# The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East/Volume 6/Introduction

SACKED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF THE MEDIEVAL ARABS, MOORS, AND TURKS
INTRODUCTION
HOW THE TEACHING OP MOHAMMED SPREAD INTO MANY LANDS AND CREATED MANY LITERATURES
THE wide-spread Arabic empire and religion originated with Mohammed and was founded on his book, the Koran. That tremendously important work, with the primitive Arabic literature of even earlier date, formed the theme of our preceding volume. We have now to trace the Arabic literature and thought which, with the expanding of the Mohammedan empire, spread over a large part of the Eastern world. Geographically that empire reached from its Arabian center eastward through Babylonia and Persia into India, westward through all North Africa into Spain, southward through Egypt into the wilds of Central Africa, and northward through Asia Minor to all the Turkish possessions. Through much of this vast region, Arabic became the common speech, and books were written in its tongue. Even in our own day, Arabic continues as the language of a considerable part of Turkey in Asia, of Egypt, and of all North Africa.
We can scarcely, however, regard as a unit all the varying Mohammedan literatures of these many lands. The Persians, for example, retained their own language and wrote in it a literature of Mohammedan religious spirit, so important that we shall devote to it a later separate volume. Our present task, therefore, will confine itself to tracing through ​the Middle Ages the more strictly Arabian development. This includes first, the spread of literature and thought among the Arabs themselves, or among those people who completely adopted the Arabic faith and speech. Second, it includes the literature of the Moors, or semi-Arabic peoples, of North Africa and Spain. And third, it leads us to the Turks, the last Mohammedan conquerors, who took up and carried on Arabic tradition, though in a language and spirit more Tartar than Arabian.
For the purely Arabic development, that is for the literature and thought that sprang directly from Mohammed's teaching, we turn first to the "Sunan," or traditions about Mohammed. After the prophet's death in A.D. 632, and while his followers were spreading his teachings by force of arms, they talked much of the doings and sayings of their adored master. Then, long after his own writings had been gathered in the official form of the Koran, a similar collection was made of what might be termed his unofficial teaching, that is of all his remembered words, the ideas which he had not proclaimed as inspired by God, but had given forth in ordinary conversation between man and man. The details of his life were also treasured. Thus sprang up the "Sunan," from which we may learn as much of Mohammed the man, and of the daily life and thought of his people, as from the Koran we learn of Mohammed the poet and of the poetic spirit of Arabia.
For a long time the Arabs developed no other religious literature than this. Of the third leader of their new faith, the Caliph Omar, there is a well-known legend which may be untrue in fact but is intensely true to the fanatic spirit of the Caliph and his followers. It says that when Omar's armies conquered Egypt the scholars of Alexandria entreated him to protect the books of their great library, the largest in the world. Instead, Omar ordered the thousands of manuscripts to be used to feed the fires of the public baths; and he based the destruction upon this verdict: "If these books disagree with the Koran they are evil; if they agree they are unnecessary."
​The Arabic literary spirit was thus compelled to cling to its old pre-Mohammedan form. That is, it expressed itself only in brief personal poems, in skilfully phrased epigrams, satiric couplets, or "rubaiyat," called forth by a sudden occasion. A collection of the best known of these poems, gathered from successive ages of gay and dashing singers, is given at the close of our Arabic section.
Gradually, however, a change came over the victorious Arab race. The warriors lost their intense religious inspiration. They fought among themselves for place and power. The enormous wealth which they had conquered, with its resulting temptations to luxury and ease and empty vanity, weakened them, lured them from both the high moral strength which they had really attained, and from the fanatic frenzy of faith which had been their pride. They removed the capital of their empire from the holy cities of Arabia, first to Damascus and then to Bagdad, the wonderful dream-city of splendor which they built upon the banks of the ancient Tigris river.
Under these gorgeous Caliphs of Bagdad, such as Haroun al Raschid of "Arabian Nights'" fame, a civilization developed which Mohammed would never have recognized as his own, which he would indeed have been the first to repudiate. Unrestrained power bred a callous indifference to the sufferings of its victims, and even a barbarous delight in inflicting torture. The tyranny of the ruling classes bred a corresponding falsity in their helpless but supple servitors. Truth, the chief virtue in Mohammed's teaching, became unknown in human intercourse, except as a poetic ideal. From their priest-king down, through all the ranks of society, men talked much of the virtues, while surrendering themselves almost wholly to the passions. One might of course speak cynically of mankind's having found this somewhat true in every age, but seldom has the tragic contrast between the ideal and the actual been brought into such sharp and visible form as in the medieval world of Bagdad.
