The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

He died too young—at forty eight (833)—and yet too late; for in a fever of authoritarian liberalism he disgraced his final years by persecuting orthodox belief.

He surrounded himself with a bodyguard of 4000 Turkish soldiers, as Roman emperors had leaned on a Praetorian Guard; and in Baghdad, as in Rome, the guard became in time and effect the king.

Arabs, Persians, Syrians, Berbers, Christians, Jews, and Turks agreed only in despising one another; and the faith that had once forged unity split into sects that expressed and intensified political or geographical divisions.

CIVILIZATION is a union of soil and soul—the resources of the earth transformed by the desire and discipline of men.

These are the patient yet restless leviathan on whose swaying back civilization precariously rides.

Under Moslem rule western Asia attained a pitch of industrial and commercial prosperity unmatched by western Europe before the sixteenth century.

“Do not call him my horse,” said an Arab; “call him my son. He runs more swiftly than the tempest, quicker than a glance…. He is so light of foot that he could dance on the breast of your mistress and she would take no hurt.”

This vitalizing commercial activity reached its peak in the tenth century, when western Europe was at nadir; and when it subsided it left its mark upon many European languages in such words as tariff, traffic, magazine, caravan, and bazaar.

from the Arabic word sakk for this form of credit is derived our word check.

the figures are Oriental and must be discounted.

The Moslem had full rights of life and death over his slaves; usually, however, he handled them with a genial humanity that made their lot no worse—perhaps better, as more secure—than that of a factory worker in nineteenth-century Europe.

It is astonishing how many sons of slaves rose to high place in the intellectual and political world of Islam, how many, like Mahmud and the early Mameluks, became kings.

There was and is much begging in Islam, and much imposture in begging; but the poor Asiatic had a protective skill in working slowly, few men could rival him in manifold adaptation to idleness, alms were frequent, and at the worst a homeless man could sleep in the finest edifice in town—the mosque.

Surkh Alam—the “Red Flag.”

Next to bread and woman, in the hierarchy of desire, comes eternal salvation; when the stomach is satisfied, and lust is spent, man spares a little time for God.

And as Jehuda ha-Nasi gathered the oral law of the Jews into written form in 189, so in 870, al-Bukhari, after researches which led him from Egypt to Turkestan, critically examined 600,000 Mohammedan traditions, and published 7275 of them in his Sahih—“Correct Book.”

the rational can secure popular acceptance only in the form of the mystical.

It is a powerful appeal, a noble summons to rise with the sun, a welcome interruption in the hot work of the day, a solemn message of divine majesty in the stillness of the night; grateful even to alien ears is this strange shrill chant of many muezzins from divers mosques calling the earthbound soul to a moment’s communion with the mysterious source of life and mind.

“Prayer,” said Omar II, “carries us halfway to God, fasting brings us to the door of His palace, almsgiving lets us in.”

forbidden foods might be eaten in cases of necessity; of a tasty cheese containing some prohibited meat he only asked, with his sly humor, “Mention the name of Allah over it.”

Mohammed accepted the old custom because he knew that ritual is less easily changed than belief;

All religions are superstitions to other faiths.

And all religions, however noble in origin, soon carry an accretion of superstitions rising naturally out of minds harassed and stupefied by the fatigue of the body and the terror of the soul in the struggle for continuance.

As in most religions, the various sects of Islam felt toward one another an animosity more intense than that with which they viewed the “infidels” in their midst.

In the ninth century the Moslem governor of Antioch appointed a special guard to keep Christian sects from massacring one another at church.

Where Hellenism, after a thousand years of mastery, had failed to take root, and Roman arms had left the native gods unconquered, and Byzantine orthodoxy had raised rebellious heresies, Mohammedanism had secured, almost without proselytism, not only belief and worship, but a tenacious fidelity that quite forgot the superseded gods.

A class of professional homosexuals (mukhannath) arose who imitated the costume and conduct of women, plaited their hair, dyed their nails with henna, and performed obscene dances.

The contact with Persia promoted both pederasty and purdah in Islam.

As for the women themselves, until the nineteenth century, there is no evidence that they objected to purdah or the veil.

In nonsexual morals the Mohammedan did not differ appreciably from the Christian. The Koran more definitely denounced gambling and intoxication (v, 90); but some gambling and much drinking continued in both civilizations.

Corruption in government and judiciary flourished in Islam as in Christendom. In general the Moslem seems to have excelled the Christian in commercial morality,63 fidelity to his word, and loyalty to treaties signed;64 Saladin was by common consent the best gentleman of the Crusades.

The Moslems were honest about lying; they allowed a lie to save a life, to patch up a quarrel, to please a wife, to decei...

Mohammed (says a tradition) was convinced that out of three judges at least two would go to hell.

In Islam, as in Judaism, law and religion were one; every crime was a sin, every sin a crime; and jurisprudence was a branch of theology.

A law originally enacted for a desert community, he argued, must be interpreted analogously, not literally, when applied to an industrial or urban society;

“The legal rule,” said Hanifa, “is not the same as the rules of grammar and logic. It expresses a general custom, and changes with the circumstances that produced it.”

The multiplicity of enactments would have stifled human development; but legal fictions and condoned evasions reconciled the rigor of the law with the flow and vigor of life.

Civilization is rural in base but urban in form; men must gather in cities to provide for one another audiences and stimuli.

About 790 we hear of a club of ten members: an orthodox Sunni, a Shi’ite, a Kharijite, a Manichean, an erotic poet, a materialist, a Christian, a Jew, a Sabaean, and a Zoroastrian; their meetings, we are told, were marked by mutual tolerance, good humor, and courteous argument.

In general Moslem society was one of excellent manners; from Cyrus to Li Hung Chang the East has surpassed the West in courtesy.

Mosque is from the Arabic masjid, from sajada, to bow down, adore. In the Near East masjid is pronounced musjid; in North Africa, musghid—whence the French and English forms of the word.

The method was memory, the discipline was the rod;

Elementary education aimed to form character, secondary education to transmit knowledge.

In a thousand mosques from Cordova to Samarkand scholars were as numerous as pillars, and made the cloisters tremble with their eloquence; the roads of the realm were disturbed by innumerable geographers, historians, and theologians seeking knowledge and wisdom; the courts of a hundred princes resounded with poetry and philosophical debate; and no man dared be a millionaire without supporting literature or art.

his history remains a mountain of industry rather than a work of art.

perhaps realizing that his readers had less time to read than he had to write—

“It is the character of our time,” he wrote, “to separate and disperse all…. God makes a nation prosper through love of the hearth; it is a sign of moral uprightness to be attached to the place of one’s birth; it is a mark of noble lineage to dislike separation from the ancestral hearth and home.”

nothing human is alien to them;

But how can a Western mind ever judge an Oriental justly? The beauty of the Arab language fades in translation like a flower cut from its roots; and the topics that fill the pages of Moslem historians, fascinating to their countrymen, seem aridly remote from the natural interests of Occidental readers, who have not realized how the economic interdependence of peoples ominously demands a mutual study and understanding of East and West.

In 830 al-Mamun established at Baghdad, at a cost of 200,000 dinars ($950,000), a “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikmah) as a scientific academy, an observatory, and a public library; here he installed a corps of translators, and paid them from the public treasury.