Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/285

Rh A R A A R A 265 Jraminar rlie- oric. Finally, and as though to counteract any foreign in fluence that the cultivation of these exotic sciences might correlatively introduce, Arab grammar and rhetoric were, from the days of the first Ommiade to those of the last Abbaside caliph, considered an indispensable item of respectable education. Every nicety of the language was investigated in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries by the rival schools of Cufa and Bosrah ; and the Alfeei/ah, a gram matical treatise of the celebrated Ebn-Malek, a native of the latter city, who flourished in the 9th century, is even now the standard work in the hand of every professor. But for absolute mastership, joined with exquisite taste, in the use of the subtlest refinements both of rhetoric and grammar, the palm must be assigned to Hareeree, the author of the celebrated Makamat or Stations, a work esteemed by many as hardly less wonderful in the talent it displays than the Koran itself. It belongs to the llth century, and though it has had many imitators, has never yet acknowledged a rival. Iscbanical Industrious and enterprising, the Arabs led the way by nror.tions. their invention and skill to most of the more complicated manufactures of our own times. In metallurgy, their art in tempering and enamelling has become justly famous ; nor did any sword-blades ever rank higher than those of Damascus, nor any coppersmiths excel those of Baghdad, or gold and silver workmanship that of Oman. Specimens of their skill in porcelain yet remain in Spain and Syria ; while the popular words &quot; morocco &quot; and &quot; cordovan &quot; attest their cleverness in preparing and dyeing leather. The pendulum and the semaphoric telegraph, if not invented, as some think, by the Arabs, were certainly introduced by them into Europe, as was also the manufacture of silk and of cotton, and an invention of the highest value the mariner s compass. As early as 706 A.D. writing-paper was made at Mecca, whence it spread through all the Arabian dominions, and ultimately reached the Western world. In the discovery or use of gunpowder, so far back as the llth century, the Arab claim to priority is contested by the Byzantines alone. In a word, the literature, arts, and sciences of the Arabs Influence &amp;lt; J formed the connecting-link between the civilisations of th. e Arab ancient and modern times ; and the culture which they mind * introduced into the countries they conquered has in almost every instance outlasted the rule of the conquerors them selves. To them, directly and indirectly, we owe the revival of learning and philosophy in Western Europe, and the first awakening of the critical and inquiring spirit that has in great measure rescued Europe from the lethargy of monkish ignorance and ecclesiastical bigotry ; to them also, at least indirectly and by deduction, are due most of the useful arts and practical inventions laboriously perfected by later nations. Wide-spread as was the empire of the Arab sword, it has been less extended and less durable than the empire of the Arab mind. (w. G. p.) ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY owed to Arabia little more than its name and its language. It was a system of Greek thought, expressed in a Semitic tongue, and modified by Oriental influences, called into existence amongst the Moslem people by the patronage of their more liberal princes, and kept alive by the intrepidity and zeal of a small band of thinkers, who stood suspected and disliked in the eyes of their nation. The Arabian philosophers have but a secondary interest in the history of their own lands. Their chief claim to the notice of the historian of speculation comes from their warm reception of Greek philosophy when it had been banished from its original soil, and whilst Western Europe was still too rude and ignorant to be its home. In the annals of philosophy the period from the beginning of the 9th to the close of the 12th century may be styled the &quot;Flight into Egypt.&quot; During these four centuries free thought found a refuge under Mahometan princes until her oppressors were dead. In the course of that exile the traces of Semitic or Mahometan influence gradually faded away; and the last of the line of Saracenic thinkers was a truer exponent of the one philosophy which they all professed to teach than the first. The whole movement was little else than a chapter in the history of Aristotelianism. That system of thought, after passing through the minds of those who saw it in the hazy light of an Orientalised Platonism, and finding many laborious but narrow-purposed cultivators in the monastic schools of heretical Syria, was then brought into contact with the ideas and mental habits of Islam. But those in whom the two currents converged did not belong to the pure Arab race. Of the so-called Arabian philosophers of the East, Al-Farabi, Ibn-Sina, and Al- Ghazali were natives of Khorassan, Bokhara, and the outlying provinces of north-eastern Persia; whilst Al- Kendi, the earliest of them, sprang from Basra, on the Persian Gulf, on the debatable ground between the Semite and the Aryan. In Spain, again, where Ibn-Badja, Ibn- Tofail, and Ibn-Roshd rivalled or exceeded the fame of the Eastern schools, the Arabians of pure blood were few, and the Moorish ruling class was deeply intersected by Jewish colonies, and even by the natives of Christian Spain. Thus, alike at Baghdad and at Cordova, Arabian philosophy represents the for a time victorious reaction of exotic ideas and of subject races against the theological one-sidedness of Islam, and the illiterate simplicity of the early Saracens. Islam had, it is true, a philosophy of its own. There were Schoolmen amongst the believers in the Koran, not less than amongst the Latin Christians. At the very moment when Mahometanism came into contact with the older civilisations of Persia, Babylonia, and Syria, the intellectual habits of the new converts created difficulties with regard to its very basis, and showed themselves a prolific source of diversity in the details of interpretation. The radical questions on which these disputes turned were two. The first dealt with the possibility of ascribing manifold attributes to God to a Being who was absolute unity. The other referred to the bearing of God s omnipotence upon the freedom of the human will Ere the second century of the Hegira, sturdy adherents of the literal truth of the Koran taught a gross anthropomorphism, applying to the Creator the very bodily attributes of his creatures. These were the Sefatites, or partisans of the attributes. Another sect represented Mahomet as the teacher of an unqualified fatalism. Opposed to these narrow-minded exponents stood the comparatively liberal sect of the Motazalites, the Dissidents, who first appeared about 750. As they maintained, on one hand, that man was in some degree a free agent, and on another, elevated the unity of the divine nature far above the diversity of attributes, they came to be styled the partisans of justice and unity. It was with them that the Mussulman theology the science of the word (Caldm) first came into existence. Its professors, the Motecallemin (known in Hebrew as Medabbcrim, and as Loqucntes in the Latin versions) may be compared with the scholastic doctors of the Catholic Church. Driven in the first instance to speculation in theology by the needs of their natural reason, they came, in after days, when Greek philosophy had been naturalised in the Caliphate, to adapt its methods and doctrines to the support of their views. They employed a II. -- 34