De Lacy O'Leary

“ Thus it appears that the real work of Islam in art and architecture lay in connecting the various portions of the Muslim world in one common life, so that Syria, Persia, 'Iraq, North Africa, and Spain shared the same influences, which were ultimately Greek or Graeco-Persian, the Indian element, of quite secondary importance, entering directly through Persia. Already before the outspread of Islam, Byzantine art had entirely replaced native models in Egypt, and this was largely the case in Persia as well. ”

“ There is no such division in Islam as that which prevents the average English churchman from knowing about and appreciating a religious movement at work in the Coptic or Serbian church. The common life of Islam is largely based on the use of the Arabic language as the medium of daily life, or at least of prayer and the medium of scholarship, and this was extremely effective before the inclusion of large Turkish and Indian elements which have never really become Arabic speaking. ”

“ Scornful of agriculture and with a strong distaste for settled and especially for urban life, the Bedwin are those who have remained nomads by preference, and like all races at that stage of evolution, find the most congenial outlet for their vigour in tribal warfare and plundering expeditions. ”

“ As rulers in Syria, the Arabs were in contact with a fully developed culture which was brought to bear upon them in various ways, in the structure of society and in social order generally, in the arts and crafts, and in intellectual life. The Greek influence was nearest at hand, but there was also a very strong Persian element in close contact with them. The provincial officials of Syria, all trained in the methods of the Byzantine Empire, continued in their employ, and, as Syria was the seat of the 'Umayyad government, the state came under Greek influence. ”

“ The desert man had no tendency to the sublime thoughts about God with which he is sometimes credited, nor had he any great reverence towards the minor members of his pantheon. The Prophet found it one of his most difficult tasks to introduce the observance of prayer amongst the Arabs, and they do not appear very much attached to it at the present day. In Madina the Prophet was in contact with men whose attitude towards religion was very different and who were more in sympathy with the principles which he had learned from very much the same sources as themselves. ”

“ Islam became a militant religion because it spread amongst the Arabs at a time when they were beginning to enter upon a career of expansion and conquest, and this career had already commenced before Muhammad had got beyond the first—the purely spiritual—stage of his work. ”

“ In older times equity shows us the philosophical principles of justice correcting the defects of common law; but modern practice displays these principles fossilized as precedents and as rigid and formal in their application as the common law itself. As first conceived, "the preferable" shows the influence of Roman law and Greek philosophy, both of which contemplated an objective standard of right and wrong which could be discovered by investigation, the Stoic teaching, predominant in Roman law, tending to treat this discovery as intuitive. ”

“ They were those who would have gone forward to conquest under any efficient leader as soon as it was clear that Persia and the Greek Empire were vulnerable, and to them it was a detriment that union under a leader incidentally involved adherence to a new religion. At the head of these purely secular Arabs was the Umayyad clan of the tribe of Quraysh, and the main thing which gained their continued adherence to Islam was that the Prophet himself had belonged to that tribe and so the prestige of Islam involved that of the Quraysh who thereby became a kind of aristocracy. ”

“ It is not to be supposed that Arab governors and judges studied the Roman code, they simply accepted its provisions as they found them in force in Syria and Egypt, and thus learned its general principles from the usage of the civil courts already existing. In many places material is found in the traditions which can be traced to Zoroastrian, Jewish, and even Buddhist sources, though these deal rather with ritual and the description of the unseen world and serve to show how readily Islam absorbed elements with which it was in contact. ”

“ However great were the sectarian and political differences of later times, the church of Islam long remained, and to a great extent still remains, possessed with a common life in the sense that there is a mutual understanding between the several parts and that thus an intellectual or religious influence has been able to pass rapidly from one extreme to the other, and the religious duty of pilgrimage to Mecca has done much to foster this community of life and to promote intercourse between the several parts. ”

“ Madina was a city in a sense quite different from that in which the term could be applied to Mecca. It had developed a civic life, rudimentary no doubt but very far in advance of the Meccan conditions, and had inherited a constitutional tradition from Aramaean and Jewish colonists. At Madina the Prophet began to perceive the difference produced by the association of men in an ordered communal life as contrasted with the incoherence of the older tribal conditions, and the accompanying difference of attitude towards religion. ”

