclid and Ptolemy that vision results from a ray leaving the eye and reaching the object; rather “the form of the perceived object passes into the eye, and is transmitted there by the transparent body”—the lens.²¹ He remarked the effect of the atmosphere in increasing the apparent size of sun or moon when near the horizon; showed that through atmospheric refraction the light of the sun reaches us even when the sun is as much as nineteen degrees below the horizon; and on this basis he calculated the height of the atmosphere at ten (English) miles. He analyzed the correlation between the weight and the density of the atmosphere, and the effect of atmospheric density upon the weight of objects. He studied with complex mathematical formulas the action of light on spherical or parabolic mirrors, and through the burning glass. He observed the half-moon shape of the sun’s image, during eclipses, on the wall opposite a small hole made in the window shutters; this is the first known mention of the camera obscura, or dark chamber, on which all photography depends. We could hardly exaggerate the influence of al-Haitham on European science. Without him Roger Bacon might never have been heard of; Bacon quotes him or refers to him at almost every step in that part of the Opus maius which deals with optics; and Part VI rests almost entirely on the findings of the Cairene physicist. As late as Kepler and Leonardo European studies of light were based upon al-Haitham’s work.

The most striking of all effects produced by the Arab conquest of North Africa was the gradual but almost complete disappearance of Christianity. The Berbers not only accepted Mohammedanism, they became its most fanatical defenders. Doubtless economic considerations entered: non-Moslems paid a head tax, and converts were for a time freed from it. When in 744 the Arab governor of Egypt offered this exemption, 24,000 Christians went over to Islam.²² Occasional but severe persecutions of Christians may have influenced many to conform to the ruling faith. In Egypt a Coptic minority held out bravely, built their churches like fortresses, maintained their worship in secret, and survive to this day. But the once crowded churches of Alexandria, Cyrene, Carthage, and Hippo were emptied and decayed; the memory of Athanasius, Cyril, and Augustine faded out; and the disputes of Arians, Donatists, and Monophysites gave way to the quarrels of Sunni and Ismaili Mohammedanism. The Fatimids propped up their power by gathering the Ismailites into a Grand Lodge of complex initiations and hierarchical degrees; the members were used for political espionage and intrigue; the forms of the order were transmitted to Jerusalem and Europe, and strongly influenced the organization, ritual, and garb of the Templars, the Illuminati, and the other secret fraternities of the Western world. The American businessman is periodically a zealous Mohammedan, proud of his secret doctrine, his Moroccan fez, and his Moslem shrine.

III. ISLAM IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: 649–1071

Having conquered Syria and Egypt, the Moslem leaders realized that they could not hold the coast without a fleet. Soon their men-of-war seized Cyprus and Rhodes, and defeated the Byzantine navy (652, 655). Corsica was occupied in 809, Sardinia in 810, Crete in 823, Malta in 870. In 827 the old struggle between Greece and Carthage for Sicily was resumed; the Aghlabid caliphs of Qairwan sent expedition after expedition, and the conquest proceeded with leisurely bloodshed and rapine. Palermo fell in 831, Messina in 843, Syracuse in 878, Taormina in 902. When the Fatimid caliphs succeeded to the Aghlabid power (909) they inherited Sicily as part of their domain. When the Fatimids removed their seat to Cairo their governor of Sicily, Husein al-Kalbi, made himself emir with nearly sovereign authority, and established that Kalbite dynasty under which Moslem civilization in Sicily reached its height.

Fortified by mastery of the Mediterranean, the Saracens now looked appreciatively on the cities of southern Italy. As piracy was quite within the bounds of honored custom at this time, and Christians and Moslems raided Moslem or Christian shores to capture infidels for sale as slaves, Saracen fleets, mostly from Tunisia or Sicily, began in the ninth century to attack Italian ports. In 841 the Moslems took Bari, the main Byzantine base in southeastern Italy. A year later, invited by the Lombard Duke of Benevento to help him against Salerno, they swept across Italy and back, despoiling fields and monasteries as they went. In 846 eleven hundred Moslems landed at Ostia, marched up to the walls of Rome, freely plundered the suburbs and the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, and leisurely returned to their ships. Seeing that no civil authority could organize Italian defense, Pope Leo IV took charge, bound Amalfi, Naples, Gaeta, and Rome in alliance, and had a chain stretched across the Tiber to halt any enemy. In 849 the Saracens made another attempt to seize the citadel of Western Christianity. The united Italian fleet, blessed by the Pope, gave them battle, and routed them—a scene pictured by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican. In 866 the Emperor Louis II came down from Germany, and drove the marauding Moslems of south Italy back upon Bari and Taranto. By 884 they were expelled from the peninsula.

But their raids continued, and central Italy lived through a generation of daily fear. In 876 they pillaged the Campagna; Rome was so endangered that the pope paid the Saracens a yearly bribe of 25,000 mancusi (c. $25,000) to keep the peace.²³ In 884 they burned the great monastery of Monte Cassino to the ground; in sporadic attacks they ravaged the valley of the Anio; finally the combined forces of the pope, the Greek and German emperors, and the cities of southern and central Italy defeated them on the Garigliano (916), and a tragic century of invasion came to an end. Italy, perhaps Christianity, had had a narrow escape; had Rome fallen, the Saracens would have advanced upon Venice; and Venice taken, Constantinople would have been wedged in between two concentrations of Moslem power. On such chances of battle hung the theology of billions of men.

Meanwhile the polyglot culture of Sicily, yielding with the grace of habit to new conquerors, took on a Moslem veneer. Sicilians, Greeks, Lombards, Jews, Berbers, and Arabs mingled in the streets of the Moslem capital—ancient Panormus, Arabic Balerm, Italian Palermo; all hating one another religiously, but living together with no more than a Sicilian average of passion, poetry, and crime. Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants “in spite of the fact,” says the geographer, “that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains.”²⁴ With sunshine and rain co-operating to make a lush vegetation, Sicily was an agricultural paradise; and the clever Arabs reaped the fruits of a well-managed economy. Palermo became a port of exchange between Christian Europe and Moslem Africa; soon it was one of the richest cities in Islam. The Moslem flair for fine dress, brilliant jewelry, and the arts of decoration made for a life of otium cum dignitate—leisure without vulgarity. The Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis (c. 1055–1132) describes the vivacious hours of Palermitan youth: the midnight revels, the jolly raid on a convent to buy wine from a surprised but genial nun, the gay mingling of men and women in festival, “when the King of the Revels has outlawed care,” and singing girls tease the lute with slender fingers, and dance “like resplendent moons on the stems of willowy trees.”²⁵

There were thousands of poets in the island, for the Moors loved wit and rhyme, and Sicilian love offered rich themes. There were scholars, for Palermo boasted a university; and great physicians, for Sicilian Moslem medicine influenced the medical school at Salerno.²⁶ Half the brilliance of Norman Sicily was an Arab echo, an Oriental legacy of crafts and craftsmen to a young culture willing to learn from any race or creed. The Norman conquest of Sicily (1060–91) helped time to efface the vestiges of Islam in the island; Count Roger was proud that he had leveled “Saracen cities, castles, and palaces built with marvelous art.”²⁷ But Moslem style left its mark on the Palace of La Ziza, and on the ceiling of the Capella Palatina; in this chapel of the palace of the Norman kings Moorish ornament serves the shrine of Christ.

IV. SPANISH ISLAM: 711–1086

1. Caliphs and Emirs

It was at first the Moors, not the Arabs, who conquered Spain. Tariq was a Berber, and his army had 7000 Berbers to 300 Arabs. His name is embedded in the rock at whose foot his forces landed; the Moors came to call it Gebel al-Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq, which Europe compressed into Gibraltar. Tariq had been sent to Spain by Musa ibn Nusayr, Arab governor of North Africa. In 712 Musa crossed with 10,000 Arabs and 8000 Moors; besieged and captured Seville and Merida; rebuked Tariq for exceeding orders, struck him with a whip, and cast him into prison. The Caliph Walid recalled Musa and freed Tariq, who resumed his conquests. Musa had appointed his son Abd al-Aziz governor of Seville; Suleiman, Walid’s brother, suspected Abd al-Aziz of plotting to make himself independent sovereign of Spain, and despatched assassins to kill him. The head was brought to Suleiman, now caliph, at Damascus; he sent for Musa, who asked: “Grant me his head, that I may close his eyes.” Within a year Musa died of grief.²⁸ We may believe that the story is only a bloody legend.

The victors treated the conquered leniently, confiscated the lands only of those who had actively resisted, exacted no greater tax than had been levied by the Visigothic kings, and gave to religious worship a freedom rare in Spain. Having established their position in the peninsula, the Moslems scaled the Pyrenees and entered Gaul, intent upon making Europe a province of Damascus. Between Tours and Poitiers, a thousand miles north of Gibraltar, they were met by the united forces of Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine, and Charles, Duke of Austrasia. After seven days of fighting, the Moslems were defeated in one of the most crucial battles of history (732); again the faith of countless millions was determined by the chances of war. Thenceforth Charles was Carolus Martellus, or Martel, Charles the Hammer. In 735 the Moslems tried again, and captured Arles; in 737 they took Avignon, and ravaged the valley of the Rhone to Lyons. In 759 Pepin the Short finally expelled them from the south of France; but their forty years of circulation there may have influenced Languedoc’s unusual tolerance of diverse faiths, its colorful gaiety, its flair for songs of unpermitted love.

The caliphs of Damascus undervalued Spain; till 756 it was merely “the district of Andalusia,” and was governed from Qairwan. But in 755 a romantic figure landed in Spain, armed only with royal blood, and destined to establish a dynasty that would rival in wealth and glory the caliphs of Baghdad. When, in 750, the triumphant Abbasids ordered all princes of the Umayyad family slain, Abd-er-Rahman, grandson of the Caliph Hisham, was the only Umayyad who escaped. Hunted from village to village, he swam the broad Euphrates, crossed into Palestine, Egypt and Africa, and finally reached Morocco. News of the Abbasid revolution had intensified the factional rivalry of Arabs, Syrians, Persians, and Moors in Spain; an Arab group loyal to the Umayyads, fearing that the Abbasid caliph might question their titles to lands given them by Umayyad governors, invited Abd-er-Rahman to join and lead them. He came, and was made emir of Cordova (756). He defeated an army commissioned by the Caliph al-Mansur to unseat him, and sent the head of its general to be hung before a palace in Mecca.

Perhaps it was these events that saved Europe from worshiping Mohammed: Moslem Spain, weakened with civil war and deprived of external aid, ceased to conquer, and withdrew even from northern Spain. From the ninth to the eleventh century the peninsula was divided into Moslem and Christian by a line running from Coimbra through Saragossa and along the Ebro River. The Moslem south, finally pacified by Abd-er-Rahman I and his successors, blossomed into riches, poetry, and art. Abd-er-Rahman II (822–52) enjoyed the fruits of this prosperity. Amid border wars with the Christians, rebellions among his subjects, and Norman raids on his coasts, he found time to beautify Cordova with palaces and mosques, rewarded poets handsomely, and forgave offenders with an amiable lenience that may have shared in producing the social disorder that followed his reign.

