Part 2

Trade routes extended everywhere. There was intercourse with India and China on the east, as well as with the Spice Islands, so called, of Malaysia. Caravans carried trade across the whole of Central Asia and Northern Arabia to the emporiums of the West. Spain had intercourse with Persia. Al-Hariri praises Busrah “as the spot where the ship and the camel meet, the sea fish and the lizard, the camel-leader and the sailor, the fisher and the tiller.” In other words it was the port and emporium for all the lands watered by the Euphrates and Tigris. The same was true of Alexandria for the West.

We have evidences that an extensive trade was carried on between Arabia and China in walrus and ivory. An extensive work exists written in Chinese in the twelfth century on trade with the Arabs of which a recent translation has been published at Petrograd. More remarkable still is the fact that in Scandinavia thousands of Kufic coins have been found, nearly all of which date from the eleventh century. This would indicate that even this remote part of Europe was in touch with the Near East.[4]

Judging from literature and history, it was a time of looseness of morals and of divorce between religion and ethics, even more startling than in the world of Islam to-day. There were those who wrote commentaries on the marvels of the Koran, like Al-Harawi, yet did not scruple to indulge in private wine-drinking and carousals and loose conversation. The place of wine, women, and song, not only in popular literature and poetry, but even in the table talk of theologians and philosophers is clear evidence. Huart remarks in regard to the celebrated “Book of the Monasteries,” which is an anthology of the convents of the Near East: “We must not forget that, when Moslems went to Christian cloisters, it was not to seek devotional impulses, but simply for the sake of an opportunity of drinking wine, the use of which was forbidden in the Mohammedan towns. The poets, out of gratitude, sang the praises of the blessed spots where they had enjoyed the delights of intoxication.” Those who dared to preach and write against this public immorality had to suffer the consequences; and because hypocrites were in power reformers were not heeded.

We read of Ibn Hamdun (1101-1167), that when he openly attacked the evils which he saw around him in Bagdad, he was dismissed from his public office as secretary of state, cast into prison, and left to die. Punishments were cruel. Amputations for theft, in accordance with the Koran legislation, were matters of such every-day occurrence that the maimed man was always a suspect. We read of Al-Zamakhshari, that one of his feet had been frost-bitten during a winter storm, necessitating an amputation, and so he went about with a wooden leg, but he also carried about with him a written testimony of witnesses to prove that he had been maimed by accident, and not in punishment for a crime.

Al-Baihaki, the chronicler of the court at Bagdad, shows us that the zeal for the faith was often accompanied by a reckless disregard for the law of Islam as regards the use of fermented liquor. Not only the soldiers and their officers had drunken brawls, but the Sultan Masʾud used to enjoy regular bouts in which he frequently saw his fellow topers “under the table.” Here is a scene represented as having taken place at Ghazni, the capital of Khorasan province. “Fifty goblets and flagons of wine were brought from the pavilion into the garden, and the cups began to go round. ‘Fair measure,’ said the amir, ‘and equal cups—let us drink fair.’ They grew merry and the minstrels sang. One of the courtiers had finished five tankards—each held nearly a pint of wine—but the sixth confused him, the seventh bereft him of his senses, and at the eighth he was consigned to his servants. The doctor was carried off at his fifth cup; Khalil Dawud managed ten, Siyabiruz nine, and then they were taken home; everybody rolled or was rolled away, till only the Sultan and the Khwaja Abd-ar-Razzak remained. The Khwaja finished eighteen goblets and then rose, saying, ‘If your slave has any more he will lose both his wits and his respect for your Majesty.’ Masʾud went on alone, and after he had drunk twenty-seven full cups, he too arose, called for water and prayer-carpet, washed, and recited the belated noon and sunset prayers together as soberly as if he had not tasted a drop; then mounted his elephant and rode to the palace.”[5]

Masʾud was put to death in 1040. His sons and descendants for more than a century ruled this part of the Moslem world. But Ghazni fell from the proud position of the capital of a kingdom to a mere dependency of the Empire of Malek Shah.

The eleventh century was a period when the nations of Western Europe were beginning to crystallize both as regards their governments and civilization. Their influence was felt at home and abroad, although the masses were still in the depths of barbarism. Among the clergy and nobility something of order and civilization, and social development had appeared, but we are told by one writer that it was a striking characteristic of the time to find side by side with barbarian violence and disorder, and the constant display of the most brutal passions, a strong religious feeling. This feeling often took the form of superstition and fanaticism, the performance of meritorious works, especially a pilgrimage to the holy sepulcher. Thousands risked their life and health, and spent all their fortune to reach the holy city, with the same devotion and sacrifice which we still witness among the ardent Russian pilgrims of to-day.

