A literary history of Persia

286 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHYunusual and regrettable harshness towards those doctrineswhich are now generally prevalent and accounted orthodoxin all Sunnite countries. Yet perhaps there was a reasonhave been conscious thatfor their harshness.They maydoctrines of extreme Calvinism or Fatalism, if the wordbe preferred must in the long run (atleast in Asia, whichis more logical than Europe in its applications of theory todaily life) destroy effort and prevent progress ; they may haveforeseen that the literal interpretation of an inspired Scripturewhich followed naturally from a belief in itsEternity, notonly in the future but in the past, would inevitably stereotypeand narrow the religious outlook in such a waythat allitself to new conditions orflexibility, all power of adaptingcarryingconviction to the minds of intelligent men, would belost ;and they may have felt that the belief that God couldbe seen by men must tend to an anthropomorphic and debasedconception of the Deity. Whether or no they realised theseresults of the victory of orthodoxy, such were in realityitseffects, and the retrograde movement of Islam, inauguratedby the triumph of al-Ash'arf (of which we shall speak in alater chapter), was but accelerated and accentuated by theoverthrow of the Caliphate and the sack of Baghdad by thevandals of Mongolia in the middle of the thirteenth century.Changiz and Hulagu on the one hand, and al-Ash c an on thethree individualsother, probably contributed as much as anyto the destruction of the material and intellectual glories ofthe Golden Age of the early *Abbasid Caliphs.-The further development of the Mu'tazilite doctrine isadmirably summed up by Dozy (Chauvin's French translation,pp. 205-207) :prejudice"This doctrine was subsequently remodelled and propagatedunder the influence of the Philosophy of * J Aristotle.Further develop- .; ......merit of the The sect, as was m the nature of things, subdivided.6^doctrineAll the Mu'tazilites, however, agreed in certain points.They denied the existence of the Attributes inGod, and contested everything which couldthe dogma