Abd-er-Rahman III (912–61) is the culminating figure of this Umayyad dynasty in Spain. Coming to power at twenty-one, he found “Andaluz” torn by racial faction, religious animosity, sporadic brigandage, and the efforts of Seville and Toledo to establish their independence of Cordova. Though a man of refinement, famous for generosity and courtesy, he laid a firm hand upon the situation, quelled the rebellious cities, and subdued the Arab aristocrats who wished, like their French contemporaries, to enjoy a feudal sovereignty on their rich estates. He invited to his councils men of diverse faiths, adjusted his alliances to maintain a balance of power among his neighbors and his enemies, and administered the government with Napoleonic industry and attention to detail. He planned the campaigns of his generals, often took the field in person, repulsed the invasions of Sancho of Navarre, captured and destroyed Sancho’s capital, and discouraged further Christian forays during his reign. In 929, knowing himself as powerful as any ruler of his time, and realizing that the caliph of Baghdad had become a puppet of Turkish guards, he assumed the caliphal title—Commander of the Faithful and Defender of the Faith. When he died he left behind him, in his own handwriting, a modest estimate of human life:

I have now reigned above fifty [Mohammedan] years in victory or peace…. Riches and honors, powers and pleasures, have waited on my call; nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen. O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!²⁹

His son Hakam II (961–76) profited wisely from this half century of unhappy competence. Secure from external danger and internal revolt, he gave himself to the adornment of Cordova and other cities; built mosques, colleges, hospitals, markets, public baths, and asylums for the poor;³⁰ made the University of Cordova the greatest educational institution of his time; and helped hundreds of poets, artists, and savants. The Moslem historian al-Maqqari writes:

The Caliph Hakam surpassed every one of his predecessors in love of literature and the sciences, which he himself cultivated and fostered … he converted Andaluz into a great market whereto the literary productions of every clime were immediately brought for sale. He employed agents to collect books for him in distant countries, and remitted to them large sums of money, until the number of books thus conveyed to Andaluz exceeded all calculation. He would likewise send gifts of money to celebrated authors in the East, to encourage the publication of works, or to obtain the first copies of them. In this way, knowing that Abu’l Faraj of Isfahan had written a work entitled Kitab ul-Aghani, he sent him 1000 dinars of pure gold ($4750), upon which the author forwarded him a copy of this work, even before it had appeared in Iraq.³¹

While the scholar-caliph attended to the amenities of life, he left the administration of the government, even the guidance of national policy, to his able Jewish prime minister Hasdai ibn Shaprut, and the leadership of his armies to a brilliant and unscrupulous general who, under the name of Almanzor, was to provide material for many a Christian drama or romance. His real name was Muhammad ibn Abi Amir. He came of an old Arab family with more genealogy than means; he earned a living by writing petitions for persons who wished to address the caliph; became a clerk in the office of the chief qadi or attorney general; and in 967, at the age of twenty-six, was appointed to manage the property of al-Hakam’s eldest son, another Abd-er-Rahman. He ingratiated himself with the lad’s mother, Queen Subh, charmed her with courtesies and compliments, and impressed her with his tireless ability; soon he was managing her property as well as her son’s; and within a year he was named master of the mint. He now became so generous to his friends that rivals accused him of malversation. Al-Hakam summoned him to clear his account; knowing that he could not, Ibn Abi Amir asked a rich friend to advance him the deficit; so armed, he went to the palace, faced his accusers, and carried the matter off so triumphantly that the Caliph appointed him concurrently to several lucrative posts. When Hakam died, Ibn Abi Amir secured the succession to Hakam’s son Hisham II (976–1009;—1010–13) by personally directing the murder of a rival claimant. A week later he was made vizier.³²

Hisham II was a weakling, altogether incapable of rule; from 978 to 1002 Ibn Ali was caliph in all but name. His enemies charged him, quite rightly, with loving philosophy more than the Moslem faith; to silence them he invited the orthodox theologians to weed out from al-Hakam’s great library, and burn, all volumes that in any way impugned the Sunni creed; and by this act of dastardly vandalism he earned a useful reputation for piety. At the same time he drew the intellectual classes to his support by secretly protecting the philosophers, welcoming men of letters at his court, and housing there a bevy of poets who drew stipends from the treasury, followed his campaigns, and sang his victories. He built a new town, Zahira, cast of Cordova, for his palace and administrative offices, while the young Caliph, carefully trained to absorption in theology, remained almost a neglected prisoner in the ancient royal residence. To consolidate his position, Ibn Abi Amir reorganized the army mainly with Berber and Christian mercenaries, who, hostile to the Arabs, felt no obligations to the state, but rewarded with personal loyalty his liberality and tact. When the Christian state of Leon aided a domestic rebellion against him, he destroyed the rebels, severely defeated the Leonese, and returned in triumph to his capital; thereafter he assumed the surname of al-Mansur, “the victorious.” Plots against him were numerous, but he circumvented them with pervasive espionage and judicious assassination. His son Abdallah joined one of the conspiracies, was detected, and was beheaded. Like Sulla, al-Mansur never left a favor unrewarded, nor an injury unavenged.

The people forgave his crimes because he effectively suppressed other criminals, and secured an impartial provision of justice for rich and poor; never had life or property been so safe in Cordova. Men could not help admire his persistence, intelligence, and courage. One day, while holding court, he felt a pain in his leg; he sent for a physician, who advised cautery; with no interruption to the session, al-Mansur allowed his flesh to be burned without giving any sign of discomfort; “the assembly,” says al-Maqqari, “perceived nothing until they smelled the burnt flesh.”³³ As a further aid to popularity, he enlarged the mosque of Cordova with the labor of Christian captives, and himself wielded pick and shovel, trowel and saw. Having learned that statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterity, he renewed the war with Leon, captured and razed its capital, and massacred the population. Nearly every spring he sallied forth on a new campaign against the infidel north, and never returned without victory. In 997 he took and destroyed the city of Santiago de Compostela, leveled to the ground its famous shrine to St. James, and made Christian captives carry the gates and bells of the church on their shoulders in his triumphal entry into Cordova.³⁴ (In later years the bells would be returned to Compostela on the backs of Moslem prisoners of war.)

Though sovereign in fact of Moslem Spain, al-Mansur was not content; he longed to be sovereign in name, and to found a dynasty. In 991 he resigned his office to his eighteen-year-old son Abd-al-Malik, added the names sayid (lord) and malik karim (noble king) to his other titles, and ruled with absolute power. He had wished to die on the battlefield, and, prepared for this consummation, he took his burial shroud with him on his campaigns. In 1002, aged 61, he invaded Castile, captured cities, destroyed monasteries, ravaged fields. On the homeward march he fell ill; refusing medical attendance, he called for his son, and told him that death would come within two days. When Abd-al-Malik wept al-Mansur said: “This is a sign that the Empire will soon decay.”³⁵ A generation later the Cordovan caliphate collapsed.

The history of Moorish Spain after al-Mansur is a chaos of brief reigns, assassinations, racial strife, and class war. The Berbers, scorned and impoverished in the realm that their arms had won, and relegated to the arid plains of Estremadura or the cold mountains of Leon, periodically revolted against the ruling Arab aristocracy. The exploited workers of the towns hated their employers, and changed them spasmodically with murderous insurrection. All classes united in one hatred—of that Amirid family, the heirs of al-Mansur, which, under his son, almost monopolized the offices of government and the perquisites of power. In 1008 Abd-al-Malik died, and was succeeded as prime minister by his brother Abd-er-Rahman Shandjul. Shandjul drank wine in public, and had a kind word for sin; he preferred to carouse rather than to govern; in 1009 he was deposed by a revolution in which nearly all factions joined. The revolutionary masses got out of hand, plundered the Amirid palaces at Zahira, and burned them to the ground. In 1012 the Berbers captured and pillaged Cordova, slew half the population, exiled the rest, and made Cordova a Berber capital. So briefly does a Christian historian recount the French Revolution of Islamic Spain.

But the ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds. Under Berber rule disorder, brigandage, and unemployment mounted; cities subject to Cordova seceded and withheld tribute, and even the owners of great estates made themselves sovereign on their lands. Gradually the surviving Cordovans recovered; in 1023 they expelled the Berbers from the capital, and gave the throne to Abd-er-Rahman V. Seeing no advantage in a return to the old regime, the proletariat of Cordova captured the royal palace, and proclaimed one of their leaders, Muhammad al-Mustakfi, as caliph (1023). Muhammad appointed a weaver as his prime minister. The weaver was assassinated, the proletarian Caliph was poisoned, and in 1027 a union of upper and middle classes elevated Hisham III. Four years later the army took its turn, killed Hisham’s prime minister, and demanded Hisham’s abdication. A council of leading citizens, perceiving that competition for the throne was making government impossible, abolished the Spanish caliphate, and replaced it with a council of state. Ibn Jahwar was chosen first consul, and ruled the new republic with justice and wisdom.

But it was too late. The political authority and cultural leadership had been irrevocably destroyed. Scholarship and poetry, frightened by civil war, had fled from the “Gem of the World” to the courts of Toledo, Granada, and Seville. Moslem Spain disintegrated into twenty-three taifas or city-states, too busy with intrigue and strife to stop the gradual absorption of Mohammedan by Christian Spain. Granada prospered under the able ministry (1038–73) of Rabbi Samuel Halevi, known to the Arabs as Ismail ibn Naghdela. Toledo declared its independence of Cordova in 1035, and fifty years later submitted to Christian rule.

Seville succeeded to the glory of Cordova. Some thought it fairer than that capital; people loved it for its gardens, palm trees, and roses, and a gaiety always ready with music, dance, and song. Anticipating the fall of Cordova, it made itself indepedent in 1023. Its chief justice, Abu’l Qasim Muhammad, found a mat-maker resembling Hisham II, hailed him as Caliph, housed and guided him, and persuaded Valencia, Tortosa, even Cordova, to recognize him; by this simple device the subtle jurist founded the brief Abbadid dynasty. When he died (1042), his son Abbad al-Mutadid succeeded him, ruled Seville with skill and cruelty for twenty-seven years, and extended his power till half of Moslem Spain paid him tribute. His son al-Mutamid (1068–91), at the age of twenty-six, inherited his realm, but neither his ambition nor his cruelty. Al-Mutamid was the greatest poet of Moslem Spain. He preferred the company of poets and musicians to that of politicians and generals, and rewarded his able rivals in poetry with unenvious hand; he thought it not too much to give a thousand ducats ($2,290) for an epigram.³⁶ He liked Ibn Ammar’s poetry, and made him vizier. He heard a girl slave, Rumaykiyya, improvise excellent verses; he bought her, married her, and loved her passionately till his death, while not neglecting the other beauties of his harem. Rumaykiyya filled the palace with her laughter, and drew her lord into a spiral of gaiety; theologians blamed her for her husband’s coolness to religion, and the near emptiness of the city’s mosques. Nevertheless al-Mutamid could rule as well as love and sing. When Toledo attacked Cordova, and Cordova asked his aid, he sent troops who saved the city from Toledo and made it subject to Seville. The poet-king stood for a precarious generation at the head of a civilization as brilliant as Baghdad’s under Harun, as Cordova’s under al-Mansur.

