If Abderrahman Boasted That He Would Rear A
Shrine To The Joy Of Earthly Life And The Hope Of An
Earthly heaven, in
the place of the Christian temple which he would throw down, I should
like to overhear what
His disembodied spirit would have to say to the
saint whose shrine he demolished. I think the saint would have the
better of him in any contention for their respective faiths, and could
easily convince the impartial witness that his religion then abiding in
medieval gloom was of promise for the future which Islam can never be.
Yet it cannot be denied that when Abderraham built his mosque the Arabs
of Cordova were a finer and wiser people than the Christians who dwelt
in intellectual darkness among them, with an ideal of gloom and
self-denial and a zeal for aimless martyrdom which must have been very
hard for a gentleman and scholar to bear. Gentlemen and scholars were
what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate seem to have become, with a
primacy in medicine and mathematics beyond the learning of all other
Europe in their day. They were tolerant skeptics in matters of religion;
polite agnostics, who disliked extremely the passion of some Christians
dwelling among them for getting themselves put to death, as they did,
for insulting the popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. Probably people
of culture in Cordova were quite of Abderrahman's mind in wishing to
substitute the temple of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the
medieval Christianity which he destroyed; though they might have had
their reserves as to the taste in which his mosque was completed.
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