A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
44.THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS
There follows the most amazing story of conquest in the whole history of our race. The Byzantine army was smashed at the battle of the Yarmuk (a tributary of the Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor Heraclius, his energy sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted by the Persian war, saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus, Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem and the rest fall almost without resistance to the Moslim. Large elements in the population went over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned east. The Persians had found an able general in Rustam; they had a great host with a force of elephants; and for three days they fought the Arabs at Kadessia (637) and broke at last in headlong rout.
The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem Empire pushed far
into Western Turkestan and eastward until it met the Chinese. Egypt
fell almost without resistance to the new conquerors, who full of a
fanatical belief in the sufficiency of the Koran, wiped out the
vestiges of the book-copying industry of the Alexandria Library. The
tide of conquest poured along the north coast of Africa to the Straits
of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded in 710 and the Pyrenees
Mountains were reached in 720. In 732 the Arab advance had reached the
centre of France, but here it was stopped for good at the battle of
Poitiers and thrust back as far as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of
Egypt had given the Moslim a fleet, and for a time it looked as though
they would take Constantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between
672 and 718 but the great city held out against them.
Map: The Growth of the Moslem Power in 25 Years
Map: The Moslem Empire, 750 A.D.
The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political experience,
and this great empire with its capital now at Damascus, which stretched
from Spain to China, was destined to break up very speedily. From the
very beginning doctrinal differences undermined its unity. But our
interest here lies not with the story of its political disintegration
but with its effect upon the human mind and upon the general destinies
of our race. The Arab intelligence had been flung across the world
even more swiftly and dramatically than had the Greek a thousand years
before. The intellectual stimulation of the whole world west of China,
the break-up of old ideas and development of new ones, was enormous.
In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not only
with Manichæan, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with the
scientific Greek literature, preserved not only in Greek but in Syrian
translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also. Every-where, and
particularly in Spain, it discovered an active Jewish tradition of
speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met Buddhism and the
material achievements of Chinese civilization. It learnt the
manufacture of paper—which made printed books possible—from the
Chinese. And finally it came into touch with Indian mathematics and
philosophy.
JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR
JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of
faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible book, was dropped.
Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the Arab conquerors.
By the eighth century there was an educational organization throughout
the whole “Arabized” world. In the ninth learned men in the schools of
Cordoba in Spain were corresponding with learned men in Cairo, Bagdad,
Bokhara and Samarkand. The Jewish mind assimilated very readily with
the Arab, and for a time the two Semitic races worked together through
the medium of Arabic. Long after the political break-up and
enfeeblement of the Arabs, this intellectual community of the
Arab-speaking world endured. It was still producing very considerable
results in the thirteenth century.
VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES
VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts which
was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in this astonishing
renascence of the Semitic world. The seed of Aristotle and the museum
of Alexandria that had lain so long inactive and neglected now
germinated and began to grow towards fruition. Very great advances
were made in mathematical, medical and physical science. The clumsy
Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic figures we use to this day and
the zero sign was first employed. The very name algebra is Arabic. So
is the word chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol, Aldebaran and
Boötes preserve the traces of Arab conquests in the sky. Their
philosophy was destined to reanimate the medieval philosophy of France
and Italy and the whole Christian world.
The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists, and they were
still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods and results
secret as far as possible. They realized from the very beginning what
enormous advantages their possible discoveries might give them, and
what far-reaching consequences they might have on human life. They
came upon many metallurgical and technical devices of the utmost value,
alloys and dyes, distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass; but
the two chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was “the
philosopher’s stone”—a means of changing the metallic elements one into
another and so getting a control of artificial gold, and the other was
the _elixir vitœ_, a stimulant that would revivify age and prolong life
indefinitely. The crabbed patient experimenting of these Arab
alchemists spread into the Christian world. The fascination of their
enquiries spread. Very gradually the activities of these alchemists
became more social and co-operative. They found it profitable to
exchange and compare ideas. By insensible gradations the last of the
alchemists became the first of the experimental philosophers.
The old alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone which was to
transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality; they found
the methods of modern experimental science which promise in the end to
give man illimitable power over the world and over his own destiny.