2. Civilization in Moorish Spain

“Never was Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her Arab conquerors.”³⁷ It is the judgment of a great Christian Orientalist, whose enthusiasm may require some discounting of his praise; but after due deductions his verdict stands. The emirs and caliphs of Spain were as cruel as Machiavelli thought necessary to the stability of a government; sometimes they were barbarously and callously cruel, as when Mutadid grew flowers in the skulls of his dead foes, or as when the poetic Mutamid hacked to pieces the lifelong friend who had at last betrayed and insulted him.³⁸ Against these stray instances al-Maqqari gives a hundred examples of the justice, liberality, and refinement of the Umayyad rulers of Spain.³⁹ They compare favorably with the Greek emperors of their time; and they were certainly an improvement upon the illiberal Visigothic regime that had preceded them. Their management of public affairs was the most competent in the Western world of that age. Laws were rational and humane, and were administered by a well-organized judiciary. For the most part the conquered, in their internal affairs, were governed by their own laws and their own officials.⁴⁰ Towns were well policed; markets, weights and measures were effectively supervised. A regular census recorded population and property. Taxation was reasonable compared with the imposts of Rome or Byzantium. The revenues of the Cordovan caliphate under Abd-er-Rahman III reached 12,045,000 gold dinars ($57,213,750)—probably more than the united governmental revenues of Latin Christendom;⁴¹ but these receipts were due not so much to high taxes as to well-governed and progressive agriculture, industry, and trade.⁴²

The Arab conquest was a transient boon to the native peasantry. The overgrown estates of the Visigothic nobles were broken up, and the serfs became proprietors.⁴³ But the forces that in these centuries were making for feudalism operated in Spain too, though better resisted than in France; the Arab leaders in their turn accumulated large tracts, and farmed them with tenants verging on serfdom. Slaves were slightly better treated by the Moors * than by their former owners;⁴⁴ and the slaves of non-Moslems could free themselves merely by professing Islam. The Arabs for the most part left the actual work of agriculture to the conquered; however, they used the latest manuals of agronomy, and under their direction agricultural science developed in Spain far in advance of Christian Europe.⁴⁵ The leisurely oxen, hitherto universally used in Spain for plowing or draft, were largely replaced by the mule, the ass, and the horse. Stock breeding of Spanish with Arab strains produced the “noble steed” of the Arab horseman and the Spanish caballero. Moslem Spain brought from Asia, and taught to Christian Europe, the culture of rice, buckwheat, sugar cane, pomegranates, cotton, spinach, asparagus, silk, bananas, cherries, oranges, lemons, quinces, grapefruit, peaches, dates, figs, strawberries, ginger, myrrh.⁴⁶ The cultivation of the vine was a major industry among the Moors, whose religion forbade wine. Market gardens, olive groves, and fruit orchards made some areas of Spain—notably around Cordova, Granada, and Valencia—“garden spots of the world.” The island of Majorca, won by the Moors in the eighth century, became under their husbandry a paradise of fruits and flowers, dominated by the date palm that later gave its name to the capital.

The mines of Spain enriched the Moors with gold, silver, tin, copper, iron, lead, alum, sulphur, mercury. Coral was gathered along Andalusia’s shores; pearls were fished along the Catalonian coasts; rubies were mined at Baja and Malaga. Metallurgy was well developed; Murcia was famous for its iron and brass works, Toledo for its swords, Cordova for shields. Handicraft industry flourished. Cordova made “Cordovan” leather for the “cordwainers” (cordobanes) of Europe. There were 13,000 weavers in Cordova alone; Moorish carpets, cushions, silk curtains, shawls, divans found eager buyers everywhere. According to al-Maqqari,⁴⁸ Ibn Firnas of Cordova, in the ninth century, invented spectacles, complex chronometers, and a flying machine. A merchant fleet of over a thousand ships carried the products of Spain to Africa and Asia; and vessels from a hundred ports crowded the harbors of Barcelona, Almeria, Cartagena, Valencia, Malaga, Cadiz, and Seville. A regular postal service was maintained for the government. The official coinage of gold dinars, silver dirhems, and copper fals preserved a relative stability in comparison with the currencies of contemporary Latin Christendom; but these Moorish coins, too, gradually deteriorated in weight, purity, and purchasing power.

Economic exploitation proceeded here as elsewhere. Arabs who had extensive estates, and merchants who squeezed producer and consumer alike, absorbed the wealth of the land. For the most part the rich lived in country villas, and left the cities to a proletarian population of Berbers, “Renegades” (Christian converts to Mohammedanism), “Mozarabs” (non-Moslems accepting Moslem ways and Arabic speech), and a sprinkling of palace eunuchs, Slav officers and guardsmen, and household slaves. The Cordovan caliphs, feeling themselves unable to end exploitation without discouraging enterprise, compromised by devoting a quarter of their land income to the relief of the poor.⁴⁹

The desperate faith of the indigent gave a subtle power to the faqihs or theologians of the law. Innovations in creed or morals were so abhorred by the populace that heresy and speculation usually hid their heads in obscurity of place or speech; philosophy was silenced, or professed the most respectable conclusions. Apostasy from Islam was punishable with death. Cordovan caliphs themselves were often men of liberal views, but they suspected the Egyptian Fatimid caliphs of using wandering scholars as spies, and occasionally they joined the faqihs in persecuting independent thought. On the other hand the Moorish authorities gave freedom of worship to all non-Moslem faiths. The Jews, harshly hounded by the Visigoths, had helped the Moslem conquest of Spain; they lived now—until the twelfth century—in peace with the conquerors, developed wealth and learning, and sometimes rose to high place in the government. Christians faced greater obstacles to political preferment, but many succeeded nevertheless. Christian males, like all males, were subject to compulsory circumcision as a measure of national hygiene; otherwise they were ruled by their own Visigothic-Roman law, administered by magistrates of their own choosing.⁵⁰ In return for exemption from military service, free and able Christian males paid a land tax, normally forty-eight dirhems ($24.00) per year for the rich, twenty-four for the middle classes, twelve for manual workers.⁵¹ Christians and Moslems intermarried freely; now and then they joined in celebrating a Christian or Moslem holyday, or used the same building as church and mosque.⁵² Some Christians, conforming to the custom of the country, established harems, or practiced pederasty.⁵³ Clerics and laymen from Christian Europe came in safety and freedom to Cordova, Toledo, or Seville as students, visitors, or travelers. One Christian complained of the results in terms that recall ancient Hebrew criticism of Hellenizing Jews:

My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the works of Mohammedan theologians and philosophers, not to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style…. Alas! the young Christians who are most conspicuous for their talent have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic; they read and study with avidity Arabic books; they amass whole libraries of them at great cost; they everywhere sing the praises of Arabic lore.⁵⁴

We may judge the attractiveness of Islam to Christians from a letter of 1311, which gives the Mohammedan population of Granada at that time as 200,000, of whom all but 500 were descendants of Christians converted to Islam.⁵⁵ Christians frequently expressed their preference of Moslem to Christian rule.⁵⁶

But there was another side to the picture, and it darkened with time. Though Christians were free, the Church was not. Most of her landed property had been confiscated by a decree affecting all active resisters to the conquest; many churches had been destroyed, and new ones were prohibited.⁵⁷ The Moslem emirs inherited from the Visigoth kings the right to appoint and depose bishops, even to summon ecclesiastical councils. The emirs sold bishoprics to the highest bidder, though he might be a skeptic or a libertine. Christian priests were liable to abuse by Moslems in the streets. Moslem theologians commented freely on what seemed to them absurdities in Christian theology, but it was dangerous for Christians to reply in kind.

Under such tense relations a minor incident could lead to a major tragedy. A pretty girl of Cordova, known to us only as Flora, was the child of a mixed marriage. When her Mohammedan father died she resolved to become a Christian. She fled from her brother’s guardianship to a Christian home, was caught and beaten by him, persisted in apostasy, and was turned over to a Moslem court. The qadi, who might have condemned her to death, ordered her flogged. She escaped again to a Christian home, and there met a young priest, Eulogius, who conceived for her a passionate spiritual attachment. While she hid in a convent another priest, Perfectus, achieved martyrdom by telling some Moslems what he thought of Mohammed; they had promised not to betray him, but the vigor of his exposition so shocked them that they denounced him to the authorities. Perfectus might have saved himself by a retraction; instead he repeated to the judge his conviction that Mohammed was “the servant of Satan.” The judge remanded him to jail for some months, hoping for a change of mood; none came; and Perfectus was condemned to death. He marched to the scaffold cursing the Prophet as “an impostor, an adulterer, a child of hell.” The Moslems gloated over his decapitation, the Christians of Cordova buried him with pomp as a saint (850).⁵⁸

His death inflamed the theological hatred of both sides. A group of Christian “Zealots” formed, led by Eulogius; they were determined to denounce Mohammed publicly, and to accept martyrdom joyfully as a promise of paradise. Isaac, a Cordovan monk, went to the qadi and professed a desire for conversion; but when the judge, well pleased, began to expound Mohammedanism, the monk interrupted him: “Your Prophet,” he said, “has lied and deceived you. May he be accursed, who has dragged so many wretches with him down to hell!” The qadi reproved him, and asked had he been drinking; the monk replied: “I am in my right mind. Condemnme to death.” The qadi had him imprisoned, but asked permission of Abd-er-Rahman II to dismiss him as insane; the Caliph, incensed by the splendor of Perfectus’ funeral, ordered the monk to be executed. Two days later Sancho, a Frank soldier of the palace guard, publicly denounced Mohammed; he was beheaded. On the following Sunday six monks appeared before the qadi, cursed Mohammed, and asked for not death only, but “your sharpest tortures”; they were beheaded. A priest, a deacon, and a monk followed their example. The Zealots rejoiced, but many Christians—priests as well as laymen—condemned this lust for martyrdom. “The Sultan,” they said to the Zealots, “allows us to exercise our religion, and does not oppress us; why, then, this fanatical zeal?”⁵⁹ A council of Christian bishops, summoned by Abd-er-Rahman, reproved the Zealots, and threatened action against them if they continued the agitation. Eulogius denounced the council as cowards.

Meanwhile Flora, her ardor raised by the Zealot movement, left her convent, and with another girl, Mary, went before the qadi; they both assured him that Mohammed was “an adulterer, an impostor, and a villain,” and that Mohammedanism was “an invention of the Devil.” The qadi committed them to jail. The entreaties of their friends had inclined them to retract when Eulogius prevailed upon them to accept martyrdom. They were beheaded (851), and Eulogius, much encouraged, called for new martyrs. Priests, monks, and women marched to the court, denounced Mohammed, and obtained decapitation (852). Eulogius himself earned martyrdom seven years later. After his death the movement subsided. We hear of two cases of martyrdom between 859 and 983, and none thereafter under Moslem rule in Spain.⁶⁰

Among the Moslems religious ardor declined as wealth grew. Despite the rigor of Moslem law, a wave of skepticism rose in the eleventh century. Not only did the mild heresies of the Mutazilites finally enter Spain; a sect arose that declared all religions false, and laughed at commandments, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and alms. Another group, under the name of “Universal Religion,” deprecated all dogmas, and pled for a purely ethical religion. Some were agnostics: the doctrines of religion, they said, “may or may not be true; we neither affirm nor deny them, we simply cannot tell; but our consciences will not allow us to accept doctrines whose truth cannot be demonstrated.”⁶¹ The theologians fought back with vigor; when disaster came to Spanish Islam in the eleventh century they pointed to irreligion as its cause; and when for a time Islam prospered again, it was under rulers who once more rooted their power in religious belief, and restricted the controversy between religion and philosophy to the privacy and amusement of their courts.

Despite the philosophers, gleaming cupolas and gilded minarets marked the thousand cities or towns that made Moslem Spain in the tenth century the most urban country in Europe, probably in the world. Cordova under al-Mansur was a civilized city, second only to Baghdad and Constantinople. Here, says al-Maqqari, were 200,077 houses, 60,300 palaces, 600 mosques, and 700 public baths;⁶² the statistics are slightly Oriental. Visitors marveled at the wealth of the upper classes, and at what seemed to them an extraordinary general prosperity; every family could afford a donkey; only beggars could not ride. Streets were paved, had raised sidewalks, and were lighted at night; one could travel for ten miles by the light of street lamps, and along an uninterrupted series of buildings.⁶³ Over the quiet Guadalquivir Arab engineers threw a great stone bridge of seventeen arches, each fifty spans in width. One of the earliest undertakings of Abd-er-Rahman I was an aqueduct that brought to Cordova an abundance of fresh water for homes, gardens, fountains, and baths. The city was famous for its pleasure gardens and promenades.