“ At most we can say that Islam evolved a quasi-Byzantine style which owed its distinctive features to the limitations of the Persian artists, but which occasionally attained a better level by the importation of Byzantine craftsmen. ”

“ From the earliest dawn of history they have always been strongly tempted by the wealth of the settled communities within reach, and appear in the oldest records as robber bands. Sometimes predatory excursions were followed by settlement, and the invading tribes learned the culture of those amongst whom they settled: all the Semitic groups other than the Arabs had formed such settlements before the 7th century A.D., and these groups are distinguished one from another, and all from the parent stock, simply by the cultural influences due to the earlier inhabitants of the lands they entered ”

“ It was this which made the Arabic speaking community of Islam so favourable a medium of cultural transmission. The 'Umayyad period was a marking time during which this common life was being evolved, and with it was evolved necessarily the bitterness of sectarian and faction divisions which always result when divergent types are in too close contact with one another. ”

“ The older Arabs seem to have accepted the idea of one supreme God, but speculated little about him: they did not regard the supreme deity as at all entering into their personal interests, which were concerned only with the minor tribal deities who were expected to attend diligently to tribal affairs and were sharply censured when they appeared to be negligent about the interests of their clients. ”

“ The "old believers," i.e., the sahibs or companions of the Prophet and the early converts who placed the religion of Islam first and desired that religion to produce a real brotherhood of all believers, whether Arab or not. Important by their prestige they were numerically in the minority. (ii) The Arab party, consisting of those who had embraced Islam only when Muhammad had shown his power by the capture of Mecca. They accepted Muslim leadership because Muhammad and the first two Khalifs were at the moment in the ascendancy, but they had no attachment to the religion of Islam. ”

“ In origin all Muslim art had a Byzantine beginning, but the traditions of Byzantine art received a peculiar direction by passing through a Persian medium, and this medium colours all work done after the close of the 'Umayyad period. ”

“ The consequence of these conditions is that through all the history of Western Asia there runs the eternal distinction between the civilized cultivators of the plains and lower hills and the wild peoples of mountain and desert. The great monarchies which have arisen here have rarely been effective beyond the limits of cultivation; mountain and desert are another world in which they can get, at best, only precarious footing. ”

“ It may be that this refers to the idea of which the word is the expression, and that in this the Prophet was influenced by Christian or Jewish theories which had originally a Platonic colouring, but it seems probable that he had no very clear theory as to the "mother of the book." At an early date the view arose that the Qur'an had existed, though not expressed in words, that the substance and meaning were eternal as part of the wisdom of God, though it had been put into words in time and then communicated to the Prophet, which is now the orthodox teaching on the basis of Qur. ”

“ Such an understanding has by no means always produced sympathy or friendliness, and the various movements as they have passed from one part to the other have often been considerably modified in the passage; but the motive power behind a movement in Persia has been intelligible in Muslim Spain—though perhaps intensely disliked there—and most often a movement beginning in any one district has sooner or later had some contact with every other district. ”

“ It is a chaotic region out of which may pour upon them at any weakening of the dam hordes of devastators. At the best of times it hampers the government by offering a refuge and recruiting ground to all the enemies of order. ”

“ Unsupported by other evidence, we might hesitate to suggest that istihsan necessarily had a Hellenistic basis, but when we compare the ideas of Abu Hanifa with the contemporary teaching of Wasil b. 'Ata (d. 131) in theology, we are forced to the conclusion that the same influences are at work in both, and in Wasil these are certainly derived from Greek philosophy. ”

“ Cette force ne pouvait longtemps demeurer sans emploi. Par ailleurs l-islam, en imposant la paix entre les tribus, ralliées à la nouvelle religion ou simplement à l’état médinois en formation,—le ta’līf al-qoloūb poursuivait ce dernier objectif—l’islam allait fermer tout issue à l’inquiète activité des nomades. ”