Page:The Moslem World Vol XI.djvu/116

96 cial disintegration began—"a process of rapid decline into irremediable decay."^ The whole structure, with its pomp and learning, battered by the Seljulcs, finally broke under the hammer of the Mongols, and fell back into the desert.

A reflection of Damascus and Baghdad, at first, was the Moslem state in Spain, which, under the emirs of Cordova (711-1031), made the Arabian schoolmen the teachers of the Christian West, in an outburst of intellectual development that ultimately outshone the glories of the East. In education, wealth, and prosperity the Iberian Peninsula became in the tenth century the foremost country of Europe. But of this achievement of the Arab and Berber conquerors, the latest historian of Spain, on the authority of Altamira, says: "It was more largely through the efforts of others whom they imitated than through innovations of their own that they reached their high estate.'"'^ Fifty years after its most lustrous period (912-976) the mighty caliphate, which had embraced almost the whole Peninsula, split into warring units, and, soon after, dwindled into the kingdom of Granada. The descendants of the first fiery invaders, who hacked their way to victory in the name of Mohammed, were unable to withstand the counter oppression of Spanish Catholicism. With the expulsion of 500,000 Moriscos (1610) the Islamic faith and community were completely extirpated. The work of eight centuries, except the treasures of Arabic learning bequeathed to the Christians, disappeared in the hills of North Africa.

Persia had a second golden prime as an Islamic state, after the downfall of the foreign Mongol khans, with the rise in the 16th century of the native of Safavi shahs, who made the Shiah doctrine—Persia's peculiar modification of the Faith—the religion of the throne. Under the illustrious Abbas, "greatest of Persia's sovereigns since the Moslem conquest," the city of Meshed, enshrining the tombs of the Imam Ali Riza and of the great caliph, Harun-al-Rashid, became a goal of pilgrimage for all Central Asia, while the enamelled palaces of Ispahan made that new capital fairer than the Sasanian Ctesiphon. Art and literature, schools and commerce flourished under the stimulus of religious zeal. The tribes of Iran were united under a single rule as never since the days of Cyrus. But the bright imperial edifice of unity and prosperity no sooner began to attract the embassies of Europe than it sank into a decadence from which it has not revived.

Further examples of sanguinary subjugation, fanatical propaganda, violent syncretism and despotic dominion, issuing in cultural achievements soon to deteriorate, are Egypt, Morocco and the Khanates of Middle Asia. But one must look to India for Islam's greatest opportunity since the fall of Baghdad—and for its most signal failure. The Mugal Empire was, in some respects, the most resplendent pageant in the long history of Indian monarchies. Built on three centuries of the bloodiest invasions in Moslem annals, it arose in 1526 with Babur, the Tartar kinsman of Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane. Millions of Hindus were slain. Millions more were bribed and beaten into the Faith, although at times there was peaceful missionary penetration. Brahman priests were butchered by thousands and Hindu temples demolished to become foundations of Moslem palaces. In a brilliant efllorescence of arts, letters, philosophy, and a religious eclecticism in which Moslem doctrine was largely influenced by Aryan speculation, the Empire reached its 'Cf. Nicholson: A Literary History of the Arabs, p. 257. 'Chapman: A history of Spain. Macmillan, 1908. Cf. Rafael Altamira: Historia de ^spaiia y de la Civilizac16n Kspafiola.