0"T' LAERT> "! - USP

ARABIAN CIVILIZATION.
For the Koran, inasmuch as it was the religious and civic
law book of the adherents of Islam, was read and spread
wherever the doctrines of MUHAMMED found believers, and
with it the Arabic language extended from country to
country. It is owing to this fact that Arabic became the
speech used in the religious worship of Islam and thus
formed the link uniting the different peoples who professed
the same faith. This circumstance as well as the care and
perfecting which it consequently underwent, explain the
fact that it became the language of the educated and
learned. It gained the same importance in the Muham-
medan world as the Latin tongue did in the Christian
middle ages.
Gradually, a rich literature and a flourishing civilization
sprang from it, embracing in its domain nearly one half of
the earth as known at that time. The Indians in the East,
the Goths in Spain, the Armenians and Tartars on the
Caspian, and the Ethiopians at the outlet of the Red Sea
adopted with their religion the language of the Arabs.
To be sure, these various nations retained each its own
language for national intercourse and exceptionally such
language furnished a literary production, which while differ­
ing from Arabic literature in the form of the characters
used, breathed in its contents the same spirit and the same
mode of thought.
The Arabian people probably contributed but little to
what we are-in the habit of calling Arabian culture. The
roots of this must be sought among the Persians, the
Greeks of Asia Minor and of Alexandria, and in India:
nearly all the peoples subdued by the Arabs took part in its
development from the Pillars of HERCULES in the West'to
the Sea of Darkness, as the Arabs called the Indian Ocean,
in the far East. During the first decades of their appear­
ance as prominent actors in the world's history, they were so
much occupied with quarrels among their rulers and wars
of conquest that they had but little leisure for the arts of
peace. It was "the day of ignorance." The anecdote
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