Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/435

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 419

reconstituted by force. What admirable natural frontiers were those which constituted the geographical limits of this peninsula, with its largely homogeneous peoples !

And yet, shortly after the death of the prophet, the Arabs spread beyond the peninsula to the north, and, in spite of moun- tains, conquered Syria, and even Egypt and Persia, in spite of their rivers. The republic of Arab tribes became a great empire, at once religious and military. It was internal social conditions which brought about unity in the peninsula of its origin, and it was the same conditions which in their development provoked the Arab overflow of boundaries; but wherever it succeeded in spreading, it adapted itself to existing conditions by seeking in part their level; and when the inundation was stopped, it was because it had exhausted its own strength, and was, moreover, halted by other social forces which were more powerful relative to the state of civilization at that time. Successively, Africa, upper Asia, the isle of Cyprus, and Spain, with the exception of the mountainous part in the northwest, became subject to Mus- sulman domination. Septimania even was conquered in the eighth century, and the other islands of the Mediterranean during the two following centuries. Thenceforth the frontiers of the Mussulman world in Asia were, upon the east, the whole basin of the Indus and the mountains; upon the north, the Aral Sea and the Caspian Sea, and the Caucasus between the latter and the Black Sea ; in Africa it included Egypt and the whole coast of the Mediterranean to a point beyond the Strait of Gibraltar; in Europe it overstepped the Pyrenees. The empire embraced the basins of the Indus, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Amu Daria, the lower and middle Nile, and all the Spanish streams ; it touched two oceans and dominated the Mediterranean upon the west, the east, and the south. Where shall we draw the natural frontiers of this empire? Where ought it to stop? To what point could it legitimately advance? Why did it end by being broken up politically and religiously? Why were distinct caliphates formed in Spain, in Maghreb, in Egypt, in Bagdad, with their distinct territorial divisions? Why, finally, from 870 to 874, were the Arabs and the Arabic tongue in Asia reduced to the same limits