When Asia Minor and Syria were conquered by the Turks this access to Jerusalem was cut off. In 1076 (Al-Ghazali was then eighteen years old) they massacred three thousand of these Christian people and their subsequent rule was relentless in its tyranny. We read that “the venerable Patriarch was dragged by the hair along the streets, and cast into a dungeon; the clergy of every sect were insulted; and the unhappy pilgrims were made to suffer every indignity and abuse.”

This treatment of Christian pilgrims produced a storm of indignation and anger throughout the West. Peter the Hermit himself visited Jerusalem and returned to Europe to arouse the nations. The result was the first Crusade, in which Pope Urban II coöperated. Three hundred thousand half-armed, half-naked peasants forced their way across Europe along the Rhine and the Danube. Only one-third of their number reached the shores of Asia. There they were utterly destroyed and only a pyramid of bones remained to tell of their fate.

The Crusade under Godfrey of Bouillon was a well-appointed military expedition embracing the flower of Europe. There are said to have been mustered in the plains of Bithynia one hundred thousand horsemen in full armour and six hundred thousand footmen. These numbers may be exaggerated, and pestilence and famine thinned their ranks, but in less than three years they had attained the great object of their expedition. In 1097 they laid siege to Nicea and captured it. They advanced against Antioch and after seven weary months laid siege to the city. In 1099 they advanced on Jerusalem and after a siege of forty days the holy city surrendered. “The merciless Franks did not fail to inflict a terrible vengeance for their own sufferings and the indignities which had been heaped upon their religion and their race. The Jews were burned in their synagogues; and seventy thousand Moslems were put to the sword. For three days the city was given up to indiscriminate pillage and massacre, until a pestilence was bred by the putrefaction of the slain.”

Soon Godfrey and his successors extended their dominions until only four cities, Aleppo, Damascus, Hamath, and Hums remained in the possession of the Moslems in Syria. Everywhere the followers of the Prophet were filled with grief and shame and with a great longing to wipe away the disgrace which had fallen on their religion.

“In the year 492 A. H.,” says Muir,[6] “consternation was spread throughout the land by the capture of Jerusalem, and cruel treatment of its inhabitants. Preachers went about proclaiming the sad story, kindling revenge, and rousing men to recover from infidel hands the Mosque of Omar, and scene of the Prophet’s heavenly flight. But whatever the success elsewhere, the mission failed in the East, which was occupied with its own troubles, and moreover cared little for the Holy Land, dominated as it then was by the Fatimide faith. Crowds of exiles, driven for refuge to Bagdad, and joined there by the populace, cried out for war against the Franks. But neither Sultan nor Caliph had ears to hear. For two Fridays the insurgents, with this cry, stormed the Great Mosque, broke the pulpit and throne of the Caliph in pieces, and shouted down the service; but that was all. No army went.”

Among Moslems themselves religious rancour abounded. At present the four orthodox sects worship together and live in peace as neighbours, but in those days there were frequent and hot disputes between the rival schools and much controversial literature arose, so that the hatred between the sects was deep and bitter. The Persian historian, Mirkhond, has recorded a fact which shows how implacable the feeling had become towards the close of the Caliphate. When the Mongols of Genghiz Khan appeared before the city of Rei, they found it divided into two factions—the one composed of Shafiʾites, the other of Hanifites. The former at once entered into secret negotiations undertaking to deliver up the city at night, on condition that the Mongols massacred the members of the other sect. The Mongols, never reluctant to shed blood, gladly accepted these proposals, and being admitted into the city, slaughtered the Hanifites without mercy.

It was in this atmosphere of mutual hatred, of war and bloodshed, that Al-Ghazali spent the last years of his life. We may excuse in him much of what would otherwise seem intolerant and hateful, when we remember how the passion of war blinds human judgment and makes it impossible to see any virtue in the invader.

We must not forget that Al-Ghazali came into close touch with Oriental Christians from his boyhood.[7] Christianity was established in Persia at the time of the Moslem conquest, and the Nestorian Church withstood its terrific impact when Zoroastrianism was almost destroyed. The coming of the Arabs meant to the Christians only a change of masters. The Nestorians became the _rayah_, “people of protection,” of the Caliphs. They did not immediately sink into their present deplorable condition. They still conducted foreign missions and during the entire Abbasside period remained a very important factor of civilization in the East. They were permitted to restore their Churches, but not to build new ones; they were forbidden to bear arms or ride a horse, save in case of necessity, and they even then had to dismount on meeting a Moslem; they were subject to the usual poll-tax. Yet the Nestorians were the most powerful non-Moslem community while the Caliphs reigned at Bagdad (750-1258), and had a higher tradition of civilization than their masters. They were used at court as physicians, scribes, and secretaries, and thus gained great influence, having much freedom in canonical matters, elected Patriarchs, etc. The Arab scholarship which came to Spain, and was a great factor in mediæval learning, begins in great part with the Nestorians of Bagdad. They handed on to their Arab masters the Greek culture which was inherited in Syriac translations. So we find the Caliphs treating them as chief of the Christian communities, and at times civil authority over all Christians had been given to the Nestorian Patriarch.

