Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/162

636] active assistance rendered by Jews and Christians to the enemy. There may have been even a sense of relief in the equal, though contemptuous, licence which the haughty conquerors conceded to all alike. But there was a deeper cause,—the decrepitude of the Roman empire. The virtue and vigour needed to repel the shock of barbarian invasion were gone. And while northern hordes gradually amalgamated with the nations which they overran, the exclusive faith and intolerant teaching of Islām kept the Arabs a race distinct and dominant.

The conquerors did not spread themselves abroad in Syria as in Chaldæa, They founded here no such Arabian towns and military settlements as Al-Baṣra and Al-Kūfa. The country and climate were also less congenial. Though a land of brooks of water, of vines and fig-trees, of oil-olive and honey, still the Syrian shores offered fewer attractions to the Arabian than the hot and sandy plains of Al-ʿIrāḳ with their familiar garb of tamarisk and date. The Arabs came to Syria as conquerors; and as conquerors they settled largely, particularly the southern tribes, in Damascus, Ḥimṣ, and other centres of administration. But the body of native Syrians, urban and rural, remained after the conquest substantially the same as before; and through long centuries of degradation they clung, as the surviving remnant still clings, to their ancestral faith.

I have spoken of the loss of Syria as the dismemberment of a limb from the Byzantine empire. In one respect it was something more. For their own safety, the Greeks dismantled a broad belt on the border of hostile and now barbarous Syria. The towns and fortresses within this tract were razed, and the inhabitants withdrawn. And so the neutral zone became a barrier against travel to and fro. For all purposes, social, religious, and commercial, the road was for generations closed. Pilgrimage, it is true, and commerce, from the West, could be maintained by sea; but in respect of communication by land, the East for the time was severed from the West.

"The abomination of desolation stood in the Holy place." The cradle of Christianity, Zion, the joy of the whole earth, was trodden under foot, and utterly cut off from the sight of its devoted worshippers. And all is told by the Byzantine