Abd-er-Rahman I, lonesome for his boyhood haunts, planted in Cordova a great garden like that of the villa in which he had spent his boyhood near Damascus, and built in it his “Palace of the Rissafah.” Later caliphs added other structures, to which Moslem fancy gave florid names: Palace of the Flowers … of the Lovers … of Contentment… of the Diadem. Cordova, like later Seville, had its Alcazar (al-qasr, castle, from the Latin castrum), a combination of palace and fortress. Moslem historians describe these mansions as equaling in luxury and beauty those of Nero’s Rome: majestic portals, marble columns, mosaic floors, gilded ceilings, and such refined decoration as only Moslem art could give. The palaces of the royal family, the lords and magnates of land and trade, lined for miles the banks of the stately stream. A concubine of Abd-er-Rahman III left him a large fortune; he proposed to spend it ransoming such of his soldiers as had been captured in war; proud searchers claimed they could find none; whereupon the Caliph’s favorite wife, Zahra, proposed that he build a suburb and palace to commemorate her name. For twenty-five years (936–61) 10,000 workmen and 1500 beasts toiled to realize her dream. The royal palace of al-Zahra that rose three miles southwest of Cordova was lavishly designed and equipped; 1200 marble columns sustained it; its harem could accommodate 6000 women; its hall of audience had ceiling and walls of marble and gold, eight doors inlaid with ebony, ivory, and precious stones, and a basin of quicksilver whose undulating surface reflected the dancing rays of the sun. Al-Zahra became the residential center of an aristocracy renowned for the grace and polish of its manners, the refinement of its tastes, and the breadth of its intellectual interests. At the opposite end of the city al-Mansur constructed (978) a rival palace, al-Zahira, which also gathered about it a suburb of lords, servants, minstrels, poets, and courtesans. Both suburbs were burned to the ground in the revolution of 1010.

Normally the people forgave the luxury of their princes if these would raise to Allah shrines exceeding their palaces in splendor and scope. The Romans had built in Cordova a temple to Janus; the Christians had replaced it with a cathedral; Abd-er-Rahman I paid the Christians for the site, demolished the church, and replaced it with the Blue Mosque; in 1238 the reconquista would turn the mosque into a cathedral; so the good, the true, and the beautiful fluctuate with the fortunes of war. The project became the consolation of Abd-er-Rahman’s troubled years; he left his suburban for his city home to superintend the operations, and hoped that he might before his death lead the congregation in grateful prayer in this new and majestic mosque. He died in 788, two years after laying the foundation; his son al-Hisham continued the work; each caliph, for two centuries, added a part, till in al-Mansur’s time it covered an area 742 by 472 feet. The exterior showed a battlemented wall of brick and stone, with irregular towers, and a massive minaret that surpassed in size and beauty all the minarets of the time, so that it too was numbered among the innumerable “wonders of the world.”⁶⁴ Nineteen portals, surmounted by horseshoe arches elegantly carved with floral and geometrical decoration in stone, led into the Court of Ablutions, now the Patio de los Naranjos, or Court of Oranges. In this rectangle, paved with colored tiles, stood four fountains, each cut from a block of solid marble so large that seventy oxen had been needed to haul it from the quarry to the site. The mosque proper was a forest of 1290 columns, dividing the interior into eleven naves and twenty-one aisles. From the column capitals sprang a variety of arches—some semicircular, some pointed, some in horseshoe form, most of them with voussoirs, or wedge stones, alternately red or white. The columns of jasper, porphyry, alabaster, or marble, snatched from the ruins of Roman or Visigothic Spain, gave by their number the impression of limitless and bewildering space: The wooden ceiling was carved into cartouches bearing Koranic and other inscriptions. From it hung 200 chandeliers holding 7000 cups of scented oil, fed from reservoirs of oil in inverted Christian bells also suspended from the roof. Floor and walls were adorned with mosaics; some of these were of enameled glass, baked in rich colors, and often containing silver or gold; after a thousand years of wear these dados still sparkle like jewels in the cathedral walls. One section was marked off as a sanctuary; it was paved with silver and enameled tiles, guarded with ornate doors, decorated with mosaics, roofed with three domes, and marked off with a wooden screen of exquisite design. Within this sanctuary were built the mihrab and minbar, upon which the artists lavished their maturest skill. The mihrab itself was an heptagonal recess walled with gold; brilliantly ornamented with enameled mosaics, marble tracery, and gold inscriptions on a ground of crimson and blue; and crowned by a tier of slender columns and trefoil arches as lovely as anything in Gothic art. The pulpit was considered the finest of its kind; it consisted of 37,000 little panels of ivory and precious woods—ebony, citron, aloe, red and yellow sandal, all joined by gold or silver nails, and inlaid with gems. On this minbar, in a jeweled box covered with gold-threaded crimson silk, rested a copy of the Koran written by the Caliph Othman and stained with his dying blood. To us, who prefer to adorn our theaters with gilt and brass rather than clothe our cathedrals in jewelry and gold, the decoration of the Blue Mosque seems extravagant; the walls encrusted with the blood of exploited generations, the columns confusingly numerous, the horseshoe arch as structurally weak and aesthetically offensive as obesity on bow legs. Others, however, have judged differently: al-Maqqari (1591–1632) thought this mosque “unequaled in size, or beauty of design, or tasteful arrangement of its ornaments, or boldness of execution”;⁶⁵ and even its diminished Christian form is ranked as “by universal consent the most beautiful Moslem temple in the world.”⁶⁶

It was a common saying in Moorish Spain that “when a musician dies at Cordova, and his instruments are to be sold, they are sent to Seville; when a rich man dies at Seville, and his library is to be sold, it is sent to Cordova.”⁶⁷ For Cordova in the tenth century was the focus and summit of Spanish intellectual life, though Toledo, Granada, and Seville shared actively in the mental exhilaration of the time. Moslem historians picture the Moorish cities as beehives of poets, scholars, jurists, physicians, and scientists; al-Maqqari fills sixty pages with their names.⁶⁸ Primary schools were numerous, but charged tuition; Hakam II added twenty-seven schools for the free instruction of the poor. Girls as well as boys went to school; several Moorish ladies became prominent in literature or art.⁶⁹ Higher education was provided by independent lecturers in the mosques; their courses constituted the loosely organized University of Cordova, which in the tenth and eleventh centuries was second in renown only to similar institutions in Cairo and Baghdad. Colleges were established also at Granada, Toledo, Seville, Murcia, Almeria, Valencia, Cadiz.⁷⁰ The technique of paper making was brought in from Baghdad, and books increased and multiplied. Moslem Spain had seventy libraries; rich men displayed their Morocco bindings, and bibliophiles collected rare or beautifully illuminated books. The scholar al-Hadram, at an auction in Cordova, found himself persistently outbid for a book he desired, until the price offered far exceeded the value of the volume. The successful bidder explained that there was a vacant place in his library, into which this book would precisely fit. “I was so vexed,” adds al-Hadram, “that I could not help saying to him, ‘He gets the nut who has no teeth.’”⁷¹

Scholars were held in awesome repute in Moslem Spain, and were consulted in simple faith that learning and wisdom are one. Theologians and grammarians could be had by the hundred; rhetoricians, philologists, lexicographers, anthologists, historians, biographers, were legion. Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Hazm (994–1064), besides serving as vizier to the last Umayyads, was a theologian and historian of great erudition. His Book of Religions and Sects, discussing Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and the principal varieties of Mohammedanism, is one of the world’s earliest essays in comparative religion. If we wish to know what an educated Moslem thought of medieval Christianity we need only read one of his paragraphs:

Human superstition need never excite our astonishment. The most numerous and civilized nations are thralls to it…. So great is the multitude of Christians that God alone can number them, and they can boast of sagacious princes and illustrious philosophers. Nevertheless they believe that one is three and three are one; that one of the three is the Father, the other the Son, and the third the Spirit; that the Father is the Son and is not the Son; that a man is God and not God; that the Messiah has existed from all eternity, and yet was created. A sect of theirs, the Monophysites, numbered by hundreds of thousands, believes that the Creator was scourged, buffeted, crucified, and that for three days the universe was without a ruler.⁷²

Ibn Hazm, for his part, believed that every word of the Koran was literally true.⁷³

Science and philosophy, in Moslem Spain, were largely frustrated by the fear that they would damage the people’s faith. Maslama ibn Ahmad (d. 1007), of Madrid and Cordova, adapted the astronomic tables of al-Khwarizmi to Spain. A work doubtfully attributed to him describes one of the many experiments by which alchemy was transmuted into chemistry—the production of mercuric oxide from mercury. Ibrahim al-Zarqali (c. 1029–87) of Toledo made an international name by improving astronomical instruments; Copernicus quoted his treatise on the astrolabe; his astronomical observations were the best of his age, and enabled him to prove for the first time the motion of the solar apogee with reference to the stars; his “Toledan Tables” of planetary movements were used throughout Europe. Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi (936–1013), physician to Abd-er-Rahman III, was honored in Christendom as Abulcasis; he stands at the top of Moslem surgeons; his medical encyclopedia, al-Tasrif, included three books on surgery which, translated into Latin, became the standard text of surgery for many centuries. Cordova was in this period the favorite resort of Europeans for surgical operations. Like every civilized city, it had its quota of quacks and moneymad physicians. One Harrani announced a secret specific against intestinal troubles, and sold it at fifty dinars ($237.50) a phial to moneyed fools.⁷⁴

“We forbear,” says al-Maqqari, “to mention the poets who flourished under Hisham II and al-Mansur, for they were as numerous as the sands of the ocean.”⁷⁵ Among them was the princess Wallada (d. 1087); her home at Cordova was a veritable salon of the French Enlightenment; wits, scholars, and poets gathered round her; she made love to a score of them, and wrote about her amours with a freedom that would have shocked Mme. Récamier. Her friend Mugha outdid her in beauty of person and licentiousness of verse. Almost everyone in Andalusia was a poet in those days, and exchanged improvised rhymes at any provocation. The caliphs joined in the sport; and there was seldom a Moorish prince who did not have at his court a poet not only honored but paid. This royal patronge did some injury as well as good; the poetry that has reached us from this age is too often artificial, flowery, lame with laborious similes, and clogged with petty conceits. The theme was love, carnal or Platonic; in Spain, as in the East, the Moslem singers anticipated the methods, moods, and philosophy of the troubadours.⁷⁶

From this dancing galaxy we take one star: Said ibn Judi, son of the prefect of Cordova; an excellent warrior, a constant lover in the plural sense, a master of all the qualities that in Moslem judgment made a perfect gentleman: liberality, courage, skillful horsemanship, good looks, eloquence, poetic talent, strength, and the arts of fencing, wielding the spear, and bending the bow.⁷⁷ He was never sure which he loved the more—love or war. Sensitive to the slightest touch of a woman, he suffered a series of infatuations, each of which had every promise of perpetuity. Like a good troubadour, he loved most ardently where he had seen least; his warmest ode was to Jehane, of whom he had seen only a lily hand. He was a candid epicurean, and felt that the burden of proof was always on the moralist. “The sweetest morsel in life,” he said, “is when the wine cup goes around; when, after a quarrel, the lovers are reconciled, embrace, and are at peace. I traverse the circle of pleasures as a frenzied war horse that has taken the bit in its teeth. I leave no desire unsatisfied! Steadfast when the angel of death hovers over my head in the day of battle, a pair of bright eyes can sway me as they will.”⁷⁸ His fellow warriors sometimes resented his seduction of their wives; one officer caught him in situ, and killed him (897).