Early in the eleventh century Al-Biruni, a Moslem writer from Khiva, mentions the Nestorians as the most civilized of the Christian communities under the Caliph. He says that there are three sects of Christians—Melchites, Nestorians and Jacobites. “The most numerous of them are the Melchites and Nestorians; because Greece and the adjacent countries are all inhabited by Melchites, whilst the majority of the inhabitants of Syria, Irak and Mesopotamia and Khorasan are Nestorians.”[8]

Al-Ghazali spent his first twenty years in Khorasan. Did he ever become acquainted with Christianity through perusal of the Gospel? We know that Arabic, if not Persian, translations existed at this period; and not only are there many references to Christ and His teaching in Al-Ghazali’s works, but there are some very few passages accurate enough to be called quotations. He himself states as we shall see later: “I have read in the Gospel.”

That there were translations of the Bible into Arabic to which Al-Ghazali may have had access is probable. Dr. Kilgour tells of Arabic Gospel manuscripts of the ninth century and of translations of the Old Testament and portions of the New made in the Fayyoum before 942 A. D. “To the tenth century belong versions of some books of the Old Testament from Syriac, others from the LXX., and from the Coptic; and some fresh translations of the Pentateuch, using the Samaritan text as well as the Massoretic.”[9]

Diglot manuscripts in Syriac and Arabic are quite numerous. The manuscript of the four Gospels, of which a few leaves are now in the British Museum, is a good specimen of such a diglot. It was brought by Tischendorf from the Syrian Convent of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert. In the early part of the eleventh century an Arabic scholar made a version of Tatian’s Diatessaron, that early Syriac Harmony of the Gospels which helped the Christian Church to realize the main facts concerning our Saviour. A version of the Psalms was prepared in the middle of the same century for use in the Church services of the papal or Melchite Greeks. This was translated from the Greek Psalter, and, from the place where it was first printed, became known afterwards as the Aleppo Psalter.[10] It remains an interesting question whether Al-Ghazali in his travels, or while still in Khorasan, ever examined the New Testament.

We are told that the Jews translated their law into Persian by 827 A. D. It is, therefore, hard to acquit the Christians of Persia of negligence. Their bishops found time to write learned treatises in Persian and Arabic, and even to translate Aristotle, but not to give Moslems the Scriptures. Yet Al-Kindi and others like him, many of whose names and writings are lost, were not afraid to give their testimony even at the court of the Caliphs. “The Church,” says W. T. Whiteley,[11] “had not failed to exercise an influence on Islam around it, while Christians might not, on peril of death, seek to win converts direct, a command occasionally violated with honour and success, yet all the development of Islam at Damascus and Bagdad was in a Christian atmosphere.”

The Christianity of that period was, however, not the religion of Christ in its purity nor after the example of His love and toleration. Mutual hatred and suspicion prevented real intercourse of those who, as devout Christians and devout Moslems, were both seeking God. The Moslem was feared and the Christian despised. The followers of Jesus were the enemies of Allah in the eyes of Moslems.

How Christians were regarded at this time we may learn from the books of canon law of this period, and that immediately following upon it. They were considered _infidels_ in the Moslem sense of the word, and were protected only by the payment of a poll tax, which gave them certain rights as subjects. The most distinguished jurist of the Shafiʾite sect, An-Nawawi, who taught at Damascus in 1267, lays down the law[12] as follows: “An infidel who has to pay his poll tax should be treated by the tax collector with disdain; the collector remaining seated and the infidel standing before him, the head bent and the body bowed. The infidel should personally place the money in the balance, while the collector holds him by the beard and strikes him upon both cheeks. Infidels should be forbidden to have houses higher than those of their Moslem neighbours, or even to have them as high; a rule, however, that does not apply to the infidels who inhabit a separate quarter. An infidel subject of our Sovereign may not ride a horse; but a donkey or a mule is permitted him, whatever may be its value. He must use an _ikaf_, and wooden spurs, those of iron being forbidden him, as well as a saddle. He must go to the side of the road to let a Moslem pass. He must not be treated as a person of importance, nor given the first place at a gathering. He should be distinguished by a suit of coloured cloth and a girdle outside his clothes. If he enters a bathing house where there are Moslems, or if he undresses anywhere else in their presence, the infidel should wear round his neck an iron or leaden necklace, or some other mark of servitude.[13] He is forbidden to offend Moslems, either by making them hear his false doctrines, or by speaking aloud of Esdras or of the Messiah, or by ostentatiously drinking wine or eating pork. And infidels are forbidden to sound the bells of their churches or of their synagogues, or celebrate ostentatiously their sacrilegious rites.”[14]