From this fertile though unhealthy soil a new literature sprang up, typical of the time and place. Here were cen​tered the wealth and leisure and most of what survived of the culture of ancient Asia and Africa. So wit and learning journeyed there as well. At first the new literature found voice mainly as history or biography, or as a rather crude form of these collections of anecdotes purporting to give the virtues and chief events in the lives of former caliphs. Among the writers of these semi-biographic tales, by far the most noted and most noteworthy is Masoudi (died A.D. 957). His huge work, the "Golden Meadows," fills many volumes, from which we give the most attractive anecdotes. While such tales must not be taken as genuine history, they teach us very clearly the spirit of their age.
After these loose histories, a more careful science developed. The real learning of the Arab scholars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries far outranked that of their European and Christian contemporaries. As yet the various fields of science were scarcely differentiated; the student took all knowledge for his province. The earliest Arab writer, who may perhaps be regarded as a genuine historian, in contrast to the previous romancers, was Al Biruni (973–1048), whose "Chronology" our volume quotes. But Al Biruni was far more than an historian; he was a leading scientist of his day and also a geographer, his work on "India" being almost as celebrated as his "Chronology." Of even greater fame in science than Al Biruni was Avicenna (980–1037), a sort of universal genius, known first as a physician. To his works on medicine he afterward added religious tracts, poems, works on philosophy, on logic, on physics, on mathematics, and on astronomy. He was also a statesman and a soldier, and he is said to have died of debauchery. He is famed as the most versatile and brilliant member of a versatile and brilliant race.
With the increasing freedom of scientific thought and speech which Avicenna typifies, there sprang up among the Eastern Mohammedans a new religious impulse. They began to examine more carefully the faith which they had before accepted blindly. To this age therefore we owe the writings of Al Ghazali (1049–1111), whom some of his own ​countrymen have regarded as second only to Mohammed as a teacher of their religion. Indeed, it was a common saying of his day that "If there were still prophets in the world Al Ghazali would be one."
Western scholars have, some of them, gone still further in their admiration of Al Ghazali, declaring him to have heen one of the world's greatest thinkers, whom his Mohammedan contemporaries never sufficiently appreciated, and to whose high moral stature the Mohammedan world has not even yet grown up. Among his writings the most interesting and useful to modern readers is his "Rescuer from Error," a sort of spiritual autobiography, his account of his own growth in religious faith. This striking book our volume gives in full.
From Al Ghazali, or even from before his time, dates the great flow of commentaries on the Koran. These half-philosophical, half-fanatical discussions would have seemed irreligious to the earliest Mohammedan age. The Koran had been originally accepted as perfect, and therefore as completely clear. But now the analytic spirit of the Semite reasserted itself; and even as the Hebrews in their Biblical commentaries weighed every "and" and "but" and every carelessly made letter in their Holy Book, so now the Mohammedan "mullahs," or priests, began to draw deductions from their law, to interpret and so develop it. Among these commentators two are chiefly celebrated. Zamakhshari (1074–1143) was perhaps the most learned and the shrewdest, but his ideas have seemed to his coreligionists a little too radical, too independent of Mohammed, daring almost to question the divine inspiration of the prophet. Therefore the work of Zamakhshari's more submissive successor of a century later, Al Baidawi, has gradually superseded the older book as the favorite exposition of the Koran. The Western reader, however, will distinctly prefer the independence of Zamakhshari.
Into the lighter literature of the medieval Arabs we need not look too far. They had their wholly unreligious and fantastic romances such as the "Arabian Nights." This famous ​work, however, draws largely upon Persian sources. Indeed, as our later Persian volume will emphasize, most of the pure romance of later Arab literature is of Persian origin, and may best be studied in the Persian books. There is, however, an intermediate class of tale peculiarly Arabian. This is the mingling of romance with poetry and moral teachings, just as the earlier historians had mingled it with history. Most celebrated in this peculiar class of semi-religious, semi-poetic romances is the work presented in this volume, the "Assemblies" of Al Hariri (1054–1122). Just as Masoudi stands to his race for history, Al Biruni for geography, Avicenna for science, Al Ghazali for philosophy, and Zamakhshari and Al Baidawi for religious study, so does Al Hariri stand for literary skill, for brilliancy and humor. His "Assemblies" is the Arabs' chief purely literary achievement.