A more heroic end came to a greater poet, al-Mutamid, Emir of Seville. Like other kinglets of disintegrating Spain, he had for several years paid tribute to Alfonso VI of Castile as a bribe to Christian peace. But a bribe always leaves a balance to be paid on demand. With the sinews of war provided by his prey, Alfonso pounced upon Toledo in 1085; and al-Mutamid perceived that Seville might be next. The city-states of Moslem Spain were now too weakened by class and internecine war to offer any adequate resistance. But across the Mediterranean there had arisen a new Moslem dynasty; it was called Almoravid from the marabout or patron saint of northwestern Africa; founded on religious fanaticism, it had turned almost every man into a soldier of Allah, and its armies had easily conquered all Morocco. At this juncture the Almoravid king Yusuf ibn Tashfin, a man of courage and cunning, received from the princes of Spain an invitation to rescue them from the Christian dragon of Castile. Yusuf transported his army across the Strait, received reinforcements from Malaga, Granada, and Seville, and met the forces of Alfonso at Zallaka, near Badajoz (1086). Alfonso sent a courtly message to Yusuf: “Tomorrow [Friday] is your holyday, and Sunday is ours; I propose, therefore, that we join battle on Saturday.” Yusuf agreed; Alfonso attacked on Friday; al-Mutamid and Yusuf fought well, the Moslems celebrated their holyday with victorious slaughter, and Alfonso barely escaped with 500 men. Yusuf astonished Spain by returning bootyless to Africa.

Four years later he came back. Al-Mutamid had urged him to destroy the power of Alfonso, who was rearming for a fresh assault. Yusuf fought the Christians indecisively, and assumed sovereign power over Moslem Spain. The poor welcomed him, always preferring new masters to old; the intellectual classes opposed him as representing religious reaction; the theologians embraced him. He took Granada without a blow, and delighted the people by abolishing all taxes not prescribed in the Koran (1090). Al-Mutamid and other emirs joined in a league against him, and formed a holy alliance with Alfonso. Yusuf besieged Cordova; its populace delivered it to him. He surrounded Seville; al-Mutamid fought heroically, saw his son killed, broke down in grief, and surrendered. By 1091 all Andalusia except Saragossa was in Yusuf’s hands, and Moslem Spain, ruled from Morocco, was again a province of Africa.

Al-Mutamid was sent as a prisoner to Tangier. While there he received from a local poet, Husri, some verses praising him and asking for a gift. The ruined emir had now only thirty-five ducats ($87) in all the world; he sent them to Husri with apologies for the smallness of the gift. Al-Mutamid was transferred to Aghmat, near Morocco, and lived there for some time in chains, always in destitution, still writing poetry, till his death (1095).

One of his poems might have served as his epitaph:

Woo not the world too rashly, for behold,

Beneath the painted silk and broidering,

It is a faithless and inconstant thing.

Listen to me, Mutamid, growing old.

And we—that dreamed youth’s blade would never rust,

Hoped wells from the mirage, roses from the sand—

The riddle of the world shall understand

And put on wisdom with the robe of dust.⁷⁹

CHAPTER XIV

The Grandeur and Decline of Islam

1058–1258

I. THE ISLAMIC EAST: 1058–1250

WHEN Tughril Beg died (1063) he was succeeded as Seljuq sultan by his nephew Alp Arslan, then twenty-six years of age. A well-disposed Moslem historian describes him as

tall, with mustaches so long that he used to tie up their ends when he wished to shoot; and never did his arrows miss the mark. He wore so lofty a turban that men were wont to say that from its top to the end of his mustaches was a distance of two yards. He was a strong and just ruler, generally magnanimous, swift to punish tyranny or extortion among his officials, and extremely charitable to the poor. He was also devoted to the study of history, listening with great pleasure and interest to chronicles of former kings, and to works that threw light on their characters, institutions, and methods of administration.¹

Despite these scholarly inclinations, Alp Arslan lived up to his name—“the lion-hearted hero”—by conquering Herat, Armenia, Georgia, and Syria. The Greek Emperor Romanus IV collected 100,000 varied and ill-disciplined troops to meet Arslan’s 15,000 experienced warriors. The Seljuq leader offered a reasonable peace; Romanus rejected it scornfully, gave battle at Manzikert in Armenia (1071), fought bravely amid his cowardly troops, was defeated and captured, and was led before the Sultan. “What would have been your behavior,” asked Arslan, “had fortune smiled upon your arms?” “I would have inflicted upon thy body many a stripe,” answered Romanus. Arslan treated him with all courtesy, released him on the promise of a royal ransom, and dismissed him with rich gifts.² A year later Arslan died by an assassin’s knife.

His son Malik Shah (1072–92) was the greatest of the Seljuq sultans. While his general Suleiman completed the conquest of Asia Minor, he himself took Transoxiana as far as Bokhara and Kashgar. His able and devoted prime minister, Nizam al-Mulk, brought to this and Arslan’s reign much of the brilliance and prosperity that the Barmakids had given to Baghdad in the days of Harun al-Rashid. For thirty years Nizam organized and controlled administration, policy, and finance, encouraged industry and trade, improved roads, bridges, and inns, and made them safe for all wayfarers. He was a generous friend to artists, poets, scientists; raised splendid buildings in Baghdad; founded and endowed a famous college there; and directed and financed the erection of the Great Dome Chamber in the Friday Mosque at Isfahan. It was apparently at his suggestion that Malik Shah summoned Omar Khayyam and other astronomers to reform the Persian calendar. An old tale tells how Nizam, Omar, and Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, when schoolmates, vowed to share with one another any later good fortune; like so many good stories it is probably a legend, for Nizam was born in 1017, while both Omar and Hasan died in 1123–4; and there is no indication that either of these was a centenarian.³

At the age of seventy-five Nizam wrote down his philosophy of government in one of the major works of Persian prose—the Siyasat-nama, or Book of the Art of Rule. He strongly recommended religious orthodoxy in people and king, considered no government secure without a religious base, and deduced from religion the divine right and authority of the sultan. At the same time he did not spare his divine monarch some human advice on the duties of a sovereign. A ruler must avoid excess in wine and levity; must detect and punish official corruption or tyranny; and must, twice a week, hold public audiences at which even the lowliest subject may present petitions or grievances. Nizam was humane but intolerant; he mourned that Christians, Jews, and Shi’ites were employed by the government, and he denounced the Ismailite sect with especial violence as threatening the unity of the state. In 1092 an Ismaili devotee approached him in the guise of a suppliant, and stabbed him to death.

The assassin was a member of the strangest sect in history. About 1090 an Ismaili leader—the same Hasan ibn al-Sabbah whom legend allied with Omar and Nizam—seized the mountain fortress of Alamut (“Eagle’s Nest”) in northern Persia, and from that stronghold, 10,000 feet above the sea, waged a campaign of terror and murder against the opponents and persecutors of the Ismaili faith. Nizam’s book charged the group with being lineally descended from the communistic Mazdakites of Sasanian Persia. It was a secret fraternity, with diverse grades of initiation, and a Grand Master whom the Crusaders called the “Old Man of the Mountain.” The lowest degree of the order included the fidais, who were required to obey, without hesitation or scruple, any of their leader’s commands. According to Marco Polo, who passed by Alamut in 1271, the Master had arranged behind the fortress a garden peopled like the Mohammedan paradise with “ladies and damsels who dallied with the men to their hearts’ content.” The candidates for admission to the order were given hashish to drink; when stupefied by it, they were brought into the garden; and on recovering their senses they were told that they were in paradise. After four or five days of wine, women, and good food, they were again drugged with hashish, and were carried from the garden. Waking, they asked for the lost paradise, and were told that they would be readmitted to it, and forever, if they should obey the Master faithfully, or be slain in his service.⁴ The youths who complied were called hashshasheen, drinkers of hashish—whence the word assassin. Hasan ruled Alamut for thirty-five years, and made it a center of assassination, education, and art. The organization long survived him; it seized other strongholds, fought the Crusaders, and (it is alleged) killed Conrad of Montferrat at the behest of Richard Coeur de Lion.⁵ In 1256 the Mongols under Hulagu captured Alamut and other Assassin centers; thereafter the members of the order were hunted and slain as nihilist enemies of society. Nevertheless it continued as a religious sect, and became in time peaceable and respectable; its zealous adherents in India, Persia, Syria, and Africa acknowledge the Agha Khan as their head, and yearly pay him a tenth of their revenues.⁶

Malik Shah died a month after his vizier. His sons fought a war of succession, and in the ensuing chaos no united Moslem resistance was offered to the Crusades. Sultan Sinjar at Baghdad restored the Seljuq splendor for a reign (1117–57), and literature prospered under his patronage; but after his death the Seljuq realm disintegrated into independent principalities of petty dynasties and warring kings. At Mosul one of Malik Shah’s Kurd slaves, Zangi, founded in 1127 the Atabeg (“Father of the Prince”) dynasty, which fought the Crusaders zealously, and extended its rule over Mesopotamia. Zangi’s son Nur-ud-din Mahmud (1146–73) conquered Syria, made Damascus his capital, ruled with justice and diligence, and plucked Egypt from the dying Fatimids.

The same decadence that had subjected the Abbasids to Buwayhid and Seljuq domination had, two centuries later, debased the caliphs of Cairo to the role of Shia priests in a state actually ruled by their soldier viziers. Immersed in a numerous harem, hedged in by eunuchs and slaves, emasculated by comfort and concubines, the Fatimids allowed their prime ministers to take the title of kings, and to dispense at will the offices and perquisites of government. In 1164 two candidates competed for this royal vizierate. One of them, Shawar, asked the help of Nur-ud-din, who sent him a small force under Shirkuh. Shirkuh slew Shawar, and made himself vizier. When Shirkuh died (1169) he was succeeded by his nephew al-Malik al-Nasir Salahed-din Yusuf ibn Ayyub—i.e., the King, the Defender, the Honor of the Faith, Joseph, son of Job—known to us as Saladin.

He was born (1138) at Tekrit on the upper Tigris, of Kurd—non-Semitic—stock. His father Ayyub rose to be governor first of Baalbek under Zangi, then of Damascus under Nur-ud-din. Saladin, brought up in those cities and courts, learned well the arts of statesmanship and war. But with these he combined orthodox piety, a zealous study of theology, and an almost ascetic simplicity of life; the Moslems number him among their greatest saints. His chief garment was a coarse woolen cloth, his only drink was water, and his sexual temperance (after some early indulgence) aroused all but the emulation of his contemporaries. Sent with Shirkuh to Egypt, he gave so good an account of himself as a soldier that he was put in command over Alexandria, which he successfully defended against the Franks (1167). Made vizier at thirty, he devoted himself to restoring orthodox Mohammedanism in Egypt. In 1171 he had the name of the Shia Fatimid caliph replaced in the public prayers by that of the Abbasid caliph—now merely the orthodox pontiff of Baghdad. Al-Adid, last of the Fatimids, was at the time ill in his palace, and did not notice this ecclesiastical revolution; Saladin kept him fully uninformed, so that the wastrel “might die in peace.” This the Caliph did presently, and as no successor was appointed, the Fatimid dynasty came to a quiet end. Saladin made himself governor instead of vizier, and acknowledged Nur-ud-din as his sovereign. When he entered the caliphal palace at Cairo he found there 12,000 occupants, all women except the male relatives of the Caliph; and such wealth in jewelry, furniture, ivory, porcelain, glass, and other objects of art as could hardly be rivaled by any other dignitary of that era. Saladin kept nothing of all this for himself, gave the palace to his captains, and continued to live, in the vizier’s chambers, a life of fortunate simplicity.

