ABSTRACT
When mohammed died, in 631, the religion he founded had already spread throughout Arabia, and his successors, the first caliphs, managed in the course of a few decades to bring under their dominion the old civilized countries of Babylon, Persia, Syria, and Egypt, to which were later added North Africa and Spain. War against the unfaithful was indeed the prophet's first commandment, and according to his injunction the heathen had a choice between death and conversion; such of the unfaithful, again, as possessed religious writings — Christians, Jews, and Persians—had their lives spared, but were subject to impositions and personal humiliation. The bedouins of the desert, who thus at one blow became the rulers of the most ancient civilized countries in the world, were themselves nothing but barbarians, it is true, but they were intelligent and susceptible to cultural influence, all the more so as in the course of the wandering life they led, they had already come into contact with their civilized neighbours. Their new religion was favourable for rapid cultural progress in that it was a legal doctrine with few and easily comprehensible rules, without, to be sure, the lofty ethical claims of Christianity, but also without the theological subtleties of the different ecclesiastical formula. And as, besides, the Arabs troubled themselves but little about social and political questions — they permitted the institutions of conquered nations to survive and contented themselves with appointing governors who collected taxes from them — they had ample time to devote themselves to purely intellectual interests. Indeed, they grasped the elements of the culture of the period with a rapidity which has been compared to that of the Japanese in our own day, and were able in many respects to build higher upon the foundations they found prepared for them. These foundations were Greek science, as the subject peoples produced it in Syrian and Persian translations; it was not until later that the Arabs learnt to read Greek writings in the original. They developed this material and thus created a science representing at the same time a direct continuation of the Greek and a reconstruction of it to suit the conditions which the peculiar Arabian view of the world required. According to Mohammed's theory, the Koran is the source of all learning and contains all the knowledge that man requires; but this claim, which would have rendered all research impossible, was 69evaded during more liberal eras, while obscurantist rulers continued to threaten the learned with its literal application. This was, however, the cause of a certain restraint invariably characterizing Arabian research, at least in form; the scientists preferred to give their works — even the most independent — the appearance of commentaries on the writings of some famous scientist of antiquity. In philosophy and natural science it was naturally Aristotle, in medicine Galen, who was made to represent the authority on whom the work was based, and at the same time the screen behind which the Arabian scientists saved themselves in the event of the authorities' finding the results of their research work inadmissible. During the most brilliant period of Arabian research it was certainly possible for original and great thoughts to be disguised beneath these commentaries on ancient writings, but the danger of slavish imitation lay in the method itself, and for more than five hundred years the science of the East was drowned in an utterly soulless amplification of ancient authorities.