“The history of Christian communities,” says Margoliouth,[15] “under Moslem rule cannot be adequately written; the members of those communities had no opportunity of describing their condition safely, and the Moslems naturally devote little space to their concerns. Generally speaking, they seem to have been regarded as certain old Greek and Roman sages regarded women: as a necessary annoyance. Owing to their being unarmed their prosperity was always hazardous; and though it is true that this was the case with all the subjects of a despotic state under an irresponsible ruler, the non-Moslem population was at the mercy of the mob as well as of the sovereign; they were likely scapegoats whenever there was distress, and even in the best governed countries periods of distress frequently arose.”

There are darker shades in the treatment of Christians and in the moral condition of this period over which one might well draw the veil, but some of the chapters of Ghazali’s _Ihya_ reflect such terrible conditions as Margoliouth describes: “A form of passion which is nameless would appear at one time to have been as familiar among Moslems as of old among Hellenes. Christian lads seem often to have been the unhappy objects of this passion. A story is told us by the biographer Yakut of a young monk of Edessa or Urfah who had the misfortune to attract the fancy of one Saʾad the copyist. The visits and attentions of this Moslem became so offensive that the monks had to put a stop to them. Thereupon this personage pined away, and was finally found dead outside the monastery wall. The Moslem population declared that the monks had killed him, and the governor proposed to execute and burn the young monk who had occasioned the disaster, and scourge his colleagues. They finally got off by paying a sum of 100,000 dirhems.”

Not only among Moslems, however, but among Christians as well, morals were at a low ebb in the eleventh century. One of the annalists of the Roman Church says it was an iron age barren of all goodness, a leaden age abounding in all wickedness. “Christ was then, as it appears, in a very deep sleep, when the ship was covered with waves; and what seemed worse, when the Lord was thus asleep, there were no disciples, who by their cries might awaken him, being themselves all fast asleep.”

Enemies of the Papacy have perhaps exaggerated the vices and crimes of the popes in this and the preceding century; but the Church, on the testimony of its own writers, was immersed in profaneness, sensuality, and lewdness. When Otho I, Emperor of Germany, came to Rome, he introduced moral reforms by the power of the sword, but according to Milner,[16] “The effect of Otho’s regulations was that the popes exchanged the vices of the rake and the debauchee for those of the ambitious politician and the hypocrite; and gradually recovered, by a prudent conduct, the domineering ascendency, which had been lost by vicious excesses. But this did not begin to take place till the latter end of the eleventh century.”

Missionary effort in this century was confined to work in Hungary, the unevangelized portions of Denmark, Poland, and Prussia. Adam of Bremen, who wrote in 1080, says: “Look at the very ferocious nation of the Danes. For a long time they have been accustomed, in the praises of God, to resound Alleluia. Look at that piratical people. They are now content with the fruits of their own country. Look at that horrid region, formerly altogether inaccessible on account of idolatry; they now eagerly admit the preachers of the word.”

The Prussians continued pagans in a great measure throughout this century. We read that eighteen missionaries sent out to labour among them were massacred. They seemed to have been among the last of the European nations to submit to the yoke of Christ.

The noblest figure of the century in the West, in the annals of Christendom, was undoubtedly that of Anselm. He was born about the time of Al-Ghazali, and died in 1109. His life in many respects is a parallel to that of his contemporary. Both were theologians and both were mystics, seeking rest for their souls in withdrawing from the world and its allurements. Both were apologists for the Faith and opponents of infidelity and philosophy. Both exerted an immense influence by their writings as well as through teaching; and if Al-Ghazali sought the revival of religious life in Islam through his _Ihya_, Anselm gave employment to his active mind in writing his celebrated treatise “_Cur Deus Homo?_” Both of them refuted philosophers in their effort to establish the Faith.

It is interesting to note in this connection that Anselm’s famous book is now used in Arabic translation by missionaries to Moslems, and that Al-Ghazali’s “Confessions” have been put into the hands of the English reader as a testimony of his sincerity and devotion.

Both Anselm and Al-Ghazali lived and wrote under a deep consciousness of the world to come, the terrors of the judgment day, and the doom of the wicked. This also was characteristic of the times.

To understand the time in which Al-Ghazali lived we must also remember that it was one of great literary activity under the Abbasside Caliphs of Bagdad and the Seljuk sultans. We have seen how rulers rewarded literary genius, established schools, and furthered education on religious lines. Arabic literature affords a galaxy of names during the latter half of the eleventh century in almost every department of Moslem learning.