On Nur-ud-din’s death (1173) the provincial governors refused to acknowledge his eleven-year-old son as king, and Syria verged again on chaos. Alleging fear that the Crusaders would take the country, Saladin left Egypt with a force of 700 horsemen, and in swift campaigns made himself master of Syria. Returning to Egypt, he took the title of king, and thereby inaugurated the Ayyubid dynasty (1175). Six years later he set out again, made Damascus his capital, and conquered Mesopotamia. There, as at Cairo, he continued to display the stern orthodoxy of his faith. He built several mosques, hospitals, monasteries, and madrasas or theological schools. He encouraged architecture, discountenanced secular science, and shared Plato’s disdain for poetry. All wrongs that came to his knowledge were speedily redressed; and taxes were lowered at the same time that public works were extended and the functions of government were carried on with efficiency and zeal. Islam gloried in the integrity and justice of his rule, and Christendom acknowledged in him an infidel gentleman.

We shall not detail the medley of local dynasties that divided Eastern Islam after his death (1193). His sons lacked his ability, and the Ayyubid rule in Syria ended in three generations (1260). In Egypt it flourished till 1250, and reached its zenith under the enlightened Malik al-Kamil (1218–38), friend of Frederick II. In Asia Minor the Seljuqs established (1077–1327) the sultanate of “Rum” (Rome), and for a time made Konya (St. Paul’s Iconium) the center of a lettered civilization. Asia Minor, which had been half Greek since Homer, was now de-Hellenized, and became as Turkish as Turkestan; there, today, Turkey holds its precarious seat in a once Hittite capital. An independent tribe of Turks ruled Khwarizm (1077–1231), and extended its power from the Urals to the Persian Gulf. It was in this condition of political atomism that Jenghiz Khan found Asiatic Islam.

Yet even in these declining years Islam led the world in poetry, science, and philosophy, and rivaled the Hohenstaufens in government. The Seljuq sultans—Tughril Beg, Alp Arslan, Malik Shah, Sinjar—were among the ablest monarchs of the Middle Ages; Nizam al-Mulk ranks with the greatest statesmen; Nur-ud-din, Saladin, and al-Kamil were the equals of Richard I, Louis IX, and Frederick II. All these Moslem rulers, and even the minor kings, continued the Abbasid support of literature and art; at their courts we shall find poets like Omar, Nizami, Sa‘di, and Jalal ud-din Rumi; and though philosophy faded out under their cautious orthodoxy, architecture flourished more splendidly than before. The Seljuqs and Saladin persecuted Moslem heresy; but they were so lenient to Christians and Jews that Byzantine historians told of Christian communities inviting Seljuq rulers to come and oust oppressive Byzantine governors.⁷ Under the leadership of the Seljuqs and Ayyubids Western Asia again prospered in body and mind. Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Isfahan, Rayy, Herat, Amida, Nishapur, and Merv were in this period among the best adorned and most cultured cities in the white man’s world. It was a brilliant decay.

II. THE ISLAMIC WEST: 1086–1300

In 1249 al-Salih, last Egyptian sultan of the Ayyubid line, passed away. His widow and former slave, Shajar-al-Durr, connived at the murder of her stepson, and proclaimed herself queen. To save their masculine honor, the Moslem leaders of Cairo chose another former slave, Aybak, as her associate. She married him, but continued to rule; and when he attempted a declaration of independence she had him murdered in his bath (1257). She herself was presently battered to death with wooden shoes by Aybak’s women slaves.

Aybak had lived long enough to found the Mamluk dynasty. Mamluk meant “owned,” and was applied to white slaves, usually strong and fearless Turks or Mongols employed as palace guards by the Ayyubid sultans. As in Rome and Baghdad, so in Cairo the guards became the kings. For 267 years (1250–1517) the Mamluks ruled Egypt, and sometimes Syria (1271–1516); they incarnadined their capital with assassinations, and beautified it with art; their courage saved Syria and Egypt—even Europe—when they routed the Mongols at Ain-Jalut (1260). They received less wide acclaim for saving Palestine from the Franks, and driving the last Christian warrior from Asia.

The greatest and least scrupulous of the Mamluk rulers was al-Malik Baibars (1260–77). Born a Turkish slave, his brave resourcefulness raised him to high command in the Egyptian army. It was he who defeated Louis IX at Mansura in 1250; and ten years later he fought with fierce skill under the Sultan Qutuz at Ain-Jalut. He murdered Qutuz on the way back to Cairo, made himself sultan, and accepted with winning grace the triumph that the city had prepared for his victorious victim. He renewed repeatedly the war against the Crusaders, always with success; and for these holy campaigns Moslem tradition honors him next to Harun and Saladin. In peace, says a contemporary Christian chronicler, he was “sober, chaste, just to his people, even kind to his Christian subjects.”⁸ He organized the government of Egypt so well that no incompetence among his successors availed to unseat the Mamluks till their overthrow by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. He gave Egypt a strong army and navy, cleared its harbors, roads, and canals, and built the mosque that bears his name.

Another Turkish slave deposed Baibars’ son, and became Sultan al-Mansur Sayf-al-Din Qalaun (1279–90). History remembers him chiefly for the great hospital that he built at Cairo, and which he endowed with an annuity of a million dirhems ($500,000). His son Nasir (1293–1340) was thrice enthroned but only twice deposed; built aqueducts, public baths, schools, monasteries, and thirty mosques; dug with the forced labor of 100,000 men a canal connecting Alexandria with the Nile; and exemplified Mamluk ways by slaughtering 20,000 animals for the marriage feast of his son. When Nasir traveled through the desert forty camels bore on their backs a garden of rich earth to provide him with fresh vegetables every day.⁹ He depleted the treasury, and condemned his successors to a slow decline of the Mamluk power.

These sultans do not impress us as favorably as the Seljuqs or Ayyubids. They undertook great public works, but most of these were accomplished by peasants and proletaires exploited to the limit of human tolerance, and for a government completely irresponsible to either the nation or an aristocracy; assassination was the only known form of recall. At the same time these brutal rulers had good taste and a large spirit in literature and art. The Mamluk period is the most brilliant in the history of medieval Egyptian architecture. Cairo was now (1250–1300) the richest city west of the Indus.¹⁰ Markets teeming with all the necessaries and many of the superfluities of life; the great slave mart where one could buy and sell men and maidens; little shops nestling in the walls, and crowded with goods of flexible price; alleys crawling with men and beasts, noisy with pedlars and carts, deliberately narrow for shade and crooked for defense; homes hidden behind stern façades, rooms dark and cool amid the glare and heat and bustle of the streets, and breathing from an inner court or garden close; interiors lushly furnished with hangings, carpets, embroideries, and works of art; men chewing hashish to produce a dreamy intoxication; women gossiping in the zenana, or furtively flirting in a window bay; music strummed from a thousand lutes, and weird concerts in the Citadel; public parks redolent with flowers and picnicking; canals and the great river dotted with cargo barges, passenger vessels, and pleasure boats: this was the Cairo of medieval Islam. One of its poets sang:

Beside that garden flowed the placid Nile.

Oft have I steered my dahabiya there;

Oft have I landed to repose awhile,

And bask and revel in the sunny smile

Of her whose presence made the place so fair.¹¹

Meanwhile in North Africa a succession of dynasties had their day. Zayrids (972–1148) and Hafsids (1228–1534) ruled Tunisia; Hammadids (1007–1152) governed Algeria; Almoravids (1056–1147) and Almohads (1130–1269) held sway in Morocco. In Spain the victorious Almoravids, once the frugal warriors of Africa, rapidly learned the luxurious ways of the Cordovan and Sevillian princes whom they had replaced. The discipline of war gave way to the blandishments of peace; courage yielded to money as the standard of excellence and the goal of desire; women won by their grace and charms a power rivaled only by theologians promising like joys in paradise. Officials became corrupt, and administration, which had been competent under Yusuf ibn Tashfin (1090–1106), was already debased under Ali his son (1106–43). As governmental negligence grew, brigandage spread; roads became unsafe; commerce languished, wealth declined. The kings of Catholic Spain seized their opportunity, and raided Cordova, Seville, and other cities of Moorish Spain. Again the Moslems turned to Africa for deliverance.

There, in 1121, a religious revolution had raised a new sect to power and violence. Abdallah ibn Tumart denounced both the anthropomorphism of the orthodox and the rationalism of the philosophers; he demanded a return to simplicity of life and creed; and ended by proclaiming himself the Mahdi or Messiah promised in the Shia faith. The barbarous tribes of the Atlas range flocked to him, organized themselves under the name of Almohads or Unitarians, overthrew the Almoravid rulers in Morocco, and found it an easy matter to do the like in Spain. Under the Almohad emirs Abd al-Mumin (1145–63) and Abu Yaqub Yusuf (1163–84) order and prosperity returned to Andalusia and Morocco; literature and learning once more raised their heads; and philosophers were protected on the quiet understanding that they would make their works unintelligible. But Abu Yusuf Yaqub (1184–99) yielded to the theologians, forsook philosophy, and ordered all philosophical works to be burned. His son Muhammad al-Nasir (1199–1214) cared for neither philosophy nor religion; he neglected government, specialized in pleasure, and was overwhelmingly defeated by the united armies of Christian Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Almohad Spain broke into small and independent states, which were conquered by the Christians one by one—Cordova in 1236, Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248. The harassed Moors retired to Granada, where the Sierra Nevada, or Snowy Ridge, provided some defense; and well-rivered fields flowered into vineyards, olive orchards, and orange groves. A succession of prudent rulers sustained Granada and its dependencies—Xeres, Jaen, Almeria, and Malaga—against repeated Christian assaults; commerce and industry revived, art flourished, the people gained renown for their gay dress and joyous fetes; and the little kingdom survived till 1492 as the last European foothold of a culture that had made Andalusia for many centuries an honor to mankind.

III. GLIMPSES OF ISLAMIC ART: 1058–1250

It was in this age of Berber domination that Moslem Spain raised the Alhambra at Granada and the Alcazar and Giralda at Seville. The new architectural style is often called Morisco, as having entered from Morocco; but its elements came from Syria and Persia, and mark as well the Taj Mahal in India; so wide and rich was the realm of Moslem art. It was a feminine style, aiming no longer at impressive strength as in the mosques of Damascus, Cordova, and Cairo, but at a delicate beauty in which all skill seemed absorbed in decoration, and the sculptor engulfed the architect.

The Almohads were enthusiastic builders. First they built for defense, and surrounded their major cities with mighty walls and towers, like the Torre del Oro, or Tower of Gold, that guarded the Guadalquivir at Seville. The Alcazar there was a union of fortress and palace, and showed a plain, blunt front to the world. Designed by the Toledan architect Jalubi for Abu Yaqub Yusuf (1181), it became after 1248 the favorite domicile of the Christian kings; it was modified, repaired, restored, or enlarged by Pedro I (1353), Charles V (1526) … and Isabella (1833); it is now predominantly Christian in origin but predominantly Moorish—or Christian Moorish (“Mudejar”)—in workmanship and style.