MOORISH LITERATURE
In the year 1258 Bagdad was stormed and conquered by a Tartar general. It is true that most of the ravaging Tartars finally adopted the religion of the conquered, and so the region continued to obey in religious matters a Mohammedan caliph; but the rule of the Arabs, which had been long undermined by Persian influences, ended definitely with the fall of Bagdad. From the time of that disaster we must look to other lands for the continuation of a semi-Arabic literature.
Chief of the secondary developments from the Arabian stock was the remarkable and justly celebrated civilization of the Moors in Spain. The fame of medieval Arabic scholarship was carried to its climax by these first Mohammedan invaders of Europe. In the first wild onrush of Arabian conquest most of Spain was captured in the year A.D. 712, captured by an army having leaders of pure Arab blood, but with followers mainly of the semi-Arabic, or Moorish, people of North Africa. In the year 756 this Moorish kingdom in Spain broke completely from the Arabian Caliph and set up a priest-king of its own, a caliph whose capital was ​at Cordova in Spain, and whose connection with the older Arab world was only one of race and religion and not of empire. Our Hebraic volume has already spoken of the remarkable Hebrew writers and philosophers who flourished within the shelter of this Cordova caliphate. The Arabs themselves were not less able than their Hebrew servitors.
Here then, under the sunny skies of Southern Spain, far, far indeed from the first centers of Semitic civilization, was the last brilliant blossoming of distinctively Semitic thought. We have in our previous volumes traced the growth of Semitic thought and of the Semitic religious progress from their earliest home by the Euphrates river, where the Babylonian and the desert Arab warred in unrecognized brotherhood of race. Now we are ready to glance briefly at them in Spain, the last strong kingdom they were to possess, and the last literature of note which the Semites, except as scattered members of other communities, were to give the world.
Among the Arabic writers of Spain the most noted is the scientist and philosopher, Averroes (1126–1198). To Mohammedans he is the religious thinker, who strove to harmonize their faith with the advancing science of a later day, and who opposed his practical, rational spirit to the mysticism of Al Ghazali. To the European world he is the celebrated commentator on that greatest of philosophers, Aristotle. As the voice of Aristotle, Averroes thus became the leading teacher and philosopher of his day; he is the link which connects our present thought and science with the first splendor of independent inquiry under the Greeks. The name of Aristotle, the chief scientific teacher of all the world, is thus united forever with that of the great Arab teacher, Averroes.
Moorish literature was also a shrine of poetry and romance, though most of these lighter writings have only been preserved to us through the Spanish tongue. Our own Washington Irving found in these Moorish tales an inspiration for his genius, and has turned many of them into English. Others will be found included in our volume.
TURKISH LITERATURE
Of the Turkish literature we need speak but briefly. The Turks were not Semites, but a Tartar or East Asiatic stock who, after wandering into Western Asia, accepted the Mohammedan faith about A.D. 1288. At the very moment when the vast Mohammedan empire was crumbling to pieces, assailed by pagan Tartar hordes and crusading Christian armies from without, and withering from spiritual decadence within, the Turks took up the waning faith, and with the energy of new and younger converts carried it onward to the military conquests which built up the Turkish Empire.
This new empire soon included geographically most of the older Arab Empire; but the Turks brought to their new faith only the dubious glory of victory in war. They added little, either to its thought or to its literature. They were, in fact, a nation still semi-barbaric, strong in the natural virtues of faith and honesty and a rude kindliness, but wholly lacking in the subtlety and intellectual keenness which could have advanced Mohammedan thought.
Hence we shall find in their literature, at first, only childish tales, echoes of the childhood of the world, magic stories close akin to those of our own fairyland. Then comes a native poetry, not rising to remarkable heights in any one great poet, but full of a warm human love of romance and justice. Later we come to more thoughtful and elaborate writings, but these incline to deal with the practical world rather than with that of religion and speculative thought. So that we close our Turkish section with what is perhaps the most valuable piece of early Turkish literature, a work of travel, the celebrated autobiography of Sidi Ali Reis.