THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
515
What does the world not owe to Islam during the dark ages? For full five hundred years Islam bravely bore up the torch of learning to the world. Let us glance at Spain where, under a fortunate succession of Caliph’s literature, arts and sciences blossomed into a perfection before unknown. The Arabs collected, translated, and preserved for us the masterpieces of Greek thought, who advanced upon the generosity of Euclid, who developed agriculture and astronomy into sciences. They were noted too for their philosophical lore. Universities existed in all their large cities, Cordova, Granada, Seville, with immense libraries attached, where lectures on classics, rhetoric, mathematics, and other sciences were constantly given. Encyclopaedias and lexicons in Hebrew, Greek and Latin were written. Jews and Christians alike presided with Moslems, a degree of toleration unknown in Continental Europe today. So favorable were all their conditions that all Christendom desiring learning and refined surroundings sought to enter there. The Arabs were the introducers of rhyme, their poetry crossed the Pyrenees and reappeared in the Troubadors of Provence which is today recognized as the first impulse of European literature. All mathematical computations were revolutionized by their invention of the nine digits and cipher. While all Christendom was declaring the world was flat, the Arabs were teaching geography by the use of globes. Every mosque was a public school where the poor were gratuitously taught the Koran and elements of education.
In the practical arts our benefits are as great. They gave us the use of gunpowder, artillery and mariner’s compass. They introduced rice, sugar and many of our fine garden and orchard fruits and our medicinal herbs. To them Spain owes the culture of silk and the celebrity of its wines. Irrigation was brought by them with the manufacture of all sorts of fabrics, rugs, cambrics, silks and cottons for wearing apparel, earthenware, iron, steel and all metal work of every description. (Professor Draper may be consulted for further facts upon this subject.)
Such was the record of Mohammedanism in YVestern Europe, such its luxury, splendor and knowledge, such arc a few only of Christendom’s debts to it and which with strange injustice Christendom is loth to acknowledge.
Penally, Islam is essentially a spiritual religion. As instituted by Mohammed it needed no priests and had no sacrifices, it offers no theories of Apostolic succession, gives no powers of absolution. Absolutely nothing intervenes between each human soul and God. Forbidding alike the representation of all living things as objects of admiration, veneration or worship, Islam is more opposed to idolatry than Christianity itself. The interior of every mosque bears witness to this.
Shall the world longer deny Mahomet his true place in history? He exalted and purified his own nation and the age in which he lived. His precepts have brought comfort and benefactions to unnumbered millions. Surely his name should be forever enrolled not as one worthy only of “ hero-worship,” but as a benefactor deserving the immeasurable gratitude of mankind