The same Abu Yaqub Yusuf who began the Alcazar built in 1171 the great mosque of Seville, of which nothing remains. In 1196 the architect Jabir raised the magnificent minaret of the mosque, known to us as the Giralda. The conquering Christians transformed the mosque into a church (1235); in 1401 this was torn down, and on its site—partly with its materials—was erected the vast cathedral of Seville. Of the Giralda the lowest 230 feet are of the original structure, the remaining 82 are a Christian supplement (1568) completely harmonious with the Moorish base. The upper two thirds are richly ornamented with arcaded balconies and lace-like trellises of stucco and stone. At the top is a powerful bronze figure of Faith (1568), which hardly symbolizes the ever-religious mood of Spain by turning with the winds; hence the Spanish name Giralda—that which turns (gira). Towers almost as beautiful were raised by the Moors at Marraqesh (1069) and Rabat (1197).

At Granada, in 1248, Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar (1232–73) ordered the erection of Spain’s most famous edifice, the Alhambra—i.e., “the red.” The chosen site was a mountain crag bounded by deep ravines, and looking down upon two rivers, the Darro and the Genil. The emir found there a fortress, the Alcazaba, dating from the ninth century; he added to it, built the great outer walls of the Alhambra and the earlier of its palaces, and left everywhere his modest motto: “There is no conqueror but Allah.” The immense structure has been repeatedly extended and repaired, by Christians as well as Moors. Charles V added his own palace in square Renaissance style, solemn, incongruous, and incomplete. Following the principles of military architecture as developed in Eastern Islam, the unknown architect designed the enclosure first as a fortress capable of holding 40,000 men.¹² The more luxurious taste of the next two centuries gradually transformed this fortress into a congeries of halls and palaces, nearly all distinguished by unsurpassed delicacy of floral or geometrical decoration, carved or stamped in colored stucco, brick, or stone. In the Court of the Myrtles a pool reflects the foliage and the fretted portico. Behind it rises the battlemented Tower of Comares, where the besieged thought to find a last and impregnable redoubt. Within the tower is the ornate Hall of the Ambassadors; here the emirs of Granada sat enthroned, while foreign emissaries marveled at the art and wealth of the tiny kingdom; here Charles V, looking out from a balcony window upon the gardens, groves, and stream below, mused, “How ill-fated the man who lost all this!”¹³ In the main courtyard, the Patio de los Leones, a dozen ungainly marble lions guard a majestic alabaster fountain; the slender columns and flowered capitals of the surrounding arcade, the stalactite archivolts, the Kufic lettering, the time-subdued tints of the filigree arabesques, make this the masterpiece of the Morisco style. Perhaps in their enthusiasm and their luxury the Moors here pressed their art beyond elegance to excess; where all is ornament the eye and soul grow weary even of beauty and skill. This delicacy of decoration leaves a sense of frailty, and sacrifices that impression of secure strength which architecture should convey. And yet nearly all this frosting has survived a dozen earthquakes; the ceiling of the Hall of the Ambassadors fell, but the rest remained. In sum this picturesque ensemble of gardens, palaces, fountains, and balconies suggests both the climax and the decay of Moorish art in Spain: a wealth gone to extravagance, a conquering energy relaxed into a flair for ease, a taste for beauty that has subsided from power and grandeur to elegance and grace.

In the twelfth century Moorish art flowed back from Spain into North Africa, and Marraqesh, Fez, Tlemcèn, Tunis, Sfax, and Tripoli reached the apogee of their splendor with handsome palaces, dazzling mosques, and labyrinthine slums. In Egypt and the East a new virility was brought into Islamic art by the Seljuqs, the Ayyubids, and the Mamluks. Southeast of Cairo Saladin and his successors, using the forced labor of captured Crusaders, raised the immense Citadel, probably in imitation of the castles built by the Franks in Syria. At Aleppo the Ayyubids reared the Great Mosque and Citadel, and at Damascus the mausoleum of Saladin. Meanwhile an architectural revolution transformed the old courtyard style of mosque into the madrasa or collegiate mosque throughout Eastern Islam. As mosques increased in number, it was no longer necessary to design them with a large central court to hold a numerous congregation; and the rising demand for schools required new educational facilities. From the mosque proper—now almost always crowned with a dominating dome—four wings or transepts spread, each with its own minarets, a richly decorated portal, and a spacious lecture hall. Normally each of the four orthodox schools of theology and law had its own wing; as an honest sultan said, it was desirable to support all four schools, so that at least one would in any case be found to justify the actions of the government. This revolution in design was continued by the Mamluks in mosques and tombs firmly built in stone, guarded with massive doors of damascened bronze, lighted by windows of stained glass, and brilliant with mosaics, carvings in colored stucco, and such enduring tiles as only Islam knew how to make.

Of Seljuq architectural monuments not one in a hundred has survived. In Armenia the mosque of Ani; at Konya the magnificent portal of the mosque of Diwrigi, the immense mosque of Ala-ud-din, the cavernous porch and embroiderylike façade of the Sirtjeli madrasa; in Mesopotamia the Great Mosque of Mosul, and the mosque of Mustansir at Baghdad; in Persia the tower of Tughril Beg at Rayy, the tomb of Sinjar at Merv, the dazzling mihrab of the Alaviyan Mosque at Hamadan, the ribbed vault and unique squinches of the Friday Mosque at Qasvin, and there, too, the great arches and mihrab of the Haydaria Mosque: these are but a few of the structures that remain to prove the skill of Seljuq architects and the taste of Seljuq kings. But more beautiful than any of these—rivaled in Persia only by the later Tomb of Imam Riza at Mashhad—is the masterpiece of the Seljuq age, the Masjid-i-Jami, or Friday Mosque, of Isfahan. Like Chartres or Notre Dame, it bears the labor and stamp or many centuries; begun in 1088, it was several times restored or enlarged, and reached its present form only in 1612. But the larger of the great brick domes carries the inscription of Nizam al-Mulk, and the date 1088. The porch and the sanctuary portals—one eighty feet high—are adorned with mosaic faïence hardly rivaled in all the history of that art. The inner halls are roofed with ribbed vaults, complex squinches, and pointed arches springing from massive piers. The mihrab (1310) has a stucco relief of vine and lotus foliage, and Kufic lettering, unsurpassed in Islam.

Such monuments laugh out of court the notion that the Turks were barbarians. Just as the Seljuq rulers and viziers were among the most capable statesmen in history, so the Seljuq architects were among the most competent and courageous builders of an Age of Faith distinguished by massive and audacious designs. The Persian flair for ornament was checked by the heroic mold of the Seljuq style; and the union of the two moods brought an architectural outburst in Asia Minor, Iraq, and Iran, strangely contemporary with the Gothic flowering in France. Instead of hiding the mosque in a corner of a court, as the Arabs had done, the Seljuqs gave it a bold and brilliant façade, raised its height, and led it up to a circular or conical dome that brought all the edifice into unity. The pointed arch, the vault, and the dome were now perfectly combined.¹⁴

All the arts reached their Moslem zenith in this strange age of grandeur and decay. Pottery seemed to the Persians an indispensable amenity of life; and seldom has the ceramic art reached so heterogeneous an excellence.¹⁵ The techniques of luster decoration, of monochrome or polychrome painting over or under glaze, of enamel, tile, faïence, and glass, now perfected their Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Sasanian, and Syrian heritage. Chinese influence entered, especially in the painting of figures, but it did not dominate the Persian style. Porcelain was imported from China; but the scarcity of kaolin in the Near and Middle East discouraged the Moslem manufacture of this translucent ware. Nevertheless, during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries Persian pottery remained unrivaled—superior in variety of forms, elegance of proportions, brilliance of decoration, grace and delicacy of line.¹⁶

In general the minor arts in Islam hardly deserved so slighting a name. Aleppo and Damascus in this period produced frail marvels of glass with enamel designs, and Cairo made for mosques and palaces enameled glass lamps which are among the prizes of art collectors today.* The Fatimid treasury dispersed by Saladin contained thousands of crystal or sardonyx vases whose artistry seems beyond our skill today. The old Assyrian art of metalwork reached now an unprecedented height in Syria and Egypt, whence it passed to Venice in the fifteenth century.¹⁸ Copper, bronze, brass, silver, gold were cast or beaten into utensils, weapons, arms, lamps, ewers, basins, bowls, trays, mirrors, astronomical instruments, flower vases, chandeliers, pen boxes, inkstands, braziers, perfume burners, animal figures, Koran cases, andirons, keys, scissors … delicately engraved, and in many instances inlaid with precious metals or stones. Brass table tops were incised with superabundant designs, and magnificent metal grilles were made for sanctuaries, doors, or tombs. A silver salver engraved with ibexes, geese, and the name of Alp Arslan, and dated 1066, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, has been judged “the outstanding silver piece of the Islamic period” of Persian art, “and the most important single object surviving from Seljuq times.”¹⁹

Sculpture remained a dependent art, confined to reliefs and carvings of stone or stucco, to ornamental scripts and arabesques; a reckless ruler might have a statue made of himself or his wife or a singing girl, but such figures were secret sins, rarely exposed to public gaze. Wood carving, however, flourished. Doors, pulpits, mihrabs, lecterns, screens, ceilings, tables, lattice windows, cabinets, boxes, combs were cut in lacelike designs, or were laboriously rounded by cross-legged turners revolving their lathes with a bow. A still more incredible patience produced silks, satins, brocades, embroideries, gold-woven velvets, hangings, tents, and rugs of such delicate weave or fascinating design as set the world wonderingly envious. Marco Polo, visiting Asia Minor about 1270, noted there “the most beautiful rugs in the world.”²⁰ John Singer Sargent thought a certain Persian rug “worth all the pictures ever painted”;²¹ yet expert opinion judges extant Persian carpets to be imperfect examples of an art in which Persia has for centuries led the world. Only tattered fragments remain of Iranian rugs from the Seljuq age, but we may surmise their excellence from their representation in the miniatures of the Mongol period.

Painting in Islam was a major art in miniatures, and an ever less minor art in murals and portraiture. The Fatimid Caliph Amir (1101–30) engaged artists to paint in his rooms at Cairo the portraits of contemporary poets;²² apparently the old prohibition of “graven images” was weakening. Seljuq painting reached its height in Transoxiana, where Sunnite prejudices against representation was diluted by distance; and Turkish manuscripts picture their heroes abundantly. No certainly Seljuq miniature has reached us, but the heyday of the art in the ensuing Mongol period of Eastern Islam leaves little doubt of its flourishing in Seljuq times. Subtle minds and hands made ever lovelier Korans for Seljuq, Ayyubid, or Mamluk mosques, monasteries, dignitaries, and schools, and engraved upon the leather or lacquer bindings designs as delicate as a spider’s web. Rich men spent small fortunes in engaging artists to make the most beautiful books ever known. A corps of papermakers, calligraphers, painters, and bookbinders in some cases worked for seventeen years on one volume. Paper had to be of the best; brushes were put together, we are told, from the white neck hairs of kittens not more than two years old; blue ink was sometimes made from powdered lapis lazuli, and could be worth its weight in gold; and liquid gold was not thought too precious for some lines or letters of design or text. “Imagination,” said a Persian poet, “cannot grasp the joy that reason draws from a fine-drawn line.”²³

IV. THE AGE OF OMAR KHAYYAM: 1038–1122

The artists of this age were apparently equaled in number by the poets and savants. Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Baalbek, Aleppo, Damascus, Mosul, Emesa, Tus, Nishapur, and many other cities boasted colleges; Baghdad alone had thirty in 1064. A year later Nizam al-Mulk added another, the Nizamiya; in 1234 the Caliph Mustansir founded still another, which in size, architecture, and equipment surpassed all the rest; one traveler called it the most beautiful building in the city. It contained four distinct law schools, in which qualified students received free tuition, food, and medical care, and a monthly gold dinar for other expenses; it contained a hospital, a bathhouse, and a library freely open to students and staff. Women probably attended college in some cases, for we hear of a shaikha—a lady professor—whose lectures, like Aspasia’s or Hypatia’s, drew large audiences (c. 1178).²⁴ Libraries were now richer and more numerous than ever in Islam; Moslem Spain alone had seventy public libraries. Grammarians, lexicographers, encyclopedists, and historians continued to flourish. Collective biography was a Moslem hobby and forte: Ibn al-Qifti (d. 1248) wrote the lives of 414 philosophers and scientists; Ibn Abi Usaybia (1203–70) performed a like service for 400 physicians; Muhammad Awfi (1228) achieved an encyclopedia of 300 Persian poets without mentioning Omar Khayyam; and Muhammad ibn Khallikan (1211–82) surpassed all other singlehanded works of this kind in his Obituaries of Men of Note, containing brief anecdotal lives of 865 distinguished Mohammedans. It is remarkably accurate for a book covering so wide a field; Ibn Khallikan nevertheless apologized for its imperfections, saying, in its final words, that “God has allowed no book to be faultless except the Koran.” Muhammad al-Shahrastani, in a Book of Religions and Sects (1128), analyzed the leading faiths and philosophies of the world, and summarized their history; no contemporary Christian could have written so learned and impartial a work.

