Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/77

 but they had no attachment to the religion of Islam. 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. Although the Umayyads were thus able to gratify their personal pride, always a strong factor in semi-civilised psychology, and even to obtain a considerable measure of control over the other tribes, this only served to perpetuate the pre-Islamic conditions of tribal jealousy, for the primacy of the Quraysh was bitterly resented by many rivals. For the most part the true Arab party was, and still is, indifferent towards religion.

"The genuine Arab of the desert is, and remains at heart, a sceptic and a materialist; his hard, clear, keen, but somewhat narrow intelligence, ever alert in its own domain, was neither curious nor credulous in respect to immaterial and supra-sensual things; his egotistical and self-reliant nature found no place and felt no need for a God who, if powerful to protect, was exacting of service and self-denial." (Browne: Literary Hist. of Persia, i., pp. 189–190.)