The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

and to make matters clear they crowned the foetus by suspending the royal diadem over the mother’s womb.

Mazdak, a Zoroastrian priest, had proclaimed himself God-sent to preach an old creed: that all men are born equal, that no one has any natural right to possess more than another, that property and marriage are human inventions and miserable mistakes, and that all goods and all women should be the common property of all men.

Procopius described him as “a past master at feigning piety” and breaking his word;41

In forty-eight years of rule he had won all his wars and battles except one; had extended his empire on every side; had made Persia stronger than ever since Darius I; and had given it so competent a system of administration that when the Arabs conquered Persia they adopted that system practically without change. Almost contemporary with Justinian, he was rated by the common consent of their contemporaries as the greater king; and the Persians of every later generation counted him the strongest and ablest monarch in their history.

they are more impressive than beautiful; but we cannot judge past beauty by present ruins.

The oldest of the Sasanian sculptures shows Ardashir trampling upon a fallen foe—presumably the last of the Arsacids.

Persians wrote love poems about their rugs.

Khosru I had the good sense to import Greek artists and engineers while defeating Greek generals.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

the populace is always more royalist than the king.

The Persians met the Arabs in the Battle of the Bridge, defeated them, and pursued them recklessly; Muthanna re-formed his columns, and at the Battle of El-Bowayb destroyed the disordered Persian forces almost to a man

the Greeks, who called all the population of the peninsula Sarakenoi, Saracens, apparently from the Arabic sharqiyun, “Easterners.”

Kindly and murderous, generous and avaricious, dishonest and faithful, cautious and brave, the Bedouin, however poor, fronted the world with dignity and pride, vain of the purity of his inbred blood, and fond of adding his lineage to his name.

the career of the Arab woman passed from a moment’s idolatry to a lifetime of drudgery.

The pre-Moslem Arab was usually illiterate, but he loved poetry only next to horses, women, and wine.

The poet was to the Arabs their historian, genealogist, satirist, moralist, newspaper, oracle, call to battle;

amanuensis.

Like every successful preacher, Mohammed gave voice and form to the need and longing of his time.

New ideas are welcomed only if promising early material advantage;

Muslimin or Moslems—“the surrendering ones,” “those who have made their peace with God.”

As in Judaism, no distinction was made between secular and religious affairs; all alike came under religious jurisdiction; he was both Caesar and Christ.

Aisha, in a tradition of uncertain authority, quoted him as saying that the three most precious things in this world are women, fragrant odors, and prayers.

Women and power were his only indulgence; for the rest he was a man of unassuming simplicity.

Courteous to the great, affable to the humble, dignified to the presumptuous, indulgent to his aides, kindly to all but his foes—so his friends and followers describe him.

If we judge greatness by influence, he was one of the giants of history. He undertook to raise the spiritual and moral level of a people harassed into barbarism by heat and foodless wastes, and he succeeded more completely than any other reformer; seldom has any man so fully realized his dream.

He accomplished his purpose through religion not only because he himself was religious, but because no other medium could have moved the Arabs of his time; he appealed to their imagination, their fears and hopes, and spoke in terms that they could understand.

The book is in the purest Arabic, rich in vivid similes, and too florid for Occidental taste. By general consent it is the best, as well as the first, work in the prose literature of Arabia.

A religion is, among other things, a mode of moral government.

The historian does not ask if a theology is true—through what omniscience might he judge? Rather he inquires what social and psychological factors combined to produce the religion; how well it accomplished the purpose of turning beasts into men, savages into citizens, and empty hearts into hopeful courage and minds at peace; how much freedom it still left to the mental development of mankind; and what was its influence in history.

The Koran, like the Fundamentalist forms of Christianity, seems more concerned with right belief than with good conduct;

Like his religious contemporaries he accepted slavery as a law of nature, but did what he could to mitigate its burdens and its sting.

The greatest problems of the moralist are first to make co-operation attractive, and then to determine the size of the whole or group with which he will counsel pre-eminent co-operation.

But morality is the child of custom and the grandchild of compulsion; it develops co-operation only within aggregates equipped with force. Therefore all actual morality has been group morality.

It was a noble conception that made one people of diverse nations scattered over the continents; this is the glory of both Christianity and Islam.

No other religion in history has so consistently tried to make men strong, or so generally succeeded.

Revered to the edge of idolatry, copied and illuminated with loving skill and care, used as the book from which the Moslem learned to read, and then again as the core and summit of his education, the Koran has for thirteen centuries filled the memory, aroused the imagination, molded the character, and perhaps chilled the intellect, of hundreds of millions of men.

It gave to simple souls the simplest, least mystical, least ritualistic, of all creeds, free from idolatry and sacerdotalism.

Three books made and almost filled the Age of Faith: the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran—as if to say that in the rebarbarization of the Roman Empire only a supernatural ethic could restore order to society and the soul.

Abu Bekr the first Caliph of Islam.

Khalifa (“representative”) was at first a designation rather than a title; the official title was amir al-muminin, “Commander of the Faithful.”

Ali, cousin and sonin-law of Mohammed, was disappointed by the choice, and for six months withheld allegiance. Abbas, uncle of both Ali and Mohammed, shared this resentment. From this inaugural disagreement came a dozen wars, an Abbasid dynast...

“Surely the womb is exhausted. Woman will no more bear a Khalid!”

The invincible general took his demotion with something finer than bravery: he put himself unreservedly at the disposal of Abu Obeida, who had the wisdom to follow his advice in strategy and oppose his ferocity in victory.

he shrank from a drama in which religion had been displaced by politics, and devotion by intrigue.

“I apply not my sword,” he said, “where my lash suffices, nor my lash where my tongue is enough. And even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men I do not let it break; when they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.”

After a century of humiliation, Persia conquered her conquerors.

Al-Mansur and Khalid created the order and prosperity whose full fruits were to fall into the lap of Harun al-Rashid.

“Ten dervishes can sleep on one rug, but two kings cannot be accommodated in an entire kingdom.”

Yahya proved to be one of the ablest administrators in history.

Abdallah al-Mamun ranks with al-Mansur and al-Rashid as one of the great caliphs of the Abbasid line.