Moslem fiction never rose above the episodic picaresque proliferation of tales unified only by the persistence of a single character. After the Koran, the Thousand Nights and a Night, and the fables of Bidpai, the most popular book in Islam was the Maqamat (Discourses) of Abu Muhammad al-Hariri (1054–1122) of Basra. Here, in rhymed Arabic prose, are the adventures of the charming scoundrel Abu Zaid, who wins forgiveness for his pranks, crimes, and blasphemies by his genial humor, resourceful cleverness, and tempting philosophy:

Obey not the fool who forbids thee to pull beauty’s rose when in full bloom thou’rt free to possess it; pursue thine end still, though it seem past thy skill; let them say what they will; take thy pleasure and bless it!²⁵

Nearly every literate Moslem now wrote poetry, and nearly every ruler encouraged it. If we may take the word of Ibn Khaldun, hundreds of poets could be found at the Almoravid and Almohad courts in Africa and Spain.²⁶ At a gathering of rival poets in Seville, el-Aama et-Toteli (i.e., the Blind Poet of Tudela) won the prize with lines that sum up half the poetry of the world:

When she laughs, pearls appear; when she removes her veil, the moon is seen; The universe is too narrow to contain her; yet she is enclosed in my heart.²⁷

The other poets, we are told, tore up their verses unread. In Cairo Zuheyr sang of love long after his hair was white. In Eastern Islam the breakup of the Empire into small kingdoms increased the number and rivalry of patrons, and helped literature, as in nineteenth-century Germany. Persia was the richest of the nations in her poets. Anwari of Khurasan (fl. 1185) rhymed for a time at the court of Sinjar, whom he praised only next to himself.

I have a soul ardent as fire, a tongue fluent as water,

A mind sharpened by intelligence, and verse devoid of flaw.

Alas! there is no patron worthy of my eulogies!

Alas! there is no sweetheart worthy of my odes!²⁸

Quite as confident was his contemporary Khagani (1106–85), whose arrogance provoked his tutor to a genealogical barb:

My dear Khagani, skillful though you be

In verse, one little hint I give you free:

Mock not with satire any older poet;

Perhaps he’s your sire, though you don’t know it.²⁹

Europe knows Persian poetry chiefly through Omar Khayyam; Persia classes him among her scientists, and considers his quatrains the casual amusement of “one of the greatest mathematicians of medieval times.”³⁰ Abu’l-Fath Umar Khayyami ibn Ibrahim was born at Nishapur in 1038. His cognomen meant tentmaker, but proves nothing about his trade or that of his father Abraham; occupational names, in Omar’s time, had lost their literal application, as among the Smiths, Taylors, Bakers, and Porters of our land. History knows little of his life, but records several of his works. His Algebra, translated into French in 1857, made significant advances both on al-Khwarizmi and on the Greeks; its partial solution of cubic equations has been judged “perhaps the very highest peak of medieval mathematics.”³¹ Another of his works on algebra (a manuscript in the Leiden Library) studied critically the postulates and definitions of Euclid. In 1074 the Sultan Malik Shah commissioned him and others to reform the Persian calendar. The outcome was a calendar that required a day’s correction every 3770 years—slightly more accurate than ours, which requires a day’s correction every 3330 years;³² we may leave the choice to the next civilization. Mohammedan religion proved stronger than Moslem science, and Omar’s calendar failed to win acceptance over Mohammed’s. The astronomer’s repute is reflected in an anecdote told by Nizami-i-Arudi, who had known him at Nishapur:

In the winter of A.H. 508 [A.D. 1114–5] the King sent a messenger to Merv bidding its governor tell Umar al-Khayyami to select a favorable time for him to go hunting…. Umar looked into the matter for two days, made a careful choice of the desirable time, and himself went to superintend the mounting of the King. When the King had gone a short distance the sky became overcast, a wind rose, and snow and mist supervened. All present fell to laughing, and the King wished to turn back. But Umar said, “Have no anxiety, for this very hour the clouds will clear away, and during these five days there will be no drop of moisture.” So the King rode on, and the clouds opened, and during those five days there was no wet, and no cloud was seen.³³

The rubaiyah or quatrain (from rubai, composed of four) is in its Persian form a poem of four lines rhyming aaba. It is an epigram in the Greek sense, as the expression of a completed thought in terse poetic form. Its origin is unknown, but it long antedated Omar. In Persian literature it is never part of a longer poem, but forms an independent whole, hence Persian collectors of rubaiyat arrange them not by their thought sequence but in the alphabetical order of the final letter of the rhyming syllables.³⁴ Thousands of Persian quatrains exist, mostly of uncertain authorship; over 1200 of them have been attributed to Omar, but often questionably. The oldest Persian manuscript of the Rubaiyat of Omar (in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) goes back only to 1460, and contains 158 stanzas, alphabetically arranged.³⁵ Several of these have been traced to Omar’s predecessors—some to Abu Said, one to Avicenna;³⁷ it is hardly possible, save in a few cases, to assert positively that Omar wrote any particular one of the quatrains ascribed to him.³⁸

The German Orientalist Von Hammer, in 1818, was the first European to call attention to Omar’s rubaiyat. In 1859 Edward FitzGerald translated seventy-five of them into English verse of a unique and pithy excellence. The first edition, though its price was a penny, found few purchasers; persistent and enlarged reissues, however, succeeded in transforming the Persian mathematician into one of the most widely read poets in the world. Of the 110 quatrains translated by FitzGerald forty-nine—in the judgment of those familiar with the original—are faithful paraphrases of single quatrains in the Persian text; forty-four are composites, each taking something from two or more quatrains; two “reflect the whole spirit of the original poem”; six are from quatrains sometimes included in Omar’s text, but probably not his; two were influenced by FitzGerald’s reading of Hafiz; three have no source in any extant text of Omar, were apparently fathered by FitzGerald, and were suppressed by him in his second edition.³⁹ Of stanza lxxxi—

O Thou, who man of baser earth didst make,

And e’en with Paradise devise the snake,

For all the sin wherewith the face of man

Is blackened, man’s forgiveness give—and take!—

no corresponding passage can be found in Omar.⁴⁰ For the rest a comparison of FitzGerald’s version with a literal translation of the Persian text indicates that FitzGerald always reflects the spirit of Omar, and is as true to the original as may reasonably be expected of so poetic a paraphrase. The Darwinian mood of FitzGerald’s time moved him to ignore Omar’s kindly humor, and to deepen the antitheological strain. But Persian authors only a century later than Omar describe him in terms quite consistent with FitzGerald’s interpretation. Mirsad al-Ibad (1223) called him “an unhappy philosopher, atheist, and materialist”; al-Qifti’s History of the Philosophers (1240) ranked him as “without an equal in astronomy and philosophy,” but termed him an advanced freethinker, constrained by prudence to bridle his tongue; al-Sharazuri, in the thirteenth century, represented him as an ill-tempered follower of Avicenna, and listed two works by Omar on philosophy, now lost. Some Sufis sought a mystic allegory in Omar’s quatrains, but the Sufi Najmud-din-Razi denounced him as the arch freethinker of his time.⁴¹

Influenced perhaps by science, perhaps by the poems of al-Ma’arri, Omar rejected theology with patient scorn, and boasted of stealing prayer rugs from the mosque.⁴² He accepted the fatalism of the Moslem creed, and, shorn of hope for an afterlife, fell into a pessimism that sought consolation in study and wine. Stanzas cxxxii-iii of the Bodleian manuscript raise intoxication almost to a world philosophy:

’Tis I who have swept with my mustaches the wineshop,

To what is good and ill of both worlds said good-bye.

Should both worlds fall like a polo ball into the street,

You shall seek me out. A-sleeping like a drunkard I shall be.…

From all that is, save wine, to refrain is well. …

To be inebriate, squalid, and vagrant is well.

One draught of wine is well from Moon to Fish⁴³—

that is, from one end of the sky to the other. But when we note how many Persian poets chant similar eulogies to unconsciousness, we wonder is not this Bacchic piety a pose and literary form, like Horace’s ambigendrous loves?

Probably such incidental quatrains give a false impression of Omar’s life; they doubtless played a minor role in his eighty-five years. We should picture him not as a drunkard sprawling in the street, but as an old savant quietly content with cubic equations, a few constellations and astronomic charts, and an occasional cup with fellow scholars “star-scattered on the grass.” He seems to have loved flowers with the passion of a people bound to a parched terrain; and if we trust Nizami-i-Arudi, he was granted his wish to lie where flowers bloomed.

In the year A.H. 506 [A.D. 1112–3] Umar Khayyami and Muzaffar-i-Isfizari had alighted in the city of Balkh… in the house of Emir Abu Sa’d, and I had joined that assembly. In this friendly gathering I heard that Proof of the Truth (Omar) say, “My grave will be in a spot where trees will shed their blossoms on me twice a year.” This seemed to me impossible, though I knew that one such as he would not speak idle words.

When I arrived at Nishapur in the year 530 [1135], it being then some thirteen years since that great man had veiled his countenance in the dust… I went to visit his grave.… His tomb lay at the foot of a garden wall, over which pear trees and peach trees thrust their heads; and on his grave had fallen so many flower petals that his dust was hidden beneath them. Then I remembered his words at Balkh, and I fell to weeping, because on the face of the earth, in all the regions of the habitable globe, I nowhere saw one like unto him.⁴⁴

V. THE AGE OF SA’DI: 1150–1291

Five years after Omar’s death a poet far more honored in Persia was born at Gandzha, now Kirovabad, near Tiflis. As if in foil to Omar, Ilyas Abu Muhammad, later known as Nizami, lived a life of genuine piety, rigorously abstained from wine, and devoted himself to parentage and poetry. His Romance of Layla and Majnun (1188) is the most popular of all love stories in Persian verse. Qays Majnun (i.e., the Mad) becomes enamored of Layla, whose father compels her to marry another man; Majnun, delirious with disappointment, retires from civilization to the wilderness; only when Lay la’s name is mentioned does he return to brief sanity. Widowed, she joins him, but dies soon afterward; and Romeo Qays kills himself on her grave. Translation cannot render the melodious intensity of the original.